It Was a Very ___ Year
The more things change, the more things change
Dear Readers,
I don’t know exactly what year this happened, but I remember it clearly: It was a December in my youth and I was beginning to take an interest in the news. One of the networks had put together a “year in review” program. I sat down in front of the television and was transfixed. Here in a coherent and chronologically ordered hour or two was a retrospective of the twelve months we had just lived through. It was deeply satisfying. It seemed to be just what I needed to put things “in perspective.”
So of course the next December I looked forward to the same satisfaction. I probably started checking the TV Guide early in the month to see when the end-of-the-year roundup would air. I looked for it, not remembering whether it was CBS, NBC, or ABC. Eventually, I tuned in to what I took to be that year’s version. But it wasn’t done in the same way! It didn’t give me the feeling of edification and clarity I wanted. Why couldn’t they stay with the formula that worked so well? As the years went by, it was that disappointment that stuck with me, because I recognized what it meant: I almost never liked the “new and improved” version of things.
Much later, I came to learn that the constant churn and “innovation” we get in the commercial world is extolled by many as the “dynamism” of capitalism. Entrepreneurs and technologists thrill to it. They like to call it “creative destruction.” Or disruption. But I was not a dynamic entrepreneur or an early adopter of new technology. I wondered whether I would have been happy growing up Amish.
Thinking about it now, I realize it’s not a matter of rejecting new things at all, wishing for a horse-drawn buggy instead of a car. The typewriter was once newfangled. But I’m writing this letter on a laptop computer. At some point in 2007 or 2008 I acquired an i-pod Classic and converted a lot of CDs (and even LP music) to this handy little device. But some years later the i-Pod was “discontinued.” It is “no longer supported.” We’re supposed to use our smartphone now for music and everything else. And subscribe to Spotify, etc.1
Well guess what. We just had the 2025 New Year’s Eve and when it was almost time to ring in 2026, I had the i-Pod at the ready, with a bluegrass version (Bill Keith) and a blues version (B.B. King) of “Auld Lang Syne.” For good measure, my playlist then goes right into J.J. Cale singing “After Midnight.”2
The point is that none of us can claim to reject new products and new technologies. Every old machine was once new. I bowl regularly with appreciation for automatic pinsetting machines rather than young humans at the end of the lane setting pins by hand. For me, and I think a lot of others, the problem is that the pace of change in our “dynamic” society can be maddening. Just when we get used to something it is declared obsolete. Is that a geezer complaint? Not necessarily. I enjoy seeing people much younger than me resist the churn: A while ago, my nephew, 31, published a piece (in a magazine that does not publish its work on the web) praising the continued use of the i-Pod classic.3 And I have no doubt that both young and old are plagued by the omnipresence of social media via the cellphone in modern life. The psychologist Angela Duckworth, writing the other day in the NYT about ways to break bad habits, reported that a student of hers “declared the infinite scroll the most evil invention of his lifetime.”
It doesn’t serve as a comprehensive “year in review” but we’ve got the annual list of some of The Baffler magazine’s best stories here on the Baffler’s site. You will find a story called “Changing Lanes,” in which the author claims that “to be a bowler is to be at war with change.” I was thinking this was probably the only end-of-the-year list to include a bowling story, but, hey, here it is on this excellent Longreads list of “number five” stories.
Many publications make lists of notable people who died in the previous year. “The Lives They Lived” in the New York Times Magazine is one of the best known. The editors have never meant this to be a list of the most “important” people or the biggest celebrities (Robert Redford wasn’t in this year’s collection). It’s meant to be a look at some of the interesting life stories that came to their final chapter in the recent year.
My own list would include four Texans, each of whom touched my life in different ways.
Ronnie Dugger died on May 27 at 95. He was a huge influence on me, and I still find it hard to put into words what it was like to know him over four decades. He hired me to work at the Texas Observer when I was 26, with apparent conviction (on very little evidence) that I had some kind of talent for writing about politics. Much later, Ronnie spent a couple years living on Cape Cod with his wife Patricia Blake. We visited him there, and then more regularly when he and Patricia lived in Somerville, Mass. He spent his final years back at his home in Austin, Texas. The New York Times obituary quoted Forrest Wilder, a former editor of the Observer, noting that Ronnie was “a man ahead of his time by 50 years.” But one could also say Texas is still a long way from catching up to his views on civil rights, the moral treatment of immigrants, the rejection of violence and war, and so many other causes having to do with social justice and progress. He got more radical as he got older. An aspiration for many of us.
