What we loved this year (not health care related)

What the Arm and a Leg team loved in 2025

Dan: The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff

This novel does terrific double duty: It’s a girl-power heist comedy — about women in a village in India who band together and get rid of their rotten husbands — that directly confronts patriarchy, domestic violence, sexual assault, and caste oppression. Bonus: As Shroff’s characters develop trust, respect, and solidarity, their banter keeps getting more quick-witted (and foul-mouthed). A delight. I bet the audiobook would be a great road-trip company.

Ellen Weiss, Editor: “The Banned Prince Documentary” from Pablo Torre Finds Out

Ezra Edelman gave, as far as I know, only one interview about what happened to his nine?hour documentary on Prince, a series that was swallowed by an estate battle and will likely never be seen. In this conversation, you hear him wrestle with what it means to spend five years on a project that will never reach an audience, and with the tension between truth and control over Prince’s life story. It’s brutal in its emotional honesty.

Emily Pisacreta, Senior Producer and First Aid Kit editor: The Almanac of Ireland

In 2025, a new hobby led to a bittersweet podcast discovery. I’ve been trying to learn the Irish language — mostly from Duolingo and YouTube. It wasn’t long into this exercise in humiliation (it took me a whole week to learn ‘thank you’) before I came across Manchán Magan, a writer and Irish-language documentarian, and his (English-language) podcast “The Almanac of Ireland.”

I say bittersweet because, tragically, Magan passed away in October at age 55. He leaves us with more than a dozen books and many more hours of documentary-TV and podcasts about Ireland, as well as cultures all over the world.

I recommend The Almanac of Ireland if you have even a passing interest or cultural connection to Ireland, or if stories and mysteries from the distant past give you solace amid the instability of the present.

My favorite: How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher

A good friend recommended this book to me, and for anyone who loves to eat, reading it feels like drinking a steaming cup of minestrone.

Written as a guide to cooks managing wartime shortages, “How to Cook a Wolf” is chock-full of delightful recipes, useful kitchen tips (a boil should always be a mad boil), and witty asides, but perhaps more than anything else, it’s a guide to enjoying the small things in life during difficult times. It kept me hungry throughout a hard year, and it’s my new antidote to the winter blues.

Collectively: The Pitt (coming back January 8)

OK, this one is related to health care — oops!

We devoted an episode last spring to declaring HBO’s drama, set in a Pittsburgh emergency room, our favorite new show of 2025. If you didn’t happen to watch, you can get caught up now, ahead of the new season.

And: We want to hear what you enjoyed reading and listening to in 2025 — it could be your favorite story we ran, or… something else you enjoyed! Drop us a line here.