Entries for December 2025
Spotify really started something, didn’t they? Everyone has a “Wrapped” this year; I even got an email one from the cruise line on which I took a trip this summer. Like, “Congratulations! You went on {1} cruise for {7} days!” — and then nothing else. Two stats. So I thought for an end-of year thing here on KDO, I would write a post with a title like “Kottke Wrapped 2025” and then say, “haha, just kidding, I’ll see you jokers next year”. Fun gag.
But then I started thinking about it, running some SQL queries, and looking at my stats and decided to do a Kottke Wrapped for real. (All stats as of today.)
262. That’s the number of distinct days someone (me or a guest editor) published at least one post to KDO in 2025. How does that compare to past years? In 2024, we blogged on 267 days. 2023: 275 days. 2022, I went of sabbatical for 7 months but still managed 129 days. From 2007-2021, the average is around 275 days. In 2004, the year before I started working on KDO full-time, I posted on 344 days! (The average American work-year in ~250 days — maybe I should take more time off?)
2142. The number of KDO posts for 2025. That’s 8.2 posts/day on days that we posted.
1084. The number of members who either commented on (964 ppl) or faved (513 ppl) a KDO post this year. All told, we left 4474 faves and 4983 comments on posts in 2025. Compared to the number of total members, that is an absurdly high participation rate. Thank you so much for taking part!
845. That’s the number of distinct tags used for entries this year. The list of most-used tags included movies, art, astronomy,music, design, science, books, remix, politics, photography, sports, travel, lists, and Japan. That’s a pretty good encapsulation of my (and hopefully your) general interests.
4.9%. The amount by which KDO membership numbers increased from Jan 1. At one point in the year, membership numbers were up almost 10% (!) but that came back down steadily as the year went on. I only made a couple of membership calls during the year — most of the time I was just heads down on site work. I know this has been a tough year for a lot of folks out there and I really appreciate the support. If you’d like to help support this paywall-less site (a rarer and rarer thing as 2025 comes to a close), you can sign up for a membership for as little as $3/mo. ✌️
And now a bunch of links to the most popular posts of the year according to three different metrics: visits, comments, and faves. Some random thoughts to follow.
The Most Visited Posts in 2025
- JD Vance Chastised by Vermont Snow Reporter
- Questlove’s Fantastic Video Mix of 50 Years of SNL Music
- 80 of the Most Iconic Guitar Intros
- The Official Map of the Star Wars Galaxy
- All the Dogs Explained
- Football Stadium Turned Community Garden
- The World’s Largest Data Center Rises in Texas
- The 2025 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide
- Extinction Burst Explains MAGA Voters’ Racist Anger
- I Want No One Else to Succeed
- Meet the Aphantasics: Those Who Can’t See Mental Images
- TV Garden: stream television channels from all over the world for free…
- USPS Announces Goodnight Moon Stamps
- Hard Things Are Supposed to Be Hard
- The Design of the New Swiss Passport
- WWII Vet Crushes a Tesla With a Sherman Tank
- Six Films Better Than the Books They’re Based On
- Weird Al Yankovic Covers Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine
- Real Photos That Look Fake
- Bernini’s Ratto di Proserpina
- Lololol: Max is changing its name back to HBO Max.
- Can I Lick It? Yes You Can
- A Comprehensive Guide to Yellow Stripey Things
- The Prayer of Saint Francis
- 87% Of Loud Crashing Noises Are Nothing, Report Top Experts From Other Room.
The Most Commented-On Posts in 2025
- A Programming Note
- How Are You?
- “What is the best album released by a music act at least 15 years after its debut album?”
- I’m Heading to Japan. What Should I Do?
- Are You Looking for Work? Are You Looking to Fill a Position?
- Six Films Better Than the Books They’re Based On.
- My Recent Media Diet, the Resistance Edition
- Wind It Back
- Can You Recommend a Good Bookmark Manager?
- What’s All the Fuss About Pluribus?
