Opinion | The Books, TV, Podcasts, Films and TikToks We’ll Keep From 2023

I’ve loved the Indigo Girls song “Closer to Fine” since the moment I first heard it. I thought it couldn’t be improved. But Brandi and Catherine Carlile’s cover transforms an anthem into a bit of a lament, and that feels so true to our national moment.

Emily Wilson was the first woman to translate Homer’s “The Odyssey” into English in 2017 and now she has given us “The Iliad,” a thrillingly fresh perspective on the war between the Trojans and Greeks, on “swift-footed Achilles,” “warmongering” Athena, and Hector with “his bright helm flashing.” In the age of TikTok, pixels and apps, Wilson has followed Homer’s dictate to “tell the old story for our modern times.”

We are downsizing from a big apartment to a smaller one, and it turns out it’s really hard to give things away. But on my Buy Nothing group, I’ll post, say, a backpack and it will be taken right away. I love having the ability to give it to a person who will actually use it and appreciate it, and having that human-to-human connection. I want to take that energy of giving and sharing — and perhaps consuming less — with me into 2024.

“Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story,” in which a flock of sheep solve the murder of their beloved shepherd. It may sound absurd, but our online book discussion traced themes of anomie, social solidarity, and care in this strange little, delightful book. I’m still thinking of sheep jumping from cliffs to become “cloud sheep” as a metaphor for secular religion. A tonic for my political despair.

When I started working at The Times in February I was surprised to discover that the Subway near our Washington office serves good pizza. I usually get mine with veggies and a dusting of Parmesan on top. I challenge anyone to find a better lunch in D.C. for $7.

Letterloop, which lets you create a collaborative newsletter that’s more meditative than a group chat, more intimate than a Substack. It’s my favorite way to stay connected to my high school friends, now scattered across the world.

Bakeries and restaurants sell their leftover food through the Too Good to Go app for one-third the cost. Part of the fun is the surprise: You get whatever’s left over that day. Once I scored a chocolate babka from Breads Bakery for $4.99.

Noor Naga’s “Washes, Prays” is a book that I wish existed when I was coming of age. This novel-in-verse brings you into the tumultuous inner mind of a young Muslim woman navigating her faith and identity amid a risky love affair. It’s breathtaking.

I adore Sophie Calle’s droll humor. On the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, she took over his museum in Paris, removing almost all but one Picasso from the galleries and filling the space with her own artwork and belongings. Best exhibition of the year.

Charles Gaines’s pecan trees at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York, systematically layered and deconstructed into color blocks, made me think about how humans love to fetishize and memorialize the nature that we are making disappear.

The Vienna State Opera’s production of “Salome” spoke to the enduring power of megalomania and greed to destroy family and even state. The biblical epic was transformed into an indictment of our own era and 21st-century thought.

Henry Taylor’s “The dress, ain’t me” at the Whitney Museum. The awkward hands, the gaze that says all it can without hurting the older woman’s feelings: such a tender, palpable evocation of that age when you’re becoming your own person but are still beholden. I was instantly transported.

At MoMA’s retrospective “Ed Ruscha/Now Then,” I feasted on sly pieces about American consumption, then confronted the exhibition’s most enduring work: gift shop merchandise. Oh, what we compromise to be remembered!

A woman asks her husband to go shopping and buy a carton of milk and if there are avocados to buy six. He comes back with six cartons of milk and says, “There were avocados.” In 2023, the clueless husband in the milk meme was replaced with clueless ChatGPT. We wanted — needed — A.I. to be dumber than we are.

From Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker essay “How Plastics Are Poisoning Us,” I learned that thanks to plastic’s ubiquity, you’d need to use a cotton tote 7,100 times for it to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag. Depressing and motivational.

A speech from the U.A.W. president Shawn Fain: Just before the auto workers’ strike, he brandished his grandmother’s Bible on a YouTube livestream and asked: “Do you have faith?” When Christianity is in decline in America and long associated with conservatism, Fain flips the script, linking his faith to the labor movement.

Since moving to New York City I’ve been underwhelmed by the fruits and vegetables. The “Odd Lots” podcast episode “This Is How New York City Gets Its Produce,” which tracks the region’s “cold chain” and dives into the history of the Hunts Point Produce Market, gave me a new understanding of — and respect for — my corner market’s spotted bananas.

“The Retrievals” (released by Serial Productions, which is part of The Times) is a gripping tale of women who underwent in vitro fertilization procedures without pain medication because a nurse was stealing it for her own use. At almost every turn, the podcast challenges your expectations about whose pain matters.

In “Light and Belief: Sketches of Life From the Vietnam War,” a documentary about Ho Chi Minh’s deployment of artists with the North Vietnamese Army, I was struck by how eager the soldiers were to have their likenesses made before battle, hoping to endure in a manner previously available primarily to the wealthy.

By turns fun and existential, Lana Del Rey’s album “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” has hyped me up before a party and consoled me on the way to my grandfather’s burial. It is concerned with just about everything that matters. Listening lets the light in.

​​When I saw “Spring Awakening” in 2007 I empathized with the teenage characters confused about sex and sexuality and coping with depression. But listening to the musical now, as the parent of a teenager, I see it for what it is: a cautionary tale about the dire consequences of adults failing to tell children the truth and accept them for who they are.

The reality TV show “Alone,” in which participants are dropped off in the wilderness and film themselves trying to survive, left me both in awe of the competitors’ often-stunning competence and incredibly appreciative of my own meals. What these people wouldn’t give for a carrot!

Hilary Leichter’s novel “Terrace Story” opens with a couple discovering extra square footage in their cramped apartment — a dream I’ve had countless times — and offers a devastating meditation on how making space for something means taking it away from someone else.

I sped through “I’m Glad My Mom Died” by Jennette McCurdy when going through a rough time with a relationship and found it validating: The book perfectly encapsulates the experience of a difficult mother-daughter dynamic.

While some (many?) found “The Banshees of Inisherin,” about the absurdist nonsensical rift between two Irish buddies, insufferable, to me it was a brutal yet poetic reflection of the irreparable distancing that can turn friends into enemies and of art’s potential as an antidote to despair.

Our modern “discourse” can make it feel as if people have uniquely terrible relationships with one another, or that class war is especially bad. George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” at 152 years old, reassures: Politicians have always twisted with the wind. People have always gossiped and self-sabotaged. And dating has always been awful.

Luke Combs’s cover of “Fast Car” reimagines the characters, place and even the car from Tracy Chapman’s original. While I didn’t like that this cover challenged my conception of the song’s meaning, I appreciated that it found an audience so unlike the one that it was originally written for.

What if there is no catastrophe? Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” written in 1993, envisions the United States in 2024. There is no virus, no war, no right-wing coup, and yet society has all but collapsed. Read it as a handbook for how to survive with your humanity intact.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me ….” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy” has so much resonance now, as the power of our wealthiest has grown to monstrous proportions.

Maybe it was David Byrne’s cartoonishly large shoulder pads, maybe it was the entire theater spontaneously breaking out into dance, but the concert film “Stop Making Sense” filled me with pure, unbridled joy, nearly four decades after it was first released.