Happy New Year

Today’s AJ highlights the year we just left.We begin with my own attempt to make sense of it all: From 30,000 Feet: Five Year-end Observations about Arts and Culture in 2025 looks at the more than 6,000 stories we posted this year to find the patterns beneath the noise. The individual incidents—closures in San Francisco, lawsuits in D.C., op-eds on the “death of cinema”—stop looking like isolated events and reveal a broader structural shift (Diacritical Blog).The Wa