★★ The lingering snow fell as rain under the scaffolding. Jackets had taken back the streets from parkas and puffy coats. The wan and unpleasant light bloomed, briefly and unexpectedly, into something that was almost sunshine. Space opened between the edges of shrinking snowbanks and the pavement below. Everywhere people’s shoes had gone, there was a film of grimy dampness.

Image: mark via Flickr

JARED is using IVANKA’s paper shredder to destroy copies of MICHAEL WOLFF’s Fire and Fury. He’s not sure who sent five hundred copies of the book to the White House, but if pressed to guess, he’d have to say it was STEVE BANNON. He’s doing his best to get rid of the books before they provoke another meltdown from TRUMP, but it takes a really long time to destroy that many pages, and no one is helping. IVANKA is reclining on her fainting couch, not eating. Their DAUGHTER, the Shadow President, is vetting nominees to the federal bench, while also practicing her handwriting. STEPHEN MILLER and ONE OF THE TRUMP SONS are huddled around STEPHEN MILLER’s monitor laughing their asses off. They’re watching YouTubes of people eating really spicy foods. GENERAL KELLY strides in, dressed like an old-timey gym teacher and twirling a whistle. He’s with KELLYANNE CONWAY, who’s breaking her number one rule for the workplace: sweating in the vicinity of male colleagues.

GENERAL KELLY [aggressively]: Jared, you’re up.

[JARED pretends he can’t hear GENERAL KELLY. He puts down and then picks up a book. He looks at the floor.]

GENERAL KELLY [blowing into his whistle]: Jared, I know you can hear me.

[JARED pretends to be reading Fire and Fury. He knows that today begins GENERAL KELLY’s twenty-one day body transformation regimen, and he never got strong enough over break to do push-ups not on his knees. KELLYANNE CONWAY dabs her brow with some of the shredded paper that’s everywhere.]

GENERAL KELLY [softly but in a sociopathic way]: We’re leaving in ten

Johan Viirok via Flickr

On the internet, where people become data and popularity is conveniently quantified, it’s easy to learn what a community values most. Twitter embraces celebrities and #brands. Reddit stans for Barack Obama and elaborate pop-culture GIFs. Quora is an asylum of techies questioning their morality and their stock options; its second-most-upvoted answer is a “soul-satisfying” account of a sales bro helping a homeless man.

On the Bodybuilding.com forums, the two most popular threads of all time are not about deadlifts, intermittent fasting, or maintaining motivation. They’re about women. Specifically, women Bodybuilding.com members would “love to pound.” While one thread features pictures of “petite/slim girls” and the other of “athletic girls,” both are an endless stream of lightly Photoshopped near-nudity and predictably lecherous comments. Both have been viewed almost 3 million times. And both are on the lone section of the Bodybuilding.com forums that’s explicitly unrelated to fitness: the Misc.

“Participate at your own risk, some content NSFW,” reads the description of the Misc. on the forums’ homepage. “U Aware?”

Photos by Bryan Washington

About a week into my stay in Setagaya, I decided to give Akihabara a second try. It’s an area in central Tokyo, mostly famous for its electronics and anime holdings. I’ve been in the city for the past few weeks, mostly recovering from a terminal graduate degree, and the other day it occurred to me that I needed a keychain. The night before, I’d been out in the street at this takoyaki stand by my AirBnB, smoking and joking with the neighbors, when the ground started shaking. I lost my shit. Dropped my food and everything. But the folks standing around me didn’t miss a beat; they just grabbed the nearest table. If anything, they started laughing harder. There’d been an earthquake warning that afternoon. My new friends asked if it had been my first one. The secret, a woman in a cowboy hat told me, was keeping everything together. Holding your cool. That was the exact opposite of what I’d done.

So: a keychain. Those are my thing. As someone who would lose his bones if not for his skin, I have so many. But I wanted a very specific one, a highly particular still from the intro of a highly particular series, the sort of thing that, even in the most esoteric comic shops and conventions in the States, you’d be hard-pressed to find. And that could, I think, be one of the best things about Akihabara: if you can think of a thing, there’s a fair chance that you’ll find it, and without the online overlord wareshop monopoly.

★★★ The otherwise mirror-flat surface of the Hudson was studded with chunks of ice. The chill was an agreeable coolness, the sky a newly enriched blue. There was enough clear and dry space to safely navigate with a broken toe, though the sidewalk spotlights outside the Time Warner Center were slippery with watery dark muck. Birds went ahead and chirped.

Screenshot: YouTube

Who’s to say how a particular YouTube rabbit hole gets rabbit-holed? I’ll tell you one thing: I did NOT find the German children’s hip-hop group Deine Freunde (DIE-nuh FROYN-duh, or “your friends”) by searching please Internet give me something that does not make me want to shriek into the overflowing sky of wasted stars, no matter how fulfilling Rilke says that is to do. No, I definitely did not happen upon their hit song about homework (position: anti), or their hit song about chocolate (position: pro; also pro-grandmas), or concert footage of a thousand German kids going straight-up batshit at a totally hip-ified version of the kids’ standard “Häschen in der Grube” (literally a song about a rabbit in a hole, just like my life watching these videos), by searching please, dear sweet Dark Lord Internet, show me something that is not about Katie Roiphe before I disintegrate into molecules and those molecules explode out of angst.

I don’t remember how I found My Friends and then assiduously researched their entire oeuvre (with the notable exception of their official YouTube channel, which is blocked in the United States—WHAT GIVES!) but I’m pretty grateful I never have to live without them again. And now you don’t have to, either.

★★★★ New sun shone over old snow. Trashed Christmas trees and scaffolding joined the grubby snow piles to squeeze the foot traffic to and from the school dropoff. New granules or rocks of salt were scattered on the wet pavement, later or earlier than necessary. The sun was blinding on the sidewalk meltwater. The cleanup along the curb on Broadway had somehow re-filled the main roadway with fluffed-up snow for a loader to scoop up. The air could briefly fool the body into believing it was mild. The afternoon was drippy; a haze was in the sky and the sky was in the puddles.

So after less than two weeks it is pretty clear that 2018 will be at best just as bad as 2017, and that is at best. Let’s be honest, it’s going to get a lot more awful before it gets better and it’s not going to get better. We had a good run but actually the run wasn’t even all that good and the only reason we’re remembering it fondly is we’ve forgotten how it felt before everything fell apart. I guess what I’m saying is everything is terrible and only getting worse. Would you like to distract yourself from how horrible everything is but also not hate yourself for suddenly realizing you just watched eight straight hours of “golden age” television, which apparently means elves fucking their sisters?

Good news: Books still exist. I read a bunch of them last year, and these are the ones I enjoyed the most. It is an idiosyncratic list based on my own personal tastes but guess what, I am the one writing this post, what else would it be based on? In any event, there will certainly be something here for you to enjoy. I am not going to tell you too much about each title because I think we all know that the more you read about a book in a review the more you feel as if you have already read the actual book and therefore don’t need to pick it up. These are all good books, and they all deserve to be read. Note: This list is roughly in order of when I read them last year, so don’t think they are ranked or weighted any other way. Okay, here we go.