Posts Tagged ‘society’
“Curation is a form of pattern recognition – pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view”*…
It’s that time of year again… we’re being inundated by “best-of” lists. Many of them are interesting, if only for the reactions they evoke (“how could you include/omit that???”). A few are gems. Here, two that your correspondent found especially interesting…
First, our (now annual) visit with Tom Whitwell and his “52 things I learned in 2025.” For example…
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… 11. The Radioactive Shrimp Scare of 2025 was likely caused when a recycling plant in Cikande, Indonesia accidentally melted scrap metal from a piece of medical or industrial equipment containing Caesium-137. A plume of smoke was released across Java, entering the BMS Foods plant which processes 1/3rd of the shrimp imported into the US. [Paris Martineau]…
… 31. In 2023, Nigeria had a million more births than the whole of Europe. [Our World in Data, via Charles Onyango-Obbo]…
… 52. Gall’s law says: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” [John Gall p.52]
Next, “The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026,” from Derek Thompson…
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… 2. The triumph of streaming video
In my essay “Everything Is Television,” [highy recommended] I wrote that all media are converging toward the same flow of video. Social media is becoming less about keeping up with friends and more about watching short-form videos made by strangers—i.e., television. Podcasts are becoming less about listening to Internet radio and more about watching YouTube talk shows—i.e., television…
[in this entry– as in all of his points– Thompson elobaorates (e.g., here, the end of reading, the victory of streaming, the threat to movie theaters, and the warning that TikTok might be mealting your brain) and substantiates his points with data.]…
… 5. The whole US economy right now is one big bet on artificial intelligence
Housing is in a rut. Farmers are hurting. Manufacturing has been shrinking for months. Hiring is hell. And yet, the US economy continues to grow, powered by an AI infrastructure project unlike anything in modern history…
… 13. Americans aren’t drunk. They’re high.
In 2010, daily or near-daily drinkers outnumbered daily marijuana users by a two-to-one margin. But since then, a wave of decriminalization has allowed marijuana use to soar into the 2020s, so that today daily marijuana users exceed drinkers for the first time ever…
… 26. [in it’s glorious entirety] Great art can save lives.
We’ll close with one of the finer letters to the editor you’ll read, from the Times of London, on the occasion of the death of playwright Tom Stoppard.
“Saved by Stoppard”: Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival. Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia. – Michael Baum, Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
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As we read ’em and reap, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that Dusty Springfield was deported from South Africa after performing before a desegregated audience at a show near Capetown. Springfield was the first British artist to stipulate the inclusion of a specific “No Apartheid” clause into her contract, and her disgust with the country’s policy of racial segregation and discrimination helped inspire a cultural boycott of South Africa.
“Las Vegas: a savage journey to the heart of the American dream”*…
Isaac Ariail Reed muses on Las Vegas and what it can tell us about ourselves…
It comes buzzing into my mind like a hazy half dream, the kind that arrives when you’ve had too much espresso and need to close your eyes in the dark of your hotel room for a moment. I’m in two places at once: One is the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, where I am wandering around the sandy two-acre lot amid the retired signs of dynamited casinos, hotels, and other businesses on the Strip, listening to old Elvis live shows on my headphones; the other is the recently opened poker room in the Venetian Casino, where I find myself sitting next to Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who once saw, with a clarity that remains difficult to reckon with today, the end of an epoch.
As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, “if, sometime in the mid-nineties, we had asked for a prediction, surely it would have been: the decline of a culture.” He meant the 1890s, the European fin-de-siècle and the coming descent into fascism, but I could say the same thing about the 1990s today. Benjamin was writing about the arcades, those iron-and-glass canopied commercial passageways that he took as emblematic of Paris when it was the epicenter of the glory and fragility of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. What Benjamin saw in the persistence of the remaining arcades in early-twentieth-century Paris (after the urban-renewal efforts of Baron Haussmann leveled many) is what I see in the persistently glitzy architecture and tightly time-constrained nightly shows of Las Vegas today: a culture attempting to grasp its own passing…
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… What I did not quite realize viscerally before this year, though, is something that the great art critic Dave Hickey was always on about. Las Vegas, despite its similarities to Macau, is in its history, culture, and politics deeply American. Hence, de Tocqueville: “Those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations have always before their eyes the image of chance; and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part.” In Hickey’s 1997 classic, Air Guitar, he wrote, “America…is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.” He continued:
What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place than Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home. The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize—and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication.
