Is reading dying? This year, as screens and social-media apps continued to fragment our attention, it felt like we finally began to grasp that there is a crisis at hand. In August, the journal iScience published a study by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London which analyzed how people across the United States—cumulatively nearly a quarter of a million, across twenty years—spent their time during a twenty-four-hour window. The data for 2023, the most recent year covered, showed that participants spent an average of sixteen minutes “reading for pleasure,” which included reading a magazine, book, or newspaper; listening to audiobooks; or reading on an electronic device. That figure, however, partially obscured a more striking finding: only sixteen per cent of the respondents read for pleasure at all during the day that was surveyed. In 2004, that figure was twenty-eight per cent. It is the trend line that is most alarming: in the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has declined by about three per cent per year. It is a sustained, steady erosion, one that is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Our information ecosystem is in the process of a similarly profound transformation. In 2025, The New Yorker celebrated its centenary. The question that has inevitably come up is whether the magazine can survive another hundred years. We’re now much more than a weekly print magazine, of course. We’re also a daily digital enterprise, active on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. This year brought a first: The New Yorker won a Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting. And a short film that we released won an Oscar—our second.
But I believe that The New Yorker will always be a word-driven enterprise, even decades from now, when the world might appear unrecognizable to a denizen of the year 2025. Here we celebrate words, and the way they can be arranged on the page—or screen—to surprise, delight, and inform; the way they can transport you; the way they can hold the powerful to account. Millions of people continue to read them. And we believe that this will be the case for many years to come.
It is in this spirit that we bring to you the most popular New Yorker stories of 2025, measured in the total time that people spent reading them. Consider this your personal year-end reading list, one that we hope provides hours of pleasure.
By Tatiana Schlossberg
“When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.”
Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker
By Ronan Farrow
When a prosecutor began chasing an accused serial rapist, she lost her job but unravelled a scandal. Why were the police refusing to investigate Sean Williams?
By Barbara Demick
As thousands of Chinese families take DNA tests, the results are upending what adoptees abroad thought they knew about their origins.
By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
