The Last Five People Who Got Us Through This Awful Year

The final look at people who saved us.

4 min readDec 25, 2020

This year has been awful: You don’t need me to tell you that. But to try to accentuate the positive, if that’s even possible, every Friday until the end of December I’ve been shout out five people who got us through this wretched year. (Here is the one from three weeks ago , here is two weeks ago and here is last week’s.) These people may work in politics, or entertainment, or the arts, or any field in America or around the world. All that matters is that their contributions in 2020 made it a little easier for the rest of us to make it through. This is the final installment. We thank all of them.

Michaela Coel

There is no excuse for not having watched “I Will Destroy You” on HBO yet. (It’s right there on HBO Max: You can even watch it on your Roku now.) What Phoebe Waller-Bridge was to 2019, Coel was to 2020.

Clayton Kershaw

Clayton Kershaw is very well the best pitcher anyone under the age of 35 has ever seen pitch live, depending on whether or not you got to stay up and watch Pedro Martinez or Roger Clemens as a kid. But up until this year, this greatness was always tinged with regret, because not only had he never won a World Series, he had in fact always come up short in the postseason. You had to wonder if he’d ever get that last bit of his resume filled out. Well, it happened this year: The Dodgers won their first World Series since 1988, Kershaw was terrific all season and now his Hall of Fame plaque will be complete. And he’s a great dude too.

Lin-Manuel Miranda