Person of the Year: Luigi Mangione

PART ONE: Perhaps there has been a vibe shift: one where the cultural script is shifting from “nothing matters” to “something must be done.”

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

LET’S PRETEND THERE WAS a subversive calendar created for 2025. A calendar that featured, for each month, a rendering of a radical anti-capitalist, a loose cannon provocateur, a skilled activist, or a forthright politician. For those months when anonymity was essential—a white page filled with cryptic computer code that honored a particular hacker or cyberpunk would suffice. Throughout, there’d be prominent stars that would shine within MAGA’s stygian blight. Beacons like activist Cory Doctorow, investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and NY mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

As 2025 shuts down, let’s back up and consider January—the month that launched our annus horribilis. For, as astrologers will tell you, the way any time fraction commences says everything about how that slice of time will play itself out. With apologies to T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, January, not April, is the cruelest month. And so, natch, our calendar’s first icon would be the alleged vigilante Luigi Mangione.

Mangione is the comely kouros who—plucked from a Cassandra-like myth or Dave vs. Goliath biblical yarn—readied us for one of the most grotesque years in US history. Although Mangione didn’t appear on the cultural radar until December of 2024, his presence dominated the news cycle for months (a rarity nowadays when several church, school, or Carolina dive bar shootings occur weekly in America). And so, Mangione dovetailed easily into the slot of our calendar’s first month.

Stop and think about it: 2025, with its paroxysm-generating cultural shift, was the only year that could follow the 16-year-long transit of Pluto in Capricorn. A reaming that commenced when the global financial markets sinkholed in 2008—days after the planet entered the sign. And so commenced a surgical process that dredged up the guts and goo of decaying late-stage capitalism. The Pluto-Capricorn transit set up the chessboard in a ‘broad daylight’ arrangement, revealing how the pillaging and grift are played, rigged, and won. And by whom. And on that note, let’s consider some of its kingpins.