Hickey was luminously perspicacious in his ability to recognize, amid the vast and disturbing inequalities of Las Vegas, the horizontality of its cultural politics, which are not so much lowbrow as they are open to weirdness and conformity in equal measure such that the sheer humanity of the equally but differently weird (or conformist) is suddenly public and undeniable. Hickey also argued that there was something about the American experiment wrapped up in his “home in the neon.” The secret of Vegas is that there are no secrets, he explained, and, furthermore, “there are only two rules: (1) Post the odds, and (2) Treat everybody the same. Just as one might in a democracy (What a concept!)” Hickey thus found in Liberace’s rhinestones the key to a democratic politics of honest fakery as a defense against the subtle tyranny—recently become much less subtle—of a politics of authenticity and its handmaiden, the deep hatred of art, freedom, and changing your mind dressed up as love of family, morality, nation, and the supposed liberty of guns and tariffs. The emphasis, for Hickey, is on the honest and the different human commmunities of desire that are the root of pluralism in aesthetics: Liberace’s rhinestones is not a real diamond, but union wages, sexual freedom, and aesthetic ambition are honestly held commitments. In Hickey’s version of Las Vegas, no one asks who is a “real” American, because the reality of the USA is not something that has to be performed into existence by duplicitous electoral promises and unpaid contractors; it’s right there in the posted gambling odds, the midnight steak and eggs, and the civilizational ambition of the Hoover Dam.
This, then, is the problem we have inherited from Hickey: Can the bare and brutal honest fakery of Las Vegas, and the deeply American, weirdly libertarian, outsider-art-loving union democracy that Hickey found inside that honest fakery sustain itself as part of a free society? Or will the crushing inequality, insane techno-oligarchy, and battling moralisms of toxic masculinity and therapeutic bureaucracy be, in the end, too much for Vegas and thus too much for the United States as well?…
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… There was in Hickey’s writing a deep suspicion of both the aesthetics and the politics of authenticity, and that suspicion, one might hazard, is the connection between Las Vegas and the kernel of freedom held in common that has, on occasion, here and there, made itself present in American life, and which has sustained American intellectuals as distinct as John Dewey and Joan Didion. What, then, does Las Vegas do for us when it reminds us that libido is a fact of life and building a culture on its suppression is a little like taking a political stand against gravity? Here I found my way to a different kind of theorizing, once I realized that far from any simulacrum, Las Vegas is in fact the place where American modernity articulates the eternal problems of being human.
On the one hand, Las Vegas is the culmination of the historically specific phenomenon of the American modern, bringing together the technological sublime, movable capital, representative democracy, and libertarian culture in the first postindustrial metropolis. Yet on the other hand, Vegas is about the inescapable aspects of human existence from time immemorial: desire as multiple, the importance of creature comforts to a sense of well-being, the philosophy of uncertainty and the problem of fate, embodiment as both wonderful and unbearable, and the irrepressible need to create new art and build new buildings. In this regard, we can say that Vegas is the place where the American project’s complex and conflictual relationship to the more immovable aspects of human life together was thrown into stark relief.
And then there are the binaries. In Vegas, it becomes quite clear that the towering economic power that drives American politics has, in the end, cultural sources and cultural consequences. The USA is about sin and salvation, filth and cleanliness, God and the Devil, believer and atheist, winners and losers. All societies have such binaries. The sociologist Émile Durkheim mapped them all as versions of sacred versus profane, while the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used them to read stories as clues to the structure of the mind itself. But in the United States, with its Calvinist inheritance and infamously strict racial hierarchy, the binaries have a special importance. They have always resisted middle grounds and gray areas, preferring the intense clash of purified poles to ambiguous endings and existential despair. This is why American movies are melodramatic to the point of absurdity and why the harshness of the American moral climate, when combined with the filth of American politics, created a political culture that can be unbearably self-righteous. Vegas puts on display the harsh feel and gleaming strangeness, bordering on surreality, of the American binaries, but it also breaks them down, which is the deep effect of its honest fakery. Vegas is not there to make you feel your job back home is unavoidable. It is there to make you ask whether the difference between good and evil is really what your pastor says it is.
