It’s New Years. Remember Grant Owen.

01/01/22 • 8 min

2 Listeners

I am home alone on New Years, cleaning and listening to music, and suddenly I remembered Grant Owen, a kid I interviewed at the beginning of the pandemic, and I realized he is exactly the company I needed. So as you’re getting ready for your dinner party or dance party or if you are stuck in a cab or a subway on the interminable trip to The New Years Place, I think you will find that Grant Owen is good company.

Previous Episode

Awful Sisters Christmas. Pandemic Year Two.

It’s been another challenging year of the pandemic, and families across the nation are trying to figure out how to be together for the holidays. For some, this is hard. Really hard.

Welcome to Problems, a series about comfortable, upper middle class people who have a lot to complain about. This year, sisters Andrea and Amanda have managed to get to their childhood home in Massachusetts to spend Christmas with their parents, but sister Pam and her daughter River are unable to get there. This is disappointing, and challenging.

On Christmas Eve, the sisters get together for a zoom call, and to share their yearly tradition of New Years Noticings.

Credits

Sarah Miller is a writer in Nevada City, California. Here is her biomass article in the New Yorker and here is her substack.

Amelia Meath is one half of the band Sylvan Esso, which has been nominated for a Grammy for best electronic/dance album. They will win if I have anything to say about it. Which I don’t. But they will.

Sedsel is my son Henry’s sister and she lives on a small farm in a place that is hard to get to. Thanks to her mother Stacey for coaching her on some spectacular whining.

Sedsel and chicken

Next Episode

Helena Becomes an American

Helena de Groot grew up in Belgium and is now a radio producer living in New York City. When I found out she was about to take her citizenship test, I asked if she’d be willing to record herself talking about what it feels like to become an American...and she agreed.

Helena is the host and producer of the Poetry Foundation podcast Poetry Off the Shelf and senior producer of The Paris Review Podcast, and she teaches at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. Once a year she goes home to Belgium, and then comes back home to New York. Ten years after they first met, she still thinks David is the most beautiful man on the entire planet.