From Sally Rooney's latest to a Booker winner – the best fiction of the year

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On the second weekend after Hurricane Helene, Swannanoa Christian Church held its first Sunday service since the storm-battered western North Carolina. The sanctuary was piled high with clothes, water, and food, so everyone gathered outdoors. Out in the yard, beneath a clear blue sky and uphill from the devastation wrought by the flood, the congregation interspersed prayer with the testimonies of congregants who had pulled people from the water or been pulled from it themselves.

After the service, as congregants lingered to chat or sort donations, Elder Gordon Dasher recounted his church’s mission following the storm. “Our goal is to be the kingdom of God here on Earth,” the pastor said. “We’re getting into the filth, getting dirty, getting sewage and mud on our feet and hands, and helping people in the darkest moment of their life. That’s number one. And number two, what we want to see come out of that is we want people to see at least a glimmer of a light to come on that says God is real, because here are his people right here, side by side with us in our suffering.”

Dasher and his ministry in Swannanoa are part of a teeming community of faith-based organizations using their deep roots, vast networks of the faithful, and financial means to help in whatever way they can. Beyond the local congregations, Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists, and many other denominations rushed in to help, as they so often do after floods, and hurricanes, and wildfires everywhere. Almost three months later, the sight of church volunteers clearing away rubble, handing out water, or gathering in prayer remains as common as the sight of damaged homes and washed-out roads. 

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Camo hat, orange letters. The ever-present “Hot to Go!” dance. VMA alien makeout. Beyoncé covering Dolly Parton—and Dolly loving it in return. Feuds. Flirting. That shade of green.

There was a lot of buzz around pop music over the past year, and our younger colleagues have assured us that it wasn’t all hype. The music, especially the pop music, was legitimately good.

Even the numbers back it up. The data shows that 2024 was the year of the “pop star (re)emergence.” But the trend extended to other genres, from country to musical theater and the ’80s power ballads, experiencing a resurgence thanks to their association with pop stardom. The common denominator throughout? Women were at the forefront of all of it:

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Destroyed by Watergate and vilified for suggesting that presidents are above the law, Richard Nixon died in disgrace in 1994.

But it turns out he was right. The 37th president was quietly but resoundingly vindicated by the Supreme Court in its Trump v. United States decision in July, when Chief Justice John Roberts declared that “the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.”

“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

Until the 1960s, the word computer indicated a worker—often a woman—who entered calculations into a mainframe. An exhibition now at MUDAM in Luxembourg and traveling to Kunsthalle Vienna, “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991,” unearths the history of this gendered workforce, while also highlighting those women artists experimenting with or “musing” those same machines. Taking a broad view of the computer in art history, it includes artists who used the computer as tool and as subject, as well as those who simply “worked in a computational way.”

The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections, organized roughly chronologically. “Zeros and Ones” shows early experiments in computing, mostly in the form of wall-based works, but it also includes Liliane Lijn’s kinetic sculpture Man Is Naked (1965), a fragile work from her “Poem Machines” (1962–68)series rarely seen in operation. In the “Hardware” section, paintings by Ulla Wiggen and Deborah Remington evoke the mysteries of various technologies hidden behind their shiny exteriors, while “Software” returns to weaving as the origins of the “soft wares” that have come to define computational output. “Home Computing” traces the availability of the computer to artists who were making screen-based works via novel programs. And finally, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” which takes its name from Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” explores the repercussions of the computer on the (female) body, via the likes of Valie Export’s photomontages and Analívia Cordeiro’s algorithmic choreographies.

The show is organized around a technology rather than a genre, movement, or medium, which makes for unexpected and captivating inclusions. A computational rendering of Isa Genzken’s Ellipsoid (1977), for instance, is displayed alongside the sculptural object that it produced. The pairing underscored her ambition to make sculptures she called “mathematically correct.” Elsewhere, The House of Dust (1967), a computer-generated poem by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, is displayed on a vintage printer, alongside Katalin Ladik’s Genesis 01-11 (1975), comprising enchanting sonic interpretations of various circuit boards rapidly obsoleting.

Some of these early experiments betray an uncertainty about the status of “artwork.” Beryl Korot—cofounder of the magazine Radical Software, from which this exhibition takes its title—displays Text and Commentary (1976–77) as sketches, woven textiles, and videos, alongside documentation of the process. It is unclear where the art object ends and the idea begins, a move in line with the conceptual art movement of the time.

The exhibition positions the advent of computing as a process that eradicates any separation between fine art and craft. This rupture is welcome, as women have historically been excluded from the former category. This argument is most clearly articulated in the links the exhibition makes between computing and weaving: digital artist Charlotte Johannesson, whose work is shown as woven fabrics, digital drawings, and digital images displayed on impressive LCD screens in the sculpture garden, asserts that the screen’s pixels correspond to the warps and wefts of the loom.

The AI Art Magazine, a new, 176-page biannual publication dedicated entirely to art made by artificial intelligence (AI), has launched. It’s publisher, Mike Brauner, said in a statement that it will “serve as a vital chronicle of this transformative moment in art history.”

Its website says it “celebrates the fusion of human creativity and intelligent machines. Freezing the moment of art in a tangible printed form while AI is evolving rapidly.”

Hamburg-based creative studio, polardots.studio, and Christoph Grünberger – who wrote the book The Age of Data: Embracing Algorithms in Art & Design – were instrumental in getting the project off the ground.

“[The magazine] showcases remarkable works and accompanying essays that set the benchmark for today’s AI-generated art, from surprising visual experiments to conceptually refined pieces that push the boundaries of this rapidly evolving field,” the project said in a statement. “The magazine reveals what happens when humans and machines get creative together. We’re throwing the doors wide open believe it’s going to be a big party – come in and let’s dance.”

