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Here at Slate, we believe in the power of journalism. It’s our mission to keep you informed and help you decide how to think and feel about what’s going on out there, whether it’s Trump’s terrifying Cabinet picks or Democrats’ identity crisis.
But we also believe in the healing power of brain rot. And for that, we journalists turn to trash TV, movies, and social media spirals—and really anything else we can consume (including in the most literal sense of the word) that might distract us. Coping mechanisms don’t change reality. But they do help us take breaks and tune out the news, if only for a little while.
Here’s how members of Slate’s newsroom dealt with this election year when they weren’t on the clock. Tell us about your own favorite modes of distraction in the comments.
Susan Matthews, Executive Editor
Sometime in October, I redownloaded an app to my phone: Ball Sort Puzzle. In Ball Sort Puzzle, you are shown a screen featuring several test tubes that contain marbles of various colors. You must sort these marbles by color within the test tubes.
There is nothing more to it than that, really. There are levels to the game, and on some levels, you don’t see the colors of the marbles that are farther down in the test tube until they are accessible. You can buy a little extra test tube to help your sorting process by watching about 90 seconds of ads. (The ads, they are … so bad.) The marble puzzles get slightly, but not extremely, more complicated as you move through the levels. But always, there is the very good chance of restoring order to your test tube universe.
I told myself I would delete this game after the election. It’s still on my phone.
Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Editor, Host of Amicus
The TV series Parenthood, on DVD. Lorelai Gilmore meets Nate Fischer meets Frito Pendejo. Nothing bad ever happens, and there is so much food and floral arrangements.
Jim Newell, Senior Politics Writer
Let’s start at the very bottom, with some literal, rather than cultural, consumption: I spent $56.27 via Uber Eats for Taco Bell delivery on Election Day. This included a Cheesy Gordita Crunch, a Grilled Cheese Burrito, a chicken quesadilla, three soft tacos, five sauce packets, and a Diet Coke. This was the entirety of what I consumed on Election Day. I had also ordered Taco Bell delivery via Uber Eats the previous Friday. Hmm? Have I ordered Taco Bell delivery via Uber Eats since Election Day? You ask too many questions.
From a healthier anxiety-relieving perspective, I ran 16 times in the month before the election, an average of about 5 miles each time, to clear my brain of all thought. This stretch was met with accolades, earning me Local Legend status on Strava for two well-trafficked neighborhood segments. Not for speed (I am slow), just for how often I would run in the same circle (a frightening number of times).
How to spend the evening after a lovely day of loading up on Taco Bell and running it off? Netflix provided the answer with Season 4 of Outer Banks. Some people would call it a teen soap opera. Well, people watch soap operas for a reason: to not think about elections! Plus, the characters hunt for treasure. I find this compelling. Part 2 of the season was released a few days after the election. That was useful too.
Molly Olmstead, Staff Writer, News and Politics
There was a baffling period in my preelection life when my sanity seemed to cling entirely to a Dungeons & Dragons podcast. I should explain that I’m not a board games person; I lack the patience or strategic mind for anything involving resource cards or character stats. I did not—and still do not—know the basic mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons or even what kinds of characters populate its lore.
And yet, someone at some point pitched me on a podcast called Dungeons & Daddies (tagline: “Not a BDSM Podcast”), and I became so obsessed with it that I dreamed about it at least three separate times. The conceit is this: A group of comedians play a D&D campaign as different kinds of suburban dads trying to rescue their sons, who have been transported into a magical high-fantasy realm on the way to a soccer tournament. You have the hippie granola dad, the sports dad, the negligent rocker dad, and everyone’s favorite, the emotionally stunted stepdad (played by a woman who has never made the slightest effort to understand D&D rules). It’s improv storytelling guided by the randomness of dice rolls.
I later learned that there’s a whole genre of D&D podcasts. I sampled some others, but they never captured my imagination in the same way. Maybe it’s that Dungeons & Daddies essentially ignores real complex gameplay in favor of creating chaos; maybe it was that I had room for only one D&D podcast in my life. Whatever it was, it worked. If someone were to ask me how I kept my sanity this past year, I would first probably fib and come up with something literary. But if pressed, I’d shamefully admit I listened to 68 hour-plus episodes of five nerds playing a board game.
