Perhaps the close of every year feels this borderline apocalyptic, and we simply lose perspective each time, but 2015 seems like it has to be the darkest year in my living memory. Between carnage in Nigeria and Paris and Syria and American abortion clinics; Donald Trump and company turning the presidential race into a word salad and xenophobia babble-off; and the planet beginning to cook in its own juices, an audit of the past year has me considering off-the-grid hermitude. A hollow tree, perhaps. Or a Waterworld-type situation. I’ll drink my own pee as long as there’s no Wi-Fi.

But I also got married this year. That was pretty great. I wrote a book. And I’ve watched some true revolutionaries battle our garbage fire of a world in ways that have taught me how to be a better human.

Here are the people who defined the year for me, on both ends of the spectrum.

The best



#BlackLivesMatter

If anything positive can be said to have taken root during this spectacularly bleak year, it’s the lesson – administered doggedly to white America by the #BlackLivesMatter movement – that true progress is not comfortable. True progress requires sacrificing ease, moving your body, making space. Sometimes the white guy doesn’t get to talk. Sometimes you’re late for work because the streets are shut down. Sometimes you can’t have a fun day of Christmas shopping because chains of chanting protesters won’t stop reminding you about all the black bodies that have been murdered by the state this year. If that doesn’t seem “fair”, well, welcome to the point. Black people are being gunned down in the street, and you could have gone your whole life only thinking about that fact when it was convenient for you, if #BlackLivesMatter hadn’t gotten in between you and the roll-neck sweater you were trying to buy for your white son who is not dead.

Cecile Richards

Few things delighted me more this year than watching Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards make elegant, imperious mince out of the rightwing congressmen who thought it was a good idea to waste taxpayers’ money attempting to prove she’s a baby-devouring succubus. The Senate voted to defund Planned Parenthood anyway – just a week after a gunman killed three at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado –because I live in a garbage country full of shambling fools who think “pre-born” is a real word. But Richards was magnificent, and her grace in the face of such pitch-black absurdity fed perfectly into the rumbling upswell of women speaking openly about their reproductive rights (#ShoutYourAbortion!).

Malia and Sasha Obama

I hope it isn’t long before we see black girls growing up in the White House again, but I can’t help feeling wistful that this was our last full year with Malia and Sasha and their outfits and their eye rolls. My husband, who is black, always says of his childhood: “No one ever told me I could be president.” Now, for as long as they can remember, our daughters have watched girls their age, who look like them, at home in the halls of power. Malia and Sasha for president.

The Great British Bake Off

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Changing the way Americans think about custard ...the GBBO gang. Photograph: Mark Bourdillon/BBC/Love Productions

The Great British Bake Off appeared in American Netflix streams this year, forever altering the way my people think about sponge, crumb, custard, and, most importantly, THE LAYERS. It’s a breed of reality television all but lost to American networks: no manufactured drama, action-film soundtrack, or overwrought challenges (“Today’s technical is to bake 40 perfect souffles using only the ingredients you can find in this runaway train; you have seven minutes”). It’s just people who have cultivated a tremendous skill being given the time and space to do it well. In a tent. In a meadow. There are bunnies! And also I’m pretty sure everyone is an elf, except for the old guy who only knows how to make one kind of biscuit. (He is a hobbit.) Please send more seasons posthaste. It is my medicine.

The worst

Internet trolls

In September, police went to arrest an Isis-affiliated Islamic radical for allegedly attempting to incite a terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, and discovered that he was actually 20-year-old Joshua Goldberg, a prolific internet troll and GamerGate fan who had also posed online as a white supremacist, a feminist, and an Islamophobic Jewish lawyer, among other personae. At a protest in November, five #BlackLivesMatter activists were shot by gunmen allegedly affiliated with troll hive 4chan. Meanwhile, favourite trolling targets Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn were invited to address the UN about the stalking and harassment of women online. As web-spawned violence becomes more overt, its victims’ stories are becoming more distinct and undeniable.

Kim Davis

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kim Davis (right) in action in Rowan County, Kentucky. Photograph: Timothy D Easley/AP

This delusional pool noodle thought she would make herself famous in heaven by refusing to issue marriage licences to gay couples in Rowan County, Kentucky, even though those same gay couples pay her county clerk salary out of their gay paychecks, and also happen to be human beings with federally protected rights. Defying a court order, Davis claimed she was acting “under God’s authority”, and was subsequently thrown in prison where I’m sure she glided around with only the faintest tremble of her stoic jaw like some sort of normcore madonna. After her release, she was treated to the ultimate rightwing honour: standing on a stage crying while Republican candidate Mike Huckabee masturbates into a microphone. Then she pretended to be best friends with the pope, who was so embarrassed he issued the following public statement: “new phone who this?”

Jared Fogle

For those unfamiliar with American sandwich celebrities, Fogle rose to fame when he lost a whole bunch of weight by eating nothing but dry, awful, mayonnaise-free sandwiches from the fast-food giant Subway. Thanks to America’s boner for weight loss, Subway quickly snapped him up to be the world’s least appealing pitchman, a national nightmare visited upon us for OVER A DECADE, until it was revealed this year that Fogle had been raping children the entire time and using his childhood obesity foundation as a clubhouse to trade child pornography with his buddy.

Every single politician, religious leader or private citizen who used the phrase “abortion is murder” or perpetuated lies about planned parenthood selling “baby parts” or leveraged xenophobia for money or influence or took money from the gun lobby or gave money to the gun lobby

You don’t just have blood on your hands; you are drenched in it. You rejoice in the deaths of the poor and marginalised. History will judge you mercilessly and your descendants will be mortified to speak your names.