It costs 22 euros and is independently funded to ensure “editorial independence and creative freedom,” Brauner added. “While our first issue is advertisement-free, we’ve established meaningful partnerships with partners who supported us and received customised editions for their clients.”

The cover of the first issue features an artwork by Japanese AI artist Emi Kusano, who discusses her practice in an interview. There’s also a “curated gallery” of 50 works chosen from an international open call by jury including Mexican graphic designer Adriana Mora and a jury member created by AI called Xiaomi.

Several of the selected artworks are accompanied by essays written by the jury members. For example, American graphic designer David Carson’s contribution is titled “If someone gives a command to a machine, is that person then an artist?” The essay focuses on US artist Kevin Esherick’s work, Somewhere in Michigan, and “demonstrates the depth of critical engagement we aim to foster,” Brauner said.

Vincent Valdez’s studio in East Los Angeles is packed with large canvases, some still in progress. There’s a painting titled Supreme of the Supreme Court with portions unpainted and sketched on the canvas. On the same canvas, there are glimpses of the Rockefellers and depictions of Manifest Destiny. Another wall has a painting of Michael Jordan mid-dunk circa 1988, shining in the sea of darkness behind him. His canvases of various sizes are stacked and leaning against the walls, at times five works deep.

“What you see here is the most work that I’ve ever had at a single time inside my studio,” Valdez told ARTnews in October ahead of his first major museum survey that opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston last month and will travel to MASS MoCA next May.

Valdez has kept the room intentionally warm, hoping to speed up the drying of the oil paints in the Jordan piece. It’s crunch time. With “Just a Dream…” as its title, the exhibition will bring together 25 years’ worth of work; for Valdez, it’s an apt time to reflect on the arc of his artmaking, thinking through how connected his works are. He sees them as chapters in one giant novel, the United States its protagonist. From the Zoot Suit Riots to the Iran-Contra Affair, his work interrogates all the country represents, its brutal histories of racism and the inciting incidents that brought us to where we are today.

“This work, although it is complex in its nature and heavy in its subject matter, has been the very thing that has kept me at peace,” he said. “It is the truest form of freedom that I’ll ever know in this life, being in the studio and talking about the absurdities outside of the studio.”

Born in San Antonio in 1977 and now based between LA and Houston, Valdez started working with CAMH and MASS MoCA, the exhibition’s two organizers, nearly five years ago to bring this show to life. When cocurators Patricia Restrepo and Denise Markonish approached him about a survey exhibition in 2019, he felt he wouldn’t have much to say for a retrospective. “But then I started to love the idea about re-collecting 25 years of work to be seen together for the very first time,” he said.

In terms of art forgeries, 2024 belonged to the Russian avant-garde market, the increasingly questioned umbrella term for modernist art from post-Soviet and Eastern European countries. This recess of the art market is riddled with fakes; several dealers told ARTnews that as many as 95 percent of the paintings currently in circulation aren’t legitimate.

One art lender said he was invited to Israel by one collector-dealer who showed him a warehouse stacked to the rafters with Russian modernist paintings with dubious attributions. (The collector-dealer allegedly was trying to pass them off as genuine to use as collateral.) This year saw a slew of investigations into Russian art forgeries that illuminated the extent of the issue, including “The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection”, from the BBC, and ARTnews‘ own investigations.

The rest of the art world also suffers from fakes, just not to the same degree. The tech sector, meanwhile, is tackling the problem with (occasionally controversial) tactics, including facial recognition software and patented algorithms. Some of these firms argue that replacing subjectivity with objectivity in art authentication is the answer. In other words, they think human judgement will soon be obsolete in this game.

Below are eight of this year’s most interesting stories of art world forgeries.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

For those of us who would be described in HR packets at progressive workplaces as “gender nonconforming” or “of non-normative gender presentation,” it can sometimes be really hard to get a haircut.

The places where one might get one are usually gender-segregated zones, where cisgender people go for what one might call gender-affirming care—that is, cosmetic care toward redeclaring their man- or womanhood. Still, enough gender studies papers have been written about the barbershop as a masculine space and the hair salon as the center of an all-women’s social world. I, frankly, don’t want to get into all of that.

But my point here is, in the expensive coastal cities where broke queer and trans people congregate for safety and community, it can be difficult to find an affordable haircut. When I moved to New York City, I was inundated with ads for queer-affirming barbershops. But these were all promoting places where haircuts cost $120—not, for me, a particularly affirming price tag. For a while, I resorted to making my friends cut my hair with drugstore scissors. 

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When was the 2024 presidential election really lost? 

Maybe you’d argue (though I would not) that it was the rubber-stamp nominating process for Vice President Kamala Harris. You could point, on a symbolic level, to Trump’s fist pump after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. For a time, it seemed like the clearest answer to this was the first debate, when President Joe Biden melted down on stage. But I think if you want to pinpoint when things went irreversibly downhill, you have to go back further—to the aftermath of the midterms two years ago, when a then-80-year-old Biden moved ahead with his plan to run for a second term.

Biden had always insisted that he was never planning on being a one-term president. Still, he tried to allay concerns about his age that dogged him even in 2020 by referring to himself as a generational “bridge,” and behind the scenes, aides offered context for his public denials. “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years, but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen, then I’ll run for reelection,’” an aide told Politico in 2019. “But he’s not going to publicly make a one-term pledge.” After a strong showing in the midterms against a predicted red wave, any notion of a smooth transition to the next in line—or a competitive primary—went out the window. Democrats shuffled around their primary calendar to warn off challengers. And that was that. Biden was dead set on running, he argued, because the stakes were too high and he was the best candidate for the job.