Good evening. This time last year, we delivered to you the announcement that the founder and namesake of our foundation had sadly and unfortunately passed on from this life into either another, more exciting one or pure oblivion, recycled and returned from the oversaturated fields of history, anthropology, and psychology to the simpler pleasures of chemistry, biology, and rudimentary culinology. His particles are to, if you fancy yourself a romantic, live on in the form of cosmic dust shared by all who here breathe in his legacy, and, if you instead identify as a realist, be eaten, at first slowly and then rapidly and then slowly again, by a succession of bacteria and friends of bacteria. Unless, of course, he has chosen cremation, in which case we’ll look to the former, romantic path but grimier, coated in a veneer of pollution thick enough to destroy a pleasant Sunday outing at the local ash-dumping hot spot.

All of this is, of course, neither here nor there; it is in honor of his life and his absence that we, just one year prior, agreed to continue this tradition on in his legacy from now until the end of time, or at least until our funding runs out.

That second path, has, as it happens, beckoned more rapidly than any of us had hoped or expected. Promises of eternal devotion have a sparkle to them in the funeral parlor that, with time, decay to grains of cheap, crevice-drawn glitter faster than the average foundation co-chair would like to admit.

And so, this year, alongside the usual calls for remembrance and renewal comes a necessary culling of the fat. First to go must be, to the groans of all in the room I’m sure, the artificial intelligence-powered celebrity host. Obviously out of the picture is our ready-made AI model of Ellen DeGeneres, a hit at the 2022 event and the cause of much subsequent legal consternation. In the interest of full transparency, it should be noted by all budget-conscious subscribers that our event planning team did, in light of the news that Ms. DeGeneres had fled the country, make an attempt to reboot the bot in secret, but those plans were stalled by a secondary venture.

Again, in the interest of transparency and to quiet rampant rumor, I will acknowledge that some of the event planners did devote a not-insignificant portion of our rapidly-dwindling funding into new AI models — now much cheaper, I might add — particularly those mimicking the personages of a famous children’s YouTube clown and a New York-based rapper and master of ceremonies. For reasons private to the board, these plans had to be scrapped as well.

So, while our computing resources will still be put to a tasteful reimagining of the thoughts of a now-dead founder who did not consume any media this year for reasons of death, I must caution you that the long, droning paragraphs accompanying each of the entries, providing in-depth descriptions for television shows you’ve either already watched or decided to ignore forever, will be absent. We hope you understand and continue to be generous with your annual payouts.

The Best Books I Read in 2024

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
• How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky
• The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell
• The Last Emperor of Mexico by Edward Shawcross
• Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
• Parliamentary America by Maxwell L. Stearns
• Raisin d’Or: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

The Best TV Shows I Watched in 2024

• Beef
• The Curse
• Fallout
• QI
• Taskmaster
• Taskmaster: Australia
• Taskmaster: New Zealand
• Raisin d’Or: The Sopranos

The Best Documentary Series I Watched in 2024

• Raisin d’Or: The U.S. and the Holocaust

The Best Video Essay I Watched in 2024

• Raisin d’Or: In Search of a Flat Earth by Floating Ideas

The Best Albums I Listened to in 2024

• brat by Charli XCX
• Raisin d’Or: GNX by Kendrick Lamar

The Best Podcasts I Listened to in 2024

• 99 Percent Invisible
• The Bugle
• Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend
• Lateral
• Search Engine
• You’re Dead to Me
• Raisin d’Or: Radio Lab

The Best Video Games I Played in 2024

• Balatro
• Dredge
• Stardew Valley
• Super Mario Wonder
• Timberborn
• Raisin d’Or: Chants of Sennaar

The Best Board Games I Played in 2024

• 7 Wonders Duel
• Just One
• Qwixx
• Raisin d’Or: Jaipur