When Drew and I recorded this week's episode of The Distraction roughly a week before Christmas, we were aware of the risk we were taking. All kinds of stuff can happen in an ungovernable and deranged culture over the course of two weeks, even during the two weeks of the year in which the least tends to happen. But Drew was getting ready to go on a longish family vacation, and I was getting ready to make my annual pilgrimage to Maine for six freezing days of last-minute shopping and Amato's sandwiches; there were only so many options. And so we placed our bet that nothing in the remaining days of 2025 would change our assessment of this stupid, brutal, mostly awful, but ultimately survivable year.
It probably does not qualify as much of a spoiler to say that we both thought 2025 sucked, but we each ended the year in decent spirits, and much more hopeful than we started it. Much of this fun-sized, 36-minute episode is given over to talking about how we managed that. I discussed my personal journey of feeling like shit in 2025, and my dark winter of grim 1970s movies, Drew talked about taking pride in his family, and making some self-care decisions about how much bad news he chose to ingest, and we agreed that, for all the things are obviously ending or all the way over, the doom-filled sense of everything ending that suffused last winter was ultimately an illusion. It's not that things aren't bad, but they also aren't over, and good things are still possible even in this (again, pretty miserable) interregnum of ours. We talked about those good things, too.
I do not want to give the impression that we did not yammer about our political discontent in this episode. We absolutely did that, too, discussing the hangover of facile '80s-style anti-authority culture and how strange it is to see that pose reframed around not the awful elite currently robbing and degrading everyone but, like, teachers. Still, we managed to back ourselves into some stubborn optimism, not despite but because of how manifestly untenable this moment feels and is. A lot of work is going to be required to get us not back to normal—normal, we agreed, is off the table for the moment—but to a new way of being that is more sustainably and broadly just and good. The extent to which people seem to hate the way things are now suggests that this realization is setting in, if not for the mediocre elites and boring villains currently in charge then for the people who will get us from here to whatever is next.
All that left-coded, middle-aged podcaster blood and thunder, and two Funbag questions? In this economy? That may not be sustainable, but this is the season of treats, and so we found a way. Readers asked us about why over-the-counter cold remedies don't work, and we got upset about that, used the phrase "prescription-strength Ludens," and discussed taking pills dry as a cinematic tough-guy move. A question about the worst human being in the Baseball Hall of Fame led us to an anti-celebration of Cap Anson, a vile racist and one of the architects of the sport's color line, and a brief consideration of the (many) other competitors there. All in all, it's a suitable start for 2026—loopy but hopeful, or hopeful but loopy, seems like as good a place to being as any.
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