2024: The Will Leitch Newsletter in Review

Here’s all the stuff I made.

2024 is going to be a year we’ll all going to remember for a long time, what sure seems like a pivot year, when the pendulum swung one way rather than the other, changing the lives of everyone on the planet for the rest of their lives. I certainly know that I will never forget it.

But what I remember, and what my children will remember, will be very different. I was 10 years old in 1986, a year when some truly horrible things happened. The Challenger exploded. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant melted down. But I was 10. I only barely remember those things. What I remember is the Super Bowl Shuffle. What I remember is a Jaycee League baseball game when I got the walkoff single, a game that was coached by my mom because my father got called out to work an hour before the game and she was the only one who knew everyone on the team to put a lineup together. It was an outside pitch, and I poked it down the first base line, and John Hawkins scored and everybody dogpiled at home plate. I ripped the left knee of my baseball pants when Shaun Hendricks jumped on top of me, and we hugged and screamed. I can recall every detail of every second. I don’t know if I heard about Chernobyl until years later. I certainly don’t know where I was when it happened.