Our biggest cover stories, boldest investigations, and most gripping journalism of the year — here are the most-read stories we’ve published over the last 12 months
From a cold plunge with Sabrina Carpenter to ringside at a UFC fight opposite President Trump, the treacherous jungle of the Darién Gap to the smoldering wreckage of the Los Angeles fires, Rolling Stone took readers places no other publication could this year. Our reporting tackled political corruption and corporate malfeasance, the rise of AI and the scourge of sports betting. We delved into mysterious, long-dormant tragedies and perplexing new trends. We brought you face to face with pop-culture legends and introduced you to the innovators reshaping our world. Simply put, our journalism explored the people, places, and issues that mattered in 2025, as Rolling Stone has been doing since 1967.
So, before we usher in the new year, we’re presenting the features that resonated the most with readers in the outgoing one — our most revealing profiles, from-the-edge narratives, thought-provoking essays, and ambitious investigations. Here are Rolling Stone‘s most-read long-form stories of 2025, in the order in which they were published.
Photographs in Illustration
XNY/Star Max/GC Images; Natalie Keyssar; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images; Paul Natkin/Getty Images
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’He Had No Fear’: Ryan Wedding’s Path From Olympic Athlete to Drug Lord
Image Credit: Illustration by MATTHEW COOLEY
In 2002, Ryan Wedding was a champion snowboarder representing Canada in the Winter Olympics. Twenty-five years later, he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for “running a transnational drug enterprise and ordering several murders.” How did he go from national hero to global fugitive? Writer Jesse Hyde — who first reported on Wedding for Rolling Stone in 2009, when the ex-athlete was on trial for drug trafficking — pieces together the wild tale through court documents and exclusive interviews with Wedding’s family members, former athlete acquaintances, and government investigators. The unlikely journey of a young man from promise to predation must be read to be believed.
Read the story here.
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Empire of Blood: How Dana White’s UFC Conquered America
Image Credit: Natalie Keyssar for Rolling Stone
“There are two men bleeding in a chain-link cage in front of the next President of the United States,” begins this raw and visceral look inside the UFC, Dana White’s $12 billion mixed-martial-arts juggernaut. Contributing writer Jack Crosbie gained unprecedented access to the famously press-averse White, spending weeks with him in Las Vegas and New York, as well as talking with current, former, and aspiring fighters. Crosbie, a fighter himself, captures the peak era of this sport, which has gone from being a late-night cable-TV sideshow to a new American pastime that counts some of our country’s most powerful among its fans. But this isn’t just a story about fighting — it’s about politics and American culture. “If you want to understand Trump’s America,” Crosbie writes, “you have to understand the UFC.”
Read the story here.
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Eric Carmen Was a Power-Pop Legend. Then He Vanished
Image Credit: Tom Hill/WireImage
Eric Carmen had a gift for crafting irresistible power-pop gems, from his songs with the Raspberries, like “Go All the Way,” to solo hits “Make Me Lose Control” and “All by Myself,” which Celine Dion turned into a smash. But Carmen spiraled later in life, embracing conspiracy theories, ostracizing his children, and all but disappearing from public life. When he died in 2024 at age 74, he was a recluse — to this day, his cause of death has not been officially revealed. Rolling Stone senior writer Andy Greene spent more than six months digging into Carmen’s life, conducting interviews with family members, bandmates, and close friends to try to understand what drove a musician many considered a genius off the grid and to the brink of madness.
Read the story here.
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’Brilliant, Lost, Damaged’: Inside the Tragedy of Liam Payne
Image Credit: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
The shocking death of former One Direction phenomenon Liam Payne last year inspired an outpouring of grief around the world. The singer who once seemed like the boy band’s leader had struggled in recent years with substance abuse and failed solo projects. But just as he seemed to be correcting course, Payne plummeted from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, apparently after a drug-fueled breakdown. Rolling Stone staff writers Jonathan Blistein and Tomás Mier and senior writer Kory Grow combined forces to investigate not only the singer’s untimely death but his tormented final days and rocky years dealing with fame. Interviews with friends, exes, and music industry associates, reviews of legal documents, plus on-the-ground reporting from Argentina, where Mier spoke with hotel guests and other witnesses to Payne’s behavior in the hours before his death, create the most thorough portrait to date of a promising young pop star plagued by inner demons.
Read the story here.
