As 2025 comes to a close, we’re proud to present our most-read essays of the year, listed below in reverse order. If you enjoy these essays and dialogues, consider subscribing for 2026.
10. “Permanent Decline” by Leif Weatherby
The game’s violence and its relationship to America itself has been the topic of football from the beginning. To win a Super Bowl, as Aaron did, is to become a hero in the American epic, to found—or refound—a city, like Gilgamesh, or Aeneas. Big Ben, Joe Namath, Joe Montana—all loom over their team’s respective hometowns. Hell, Josh Allen, on just the strength of great hopes in Buffalo (and now an MVP award, after the fact), appeared on a truly monumental billboard (for Gatorade) downtown this fall. To found a city, let alone a country, you usually have to commit some violence, often a great deal of violence that can’t be redeemed except in the light of the founding. But then, somewhere along the way, you have to enter civil life, a less violent social thing—you have to find your way to a legacy in which the epic is only the beginning.
9. “American Idols” by Sam Kriss
The line everyone knows is that he tried to kill the president because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster. That phrase is repeated in all the stories about him, those exact words: impress Jodie Foster. He was stalking her, he was in love with her; somehow he thought that assassinating Reagan would help. But that’s not what really happened. What happened in 1981 is that John Hinckley discovered the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.
8. “Left-Wing Irony” by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
How should the left counter right-wing irony, if not by adopting the same destructive rhetorical strategies as Trump, or else slipping back into its own contemptuous habits? I have no wish to transform leftist rhetoric into a Trojan horse for chaos and conspiracy. But there are, happily, other options. In particular, other types of irony. A more productive left-wing irony might be rooted not in the ideological certainty of the smug critic—the “know-all” irony of Benjamin’s “spiritual elite”—but in ideological humility. The irony, that is, of holding two thoughts in mind at once: my experience, and yours.
7. “An Experience for Me” by Alexandra Tanner
“When you practice being other people for long enough,” Fielder says in a sad voice-over, “you can forget to learn about yourself;” in his delivery he emphasizes the word can, transfiguring a melancholy admission into a kind of flex, or a kind of punchline: like he’s saying Duh; Haha; No wonder; Oh shit; How do I land this thing? You can reach the middle of your life and realize that you don’t know yourself; that there might be no self to know. There’s no self, and this is tragedy; there’s no self, and this is comedy.
6. “Jonathan Lear (1948-2025)”
Jonathan’s work in philosophy speaks for itself. For one who was lucky enough to be his student for a stretch of time, what stays with me most is what he did not put into words.
5. “Gateway Books” by Timothy Aubry
As a teenager, I lined the cinderblock shelves in my bedroom with novels by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus and George Orwell. These were my gateway books, my entry into the heady life of the intellectual I hoped I was on the brink of becoming: They raised big questions about existence. They made me laugh at the absurdity of the adult rules I was being taught to follow. And they promised to lead me somewhere else, somewhere better than the Blockbuster Video, the Danbury Fair Mall, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the Windmill Diner, all the cul-de-sacs of my social life in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In high school, I read them zealously and talked about them with anyone who seemed game—seeking like-minded readers, hoping to find my people. In college, where I hoped such people would be in great abundance, I discovered my mistake.
4. “A Matter of Words” by Megan Fritts
Various ideas for “rethinking assessment” are bandied about, eliciting suggestions of video essays, grading based on classroom discussion, assignments that include a list of where and how AI was used, and so on. During one of these discussions, I remember offhandedly remarking, “Sure, but I mean, they still need to learn how to write a paper.” It was not until after the resulting awkward pause that I began to see all of these committee meetings were dancing around the unspoken follow-up question that hung dangling from the end of my statement: “Do they?”
3. “Alt Lit” by Sam Kriss
I’m mildly fascinated by scenes, in the same way that I’m interested in capitalism and religion and magic and every other system that assigns value to things based on its own mysterious set of criteria running entirely orthogonal to quality. But the existence of this particular scene is not noteworthy in itself. Writers have always done this. … They go to parties and marry each other’s exes and write books about it, and then their friends all pretend those books are better than they actually are: this is the world. There have also always been writers who hate all this incest and clannishness so much that they barely write about anything else. Wyndham Lewis wrote Tarr more than a century ago and it’s one long howl against the smug pink scene of mediocre artists all living off their parents’ money. It’s Montparnasse instead of Dimes Square, but nothing really changes. The thing that actually matters about a scene is the work it produces. So I decided to read the work.
2. “Among the Post-Feminists” by Grazie Sophia Christie
Even when sincerely believed, the “truths” of the post-feminists are alternative; their motives mixed, if not downright ulterior. Too often it seems like they are just performing a bit, in the theater immortalized by the iPhone camera. A going refrain on social media advises women that “delulu is the solulu”—delusion is the solution. But when you’re asking women to live for an improved future, to disengage from reality so as not to prop it up, it should be no surprise when they become skilled in the art of doublethink.
1. “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” by Mana Afsari
“Well,” he laughs, “this is a little silly. But when I was little, I always wanted to do something great, and I would talk about that when I was a kid. And I’d have teachers and other people telling me: you can’t say that, you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. And then this guy comes on to the stage, eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”
And from our Substack…
3. Jon Baskin and David Sessions on the millennial left
2. Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg on whether the humanities can be saved
1. Anastasia Berg responds to Moira Donegan
As 2025 comes to a close, we’re proud to present our most-read essays of the year, listed below in reverse order. If you enjoy these essays and dialogues, consider subscribing for 2026.
