Suggestions for watching, listening, and reading.  Illustration by Daniel Jurman “I lost interest in podcasts. I lost interest in silence. There was too much extraordinary work out there,” Amanda Petrusich writes, in her roundup of the year’s best albums. If you haven’t lost interest in podcasts, Sarah Larson’s list of top listens is for you—subjects range from an investigation of Elon Musk to our relationship with death. A Taylor Swift comeback, an unexpected Internet-rap collab, and an absurdist sample of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Carrie Battan on the year’s best songs. A middle-aged, murderous Tom Ripley; a boozy, stagestruck Mary Todd Lincoln; an unlikely pair of singers at the Grammys—these were the acts that broke through the noise of this fractious, tumultuous year. Michael Schulman catalogued the best performances of the year. “2024 was an exceptionally weak year for television,” Inkoo Kang writes. “Until the arrival of a few late, great contenders, I wondered whether I’d have enough entries for a conventional Top Ten list.” Yet she managed to pull it off. Can the art of opera ever escape the suffocating grip of its magnificent past? Judging from the contemporary works that reached the stage this year, Alex Ross finds many reasons for hope. This year, Broadway returned to boom times, but Off Broadway’s nonprofit companies continued to struggle. Helen Shaw explores the reasons for the divergence. A year of great reading: a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry. | 
