With 2025 drawing to a close, we reached out to Times Opinion contributors for their personal lists. Our algorithmic feeds and all the “helpful” suggestions from A.I. chatbots have only enhanced the status of the list as a place of clarity and refuge: Here is what I saw and experienced. Here is what lodged in my mind as important. Here is what I want to think about more. Here is what I never want to think about again.
List making is ultimately a forward, affirmative act — the wish to impose order on a chaotic world. In that spirit, we present lists on economics, fandom, nostalgia, fashion, politics, culture and other subjects. These are human-made lists for human-made readers in an uncertain time.
Illustrations by Joanne Joo
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5 FASHION MOMENTS THAT REVEAL OUR POLITICS
BY CHRISTINE EMBA
1. Elon Musk’s “tech support” T-shirt. It turns out that sartorial norms still matter: Dressing down is a power move, and Mr. Musk overestimated his power. Silicon Valley needs to at least make an effort if it’s going to enter the West Wing; its supposed geniuses should be less reckless and more discreet.
2. Mar-a-Lago face. In a world where you can look like anything — see Lindsay Lohan’s shocking transformation — this particular look is a choice. Fake eyelashes, unsubtle fillers, blinding veneers and enough hair extensions to style a horse: It’s the style of a decadent court, meant to appeal to exactly one person.
3. Zohran Mamdani’s J. Crew suits. New York elected the smiling Everyman in the suit every millennial owns. Affordability! Relatability! Democratic socialism is winsome and winning, literally.
4. Luigi Mangione’s boy-next-door court outfits. You can be accused of assassinating a chief executive and still be swooned over as a nice young man with perfect eyebrows. The reaction to Mr. Mangione’s classic aesthetic shows where mass sympathy has moved, and it’s not with big corporations.
5. Pete Hegseth’s American flag swag. Suit linings, socks, pocket squares: Mr. Hegseth’s choices manage to be both belligerent and completely unserious — just as his leadership of the Department of Defense (or rather, the Department of War) was this year.
Christine Emba is a contributing Opinion writer and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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THE WORDS AND PHRASES OF 2025
BY JOHN MCWHORTER
It was a year of so much politics and so much culture, a year of so many hopes and so many fears. But however you experienced 2025, you did it through language. Here are the seven words and phrases that, to me, most closely represent the past year of our lives.
1. Groyper. Followers of the archconservative, openly racist and antisemitic, recreationally combative commentator Nick Fuentes take their name — or did they give it? — from a sourish, homely, froglike cartoon figure that they treat as their avatar. They’ve been around since the 2010s, but 2025 was the year that Mr. Fuentes, previously a sideshow, entered the MAGA mainstream. The death of Charlie Kirk, who led a competing swath of followers, was one reason; another was a long and respectful interview by Tucker Carlson that divided conservatives. Along the way, “groyper” moved from the dark corners of the internet to widespread recognition.
2. No Kings. When President Trump took to social media and declared “Long Live the King,” and the White House upped the ante with an image of Mr. Trump wearing a crown, organizers on the left offered a devastatingly simple response: No. No King Trump, no King Anyone Else, no kings. And they punctuated that response with a series of huge, cross-national protest marches, the very existence of which proved that they were right. The word “Occupy” served a similar rhetorical function in 2011, taking extreme economic inequality out of the realm of concept and into the stark physical reality of bodies on the street.
3. 6-7. You know I had to mention this one, right? “6-7,” the thing kids insist on articulating — with a knowing giggle — every time the two digits appear in that order, has been a subject of ongoing confusion by adults. For kids, that’s half the fun. Eventually those adults started consoling one another with the explanation that the expression has no meaning at all. That’s wrong, a mistake based on the false belief that all language serves to communicate facts. Language — starting with plain old “please” and “hello” — also serves social functions. Did “6-7” emerge from a line in a rap song that refers to the height of a basketball player? It’s almost irrelevant. For Gen Alpha folks, the phrase is a form of group identification: You have to be a teen or tween to get it. This is the function that slang has always served. “6-7” is unusual only in that — unlike “cool” or “lit,” say — it did not emerge out of a word or expression already in circulation. It’s a good bit. And the longer that grown-ups scratch our heads about it, the more such gags are likely to emerge.
4. It’s the phones. The year 2025 wasn’t the first time anyone lamented the influence of ubiquitous cellphones on our kids and our culture, but it was the year that this three-word declaration became the go-to formulation. Today it’s less a sentence one composes word by word than a set expression, a short, handy reference to a larger argument, advanced by, among others, the psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, that smartphones are transforming children’s lives and brains for the worse.
5. The price of eggs. This humble home economics phrase became a stand-in for inflation but also for more than that — its rise and fall, the effect on consumers’ lives, the way that effect is influencing our nation’s politics and the discourse that has arisen to explain that influence. It’s what linguists call metonymy. Why eggs? Their price did jump substantially, but like so much of what happens to language, there is an element of chance. Lately the Democrats’ focus on this concept, which they feel plays to their advantage, has been so focused that it has squeezed the four words down to just one: “affordability.” There’s no perfect measure for how often the word was used, but digital search tools indicate that significantly more news articles included it this year than last.
6. Giving. Don’t groan. I know that the expression — as in “That song is giving Taylor Swift” or “That dress is giving old lady”— has been around for a while, originating in Black gay and ballroom culture, along with “slay” and “serve.” But 2025 was the year that “giving” became what linguists refer to as entrenched, meaning it’s no longer a dash of wit, color or attitude; it’s just normal, everyday speech. A sign that this is happening is when members of Gen Alpha casually use the term with an adult (such as me) and it starts to feel as though it should be in the dictionary rather than just on lists of savory slang.
