Favorite Essays of 2025
As I do every year, I keep a running list of the essays I read throughout the year that especially captivate me. As of this writing, my 2025 list clocks in at 41 essays. Continuing my quest from last year, I’ve tried to read more in print where I can (with print subscriptions to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and a handful of design publications) but my read-it-later service is always full of things I’ve saved to return to later.
As I look over my list, I’m surprised how many of my favorite pieces came from The Atlantic and The New Yorker this year. Perhaps I need to diversify my intake again…
Below are a few favorite essays, podcast episodes, interviews, and commentary that were especially enjoyable this year.
I thought a lot about Brian Eno this year when I returned to his diaries, A Year With Swollen Appendices, over the summer, reading each entry on the corresponding day. Interestingly, it seems a lot of other people were thinking about him too. Grayson Haver Currin had a profile of him in GQ that did a nice job of connecting his art to his activism work. But I really found Ian Penman’s astute analysis on Eno’s career, Infinite Wibble, in the London Review of Books, forced me to think through Eno’s work in a different way. Highly recommended!
Ezra Klein’s long interview Eno on his podcast is also well worth a listen, covering both his career and his approach to creativity, technology, and engaging with the world.
Sam Anderson continues to be one of my favorite essayists working today and I especially enjoyed two of his New York Times Magazine pieces this year. The first chronicles his attempt to follow the 365-mile trail of the mysterious vagrant The Old Leatherman and the second is a surprisingly personal profile of Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson published to support his new film, The Smashing Machine.
The cultural experience that stuck with me the deepest this year was season two of Nathan Fielder’s excellent HBO series, The Rehearsal. This season, which focuses on commercial airline pilots is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and changed the way I experienced a series of flight I took in the Fall. The best writing about the show, for me, came from Alexandra Tanner in The Point, in an essay called []”An Experience for Me.”](https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/an-experience-for-me/)
Brian Phillips, a writer for the Ringer I always love, also wrote a smart take called “Flying in the Dark with Nathan Fielder”. (One more from Brian, his review of the latest season of The Bear, a show I find immensely frustrating, explained perfectly why I keep wanting more from it. His notion of stories expanding vertically or horizontally is a metaphor I’ve used often since.)
Inevitably, I read more about AI than I’d like to admit. This year, it seemed I was thinking about its impact on education (and, in turn, our response to it). Here’s Natalia Ilyin’s short piece on why AI as a tool is a myth, especially in design:
What could be more colonizing than leap-frogging an individual’s power to create, making ”creative tools” depend on databases of predigested thoughts and images? An artist’s or writer or designer’s work is not a “most likely” solution averaged from every piece that has gone before it. It is a unique expression born only from that person’s experience colliding with their one and only mind. Now, with AI all over, of all places, the arts—the center of the soul of a culture–instructors like me are truant if not paving the way for students to squeeze themselves into “working with” large language models—the same AI that we tell them will out-design them, out-write them and out-think them, make them impoverished, and render their individuality unimportant.
Megan Fritt’s essay in The Point on the perils of “AI committees” hit very close to home for me but Carlo Rotella’s essay on teaching humanities in the age of AI left me more…hopeful? What is it? A call to be more human again.
But how do we work with feelings of offendedness? This is a question worth asking: offense has become so large and so accepted a part of our response to art that it can sometimes seem we’ve endowed it with unimpeachable authority. That’s the thing about feelings, as opposed to judgments: my feelings are mine, I have sole authority over them; they can’t be questioned, or not politely. That’s why they’re such a refuge, and why so often (I’m thinking of myself ) we begin statements that really should be prefaced by “I think” or “I believe” with “I feel like.” There’s nothing comfier than wrapping oneself up in the impregnable Snuggie of one’s subjectivity.
I’ve admittedly read little of the late, great Mike Davis (despite having two copies of City of Quartz) but I still enjoyed Nelson Lichenstein’s look at Davis’s Marxism in Jacobin.
Places Journal had a package of stories this year on rethinking interstates and I loved Reinhold Martin’s piece on highways as a form of democracy.
I liked this excerpt from Susan Orlean’s memoir, centering on the making of one of my favorite movies, Adaptation. And here’s Zadie Smith on the art of the impersonal essay.
Maybe it speaks to the moment but I seemed to read more mysteries this year. The Atlantic published two thrilling pieces I couldn’t seem to put down. The first, on a heist to steal Yogi Berra’s World Series rings by Ariel Sabar was such a fun read I can already see a Steven Soderbergh adaptation. The second, Jamie Thompson’s The Missing Kayaker had so many twists and turns that I actually stepped outside to the front porch on Thanksgiving so I could finish reading it without interruption.
And then in New York, this story on a young, mysterious philanthropist in New York who died suddenly is a perfect tail of imposters, performance, and grift.
As as usual, I read every profile the New Yorker publishes. A few of my favorites this year are on:
- filmmaker Joachim Trier
- musician and generally interesting person David Byrne
- actress Keri Russell
- New York’s new mayor Zohran Mamdani
- artist Lorna Simpson
- and an epic, complicated piece on architect Norman Foster.
On the podcast side, be sure to listen to Sam Frogoso’s interview with Terry Gross on Talk Easy and David Marchese interview Ocean Vuong on NYT’s The Interview.