As Future Perfect has in past years, we’re spending this holiday season rounding up our most-read stories of 2025 — a quick way to see what landed with you when you had the whole internet to choose from.
Looking over the list, two themes dominated. One is intensely everyday: what we eat and drink, what we do with our minds, and what’s happening to our bodies. The other is big-picture: the growing power of the tech industry, and the risks that come with being clever primates with CRISPR.
If there’s a throughline to the stories below, it’s skepticism cut with curiosity. You’ll click for fluffy wolves, sure — and did you ever click — but you’ll stay for the uncomfortable questions about incentives, ethics, and unintended consequences. Here are the 10 stories you read the most in 2025.
1) These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals by Marina Bolotnikova
What can I say? Cute, fluffy wolves, especially those with a Games of Thrones genealogy, will always win the algorithm. Marina used Colossal Biosciences’ gene-edited canids — the pups Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, basically gray wolves with a handful of dire-wolf traits — to puncture the hype around “de-extinction,” skeptical quotes very much intended.
“De-extinction,” it turns out, isn’t resurrection; it’s engineering, with all the messiness that implies. The welfare costs are real (failed embryos and surrogate animals), and the conservation logic can get twisted. If we convince ourselves we can “bring species back,” it gets easier to tolerate losing them — and easier for policymakers to treat extinction as a PR problem instead of a moral one.
2) You’re being lied to about protein by Marina Bolotnikova
In 2025 protein became less a nutrient than a personality characteristic, which is why it was satisfying to see a story grounded in physiology crack the top of the list. Marina walks through what the evidence suggests: the recommended daily allowance is about 0.36 grams per pound of body weight per day for most adults, while muscle-building benefits tend to top out around 0.73 grams per pound. Beyond that, you’re mostly paying for “high protein” branding. Evidence beats influencer math.
3) The decline of drinking, explained in one chart by Bryan Walsh
Hey, I know that guy. This story comes from the Good News newsletter, which I launched this year, and it’s the perfect example of the kind of optimistic trend news I’m always looking for. Gallup reports that 54 percent of Americans say they drink, the lowest level since the poll began in 1939, while teen declines are even steeper. In 2024, 42 percent of 12th graders reported drinking in the past year, down from 75 percent in 1997. Binge drinking has fallen too. Health concerns are clearly part of it, especially as evidence mounts that even “moderate” drinking isn’t protective. The only catch is social: less alcohol is great; less socializing isn’t. Still, your liver is probably grateful.
4) The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think. by Sigal Samuel
Sigal’s argument, made in the immediate wake of January’s presidential inauguration, is that the tech-to-Trump alignment extends beyond just taxes or deregulation. It’s really about worldview: a winner-take-all ideology that valorizes domination, flirts with anti-democratic ideas, and treats society as something you can rebuild — or exit — like an app. She traces the intellectual ecosystem behind the “broligarch” moment, from Peter Thiel-style power politics to the network-state dream of private, corporate-run governance. The unsettling part isn’t that they have influence; it’s what they want to do with it.
5) How meditation deconstructs your mind by Oshan Jarow
Meditation stories tend to do well for one big reason: everyone’s stressed. But Oshan’s piece goes beyond the usual “mindfulness lowers cortisol” genre. He explores a newer scientific framework that treats the brain as a prediction machine — constantly generating models of reality, then updating them. In that view, practices like focused attention and open monitoring don’t just calm you down; they can loosen your grip on rigid mental “priors,” including the story you tell about who you are. That can reduce suffering, even if in some cases, it can feel destabilizing. Which, in a sense, is also a kind of honesty.
6) This little-known company is a major funder of right-wing politics. You’ve probably eaten their chicken. by Kenny Torrella
Kenny’s piece is a reminder that “vote with your wallet” is hard when the supply chain bringing dinner to your table is invisible. Mountaire Farms produces roughly 1 out of every 13 chickens eaten in the US, yet most consumers have never heard the name. The story follows how Mountaire CEO Ronald Cameron has become a major force in right-wing politics, donating around tens of millions since 2014 — much of it to Trump-aligned groups and hard-right causes.
7) The Ozempic effect is finally showing up in obesity data by Bryan Walsh
For decades, US obesity rates have been a grim one-way chart. In 2025, there was finally a hint of reversal. Gallup found self-reported obesity falling by nearly 3 percentage points, to 37 percent — the first sustained drop since the index began. The obvious suspect is GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy: more than 12 percent of adults told Gallup they’d taken a GLP-1 in mid-2025, up from under 6 percent in early 2024. Caveats matter (self-report, cost, unequal access, adherence, long-term effects). But it’s hard not to see this as the start of a better new era in how we think about weight.
8) The terrifying reality behind one of America’s fastest-growing dairy brands by Kenny Torrella
The ultra-filtered dairy brand Fairlife sells a protein-boosted version of milk — and a sheen of ethical reassurance. Kenny lays out why that reassurance has repeatedly been challenged by undercover investigations alleging severe abuse at supplier farms, plus lawsuits accusing Fairlife of misleading humane-treatment claims. The larger point is structural: industrial agriculture is extremely good at producing distance — between consumers and animals, and between brand promises and the conditions that make products cheap.
9) “A whole new thing that could end the world” by Kelsey Piper
Well, this was quite the way to start off 2025. Mirror bacteria — organisms built from “right-handed” versions of the molecules life uses — could, in theory, behave like the worst invasive species imaginable. They could be hard for other life to digest, difficult for immune systems to recognize, able to spread unchecked. The five-alarm warning that Kelsey writes about was so striking partly because many of the scientists sounding the alarm are close to the research itself. Kelsey’s key move is holding two ideas at once: the risk is real, and we’re not doomed by default. Mirror life is still far off — which means we have time to build norms and safeguards before the lab work gets ahead of the guardrails.
10) “25 things we think will happen in 2025” by the Future Perfect team
Our annual predictions package is the closest we come to turning an editorial meeting into a spectator sport. The format for 2025 was simple: 25 forecasts, each with an explicit probability, spanning tariffs, Ukraine, Iran, H5N1, and a few cultural curveballs. This year we partnered with the online forecasting platform Metaculus, so our guesses had to share oxygen with outside forecasters — and our overconfidence had fewer places to hide. And yes: we make ourselves revisit it at the end of the year. Check out the results on December 31, and our 2026 predictions on the first of the year.
Bonus: “How to make the hardest choices of your life,” by Sigal Samuel
As you may know, Vox launched a membership program this year. (Join now, and we’ll gift a membership to a reader who can’t afford one.) And when it came to the Future Perfect stories that motivated people to become Vox members, this piece from Sigal was far and away the winner. A selection from her brilliant Your Mileage May Vary column — which imagines what an advice column might be like if it was written by a team of the smartest ethicists on Earth — this story provides a simple question for making the most difficult choices you’ll ever face: who do you want to be? I can’t imagine a better story to revisit as we enter a new year — and if you have a question you want to submit to Sigal, send it here.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
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