Politicscorruption & scandals
Vox's Best Stories of 2025 Cover Politics, Climate, and Culture
As the year winds down, it’s a perfect moment to look back at the stories that defined our collective attention, and Vox’s 2025 retrospective offers a fascinating cross-section. This isn’t just a list; it’s a snapshot of the anxieties, breakthroughs, and cultural shifts that preoccupied us.The selection, curated from staff favorites, spans from the granular details of policy to the vast, existential questions about our future, reflecting a publication deeply engaged with the messy, interconnected reality of modern life. It’s the kind of eclectic mix that sends you down a Wikipedia rabbit hole one minute and has you rethinking your daily habits the next.Take the lead story by Umair Irfan on grid-scale batteries, for instance. On its surface, it’s a tech and climate story, but it’s really about solving a fundamental puzzle: how to make renewable energy reliable.The ‘holy grail’ framing isn’t hyperbole; it speaks to a decade of frustration where solar and wind’s potential was hamstrung by their intermittency. This breakthrough isn’t just about bigger batteries; it’s about enabling a foundational shift in our energy infrastructure, a quiet revolution with louder implications for geopolitics, manufacturing, and even suburban home economics.Then there’s the poignant contrast in Benji Jones and Paige Vega’s dispatch from Madagascar, a place of unparalleled biological uniqueness now grappling with political collapse. The story elegantly ties the fate of lemurs and chameleons to human economics, a recurring theme in effective conservation.It’s a stark reminder that biodiversity loss isn’t a separate tragedy but is inextricably linked to governance and poverty, a lesson with global resonance. Shifting from the natural world to the cognitive one, Adam Clark Estes’s exploration of what podcasts do to our brains taps into a quieter concern of the digital age: the death of ambient silence.In a year of constant auditory input, his piece is a manifesto for mental space, arguing that our compulsion to fill every moment with content might be costing us reflection and presence. This personal-tech critique finds a darker political counterpart in Eric Levitz’s analysis of AI apocalypses.Moving beyond killer robots, he posits a more insidious threat: ‘fully automated neofeudalism. ’ This isn’t sci-fi; it’s a logical extension of current trends in wealth concentration and algorithmic management, a warning that the real danger of AI may not be rebellion but ratification of extreme inequality.That theme of democratic erosion is made terrifyingly concrete in Zack Beauchamp’s work, particularly his February piece drawing parallels between Trump’s playbook and Viktor Orbán’s successful dismantling of Hungarian democracy. It’s comparative political analysis at its most urgent, using a foreign case study not as a distant example but as a probable roadmap, emphasizing that institutional backsliding is a learned and replicable process.
#featured
#Trump administration
#democracy
#Hungary
#Orbán
#RFK Jr.
#climate change
#AI
#housing
#podcasts