- Some KDO Updates: We’ve Got Ourselves a Stew
- What are the five things that are essential in your kitchen?
- In Praise of Comfort Films
- Glass Onion
- The End of College Life?
- How Much Do I Really Need to Know?
- This One Goes to 27
- Biking Is Therapy
- iOS 26 / Liquid Glass is terrible.
- I disagree with Quentin Tarantino on what his best film is.
- A Quick Anniversary Note
- There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy
- You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill.
- Instances of haptic nostalgia (“the poignant memory of the physicality of an obsolete thing”).
- Trump Ejects Zelenskyy From White House
The Most Faved Posts in 2025 (from May 18)
- This Is Your Captain Speaking…
- Some Recent Tweaks (and Post Faving!)
- A Bright Light Has Gone Out
- Every Tree Can Be a Buddha
- Bernini’s Ratto di Proserpina
- I Want No One Else to Succeed
- There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy
- Slow Start to the Week
- Pediatrician Dr. Annie Andrews is running against Lindsey Graham…
- The Underscore Music Player
- Walking the Earth
- I Am An AI Hater.
- The Kottke.org Rolodex
- Q: “Want to Feel Old?” A: “Yes.”
- Refusing to Choose Is a Choice
- Taking the Day
- What Makes for a Healthy Society?
- Proof of life! I’m writing a longer post about my time in Kōyasan, but in the meantime…
- Some KDO Updates: We’ve Got Ourselves a Stew
- The 2025 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide
- Biking Is Therapy
- What Are You Thankful For?
- For They Shall Inherit
- Owls in Towels
- When In Rome
It’s interesting to look at the differences between these three lists. (Major caveat: the faved posts are all from the second half of the year because that feature didn’t launch until May.)
In general, the most visited posts are due to outside traffic, not regular readers; i.e. it got linked from Google News or Reddit or Morning Brew and blew up a little.
I feel like the most commented & faved posts are a bit more representative of what makes a “good” kottke.org post, whatever that means. But I also think that a number of my favorite posts, the s-tier stuff, didn’t make any of these lists — not that I can think of any of them right now. 😂
Largely though, kottke.org isn’t a “popular post” blog — it’s a “several small things a day” kind of site. It’s about the day-after-day accretion, the steadiness, the rhythm. I’m not trying to make a few chart-topping hits here — it’s much more about hitting a baseline of quality each day, building a bit more on the previous day, days, weeks, months, years, decades. (Yes, decades…gotta flex a litte here. 🤷♂️)
Ok, that’s all I have for now. I hope you have a healthy and safe start to 2026. I’ll see you in a few days. 🎉👋
Note: I used the awesome Space Type Generator to make the header graphic. Here are a few of the alternatives I considered:
Nancy Friedman: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Seventy-one percent of people in Iceland are Costco members” and “In Sweden, the largest size of Hellmann’s mayonnaise — 600 grams — is called “American size”.
Kent Hendricks: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Birders in the United States spend $107 billion per year, including $93B on binoculars, feeders, cameras, and other equipment; and $14B on travel. That’s more than the GDP of New Hampshire.”
Yesterday I linked to a Windows 3.x NYT crossword puzzle app from 1992 that you can play directly on the Internet Archive. I was a Windows user back in the day (my conversion to Apple didn’t happen until the early 00s) and so of course I had to see what other Win3.x games they had in their collection and re-discovered a couple of old favorites:
- The Incredible Machine. I loved this game…it was an early physics puzzler where you had to build contraptions to accomplish certain goals (like getting a ball into a hoop) with a limited selection of materials. (I just played for 20 minutes and I still love it.)
- Tripeaks. I’d forgotten about this solitaire variant.
- Freecell. This isn’t the official Microsoft version, but it’s close enough. I played Freecell much more than solitaire or Tripeaks.
- Pipe Dream. I actually had this one on Nintendo, I think. Or maybe my neighbor did? Another fun little puzzler.