For a long time, it sure looked as though Hickey was right to find a home in Las Vegas, and to find his version of America there too, because of the way Vegas both displayed the binaries and embraced the gray areas in between. It happens in two steps. First, the town cuts through pretense. One night in Vegas will remind you that in America, the most famous cultural critic in the world, past or present, is about as important as the current special-teams coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers (and probably less). Second, it liberates you from the defensiveness that constantly infects the American intellectual trying to justify his existence. Why? Because Vegas is an intellectual’s paradise in so far as it is the place that knows, better than anywhere else in the United States, that we are all creatures addicted to symbols, entranced by our illusions, and in need of a lucky roll. In Vegas, as Dean Martin and Katy Perry have both attested, the desirous body, the strategic mind, and the neon sign are bound together in a cosmic swirl, and the result is the Frankenstein’s monster of American modernity. What could be more intellectual than that?
Back when American modernity was more than the latest tweet from the Department of Homeland Security, its intellectuals navigated the harsh binaries of American culture via innovation in thinking and generosity of spirit, making some kind of room, some of the time, for the next immigrant culture to arrive and do the two most American things of all: make a buck and do whatever you want with religion and culture. This is the spirit we have lost; we increasingly just want to double down on the same binaries that every other preacher in this godforsaken land does, calling endlessly for the return of the cultural artifacts of an earlier era. But the two great philosophies of culture to emerge in America—pragmatism and jazz—are, among many other things, attempts to solve the problem of the excluded middle between the purest Good and the worst Evil, and to find in the very confrontation of contradiction an improvised way for humans to live together a little better tomorrow than they did yesterday. This is the American promise: that beyond the binaries lies not transcendent meaning or nihilism but a little bit of democracy, a little bit of freedom, and a whole lot of practicality.
But navigating the binaries to subvert and reinvent them takes energy, and it is that energy one still finds in Las Vegas. Even if in enervated form, it is there, and this is the part of the city—the Strip, yes, but also the Arts District and downtown—that some foreign visitors grasp intuitively and immediately and others will never, ever understand: Vegas as the intensity of American hustle. On that winter-vacation visit, I was set straight about it by my bartender. I had just had a quite unpleasant interaction at the craps table with an overstimulated and sleep-deficient fellow in town for the rodeo. His truculent attitude had turned very dark, even threatening, in response to my friendly overtures. I was getting ready to bitch about it to the young man from Los Angeles who had just served my whiskey and had all the signs of being a safe political harbor. He cut me off right away: “Shit, I’m glad they’re here. Otherwise, we’d have no money to make these two weeks in December.”
There, in that moment, I saw the tiniest glimpse of possibility for a new, but nonetheless recognizable, American culture, and I realized everything I was, in my academic bubble, missing. Vegas is much cheaper to live in than LA; for the first time in its history all major casinos on the Strip are unionized; my bartender, like me and the poker pros, was hustling most weeks of the year but was also going to take a real vacation with his girlfriend; I might be able to write and teach, but who cares about my opinions on the cultural politics of the rodeo? And that’s the deal that Las Vegas has offered: Make the wages fair and the housing affordable, post the damn odds, and let people make their own judgments about what kind of clothes, art, sex, and sports they want. That’s the project, if we want our country back in a new and better form. But the artists in Vegas are here to tell you: The odds are very long…
What does it mean to “think Las Vegas”? “Mourning and Melancholia in Las Vegas,” from @hedgehogreview.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Pair with “Lost Vegas,” from @lukewinkie.bsky.social in @slate.com: “Everyone inside America’s most flailing destination city has a theory for what’s wrong. Now I have my own.”
* Hunter S. Thompson
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As we check the odds, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that Las Vegas strip fixture The Aladdin hotel and casino closed. The site of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s wedding in 1967, its final show was a preformance by Mötley Crüe.
The building was demolished the following March (in front of 20,000 spectators, 1,000 of whom paid $250 each to watch the implosion from inside a “ringside” tent). In 2000 a new Aladdin resort, three times larger than the original, opened on the site, but quickly went broke. It was purchased out of bankruptcy to become “The Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino.”