10. “Permanent Decline” by Leif Weatherby
The game’s violence and its relationship to America itself has been the topic of football from the beginning. To win a Super Bowl, as Aaron did, is to become a hero in the American epic, to found—or refound—a city, like Gilgamesh, or Aeneas. Big Ben, Joe Namath, Joe Montana—all loom over their team’s respective hometowns. Hell, Josh Allen, on just the strength of great hopes in Buffalo (and now an MVP award, after the fact), appeared on a truly monumental billboard (for Gatorade) downtown this fall. To found a city, let alone a country, you usually have to commit some violence, often a great deal of violence that can’t be redeemed except in the light of the founding. But then, somewhere along the way, you have to enter civil life, a less violent social thing—you have to find your way to a legacy in which the epic is only the beginning.
9. “American Idols” by Sam Kriss
The line everyone knows is that he tried to kill the president because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster. That phrase is repeated in all the stories about him, those exact words: impress Jodie Foster. He was stalking her, he was in love with her; somehow he thought that assassinating Reagan would help. But that’s not what really happened. What happened in 1981 is that John Hinckley discovered the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.
8. “Left-Wing Irony” by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
How should the left counter right-wing irony, if not by adopting the same destructive rhetorical strategies as Trump, or else slipping back into its own contemptuous habits? I have no wish to transform leftist rhetoric into a Trojan horse for chaos and conspiracy. But there are, happily, other options. In particular, other types of irony. A more productive left-wing irony might be rooted not in the ideological certainty of the smug critic—the “know-all” irony of Benjamin’s “spiritual elite”—but in ideological humility. The irony, that is, of holding two thoughts in mind at once: my experience, and yours.
7. “An Experience for Me” by Alexandra Tanner
“When you practice being other people for long enough,” Fielder says in a sad voice-over, “you can forget to learn about yourself;” in his delivery he emphasizes the word can, transfiguring a melancholy admission into a kind of flex, or a kind of punchline: like he’s saying Duh; Haha; No wonder; Oh shit; How do I land this thing? You can reach the middle of your life and realize that you don’t know yourself; that there might be no self to know. There’s no self, and this is tragedy; there’s no self, and this is comedy.
6. “Jonathan Lear (1948-2025)”
Jonathan’s work in philosophy speaks for itself. For one who was lucky enough to be his student for a stretch of time, what stays with me most is what he did not put into words.
5. “Gateway Books” by Timothy Aubry
As a teenager, I lined the cinderblock shelves in my bedroom with novels by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus and George Orwell. These were my gateway books, my entry into the heady life of the intellectual I hoped I was on the brink of becoming: They raised big questions about existence. They made me laugh at the absurdity of the adult rules I was being taught to follow. And they promised to lead me somewhere else, somewhere better than the Blockbuster Video, the Danbury Fair Mall, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the Windmill Diner, all the cul-de-sacs of my social life in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In high school, I read them zealously and talked about them with anyone who seemed game—seeking like-minded readers, hoping to find my people. In college, where I hoped such people would be in great abundance, I discovered my mistake.
4. “A Matter of Words” by Megan Fritts
Various ideas for “rethinking assessment” are bandied about, eliciting suggestions of video essays, grading based on classroom discussion, assignments that include a list of where and how AI was used, and so on. During one of these discussions, I remember offhandedly remarking, “Sure, but I mean, they still need to learn how to write a paper.” It was not until after the resulting awkward pause that I began to see all of these committee meetings were dancing around the unspoken follow-up question that hung dangling from the end of my statement: “Do they?”
3. “Alt Lit” by Sam Kriss
I’m mildly fascinated by scenes, in the same way that I’m interested in capitalism and religion and magic and every other system that assigns value to things based on its own mysterious set of criteria running entirely orthogonal to quality. But the existence of this particular scene is not noteworthy in itself. Writers have always done this. … They go to parties and marry each other’s exes and write books about it, and then their friends all pretend those books are better than they actually are: this is the world. There have also always been writers who hate all this incest and clannishness so much that they barely write about anything else. Wyndham Lewis wrote Tarr more than a century ago and it’s one long howl against the smug pink scene of mediocre artists all living off their parents’ money. It’s Montparnasse instead of Dimes Square, but nothing really changes. The thing that actually matters about a scene is the work it produces. So I decided to read the work.
2. “Among the Post-Feminists” by Grazie Sophia Christie
Even when sincerely believed, the “truths” of the post-feminists are alternative; their motives mixed, if not downright ulterior. Too often it seems like they are just performing a bit, in the theater immortalized by the iPhone camera. A going refrain on social media advises women that “delulu is the solulu”—delusion is the solution. But when you’re asking women to live for an improved future, to disengage from reality so as not to prop it up, it should be no surprise when they become skilled in the art of doublethink.
1. “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” by Mana Afsari
“Well,” he laughs, “this is a little silly. But when I was little, I always wanted to do something great, and I would talk about that when I was a kid. And I’d have teachers and other people telling me: you can’t say that, you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. And then this guy comes on to the stage, eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”
And from our Substack…
3. Jon Baskin and David Sessions on the millennial left
2. Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg on whether the humanities can be saved
1. Anastasia Berg responds to Moira Donegan
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.