- Minesweeper. Everyone’s played this at some point.
- Tetris. Ditto. Although I played mostly on my Game Boy.
- Klotski. Ok this one was the biggest nostalgia bomb of all. The name sounded familiar so I clicked on it and wow, I played so much of this one and had completely forgotten all about it until I played the demo. Wow wow wow.
- Doom. Of course.
Ok, that’s enough, I need to get back to work!
A wildlife photographer “discovered thousands of dinosaur footprints preserved in the vertical face of a mountainside” in the Italian Alps dating back 200M years. “This is now really one of the most important places for Triassic dinosaur footprints.”
Toby Buckle for the New Republic: The Americans Who Saw All This Coming — But Were Ignored and Maligned.
This is not that far from the position many ordinary Americans found themselves in at the start of the Trump era. They weren’t time travelers but saw what was coming clearly enough. They called Trump’s movement fascist from the very start, and often predicted specific milestones of our democratic decline well in advance. They were convinced they were right — and often beside themselves with worry. Accordingly, they did everything they could to get others to listen.
But not enough people did, and many attacked them — even as events proved them right, again and again. As late as February 2025, respected legal commentator Noah Feldman was casually asserting our constitutional system was “working fine” and Jon Stewart was scolding people who used the word “fascist,” claiming all they had done “over the last ten years is cry wolf.”
I’m glad Buckle wrote about this…it’s infuriating. Who were the folks attempting to sound the alarm?
The first thing to say about fascism’s Cassandras is they’re usually women. Not all women are Cassandras (most aren’t), but most Cassandras are women. My sense is that Black Americans, of either gender, are likelier than whites to be Cassandras, and trans and nonbinary people are heavily overrepresented within the group.
I was posting about Trump’s authoritarianism in the months before the 2016 election1 because I felt it was pretty easy to spot but mostly because I was listening to the sorts of people that Buckle interviews in his piece: predominately Black, many women, many LGBTQ+ folks. And what were they saying? Jamelle Bouie, then a columnist at Slate, stated it plainly in Nov 2015: Donald Trump Is a Fascist. Buckle again:
What were they afraid of? Authoritarianism, political violence, racism, sexism, corruption, as well as threats to bodily autonomy and LGBT rights, were the common themes. Everyone mentioned at least one of those, and the vast majority mentioned multiple. “All the implications that I knew the election would have that have all come true, essentially,” as Emily, a 38-year-old white female writer in Chicago, put it. Cassandras are defined by seeing in MAGA not just policies they disagreed with but a loaded gun pointed at the heart of our politics and culture. “It just felt to me like we were the Weimar Republic; the lying press, the way he was weaponizing American people … the othering of people — Hispanics, they’re rapists, and all of that,” said Sonia, a 52-year-old white woman who works in marketing in Los Angeles.
The anti-alarmists — Buckle lists several of them: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Bret Stephens, Corey Robin, Jon Stewart, David Brooks, William Watson, John Harris, Simon Jenkins, Zachary Karabell, Josh Barro, and Noah Feldman — scolded and derided the Cassandras. Going forward, we should be skeptical of giving them and others like them our attention when they pooh pooh people fighting against obvious racism, fascism, and kleptocracy; dismiss these dangers as mere partisan differences, culture wars, wokeism, or rhetoric; and argue for what amounts to meeting the nazis halfway.
Oh this is devilish…a game where you have make to 45 groups of 45 items each by matching two at a time. Must take hours? (Where’s the multiplayer option when you need it?)
Along with Sinners and One Battle After Another,1 Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year. So I enjoyed director Rian Johnson breaking down the investigative scene in the bar in this Vanity Fair video.