Bill Moyers died on June 26 at 91. He took a dramatically different career path than Ronnie, working for Lyndon Johnson as Ronnie made himself a thorn in Lyndon’s side. But the body of work that Moyers created in his years at PBS is some of the most important work done on television when it comes to understanding the troubled life of our democracy. In the late 1990s, Moyers was playing a leading role directing the funding of the Schumann Foundation when it made a large grant to The American Prospect, which allowed a round of hiring that included me. Monika Bauerlein conveys how important that philanthropy was for journalists. Eric Alterman wrote in The New Republic that Moyers had “the most distinguished and valuable career of any television journalist ever.”
Jack Elder died on August 1 at 82. I started hearing about Jack when I first got to Texas in the mid-1980s. He was running a safe house for refugees called Casa Oscar Romero in the tiny town of San Benito in the Rio Grande Valley. At that time, there was a stream of refugees coming into South Texas, mostly from El Salvador, where the Reagan administration supported a repressive regime. Jack was part of the Sanctuary Movement, a network of churches that provided aid to refugees fleeing violence in Central America, and he paid a price for taking a brave stand. He was arrested for transporting refugees and convicted in February of 1985. He served a 150-day sentence in a federal halfway house—today the authorities would probably want him locked up in prison for thirty years. I only knew Jack from the press coverage, but eventually I became good friends with Jack’s younger brother Bob, who was making his way at Texas Lawyer as one of the best Texas journalists covering courts and law firms. I always thought of Jack as one of those rare individuals who managed to reject most of what is awful about modern America—the cruelty to immigrants, the counterfeit Christianity, the consumerism, and the casual acceptance of waste and environmental harm. A lot of that comes across in this profile of him written in 2017.
Joe Ely died on December 15 at 78. I can’t hear his voice without being transported back to the time when I was listening to his 1981 album Musta Notta Gotta Lotta (“Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?”) and occasionally catching him live at places around Austin like Liberty Lunch. He had parted with his Flatlanders partners Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock by then, but I caught those two separately a few times. Michael Hall recently wrote in Texas Monthly about hearing Ely and his band in those days. They “were playing rockabilly, country, blues, honky-tonk dance numbers, sweet waltzes, and yearning border ballads as if all of those styles were one grand thing. Some of the songs were Ely’s own, and some were by friends he had grown up with in Lubbock. This, I realized, was Texas music. Ely was the first performer I heard mix it all up and proclaim, This is what Texas sounds like.” There was a time when people thought Ely would become the Bruce Springsteen of Texas. He developed a devoted following in the 1980s and 1990s, but he tended to back away from the big time. The excellent obit by Clay Risen in the New York Times conveyed his attitude:
For better or worse, a common question in profiles and reviews about Mr. Ely was why he never got as famous as his collaborators. It was not a question that bothered him.
“I never considered ‘success’ as a real gauge of anything,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “Just last night, backstage at this place in Davis, I guess some musician had drawn a picture of this scared musician with great big eyes looking at this signpost between ‘fame’ and ‘obscurity.’ And I thought, ‘Man, what does that have to do with music?’”
I’ve got a rock-solid prognostication for 2026: This will be a year of big changes for a lot of us. I wish a happy new year to all of you devoted readers, and also to the occasional readers who skim the first few paragraphs and then go back to the infinite scroll on the cellphone. Do you want to hear something great? Take a few minutes to listen to Joe Ely, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock sing one of their best-loved songs: “If You Were a Bluebird.”
Nobody has chronicled the down side of Spotify as well as Liz Pelly. Her book Mood Machine: the Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, was released in February, 2025.
I did not personally chug-a-lug and shout, nor did I cause talk and suspicion, as far as I know.
As I wrote in a previous newsletter: “What we have here is an ode to the iPod, along with a description of the clever ways he’s learned how to replace parts and keep it going. There’s a joy in going against the wasteful and energy-intensive imperatives of tech companies, he writes, noting ‘This is a central tenet of the Right to Repair Movement, a great organization fighting Big Tech.’”
I didn’t know Joe Ely died. Thanks for posting that amazing performance of If You Were a Bluebird. Made my day! And it’s so exciting that you got picked up by Longreads again — congrats!