Is studying dying? This yr, as screens and social-media apps continued to fragment our consideration, it felt like we lastly started to know that there’s a disaster at hand. In August, the journal iScience revealed a examine by researchers on the College of Florida and College Faculty London which analyzed how folks throughout the USA—cumulatively almost 1 / 4 of 1,000,000, throughout twenty years—spent their time throughout a twenty-four-hour window. The info for 2023, the latest yr coated, confirmed that individuals spent a median of sixteen minutes “studying for pleasure,” which included studying {a magazine}, e-book, or newspaper; listening to audiobooks; or studying on an digital machine. That determine, nonetheless, partially obscured a extra placing discovering: solely sixteen per cent of the respondents learn for pleasure in any respect in the course of the day that was surveyed. In 2004, that determine was twenty-eight per cent. It’s the development line that’s most alarming: previously 20 years, each day studying for pleasure has declined by about three per cent per yr. It’s a sustained, regular erosion, one that’s unlikely to reverse itself anytime quickly.
New Yorker writers mirror on the yr’s highs and lows.
Our data ecosystem is within the technique of a equally profound transformation. In 2025, The New Yorker celebrated its centenary. The query that has inevitably come up is whether or not the journal can survive one other hundred years. We’re now rather more than a weekly print journal, in fact. We’re additionally a each day digital enterprise, energetic on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. This yr introduced a primary: The New Yorker received a Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting. And a brief movie that we launched received an Oscar—our second.
However I imagine that The New Yorker will at all times be a word-driven enterprise, even a long time from now, when the world would possibly seem unrecognizable to a denizen of the yr 2025. Right here we have a good time phrases, and the way in which they are often organized on the web page—or display—to shock, delight, and inform; the way in which they will transport you; the way in which they will maintain the highly effective to account. Thousands and thousands of individuals proceed to learn them. And we imagine that this would be the case for a few years to come back.
It’s on this spirit that we convey to you the most well-liked New Yorker tales of 2025, measured within the complete time that folks spent studying them. Contemplate this your private year-end studying listing, one which we hope offers hours of delight.
By Tatiana Schlossberg
“After I was recognized with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be taking place to me, to my household.”
{Photograph} by Thea Traff for The New Yorker
By Ronan Farrow
When a prosecutor started chasing an accused serial rapist, she misplaced her job however unravelled a scandal. Why had been the police refusing to research Sean Williams?
By Barbara Demick
As 1000’s of Chinese language households take DNA exams, the outcomes are upending what adoptees overseas thought they knew about their origins.
By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
