The Top Twenty-five New Yorker Stories of 2025

"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 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."

Screens and social-media apps have fragmented attention and coincided with a sustained decline in daily reading for pleasure. Researchers analyzed time use across nearly a quarter of a million people over twenty years during a twenty-four-hour window. In 2023 participants averaged sixteen minutes of reading for pleasure, while only sixteen percent read for pleasure on the surveyed day, down from twenty-eight percent in 2004. Daily reading has declined about three percent per year over two decades. The information ecosystem is transforming; The New Yorker marked its centenary in 2025 and operates across print and digital platforms, winning awards in audio and film while emphasizing words as central to its identity.

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