Hey all,

As promised, our bumper end-of-the-year newsletter is here. The Storythings team has collected together our favourite things from 2023 across seven categories – something read, something watched, something listened to, something old, something new, something live, and something surprising.

But before the links – a quick reminder that we’re hiring! We’re looking for a project manager to join our team. The role is full-time and at least two days per week will be in our central Brighton office. If you understand creative processes and have good experience in supporting creative teams deliver their best work, we’d love to hear from you by the 5th January.

Thank you all for subscribing and reading in 2023. Have a great holiday and happy new year.

Chloe and Grace

Something read

Anjali: Midnight At Malabar House – Vaseem Khan
Matt: Leave The World Behind – Rumaan Alam
Hugh: Doppelganger – Naomi Klein
Chloe: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments – Saidiya Hartman
Grace: The Woman in Me – Britney Spears
Emma G: The Trees – Percival Everett
Laura: Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Something watched

Anjali: Normal People
Matt: Succession
Hugh: Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland
Grace: Blackberry 
Emma G: Barbie
Laura: The Bear

Something listened to

Anjali: Empire
Matt: RHLSTP
Hugh: The Colonial History of Pumpkin Spice Lattes
Chloe: Blowback
Grace: The Lazarus Heist
Emma G: Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel
Laura: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

Something old

Anjali: The Horror Show! (exhibition)
Matt: Nielsen Audimeter (device)
Hugh: Abba Voyage
Grace: The Other Two (TV show)
Emma G: The X Files (TV show)
Laura: Lake Mungo (film)

Something new

Anjali: Hannah Diamond
Matt: Bobby Fingers (YouTube channel)
Emma G: Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons (exhibition)
Laura: the conversation around aliens

Something live

Anjali: Tinariwen (concert)
Matt: Stranger Things: The First Shadow (West End play)
Hugh: Standing at the Sky’s Edge (musical)
Grace: Flaming Lips (concert)
Emma G: Sunset Blvd. (West End musical)
Laura: 7 Deaths of Maria Callas (opera)

Something surprising

Anjali: ABBA Voyage
Matt: how Ange Postecoglu has transformed Spurs
Hugh: the collaboration between Golf Le Fleur and Lacoste 
Emma G: Weird Walk
Laura: BFI Mediatheques

How we can help you

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Something read

Anjali: I enjoyed “Midnight At Malabar House” by Vaseem Khan. Khan works with crime scientists at UCL, but the novel is about a fictional female detective in post-independence India, “India’s first”. Khan paints a vivid picture of the times through Inspector Persis Wadia’s quest to solve a murder. 

Matt: I read Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel “Leave The World Behind” at the start of the year, not knowing it was about to become a Netflix film. I’ve not seen the film yet, but the book was a brilliantly immersive story of two families connected by an Airbnb. The book starts with the awkward etiquette of meeting the people that services like Airbnb connect us with, but keep us apart from. Then in the background, a looming, but never explained, apocalypse slowly starts to break down each characters’ grip on reality. Put it this way, I’m glad I read it this year, not when it came out in 2020. 

Hugh: “Doppelganger” by Naomi Klein (not Naomi Wolf). Having read David Raney’s How Minds Change earlier this year, I was keen to understand how Naomi Klein was dealing with the challenge of being constantly accused of saying things that were said by feminist-turned-conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. Having a conspiracy theorist as a doppelganger draws you into conversations with people you’d rather not converse with, especially in online forums. Like Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, this book brilliantly pulls together lots of threads I’d been thinking about and makes sense of them in a way that only brilliant writers can. 

Grace: Reading Britney Spears’ memoir “The Woman in Me” was such a cultural event — almost everybody I knew was digging in at the same time and comparing notes. I devoured this book in four hours in one day, texting with friends throughout. Britney and I are about the same age, and despite knowing so much about her, I finished this book with so much more empathy for her situation. 

Emma G: Percival Everett’s “The Trees” gripped me on page one and wouldn’t put me down until the final sentence. Everett uses the crime genre to examine US racism, the legacy of lynchings, police violence, but does so in an approach that is playful and absurd as well as direct and unflinching.  

