Welcome to the New Year

The Friday newsletter takes a revisionist view of the calendar.

I’ve been known to have some controversial theories when it comes to the calendar.

But hear me out on this one: today is the first day of a new year.

Yes, I know. It’s actually the 71st day of the year, if you go by the official calendar. But 2020 was a special case. I believe that the span from January 1st, 2020 to March 11th, 2020—a time when we were preoccupied with things like the Iowa caucuses, the growing conflict with Iran, and the first impeachment of the former president—was False 2020. It was a weird first run where the showrunners hadn’t settled on the familiar storyline yet. It was the Good Morning, Miss Bliss or Parks & Rec S1 year.

Then, late in the evening of March 11th—a day viscerally recounted in this long-but-good oral history from Buzzfeed News—we began Real 2020, which ran from March 12th, 2020 until March 11th, 2021. This accounts for the unpleasant carryover of 2020’s worst themes—the surge in virus cases through much of January, the Capitol insurrection, etc—and…