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‘It’s All Gone’: Devastation, Survival, and Hope From the California Fires
Image Credit: Ethan Swope/AP
To tell the larger story of the catastrophic devastation of the Los Angeles fires, senior writer Stephen Rodrick takes a magnifying glass to four Angelenos: David Hertz, who owns Xanabu, his aptly named 150-acre property nestled four miles above Pacific Coast Highway; John Joyce, who managed an artist colony where Molly Tierney was one of his dozens of tenants; and 46-year-old teacher Donald Kinsey, who’s lived in Altadena his whole life. Rodrick expertly captures these personal and specific narratives, which represent the thousands of lives impacted by the destruction.
Read the story here.
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Eco-Radical, Singer, Criminal, Cult Leader: Inside Carbon Nation
Image Credit: Courtesy of Carbon Nation
Eligio Bishop declared himself a god to his followers as he led them through Central America and Mexico before they eventually landed outside of Atlanta. Bishop, who amassed a large social media following and went by the name Natureboy, promoted veganism, polygamy, nudity, astrology, and sleeping and shitting outside. Here, Georgia-based writer David Peisner tells the story of Bishop’s cult, Carbon Nation, for the first time by talking with his acolytes and the man himself. Today, the cult leader is in prison serving life without the possibility of parole after being found guilty of rape, false imprisonment, and revenge porn early this year. This is the strange truth behind his rise and fall.
Read the story here.
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The Life and Mystery of Luigi Mangione
Image Credit: Pamela Smith/AP
Luigi Mangione is one of the most debated murder suspects in recent history. After he was arrested last year and charged with the brazen murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, his face became a ubiquitous presence online and in the media. In spite of the frenzied attention paid to Mangione, very little has been made public about his life before the murder. Mangione has not spoken publicly, nor has his family or many of those close to him. Through dogged reporting over several months, Rolling Stone contributor Lorena O’Neil pieced together the definitive story of Mangione. The piece featured sources who’d never before spoken to the media to tell the story of a murder suspect who became a divisive cultural symbol.
Read the story here.
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The Battle for Greenland: ‘I’m Going to Keep Fighting for This Until I Die’
Image Credit: Patrick Brown/© 2025 Panos Pictures
Earlier this year, Greenland suddenly became an urgent topic of conversation in America when President Donald Trump declared his desire to take it over. So, award-winning Rolling Stone contributor Jason Motlagh headed north to speak with Greenland residents about their feelings about the U.S. and Trump’s statements — as well as the country’s rich and complicated history. Coupled with stunning original photography by Patrick Brown, it’s an immersive piece that leaves a lasting impression of a misunderstood place.
Read the story here.
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‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl
Image Credit: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images
Long known as a liberal haven, Portland, Oregon, was at the forefront of a progressive approach to combating the nation’s opioid crisis: the decriminalization of fentanyl. In 2020, following the lead of trailblazing countries like Portugal and France, Oregon voters passed a bill that would fund addiction treatment and harm reduction services and eliminate jail time for those found with small amounts of drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine. But instead of seeing a decrease in drug-related offenses, the city found itself struggling to cope with a surge of overdoses and deaths, to the point where the governor declared a 90-day state of emergency to deal with the crisis. Contributor Jason Motlagh spent several days reporting from the streets of Portland, speaking with addicts, advocates, and other locals, to find out where it all went wrong.
Read the story here.
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People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
Image Credit: romablack/Adobe Stock
As AI tightens its grip on our day-to-day lives, its previously unimagined consequences are revealing themselves. Rolling Stone staff writer Miles Klee probes one such development: the growing trend of people searching for answers to life’s trials and tribulations — and being seduced into a swell of delusions and spiritual fervor by AI chatbots. One woman tells Klee she discovered ChatGPT was talking to her husband “like he was the messiah.” Another describes her husband “talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and … access to an ‘ancient archive.’” One man says that ChatGPT Jesus has convinced his wife that he works for the CIA and only married her to monitor her “abilities.” Klee’s reporting reads like an episode of Black Mirror, but is all too real.
Read the story here.