This is, for me, even a little more personal than the previous movies because faith and religion is at the heart of this movie. And I grew up very Christian. I grew up not Catholic. This movie is set in a Catholic church. I grew up Protestant, kind of what we would call evangelical today. I was a youth group kid and it wasn’t just that my parents took me to church. I really, my whole perspective in life was really based on a relationship with Christ. It was very important to me. I’m not anymore, I’ve kind of grown away from that later in life, but it’s still something that I have deep feelings about. So this movie, in a way, by having Father Jud and Benoit Blanc kind of talk about this and kind of butt heads about it, it was a way for me to take both of those perspectives inside me and get them talking with each other.
The practical effect with the photograph (~10:05 mark) was 💯.
ProPublica launches Rx Inspector database. “We’ve launched a first-of-its-kind app to help you find out where your generic drugs come from and see the track records of the factories that made them.”
From Lit Hub, the best audiobooks of 2025. (It’s not new, but I just started listening to Milkman by Anna Burns and it’s really good so far.)
The 20 Best Podcasts of 2025, incl. Signal Hill (“this inventive program functions like an audio magazine”) and Our Ancestors Were Messy (“this delightful show recounts stories from the pre-civil-rights era in the vein of social pages & gossip columns”).
Shel Silverstein’s Homework Machine was one of my kids’ favorite poems of his when they were little. First published in 1981, the short poem turned out to be rather prescient about AI, especially the earlier LLMs, which couldn’t math their way out of a wet paper bag.
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is— ‘nine plus four?’ and the answer is ‘three.’
Three?
Oh me …
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.
(via @brooksrocco)
Conservatives are trying to roll the Constitution back to the pre-Civil War version. “It will be a society of the dominators and the dominated. But it will not be a democracy worthy of the name.”
One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt. “‘It’s not the same. Why am I here? I question that to myself.’ Amid an astonishing wave of anti-Indian animus, it’s a question many Indian Americans are asking.”
Ultracold atoms observed climbing a quantum staircase. (Relatable: the upstairs of my house is warmer than the ground floor too.)
I pushed a key change to the Underscore music player over the weekend. Members can now click on any song in their collection to play it (previously there was only a randomize button). I added this because I often wanted to listen to a particular song/album/playlist, genre, or tempo (chill, upbeat, etc.)1 and sat there hitting the random button until I got something I liked. No more; quick selection and back into the work groove.
If you missed it, here’s what I wrote about Underscore at launch:
Here’s how it works. You can add links to music from Spotify, YouTube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and Apple Music to it — just paste their share URLs in. Reloading the page gives you a random piece of music from your collection. You can see a list of the songs, videos, playlists, and albums in your collection and can hide them if you want. That’s it. That’s all it does.
There’s no APIs or authentication or auto-synching playlists. The music is played through embedded players and if it lands on something from Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp, you’re gonna have to click the play button in the embedded player (Soundcloud and YT videos should play automatically (but don’t always for whatever reason)). When your current selection ends, the new random thing doesn’t automatically play…you need to refresh the page.
I use Underscore every single day while I’m working. Is anyone else out there using it?
P.S. I also added the ability to add Tidal albums & playlists to Underscore. Unfortunately, Tidal’s embedded player doesn’t play full-length songs, even for logged-in users. If you’re a Tidal user, bug them about adding this feature to their embedded player!
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life. “A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn’t.”
The Internet Archive has a playable version of the NY Times Crossword Puzzle app from 1992. It ran on Windows 3.1 and included a few hundred puzzles. (Click on Game/Open to select a puzzle.)
I love these photos of Rama Duwaji by Szilveszter Mako — a perfect combination of photographer and subject. Duwaji is an artist, illustrator, New Yorker, and second-generation Syrian-American. She is also married to Zohran Mamdani, who is the mayor-elect of NYC.
Good morning! Just wanted to let you all know that Rian Johnson subtly rickrolled us with a scene in Wake Up Dead Man.
My new favorite description of Christianity’s God is from Vince Staples (~16:05): “a floating man with a blowout”.
It’s Time to Accept That the US Supreme Court Is Illegitimate and Must Be Replaced. “…so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a parody of the democracy they were promised.”
The Anthony Bourdain Reader (Amazon) is a collection of writings from the late author, TV host, and chef, including some unpublished pieces.
