Top Ten Articles of 2025

See also Best Things of 2025.

1. "When Americans Gave Up Their Freedoms," Martin Gurri, The Free Press (April 8, 2025). On the Covid violations of civil rights and the lying by government officials (the article has hyperlinks):

“Fifteen days to slow the spread” was a lie—Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump White House Covid coordinator, admitted in her memoirs that she intended to prolong the lockdowns. “Covid originated in nature” was a lie—Fauci bullied a handful of scientists into authoring an article disproving the Wuhan lab leak theory, then cited the article as definitive evidence without acknowledging his role as its prime mover. “Six feet of social distance” was a lie, as the egregious Fauci has since confessed. “The vaccines prevent infection and transmission” was a lie, as became apparent to those of us who were vaccinated and suffered recurrent bouts of the disease.

2. "A thread of 23 Survival Tips and Tricks You Might Not Have Known Before," Epic Maps, X (2025). Titles and cartoon-panel clear descriptions

3. "The Crack-Up" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Esquire (1936). A three-part essay, really, published in three issues.

4. The Jetpens blog articles on fountain pens and ink.

5. "The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars: How do Internet atheism and Internet feminism help us understand the current cultural moment?" Astral Codex Ten (2021).

6. "An Open Letter on Translating, Saints, and Tradition," Martin Luther (1530).

7. The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be,” David Brooks, New York Times (2024).

When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences. These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. Looking back over the decades, I remember rare transcendent moments at the foot of a mountain in New England at dawn, at Chartres Cathedral in France, looking at images of the distant universe or of a baby in the womb. In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss. The art historian Kenneth Clark, who was not religious, had one of these experiences at an Italian church: “I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before.” At least for me, these experiences didn’t answer questions or settle anything; on the contrary, they opened up vaster mysteries. They revealed wider dimensions of existence than I had ever imagined and aroused a desire to be opened up still further. Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding.

8. "Jimmy Carter, Friend of Dictators and Champion of Terrorists," Washington Examiner, excellent survey of his disgraceful life.

Carter likely first met with Hamas leaders in January 1996. In March and February of that year, Hamas participated in a string of suicide bombings, murdering 65 people, including three U.S. citizens. Dead Americans did not move Carter to admonish his friends in Gaza. Carter again met with Hamas in April 2008 as it was launching hundreds of missiles every month at civilian targets within Israel, promising that the group wouldn’t undermine peace. After Hamas first attempted to launch an Oct. 7-style attack in 2014, Carter called on Israel and the U.S. to recognize the offshoot of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood as the “legitimate political actor” that represents the “Palestinian population.”

9. "What is the Right Number of Women? Hints and Puzzles from Cognitive Ability Research," Garrett Jones (2008).

10. "A Brief History of We Are Church," Excerpt from Letters to the Church, by Francis Chan.

One young person in the church articulated it so well. He said it felt like the rules were suddenly changed on him. He explained that for years he was taught that salvation was a free gift and that the gospel meant that he could have a personal relationship with Jesus. It would be like someone gifting him a pair of ice skates. In excitement, he went to the skating rink and learned to do all sorts of tricks. He enjoyed this and did this for years. Now suddenly he is being told that the skates were actually given to him because he was supposed to be a part of our hockey team working together to pursue a championship. He wasn't supposed to just twirl around by himself. That's a huge difference! While he did not disagree biblically, it would take time to realign his thinking and lifestyle.

1. The Dampe by John Donne.

When I am dead, and Doctors know not Why,
And my friends curioside
Will have me cut up to survay each Part,
When they shall finde your picture in my heart

1. "1066 and the birth of two nations: What the Normans did to us," Ed West (Aug 31, 2024).

Anglo-Saxonism as a political idea is relatively ancient. In the middle of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, riotous villeins threatened to ransack the Abbey of St Albans unless they handed over charters from the time of King Offa of Mercia in the 8th century proving that serfdom had not existed in those halcyon days. The abbot was left to plead helplessly that such a document obviously did not exist, but the mob could not be reasoned with.

1. "Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids," Scott Alexander, AstralCodex10 substack (2025).

Caplan’s most striking statistic is that fathers now spend more time with their kids than mothers did in 1960 - not because gender roles have changed, but because both parents’ workload has been growing in tandem. Equally startling is that mothers spend more time parenting today than in 1960, even though in 1960 they were much more likely to be full-time homemakers.

1. "The Class of 2026," John Carter, Substack (2025).

