I’ve been in a fugue state rewatching Mad Men. It oddly is a Christmas-time show (each season straddles a calendar year, but the Christmas episodes are pointed). The show at its best (seasons 1 and 2) has this repeated trick of punctuating the action with static shots that feel iconographic even if there is, in fact, no single visual reference—it uses the image already in our heads. The twist is how the static shots stand at odds with the action that preceded them (Don at a windowsill with Sally, Norman Rockwell-style, despite our having seen him finger a secretary moments before). The point is to undo the collective lies of that era’s iconography (which is, not incidentally, to undo the work of advertising). The ambiguous pleasure is also to enjoy those same images.

I’m struck by how good the show is and also (and this is not a new thesis) how impossible it seems to have a Zeitbild of this time. 2000 looks so much more like 2025 than it does like 1975, despite the equidistance. I’ve written here before about the flattening of time in the Internet Age, how The Cranberries or Stevie Nicks can be blowing up on TikTok alongside Olivia Dean (doing Amy Winehouse doing Ella Fitzgerald). It’s all equally not new. I just saw a TikTok about a competition run by two tech bros that’s offering up to 250K to offer up some image of the future that is not retrofuturist. They are starving for an image of the new. But I cannot help but think they’ve missed out on the decisive quality of our own time’s image—that it cannot be new. To me this raises the obvious question: which old things feel new? And this is, in a way, the point of what I’m doing here.

Incidentally, I am shaken by how much Burt Cooper reminds me of myself. When he shows all his colleagues the Japanese woodblock print of an octopus eating a woman out I realized I’d basically done the same thing in the basement of Maiden Name (and weekly in your inbox).

Shoutout to Natasha Stagg for this lovely review of Grand Rapids in the Times (“luminous deadpan” is very Natasha. And shoutout to Steven for his watch piece in The Cut which I can already tell is going to make me laugh.

Happy New Year, my loves. Big things coming in 2026. No idea what they are, but doubtless that they’re coming.

For my precious new subscribers: Landed cost (the final cost you pay) = the hammer price (the highest bid) + the premium (a set percentage added to the hammer price that the auction house takes) + shipping (you’re always on the hook for this) + sales tax. To the listings!

1. 19th C Painting

Attributed to William Edward Frost (1810-1877, English). There’s Japanese paper across the surface to stabilize the paint. The painting is not that old and it is falling apart, like, girl get it together. But I kind of like it in this weird state as an objet trouvé.

2. Chrome Desk Lamp

Starting bid on this is $5.