The Anthony Bourdain Reader is also a showcase for new and never-before-seen material, like diary entries from Bourdain’s first trip to France as a teenager and “It’s Cruel and Unforgiving Terrain,” a piece on the New York restaurant scene, as well as unpublished short fiction like “I Quit My Job Yesterday” and chapters from No New Messages, his unfinished novel. These newly discovered pieces all contribute to give the fullest picture of the man behind the books.
Here’s a sample from his teenage diary he kept on a trip to France:
And from a review in the Guardian:
Some of the loveliest passages come when Bourdain writes with just-so tenderness and precision about his family: a journey with his brother to La Teste-de-Buch in France among whose sand dunes they holidayed as young men; the outsize pleasure he takes in his five-year-old daughter nibbling on Pecorino and an anchovy. I suspect Bourdain will be read in years to come less as a writer about food than of food work. Everywhere he lands — whether in struggling bistros, mob joints or midtown nightclubs — he warms to the subaltern caste of underpaid toilers slicing and sizzling and sweating away.
The book was edited by his longtime agent Kimberly Witherspoon and contains a foreword by Patrick Radden Keefe. Buy now at Bookshop.org or Amazon.
Clean Energy Is Still Winning. These 10 Charts Prove It. In March 2025, more electricity was generated with clean energy than with fossil fuels for the first time.
Martin Scorsese remembers his friend Rob Reiner. “He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh.”
Adam Serwer: “The reason so many of yesterday’s free-speech champions transitioned so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors is that their definition of free speech never included the right of others to talk back.”
Since we had a robust discussion last month on whether Pluribus sucks or not, I thought I’d ask: now that the season finale has aired, what did you think of the first season as a whole?
My impression of the show has improved slightly, but this feeling remains:
It was somewhere around the middle of episode two when I started asking myself if I was supposed to care about Carol and what was going to happen to her, which is never a good sign. I like plenty of shows with unlikable protagonists (like Succession & Seinfeld) but I often can’t get past stubborn & incurious ones — it just seems fake to me and breaks my willing suspension of disbelief.
I’m definitely in the minority here, but I just don’t think Carol’s character is very realistic — like, I’m not sure how that post-joining person with that personality got to where she was in the world pre-joining. That said, I find the premise of the show and the intellectual tension of the individual vs. the hive mind very interesting; I’ll give season two a shot.
Also, share links in the comments to good writeups/analyses on the finale and season.
The data is clear: congestion pricing in NYC has been a “huge success”. “Pollution: -22%. Revenue for mass transit: $548M.”
Infinite Ball Drop: what if the Times Square NYE ball started dropping now? (It’s currently more than 200 miles above the surface of the Earth.)
Santa Tracker Shows Sleigh Stopped For 40 Minutes Outside Old Girlfriend’s House. “NORAD’s official tracking app confirmed that Santa Claus paid a visit to his former girlfriend’s house around 3 a.m. Wednesday.”
RiotGrlErin made some great mashups of Christmas movie posters featuring Muppets. I think my favorite is Oscar the Elf but the Die Hard one is so good too. Many more in this thread.
Reminder: NASA’s holiday yule log fireplace video is delightful — it’s a rocket engine (in a fireplace). “8.8 million pounds of total thrust…”
From Mr. Bean’s official YouTube channel, the show’s hilarious Christmas episode.
While Christmas shopping, Mr Bean purchases a bulky string of tree lights before making a shambles of a department store toy section. He later manages to acquire a free turkey and Christmas tree, and attempts to conduct a Salvation Army band. Finally, during Christmas dinner, Bean has quite a surprise in store for his long-suffering girlfriend.
For finding a good book, there is no substitute for going into your local independent bookstore and browsing what’s on the front tables, the bestsellers shelf, and the staff picks. But bookshop.org is an amalgam of online sales some of the best indie bookstores in the country (and websites like kottke.org), so the list of their bestselling nonfiction books for 2025 is pretty darned good. Here are a few from the list that I’ve featured (or should have featured) here this year:
Bit too late to order in time for the holidays, but there are also bookshop.org digital gift cards.
