We Survived 2025, and All You Got Was This Lousy Newsletter

Well everyone, we did it. Here we are on the last Wednesday of 2025. While an asteroid could still wipe us all out before the year is over for good (a girl can dream), it looks like we made it through this incredibly long and stupid year. To close out, I will briefly look back and be proud of my little newsletter.

Here are the top five most popular posts from the year in terms of unique visitors and web traffic:

Maybe Stop Being a Dick: About knowing your audience, questioning your assumptions, and re-learning to communicate in a human way, not in a social media quest-for-visibility-and-virality way.

You Are Inventory: Challenging popular narratives and frameworks about the tech industry and the history of tech, or at least one narrative used by a writer with a much bigger audience than I have, by introducing what I think that narrative and framework looks like. This is an incredibly boring description of what I think is one of the better newsletters I wrote this year, so if you haven't read it, please ignore this blurb and go check it out.

Surely You Can't Be Serious: The quickest little riff on the fact that neither GenAI nor I are great at arithmetic and spreadsheets.

Feeds and Fodder: All about big-name newsletters leaving one platform for another, and what that tells us about how far the internet has strayed from the promise it held and from the internet so many people are nostalgic for.

Algorithmic Beef: Culture comes from all of us, so we're responsible for a lot of the bad stuff too. I don't want to spoil this one if you didn't read it yet because there's a pretty good reveal. (Sorry to toot my own horn again.)

What's interesting is that the top five newsletters—the ones with the highest open rates—are totally different! Maybe it was the title, the imagery, the randomness of the universe, who knows. Not to brag (ok, to brag a tiny bit, sorry) but I have a high open rate, which is incredible to me. I remain deeply grateful that any of you are willing to not only receive additional email but to go into your email, open my newsletter, and read it. Sometimes even click on it! I've said it before and I'll say it again: Truly one of the greatest compliments you can give a person, in my view (please don't ask me how many unread emails I have in my inbox).

Some Thoughts on Shouting Into the Void: Taking stock of my move from Substack to Ghost, as well as the challenges of growing a newsletter without any of the built-in tools and community of a closed garden social media-driven product.

The Great Validation Pact: My mind-blowing (to me, anyway) realization that people say they want emotional honest but really they want to be validated, and this is one big reason social media worked so well.

We Don't Need No Innovation: Sharing why I got rid of my Apple Watch, what innovation really is, and questioning whether we actually need so much innovation all the time.

We Just Weren't Made For These Times: Thoughts on context as well as context collapse, and how the firehose of the internet splinters our context and our ability to be functional humans on and offline.

April is Once Again the Cruelest Month: A meditation on getting laid off in April 2023, as well as on why I started the newsletter.

Here are two of my favorites from the year which didn't make either list.

We Are The Internet: A rambling discussion of why I'm writing what I'm writing, and why I haven't lost all hope about making the internet a better place.

Suffer Through It: Companionship, loneliness, and how technology (and certainly not GenAI) can never truly fix deep, human problems.

Honorable to mention to The Internet Was Fun Once and to Ander Louis, who has revived a dormant passion project thanks to my Bluesky post about his Bogan translation of War and Peace. Revived feels like an understatement: Book 1 of his translation went to #1 on Amazon in Russian literature, he's been on Australian national news, and been featured in The Guardian and the BBC. My two hopes now are 1. That I will not forever be known as "a New York tech writer" and 2. I can one day learn to give myself a viral boost like this one.

Anyway, I'd love to know what your favorite was—drop a comment and let me know.

That's a wrap on 2025! All that remains is a quick word from my editor, who we all know does the real work behind the scenes. 

Happy New Year everyone, and see you in 2026. Until next Wednesday.

Lx