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How Sabrina Carpenter Dream-Come-True’d Her Whole Life
Image Credit: David LaChapelle for Rolling Stone
The cover story for Rolling Stone’s summer double issue captured a superstar as she took over pop culture. Writer Angie Martoccio met up with Carpenter in London as the singer prepared to release her latest album, Man’s Best Friend, kicking off their encounter at a swanky spa. The pop star guided Martoccio through a cold plunge, and their encounter stayed intimate from there: Carpenter opened up about the trials of fame, the internet’s obsession with her love life and the more sexual parts of her live show, and how it feels to live in a time when, as she put it, “women have been picked apart more, and scrutinized in every capacity. “ Complete with lush photography by David LaChapelle, it all added up to the deepest portrait yet of Carpenter.
Read the story here.
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The Death of a CrossFit Athlete
Image Credit: Photograph by Michael Halpin
The death of 28-year-old Lazar Ðukić at the 2024 CrossFit Games shocked the close-knit CrossFit community. How could a star athlete and former water polo player, who’d been a strong swimmer since childhood, drown during the swimming portion of the race? Writer Calum Marsh takes readers back to the summer day when it all happened with a gripping and emotional account which ultimately speaks to the risks of extreme sports.
Read the story here.
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What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
Image Credit: Illustration by MELINDA BECK
Today, billionaires are a constant fixture in our lives — they’ve monopolized goods distribution, security algorithms, internet satellites, social networks, and our attention. And this year, they exerted their influence over our political system in unprecedented ways. In this deeply reported essay, Rolling Stone senior writer Alex Morris asks the question: “Do we want America remade in the image of a tech startup by men who like to move fast and break things — especially when most of the systems they’re breaking are ones that they, in fact, would never rely on?”
Read the story here.
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My Best Friend’s Murder Was a Tabloid Circus. Now, I’m Looking for the Truth
Image Credit: Maggie Soladay
In 2005, when Nicole DuFresne was shot and killed on a New York City street in a random encounter with a group of teenagers, her death became a page-one tabloid story for weeks. Twenty years later, her best friend, Mary Jane Gibson, who was present at the scene of DuFresne’s murder, excavates that horrific night — as well as the effervescent, irrepressible woman she’d met four years earlier, when they were both struggling actors in Seattle. Talking to DuFresne’s surviving family members and her former fiancé (in whose arms Nicole died), and using testimony from the teenagers complicit in the crime, Gibson crafts a story that is both astonishingly personal and clear-eyed, a correction to the record about who DuFresne was, and how she not only died, but lived.
Read the story here.
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The Great Reverse Migration
Image Credit: Matias Delacroix/AP
Early this year, there was a drastic change at the Darién Gap, the dense, swampy, deadly jungle that connects Panama and Colombia — the only spit of land linking North and South America, via Central America. In 2024, more than 300,000 northbound migrants traversed the treacherous area. But those numbers plummeted once President Trump took office again and began doubling down on his anti-immigrant agenda. Only 2,831 people crossed the Darién between January and March 2025, a 98 percent decrease. And of the migrants are still risking their lives on the journey, there’s one big difference — now they’re heading south. To tell the story of this new phenomenon, Rolling Stone, in partnership with Type Investigations, went to the Darién. Reporter Paola Ramos and video producer Miguel Fernández Flores followed a man named Edinson, who had left everything behind in Venezuela to immigrate to the U.S., but who stopped and turned around in November after the election. Ramos’ words, and an accompanying short documentary, powerfully capture this pivotal moment in immigration.
Read the story here.
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The Bookie at the Center of the Ohtani Betting Scandal Is Ready to Talk
Image Credit: Philip Cheung for Rolling Stone
Mathew Bowyer was a key player in one of the biggest sports scandals of the past decade — but his story was untold before this wild ride of a profile. Writer David Amsden spent nearly a year with the prolific bookie as he awaited trial and sentencing for his role in the Shohei Ohtani betting scandal. The story starts with Bowyer meeting Ippei Mizuhara, the translator for baseball phenom Ohtani. As Amsden writes, “It was the start of a relationship that, while surreal in its bounty, would eventually come to attract the unwanted attention of the Department of Homeland Security, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service, Major League Baseball, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and, as Bowyer’s illicit empire crumbled, the world at large.”
Read the story here.
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Four Best Friends Made an Album as Kids. 25 Years Later, It’s a Cult Classic
Image Credit: Jessica Lehrman for Rolling Stone
In 2000, four friends on the cusp of starting middle school in Santa Rosa, California, formed a girl band called X-Cetra, and with the help of one self-taught producer mom recorded a homemade album called Stardust. The record was just for fun and the friends forgot about it soon after it was finished. Decades went by and they grew up, made new friends, got jobs, settled down. All the while, their album — which had been posted online — took on an unexpected life of its own, gaining an underground following on internet forums and archives. This is the story of how a lost project became a cult-favorite phenomenon 25 years later.