7. He and she. I’ve been saying for a while that the gender-neutral “they/them” was going to become even more widespread. As a linguist who studies the ways language changes, I noted the rise in people resisting the gender binary and got caught up in — and perhaps even biased toward — what I processed as a pronominal revolution. But surveys show that the number of young people identifying as nonbinary has decreased considerably over the past two years. Binary genders are on the rise again, and therefore so are the pronouns most closely associated with them. By the way, I also thought “corona” would crowd out “Covid” as the general term for the virus, because it’s more melodious and lends itself better to wordplay. Really, predictions are always a risk, regardless of what you know and what feels right.
John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University.
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9 RETROGRADE MOMENTS FOR WOMEN
BY JENNIFER WEINER
1. Girl power rocket launch. In which Amazon’s head honcho, through his space program Blue Origin, sent three highly accomplished women — and Katy Perry, Gayle King and his then-fiancée, Lauren Sánchez — on a 10-minute joyride to space. The weightlessness lasted briefly. The cringe memes, and the memory of Ms. King clapping back at her critics by asking if they’d been to space, will live forever.
2. Meghan Markle’s TV show. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and her husband, Prince Harry, arrived in America on a wave of enthusiasm and good will, having come as close as anyone in recent memory had to taking down the British royal family (or at least forcing it — and its subjects — to a reckoning about race, a toxic tabloid culture and the way royal women get thrown under the bus). Unmuzzled, unbound, the duchess could have leaned into activism, speaking up for any one of a million causes (Gun control! Girls’ education! Period poverty! Postpartum mental health!) in desperate need of some star power. Instead she released “With Love, Meghan,” a soft-focus second-screen lifestyle show in which she made cut-up fruit rainbows, rebagged Trader Joe’s peanut pretzels and flogged her own line of products. Here’s hoping 2026 brings fewer dried flower petals, more speaking truth to power.
3. The “It Ends With Us” lawsuit. In late 2024, Blake Lively sued her “It Ends With Us” co-star and director for sexual harassment and retaliation, and this year she’s been met with scorn and derision similar to what the court of public opinion served to Amber Heard after the Instagrammers and the X dudes deemed her a mean girl. However the case ends, it’s likely the next actress will think long and hard before breaking her silence about misbehavior by a male producer or co-star.
4. Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad. “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” Ms. Sweeney, with her blond hair and blue eyes, has great jeans. Ms. Sweeney, in a moment when our president has dined with white nationalists, rants about Somalis and wonders aloud why we can’t have more immigrants from Norway, has great genes. This was tone-deaf at best, cynical trolling at worst. On the plus side, it made Gap’s commercial featuring Katseye dancing to Kelis’s “Milkshake” even more irresistible.
5. Erika Kirk and Usha Vance. It was the hug seen round the world. Seven weeks after her husband’s killing, Ms. Kirk, clad in black pants and a white T-shirt, hugged Vice President JD Vance onstage. She had her hands in his hair. He put his hands on her waist. Then, in response to an audience member’s question, he mused about the possibility of his Hindu wife, Usha, converting to Christianity. Cue a tsunami of speculation about the vice president replacing his brown wife for a more palatable white woman, as the keyboard warriors turned the aftermath of a terrifying act of violence and the subsequent debate over free speech, gun control and the mainstreaming of white Christian nationalism into a Monica/Brandy-style catfight.
6. Olivia Nuzzi’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad breakup. Who among us has not loved unwisely? And who among us, in the wake of a situationship’s demise, hasn’t dictated book-length voice memos into our phones while taking our favorite hike above a city of smoldering ashes, prompting an ugly he-said-she-said that played out in her subsequent memoir, on her former fiancé’s Substack and in publications nationwide? None of the principals touched by this scandal — Ms. Nuzzi’s various exes, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the English language — emerged looking better. The mess did serve a timely reminder to those of us in the word business: Everyone needs a good editor.
7. Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest memoir. Millions of readers cheered at the conclusion of “Eat, Pray, Love,” when Ms. Gilbert’s life-changing trip across three continents ended with love and, eventually, another “I do.” Millions of readers continued to cheer years later, after Ms. Gilbert split from her husband and announced that she’d fallen in love with her terminally ill best friend, Rayya Elias. Then came Gilbert’s 2025 memoir, “All the Way to the River,” in which fans learned that the inspiring romance they’d followed on social media was actually a shocking and sorrowful tale of a relapsed addict and her enabler, bound together on a joyride to hell. A love story that turned out to be a horror story? Peak 2025.
8. The incredible shrinking women. If ever there was a moment requiring women to take up space and raise their voices, to defend reproductive rights, to denounce gun violence, toxic male culture and the death of #MeToo, 2025 was it. Instead, women shrank themselves. Plus-size celebrities — even the ones who once denounced fat-shaming or sang that “every inch of you is perfect” or “thick thighs save lives” — got smaller. Regular-size women got thin. And the already thin became practically invisible.
9. ‘Quiet, piggy.’ Did Donald Trump kiss his mother with that mouth? When he’s not busy tearing down the East Wing of the White House, our fearless leader has been tearing down female reporters, calling them “stupid,” “obnoxious,” “ugly” and worse. His insults are bad. The absolute lack of any consequences is worse. And the failure of the rest of the press corps to stand up for their colleagues and take him to task — or even just repeat the female journalist’s question until he answers? That’s the worst of all.
