Pop Culture Happy Hour - 2026 Resolutions and What’s Making Us Happy

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Hope springs eternal, and that is nowhere more true than in the realm of New Year’s Resolutions. Today, we give ourselves goals for 2026. And because we believe in accountability, we’ll tell you how well we stuck to our resolutions for 2025.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hope springs eternal, and that is nowhere more true than in the realm of New Year's resolutions. We are back again to give ourselves goals for 2026. And because we believe in accountability, we'll tell you how well we stuck to our resolutions for 2025. I'm Stephen Thompson. And I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about resolutions on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining us today are our fellow Pop Culture Happy Hour hosts, Aisha Harris. Hello, Aisha. Hello, Linda.

And Glenn Weldon, hello, Glenn. Hey, pal. All right. You know how this goes? We look at last year's resolution. We see how it went. Then we look to next year's resolution. Glenn, we're going to start with your 2025 resolution.

I want to hear it so we can then ask you how it went. So what I'm going to do is not even a genre. It's a feature of movies. I'm going to watch long movies because the Lord knows we complain a lot about movies going on too long. But what about most movies that reportedly at least earn their duration? I'm talking about four hour plus movies. I mean, the brutalists kind of loosen the jar.

But now I'm going to dig in. I'm going to seek out films that I've avoided because of their length. Nymphomaniac, Carlos, Little Dorrit, Happy Hour. I'm going to find these movies. I'm going to clear my damn schedule. And I'm going to let 2025 be the year I let movies take me for a extended ride. Well, this won't take long. I'm going to slap a failing grade on this.

one, this didn't happen, I'm ashamed to admit. But I will say in my defense, there's a very good, substantive, logistical reason it didn't happen, something that factors hugely into my failure to execute this resolution to the extent that I hope to. And it's a bit complicated, but I'm going to try to explain it anyway. I suppose you would say the technical term is I plumb forgot. Oh, yeah. Just didn't remember that I said I was going to do it. So follow my logic. I didn't do it. And I'm not proud of that. It feels like a personal failing. I have no excuse for it at all, but yeah, no, didn't set out to do it. Didn't do it.

Saw some long movies. Not intentionally. You'd think watching a long movie with triggers. You'd be wrong. I've never been great at keeping these resolutions, but this is the first full, beefed it, abject failure face plant, and I'm going to own it. You know, the nice thing about that, Glenn, though, is that, you know, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. You spent the entire year not beating yourself up. This is true.

Yeah. If you were a newborn baby, you had no one. There were so many other things happening this year that, you know what, I'm going to give you some grace because we made it. We survived. We did survive. We made it. We're all here. We're all here together.

I just forgot. All right. So what do you have on tap to forget to do this year? I will kick the can down the road. In 26, same deal. I will watch long movies. And I will not forget to do it because. failure build character and it lights a fire into your butt.

So yes, that's my thing in 2026. As I failed to do in 2025, I will watch long movies. Glenn, can I recommend a tool that you might use to help you with this? They have developed Post-it notes. If you have like a pen and a post-it note, write long movies and not stick it to your bathroom mirror. Or your TV. Just long movies next to my password. Yes, no.

Yes, yes. I'm not going to do that. I appreciate it, Stephen. You know, Stephen, when you said that you knew of a tool that might help Glenn, I thought you were going to be talking about some kind of extremely comfortable sofa cushion. If he's looking at four-hour movies, I thought it was some sort of ergonomic. Hemeroid donut. Yeah, exactly.

Some sort of ergonomic seating device. All right. Thank you very much, Glenn Weldon. I am going to go next. Oh, let's listen to my resolution from last year. I decided that I want to read more non-fiction. specifically essays this year. I want to make that what I'm reading this year because I have a novel coming out in February. It's called Back After This. It takes place in audio world. So if you're

interested in podcasts, you can find that. But I am thinking about whether I would like to write some nonfiction, perhaps some essay type things, some criticism type things. Therefore, I want to throw myself into reading a lot of such things. You know, Glenn Weldon, it is often one of my goals in life to be more like you. I really admire you. It's one of us. I have admired you for a long time and admired you as a person and as a writer and critic. And in my effort to emulate you, I made this resolution.