Hillary Frey, Editor in Chief
In 2024, but especially in the second half of the year, I significantly upped the number of feeds of cat and kitten videos I subscribe to on Instagram. I’m not a big social media person—I’m not on TikTok, and my Facebook account has 4 friends, literally (it was set up for my yoga teacher training)—so it’s all Insta for me. I love animals generally, but I am definitely a cat person. I follow a bunch of rescues, notably @whiskers_agogo, from whom I adopted two of my three cats, and @heidiwranglescats, which chronicles not only Heidi’s rescue work in Brooklyn but also the renovation of her house into a cat/kitten paradise. (The videos of her bathing kittens are cute overload, and I love watching her be so gentle with the little floofers.) The account @abdulscats, which follows Abdul as he fosters kittens on their way to finding their forever homes, is pretty much all feel-good adorableness. (Abdul himself is also adorable.) But I also follow big accounts, like @catloversclub, which are often a win based on sheer volume alone. This account reposts tons of cute videos—of snuggles, leaps, yawns, and naps. And my favorite: dogs and cats being besties. Please email me with any other recommendations: I’m gonna need them in 2025!
Shirin Ali, Associate Writer, News and Politics
The Great British Baking Show has been around for years, and yet the charm of an eclectic array of British people explaining the elements of what they’ve baked for their signature challenge, whether it be a three-tier sponge cake or an assortment of puff pastries, still successfully soothed the chaotic mind of this American.
The most recent season of the show, Collection 12, launched on Netflix in late September, right as the U.S. was entering the final stretch of the presidential election. It featured 12 home bakers from across the U.K., and though I had established my favorite early on—we’re Team Dylan over here—I was entranced by each contestant. The bakers concocted flavor pairings I could never dream up and topped off each dish with such pleasing designs that I momentarily forgot to check my phone, which at the time was most often notifying me of the latest abhorrent comment Trump had made on the campaign trail. When the show’s judgment time came around, it was nerve-racking in the best way possible. Would the bakers finish their dishes in time? Would Paul Hollywood offer anyone his highly coveted handshake? How could the judges pick that contestant for star baker?!
The only problem: Netflix released just one episode a week. (In this economy?!) I started impatiently awaiting Fridays, not just to get a couple days’ reprieve from my work life but to have an excuse to snuggle into my couch, enter the iconic white tent with its multitude of pastel Kitchen Aids, and watch the bakers tackle a fresh set of challenges.
The last episode of TGBBS aired Nov. 29, and it was sad—the end of the road for the bakers and for my emotional-support show. I need another season. Ticktock, Netflix.
Candice Lim, Host of ICYMI
Rivals on Hulu! This extremely British show takes place in the 1980s Cotswolds. It’s Downton Abbey politics with The Crown cinematography, with perfect ’80s music and gorgeously portrayed affairs, because everyone is having sex with someone they shouldn’t. It came out in late October but didn’t pick up steam until TikTok users started editing these very convincing fan cams of Taggie and Rupert, one of the central ships in the show, with an almost 20-year age gap. I would spend my days watching a million Rivals fan cams, which tempted me to do a second and third rewatch of the series. This constant feedback loop successfully kept me from raising my blood pressure before and after the election.
Braden Goyette, Editor, News and Politics
After that harrowing first presidential debate where Joe Biden froze up repeatedly and said “We finally beat Medicare,” I had an overwhelming urge to listen to “Enter Sandman” by Metallica on repeat and continued to have it on heavy rotation through the election. I don’t exactly find that embarrassing—it’s a great song—but I wasn’t quite listening to it earnestly either. There was something kind of funny about how it paired with the subject matter I was working on, that specific mix of dark and absurd that characterized a lot of the 2024 presidential cycle. Listening to this song a truly ridiculous amount (my Spotify Wrapped can attest) was like a reminder to myself: Wow, looks like we’re heading for a bad place, but keeping a sense of humor about it helps me think more clearly than panic would.