Jennifer Weiner, a novelist, writes frequently about gender and culture.
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5 THINGS THAT SHOULD MAKE US GLAD THE ’90S ARE FINALLY OVER
BY ANTON JÄGER
The 1990s had a long tail. Even as the years passed, the decade seemed to linger, defining our politics, our culture and our view of the world. Today, in the storm of Trumpism, many yearn to return to its comforts. Yet rather than give in to such nostalgic attachments, we should be relieved that the 21st century — polycrisis and all — has truly begun.
1. China leads the way on the green transition. In the 1990s, as Europe and the United States were deindustrializing, it was often supposed that the West transmitted its smokestack industries to China, turning it into the dirty periphery of global capitalism. Of late, this story sounds woefully outdated. China is burning record amounts of coal, but it is also flooding global markets with green tech. In Pakistan, a major beneficiary of this glut, solar panels are everywhere. Amid anxieties of overcapacity, China not only is committed to aiding the world’s transition to net-zero carbon emissions but also is helping a country sensitive to energy outages. It seems that decarbonization is indeed happening, just not in the way the West imagined it.
2. Free marketeers call for state intervention. Mario Draghi, a former prime minister of Italy and head of the European Central Bank, is not known as an enemy of markets. In the 1990s he was a firm proponent of a European Union that entrenched the rule of private capital. In the past two years, as that consensus has started to crack, Mr. Draghi has become a loud voice for public investment. That even the high priests of market liberalism are clamoring for more active state intervention shows that there should be no nostalgia for Europe’s end of history. No matter how adrift the continent appears today, it is good that the complacently neoliberal Europe of the 1990s is gone.
3. A Muslim democratic socialist wins New York. Thirty years ago, the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor would have been unthinkable. Today, whatever he makes of his mayoralty, it can be chalked up as a major victory for left-wing populism, whose record to date has been mixed. But it also shows that the crisis of male loneliness has correctives on the left, too. In a telling convergence, the former hosts of one of America’s favorite underground podcasts — Nick Mullen, Stavros Halkias and Adam Friedland — supported Mr. Mamdani as the candidate gamely took to countless podcast studios. That a typically contemporary medium mostly known for its nihilism could take to political activism is another reason to welcome the 2020s.
4. ‘Friends’ is taken off Netflix U.K. It is hard to imagine a show more emblematic of the 1990s than “Friends” (of which I’m proud to say I’ve never seen an entire episode, just the occasional snippet when zapping through the dispiriting catalog of contemporary television). Critics have described the show as an Asgard for post-history: a set of mythical creatures babbling about divine banalities in an age when public debate had nothing to offer. That the show is soon to leave Netflix — one of those other defining scourges of today’s entertainment industry — in Britain and elsewhere seems richly symbolic for the epoch. Perhaps the time has come for new gods.
5. Protests keep growing. Has Western man become a political animal once again? In political theory, the 1990s were often cast as an age of postpolitics: an era in which political engagement was the exclusive province of specialists and technocrats. No longer. Since 2017, protest activity has been on the rise across the West — not least in the United States, where the size of this year’s No Kings protests was not far behind that of Black Lives Matter in 2020. So far, the achievements of these protests have been rather minimal. But it is hard to see how they should be cast as a major pathology for Democrats. In the end, excitement — however hyperpolitical — is still preferable to apathy.
Anton Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer and a lecturer in politics at Oxford University.
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5 SIGNS THE ’90s COMEBACK IS FULLY HERE
BY MARK RONSON
A few years ago, I started writing a book about D.J.ing in 1990s New York City. I was nostalgic for what we’d lost — vinyl, clubs without bottle service, dance floors free of phones. Granted, big jeans and baby tees have been in the zeitgeist for a few years now, but by the time my book came out this fall, I was seeing the spirit of that era resurrect itself in more meaningful ways.
1. Phone bans in clubs. While I’m too old to be hitting warehouse parties at 3 a.m., I keep hearing about this glorious trend: clubs banning phones on dance floors. Unless you’re Andy Warhol documenting Studio 54, nobody needs your footage. I miss when the only evidence of a night was my own scrambled memories and blurry pics I took on a point-and-shoot and had to wait a week to see. I’ll probably never set foot in those basements, but knowing they exist tells me we were onto something.
2. The Knicks ascending. In the late ’90s, my friends and I were so Knicks-obsessed, we’d fly to Indiana just to watch playoff games from the nosebleeds. Our seats at the Garden weren’t much better. When we made the finals in ’99, it felt like a miracle — until we lost Game 5 at home and I had to D.J. a party where half the San Antonio Spurs showed up to celebrate. Will Perdue, all seven feet of him, spent the night swaying in front of my booth like an inflatable tube man. For 20 years after that, Knicks fandom was a form of masochism. In May, our humble warrior Jalen Brunson carried us to the Eastern Conference finals. A few weeks ago, we finally beat the Spurs in the N.B.A. Cup finals. OK, it’s a relatively new midseason tourney sponsored by an airline owned by the Emirati government. Still, I might’ve gotten a little misty.
