Many thanks to Chris for this wonderful year-end idea. There’s only one point of overlap between our lists of our favorite pop culture moments in 2013. Looking at my list, I’m struck by how these moments often represent not just my favorite moments in pop culture, but the discussions that grew up around those moments—discussions about representation and diversity, about equality, about privilege, and about what really matters in art and entertainment. It’s been a great year.

Here are the top 5 things I’ll remember about 2013.

5. This hairy, half-naked man singing “Wrecking Ball.”

It was a divisive year in pop music. The song of summer, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” toed the line of rape apologism. And Miley—well, no one could seem to agree if her antics were a horrifying display of cultural appropriation, or whether the backlash against her newly-sexualized act was an example of slut shaming.

Then, around Thanksgiving time, there came this hairy, half-naked man lip-synching “Wrecking Ball” to random strangers on Chatroulette—and the strangers’ priceless reactions. (Chatroulette can be a seedy place; I’m sure they’ve seen worse.)

And thus the balance was restored. Watch the (slightly NSFW) video. Laugh. Pop culture’s supposed to be fun, people.

4. 30 Rock’s “Rural Juror” sendoff.

30 Rock already made an appearance on Chris’s list, but I want to talk about a specific moment in the series finale: Jenna Maroney’s hilarious and surprisingly emotional “Rural Juror” sendoff.

The gag was classic 30 Rock, somehow managing to be both sincere and deeply silly at the same time. Resurrecting a joke from the series’ beginning—Jenna Maroney’s unpronounceable legal thriller, which became a musical in the final season—the show crosscut Jenna’s singing of the “Rural Juror” song with Liz and Jack’s declarations of (platonic) love for one another, and finally with a manipulatively sentimental montage of moments from each of the main characters.

It worked. I cried. Sometimes I still get a lump in my throat when I think about that scene—and about the very real, emotional, and fundamentally kind heart at the center of the show, buried beneath several layers of irony:

I’ll never forget you… I’ll always be glad I met you… These were the best days of my flerm.

Us too, 30 Rock. Us too.

3. The Victorian novel’s comeback.

This is a bit of a cheat, I suppose, since this isn’t so much a moment as a collection of moments: Garth Risk Hallberg’s $2 million advance for City on Fire, Elizabeth Gilbert’s return to fiction with The Signature of All Things, Donna Tartt’s new novel The Goldfinch, Eleanor Catton’s Booker win for The Luminaries, or the rapturous reader reception for Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. These novels have something in common—they’re all super-long and eminently readable, with complex, propulsive plots that span multiple decades and large casts of characters.

Conventional wisdom says that written works are supposed to getting smaller—but judging by the above examples, the novel is actually getting bigger. Maybe the expansive storytelling on TV is aiding audiences’ hunger for big stories. Or maybe not. Either way, color me excited that the novel is experiencing a flourishing in the Victorian mode—as a loose, baggy monster, charting the intersection between the personal and the universal, the place where individual desires collide with systems economic, societal, and political. The renaissance may be brief, but either way, it’s an exciting time to be a reader.

2. Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias.”

At its heart, Breaking Bad was the myth of Pandora’s Box: the story of an evil that, once set loose in the world, could not be put back again. Action: Walter White begins cooking meth. Reaction: a chain of unforeseen consequence in his life and the lives of everyone unfortunate enough to know him.

In creating the show, Vince Gilligan and his team of evil-genius writers also opened a Pandora’s Box of sorts. Surely they couldn’t have anticipated “Team Walt,” the legion of fans who justified Walt’s every action, no matter how sociopathic, and responded with poisonous misogyny to Skyler White, his wife, who frequently opposed Walt’s criminal efforts. As the series neared its end in the fall, there was a brief, fraught cultural moment where it seemed that what was at stake was nothing less than the ethics of portraying evil in art, and the real-life effect of those portrayals.

All of this—both Walt’s choices and Gilligan’s—came to a head in “Ozymandias,” not the series’ final episode, but surely its finest. In a series of events I will not spoil, writer Moira Wally-Becket and director Rian Johnson settled once and for all that “Team Walt” was an absurdity, as Walt’s choices exploded in a mess of human misery that left no one untouched. In a wonderful flourish, Walley-Beckett wrote a scene in which Walt goes on a tirade against Skyler, echoing the same misogynist venom the show’s fans had been spewing, and reflecting it back on them. It was poetic justice, on multiple levels.

Ultimately, the show shied away from the blistering moral clarity of the episode and gave Team Walt the ending they wanted—but in my heart, “Ozymandias” will always be the spiritual anchor of the series, the moment of awful clarity when Walt and Gilligan said, in horrified unison: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and weep.”

1. Lena Dunham casting Patrick Wilson as Hannah Horvath’s romantic interest in Girls.

Season 2 of Girls was darker, smarter, and funnier than the first—and no episode more so than “One Man’s Trash,” in which Hannah wandered off the street into a 2-day sexcapade with Patrick Wilson in a too-good-too-be-true Brooklyn brownstone. Faster than you can say misogyny, people took to the interwebs to call the episode unrealistic, claiming that someone like Lena Dunham could never attract a man possessing such off-the-charts stone-cold-foxitude as Patrick Wilson.

Double-standard much? Observing the blowback, I was reminded of Woody Allen—no Robert Redford in the looks department, as a writer-director he’s nonetheless taken the liberty of casting himself opposite Mariel Hemingway, Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Juliet Lewis, and others. (In hindsight, the whole thing seems a little pervy; but that’s a topic for another day.) The result? A culturally-constructed view of male desirability that’s broad enough to accommodate weird-looking nebbish intellectuals.

That’s not artistic realism, that’s artistic power—the power of cultural makers to push our perceptions of the world and the people around us. Due to her undeniable talent as a writer, director, and actor, that’s a power that Lena Dunham has and exercises on Girls. For having the…ahem, balls to use that power, for giving Hannah Horvath a drop-dead gorgeous love interest, for pushing back against narrow cultural constructions of beauty, and for standing her ground in the face of dumb criticism, Lena Dunham gets my top spot this year.