I walked out of the taping and I never thought about it again. Not for five seconds did I think about it again. Was there a ghastly? What happened? What's going on here? I don't know. I'm not suggesting people tattoo themselves Memento style, but they have Sharpies. One thing that happened is that I realized after this taping and when I talked about my own desire to potentially write essays someday, that I had another novel that I had to write. There you go.

See? And so I wasn't necessarily prepared to make that pivot right away. Yeah. That's what I call an excuse. That's a good excuse. That is a solid excuse. Yeah. Well, but I don't think it's an excuse for never having thought about it again ever after I said it.

Sometimes in these things I copy Aisha. This time I'm copying Glenn in that I said this and then I never thought about it ever again, ever, ever. Ever. So I did not do that. I get a zero. Absolute zero. Thumbs down. It's okay.

Again, 2025 was a year. I'm just saying. Oh, thanks, Mom. I mean, this is so. I'm just glad we muddled through. That is a triumph. We really did. We made it, you guys.

And I did work on writing the novel, so, you know, that's a good thing. That's a positive thing. In terms of 2026, it is another reading resolution, which when I made it, I wasn't necessarily thinking about the fact that I had just failed a reading resolution. But this one is a little bit, I hope, a little bit more doable. What I want to do this year is I want to read five. books that are the kinds of books that I don't usually read. And I'm not just talking about like they're not in my exact, like, favorite genres. They're not just like rom-coms with cartoon

people on the front or anything like that. I'm talking about like the kinds of books that I look at and I say like, not for me. Like maybe something with dragons on the cover or something with vampires in it or something else. I do want to say I am not at the moment. seeking recommendations because I would like for this to remain non-stressful as opposed to stressful. I will muddle through. Don't do it. Don't just hold your horses or your dragons. Linda, would you like to be reminded of this prediction?

No. I would not like to be reminded of this resolution. I am not, that is not what I'm looking for. But I am looking to expand my horizons a little bit. So five books of type. that I do not usually read that I think I would look at and think like, oh, not like that's bad, but like, oh, that's not really a Linda book, things that I would think of as not Linda book. Just because I think you've got to keep trying things. Rodney Horizons. Like it.

Here, here. Yeah. So Aisha, we are going to listen to your resolution from last year. I want to write fiction. There we go. Yeah, which is something I've not done since I was in high school, maybe. I just like, at a certain point, I just stopped and it was like, okay, no, I'm going to be a critic. And that's what I'm going to do it.

I'm going to write nonfiction. And I've realized now that I'm missing that creative outlet, that creative side of me. I've expressed it in other ways through dance and whatever. But I'm missing when I used to write just like lots of babysitters club fan fiction and long stories that I would print out and then bind and had like a nice little cover and I had illustrations. I'm not going to be doing all that. But like I do. Well, hold on.

You could just pick up where you left off. Well, yeah, I'm not going to be writing baby spacebook fan fiction. But I do have a bunch of ideas that have been swirling in my head. I think from watching so many movies and TV shows where I'm like, this is cool, but I wish it was like from this perspective. I feel like there's something missing here. And, you know, as they say, if you don't see it, create it. Preferably, I want to try and write a screenplay. We'll see how that goes.

Mazel. That's great. Love it. A? Well. We're in the same boat here because definitely... Here's the thing. Here's the thing.

Unlike you, Linda and Glenn, I am the type of person who cannot forget this and has been haunted by this. This is the way my brain works, a day and the life of Ayesha. I wake up. I do work. I say, oh, man, I really want to work on that screenplay idea. I go out for drinks or whatever. I catch up with someone. They're like, what do you up to?