“No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.”*…
Individualism has been been a growing force in cultures around the world since the Enlightenment; it picked up momentum in the 20th century (c.f., e.g., Adam Curtis’ masterful Century of Self [and here]); and has become a– if not the— foundational concept in liberalism. But, Nils Gilman argues, the biological discovery of the holobiont gives the lie to “the autonomous individual” in a way that has massive implications not only for how we think about, but also how we govern ourselves…
We like to believe we end at our skin. This is the primary hallucination of modern political philosophy in the West, the foundational axiom upon which we have erected our laws, our economics, and our sense of self-worth. Philosophical liberalism imagines human individuals as discrete, bounded entities — monads moving through space, contained entirely within a fleshy envelope that separates “self” from “other.” This architectural model of the human being underpins the political concept of the autonomous liberal subject, just as it grounds the social scientific commitment to methodological individualism. It asserts that the basic unit of human reality is the singular actor, the “I” that thinks, chooses, and owns.
However, this model is a biological fiction. It is a map that corresponds to no territory found in nature. Over the last three decades the life sciences have undergone a quiet revolution that renders the classical liberal view of the subject not merely philosophical debatable, yet factually incorrect. The concept of the holobiont, coined by Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1943 but popularized in the anglophone world by Lynn Margulis in the 1990s, has shattered the idea of the unitary organism. We now know that every macro-organism is actually a dynamic ecosystem, a chimera composed of a host and billions of symbiotic microbes that function as a distinct, integrated biological unit. You are not a single entity. You are a walking coral reef, a plural assemblage of human and non-human cells negotiating a fragile, continuous existence. Roughly half the cells in your body are not human; they are bacterial, fungal, and viral. They do not merely hitch a ride. They digest your food, regulate your immune system, modulate your mood, and structure the development of your brain.
The implications of this biological reality for political theory are cataclysmic. The entire edifice of Liberalism, from Hobbes and Locke to modern libertarianism, rests on the assumption of the “atomic individual” — a sovereign state of one. This core concept of liberal political theory posits a world of separate, self-governing agents who enter into contracts and demand rights to protect their private sphere from intrusion. The liberal subject claims (and demands) to be walled off, protected, and kept clean of the influence of others.
Biology exposes this desire for total autonomy as not just false, but a death wish. In the logic of the holobiont, absolute immunity is not health; it is starvation. A body hermetically sealed against the “other” dies. Our physical existence requires constant contamination and collaboration with foreign agents. We cannot be “self-made” because we are constitutively “made-with.” Donna Haraway describes this shift as moving from autopoiesis (self-making) to sympoiesis (making-with). We do not precede our relationships; our relationships constitute us. If the political subject is physically constituted by “others,” the concept of self-sovereignty collapses. One cannot be the sole monarch of a kingdom occupied by foreign powers that provide the essential infrastructure for the kingdom’s survival…
[Gilman elaborates on the implications both for our political and management systems and for the social sciences that study them. And he explores why this new perspective is hard to internalize and embrace…]
The resistance to this holobiontic perspective is fierce because it is terrifying. As Rudyard Kipling observed (in a quote often misattributed to Nietzsche), “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” The autonomous liberal subject offers psychological safety. It promises control. It tells us that we are captains of our souls. Embracing the holobiont requires admitting that we are porous, vulnerable, and inextricably entangled with things we cannot control. It demands that we surrender the fantasy of the impermeable border. The skin is not a wall; it is a heavily trafficked interface. The state is not a fortress; it is a metabolic node in a planetary flow.
We are living through the friction between our laws and our biology. We legislate for individuals, yet we live as assemblages. We worship independence while our bodies are grounded in interdependence. The future of political theory cannot simply be an adjustment of liberal categories. It requires a fundamental ontological revision that starts with relation rather than separation. We must stop trying to protect the self from the world and begin understanding the self as a spatially intensified instantiation of the world.
Clinging to the myth of the autonomous subject is a massive act of collective denial. It represents a refusal to look at the microscope and see the legions teeming inside us. We construct our societies around a myth of being that does not correspond to biogeochemical reality. The cost of this error is everywhere apparent — in the degradation of our ecology, the polarization of our politics, and the isolation of our private lives. We try to seal ourselves off, creating sterile environments that make us sick, physically and politically. The holobiont offers a different path, one that acknowledges that to be one is always to be many. We are not solitary thinkers looking out at nature. We are nature looking at itself, through a lens made of billions of other lives. The sovereign is dead. Long live the swarm…
“The Sovereign Individual Does Not Exist,” from @nilsgilman.bsky.social.
