I published more than 125 stories this year, if my count is correct, and I'd like to close things out by sharing a small handful that I especially enjoyed, in no particular order—two each from my brilliant staff writers, plus four DOGE stories that feel important to this day.

Threading the 13 albums from 2025 that I liked enough to purchase—may you discover and enjoy something new:

The MetroCard became metonymic with NYC. At midnight today it will retire, and so in MetroCard’s honor I learned about how this under appreciated technological marvel came to be and saw how MetroCards are produced. A eulogy:

Goodnight, sweet angel. @matteowong.bsky.social, in mourning for the MetroCard (and with a lot of cool new photos and videos of the MetroCard factory in its final days):

I had a blast with this piece, interviewing such talented jingle writers—including the man who is literally the reason Blue Öyster Cult put more cowbell on “Don’t Fear the Reaper” www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

There is something ineffably human about commercial jingles that AI doesn’t seem able to replicate; people just seem to know the difference somehow. Fascinating and fun piece by @nancywalecki.bsky.social

“This particularly cursed holiday week kicked off in earnest last night when my father turned his iPad in my direction.”

In theory, I want to give you more detail about my column, but I'm also struggling to find anything more concise than: We Live in Hell.

Happy holidays! Sent from my iPad

"Why is any of this okay with so many of those who once claimed to be free-speech champions or absolutists? Because, quite obviously, they were not." @adamserwer.bsky.social

ipad

Emergency pod about the combing through/making sense of the Epstein Files What’s in them, what’s not, and where we go from here. feat @isaacstanleybecker.bsky.social and @adriennelaf.bsky.social

EMERGENCY PODCAST weeooweeooweeoo 🚑 It’s @cwarzel.bsky.social, it’s @adriennelaf.bsky.social, it’s @isaacstanleybecker.bsky.social, it’s a million redacted Epstein documents, it’s a good listen

Wrote about the Epstein Files. The redactions,the political point scoring, an administration that has long lost the benefit of the doubt, and why this very real conspiracy (with victims who deserve real accountability and transparency) won’t go away

What is happening to people...

School shootings now common enough that two students at Brown yesterday had experienced one before

My child named our snowman Max. Hello Max.

Great dispatch from the opulent AI parties surrounding NeurIPS by @alexreisner.bsky.social—who asks, “How much longer can the industry keep the ceviche coming?”

For your weekend perusal: An attempt to explain how Youtube ate podcasts and how everything is television now feat. NPR's Rachel Martin, Bloomberg's @ashleycarman.bsky.social, and @dkthomp.bsky.social

Spencer missed Ego Dissolution by Ancient Death but assures me he is updating shortly

Mourning childhood this morning because of what @ibogost.com wrote about “6-7” …

an excellent piece and yes, the decision to depict the CEOs of AI companies as laborers, while they sit atop the single most prolific theft machine ever created is 𝓪 𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓲𝓬𝓮

big day for me. for *us.*

Congratulations to ALL of us Time people of the year

I’m surprised to see that Disney appears to be bowing to OpenAI here, rather than the other way around

"OpenAI has become the world’s most valuable private company under the assumption that it will always set the pace. But its ascendance no longer seems inevitable."

Merry Christmas from this banner ad I was just served

An entire thesis about the consequences of the digital attention economy could be written based on this post alone

Jolly morning! 🍗 🍗 🍝 😋

“I have not seen a harm manifest so quickly from a technology.” New pod today with the great @kashhill.bsky.social on the AI chatbot delusion crisis (and how tech billionaires have, in a sense, democratized their yes men entourages with these chatbots) youtu.be/i-Hu3p7SJVI?...

🫡

“he seemed to be suffering under the strain of his belief that the creation of smarter-than-human AI was imminent and that it would almost certainly lead to the end of all human life. He often talked about the possibility that AI could kill his sister, and he seemed to be motivated by this fear.”

Amidst more and more cases of "AI psychosis," I talked to psychiatrists to figure out we do—and more importantly don't—know about how chatbots may be producing or exacerbating severe psychological distress. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Thankfully I get all of my voting information from Instagram

NEW 🗣️ YORK 🗣️ HERALD 🗣️ TRIBUNE 🗣️

Absent good data, to understand more about "AI psychosis," researchers are training chatbots to behave like people who might be experiencing a mental-health crisis, so that the sick chatbots can talk to other chatbots and give us some idea of what's going on. CAPISCE??? by @matteowong.bsky.social

Sharing my 2021 essay on the metaverse, in honor of Meta’s reported intention to scrap its metaversal aspirations.

Genuinely spellbound by the anecdotes in @lilashroff.bsky.social's new article, such as: "one tech worker in her 20s, who asked to remain anonymous out of embarrassment ... asked Claude whether she should call 911 when her fire alarm kept going off." Google-everything culture on steroids.

“One of the news stories buried in this book is that Kennedy has already started to think about running for president as a Republican in 2028. God help us all.”

Counterpoint: this is bad, actually. When “trust in media” is increasingly rooted in a sense of common identity or mutual agreement, or a parasocial bond with an influencer giving commentary on news they didn’t source, the information environment is broken. The article is worth reading.

Loved this story by @ibogost.com, which is nominally about the Apple Watch, sure, but more remarkably about granting young people the right amounts of agency and dignity in the digital world that we really have no choice but to live in.

Genuinely spellbound by the anecdotes in @lilashroff.bsky.social's new article, such as: "one tech worker in her 20s, who asked to remain anonymous out of embarrassment ... asked Claude whether she should call 911 when her fire alarm kept going off." Google-everything culture on steroids.

Me on how Chat shattered reality, and why “hallucination” is the wrong way to understand that breakage.

Charlie with a classic Warzelig step-back on the precarious LLM era so far, and…

My colleagues @lilashroff.bsky.social, @cwarzel.bsky.social and I have a little trio of stories out for the anniversary of ChatGPT. Here’s Lila on the people outsourcing their thinking to LLMs, and …

three years ago today ChatGPT launched. so i wrote about its legacy (for now). (turns out a whole hell of a lot happened in just 3 years) www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

@cwarzel.bsky.social on three years of ChatGPT: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...