Lizzie O’Leary, Host of What Next: TBD
Thrillers. To be specific, thrillers from Ireland and the U.K. I just did a quick tally, and I read 25 books that fit this bill over the course of 2024. (I also read “important” books, but they serve a different purpose.) The thrillers range from Tana French’s The Hunter, which a bookish friend got for me as a galley when I was recovering from cancer surgery, to 11 Irish cop books by Brian McGilloway featuring detectives on either side of the border. I tend to read them on a Kindle, at night, after everyone else has gone to sleep. For whatever reason, they still my racing brain. They are a touch formulaic, the police generally don’t shoot people, and they often touch on the Troubles, something that deeply interests me. I tend to have three books going all at once in my reading habit: a serious nonfiction book, something literary, then my beloved thrillers. And whenever I’m struggling, I roll over and let the dark and sinister world of crime fiction soothe me.
Rob Gunther, Producer, What Next
Lots and lots of Costco food court hot dogs. I’m a five-minute walk from a Costco here in Queens, New York, and it’s way too easy to pop over for a bite whenever I feel the walls closing in. It’s not as if I never ate them before the campaign, but right after Biden’s summer debate, I felt a hot dog–shaped hole growing in my core that demanded filling on at least a weekly basis.
My go-to order is two hot dogs dressed with mustard, relish, and chopped onions. The onions used to come out of a hand-crank-operated dispenser. The dispenser was a loaf-sized metal box, the crank on one end, which you would wind up several times. Nothing would happen at first, but after the third or fourth crank you’d feel a slight resistance, and if you kept cranking, soon enough the machine would “sneeze” out a flurry of tiny square-shaped onions from a hole on the other end of the machine, and hopefully enough of them would land on your dog. The dispenser went away during the pandemic, and for a while there were no onions at all, but recently they came back, albeit now served in little premeasured plastic ramekins.
Most of the time I also get the vanilla soft serve with strawberry sauce. I tell myself I’ll have only a few bites, but the Costco workers put a few strategic whole macerated strawberries on top of the 16-ounce clear plastic cup, and a few more at the bottom, luring you deeper and deeper, and so I always wind up finishing the whole thing. Sometimes they don’t have ice cream or they don’t have the strawberries, in which case I’ll get a fountain Mountain Dew to satisfy the sweets.
Jeremy Stahl, Jurisprudence Editor
Snoop Dogg’s musical album Doggyland. To be clear, Doggyland is not trash content. It’s just children’s content! Excellent children’s content by one of the great cultural ambassadors of our time, Snoop Dogg. In older middle age, Snoop has become a sort of beloved figure of nostalgia and reverence, almost like Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks. He had a star turn this past year as NBC’s roving Paris correspondent at the summer Olympics, tasting weird French dishes with Martha Stewart or sitting trackside with moms of star U.S. athletes, cheering wildly. Snoop can do it all. Doggyland, his children’s album of modern and old-school nursery rhymes from 2022, is definitive proof of that. In Doggyland, Snoop takes on the role of the eponymous Bow Wizzle, as Wikipedia accurately describes him “an adult mentor to the rest of the cast,” which includes a pack of child dogs eager to “learn and grow.” While Doggyland is all good stuff—and my soon-to-be-4-year-old’s current car-ride-of-any-length audio request—the top dog for me is the “Affirmation Song.” A sample of the lyrics:
Affirmations are positive statements
That help us to challenge and overcome
When you’re not feeling good and have negative thoughts
So repeat after me
Come on, everyone
There is no one better to be than myself
There is no one better to be than myself
Today is going to be an amazing day
Today is going to be an amazing day
My feelings matter
My feelings matter
I get better every single day
I get better every single day
I choose to feel happy
I choose to feel happy
My family loves me so much!
My family loves me so much!
I care about others
I care about others
I learn from my mistakes
I learn from my mistakes
This is the sort of Snoop content we need now more than ever. Being forced to listen to this by my eldest child in a time of horrific political and social turmoil has made this political season just slightly more tolerable.
