The Best Films of 2025

David Ehrlich is back with my favorite end-of-year celebration of film; here’s his look back at the best films of 2025 (YouTube). See the full list at Letterboxd. I’ve only seen five of these so it’s difficult to comment on the list as a whole, but I feel like Sinners should have been higher?

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Bookshop’s Bestselling Nonfiction Books of 2025

For finding a good book, there is no substitute for going into your local independent bookstore and browsing what’s on the front tables, the bestsellers shelf, and the staff picks. But bookshop.org is an amalgam of online sales some of the best indie bookstores in the country (and websites like kottke.org), so the list of their bestselling nonfiction books for 2025 is pretty darned good. Here are a few from the list that I’ve featured (or should have featured) here this year:

• The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
• Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad.
• Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green.
• Good Things by Samin Nosrat.
• Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba.
• Bad Company by Megan Greenwell.
• Liftoff by Casey Johnston.
• Black AF History by Michael Harriot.

Bit too late to order in time for the holidays, but there are also bookshop.org digital gift cards.

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Nature: The Best Science Images of 2025

Nature magazine has chosen its favorite science images of the year. I’ve featured a few of these on the site already — Skydiving the Sun, red sprites in the New Zealand sky — so I picked a couple of other favorites to share:

The first was taken by Francisco Negroni of the Villarrica volcano in Chile (check out his site for more amazing photos of volcanos & lightning). The second is by 13-year-old Grayson Bell of two green frogs fighting; Bell named his photo “Baptism of the Unwilling Convert”.

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This Is Always Interesting: “52 Things I Learned In 2025”

One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell’s annual record of 52 things he’s learned in the past year. Some favorites of mine from the 2025 installment:

4. You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay]

5. In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd]

14. Nearly 0.7% of US exports, by value, are human blood or blood products. [dynomight]

16. The Ceremonial Bugle is a small plastic device that slides into a real bugle and allows a non-musician to perform at a funeral. It has a discreet switch to select ‘Taps’, ‘Last Post’ or one of ten other calls. [Simon Britton via Nicolas Collins]

27. Researchers at MIT have developed a fibre computer that is stretchable and machine washable with 6 hours of battery life, weighing about as much as a sheet of A4 paper. [Nikhil Gupta & co]

49. Marchetti’s Constant is the idea that throughout human history, from cave dwellers to ancient Greeks to 21st century Londoners, people tend to commute for about an hour a day — 30 minutes out, 30 minutes home. So faster travel leads to longer distances, not less time. [Cesare Marchetti, plus a 2025 update]

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Bird Photographer of the Year for 2025

The organizers of the Bird Photographer of the Year competition received more than 33,000 images for 2025’s contest; here are the winners and runners-up. Photos above by Franco Banfi, Francesco Guffanti, Tibor Litauszki, and Andreas Hemb.

If you have no idea what you’re seeing in that third photo by Tibor Litauszki, you’re not alone — even after reading the photographer’s description (courtesy of In Focus), I can’t figure it out:

It was January and nature had created some very interesting shapes in the saline lakes near Akasztó in Hungary. I sent up my drone and was looking for the right composition when a dozen geese suddenly flew into view. I immediately started taking photos and luckily everything fell into place — the composition as well as the geese.

And eagles? Huge monsters. Dinosaurs never went extinct. (via in focus)

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Photos From the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition

Here are some of the winners, finalists, and nominees from the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition and their People’s Choice Awards. Photos by (from top to bottom): Simon Biddie, Kat Zhou, Zhou Donglin, Jonas Beyer, and Hitomi Tsuchiya.

A Ghost goby (Pleurosicya mossambica) conspicuously camouflages against coral. While small and unassuming, these cryptic fish are abundant and protein-rich, making them a critical part of reef food chains. But naturally, they’ve evolved to evade predators, the Ghost Goby in particular being partially translucent—allowing him to blend in perfectly with surrounding coral.

Photographer Kat Zhou was diving off the coast of Florida when friends alerted her to this female octopus and her eggs tucked into a pipe of some sort, perhaps a remnant of a shipwreck. Zhou returned four times, trying to capture the mother’s determination to protect her young when they’re most vulnerable. She hopes her work inspires empathy for marine life, including an animal whose behaviors differ wildly from our own but whose maternal instincts are entirely familiar.

The Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) pictured here broods just a few hundred large eggs. Once she lays her eggs, the female stops eating and guards her growing offspring day and night. Her babies will emerge as fully developed, miniature versions of their parents, ready to change color, squirt ink, hunt for food, and live as small but full-fledged octopuses in the shallow seas around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Their mother, in contrast, having exhausted herself to ensure her offspring’s survival, will die shortly after they hatch.

Lemurs are remarkably lithe creatures. With long tails providing balance and powerful, slender limbs outfitted with opposable thumbs and toes, they move with ease through the craggy limestone spires of western Madagascar’s Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park. Still, leaping over a 30-meter (100-foot) ravine with a baby clinging to your back seems like a daring choice.

To capture this scene, photographer Zhou Donglin had to do some mountaineering of her own. Setting out before sunrise, Donglin spent an hour scrambling to the top of a rocky peak, praying that the elusive brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus) would show. After a day of disappointingly distant sightings, Donglin finally found some luck as a small troop descended through a forest of stone, glowing gold in the late evening light.

A pod of Beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) gracefully glides through the frigid waters of a broken fjord, their white forms contrasting against the deep, icy blue. As they move in unison, threading their way through the maze of shifting ice, they embody the resilience and adaptability needed to survive in the ever-changing Arctic.

At the southern tip of Kyushu, Japan, a Green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) swims in a surreal scene just offshore of the volcanic island of Satsuma-iojima. The photographer attributes the fantastical colors to an “underwater aurora” composed of volcanic material, likely influenced by wind direction, water temperature, sunlight, and the tides. She notes that no single moment in the water during an aurora is the same thanks to these fluctuations, meaning this image is as dreamy as it is utterly unique.

(via my modern met)

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Shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 Competition

In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I’ve seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical images and yet there are always new, mind-blowing things to see. Like this 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption by PengFei Chou:

Or Close-up of a Comet by Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger:

Or Electric Threads of the Lightning Spaghetti Nebula by Shaoyu Zhang (Lightning Spaghetti Nebula!!!):

Or Dragon Tree Trails by Benjamin Barakat:

Teasingly, the official site only has a selection of the shortlisted entries but if you poke through the posts at Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography, you can find some more of them. (via colossal)

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Bookshop.org’s 100 Bestselling Books of 2025 (So Far)

Online bookseller bookshop.org recently released a list of their bestselling books of the year (so far). The list is quite a bit different than what you might see from larger booksellers and looks more like what your local bookstore has on their bestseller list. The top five:

1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. “Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
2. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. “An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.”
3. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. “As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances.”
4. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. “In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ books may be unmatched.”
5. We Can Do Hard Things by Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle, and Glennon Doyle. “When you travel through a new country, you need a guidebook. When you travel through love, heartbreak, joy, parenting, friendship, uncertainty, aging, grief, new beginnings — life — you need a guidebook, too. We Can Do Hard Things is the guidebook for being alive.”

Others on the list that caught my eye:

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. “From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.”
• James by Percival Everett. “A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.” (So, so good.)
• Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. “What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.” (Buy direct from the publisher.)
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. “A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist’s Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.” (I think I saw, via Insta, Doechii reading this recently.)
• Bad Company by Megan Greenwell. “A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.”

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