Further complicating the issue: “Externalities, Rights, and the Problem of Knowledge,” from Cyril Hédoin:
Very short summary: This essay explains how the knowledge problem [the challenge of a central authority having the information needed to make rational decisions for a complex system like a society] applies to the definition of jurisdictional rights. Jurisdictional rights define spheres of individual sovereignty. Rights are appropriately defined if they internalize all potential externalities. However, individuals may disagree about what counts as an externality. This disagreement stems from individuals’ preferences, which are typically dispersed and local. I discuss various solutions to this problem, including the use of polycentricity...
[Image above: source]
* John Donne
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As we incorporate the interconnected, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that our perspective was shifted in a different kind of way: Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Actually, on that day he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the title was shortened to the one we know with the sixth edition in 1872.
“If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.”*…
The estimable Arthur Goldhammer on the flavor of our moment… a moment (for many of us, anyway) in which, even as we strive to stave off despair, hope is hard to find…
There is a saying, well-known in French, counseling resolve in the face of hopelessness: “Il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer.” (Freely translated: Hope is not necessary to endeavor, nor is success necessary to persevere.”) The thought, with minor modification, has been variously attributed to both Charles the Bold and William of Orange and quoted by writers as different as Marguerite Yourcenar and Jean-Paul Sartre. It’s a good motto for bleak times in general and for these times in particular.
For the first time in a long while, though, I’ve begun to feel the first stirrings of hope, and even if Charles and William are right that hope is something one can do without, I think they would agree that it’s easier to get going if you think the winds might be shifting in a more favorable direction.
Certainly, the election results of a few weeks ago offered a modicum of encouragement. To that Republican electoral debacle have now been added signs that the MAGA movement is neither as unified nor as indomitable as it once appeared. For example, Trump has been forced to rescind tariffs on certain food items because of cries of pain from below. He has been embarrassed by the leak of derogatory items from the so-called Epstein files, challenged from within by erstwhile epigones such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and forced to back off opposition to release of the files by the growing belief that he must have a great deal to hide.
Worse still for a would-be tyrant, he has been made to look ridiculous by repeatedly changing his tune: at first, the Epstein files were going to lay bare the perfidy of the Democrats; then, through his mouthpiece Pam Bondi, he asserted that there was nothing in them and everyone should just move on; still later, he ordered the same Bondi to use this supposedly non-existent evidence to go after his enemies Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, et al.
In a Times column published [November 17], Michelle Goldberg evoked these various fissures in the MAGA edifice, to which she added the noteworthy observation that even stalwarts of the movement such as Mike Cernovich, who helped spread the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, were appalled by the magnitude of MAGA corruption. And how could one not be appalled, with the Trump family profiting so handsomely from presidential decisions on matters ranging from cryptocurrency to defense contracts to brokering pardons to wheeling and dealing in the Middle East, Asia, and beyond? Although the shamelessness of it all is breathtaking, until now none of it seemed to have been noticed by Trump’s “base.”
What has changed? Perhaps no more than my mood. I hope I’m not allowing the wish to become father to the thought. But it’s just possible that the “audience” of Trump’s slickly produced reality show has begun to notice that things aren’t going according to script. The war in Ukraine, which was to have been settled on Day One, rages on. Meanwhile, after expending a great deal of firepower to dispatch a few small motorboats to Kingdom Come, a great armada has been assembled for the apparent purpose of bringing Venezuela to its knees. Venezuela! In the heyday of American imperialism, a gunboat or two would have sufficed, but our self-designated Secretary of War has chosen to deploy our “largest and most lethal aircraft carrier,” as ABC’s Martha Raddatz describes it, along with a B52 redeemed from mothballs presumably because it cut a more impressive figure for the cameras than one of the smaller jets arrayed on the deck of the carrier below.
At the same time, heavily armed and masked ICE brigades have been unleashed on city after city, while Homeland Security officials boasted of the arrest of ”81 illegals this weekend, our biggest haul to date.” It may have dawned on television audiences that 81 is a small number compared with the 12 or 20 or 30 million “illegals” (the number keeps rising) said to be in the country. Symbolic shows of force wear thin after a while.
At the same time, doubts about Trump’s management of the economy are growing. The tariff policy is an incoherent mess. Its justification in the name of national emergency has been questioned in the federal courts. There is suspicion that the job market stagnated while statistics were not being collected owing to the federal shutdown. Investors have begun to pull back from the stock market for fear that the AI-driven bubble is about to burst, and without the winds of AI driving it forward, the economy could soon find itself dead in the water.
The Trump Show has always depended on illusion, like the professional wrestling shows that inspired it [see here]. Is it too much to hope that viewers are beginning to tire? I’m not sure, but il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre...
