The Pulpit: 2nd Edition
Welcome to The Pulpit, a newsletter from Derange. Some updates and end of year lists from friends.
Special thanks to Raazi Tea on this one. I was able to try their Indian Breakfast (now called English Breakfast) and it features a boldness and aroma my usual Lipton Black lacks. The founder, Arjun Narayen, also publishes a tea zine called “Leaves.”
Location: Chicago, IL
Temperature: 28° and snowy.
Morale: Working on it.
Millan Verma
I wish the feeling of moving halfway across the country after quitting one’s job could be bought and sold. It’s liberating and invigorating, sparking a static sense of change which beckons a glorious (yet diminishing) vision of greener pastures. During my period of voluntary unemployment, ideas were given space to live and breathe, but, as I’ve found through multiple stints of chasing the spaces in between routine life, necessity trumps idealism. Which is why I must confess that over the past two months, since moving, I have not been able to focus on anything other than getting a job. It is true—cash rules everything. Back in New York, it fell from the sky and I saved it like a squirrel stashing nuts for winter. The bad news: winter has come. The good: I have found a job. So I’ll be working on getting this project back on track, starting off with this here column.
Blame it on the snow storms here in Chicago, but any optimism I expressed towards the media world has pretty much fizzled. I don’t want to play the game, nor do I think I’m internet savvy enough either way. But what I can do is write and publish stories from other writers, which will continue to be the main objective; anything beyond that is butter. Recently, we did this with Will Gendron’s piece about boxing in Reading, PA; Cam Crowell’s experience hooping at a festival in Oaxaca, Mexico; Mariel Ferragamo’s look at peacetime vs wartime Ukraine; and the two weeks I spent in SF poking around the AI boom.
Anyways, it was a great year for music. Rock is cool again; the UK is leading the way in rap; a cohort of cool kids are rising in Scandinavia; Justin Bieber made an amazing album; a growing polarization in country music between bros and troubadours has led to some impassioned projects. Here are my favorites from a year of lofty change.
Favorite Albums of 2025
Playboi Carti - MUSIC
Sword II - Electric Hour
Jim Legxacy - black british music
Bashfortheworld - Migo In America
Snuggle - Goodbyehouse
BabyDrill - Cry For Help
2hollis - star
Rex Laurent - Seller’s Remorse
Nine Vicious - Studio Addict
Justin Bieber - SWAG
YFN Lucci - ALREADY LEGEND.
Charley Crockett - Lonesome Drifter
Hunxho - For Us
Geese - Getting Killed
Tyler Childers - Snipe Hunter
Corbin - Crisis Kid
Morgan Wallen - I’m The Problem
Treety - Trick or Treat
Bickle - Gut Feeling
Curren$y - 7/30
Favorite Books I Read in 2025
All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry
Willie, Waylon, and the Boys by Brian Fairbanks
Typee by Herman Melville
Just Kids by Patti Smith
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
Favorite Songs of 2025 (excluding anything from the albums list)
J4H$SiR - “TYPE STUFF”
feeble little horse - “This Is Real”
MexikoDro - “No Date”
YoungBoy Never Broke Again - “Finest”
Lola Young - “Messy”
Bay Swag & 42 Dugg - “Drank”
Kashus Culpepper feat. Marcus King - “Southern Man”
Lana Del Rey - “Henry, come on”
Pradabagshawty - “P wit Ha”
Erika de Casier - “December”
Kodak Black - “No Flaggin”
1300SAINT - “SOUTHSIDE FOREVER”
The Hellp - “Hot Fun”
fakemink - “Face to Face”
RobOlu - “100ONCANDLER”
Fimiguerrero & Reekz MB - “Tartan”
dexter in the newsagent - “Special”
Tony Shhnow - “Think Again”
Young Nudy - “BTA”
Whirr - “Days I Wanna Fade Away”
Wiley From Atlanta - “Don’t Look Up”
Neno Calvin - “Hush Mode”
Ella Langley - “Choosin’ Texas”
Kenny Mason - “A1”
Derby - “Jenny”
Playlist: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/favorite-songs-of-2025/pl.u-MDAWoj9tGXkPZD
~~~
SMMYSWRLD
My year began in bed, as did the previous year, and probably the year before that. I was working on a senior thesis about Goth music, covered in the cotton entrails of my beloved Yankees pillow-pet, which remains, as I type this, splayed across my lap, withered and bleeding out. On my Twitter feed, in another tab, Cam Newton is admonishing Keon Coleman, a 22 year-old NFL player who enjoys cookies. “That was all cool,” he is saying, referencing his sideline antics. “But we give that grace to young players.” The first time I saw the clip, I remembered a moment, earlier this summer, when a gruff LIRR conductor looked at my “dependent” pass—Thanks, Dad—and told me that it was 2025: You are no longer in school, and so, we are no longer accepting that. (“We give that grace to young players.”) A month or so after that, I was wearing a spike-laden leather hat in Central Park, when my friend, who is very wise, glanced at my feet and asked me: “Have you considered buying new socks instead of Cyberpunk hats?” I really wanted to cry at my graduation ceremony. At the end, our evil chancellor, who is also very succinct, granted adulthood with the grace of a falling piano: “The ceremony is now over,” he said, and no tears came.
