The Best Post of 2025

I just finished reading the latest edition of Best American Essays. I have mixed feelings about the series; I’ve discussed them many times before. This newsletter is ostensibly an exercise in enforced positivity—although this month, the devil is testing me—so I should probably lead with the positive ones.

It’s a miracle BAE exists at all, much less that it’s lasted for almost forty years, considering the marginality of the essay form within American letters during that time. It’s the only regular anthology of any real reach that features only essays, and has probably done more good for the form than any other literary institution. That’s thanks to Robert Atwan, its longtime editor, who once outlined the series’ history in Essay Daily. BAE has published many of my favorite essays, ones I’ve taught and recommended to students.1 I’ve read maybe a dozen different editions of Best American Essays, and I think the editors generally do a good job of identifying the best, say, six or eight essays published in literary journals every year.

The trouble is, they publish like twenty. And how they choose the remainder is a question that never fails to mystify me. In any given edition, the aforementioned half-dozen or more are best-worthy, about half of the selections are merely fine—what I, as a failed sportswriter, think of as replacement-level essays—and a few are just plain bad. I understand that they can’t all be great—maybe only a large handful of great essays are published in a given year2—but I regularly read much better stuff than the dregs of BAE.

It’s not hard to guess why. It probably boils down to the core question about trying to publish anything remotely literary these days: how much do you want to compromise quality for the sake of (potential) sales and (perceived) prestige? In the case of BAE, those compromises are obvious. Atwan admitted in this interview that the publisher helps pick the guest editors, and that “it doesn’t matter whether (the guest editor) is largely known as a novelist, poet, journalist, or an essayist.”3 By the same logic, BAE needs to choose the work of writers with name recognition, which are often the worst essays of the bunch.4 And while I’m failing to be positive, can we talk about how ridiculous and back-patting the whole “Best American” thing is? Best according to whom? By what criteria? For that matter, what does American mean?5

So, yeah, mixed feelings. But I was curious to read this edition, because for the first time ever, the series has a new editor. Atwan stepped down after last year.6 According to her capable preface, he hand-picked his replacement, Kim Dana Kupperman. It’s hard to tell how much of the final product to attribute to the series editor vs. the guest editor, but whoever picked this year’s essays, it does seem slightly different, and possibly in a positive way.

One welcome change I noticed is that the proportion of pieces from smaller literary magazines may be a bit higher. In previous years, it’s seemed like half of every BAE was taken from the same few magazines: the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the NYT Mag. That makes sense, I guess—they publish a lot of good writing—but most of it is articles, not essays, and choosing from the usual suspects made recent editions feel stale and predictable.

It also seems like this year’s anthology casts a slightly wider net. While a few of the writers are series regulars, it was refreshing to see a lot of new names. One of my favorites is this piece I’d read and loved before it made BAE. Another is by a writer whose fantastic MFA application I once read, and still remember many years later.

Those two and a couple of others aside, the anthology wasn’t doing much for me until I got to this crackerjack Kathleen Alcott essay. I recognized the byline, possibly from the good old days of Writer Twitter,7 but wasn’t very familiar with her work. Man, that essay does not fuck around. The line-level writing is stellar and distinct; at one point, Alcott writes a throwaway description of “anxious donkey afternoons.” (It makes sense in the essay.) Perhaps not everyone is as entranced as I am by the idea of using donkey as an adjective—it’s a perfect adjective—but say that out loud, hear the rhythm of the alternating stresses. It was one of a few dozen lines I read and thought, I wish I’d written that.

As usual, I didn’t understand why some of these essays were supposedly the best. But the change in editors seems promising, and that Alcott piece and a few others were as good as anything I’ve read in the series.

A whole passel o’ links this month:

• My aforelinked friend George has another great essay out in this month’s Writer’s Chronicle, which reconsiders Flowers for Algernon, a book I and many others of my generation read in grade school.

• I appreciated Emily’s paean to stoopyness and Swamp Dogg, which inspired me to both revisit his awesome 2020 album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, and to move the documentary Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted to the top of my list.

• This month I finally read a book a few people had exhorted me to, Jennifer Egan’s 2010 novel (-in-stories?) A Visit from the Goon Squad. Pretty cold take—it won the Pulitzer like fifteen years ago—but it’s really good.

• This month, I watched two different Netflix true-crime docs from 2017 that had been recommended to me: Casting JonBenet and Strong Island. The former was brilliant and strange and oddly poignant, a subtle critique of murder fame that never quite shows the creator’s cards; it reminded me of Mind Over Murder, one of my favorite recent true-crime docs. The latter was more memoiristic—maybe a bit too much so for my taste—but beautifully shot, and a wrenching and authentic look at the effect of a murder on the victim’s family.

• I’m skeptical of any outlet that insists Substack, a platform chock full of grift and horseshit, is somehow revolutionizing literature. Which is to say I’ve been skeptical of The Metropolitan Review, for many of the same reasons outlined here. But I did like this recent piece from TMR by Tom McAllister, about his experience with large- and small-press publishing. I’ve also published on both, and my experience wasn’t exactly the same as his, but I related to a lot of what he describes, and I’m a longtime fan of his work. (I especially enjoyed his new book.)

• Speaking of publishing posts, I shared with a few friends or former students this piece that talks to literary agents about selling essay collections and memoirs, and why they’re “tough categories.” The landscape seems to have changed in the last handful of years, particularly with memoir.

• This piece about day jobs for writers seemed practical and potentially useful.

• Big fan of this recent post by Brandon Taylor on the difference between editing and revising, probably the single biggest issue early-career writers fail to understand. Paragraphs 5-7 are solid gold.

• I also loved this recent episode of Pablo Torre’s podcast, which I’ve recommended here before, in which he interviews Ezra Edelman, who made what sounds like an amazing nine-hour documentary about Prince that will never be publicly viewed. Most stories about being an artist in any medium focus on successes, and while that’s an easy story to sell, it warps the reality that an artistic life is mostly failure, very little of which is productive or redemptive or a prelude to some inevitable triumph. I appreciated how candid Edelman was about that reality, and what it’s like to spend years creating something you think is good, but which, for reasons beyond your control and having nothing to do with its quality, will never exist in the world.

• I recently stumbled upon this interesting anti-AI academic website, whose founders include a former professor of mine from undergrad.

• Lately I’ve been trying to learn some basic videography/documentary skills, and have found Luc Forsyth’s YouTube channel so useful and informative.