I'm like, well, you know, I've been thinking about this screenplay idea. I talk about it. And I talk about it. And then I go home. And I'm like, oh, man, I just want to watch another episode of murder she wrote and go to sleep. Then I do that. And then I wake up again, rinse and repeat, the same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world.

Except I'm not taking over the world. And I'm not ready with screenplay. And basically, I spent exactly one sort of afternoon session brainstorming this one idea in February. It happened. And then since then, since then, I've done much more talking about it than I have of actually executing anything about it. And it has haunted me. But that's an active project, though.

Sure. But I think what we have in common, Aisha, is I want to talk about having done something. Sure. I don't want to do the thing. I want to talk about having done it. Yes. That's kind of what it was like writing my book, to be honest. That the process was torture.

The aftermath was like, oh, man, I did that. But if you have spent an afternoon. brainstorming your idea and you have created anything in terms of notes or ideas or material that you can work with or post-its or scribblings on your hand or anything like that. And on top of that, you are telling people that you are doing it. You have an active project, my friend. I hear what you're saying, Linda, I disagree because in my experience, I'll just keep it to me. When I talk about a project to people, my brain thinks I'm getting some of the release of actually writing it. And the project goes into the air as opposed to being on the page.

So what I tend to do is when people ask me, what are you working on? I tell them I'm working on something. And that's it. And they understand because if I release any of it into the world and talk about the idea and I get their feedback about yes, no, and they all pretend that they love it or whatever, that work isn't happening where it needs to be directed. And that's just for me. So Glenn and I have now given you diametrically opposed advice on how to continue this project. Just follow both to the letter. Just remember, neither one of us got done what we were going to do this year.

So you can decide based on that what advice you would like to listen to. That felt very therapeutic. Thank you to both of you. So my resolution is to obviously stop talking about it so much and actually do the damn thing. And I'm going to make the caveat that I do not. anticipate writing an entire screenplay, but I want to at least by the end of 2026 have written a scene. Okay.

And that is my goal. A scene, just something on the page that I can point to and say, there's the germ of an idea. And whether or not it ever actually comes to any sort of fruition is fine. But at least I attempted to do something that I have never actually attempted to do. And that is my resolution for 2026. Just imagine how exciting it's going to be when we play this clip of you saying that. And then you say, I actually have written two scenes.

Okay. Let's hold our horse's thing. But yes, it's going to feel good when I have because if I don't, it's, again, going to haunt me and make me lie awake at night wondering what am I doing with my life. So, yes. Well, we don't want that. Writing is terrible. Having written is great. Yes.

Here, here. All right. Awesome. Very good. Thank you, Aisha. Stephen Thompson. I wonder if this is going to continue in any kind of theme. If you're getting a sense of who we are as people and what frustrates us.

Please let us have a theme. Join us. All right. Let's hear Stephen's resolution from 2025. What I'd like to do in 2025 is reembrace social media that bring me some measure of community and joy. I promise I will finally start posting to the letterbox. account that we've been promoting at the end of our shows. I have been on blue sky for the last couple months. I want to lean further into that because I'm really enjoying the parts of that

that are still enjoyable. Basically, I want to recommit to social media in ways that expand my horizons, increase the number of perspectives I'm receiving the number of things that are being recommended to me by people I trust, keeping me better informed, making my world feel bigger, while still finding ways to maintain the healthier internet hygiene that wasn't always there the last time I was on social media as much as I'd kind of like to be it. What I want to do is find ways to use it to manage my anxiety without exacerbating it, which is a really tricky thing to do with social media. And so blue sky and letterboxed, I'm committing completely. And the other part of this is, instead of just talking about it, I do intend to actually fit. the children's book in 2024.

Not committing to signing a book deal, not committing to publishing it in 2025, but I do want to actually spend 2025 making art with my daughter, which I cannot think of a more fun thing to promise to do than that. Y'all, why did I think that spending more time on social media was a healthy thing to promise to resolve? In fairness, you didn't necessarily see this year coming. Well, should I be updating my letterboxed page, which is currently like an empty shell? I should. Did I know? Did I spend more time on blue sky? Sure.