“Pats on the back are over with,” Newton is declaring on my Twitter feed, which is now playing the full video—not the 30-second TikTok clip, but the unedited, much funnier monologue. “You’re not a rookie anymore, brother.” If 2025 has meant anything to me, it is that I am no longer a rookie, and so the associated privileges—of dawdling, of dancing, of eating cookies—have expired. What have I done with this information? A few things: I now exclusively consume raw fish and pre-workout. When I do listen to music, which is rarely, it is dissonant and arrhythmic, which instills in my developing prefrontal cortex a disposition of eternal struggle. I do not “dance,” but when my body moves in accord with pleasurable frequencies, it is involuntary, and I flog myself before tearfully repenting, on my knees, under a freezing shower. There is no sugar in my home, as it is a distraction from the bitter truths I diligently seek.
I am kidding. Here are ten songs I listened to a lot this year.
Chemical - “Subliminal Arrow”
Rita P - “RRP”
Halloween - “Crown”
TOBACCO - “The Black Album”
Shiner - “Giant’s Chair”
Peace de Résistance - “You Are Absurd”
The Third Eye Foundation - “Sleep”
quannnic - “Prunesnail”
Phreshboyswag - “skinny jeans w the platform boots”
ed note: read Sammy on phreshboyswag here: https://sammysworld.org/the-wrong-underground/
Double Virgo - “Nuggit Step Down”
~~~
Martin Dolan
This Fall, I spent most of my spare brain power being humbled by marathon training and the graduate school admissions cycle. But now that my MFA apps are done (we’ll hear back in March) and the Philadelphia Marathon has been run (the first 20 miles went well, at least) I’m looking forward to a winter of sleeping in, cheap beer, and reading for fun.
I’m not really an end-of-year list guy, though that’s not really a statement about evaluating art but a consequence of how disorganized I am.
But here’s a list of some books I loved this year that I didn’t get a chance to write about elsewhere:
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian
Information Age by Cora Lewis
Amateurs! by Johanna Walsh
And some shoutouts to some really smart essays I’ve read recently:
Gabriel Winslow Yost on Disco Elysium for the Baffler
n+1’s recent pair of pieces (by Brandon Harris and Mack Basham and Joshua Judd Porter) on baseball, a potential MLB salary cap, and the Dodgers
Leah Abrams in the Nation about working as a speechwriter for John Fetterman
As for music, just MUSIC by Playboi Carti.
~~~
Will Gendron
Navigate to any piece of online journalism on modern generational divides and hit ctrl-f. Type in “experience.” You will find that the defining trait of millennials and their younger cohorts — zillenials, gen-z, gen-alpha, blah blah — is a desire to accumulate this amorphous “experience” rather than establish footholds in say, a career. Many of these pieces posit that people 40 and under would sooner work at a coffee shop than start families. It makes sense to fuck around accepting piecemeal gig work in order to pursue a passion or dream when there were never any jobs to begin with.
Why do I bring all of this up? Because the bulk of 2025, the second year into my 30s, has been defined by an escape from the infinite, humiliation-ritual matrix of the gig-economy. Like a non-insignificant portion of my peers, I spent the most of the last decade avoiding anything that would improve my candidacy for the renowned “email job.” What they don’t tell you about choosing this route is that if you are interested in stability at any point in the future, you will have to debase yourself in increasingly inventive ways later down the road.
I moved to New York in 2018 after getting fired by a law firm in Atlanta within a record-breaking amount of time (1.5 months), which was primarily spent in the office bathroom watching Fortnite vids until my thighs sustained nerve damage. Over a seven-year period, I worked everything from part-time receptionist at the FADER to box truck driver for a moving company during the height of the pandemic to janitor at a shuffle board club. I worked the graveyard shift (3 AM - 9:00 AM) at the UPS factory in Maspeth, Queens. During the holiday season, the speed and volume of the endless packages we had to stuff into trucks induces psychosis.
Relative salvation was offered to me in the form of a unionized position at a tech company that, yes, functions as a digital pain factory courageous enough to provide an answer to the following: what if we could monetize rising paranoia over “urban crime”? So at the beginning of 2025, I was listening to police radio overnight, living in an underworld where work hours take place from 7 PM to 5 AM.
In April, thankfully, a homie who started a social agency gave me a call and asked if I was still looking to “break into advertising.” He needed a full-time writer and comes from an editorial background himself. It is the only reason I no longer have to stay up overnight and listen to thousands of 911 calls, detailing the worst experiences of unnamed strangers’ lives to an audience seeking confirmation bias. In the months since, my primary concern has been maintaining said job and, as a result, my writing — when it doesn’t involve TikTok or IG Reel scripts or social show concepts — has largely fallen by the wayside.
