Looking Back: Moments of Grace and Inspiration
It has been a helluva a year and this morning’s headlines — “Trump Plunges U.S. Into a New Era of Risk in Venezuela” (NY Times), “Rubio Takes on Most Challenging Role Yet: Viceroy of Venezuela” (Washington Post) — do not augur well for what’s to come.
The past two weeks, between missing our traditional holiday reunion with our sons and grandsons and excessive doom scrolling, I made a peremptory New Year’s resolution: to seek out more moments of grace and inspiration.
Sequestered much of the time at my desk, punctuated by gatherings with friends and photos of my family basking in Mexico, the Internet was my gift giver.
All but one of the offerings that follow are short videos of events that moved me, personally, in my holiday Internet look back. I hope they resonate with you too, but I “get it” if they don’t. (To spare you the freak show of ads and more on You Tube, I took screen shots of the YouTube videos, edited them in iMovie, and uploaded them to Vimeo. The sound quality, I fear, suffered in my translation.)
Maya Angelou’s Poem for President Bill Clinton’s 1993 Inauguration (4:52 min)
Did Donald Trump have a poet at his second inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2025? (No!) Only a few U.S. presidents have featured an inaugural poet and all have been Democrats, beginning with Robert Frost (1961) at Kennedy’s swearing in. The others include Maya Angelou and Miller Williams at Clinton’s inaugurations, Richard Blanco and Elizabeth Alexander at Obama’s, and the unforgettable Amanda Gordon (“The Hill We Climb”) at Biden’s.
New Year’s Day, I came upon this clip from PBS’s American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise. It features part of Angelou’s performance at Clinton’s 1993 inauguration plus background about Clinton’s reasons for asking Angelou, her response to his request, and how the poem was received by the public. President Clinton called her poem “an eternal gift to America.”
Figure Skater Ilia Malinin and the Seven Quads (5:20 min)
I’ve watched national and world figure skating championships since 1957, when I dreamed of becoming a figure skater after stumbling through practice sessions at the Princeton University rink. The perfectionism and artistic athleticism of the sport captivates me.
This December, Ilia Malinin, a 21-year-old American figure skater who hasn’t lost in more than two years, began his free skate at the annual Grand Prix Final (Dec. 5, ’25) in Nagoya, Japan in an unusual spot — third place. It was going to take something special to keep the streak going.
How about a world record?
Yes! Malinin delivered a dazzling routine, the first person ever to ever land seven clean quads (jumps with four rotations in the air) in a single competition along with the once-forbidden back slip, all with infinite grace. Even if you’ve never watching figure skating, catch this.
Carly Simon and James Taylor Perform Mockingbird (3:15 min)
I fell in love with Carly Simon and James Taylor, singly and together, when I saw them perform in Boston in 1975. A song they didn’t perform that night, but which later stole my heart, was “Mockingbird,” first performed by Inez and Charlie Foxx at the Appollo Theater in 1965. It was Taylor’s idea to remake ‘Mockingbird,” a song Taylor and his sister Kate reportedly sang for fun as teenagers.
Taylor and Simon, who married in 1973, debuted the new song in Madison Square Garden as part of Taylor’s 1979 tour.
Watching it now, I see not only two legendary musicians, but also two people whose connection briefly turned into music itself.
Violinist Hilary Hahn Being Epic (7:45 min)
As much as I love Carly Simon and James Taylor, I love the violinist Hilary Hahn more (I played the violin in my junior high orchestra…).
Hilary Hahn, if you haven’t heard of her, is a three-time Grammy Award winner who has performed throughout the world as a soloist with leading orchestras and conductors, and as a recitalist. She made her first major orchestral debut, at age 12, with the Baltimore Symphony, and at age 46 Hahn remains one of the most coveted soloists on the globe. She’s also a huge supporter of contemporary music.
Last spring, Tony and I drove to San Francisco to take in a live performance by Hahn with the San Francisco Symphony. A few weeks ago, I discovered this marvelous video, which strings together (no pun intended) clips from some of Hahn’s most breathtaking performances (including hula-hooping while performing Paganini).
Note: This is a clip from a longer (17 minute) video. To see the whole video, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RLShLMRCeM
The Best Sentences of 2025
“What a challenging year. Many of us struggle to make sense of what’s happening in America. We cope in different ways. Some spend more time in nature. Others retreat into books or the gym. Still others turn to their keyboards, distilling this unruly world into words. It’s their work that I honor today (and that I honor regularly in For the Love of Sentences, a feature of my Times Opinion newsletter).”
No Kings Protests (1:56 min)
To celebrate her 70th birthday, retired government worker Peggy Cole says she and a friend drove nearly 10 hours from her hometown of Flint, Michigan, to join the October 18 “No Kings” protest in Washington, DC.
The event was one of more than 2,700 “No Kings” rallies held across the country on that Saturday, protesting what organizers describe as President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian” agenda. That’s hundreds more events than were planned for the first go-round in June, when about 5 million people across the country took to the streets to protest Trump’s administration as he held a military parade in Washington.
Nearly 7 million people showed up for October rallies – including more than 100,000 people in New York, organizers and officials said. Along with larger events in major cities, small pockets of “No Kings” protesters cropped up along busy thoroughfares, in small town squares and at municipal parks in red and blue states alike. Here in Southern Oregon, I was among the protesters.
YouTube is filled with videos capturing the spirit and signs at “No Kings” rallies nationwide. Here’s a very short one with samples from Washington, DC and NYC.
Jon Stewart’s message at the 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear (17 min)
I have been to only one rally in my life in Washington, DC: Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s 2010 rally to “Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” On a sunny October day, my husband and I took the train from Providence, R.I. to join the crowd of about 215,000 on the National Mall.
The rally was a combination of what initially were announced as separate events: Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” and Colbert’s counterpart, the “March to Keep Fear Alive.” Its stated purpose was to provide a venue for attendees to be heard above what Stewart described as the more vocal and extreme 15–20 percent of Americans who “control the conversation” of American politics. He offered a mock motto for the rally: “Take it down a notch for America.”
Jon Stewart’s closing remarks, a wonderful blend of comedy, eloquence and democratic passion, seem more apt than ever. Indeed, they are stunning.