The Best Stuff I Found in 2025

It’s the time of year where I get to talk about all my favorite movies for my “Best of 2025” list. I wanted to cap off the year with something here as well and figured instead of presenting that same list again in written form, it would be more fun and interesting to curate a list all the other great stuff I found in 2025. So here’s a casual overview of some of the most interesting, beautiful, strange, and noteworthy things I encountered this year (though not necessarily things made or published in 2025). In no particular order. Beautiful contemplation of plant material and decay. I was lucky enough see this screened live. You can view the 5 minutes silent film on Jodie’s website. Combines cinema with the art of flower arrangement. Found doing research for my video on how cinema has changed, I was enthralled by this TV program from 1959 titled “Big Media in America.” It’s a panel discussion between 5 students that examines questions like: “Has the big media in America been cheapened by its manipulation to the lowest common denominator? Is the media limited to the sensational and the exploited?” We should have more of this these days! There should be roundtable discussions among Gen-Z academics about media theory (if there are and I just don’t know about them please point me in that direction). I had one of the busiest years of my life in 2025 and one side effect was that I did less reading than I typically do, but I started the year off with Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals and it laid a solid foundation for the year. Burkeman’s work, starting with 4000 Weeks, has been incredibly helpful to me in deprogramming from hustle/grind/optimization/self-help culture I fell into at a young age (I was first exposed to Gary V at 14). I don’t remember very many specifics from the book, but I took away from it the permission to accept imperfection rather than strive for optimization, and in applying this (maybe coincidentally) had one of the most productive years of my life. The best concept from the book that I do think about regularly though is to shift from thinking about your “watchlist” or “to-read list” as a to-do list to thinking about it as a “river of high-quality material that you can dip into whenever you like.” It’s a small change in mentality that’ accepts the impossibility of actually watching it all and it makes collecting media recommendations feel like less of a chore. If you haven’t read it, it’s a fantastic way to start your new year. Host Derrick Gee invites guests over to his house to play him music on Solid Air, a radio show for the internet era. This episode in particular is beautiful, features some amazing music and great stories. I was not expecting it to make me cry multiple times. While there’s much talk and theorizing about what is different about the look of movies now (we can all feel it, but what really is the cause?) Film researcher Stephen Follows crunches a bunch of data to try to answer the question, and discovers that… it’s complicated. Great if you love nerdy data about film. I was delighted to come across this fantastic conversation Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese’s longtime editor and one of the greatest editors of all time. She rarely does interviews and often downplays her work, so it’s nice to hear some insight into her process. L. M. Sacasas on how to enchant your world by improving the quality of your attention. One of my favorite paintings I’ve come across this year is this one by Thomas Anshutz. The detail work and color in the dress is incredible. Her expression is what makes it though. It feels like a reaction shot from a scene in a Jane Austen adaptation. I want to know the story. Mike Okay’s travelogues are one of my favorite recent YouTube discoveries. Mike’s ability to connect with seemingly anyone even when he doesn’t speak a work of their language is impressive. He shows us the beauty, hospitality and humanity of many rural cultures that rarely get featured in western media, and handles the difficult balance of being honest about the conditions of the places he visits, while being respectful toward the people he encounters and avoiding an exploitative frame. “Drinking in Rural China for Beginners” was how I found his channel, and is not a bad place to start. When flooding from Hurricane Helene devastated a large part of Western North Carolina where I live, I was struck by the incredible process of community bonding and mutual aid that took place in the storm’s wake. This book is about that phenomenon, which often takes place after disasters, and which is generally under-reported by the media. It’s this book that helped me understand the narrative I had discovered while making my documentary Out of a Flood. Notes from Bernard McGrane on TV and how to approach it meditatively to learn different things about the medium. In one exercise he asked students to look at a blank TV for 30 minutes: One expression of this anger that comes up repeatedly is "I wasted 30 minutes of my time." Is it possible that this is a very valuable waste of time? Is it possible that "wasting time" is a very valuable thing to do in studying society? While the bit occasionally wears thin, The Adam Friedland Show is one of the best swings at a genuine YouTube talk show that isn’t food-based. Friedland shines when he’s chatting with actors that don’t get as much of the spotlight as they deserve like in this episode with guest Richard Kind or this one with William H. Macy. Some people are now writing explicitly with the idea that the writing will become part of the training material for future AI models. Scott Alexander gives a breakdown of some of the how and why. I do not endorse this behavior, but I note these examples of how quickly we’ve entered a very strange reality with a kind of anthropological curiosity. Is what it says it is, recursive surrealism generated using Notebook LM’s feature that lets you generate an “AI podcast” that discusses any video or document. Good reminder that LLMs are first a foremost, skilled bullshit generators. Mash together an episode of High Maintenance and I Think You Should Leave and you’ve got: whatever this is. Part of the Internet New Wave. Part meditation, part travel documentary. Incredible cinematography. Is this also part of the Internet New Wave, albeit a very different genre? Research for my video on the cinematography of Sinners lead me to the FSA photography archive on the Library of Congress website. I hadn’t seen this collection previously, and love browsing through high-quality historical archives. Helped me make sense of the role art has played for humanity throughout are existence, and how we stay in touch with that in the face of advertising, propaganda, and now AI generated media. Was very influential on the video I made this year about “AI art.” Donna Tart’s introduction for the new edition of the book is also worth your time: “Art with a capital A—is all too often viewed as an antiquated construction ensconced behind velvet ropes, not very relevant except as a standing resource to be boiled down to blunt cultural agendas, picked apart by theory, aped by predictive formulas, pillaged and parodied for commercials and computer software, if not ignored altogether in the glitz of technological stimulus… “But Martel’s definition of Art with a capital A extends beyond the gilded category of fine arts. He casts it as an uncanny force bursting into the world in earliest prehistory, less a theoretical construct or byproduct of culture than a slant of light streaming into our world from elsewhere. Like dream, it gives us access to parts of the psyche and even of society that we might not otherwise be able to see; like prophecy, it has potential to burn through all the managed and multilayered cultural fictions that surround us and to awaken us from our pervasive sense of unreality. And as our world degenerates around us into pixels, Martel maintains that one of our oldest and most hu…