Laura: In 2023, my reading list focused on books that explore our relationship with the natural world through stories, myths and folklore. I really enjoyed “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer. It is a restorative read and does a brilliant job at pointing out that stories, for all the knowledge they add to the world, also simultaneously carve out other perspectives. Complement it with this article for a deeper understanding of how stories shape our world. 

Something watched

Anjali: I finally got around to watching the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People this year on BBC iPlayer, and it is breathtakingly beautiful. I later spoke to many people who got obsessed — like I did — when they watched it. I searched for multiple interviews with the cast and crew later, and found this aptly named one on the ‘Obsessed with’ podcast. 

Matt: I’m going to say Succession, obviously. It’s so rare for a big series like that to stick the landing, but I think they did, very successfully. They did it by doing the thing few dramas dare to do — bringing in the plot point that the entire show hinged around early in the final series, and then letting us see how that event affects the lives of the rest of the cast. The aftermath of a major narrative event is sometimes more important and compelling than the event itself. This is something the Marvel Universe should have learned, in what has been a messy and substandard year for their films and TV series (Loki excepted).

Hugh: I finally got around to watching Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland this October and two months later I still think about it regularly. As an Irish man who spent every summer holidaying in the trouble spots during the 1970s, it brought home to me how normalised everything felt. As a piece of documentary, it demonstrates how important it is to let people tell their stories in their own voices. A remarkable piece of work. 

Grace: After seeing this movie at the Berlinale in February, I couldn’t stop talking about it and making my friends watch it: “Blackberry,” a dramatisation of the invention of the world’s first smartphone. Directed by the hilarious Matt Johnson (very well-known in Canada for “Nirvanna the Band the Show”), this movie has earned a spot alongside “The Social Network” for me in breaking down modern tech culture. The contemporaneous music is just spot-on, and there’s no better representation of soldering irons on film. 

Emma G: “Barbie” got me with the strapline “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you”. Funny, frothy, pink… I simply had to see it and preferably before friends and family gave all the jokes away. I also enjoyed reading this article in which Marie Le Conte asks: “What if the Barbie movie was just that, a bit of harmless entertainment? Must everything have depth? Equally, must all mainstream pop culture be treated as deserving of pointed criticism?”

Laura: ​​I loved the TV series “The Bear.” Especially the second season, with multiple episodes ranking as my all-time favourite. In a restaurant setting, it speaks volumes about the two-sided coin that creativity, passion, and ultimately love represent. There is a fine line between a spoonful of bitter tears and one of wonder. Between sharing with someone a drop of your own poison or giving them back a piece of themselves. The hard truth — both instances can come from a place of real love and self-sacrifice. 

Something listened to

Anjali: The Empire podcast hosted by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. I have never learnt so much from a podcast. This one digs into the rise and fall of empires. The first series looks at the British in India, covering the East India Company, the Raj, Gandhi, Independence and Partition. The second series is about the Ottoman Empire. In Season 3, the story of the Russian empire. In one episode in Series 2 about the Ottomans, and particularly pertinent to what is going on now, they dig into the origin of conflict in Israel and Palestine. 

Matt: I mainly listen to podcasts on the walk to work or when running, and I’ve been doggedly working my way through the archives of Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre podcast (RHLSTP!). This year I caught up with his weekly podcasts during the Covid era of spring 2020, through to the end of 2022. It’s been remarkable, and quite surprising, to experience that time again, and recall things I’d already forgotten (or blanked out). In particular the early weeks of the first lockdown, a combination of the guilty pleasures of our disrupted work patterns with the confused rituals of pandemic hygiene. Truly weird times, and it really doesn’t feel like we’ve even begun to process them, personally or as a society.

Hugh: This year I entered the world of Blindboy and was shocked at how late I was to this wonderful party. His episodes are a mix of stories and interviews. His stories meander and cover a range of subjects but what they all have in common is they all contain the kind of revelations that only an incredibly curious mind could unearth. So as it’s Christmas I’ll recommend his episode on The Colonial History of Pumpkin Spice Lattes. 

