It’s the first week of December, which means it’s the start of my favorite time of year. I’m not talking about Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwaanza. And I’m not talking about any sort of New Year’s celebration. The season I’m talking about is what I call “year-in-review time.” When all the Best Of lists come out. When all the roundups of the wildest and biggest news events of the year are compiled. When the winners and losers of the past 12 months are crowned. I *live* for this stuff, which means this week’s show is all about just that: looking back on the pop culture that made 2024 tick.  

I’m joined by two all-stars for this challenge: Traci Thomas, host of the books podcast The Stacks, and Franklin Leonard, creator of The Black List, a company that helps Hollywood find good scripts. 

A thing I had us all do to kick off the episode was to try to sum up our year of pop culture in only three words. The three words thing is a little party trick used a lot when I was conducting man-on-the-street interviews during my time covering politics. Without fail, if I asked a political rally-goer to tell me how the event felt in just three words, they’d give me those three words, and then they wouldn’t stop talking, to give me even more. Picking three words always opens up the conversational floodgates, so I figured it would work well for the show this week, too. 

But then I realized that the words I picked only made me more confused about what this past year really meant. I picked “demure,” “brat,” and “weird.” You probably remember each of them trending this year.

“Weird” was the word Tim Walz and Kamala Harris used to call out behavior they found strange or just plain wrong from Donald Trump and his running-mate JD Vance during this past election season. “Brat” was the one-word catch-all Charli XCX introduced to the culture with her smash 2024 album of the same name. The highly-memeable font and glaring green backdrop of its album cover became a rallying cry for the femme and queer internet over the summer, as well as one for the Harris campaign. And usually, the way one defined “brat” — which, according to Collins Dictionary, means having a "confident, independent and hedonistic attitude” — was as an adjective, via stating an activity that could be considered brat: showing up to brunch already hungover; sneaking a cigarette in a public bathroom; telling your crush you have a crush on them, in front of their partner. 

“Demure” felt just as imaginative and expansive, if in the opposite direction. A viral TikTok from trans creator Jools Lebron had millions talking about the ways they performed “demure” and its offshoots “cutesy” and “mindful”: dressing tastefully, going easy on the makeup, keeping it classy during work meetings. “Brat” was the bad girl you loved; to be “demure” was to be the good girl others aspired to. 

I was obsessed with both, especially in the ways each word allowed for a certain expansiveness around the performance of femininity and queerness. “Brat” and “mindful” were both about finding countless ways to perform those two things. And “weird” felt like the opposite to me: inherently restrictive. Calling someone or something “weird” in the context of 2024 stopped the conversation in its tracks. Something you already did was labeled, and there was nothing you could do to reverse it. 

I had a whole theory on how these three words summed up 2024. In my mind, “brat” and “demure” won the year, and that was a testament to the ways in which our cultural imagination around things like queerness and femininity were continuing to expand and become increasingly imaginative. Meanwhile, the rise of “weird” represented a commentary on the status of the long-standing ideal of perfect heteromasculinity. That ideal was stuck, and “weird” proved it. 

But then the two men labeled “weird” the most over these last few months won the election. And Jools Lebron’s 15 minutes of fame came to an end. And Charli XCX had a great year, but not a single Top 10 hit. I wanted to say that my three words showed just how culturally progressive 2024 was, but the more I think about it, maybe that wasn’t really the case. 

So how else might I define this year of culture, if not through those three words? Maybe it was Wicked and its all-consuming press tour proving that the monoculture can still exist, even in 2024 and this moment of media fragmentations, and even if the monoculture that the Wicked press tour embodies came very, very close to being downright oppressive. Or maybe this year of culture is totally summed up by the months-long rap battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake: a sign that anger usually makes for better art than love, and that the best culture often comes to us as a complete surprise. Or maybe I have no idea how to sum up what this year of culture actually meant. 

Here’s where I throw it to you. How would you define or describe this year of pop culture? What three words would you use to label it? And do any of the theories I’ve floated here make any sense at all? I’ll pick this all up again next week, with some of your opinions (so reply to this email and let me know!). I’ll also start sharing some of my best-of lists: movies and music and books (not too much TV this year, tho — streaming kinda sucked!) Alright, hit me back with your thoughts and we’ll talk next week. 

Happy year-in-review-time, 

Sam