The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore. “To truly understand living systems as self-organized, autonomous agents, physicists need to abandon their ‘just the particles, ma’am’ mentality.”
Allspice is a single spice?! “Allspice is the dried fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant.”
We Asked Four AI Coding Agents to Rebuild Minesweeper… “Cloning Minesweeper isn’t a trivial task that can be done in just a handful of lines of code, but it’s also not an incredibly complex system that requires many interlocking moving parts.”
The Case for a Public Social Media Platform. “What if the United States government decided to, overnight, nationalize Facebook and make it a digital division of the post office. What would that look like?”
Watch Jonas Wolf and three friends sing a choral arrangement of the Bee Gee’s Stayin’ Alive in the style of a madrigal. Just in case (like the me of 1 minute ago) you don’t know what that is (although you will recognize it from just a few seconds of listening to the video), voila:
A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) and early Baroque (1580–1650) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number of voices varies from two to eight, but the form usually features three to six voices, whilst the metre of the madrigal varies between two or three tercets, followed by one or two couplets.
Wolf has a few more videos of “pop songs in renaissance and baroque style” on his YouTube channel. (Note: these are not AI in case you were wondering/worried.)
Finland uses a progressive scale for speeding tickets; the fine amount is based in part on income. In 2023, a businessman got hit with a €121,000 fine.
From Sight & Sound, a list of the best video essays of 2025. I have barely seen or linked to or even heard of most of these. What am I even doing here, besides utterly failing you? (I wonder what would make my list…?)
From Kurzgesagt, an hour-long animated music video that shows all of human history in an hour.
So here’s an experiment: every second, 2 generations or 50 years will pass. You are on a musical train ride looking out the window, as you watch our ancestors hunt large animals, tell stories around campfires, and slowly spread around the globe. Experience all of human history in one hour. You can have this in the background, study with it, or just enjoy the ride. From time to time, I’ll say a few words.
Why Japan’s internet looks weird — unless you live here. “Japanese customers are used to seeing a lot of information packed into tiny spaces — consider how much text you can find on the label of an onigiri…”
Underwater photographer Álvaro Herrero positioned himself in the midst of a humpback whale pod and captured on video several of the whales breaching high out of the water, including one that landed incredibly close to him. Since he was floating in the water, you get to see the whales underwater before they jump, breaching, and then diving down underwater again. Given how cool this looks on video, it must have been amazing to witness in person.
American Classmates Having Difficulty Understanding Better Educated Foreign Exchange Student. “Kids say it’s really hard to understand what he’s talking about due to his precise English diction and extensive vocabulary.” 🫠
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is my #1 most anticipated film of 2026 and this trailer has got me revved up! Nolan’s trailers never reveal much, but still, it looks gooood.
I am still skeptical of Matt Damon at Odysseus. Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Circe, and Hoyte van Hoytema doing the cinematography tho! And how do you fit this entire story into 2.5 hours? (Unless Nolan’s gonna go for 3.5 to 4 hours?) Opens in theaters July 17, 2026.
Runaway supermassive black hole? Did not know this could be a thing. It’s moving at 2.2M mph and “is pushing forward a literal galaxy-sized ‘bow-shock’ of matter in front of it, while simultaneously dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind it”.
In 2002, Aardman Animations produced a series of short episodes called Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. In each episode, Wallace unveils a new invention, which Gromit then has to deal with. For the holiday season, Aardman has packaged a few of these short shorts into this compilation, Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas, free to watch on YouTube.
You can watch a longer compilation of (I believe) all of the episodes here.
Aardman even produced a new episode this year, in the form of a clothing commercial:
I hadn’t seen most of these before; I legit laughed out loud several times while watching.
See also: Nick Park demonstrates how to draw Gromit.
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