Here’s to the Changemakers and Culture Shapers of 2024

It’s been a banner year for Truthdig’s arts and culture coverage. Our writers — fresh voices and storied contributors from Los Angeles to Italy — rendered pieces that explored the global landscape of cinema, highlighted the power of theater for the social good and pondered the increasingly bizarre ways that social media is mutating our language. We interviewed Hollywood A-listers and illuminated the work of artists who fly under the radar. Together with our reported stories, our award-winning arts coverage shined a light on the forces influencing our culture and the changemakers using creativity to stand up to the status quo. Here are just some of our favorites from 2024.

Film

Siddhant Adlakha reviewed “Close Your Eyes,” a film by the Spanish maestro Victor Erice that becomes hauntingly focused on whether cinema can raise someone from the dead. Tim Riley portrayed the stark contrast between the lurching Beatles movie released in 1970 and Peter Jackson’s fresh perspective in his remastered version of “Let It Be.” In one of many contributions to Truthdig, Carrie Rickey critiqued the promising debut of rookie director Julio Torres’ comically surreal satire on immigration, “Problemista.” In “No Place for Sissies,” senior editor Alex Zaitchik explored a filmmaker’s insightful attempt to understand how old age caught up with him. And Jim Knipfel asserts that few have done more to define the restless world of teenagedom than the independent filmmaker Roger Corman.

Books

Speaking of Knipfel, the versatile Truthdig writer also contributed to our books coverage, reviewing “Deaths of Artists,” a novel that uses the sadly unheralded literary subgenre of obituaries to unravel “the capriciousness of fame, the myths and sad realities of the ‘starving artist’ archetype.” Stephen Rhode underscored the U.S. Constitution’s threat to American democracy in his consideration of “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.” And Paul Von Blum revisited the catalyzing power of the Black Lives Matter movement’s focus on naming the victims of police violence in the compendium, “#SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence.”

Interviews

New to our pages this year, contributor Bedatri D. Choudhury spoke with the journalist Ronan Farrow about his thriller-like HBO documentary, “Surveilled,” which uncovers the insidious ways governments keep an eye on us all. In “The Modern Odyssey of Mass Migration,” longtime film critic Ed Rampell asked Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone how he harnessed the talents of nonprofessional actors to humanize the horrors of mass migration.

Culture

In Italy, where a woman is murdered every three days, Beatrice M. Spadacini considered what role the age-old stage of theater can play to change misogynist attitudes. In “‘Unalived’ by a Thousand Cuts,” Knipfel dove into the grammatically awkward world of censored social media to find that, “When a culture becomes terrified of words, it’s in deep shit.” Facing a U.S. election sorely wanting for the kind principled, charismatic leader you only find on TV, Luke Savage turned an eye to “The West Wing” — or, “the perfect centrist fairy tale for an age of crumbling institutions.” And finally, Steffie Nelson gathered for tea, coffee, cake and open discussions on death with a transformational psychologist in the monthly meeting of the Death Cafe.