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January 4, 2025 
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Good morning. The new year is spread out ahead of us, an empty calendar. What meaning will we give to it?
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| María Jesús Contreras |
Clock work
Four days into the year and it's all possibility right now. You have an idea of how things will go — what you're looking forward to, what's going to be challenging — but you're working off archival material. Memory and experience, educated guesses. "2025 is going to be very difficult for me," a friend said matter-of-factly the other night, before ticking off all the things she had to do this year: taking her business to a new stage, considering a move. To me, these things sounded exciting, interesting — the fascinating content of someone else's life.
We're all sitting here with the same year's worth of days in front of us now, the same calendar. What activities and events will we fill it with? How will we greet the material of our days? What meaning will we give to it?
I recently saw Christian Marclay's installation "The Clock" at MoMA. It's a 24-hour montage of thousands of clips from movies and shows, each featuring a clock, a watch, a line of dialogue or other timepiece. The film is synchronized with the actual time, so every scene depicts the moment at which you're watching it, making "The Clock" a functioning timepiece in itself. You're watching a movie, but you're also watching a clock, for hours on end.
The museum stayed open for 24 hours on Dec. 21 for a special solstice showing of "The Clock," from 7 p.m. Saturday to 7 p.m. Sunday. On my way there Saturday night, I noticed myself rushing: It was 8 p.m., I was late! But then I stopped. It didn't really matter when I arrived. People would be coming and going throughout the screening all night and into the following day. Here was an invitation to reconsider how I thought about time. "The Clock," like real time, isn't a performance with a beginning and end. It's happening whether you're there or not. You show up or you don't. You pay attention or you don't. You can't do it wrong.
Sitting in the audience as three, four, five hours elapsed and somehow my attention never wavered, I considered this proposition again. Maybe you could do it wrong. Should I be paying attention to the plot of each clip, the characters and dialogue, or should I be paying attention to the timepieces? 11:22, 11:23, did I miss the clock on the screen showing 11:24 because I was trying to figure out what movie that last scene was from? (I'd discover afterward there was an entire wiki devoted to "The Clock" with each clip's provenance identified — 11:24 includes scenes from "Shanghai Knights," "Malice in Wonderland" and "Se7en.") Can you do time wrong, by paying either too much attention to its passing, or not enough?
"The Clock" forces you to meditate on time, the way we compulsively turn the consecutive scenes of our lives into a narrative, project a cause and effect onto everything that happens, assume everything has meaning and decide if that meaning is positive or negative. We're the artists and architects of our own lives, surveying the day or year ahead and trying to figure out what story we're going to tell. Is this going to be a good year? Is it going to be hard? Who decides?
I stayed at "The Clock" until I started to doze off and dream some time Sunday morning. Marclay supports falling asleep during the film: "That's what you're supposed to do — let go and absorb it and feel like you're part of this thing," he told my colleague Marc Tracy. If I had remembered that, I might have stayed longer. Instead I stumbled out during the wee hours of the first day of winter into Midtown Manhattan.
That was two weeks ago. In the time since, the sun has risen and set 13 times, one year ended and another began. I've been trying to pay attention to time, but not too closely, to notice that it's passing without getting too attached. This year is spread out before us, lots penciled in but nothing for certain. It could be difficult, as my friend predicted for herself. And, in the words of a Morning reader who wrote in to offer their best advice — the question mark to me is what makes this good advice, as if the idea of things not being terrible is a revelation — "It could be great?"
For more
Film and TV
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| Nikki Glaser Hailey Heaton for The New York Times |
Music
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| Carter Vail JJ Geiger for The New York Times |
- Carter Vail built a huge audience online with catchy, and ridiculous, songs. He spoke with The Times about his quick rise to fame.
- The dancehall artist Vybz Kartel served 13 years in prison for murder before his conviction was overturned. Despite imprisonment and a radio ban, his influence has grown.
- Wayne Osmond, a founding member of the family pop group the Osmonds, died at 73.