Shannon Palus, Features Editor
I have found watching Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno” positions as they pop up on social media to be very cathartic right now. For the uninitiated, there’s a moment in Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet set when, during the song “Juno,” which is about being so into someone that you kind of want them to knock you up, she sings “Wanna try out some freaky positions? Have you ever tried this one?” then strikes a pose—getting on all fours, kneeling and pretending to be a cowgirl, miming fellatio on the microphone … those kinds of poses. It’s very silly. It’s more juvenile and joyful than classic-pop-star sexy (in a good way). But most of all, it simply has nothing to do with anything. Like other surprise elements of major pop music tours these days (Taylor Swift’s surprise songs, for example), when a new “Juno” position “debuts,” it is—in some corners of the internet—a news event. The real news is bad! This is fun!
Ben Richmond, Senior Director of Podcast Operations
My house got very into Lost this fall. It may not even qualify as trash, but I remember Lost being a phenom when it was airing and its disastrous finale obliterating any goodwill it had built. Watching it this year for the first time, the truth is that throughout the series, whole plotlines just go up in smoke. Several characters were written off because their actors got DUIs and, man, you can tell. But if you go into Lost knowing that it won’t resolve completely, it’s kind of the best-case scenario of network TV—seeing what HBO was up to—trying its hand at golden-era television. It’s dated in some bad ways but also in some good ways. The reason nobody really minded when Lost storylines would dead-end is that another TWIST was already happening. It was exciting! More happens in a single episode of Lost than in House of the Dragon’s entire second season. And as for the ending? I was expecting it to be much worse than it was.
Runner-Up: I also let Instagram totally inundate me with border collie videos. (We have a border collie who is the most stubborn dog I’ve ever had but, thanks to Instagram, not the most stubborn dog I’ve ever seen.) The well-behaved dogs are impressive; the poorly behaved ones are affirming; they’re all adorable.
Katie Krzaczek, Senior Business Editor
In early July, right after the disastrous first debate, I was really turning to TikTok as a place to tune out and immerse myself in anything but news coverage. Every time I opened the app, I found myself returning to one creator: Danny Sanicki. He, along with his twin brother Steven, hosts mini-golf tournaments featuring a rotating cast of friends and family members. The brothers played golf throughout high school and college, so they are the pros of the group. The other members each have their own character arcs: Bella (Steven’s fiancée) doesn’t react audaciously when she wins or loses, which has led to the popular refrain “Bella’s pumped up” when she shows any emotion. Despite her high level of skill, she’s often an underdog. Wolf inexplicably always plays with a too-short putter. Eddie has a short temper that often derails his putting. Over the months I watched, he has clearly improved both.
Typically, Danny posts three videos a day, each containing footage from three holes on the course, and the course changes. Because I happened upon his page about a year after the tournaments began, I had plenty of content to catch up on. There was no threat of political creep in these videos, just endless rounds of amateur mini golf. It was such a perfect escape from the news cycle that I often found myself falling asleep to the videos.
By November, I’d caught up on the entire mini-golf archive and was awaiting Mini Golf Major No. 2. Then the election happened. Now, when I try to watch any of the mini-golf tournament videos, I’m uninterested. I’m not sure if this group of friends became so linked with my own dissociation from reality that engaging with them now just doesn’t have the same effect, or if it’s because I finally allowed myself to check whether the regular cast members are following Trump on social media.
Alexander Sammon, Politics Writer
There once were surf movies, but like most artful enterprises of a certain length, they have basically devolved into short-form video. Now it’s boom times for surf vlogs, which feature a small amount of actual expert surfing footage buried within 20-minute videos that showcase mostly the relative inactivity of surfers—some driving around, some plane travel, and lots of inane prattle. Sometimes it is educational: the vlogs of Nathan Florence can be instructive, with tips on navigating big waves or harrowing reef passes. But mostly it’s delightfully boring.
Most professional surfers exit formal schooling at a very young age, which means that often these vlogs are just the spectacular narrative insight of someone with a middle school education and an incredible regional drawl, rife with area-specific slang. Nothing more comforting than hearing a bunch of guys from San Clemente describe things as “gnarly” or Australians deploy idioms that I could only dream of.
