Vox Sentences - The best books of the year 📚

A time of transition is always a good time for reflection.

On the politics team, we’ve been ramping up to cover the incoming Trump administration — and have been looking back on the election season that was. Among other pieces, Christian Paz gave us a meditation on “Latino" voters, and thought through whether we ought to reconsider the category, while Eric Levitz spent time pondering why Democrats didn’t do as well as they hoped in November.  

The culture team has been thinking about 2024 as we approach 2025. Aja Romano explained what (for me) has been a confusing phenomenon this year — celebrity look-alike contests. (They seemed to me to be the flash mobs of 2024, and according to Aja, I wasn’t far off.) Kyndall Cunningham examined the excitement around Spotify Wrapped, and Constance Grady looked back at 2024 in books (more on that later).

Vox has a lot more coming on this reflective front, including a piece that’s become something of a tradition for our video team. Keep an eye on our YouTube page for that. 

The transition I’m personally most looking forward to comes next week. That’s when the winter solstice happens: The days will stop growing shorter, and start growing longer. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the extra sunlight. 

Here’s one last transition: Let’s move from this discussion over to some recent pieces I’d recommend you check out, shall we?

—Sean Collins, news editor

Put down that cough medicine

I’ve been sick this week, so I’ve appreciated Keren Landman’s — perhaps I should say Dr. Keren Landman’s — piece on cold medicine. We’ve heard a lot of late how many over-the-counter cold drugs are pretty useless when it comes to making you feel better. But Keren went a step further: Her piece is chock-full of tips on things you can take that will actually help. Thank you, doctor!

Hannah Kobayashi’s mysterious non-disappearance, explained

A lot of people near and dear to my heart love true crime. I don’t know much about it. But I, like many Americans, was taken with the disappearance of Hannah Kobayashi, and saddened by her family’s suffering. 

Aja Romano knows a ton about true crime. And so it was fortunate that they took on our explainer on Kobayashi and the mystery surrounding her. The mystery may have been solved, but I’d still recommend checking out Aja’s piece — it’s a thoughtful meditation on the saga.

🎧  Drug overdose deaths have declined. No one knows why.

I’m the sort of person who prefers reading podcast transcripts to listening to them, and so though I listen to Today, Explained, I also always appreciate when my colleagues over there make a text version of one of their episodes. And that’s exactly what Haleema Shah did for a piece she and her team worked on about America’s opioid epidemic. I’d read that the opioid crisis was abating some, but I didn’t know why, until I checked out this piece, which offers three fascinating hypotheses. 

One quick trick to make AI actually useful

For me, AI is a toy. I don’t use it very often, but when I do, it’s to make silly songs or surreal images. I struggle to find a real use for it. It turns out that our technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes was in the same boat, until recently, that is. He explained how he finally found a real use for the technology. I’m not sure his epiphany really applies to my life, but maybe one day some functional use for AI will dawn on me. Maybe.

The best books of 2024

I promised we’d come back to this, and the time for keeping that promise is now. Like my colleague Constance Grady, I love books. At the moment, I’m reading Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny, a collection of short stories I’d recommend only if you have a decent tolerance for body horror. 

If you don’t, no worries. Constance has something for you — a list of her picks for the best books of 2024. There’s more than a few on there that I plan to check out. (And if fantasy and sci-fi are your thing, may I offer you a bonus recommendation, the best books in those genres according to my Polygon colleagues Sadie Gennis, Tasha Robinson, and Rachel Conrad?)

That’s it from me this week — please keep an eye on Vox for more news in the week to come. Have a great weekend everyone! 

P.S.: As this year comes to a close, thank you so much for reading our work here at Vox. Your support means everything — it’s why my colleagues and I do this work. I hope our efforts have been helpful to you this year, and we look forward to continuing to bring you great journalism next year!

This email was sent to you. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe. If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring contribution.

View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service.

Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.