- Check out what Times classical music and opera critics have been listening to recently. Their picks include the "Brutalist" soundtrack.
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More Culture
- A bleak state of affairs in the stand-up world: Comics are more focused on promotion than on honing jokes, our comedy columnist writes.
- Shailene Woodley is starring in "Cult of Love," a Broadway play about a dysfunctional family gathered for the holidays. That means another month of caroling.
- Could an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of time type the complete works of Shakespeare? Not in this universe, a study concluded.
- Jocelyne Wildenstein, the Swiss-born socialite whose exotic cosmetic surgeries led tabloids to nickname her "the Catwoman," died at 79.
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Politics
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| Speaker Mike Johnson Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times |
Business
Other Big Stories
- The U.S. surgeon general said alcohol was a leading cause of preventable cancer, and he called for drinks to carry a warning label like those on cigarette packs.
- The Green Beret who blew up a Tesla outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas left notes praising Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Friends said he had struggled with P.T.S.D. and mental health issues.
- New Orleans identified most of the 14 people killed in the New Year's Day terror attack, many of whom were in their teens and 20s.
- A strong winter storm is expected to hit about a dozen states across the middle of the U.S. this weekend. Some areas could get their heaviest snowfall in a decade.
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🏆 Golden Globes (Sunday): The Globes, once a charming, boozy cousin to the more austere Oscars, are on life support after a series of ethical, financial and diversity scandals. The show has a new owner (the Hollywood Foreign Press Association no longer exists), a more diverse voter pool and a new network. But will those changes — and a slate of A-list nominees — be enough to attract viewers? The ceremony is tomorrow night on CBS and Paramount+.
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| David Malosh for The New York Times |
Split Pea Soup
All of a sudden the holidays are over, and the lively sparkle of December has been replaced by January's cozy, quiet days. That means it's time to pull out your biggest pot and simmer up a batch of Ali Slagle's split pea soup. Her hearty, fragrant recipe is filled with three different alliums (leeks, onion and garlic) as well as carrots and thyme, all of which bolster the thick broth, adding sweetness and depth. Many split pea soups call for ham or bacon, and you can use either one in Ali's flexible version, or leave the meat out altogether and sprinkle in some smoked paprika. Either way, be sure to add a squeeze of lemon at the end to brighten everything up.
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| Charlotte Renfield-Miller, left, and Claire Breedlove in Harlem. Lisa Corson for The New York Times |
The Hunt: In Harlem, two friends joined forces to buy a rowhouse. Which one did they choose? Play our game.
What you get for $1.3 million: A Queen Anne house in Denver; a top-floor unit in a 1916 condominium building in Chicago; or a ranch-style 2020 house in Austin, Texas.
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| Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York Times |
A precious import: Saffron is hard to harvest. But in the U.S., more small farmers and home gardeners are cultivating the spice for profit, or simply pleasure.
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How to (easily) clean your fridge
There's a good chance your refrigerator has been packed, Tetris-style, with leaky leftovers since November. To clean up the mess, follow this advice: Mentally divide your fridge into small sections you can tackle in five-minute chunks — leaving the door open any longer isn't ideal. Then, set a timer and clean each section, piece by piece, giving your fridge at least 20 minutes to return to temperature in between. You can knock it all out in a day if you want, but for me, the real appeal of this approach is that it turns a daunting task into something easily doable over a few days. — Rachel Wharton
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| The Capitals' Alex Ovechkin. Nick Wass/Associated Press |
New York Rangers vs. Washington Capitals, N.H.L.: As we approach the halfway point in the N.H.L. season, the Capitals are the team to watch. They're at the top of the standings in the Eastern Conference and have the No. 1 spot in The Athletic's latest power rankings. And Alex Ovechkin, in his 20th season in Washington, has a shot at passing Wayne Gretzky's all-time goals record. Today at 12 p.m. Eastern on ABC.
Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangrams were acronym and monocracy.
Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week's headlines.
And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.
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