[Image above: source]
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As keep on, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that the television signals of two stations (WGN and WTTW) in Chicago were hijacked: a pirate broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume was broadcast to thousands of home viewers. The culprit(s) have yet to be identified.
See one of the intrusions here.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”*…
In an piece adapted/updated from his recent book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, Stefan Fatsis explores process(es) that determine our “Word[s] of the Year”…
Thirty-five years ago, the late English professor Allan Metcalf [see here] had an idea. “I was thinking that Time magazine has its Person of the Year,” he told me, “and why can’t we do for words what Time did for people?”
Metcalf assumed that the language pros at the American Dialect Society, which held the first WOTY vote in 1990, would nominate words “headed straight for our everyday vocabulary and secure places in the dictionaries.” But he misjudged human behavior. Lexicography is sober research committed quietly and alone. Word of the Year is a key party: You can’t be sure who you’ll go home with. The inaugural winner, bushlips, meaning “insincere political rhetoric,” barely lasted a news cycle.
After some eye-rolling, criteria were established: Was the word completely new? Had it been used before in other contexts? Was it “a major focus of human activity or behavior” in the previous year? Did it have staying potential? WOTY could be brand-new or newly popular. But it had to have been used widely and reflect the zeitgeist of the annum gone by.
Today there are around a dozen Words of the Year (Word of the Years?) in English, and WOTY season runs from late fall to early January. Dictionaries duke it out for attention, some touting their scientific methodology for picking a winner, others offering a nebulous alchemy of number-crunching and feel. The dialect society, the WOTY OG, conducts a live popular vote in a hotel ballroom at a language conference, the outcome based more often than not on vibes alone.
No matter the formula, selecting one word to define a year is serious business. It’s about the sharp lines of language and usage, how society adopts and spreads new terminology, and, increasingly, the dramatic ways that social media influence the way we write, talk, and interact. As a culture we’re forever searching for ways to make sense of our big, complicated, confusing world. WOTY neatly boxes up 365 days in a single, simple word (technically a “vocabulary item”; phrases, compounds, and affixes also are eligible). It’s media catnip and hot-take gold.
“It gives people this sense of ownership,” says New York Times Wordplay columnist Sam Corbin, who’s writing a book about what she calls the WOTY-verse. “We have always been exploring new ways to fill gaps in vocabulary but also respond to culture with words. It’s delicious.”
For the dialect society, which crowns a champ last, the job is so weighty that it takes two days to pick a winner—nominations one night, balloting the next. I’ve participated in around a decade’s worth of votes. I check my journalistic objectivity at the door and do my linguistic duty. Every year, a pattern emerges. A few words totally surprise, some a product of Gen Z (or Gen Alpha) or gamer culture that’s bypassed middle-aged me (hello, skibidi, a 2023 nominee). Recency bias is common—as you’d expect in a vote of trending language. So is observer bias, with crowd approval often directly proportional to shock value (the suffix -ussy winning in 2022; rawdog in 2024).
Looking at the victorious words from a distance, you might nod in recognition of a specific event (chad, 2000; bailout, 2008), cringe at terminology that dates you (World Wide Web, 1995), or wonder what the hell people were thinking (to pluto, a verb meaning to demote, as in what happened to Pluto when it was reclassified from full-fledged to dwarf planet, 2006). But that’s the genius of Word of the Year. We’re suckers for media-driven argument engines. It’s a short walk from “LeBron is better than Jordan!” to “They should have picked rizz!”
Since around 2010, when the newsy app defeated the funner nom—as in the onomatopoetic nomnomnom, to connote eating—younger voters (mostly grad students and junior faculty) have tilted the conversation away from dictionary-type words toward social media and online slang. “It’s generally who makes the best argument in the room, and you can’t predict that,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s New Words Committee.
A couple of votes stand out for me, for linguistic and cultural reasons. One was in Austin, Texas, in January 2017. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and nearly half of the WOTY nominees were related to him: post-truth, basket of deplorables, unpresidented, alt-right, fake news, locker-room banter, yuuuge. But the mood was ominous, not apocalyptic. It was, after all, pre-inauguration, pre-Charlottesville, pre-impeachments, pre-pandemic, pre-2020 election, pre-January 6, pre-felony indictments, pre-felony convictions, pre-assassination attempts, pre-2024 election, pre-ICE raids: pre-everything.