Regardless, here is a mixture of my favorite music, movies, and #realizations in a year where the writing on the wall has never been more clear:
Songs that were aggressively in rotation
Pradabagshawty - “Tinder Date”
TDF & Ohsxnta - “Ghetto Symphony”
Khadija Al Hanafi - “Borders” (!OK! is easily a top 5 album for me)
ZayALLCAPS - “Friends You Can Kiss”
Playboi Carti - “Overly”
Rio Da Yung OG - “Ghetto Love Story” + “OFF-RAP”
Lil Xelly - “Rewind” (RIP you deserved so much better)
Future - “Maison Margiela” (2014 release but idc)
heartstopmiami - “LARRY DAVID”
Myaap - “Fairy”
Mark William Lewis - “Still Above”
Feng - “Left for USA”
Favorite movie that I saw for the first in 2025
Two-Lane Blacktop: What gripped me more than how the film looked, was Warren Oates’ character… the 21st century man. He’s someone who is a little past his prime, realizing the world he grew up in has been gone for a while and so he is desperately trying to adapt. Identity is the central currency of the future, Oates portends, and you can go as far as people are willing to buy into whatever it is you’re projecting. That’s why he is constantly searching for hitchhikers. Every new person he picks up represents an opportunity to reinvent himself. I think it coalesces nicely with our current era of short-form creator content. The second Obama era hammered home the idea that we could change our lives forever through one moment of virality
.You just have to curate the right persona to get plucked out of obscurity.
Largest recession indicator
Recession indicator as a term is thrown out there too generously. Like anything else, peak saturation has scrambled its meaning. But the biggest recession indicator to me so far this year
~~~
Cam Crowell
I started out 2025 by quitting my job, going to a Spanish school in Guatemala, working at a hotel in Mexico, playing a lot of pickup basketball, and now I’m ending it with a new job helping wipe preschoolers who haven’t locked down EVERY step of the “taking a shit” process yet. The world’s worse, but life’s better now that I’ve turned 30.
Working at a bilingual preschool of mostly immigrants while the federal administration has made it their goal to kidnap as many of their parents as possible feels surreal. Two weeks ago, a four-year-old girl whispered uneasily to me in Spanish that her mom and older sister cried because “the police came to [her sister’s] school looking to take the daddies, but mommy says that we’re safe as long as we stay inside.” The rest of the week, this girl’s teenage cousins came to pick her up after school. In any given moment, the day-to-day surreality of breaking up fights when one kid decides that another kid’s aunts are actually her cousins and he’s pissed off that she’s lying, like a mini-Maury, causes me equal parts stress in the moment.
It’s not that teaching itself is something worthy of glazing. It’s not “rewarding.” I’ve come home and napped and/or cried more than I have in the past decade combined. But it’s not self-flagellation either: I had that covered by willingly watching every UCLA football game this season for reasons unknown. It just feels like when everything is going to shit I’ve never been one to just turn away. And hopefully we, as artists, teachers, and just people in the world, are able to turn towards the evil being acted all around us and do more than just feel bad. I’m not going to pretend like I know some grand unified theory of what needs to be done, but may 2026 be a year where we try to do stuff anyways.
Favorite films of 2025
Simon de la Montaña
One Battle After Another
Eddington
Yo Vi Tres Luces Negras
Weapons
Sinners
Un Cuento de Pescadores
Favorite films I watched for the first time in 2025 (not including films that came out this year)
Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)
Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Volver (2006)
Candyman (1992)
The Parallax View (1974)
Hard Boiled (1992)
Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976)
Amores Perros (2000)
Old Joy (2006)
La Llorona (2019)
Favorite things I read in 2025
The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp
Drug Cartels Do Not Exist by Oswaldo Zavala
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Bitter Fruit: The untold story of the American coup in Guatemala by Stephen Schlesinger & Stephen Kinzer
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
The Rider by Tim Krabbe
Confía en la Lucha by Krista Dover
The Shining by Stephen King
Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
My list of favorite songs this year is decidedly far too “uncool” since I spent so much of it trying to perfect Mexican karaoke songs that would impress the 50 year old couples dancing in the cantina
Los Tigres Del Norte - “Ni Parientes Somos”
Julieta Venegas - “Lento”
Natanael Cano - “O Me Voy O Te Vas”
Los Tucanes De Tijuana - “La Chona”
Belanova - “Rosa Pastel”
Luis Miguel - “Ahora Te Puedes Marchar”
La Union - “Lobo-hombre en Paris”
Selena - “Como La Flor”
Los Tigres Del Norte - “Contrabando Y Traicion”
Bad Bunny - “DtMF”
"Lento" mention lfg