3. The return of vinyl. The first time I saw a vinyl bar was in Tokyo in 1998 — a tiny room where a Japanese soul fanatic played records through exquisite vintage speakers. Now these spots are popping up like omakase joints. I’m someone who has spent 30 years trying to make people dance, so my personal hell is a room full of people sitting down while I spin tunes. But I went to one recently and was moved watching a generation of kids who grew up with Skullcandy headphones sitting in reverent silence for the Jones Girls’ “Nights Over Egypt.”
4. The music. By the early 2000s, the grimy sound of the Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep had been steamrolled by the commercial rap of Puff Daddy. This year, with Prodigy gone, his partner Havoc released “Infinite,” Mobb Deep’s best album in decades, produced with support from the Alchemist, whose dusty sample flips capture the same atmospheric dread that made ’90s Mobb Deep so beloved. That L.A. teenager who slept on my couch in 1995 while visiting N.Y.U. is now the era’s most trusted torchbearer. Walk any street, and you can see kids wearing Aaliyah shirts. My 3-year-old knows every word to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” — apparently it’s a toddler anthem for parents stuck in 1992.
5. Hip-hop gets its mayor. “Mr. Dinkins, would you please be my mayor?” raps Phife Dawg in Tribe’s 1990 hit “Can I Kick It?” David Dinkins was celebrated by hip-hop. Zohran Mamdani actually made it — spitting bars with a friend in six languages about Uganda! His primary demolishing of Andrew Cuomo brought back an energy this city hadn’t felt since Biggie was king of New York. Sure, 50 Cent posted “RIP NYC” after the election, but he’s a 2000s rapper anyway.
Mark Ronson is a musician and the author of “Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City.”
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ABSURD MOMENTS FROM 2025 I WISH I COULD UNSEE
BY EMILY KEEGIN
I spent the year scrolling. I saw too much. Do I regret it? Kind of.
1. All the smooth faces. Oh, how I miss wrinkles. Human faces used to look so cool! Not so long ago, when people smiled, lines gathered at the corners of our eyes like starbursts. Remember? And foreheads! They once held an emotional topography of lines and ridges. Now they all are smooth and shiny, like newly waxed cars. Ladies, I love you. You can do whatever you want. But you’re starting to look kind of scary. Are you OK? If you need help, blink twice. If you can still blink.
2. The Skyrizi commercial. How did a commercial for a “moderate to severe plaque psoriasis” medication called Skyrizi come to dominate my life? Its jingle recalls absurdist theater, with lines like “nothing is everything” and “control is everything.” When the ad comes on, my family shouts “Skyrizi!” and runs toward the screen, howling at the ad’s Zen-like nonsense. When the voice-over tells us, “Don’t use if allergic,” we short-circuit. Thanks to Skyrizi, we now have moderate to severe brain rot.
3. Happy Jeff Bezos. From the looks of it, Mr. Bezos, a man Vogue once called a “swole monarch,” is finally happy. This year he got remarried, hosted a foam party on his yacht and underwrote the upcoming Met Gala. Mazel tov, Jeff! Unfortunately, we as a planet are growing a wee bit tired of how one man’s live, laugh, love — including essentially shutting down the city of Venice for his nuptials — leaves behind such a large carbon footprint.
4. The grind-set mind-set. Ashton Hall, a fitness influencer who posts his morning routines, starts his day just after 3:50 a.m. by ripping a piece of tape off his mouth. By 5:49, he has already done push-ups, has read the Bible and is ready to stick his head in a bowl of ice water (the first of many). He promises a better life by locking in. I can neither wake up early nor run fast, but sometimes, when I’m scrolling Instagram late at night, I believe him. I’ll set my alarm for 4 a.m. and fall asleep excited for my transformation. Inevitably, when the alarm goes off the next morning, I press snooze for three hours straight. Fooled again.
5. It’s beginning to look a lot like Slopmas. McDonald’s wasn’t the only high-profile company in 2025 to experiment with A.I., but it did fail the hardest. Its Christmas-themed commercial made the mistake of being both A.I.-generated and deeply depressing. By depicting the holidays as a series of letdowns, pratfalls and family squabbles and positioning McDonald’s as the Christmas season’s only savior, the company proved it doesn’t understand the human spirit. The outrage online was loud, and the ad was swiftly pulled from the air. Maybe there’s hope for mankind after all?
Emily Keegin is a photo editor and a creative consultant based in Northern California.
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6 UNDERAPPRECIATED ECONOMIC INDICATORS
BY NATASHA SARIN
It’s been a wild ride for the U.S. economy in 2025. So much has happened, from trillions of dollars in new artificial intelligence investments to tariffs at levels that we haven’t seen in a century and the longest government shutdown in history.
It’s been hard for anyone — even those of us who follow economic trends closely — to keep it all straight. As we look ahead to 2026, here is a list of moments from this year that might have gotten lost in the shuffle but that shouldn’t be overlooked, given what they portend for the future.
1. A.I. is everywhere, all at once. You may wonder: How can A.I. possibly be underappreciated, given how much ink has been spilled on whether we are in an economic bubble? But sometimes it feels as if we spend so much time debating the macro moment that we lose sight of the micro miracles that A.I. is accomplishing each day. The world seems to be quickly moving toward the Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s vision of “powerful A.I.” — models that in terms of pure intelligence are smarter than Nobel laureates across fields like biology, math and engineering. What will this mean for labor markets or productivity? This is the many-trillion-dollar question, and we are just now only beginning to get a glimpse of what may be ahead.
