Five Lights in a Dark Year

This has been the hardest year of my life. Not “busy” or “challenging” in the corporate sense, but a year that has stripped illusions, damaged my body, rattled my mind, and left me staring at the country I live in with a kind of stunned grief. I believe we are passing through one of the darkest periods in the history of the United States. Not the only dark period, not the bloodiest—but a distinctive kind of darkness: a moment when the very idea of a shared constitutional order is treated as optional, when words like “law,” “promise,” and “institution” sound more like costumes than commitments. It has also been the year I wrote most about what I now call the machinery of humiliation: the way platforms, money, and resentment cooperate to turn serious speech into parody, to drown inconvenient truth in a flood of sludge and beige noise. I wrote about dead internets, hollow empires, collapsing stages. Much of what I published in 2025 has been diagnosis, not comfort. But I don’t want to end the year there. For all my anger at the feeds, I would not have survived this year—intellectually, spiritually, or physically—without a handful of people I only know because of the internet. Algorithms and recommendation engines, the same infrastructure I spent so much time criticizing, still occasionally let real voices through. That’s the only reason a man like me, sitting alone at a screen, could find himself accompanied by a historian in Boston, a senator in Vermont, a broadcaster in London, a war correspondent turned pastor, and an economist dissecting the money beneath the fog. This is not a grand unifying theory. It is a thank you letter. What follows are five voices who kept me sane in 2025: five human beings whose presence on this cursed, miraculous network made it harder for me to become cynical, and easier to choose hope over despair. This is my small act of gratitude, written on the last day of the year, for anyone who needs proof that not everything the internet amplifies is garbage. 1. Heather Cox Richardson: History Against Cynicism Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College and author of the newsletter Letters from an American, is one of the reasons I still love America. Not the brand-managed version, not the one that lives in flags on trucks and slogans on cable news, but a quieter tradition underneath: the America that believes knowledge matters, that truth accumulates, that history is not a weapon but a teacher. She embodies something increasingly rare: a commitment to knowing. Not reacting. Not riding the spike of each scandal. Knowing—slowly, patiently, with context and sources and memory. In what has been the darkest year of my life—and what feels like one of the darkest seasons in the life of this republic—her writing has been a form of orientation. Not reassurance. Orientation. When the ground moves, she restores continuity. She reminds you that crises are not meteor strikes; they have genealogies. That people before us have faced demagogues, economic collapses, constitutional crises, and that their failures and courage are still on record if we’re willing to look. I’ve written before that I am not pro-cynicism. Cynicism feels intelligent; it signals sophistication. But it corrodes the soul and leaves you useless the moment action is actually required. Alone, it’s easy to slide into it. Heather Cox Richardson is one of the reasons I didn’t. She is proof that truth can still be visible, still be popular, and still travel widely without being turned into bait. In a year when I have criticized the internet relentlessly, she stands as evidence that not everything viral is corrupt. Sometimes clarity itself spreads. She doesn’t chase attention. Her titles are plain. Her tone is measured. She writes like someone who trusts that readers will come not because they are manipulated, but because they want to understand. Reading her has felt, at times, like sitting with an old-school doctor—the kind who doesn’t rush you, who explains what is happening to your body, who believes that comprehension is a form of care. There were moments this year—this Christmas among them—when I couldn’t be with my family, when airports and headlines and images made the world feel closed and brittle. In those moments, her steady presence mattered more than she will ever know. Not because she offered comforting stories, but because she offered truth without despair. She makes me want to be a better historian of my own time. A more patient citizen. A more serious human being. She makes me feel that belonging in this country is still possible—not through conformity or noise, but through study, memory, and moral attention. 2. Bernie Sanders: Courage That Refused to Retire Bernie Sanders, the long-time democratic socialist senator from Vermont, gave me hope this year in a different register. When a certain force was unleashed on this country—openly contemptuous of the Constitution, delighted to rip up commitments as if they were gym contracts—I expected resistance. I expected that the people who had spent years giving eloquent speeches about norms and democracy would rise to defend them. Most of them did not. The soft-spoken heroes of a previous era discovered silence. The party that brands itself as the guardian of democracy discovered patience, process, and carefully worded statements. Watching that happen taught me something I did not want to learn about how easily courage evaporates when it becomes personally expensive. And then there was this old, hoarse, stubborn democratic socialist from Vermont. At a stage in life when anyone primarily motivated by comfort could have stepped back—written their memoirs, given some lectures, and retreated to the beach—Bernie Sanders did the opposite. He kept speaking. He kept saying what he had been saying for decades. He refused to develop a new language of accommodation just because the danger became more explicit. That mattered more than any single vote. He gathered crowds when others were managing focus groups. And those crowds revealed a different country than the one we were told existed: an America that still recognizes moral consistency, that still responds to someone who sounds like the same person before, during, and after the crisis. There is something deeply moving about watching a man stand in an almost empty chamber, describing what is happening to ordinary people, and refusing to pretend it’s fine. I remember those speeches with tears in my eyes—not because I agree with every policy proposal he’s ever made, but because of the simple fact that he was there, telling the truth as he saw it, when so many others lost their voices. If politics were only about winning or personal advancement, none of this would make sense. At his age, with his record, he owed nobody another fight. And yet he stepped forward, again, into a moment that could easily have turned him into a target. In a year when commitment itself felt up for renegotiation—commitment to law, to promises, to the weak—Bernie Sanders embodied what it looks like to be faithful to a life’s work even when the moment turns hostile. I don’t pray much for politicians. But this year, when I’ve prayed at all, I’ve found myself asking God for something very simple: that this country be allowed to keep him a little longer. Not as a savior. Not as an icon. But as something rarer and more necessary—a moral elder who refuses to go quiet when quiet would be easier. 3. Rory Stewart (and Alastair Campbell): Adult Conversation, Still Possible Rory Stewart, a former Conservative MP and cabinet minister, gave me something quieter: the reminder that politics does not have to sound insane. Listening to him speak—especially in conversation with Alastair Campbell, the former communications director for Tony Blair, on The Rest Is Politics—I hear a kind of warmth I associate with the islands where I once lived. It is not the warmth of agreement, but of familiarity: the ease of two people who can argue, tease, and disagre… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com