Read the story here.
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Inside Stephen Miller’s Reign of Terror
Image Credit: Illustration by VICTOR JUHASZ
While many Americans may gasp and howl at President Trump’s every new initiative — from the unlawful detention and deportation of migrants to his use of the Justice Department against perceived enemies to the deployment of troops in our cities — our rending of garments and gnashing of teeth is really directed at the wrong man. As reporters Andrew Perez, Nikki McCann Ramirez, and Asawin Suebsaeng write in their feature on Trump advisor Stephen Miller: “More than seven months into Trump’s second term, Miller has become America’s — if not the world’s — most powerful unelected bureaucrat. With Trump’s blessing, he has been allowed to run and remake the country in a manner virtually unheard of for a U.S. government official of his rank. Think of any egregious policy from the Trump administration: Chances are, it was driven by Stephen Miller.” The trio’s exclusive reporting from inside the Trump White House reveals a portrait of a political powerbroker whose dangerous influence grows unchecked.
Read the story here.
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The Predator in the Church Basement
Image Credit: Linda Cataffo/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images
Ernie Lorch was a legendary youth basketball coach in New York whose Riverside Hawks produced NBA All-Stars. He was also a pedophile whose prolific crimes transpired over four decades of child sexual abuse. Now, 26 former players have sued the historic Riverside Church behind the team, claiming church officials looked the other way for 40 years. The allegations, with their confluence of money, exploitation, and vaunted institutions, are youth basketball’s version of the Epstein files. In this exhaustively researched report — a joint investigation with Sportico — writer Luke Cyphers, who’s been covering this story for more than two decades, blends accounts of unspeakable horror and limitless resilience.
Read the story here.
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The Burial of Black Genius (a.k.a. D’Angelo Lives!)
Image Credit: Photograph by Danny Clinch
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson was one of D’Angelo’s closest collaborators and friends for nearly three decades, forging a creative partnership that left an unforgettable impact on music. In this moving tribute, written in the days after D’Angelo’s tragic death at 51 in October, Thompson recalls their first inauspicious meeting in 1993 (“No way THIS guy was the future in those dusty-ass Timbs”); the ambition, old-school studio craft, and spirit of friendly competition that drove both the Voodoo and Black Messiah sessions; and the moments they shared during D’s final hospital stay. It’s a vivid portrait of a legendary musician from someone who knew him well enough to show the sense of humor and humanity that went with the genius. “D’Angelo, to me, was one of the last pure artists in Black music,” Questlove writes. “I know we sold the mysterious seriousness well, but the truth is — we were a silly bunch.”
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How Lady Gaga Found Herself Again: ‘I Feel Lucky to Be Alive’
Image Credit: Visuals by GREG SWALES
Superstars don’t give interviews like this anymore. But Lady Gaga was ready to reveal the truth of her mental health crises — and, for the first time, explain the real story behind the unusual arc of her career — when she met up with Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hiatt this year. The resulting piece gets deep inside the head of one of pop music’s most enduring stars, beginning with the panic attacks she secretly suffers onstage each night with her current tour. Hiatt previously wrote two other Rolling Stone cover stories on Gaga in 2009 and 2011, and their long association helped make her comfortable enough to trust him with one of the most revealing interviews of her career. Meeting up with Hiatt again was “monumental,” she said after the story’s publication.
Read the story here.
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Melissa Hortman Died in a Shocking Act of Political Violence. This Is the Story of Her Life
On June 15, Minnesota Speaker Melissa Hortman, a rising star in the Democratic Party, along with her husband, Mark, and their dog, Gilbert, was shot and killed in the doorway of her home in an apparent politically motivated assassination. Rather than focus on the suspect in the case and the grim details of his heinous alleged acts, writer Stephen Rodrick traces the delicate lines of Hortman’s life, drawing on time he’d spent with her months prior, while he was covering Gov. Tim Walz’s vice presidential campaign, and new interviews with her friends, children, parents, and colleagues. The portrait he constructs — of an ambitious, hardworking young woman who became a steady, roll-her-sleeves-up legislator, a loving mom, a determined gardener, a salt-of-the-earth neighbor — conveys the depth of her loss and ensures the lasting power of her legacy.
Read the story here.
