Things That Happened to Culture in 2019: Chernobyl, Joker and Knives Out

Or What Kept Us From becoming Our Best Selves in the Past Year

I love drawing conclusions. I imagine myself as Robert De Niro in the finale of the Irishman, just sitting in an armchair in an empty nursing home ward musing on a tragic grandeur of the past. But given that my personal most prominent achievement of 2019 was when I folded one particularly controversial semester paper into a pretty fancy X-mas tree, I would much rather reflect on the general state of things.

And because there have been too many beautiful pieces of culture to distract a decent human being, below I will speak about the three themes that were most prominent this year. For me these were insanity, radiation, and, as W.S. Burroughs would put it, sweet and toxic past times.

Insanity

Like all passionate people I often fall into a pit of one particular story and chase it to death. I start to watch a film, then I read the book, then comes a scientific article and next thing you know I’m already writing a dissertation on the bloody subject. This year I nearly got…