Did it make my life better in any way, shape, or form? Probably not. Don't know what I was going for there. What I should be resolving to do. And what I dare suggest maybe all four of us should be thinking about resolving to do is, less. How do we subtract? How do we take away? Because so much of when we look back on a year, there's this like, oh, you know, I should have taken the time to write my novel. I should have done. And look, that's a great thing to want to do. And I want to do it too. I feel like we should be

resolving to take something off our plates in order to do that. Very often when we have these conversations, it's always additive and maybe it should be subtractative. I mean, I should be subtractative. I have been working with my daughter. Unfortunately, I kind of got a little bit sidetracked on the children's book in favor of this graphic novel idea that's been floating around in my head that I have very much been taking notes on and even started very preliminarily storyboarding. So if we're going to go with Linda's metric where like if you wrote something on a post-it note, you made progress. I have made progress on that resolution. And I'm excited to continue it. My daughter is in art school. We've had some very excited conversations about. an idea that we've been batting back and forth that I feel like really could turn into something cool that I am very excited about. Is that going to play out over the course of one calendar year? It is not. It's going to take a whole bunch of time, and that's going to be part of the joy of it. As far as 2026 goes, I'm going to go with this. I want to do more to overtly in my life battle the encroachment of AI in our lives. To make sure that.

that I am not inadvertently investing in it, to make sure that my settings are up to date so that I'm not contributing to the problem, and to support messy, human art. The best way for artists to combat AI is to make art that AI couldn't duplicate if it tried, to make works that are idiosyncratic, that are human, that are not in any way, shape, or form generic. You know, I've got book projects swirling around, tons of ideas that I'm batting around. My goal really is to, one, execute one of them, whatever it is. Like you said, Aisha, maybe it's a scene. And two, to make sure that whatever I generate is idiosyncratic enough that AI can't do it. Yeah. I think it's like both specific and non-specific enough that there is plenty of room for you to hit any of those goals. And like you said,

Yes, the subtracting, but also just giving yourself a little bit of leeway. It's just like you're not going to necessarily do the whole thing, but you will do a part of the thing. You know, increments. That's achievable. It feels achievable. I also think, and, you know, and one of the reasons we do this show is to kind of give people a sense, A, of what we're thinking about about the new year, but also maybe a guideline that somebody at home might want to try. And like the one thing that I really want to carry into 2026 in one way or another is to just make art.

Make art even if it's bad. Make art even if no one experiences it. Make art for ourselves because our brains need it. It's part of being a fully fledged, fully formed human being is expressing ourselves and don't let anyone or anything take that away. I love it. Inspirational. Sounds good to me. Sounds good to me. All right. Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson. We would love to know what your resolutions are for the new year. You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash PCH. Next up, what's making us happy this week. Now it is time for our favorite segment of this week and every week, what's making us happy this week? Aisha Harris, what is making you happy this week? Well, if you're looking for a new sort of fun podcast to listen to, may I recommend the outfit, which is hosted by Dan O'Sullivan and Alana Hope Levinson. This is a show that sort of does deep dives into organized crime and uses it as a way to talk about.

American history. Looking back across different cultures and eras, one episode they're talking about how the mob infiltrated Hollywood. They've also talked about, you know, reality shows like growing up Gotti and mob wives. It's just fun history, chat banter back and forth between the hosts. And I learned a lot. And I think it's just fun to hear about America through corruption. Because what is more American than that? I don't know. So the outfit, you can find it where, if you It's a podcast. That is what is making me happy this week. All right.

Thank you very much. Aisha Harris. Stephen Thompson, what is making you happy this week? Well, in the hopes of starting 2026 on the right foot, I recently rediscovered a record I was loving last spring. It's called Nileam, and it's even better in the dead of winter. It's by a singer named Ganavia. Her work is part jazz, part classical, part South Asian devotional music. The arrangements kind of billow and unfurl like smoke and a song.

her voice is just swooping dramatically over everything. This is Sunday morning music. It's headphone music. It's music to relax and reflect. And maybe it's what you need right at the beginning of a new year to give you a sense of the vibe. There's a track I love called Song for Sad Times. You want to wash away 2025? Get that stink off you.