2. Private credit is building data centers. This summer, Meta announced a $29 billion A.I. data center initiative. Its cash on hand could easily have covered the cost of this investment, but instead, it chose to finance data centers with loans from private credit firms. Private credit sounds, well, private, but the public is more exposed than you may think. In this case, the insurance arm of the private equity giant Apollo lent Meta funds paid in by insurance policyholders. The same is true across consumers’ portfolios: Your pension dollars are funding A.I. investments, and if they crash, we will all feel the effect.
3. Tariffing Canada over the airwaves. Earlier this year, President Trump announced a 10 percent tariff and ended trade talks with Canada in retaliation for a commercial that resurfaced old clips of Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs and destructive trade wars. It was impossible to argue that these tariffs had anything to do with national security or the fentanyl crisis or the trade deficit, or any of the other myriad justifications for the highest tariffs in a century. And yet Mr. Trump got what he wanted: The ad was eventually pulled and Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, apologized, even though the ad was run by a provincial government.
4. The I.R.S. sharing data with ICE. Unauthorized immigrants pay around $100 billion in federal taxes each year. They do so in part because historically, they have trusted that the Internal Revenue Service would safeguard their data from immigration enforcement efforts. That trust was eroded earlier this year, when ICE started using I.R.S. files to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the United States illegally. This data sharing was ruled unlawful, but its consequences reverberate — for the immigrants, and for the federal government’s finances, as many of those people now have an urgent incentive to switch to more informal work arrangements and stop paying taxes.
5. The Federal Reserve chair, Jay Powell, in a hard hat. This year’s meeting at the headquarters of the Federal Reserve — currently an active construction site — between Mr. Powell and Mr. Trump was a visual representation of the president’s view that the chairman isn’t doing his part to more actively and constructively manage the economy. Come 2026, when Mr. Trump will appoint a new chair, he runs the risk of getting what he wants: a Fed more willing to do his political bidding and lower interest rates to juice the American economy ahead of an election. That’s a possibility with significant ramifications: As we learned in the Nixon administration (and as Turkey and Argentina have learned more recently), a politically motivated central bank is a recipe for high inflation and economic weakness.
6. Taylor Swift singing about having kids. Ms. Swift’s “Wi$h Li$t” lays out her hopes for life with her fiancé, Travis Kelce, and they are, well, pretty normal: She wants kids running around a “driveway with a basketball hoop.” In an era (get it?) in which the global fertility collapse is among our biggest long-term challenges, policymakers around the world have tried every approach (fertility bonuses, generous parental leave programs, even free child care) to encourage young people to start families. It hasn’t worked. There’s much more to do, especially in the United States, one of the only developed countries without a federal paid family leave program. But I also wonder if watching an icon like Ms. Swift both “boss up” and settle down could help deliver what ill-conceived, halfhearted policy fixes cannot.
Natasha Sarin is a contributing Opinion writer and a professor of law at Yale Law School.
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THE FOOD THAT I RELIED ON IN 2025
BY GABRIELLE HAMILTON
1. Getting takeout to actually rest. My local taco place, El Diablito Taqueria, has remarkable quality not only of taco but also of service, intelligence and attention to detail. The habanero hot sauce is fruity and not timid. The carnitas and the fried fish are legit. But the point is that after more than 30 years of inviting friends over for personal dinner parties, where I have only ever been ready to take off my apron and visit and chat just as my friends are gathering their coats and coming to say thank you and good night, I finally decided to stop cheffing on my days off and just be at the party. El Diablito is hot, fresh, handmade, timely, careful, thoughtful, nearby and organized. All qualities that are necessary if I am going to take off my apron and sit down. I ordered from them three separate times this year, including on my 60th birthday. Old dog; new tricks.
2. The Sizzler. A Japanese bottle opener and, importantly, a bottle resealer. This was the year that somehow I cut way back on the gin. Apparently, it’s bad for you. Until this year, there has never been a dilemma over half a bottle of unused tonic, because there has always been a second gin and tonic. But now there are weirdly whole days without a single gin and tonic, and, even weirder, days without a second one. So there’s been a lot of half bottles of Fever-Tree tonic left over that feel awful to waste. The Sizzler caps them and holds the carbonation seemingly forever.
3. Dole pineapple soft-serve mix. Three parts water to one part mix, poured right into the Vevor ice cream machine and — holy crow! — 25 minutes later: tart, sweet, fruity, creamy, seriously pineapple-y “ice cream.” But, most important to those of us who are hosting and welcoming guests with formidably elongated lists of dietary restrictions: This stuff is dairy-free, gluten-free and vegan. We also always joke as we are serving it that it is probably completely nutrient-free. Who knows what’s in it? But it’s so tasty and creamy and refreshing!
4. “The Pasta Book” by Marc Vetri and David Joachim. Marc Vetri’s an “old stove” who’s been making pasta for a very long time. I almost never look at cookbooks anymore — there are too many to sort through, and they’ve become too dumbed down, too simplified. I already know how to cook “simple.” But Mr. Vetri’s pasta book has this perfect way of offering simplicity and complexity. You can start with a basic egg and flour dough; you can use a stand mixer. But if you’re that other kind of cook, you can be grinding your own locally grown red wheat and hydrating that dough with the yolks of 10 eggs. Mr. Vetri is an encouraging and inclusive type. For those of us who prefer old-school muscle and tactile learning, there are friendly written words, clear instructions and procedural photos. And for the screen-savvy whippersnappers, he has QR codes that lead to charming instructional videos. I love this about Mr. Vetri: He hasn’t faded or plateaued or turned his back on what’s new and actually, it turns out, rather clever.
