2026-01-01 00:53:37
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 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
The Most Commented-On Posts in 2025
The Most Faved Posts in 2025 (from May 18)
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:
Tags: kottke.org
2026-01-01 00:15:36
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”.
2025-12-31 23:16:34
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.”
2025-12-31 05:49:49
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:
Ok, that’s enough, I need to get back to work!
Tags: video games · Windows
2025-12-31 04:48:07
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.”
2025-12-31 03:55:25
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.
Tags: 2025 Coup · Donald Trump · fascism · Jamelle Bouie · politics · Toby Buckle