You want to cleanse your palate of the holiday season and all the music attached to that. You want to start over fresh. first weekend of the new year. I highly recommend Ganavia. Her newest album is called Nelam. Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson. That is a very pretty song. Glenn Weldon, what is making you happy this week?

Well, to Stephen's point, a new year is dawning. And if you want to join that project of flushing the toxic remnants of 2025 from your system, may I suggest sitting down with a piping hot cup of tea with the celebrity traders on Peacock. Now, this is the UK show, and the celebrities are 19-year-old. UK celebrities, and you probably won't know most of them, I'm an anglophile. I only knew 10 of them, and if it hadn't been for the show Taskmaster, I'd know even fewer. Doesn't matter, watch it anyway. Did air in the UK before it dropped on Peacock? And if your social media feed is anything like mine, you've already seen lots of the clips and highlights. Doesn't matter.

Watch it anyway. I had the ending spoiled for me. Maybe you had too. Doesn't matter. Watch it anyway, because the mix of personalities, the alchemy, which is so important to that show has never been better. And it is fundamentally different from the U.S. version because of that fuel mixture. The U.S. version, as we know, Faber's reality show contestants trained to secure screen time by creating drama. So when Alan Cumming is kind of frosty and snooty to them, it's fun because a lot of them are narcissistic jerks. The U.K. celebrities are drawn from the world of comedy and music and sports and theater, you know, actual talent. So they also skew older, so they are just so charming and respectful of each other.

They're so polite to each other. And then you've got the host Claudia Winkleman. Her whole vibe is just pulling for everyone to do their best, which fits in with the whole show. It's certainly the coziest version of the show I've ever seen. And I think it's the best one. That is the Celebrity Traders on Peacock, Watch It and Heal. All right. Thank you, Glenn Weldon.

Well, what is making me happy this week is just one of my go-to YouTube channels, which is called anti-chef. It is a guy by the name of Jamie where he cooks in his kitchen. And when he started out, he really could not cook. It was a kind of thing that I think if I had watched it at the time, I would have been like, why would I watch this guy who doesn't know how to cook? I think he had been inspired by Julie and Julia. And he was kind of, you know, thinking in terms of doing maybe a Julia Child project. And he's done a ton of Julia Child recipes. I think she's his favorite.

He still does a lot of her stuff. But he also is branched out and does a lot of recipes from other chefs, Marco Pier White or Gordon Ramsey or people like that. And he's now quite good. But my favorite thing about him is that he will show you when it doesn't work. Like he will show you trying to make the same cake four times because it doesn't come out the first three times. And I always think that's really a fun element that even after you become a good cook, if you continue to try things that are challenging, then you're going to have a certain number of things that don't work. And there are some recipes that he does where he finishes it. It goes the way it's supposed to go. And at the end, he's like, I do not enjoy this. I do not like this. I would not eat it again. It's just a very genial. He's got a bunch of, like, you know, he's got a stand mixer that he calls the Silver Fox that he recently had to repair. He made the recipes out of this vintage Peanuts characters cookbook that I think is aimed at kids. So it's like Lucy's lemon lollipops and just a lot of weird, goofy stuff like that.

I find it super relaxing. I enjoy it very much. So look up Jamie, anti-chef on YouTube. I watch a lot. Anyway, that's what's making me happy. If you want links for what we recommended, plus some additional recommendations, sign up for our newsletter. It's at npr.org slash pop culture newsletter. That brings us to the end of our show, Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson, and Glenn Weldon.

Thank you so much for being here. my resolution is that we will all be here together again in another year. Thank you. So resolved. This episode is produced by Mike Katsif and Liz Metzger and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time.