Four big things I learned in 2025

Lessons about media and politics from one of America's weirdest years.

“Atlantic City—America’s Great All Year Resort, Pennsylvania Railroad,” Edward Mason Eggleston, 1935 (Wikimedia)

1. The new superspender economy rules everything around us.

If there’s a single stat to capture what’s happening to the economy, it’s this: The top 10% of U.S. earners now make up half of all spending, and it’s changing everything. Delta Air Lines expects to make more money soon from luxury and business fliers at the front of the plane than from everybody else. In my own world of journalism, a lot of unscaled creators this year have been running into the soft limits of competing for small dollars, while the rest of the news field is increasingly dependent on the giving of foundations and high net-worth individuals (rich people). In gross dollars, economic support for news is propelled by what feels like a smaller segment of American society, which raises uncomfy questions for journalists about who the real customers are.

2. It’s easier to make money if you’re not making content.

The paradox of journalism is that there isn’t enough of it, at the same time this media era has all the hallmarks of content overproduction: not enough consumers for what’s already being produced. Which means it’s better to be selling shovels (being a platform / infrastructure / consultancy / providing “support”) than doing the actual digging. The entertainment side of the media business is shrugging and merging with Big Tech, with Hollywood production plunging as streamers bid tens of billions for already-made IP. YouTube is now America’s TV channel but still not a place you can easily scale a production business: Mid-tier podcasts are going on-camera not because of attractive ad rates from Google but because of the relevance that Google discoverability confers (we’ve seen this story before). Even Mr. Beast reported losing more than $100 million on media production in 2024, which is okay if your real cash cow is selling candy bars. But you’re probably not selling candy bars. Maybe giving away Disney characters to Sam Altman is worth it for some OpenAI stock.

3. Overcorrections still get punished.

Midterm voters are sending their usual anti-incumbency signals, and as of this writing the rightward lurch of the American establishment that kicked off with Trump’s re-election in 2024 has less the flavor of “permanent revolution” than “passing storm front.” (As one lefty acquaintance dryly put it on a call recently, “I’m increasingly convinced there will be another election.”) Someone seems to have forgotten to tell the American consumer which way the winds were blowing. Conservative-coded personalities like Sydney Sweeney and Bari Weiss have been producing box-office and ratings bombs lately. If I had to pick the high-water mark of Trump II, it probably ended sometime shortly before the FCC’s goonish Brendan Carr jawboned liberal late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air during a McCarthyist spasm after the Charlie Kirk assassination. The local TV conglomerates who didn’t feel like broadcasting Kimmel’s return, perhaps in hopes of earning regulatory favor from the administration for mergers, instead succeeded in driving their viewers to — you guessed it — YouTube.

4. I missed novels.

As we have a collective freakout about the Pivot To Video being for real this time — every stat imaginable is hammering the urgency of getting away from text and getting on camera — our huge cultural zig has provoked in me the reporter’s instinct to zag and seek out the overlooked. With the exception of some Instagram to keep up with friends and LinkedIn to induce career-related mental illness, I’ve largely cut recommendation algorithms out of my direct consumption. I abandoned X for Bluesky as a text-posting service, quit TikTok after its “dear leader” bid to stay alive in January, have chosen Bandcamp over Spotify for music, and have been indulging myself with print subscriptions to the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and London Review of Books. It’s made me feel happier, less stressed, with a lot more room for unexpected encounters. One of those unexpected encounters has been to re-engage seriously with fiction and its psychological richness.

Right now I’m enjoying the archonic grandeur of Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian,” where, for instance, my irritation with recommendation algorithms found an echo in an (imagined) Roman emperor’s irritation with his shameless supplicants:

“There is nothing more crude than an accomplice. … It displeases me to have some creature think that he can foresee and profit from my desire, automatically adapting himself to what he supposes to be my taste. At such moments the absurd and deformed reflection of myself which a human brain returns to me would almost make me prefer the ascetic’s sorry state.”

Consuming media today is so easy, it’s like resting on a royal pillow, being fanned by ostrich feathers while someone brings you grapes. It’s nice to be comfortable, but make sure you’re leaving the palace gates to look around once in a while.