1 Headline a day - 2024 Washington Post

It is a curious thing, this modern habit of ours, that we should entrust the chronicle of an entire tumultuous year to the front page of a single newspaper, as though twelve inches of ink could contain the thunder of empires rising and falling. Yet one industrious soul, moved perhaps by the same paradox that once moved the prophets, has taken the Washington Post’s daily oracle—three hundred and sixty-five utterances, no more, no less—and compelled the strange new sorcery of the machines to translate each into visible form.

Behold, then, the year 2024 made flesh—or rather, made pigment and dream—by the restless engines men call Artificial Intelligence. Every month the work clothes itself in the manner of a different immortal: now it struts in the bold primaries of a Picasso, now broods beneath the melancholy stars of a Van Gogh, now dissolves into the liquid impossibilities of a Dalí. The headlines themselves remain untouched, unglossed, unrepented: the raw edicts delivered each dawn to the citizens of the capital, pronouncing upon caucuses in Iowa, upon the return of a prodigal president, upon fires in Gaza and trenches in Ukraine, upon bullets that missed and images that lied, upon the heavens themselves seeming to crack with storm and portent.

There is no voice-over sermon, no editorial wink, no helpful arrow pointing to the moral. Only the headlines, only the pictures, only the relentless march of days. It is as though someone had taken the town crier’s scroll, dipped it in the waters of Lethe, and then commanded the very Muses of the silicon age to dance upon it. The result is by turns gorgeous, ludicrous, terrible, and (if one dares the word) prophetic. One gazes upon a market crash rendered as a cathedral collapsing into a Monet lily-pond and finds oneself muttering, like a man who has seen the Apocalypse illustrated by illustrators of fairy tales: “Is this what truly befell us, or is this merely what we were solemnly assured had befallen us?”

Here then is the paradox in its purest form: a great newspaper, that daily sacrament of the modern world, stripped of its priestly authority and made to sit for its portrait in the dock of art. The images are beautiful; the implications are monstrous; the whole is a mirror held up not to nature but to the storyteller himself.

Watch it, I beg you, as you would watch a magic lantern show projected upon the walls of Plato’s cave—only this time the shadows are painted by the prisoners, and the light is supplied by a machine that has never yet learned the difference between truth and the front page.

And when it is done, ask the question that every honest man must ask when the curtain falls on any human comedy: Was that the year, or was it merely the version of the year that one mighty journal, with all its virtues and all its vices, chose to sing into the ears of a sleeping republic?