Hannah Docter-Loeb, Homepage Editor
On Oct. 11, Brian Jordan Alvarez, the creator of the sitcom English Teacher, decided to hop on a trend and make an innocent post on TikTok, lip-synching the words to what was at the time a trending sound.
“I love your daughter. What do you have to offer her? Nothing, only this,” he mouths, then does a little dance. For some reason, it struck a chord––with me and many others. For the next few weeks, he would record and post a video to the same audio, and I watched almost every one of them. As the election approached, it was a good and mostly wholesome distraction.
He clearly thought so too, continuing to post, day in and day out. Sometimes he’d add a variation to the dance––most notably taking off his shirt or twerking. He started to encourage viewers to to stream his show, and it worked! The New York Times did a story about it.
Over two months later, he’s still posting. To me, it never gets old. What can I say? I love a man who commits to the bit.
Rebecca Onion, Senior Editor
This summer and fall, aided by my local public library’s subscription to Libby, by the grace of which I can access free audiobooks, I finally got over my grad school snobbery and got into consuming the types of narrative history titles that are popular among older male relatives. These are Christmas present–type history books, written by absolute professionals like Hampton Sides, Erik Larson, Timothy Egan, and Stacy Schiff. They are far from trash, but the absorbing nature of their storytelling performed a trashlike function, getting my mind off the details of the election. More than that, they reminded me that the big forces I felt swept along by have swept along many others before me. I particularly liked Sides’ Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission (about some soldiers who did some unbelievably difficult things); Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (about people who loved their towns and lost a lot to that love); and Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692 (about people losing their minds in waves, then slowly regaining their senses). Whenever I was sick to death of podcasts, these books were my go-to.
Nitish Pahwa, Associate Writer, Business and Tech
I gotta give a shoutout to the digital creator widely known as @TallBart—or, in certain instances, @VeryTallBart—across the social media sphere. This anonymous, extremely skilled video editor has single-handedly brought back the fine art of the YouTube poop remix, taking recordings of dreary real-life events (e.g., a Jordan Peterson talk) or classic sitcoms and reediting them in a jittery, nigh-Godardian manner that leaves the footage unrecognizable, and all the more hilarious for it. Unexpected loops of random moments, spoken words spliced from their original syntax and crammed into other sentences, customized subtitles, myriad sound effects that explode in your face—TallBart mines brief clips from hours and hours of videos to clobber together jarring, spellbinding, rhythmic, surreal, laugh-out-loud edits that take anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes to behold in full. Some of my personal favorites: a twist on the first presidential debate that has Jake Tapper asking about the “POW-WOW-WOW-WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW,” a remix of a Seinfeld scene that has Costanza sounding even more deranged than usual, and a tweak on a vintage Jeopardy! prompt regarding “a parachuting firefighter on a camel in a pretzel factory befriending this ex–Spice Girl by pulling a thorn from its paw.”
Natalie Shutler, Politics Director
Zombies and monster movies were my go-tos for optimum brain rot. Stuff like 2023’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter, for which the plot was simply “Vampire kills everyone on a boat,” really got me through. (Also, I absolutely loved the 2006 novel World War Z, by Max Brooks—but that one really doesn’t belong in the realm of trash media.) I also ordered untold mountains of crap online. I feel guilty about it (so much plastic), but I blame the gaping maw of targeted Instagram advertising, and all that junk sort of came in handy come Christmas. And I fell into a deep Instagram wormhole after I was exposed, via my Explore page, to some truly mesmerizing Anne Geddes–knockoff A.I. baby fashion shows. These are exactly what they sound like: reels of A.I.–rendered babies dressed in cute little costumes, with giant eyes and smiling mouths, toddling down a runway. I couldn’t look away, and if you click on these links, neither will you. The A.I. babies kept morphing and iterating and showing up in more and more targeted reels—sometimes they were A.I. babies riding farm animals; sometimes they were dressed up in psychedelic colors. But the spell was broken when the babies transformed into world leaders and I was shown baby Bidens, baby Trumps, baby Putins, and baby Trudeaus, grotesquely waddling around in front of A.I.–gleaming crowds of smiling constituents. That is a kind of horror I cannot stomach!