Grace: The BBC podcast The Lazarus Heist is an incredible ongoing investigation of North Korea’s hacking program, which has successfully stolen billions of dollars. Everything about the story is just too crazy to be made up: These hackers known as the Lazarus Group are involved in dark web drug dealings and even attempted to steal $1 billion from the Bangladesh Bank in 2016 to fund the rogue nation’s nuclear program. The reporting from these two experienced journalists is just top-notch.

Emma G: Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel – it’s weirdly compelling to be the fly-on-the-wall for other peoples’ therapy sessions but fascinating insight into the breadth and depth of Esther Perel’s therapeutic practice.

Laura: One of my favourite audiobooks this year has been Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey (on Audible). Through a series of vignettes lasting 2-4 min, we get to peek into the daily routines and work habits of some of the greatest artists and thinkers from history. Particularly when it comes to women artists, I found it fascinating, inspirational and comforting in pinpointing the struggles that make creativity such an elusive and wondrous beast. 

Something old

Anjali: A bunch of us at Storythings went to see The Horror Show! exhibition earlier this year. I am not really a fan of the genre at all, but the way it was put together, going far back into British history, was really interesting. There were old horror-themed TV ads and idents, a look at the history of witchcraft – overall a truly alternative perspective of the last five decades of British history. Well done Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard and Claire Catterall!

Matt: I had my first US work trip since Covid in March, to DC and New York. I saw the Edward Hopper retrospective in NYC, and the Philip Guston show in DC, which were both excellent. But the real highlight for me was making a nerdy pilgrimage to see the Nielsen Audimeter in the Smithsonian. This was the first device that mechanically measured attention, and it’s fair to say that I’m pretty obsessed with it, and the story of Arthur C Nielsen Sr and Jr. The company they founded — the Nielsen Company — was 100 years old this year, so it felt appropriate to go and physically see the object they created, and in turn birthed the world of ‘big data’ that we live in today.

Hugh: Abba Voyage was the big surprise this year. I was telling people to go and see it for weeks after I went. My point being that we’ve been fooled into thinking that it’s all about the holograms but it’s not. Because it’s not a concert, it frees the show up from the restrictions of what a concert has to be. It also makes incredible use of the full space in a way that you can only do when you have a show running at a single venue for such a long run. 

Grace: I was a late arrival to “The Other Two,” a dark, satirical series about two slacker siblings overshadowed by their little Bieber-esque brother’s rise to fame. The same friend who turned me on to “30 Rock” back in the day was aghast that I had never watched it, and I caught up just in time for the series finale. It’s on the same level of “Silicon Valley” in how it follows the discourse and evolves with every season. Worth bingeing!

Emma G: Not going to lie, when I realised Channel 4 were streaming all episodes of The X Files, I immediately pulled up a pew and enjoyed the ride back to the nineties and noughties (well actually, I haven’t yet reached the noughties). I’m a sucker for the believer/sceptic premise of the Mulder/Scully partnership.

Laura: 2023 has been for me the year I rediscovered Australian cinema. Some of the highlights: 1. Lake Mungo (d. Joel Anderson, 2008) which quickly became one of my favourite ghost stories that is in fact a family drama. 2. Picnic at Hanging Rock (d. Peter Weir, 1975), a mystery tale where nature is both cradle and demise, weaving in perspectives of the colonised subject and the new settlers in a foreign land. 3. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (d. By Mark Lewis, 1988), a documentary about the botched attempt to introduce cane toads in Australian agriculture as counter-pests and how they radically spread. As this article puts it: “This is what a cult movie is: not a catchphrase on a t-shirt, but a secret handshake.”

Something new

Anjali: Hannah Diamond. A new pop music queen, there’s something endearing about her quest to be unapologetically feminine in today’s world, where that journey can be tricky for most. After being introduced to her work in the Perfectly Imperfect newsletter, I was even motivated to buy gig tickets to watch her live recently. She did not disappoint. 

Matt: The Bobby Fingers YouTube channel. So good. Just so good. There’s about a dozen absolutely brilliant comedy or format ideas in every video, and yet he somehow manages to tie them all together. Like Penn Teller famously said — “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

Emma G: The Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons exhibition at the Hayward Gallery earlier this year was dark, claustrophobic, and utterly compelling – full of nightmarish glimpsed futures and narrowing corridors, – see this review.

