This last decade has, to some of us at least, felt like a century. In 2024, the lessons we learned piled up locally, nationally and around the globe. Despite a culture that often tells us that age is nothing but a number, we learned that time takes its toll on individuals in highly consequential ways. We began 2024 with an unpopular incumbent president running for reelection. After one agonizing evening on the debate stage in June, it was clear that a scattered, sluggish, unfocused Joe Biden had no chance of defeating Donald Trump — who, though roughly the same age, maintains much of the ability to be dishonestly and deviously persuasive. So down went Biden, flat on the mat. And up sprung his vice president, Kamala Harris, the consensus choice and one who, at least for a time, seemed to have many more strengths and many fewer liabilities than her boss. We learned that the Biden baggage, and her own, weighed far more heavily on her than many thought it would. Despite a national economy with powerfully positive fundamentals, American voters in large numbers were exasperated with consumer prices that had risen sharply during the Biden-Harris term. They were frustrated about high levels of undocumented immigration. They were convinced (against the evidence) that the nation is in the midst of a crime wave. And — despite siding with abortion rights overwhelming — in too many other cases, they felt culturally abandoned by a Democratic Party that seemed to put progressive ideology over common sense and pragmatism. We learned that even in heavily Democratic big cities, thought to be protective of undocumented immigrants and profoundly resistant to Republican solutions, these factors and others were enough to swing people heavily toward returning to office a man who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and who’s promised mass deportations, and who’s insulted those very cities as crime-ridden hell holes. Along the way, we learned that political violence is a thing of America’s present, not only its past. Not once but twice was the Republican nominee for president shot at, with the first attempt mere inches away from likely taking his life. We learned that Americans will support a candidate even when he’s been convicted of felonies by a jury, if they’re convinced the charges were politically motivated. We learned that gravely serious federal charges related to mishandling confidential documents and seeking to overturn the results of a free and fair democratic election will effectively get washed away by a combination of sympathetic Supreme Court rulings and pure political power. A year ago, Mayor Adams was entering the second half of his first term in office attempting to make major progress toward key goals. At the end of 2024, he simultaneously stands much more accomplished and deeply wounded. The accomplishments are nothing to sneeze at: New York has for the first time in generations changed its zoning rules, paving the way to produce much more housing, an essential statement that this city, which remains in intense demand, whose residents struggle with rents that rise and rise and rise, will work hard to build more places for more people at all income levels to live. Garbage is getting put in containers to make life better for people and worse for rats. Unlicensed cannabis stores that a year ago pock-marked the urban landscape have been shuttered on block after block (though plenty remain). Murders and shootings are down. But the struggles are perhaps symptomatic of another problem. Members of Adams’ most trusted inner circle have been probed for various and sundry types of wrongdoing and are being forced out of his administration every few days now. The U.S. Justice Department has formally arrested and accused the mayor himself of trading campaign donations and favors from Turkish officials for official government actions — marking the 110th mayor the first one to be indicted while in office. The nation’s biggest city has had its share of corrupt leaders, but none of them had to face trial while in office; barring a pardon by the president or some other attempt to wipe away the case, that trial arrives this spring. We learned that this is not the only huge challenge Adams faces in this reelection year. His signature promise, to make the city as safe as it was before the pandemic arrived, remains elusive. Overall crime and violent crime remain significantly elevated, with felony assaults, one of the scariest and most common offenses, rising year after year. And the city’s most precious common space, its subways, have been crime scenes far too often — including for 11 homicides. We learned that the persistent presence underground of individuals in the throes of serious mental illness weighs on everyday commuters, so much so that a man who put one such individual in a debilitating chokehold that turned fatal was acquitted by a jury of his peers. We learned that public transit is more than a fragile public space. It is a creaking infrastructure in desperate need of help — which should finally, at long last, be on the way. In 2024, the half-century-old goal of charging cars to enter Manhattan’s core in order to fund public transit and alleviate congestion could finally come thisclose to the finish line, only to get knocked off course for the umpteenth time. Only to be resurrected again, and finally now on the cusp of implementation. The undermining and resurrection were both courtesy of the same governor who now has to contend with an incoming federal administration that is opposed. We learned that computers trained on billions and billions of documents produced by human intelligence can often sound as smart as humans. Can often write as well as humans, and can produce images and videos that look and feel indistinguishable from reality. We learned that in the face of such astonishing advances, the new world of AI and drones and unmanned vehicles is at least for now creating nearly as many problems as it purports to solve. Far beyond the five boroughs, we learned that the planet is scarred by both a changing climate and seemingly irreconcilable conflicts. In Europe and the Mideast and elsewhere, violence rages and innocents die. In the corridors of power, some are in the right and some are in the wrong, but more importantly on the ground, millions are caught in crossfire, suffering. We learned that war, humanity’s earliest invention, remains its most durable. May the year 2025 be a better one for all.