In Retrospect
Some things I wrote this year that I liked
I am writing this from a snowed in yellow limestone cliff house in Mardin’s Old City. The landlord says the house is as old as the city’s Grand Mosque, which was built in the 12th century. A historian friend tells me that it must be Medieval, probably from the 14th-16th centuries. The kitchen window overlooks the vast Mesopotamian plains. In the near distance, about 20 km away, is the border with Syria. Snow has been falling here since Monday, and getting up and down the hill, with its steep, smooth stairs covered in heavy snow and patches of dark ice, has become a bit of an extreme sport. Most restaurants in the sloping Old City are closed or operating with kitchens at reduced capacity, even on New Year’s Eve. You can order French fries or gözleme, but you will have to risk life and limb on the staircase-slopes if you want to get anything greener than that. All the same, I have no complaints. Mardin is exquisite, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.
Though I too am working at reduced capacity owing to the holiday, and will return to our normally scheduled program when it’s over, I wanted to share a quick year in writing review. The year 2025 was a great one for me personally. I won an award for best hard news feature from the L.A. Press Club for my Noema piece “Chasing Utopia, Start-up Style”. As someone who primarily covers foreign affairs, it was a fun change to write about an industry that is very much part of California, and to receive recognition for it in California. A few weeks ago, I was also informed that my piece “Go West” for the Baffler had been selected as one of the year’s Best American Essays. I used to read those Best American Essays anthologies as a teenager, so it’s been sort of an out-of-body experience. In 2025, I also relocated from Belgrade to Istanbul–an excellent decision. I disagree with people who insist that “wherever you go, there you are” and that a new environment changes nothing. It has done wonders for me.
I think my own favorite thing that I wrote this year was my piece on the Serbian student protests for New Left Review’s Sidecar. It’s called “Sense of an Ending”. It felt like a bit of vintage writing about Serbia, the kind I used to write myself and also publish by other people in the old Balkanist days, in that it’s idealistic and a bit hopeful–two things I generally am not, at least not about Serbian politics.
During the first month of Trump’s second term, I also wrote about Florida’s growing prominence in American politics for the New Statesman in a piece titled “The Florida Project”. Florida’s profile is increasing both with respect to the personnel who now staff the administration, in which Floridians are disproportionately represented (DEI for Floridians, perhaps?), and the once-fringe state policies that have been made national under Trump. Mar-a-Lago serves as “the winter White House” and Trump also moved his tax residency to Florida from New York. There have also been the pandemic-era efforts to make Miami the “new Silicon Valley”. As with my aforementioned piece about “network states”, it was strange (in a good way) to cover American domestic politics.
After returning from the NATO Summit in The Hague, which produced a transient hope in some that Trump had “seen the light” on Ukraine and the alliance, I wrote that this détente with the Atlanticist establishment wouldn’t last. Six months or so later, it appears that’s true. The piece is called “Convergence?” and is in New Left Review’s Sidecar.
The summer was a bit of a dry spell for me with pieces, partly due to the heat, which I hate (I’m a delicate flower) and partly because I was socializing constantly as I was new to Istanbul. This meant my output suffered. In the fall, I compensated by going too far in the other direction, effectively becoming a monk that never leaves the house and does nothing but read and write. That period produced some things that won’t be published until later next year, but it also gave birth to this newsletter, which I really only started taking seriously this fall. Some of my favorite and most read recent Substack pieces:
The Curtain Falls on Aleksandar Vučić’s “Balancing Act”
Serbia’s Vučić Enters Deeper International Isolation
Another one of the pieces of the year was “Confections”, my review of Finnish party girl and ex-Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s new memoir, Hope in Action, again for New Left Review’s Sidecar.
In the last weeks of the year, I also started adding video interviews here. First, I interviewed Almut Rochowanski about her recent piece for Jacobin, which is about the current European elite meltdown in the face of the continent’s declining relevance and stature. Last week, I interviewed journalist and linguist John Lechner about his book on Wagner, and we discussed the way mercenaries, volunteers and Mujahideen from the Bosnian War supplied fighters and inspiration for wars in Syria and Ukraine.
I really enjoy the freedom Substack gives me to experiment with form, to write about things that would probably scare some editors, to obsessively chronicle the shrinking world of official Serbian politics, and to link this beautiful corner of Europe to world affairs, where it has always punched far above its weight. If you’d like to follow along with what I’m doing in 2026, subscribe today. I am greatly encouraged by your support and appreciate every single one of my readers.
Happy New Year, Lily! Here’s to another great one 🎉🫶
Aesome-Please keep it going!!!