Laura: One odd undercurrent theme of 2023, for me, has been the conversation around alien life. As this article investigates: After David Grusch’s testimony to the US Congress, is it OK to talk about aliens? Watching Encounters (TV miniseries, 2023) I am equally fascinated by the possibility of alien encounters being real or imagined and what all of it means. 

Something live

Anjali: Tinariwen live at Somerset House in London. World music is one of my favourite genres, and the last time I saw them play was 8 or 9 years ago. This year’s experience reassured me of the reason I love their music. The venue, one of my favourite places to visit in London, definitely helped.

Matt: I saw Stranger Things: The First Shadow in preview in London in November. It’s a stage version of a prequel to the Stranger Things universe, and although there’s a lot of ‘fan service’ going on in the story, the staging and effects were extraordinary.

Hugh: Standing at the Sky’s Edge is a musical that tells the story of a high rise in Sheffield through the lens of four families that occupied it over the years. The music which is by Richard Hawley makes it. It was the winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Musical, UK Theatre Award and has been described as “the best British musical in decades.”

Grace: Seeing the Flaming Lips play “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” live in London, 20 years after I first saw them on tour in Pittsburgh, was a show I’ll never forget. That show back in 2003 had been one of my top five ever since, with just impeccable energy and unbridled confetti, streamers and balloons. This first show of 2023 at the Troxy was a bit of a dress rehearsal for the rest of the tour, and it has entered my top 5 shows of all time. As expected, hearing “Do You Realize??” live again made me cry.

Emma G: I saw Sunset Blvd. with Nicole Scherzinger starring in the main role. I particularly enjoyed the way the stage used the back of the stage to juxtapose ‘big screen close ups’ behind the main action and for streaming some lovely ‘back-of-stage’ sequences. 

Laura: I attended Marina Abramovich’s The 7 Deaths of Maria Callas at the English National Opera. The last opera performance I attended was Fidelio directed by Sir Graham Vick (CBE), seven years ago. The opera world lost Sir Graham Vick to Covid, and I don’t know of any artists that have been closer to my heart, or whose loss I felt so profoundly. Marina Abramovich’s work made me so much more aware of how privileged I am to have witnessed the genius of all these amazing artists live and how fragile live arts are. Being able to join your favourite artists live, or follow them throughout their careers, wondering where they will take us next, it’s such a joy and celebration. 

Something surprising

Anjali: ABBA Voyage. I took my parents to see it in the summer when they were visiting me, because they’ve been fans of ABBA since I can remember. They didn’t fully understand what I was selling them, I don’t think, but they came anyway. And it really blew my mind as well as theirs. It’s the kind of thing you just have to experience – no spoilers from me. Surprising? Definitely. 

Matt: I was looking for something more highbrow for this, but to be honest, my biggest surprise this year was how Ange Postecoglu has transformed Spurs in such a short time. I’ve followed the club since the 1980s, and the last few years of turgid Jose and Conte made me not want to watch us play. But in just a few short months, Angeball has made it an absolute joy to watch Spurs again, even (especially!) in crazy games like our 4-1 loss to Chelsea. He also seems like a genuinely lovely and grounded bloke, with impeccable standards and ethics. It’s just who he is, mate.

Hugh: The Manchester United collapse, Taylor Swift when listened to in the presence of 9-year-olds, the brilliance of new-breed reality shows Traitors and Squid Games, how much I enjoyed the Britney memoir and the collaboration between Golf Le Fleur and Lacoste. 

Emma G: Weird Walks – I love this endeavour which started out as “three friends walking an ancient trackway across southern England wearing incorrect footwear”. Check out this beautiful book – Weird Walk: Wanderings and Wonderings through the British Ritual Year – that’s just come out. 

Laura: The power of the archive! I am completely addicted to the BFI Mediatheques and its wonderful collections! One of the highlights for me was discovering Channel 4’s Midnight Underground series, highlighting emerging film and video artists utilising various film and video formats. A deep dive into the world of mediumship was, surprisingly, one of the most insightful media journeys I’ve been on this year. 

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you all next week.

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.