At intellectual fitness schools organized on this model, preventing cheating will of course be every bit as impossible as it is under the current model. But if you cheat, you miss the point, as you won’t get the cognitive benefits of deep study and contemplation. It would be like riding a motorcycle instead of a bicycle: you’ll get there faster but to no benefit to your cardiovascular endurance. Cheating won’t be so much of an issue because the majority of students will be those who choose to attend for the sake of the material they wish to learn, for the sake of the experience of learning itself. Others of course will attend just to be seen attending – high-status leisure activities always attract the status-hungry who care more for the status than the activity. Whatever: they’ll be a source of revenue, and might actually learn something along the way.

1. ""Considerations On Cost Disease," Scott Alexander, SlateStarCodex (2017).

So, imagine you’re a poor person. White, minority, whatever. Which would you prefer? Sending your child to a 2016 school? Or sending your child to a 1975 school, and getting a check for $5,000 every year?

2. "Yglesias: Why did Biden's handlers go nuts? Biden insiders turned out to be boring mainstream Democrats. Yet, they still went crazy for transgenderism, immigration, George Floyd, and "equity." How come?"] Steve Sailer (2025).

"Why are the Democrats so depressed today? One reason is October 7, 2023, which drove a wedge between the Democrats’ woke activists and their richest and most influential constituency

Another is the election results. If Trump had won by galvanizing white voters to rebel against all the racist anti-whiteism of the Great Awokening, white liberals would simply have laughed it off as one last gasp by the Bad People who will soon be swept away by the incoming Diverse. But, instead, it turned out that the Diverse have the bad taste to kind of like Trump the more they get to know him."

3. "Fusionism, not Libertarianism, Burned Down the House", Kevin Vallier, The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (2025)

"On the one hand, we should appropriate a part of the commons to fulfill our duties to God. On the other hand, we cannot appropriate the commons however we want. The poor must have “enough and as good”property as others. If we violate this sufficiency proviso, again, we robGod.No matter how we resolve this tension, all natural rights to property reston our relationship with God and other human persons. In this way, the Theistic Locke grounds the Natural Rights Locke."

4. "A Tale of Two Curricula: General Education at St. John’s College and the University of Chicago: A small liberal arts college in Maryland shows a vision of what the University of Chicago might have been," (2025).

"The pair instituted a Great Books curriculum that was completely compulsory and spanned all four years of undergraduate education. Most of the existing faculty, who experienced difficulty with the curricular transition, chose to leave and were replaced by new faculty members. Instructors of this new curriculum adopted the singular title of “tutor”; the terms “professor” or “teacher” were avoided because pedagogical responsibilities were to be attributed exclusively to the authors of Great Books."

2. "malcolm gladwell on tragic dirt-vs" (2025).

"Bloomberg’s 12 years were so successful that the NYPD changed NYC lowlife culture. Before, bad guys went out on the streets packing guns in case they ran into other bad guys packing guns. By 2013, however, frisks weren’t finding many weapons because lowlifes were now more scared of the NYPD finding a gun on them than they were scared of not having a gun of them."

2. Patronage," Aaron Renn (2025)

" Imagine someone who aspires to be a Supreme Court justice or leading scholar of some non-religious topic. The idea of providing patronage to those kinds of people - say by funding their research - doesn’t even compute for evangelicals, who again put almost their entire focus on saving souls. Being populist in character, evangelicalism is naturally structured around charismatic leaders and their loyal followers."

4. "Kojo Yakei," UnmissableJAPAN.com (2021?)

Japan’s urbanites used to go out of their way to avoid the country’s sprawling petrochemical zones, but now they’ve been reinvented as tourist attractions due to their unique, otherworldly beauty. The ‘kojo yakei’ (meaning ‘factory night view’) phenomenon kicked off a few years ago, and now tourists are signing up en masse for bus trips and boat cruises of Japan’s industrial complexes, so they can admire the aesthetics of these chemical bakeries.

5. "Why academics bent the knee to radical political activists. Or, Why are theories about sex and gender created by a professor of comparative literature taken seriously in biology?" Wokal Distance (2025).

This dynamic creates a situation where well meaning academics who lack the fortitude to stand up to aggressive activists end up keeping quiet and refuse to push back against the politically expedient scholarship that emanates from activist academics. Many academics in the STEM fields and the social sciences will then bend over backwards to accommodate activist scholarship in their fields, or at least avoid criticizing it directly lest they end up drawing the ire of student activists willing to attack their reputations, protest their speaking events, shut down their talks, or “cancel” them.

6. "The Retreat of the Successful: Why Local Businesses Are Disappearing—and So Are the People Who Once Built Them," Justin Powell, Aaron Renn's Substack (April 1, 2025).