WOTY promised closure, and everyone was down for that. In the middle of the room, Dan Villareal, a linguistics postdoc, stood up. “Okay,” he said. “It’s 2016. Dumpster fire?” Earlier in the evening, the fire emoji, and also the trashcan and fire emojis used together to represent dumpster fire, won the emoji category. One of the older attendees had asked what dumpster fire meant. “It is used to describe an incredibly catastrophic situation,” Zimmer explained. “Like some people think 2016 was one long dumpster fire.”
Normalize, post-truth, and the fire emoji also got WOTY nominations—the first time an emoji had made the final group. So did woke. “Granted it’s been around a while,” cherubic Stanford linguist John Rickford, a titan in the field, said. “But only if you stay woke can you put out the dumpster fire.” The house was brought down, and I figured it was game over. But then another postdoc, Nicole Holliday, lobbied against the word—“because it was appropriated from the Black solidarity movement in the 1960s and I think that we are so late to this game and last year was anything but woke,” she said. Dumpster fire beat woke in a runoff.
The journey of the two words since then demonstrates WOTY’s unpredictability and its historical value. Dumpster fire was relatively new and the WOTY early-warning system worked; Merriam-Webster added it just 14 months later. Woke, by contrast, would take a far more disturbing linguistic ride. The dialect society voters who (literally) snapped their fingers in approval for woke would watch it get twisted by political commentators and a demagogic right-wing into what was tantamount to a slur.
The dialect society’s last two votes also feel, in hindsight, like markers. When the group gathered in New York to pick the 2023 winner, Joe Biden was president and Trump was a long shot to return to power. The Israel-Hamas war drew a nomination of ceasefire, but the Barbie movie, AI, and online slang dominated the discourse. The most spirited debate was over a word that didn’t appear in Sam Corbin’s Times write-up of the event: cunty, “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or attitude.”
The winner straddled the line between serious and fun: enshittification, meaning a gradual deterioration in the quality of internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The word captured the growing frustration with internet subservience and AI overlords. The 2024 vote, in Philadelphia, also was relatively apolitical; maybe we were all terrified about Trump’s impending inauguration. Rawdog was subversive and fun. The runner-up, sanewashing, was doomy, but more of a criticism of how the media handled Trump than of Trump himself.
Kicking off the 2025 WOTY campaign, Dictionary.com eschewed the perilous state of the union and opted for the ubiquitous (and annoying, to adults) Gen Alpha nonsense catchphrase 67 (also written 6-7 or six seven). The British dictionary Collins went with the AI term vibe coding, which it said “captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology.” Other dictionaries are likely to lean into our quick descent into competitive authoritarianism and choose an existing word that was of the moment and looked up a lot: totalitarian, fascism (for which former Dictionary.com editor John Kelly made the case), deportation, crackdown, tariff, shutdown. (Surreal and unprecedented, fyi, have already had a turn; chaos is available.)
For the American Dialect Society voters, current-events words need to capture the seriousness of the political moment, possess some cultural stickiness, and be lexically dynamic. Language writer Nancy Friedman, who tracks potential WOTYs on her Substack, Fritinancy, flagged DOGE as a verb meaning to fire or purge and as a “combining form,” as in DOGEboys or DOGEbags. Various tariff spinoffs—such as tariffied, which has appeared in lots of headlines—also show promise. Other candidates unite the sober and the clever: Kavanaugh stop, broligarchy, trolligarchy, sadopopulism.
Brianne Hughes, a linguist and writer, maintains a running list of 2025 WOTY hopefuls on the alt-dictionary site Wordnik—around 250 of them so far, including #NoKings, Coldplayed, clanker, aura farming, Straw Hat Pirates, Gen Z stare, and chopped unc, a combo of the internet slang chopped and unc. (Some late additions: Young Republicans, in the wake of a Politico story revealing racist banter in a GOP group chat; Trumpstein files; and Gestapo Barbie, a derogative nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.)
“Choosing the Word of the Year is No Easy Feat“- the history of who and how, from @stefanfatsis.bsky.social in @literaryhub.bsky.social
See also Fatsis on the precarious status of the dictionary: “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
* Lewis Carroll (Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass)
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As we contemplate coinage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that The Animals recorded “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which had been first recorded by Nina Simone earlier that year. It was the first single released from their album Animal Tracks (followed by “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”).
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