Gabrielle Hamilton is a chef and the author of the memoir “Next of Kin.”
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5 TIMES FANDOM MOVED THE CULTURE
BY ALLEGRA ROSENBERG
1. The papal influence of the fan account Pope Crave. The awards season campaign for the 2024 Ralph Fiennes film “Conclave” felt eerily relevant as Pope Francis’s health declined. At the forefront of the film’s small but passionate online fandom was Pope Crave, a pseudonymous fan account with a name punning on Pop Crave, a celebrity news brand. Pope Crave offered a steady stream of papal memes and jokes to promote a fan-created art book, but when Pope Francis died in April, the account executed a graceful pivot to real-world news. Soon, its reporting from Rome was being followed by tens of thousands. Many non-Catholic followers were introduced to the world of an actual conclave by “Conclave” and Pope Crave.
2. “KPop Demon Hunters” takes Korean culture to a new level. While K-pop and the “hallyu’’ wave of Korean culture have been crashing on American shores since the 1990s, the animated movie musical “KPop Demon Hunters” — about a three-woman Korean pop group who live secret lives as demon slayers — felt like a tipping point. It served as a love letter to Korean culture, particularly to the dynamic and colorful community of K-pop fans. Young viewers flocked to the film and its fictional bands, as did many adults. By August it had become Netflix’s most popular original film of all time, with its lead single, “Golden,” topping the Billboard 100 chart. If you could escape K-pop before, you certainly can’t now.
3. What Silicon Valley’s Tolkien obsession reveals. Anduril. Palantir. Mithril. Narya. Erebor. Companies named after items or places in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” loom large in the tech world, often backed by right-wing venture capitalists like Peter Thiel. In the 1960s, Tolkien-obsessed nerds named Stanford tech labs after locations in Middle-earth, but Mr. Thiel and his fellows (notably Elon Musk) don’t seem to identify with Everyman hobbits so much as powerful elves — or even Sauron himself. Using readings (or rather misreadings) of their favorite franchise to justify dangerous means and suspect ends, these fanboys show how pop culture can become a weapon in the most powerful hands in the country.
4. “Dimension 20” sells out Madison Square Garden. Dropout — the comedy-focused subscription streaming service formerly known as CollegeHumor — has been one of the great postpandemic media success stories. Under the chief executive Sam Reich, the company shares its profits with its employees and talent and has racked up legions of fans. This year, the service’s show “Dimension 20” — in which cast members play through a Dungeons & Dragons game — sold out Madison Square Garden. It was a physical manifestation of the viability of independent media in a time of slop, algorithms and the collapse of Hollywood.
5. The collision of romance novels and professional hockey. The Canadian streamer Crave seemed to have no idea that its new series “Heated Rivalry,” adapted from Rachel Reid’s romance novels, would be such a viral hit. The show centers on rival male hockey players conducting a secret affair. The show’s extended sex scenes (occupying about half of the run time of the first two episodes, by some estimates) brought many new eyes to shapely hockey butts. Breathless word-of-mouth recaps catapulted the show far beyond the cloistered world of romance readers and into the mainstream. Hockey is a notoriously homophobic sport; there isn’t a single out gay player in the N.H.L. The question fans had was not whether the lovelorn players Shane and Ilya would have a happy ending (of course they did) but whether their love story will end up having an effect on the way the sport treats L.G.B.T.Q.+ players.
Allegra Rosenberg is a writer with a forthcoming book on the history of fandom culture.
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THINGS TRUMP DESTROYED THAT ARE NOT COMING BACK
BY MOLLY JONG-FAST
Some things President Trump has destroyed can be reconstituted, like the Rose Garden or Congress, while some of the things he has effectively destroyed are most likely gone forever, like much of the Department of Education, America’s scientific research advantage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American soft power, the H.I.V./AIDS prevention program PEPFAR and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Here is a nonexhaustive list of some of the more superficial but still not great harms that caught my eye. The list juxtaposes the catastrophic and the mundane, so just ride with me.
1. The East Wing. There is no better physical manifestation of what Trumpism has wrought than the actual physical flattening of the East Wing of the White House. For almost 100 years, presidential spouses have used it for everything from news conferences to meetings with the Women’s Trade Union League. Now it’s just gone.
2. The term “truth teller.” The White House communications director Steven Cheung loves to call the president a “truth teller.” Just because he says it multiple times doesn’t make it true, but it does absolutely pollute the meaning of the phrase. At this point, “truth teller” almost feels ironic. There is no way the phrase is coming back anytime soon.
3. The belief that people in power might stand up to Trump. Despite having unspendable fortunes, the wealthiest among us were the most excited to obey in advance. From Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk, billionaires have been in a race to out-sycophant one another to appeal to President Trump. They were joined by powerful law firms, media conglomerates, corporations and tech bros who were more than delighted to kowtow to the Trump administration.
4. The working vacation. Mr. Trump loves a working vacation, and even calls his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., the Winter White House. As of November, he’d reportedly played golf 72 times in his second term alone, which makes one wonder how much work is happening on these working vacations.
5. Dancing while stationary. Once you’ve seen Mr. Trump gyrate to “Y.M.C.A.,” you will never look at stationary dance as a victimless crime. It’s hard to imagine that this trend will survive into 2026.
Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”
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PUBLIC HEALTH STATEMENTS THAT LEFT ME BEREFT
BY JESSICA GROSE
When I woke up on Jan. 1, I could not have predicted that I would spend so many hours of my professional life watching Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talk about public health with other poorly informed government officials, none of whom have medical degrees. Here is a short list of the wildest things they have said and done in hearings, cabinet meetings and at news conferences involving our Department of Health and Human Services.
1. “When you and I were growing up, our parents didn’t use a drug; they used a belt and whipped our butt, you know, and told us to sit down.” This was the demented wisdom from Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama at Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, talking about treatment for attention deficit disorder in children.
2. “There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol.” Mr. Kennedy made the first public link between Tylenol use in infant circumcisions and the onset of autism in an October cabinet meeting.
3. “They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies. It’s a disgrace. I don’t see it. I don’t — I think it has … I think it’s very bad. They’re pumping — it looks like they’re pumping into a horse.” President Trump, in a news conference with Mr. Kennedy, expressed his concern over the childhood vaccine schedule. A study published in The Lancet in 2024 estimated that vaccines saved the lives of 101 million infants worldwide in the preceding 50 years.
4. “Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at eight months pregnant — she’s an associate professor at the Columbia medical school — and she is saying ‘F Trump’ and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta.” Mr. Kennedy, again talking about an unproven link between Tylenol and autism, while also not understanding basic female anatomy.
5. “Health and Human Services! This is what they do. They just do pull-ups all day.” Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, at a news conference with Mr. Kennedy at Reagan Washington National Airport, where the pair engaged in a pull-up contest while encouraging Americans to dress better but also work out at the airport. Mr. Kennedy, who has been photographed working out in jeans multiple times, is perhaps the only American who would take advantage of an airport gymnasium.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times.
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9 TIMES THE CULTURE PUSHED BACK
BY NOAH SHACHTMAN
1. “Zootopia 2.” Hollywood’s most brazenly anticapitalist movie of the year was not the one starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a leftist militant. It was the one with the plucky little rabbit and the lisping snake. Reptiles are the underclass in this animated Disney blockbuster. The lynxes steal their intellectual property, leveraging themselves into fuzzy Elon Musk-Jeff Bezos types. And when the rabbit cop tracks down evidence of their perfidy, it’s animal workers of the world, unite.
2. “Andor” Season 2. You couldn’t spend more than five minutes at a No Kings march without seeing a sign that read, “I have friends everywhere.” It’s the code the rebels use to recognize one another. And it’s one of a number of ways that the scripts from the “Star Wars” prequel became the common language of a loose movement looking for some kind of lexicon. Another: “We’re the fuel. We’re the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air.”
3. Sabrina Carpenter. There were no big protest anthems this year, no “American Idiot” or “Fight the Power.” Pro-Trump rappers hit the charts, and when a country megastar released a song with lyrics criticizing ICE, he walked it right back. The five-foot-nothing Ms. Carpenter showed that the pop world still had a bit of pushback. First she featured “Protect Trans Rights” and other protest signs and drag queen dancers in her performance at the Video Music Awards. Then she lashed out when the White House appropriated her song for a pro-ICE video montage it posted online. Ms. Carpenter’s response went viral; Team Trump hit delete.
4. The return of The Onion. When it seemed our collective sense of humor might be a casualty of 9/11, The Onion went on a rescue mission. (Sample headline: “U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War With.”) Now, under new management since late 2024, The Onion is back, and all over your Instagram. (“Think Tank Called ‘The Himmler Institute’ Assures Nation This All Legal”; “Trump Denies Writing 36-Volume Comic Titled ‘Don and Jeff: Time Pedophiles.’”) Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but “South Park” returned to relevance, too. This time, it’s picking a fight with its new Trumpist bosses at Paramount by replacing Saddam Hussein with The Donald as Satan’s mate.
5. Kehlani. Kehlani’s activism was not a secret when the silky-voiced, tatted-to-the-throat R&B artist was invited to headline shows in Central Park and at Cornell University. (“Long Live the Intifada,” read one video’s title card.) Then the May and June gigs were suddenly canceled. If the intent was to punish, it didn’t work. Kehlani scored the biggest hit of their career and two more Grammy nominations, while continuing to post videos from Gaza. “I am not antisemitic, nor anti-Jew,” Kehlani said after the first cancellation. “I am anti-genocide.”
6. Jimmy Kimmel. At least 600 people were disciplined or fired for comments they made about Charlie Kirk after his assassination. That included the late-night host Mr. Kimmel, who was suspended under Trumpist pressure. When he returned after a few days, he offered a tear-filled apology for some of his comments that he said had skipped the track. Then the show went right back to skewering the administration, with a gangster turned Trump official (played by Robert De Niro) telling Mr. Kimmel, “If you want to do a joke like, ‘He’s so fat he needs two seats on the Epstein jet,’ that’s going to cost you.”
7. Amy Sherald. If you’re an artist, there are few honors higher than a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Nevertheless, Ms. Sherald decided this summer to cancel her show when the museum considered excluding one painting, of a Black, transgender woman in a Statue of Liberty pose. Afterward, a Trump official blasted Ms. Sherald for daring “to reinterpret one of our nation’s most sacred symbols.” As if that kind of reinterpretation wasn’t at the heart of free expression.
8. “Sinners.” “It’s magic, what we do,” says Delroy Lindo’s character in the film “Sinners,” in reference to playing the blues. “It’s sacred, and big.” That’s right when the music opens a portal to his ancestors and to their descendants, who unite in a juke joint dance scene that somehow encompasses the history and future of Black music, all right there, all at once. A moment later, vampire Klansmen attack and steal the music’s power for themselves. So much of this year’s political art took direct aim at the current administration. Part of the power of “Sinners” was its ability to step back and recognize the bigger historical patterns behind this moment — to show how deep the roots of our troubles are buried.
9. Bad Bunny. His next U.S. tour would have grossed $100 million or more — and been a magnet for President Trump’s masked immigration enforcers. So Bad Bunny invited his fans to Puerto Rico instead for what became the year’s most important concerts. There he performed songs like “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” which casts the 50th state as a symbol of gentrification gone wrong. MAGA may have hated this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, with Kendrick Lamar spitfire rapping, “40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music.” Next year’s performer is Bad Bunny. The Trumpists aren’t going to like his message any better, especially not when it’s delivered in Spanish.
Noah Shachtman is a former editor in chief of Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast.
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WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THE LOS ANGELES FIRES
BY PATTI DAVIS
1. There is no longer a fire season in California. Because of climate change and recurring droughts, every season is fire season, and the fires are more devastating than firefighters have seen in the past.
2. There are heroes among us. The firefighters suffered terrible physical consequences for their bravery and selflessness, and all of Los Angeles is in their debt forever. Civilians were heroic, too. Even a few movie stars. The actor Steve Guttenberg moved neighbors’ cars to help clear the roads while the fire loomed in a hellscape around him. In the days after, donations poured in for people who had lost so much.
3. We don’t need to be strangers. In the aftermath of the fires, people met one another’s eyes, struck up conversations, cried together. We slowed down, took time to listen and share. Maybe we can hold onto that now that the smoke has cleared.
4. Homes are more than structures. An important lesson: If people has lost their homes, don’t say, “At least everyone is safe.” Homes are havens for memories and emotions. Don’t diminish the grief; recognize it.
5. The randomness of fate prevails. It is something we will never be able to explain or even be comfortable with. Why did one house survive while those around it were incinerated?
6. There is no timetable for grief. It’s been almost a year now, and there are those who still drift out to those deep waters. They should be allowed to float there as long as they need to.
7. Horror and beauty can coexist. Weeks after the fire, I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, blackened hills on one side, the ruins of oceanside homes on the other. Charred cars were still along the road. But there was the sea, which had never been visible along that stretch of the road. With no houses in the way anymore, it was blue and peaceful, and looked like forever. I wept over the ruins, and I breathed in the ocean’s beauty.
Patti Davis is the author of “Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory and the America We Once Knew.”
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5 KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN A.I.
BY ERIC SCHMIDT
1. A.G.I. is arriving sooner than most people are prepared for. According to what I’ve called the San Francisco consensus — a set of views shared by many of the researchers and investors driving progress in artificial intelligence — the timeline to transformative A.I. has compressed rapidly. Scaling laws have shown that more computing power, training data and model parameters consistently lead to better model performance, suggesting that superhuman A.I. performance on most cognitive tasks is merely three to five years away. A.I. already outperforms humans in critical domains, displaying greater accuracy in classifying the malignancy of lung tumors than radiologists and matching the top 8 percent of global competitors in the International Mathematical Olympiad. As we approach artificial general intelligence, we need to ensure institutions adapt at the same pace; otherwise, we risk building a radically different future on an infrastructure designed for the past.
2. China closed the gap and bet big on open source. When I was the chair of the National Security Commission on A.I., America had a multiyear lead on the industry. That advantage has evaporated. Chinese researchers have pioneered more efficient training methods and are flooding the market with highly capable open-source models while U.S. companies until recently largely kept theirs proprietary. The world will adopt cheaper open models faster than expensive closed ones. As Chinese-designed A.I. proliferates worldwide, so do questions about whose values get embedded in the systems that billions of people will use.
3. Energy remains the ultimate constraint, not algorithms. Even with efficiency gains through algorithmic improvements, the physics of computation means that achieving the next orders of magnitude in A.I. capability will demand significant increases in power. Some estimate that data centers will consume about 9 percent of American energy production by 2030. The A.I. revolution and America’s leading role in it will falter if the United States does not build enough reliable power generation and modernize its grid. Solving this power crunch will require an all-of-the-above strategy, including more efficient computing power, greater energy generation, electrical infrastructure efficiency gains, enhanced energy storage and much more.
4. The productivity explosion will redefine work. Workers using generative A.I. already save more than two hours per week on average — a significant productivity gain that’s just the beginning. Over the next decade, A.I. could increase global G.D.P. by as much as nearly 4 percent and open new frontiers for innovation. But the transition will be disruptive: A.I. will reshape jobs across every major industry. Workers who learn to collaborate alongside A.I. systems will thrive while those who resist will fall behind.
5. Managing A.I. development is a civilizational challenge. Henry Kissinger, one of my co-writers on “Genesis,” a book about the future of A.I., believed the A.I. alignment problem was more consequential than even nuclear weapons. Aligning A.I. to human values and ensuring it optimizes for our interests forces us to reckon with political and philosophical questions we’ve never encountered at this scale, such as these: What constitutes human flourishing? Whose conception of the good should prevail? How do we preserve human agency in a world where machines make decisions affecting billions? Increasing A.I. alignment is as critical as increasing A.I. capability. We need to build a future where humans retain a say over the norms that govern humanity’s most powerful invention.
Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive and chairman of Google, is an author of “Genesis,” which explores how humans will evolve alongside artificial intelligence.
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The post The Year in Lists
