Is reading dying? This year, as screens and social media apps continued to fragment our attention, it seemed like we were finally starting to realize that a crisis was on the way. In August magazine iScience published study by researchers from the University of Florida and University College London, who analyzed how people in the United States—a total of nearly a quarter of a million people over twenty years—spend their time over a 24-hour window. Data for 2023, the most recent year covered, showed that participants spent an average of sixteen minutes on “reading for pleasure,” including reading a magazine, book, or newspaper; listening to audiobooks; or reading on an electronic device. However, this figure partially obscured a more startling finding: only sixteen percent of respondents read at all for pleasure during the day surveyed. In 2004, this figure was twenty-eight percent. It is this trend line that is most alarming: Over the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has declined by about three percent per year. This is a steady, persistent erosion that is unlikely to reverse anytime soon.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year's highs and lows.
Our information ecosystem is undergoing an equally profound transformation. In 2025 New Yorker celebrated its centenary. The question inevitably arises: can the magazine survive another hundred years? Of course, we are now much more than just a weekly print magazine. We are also a daily digital enterprise, active on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. This year for the first time appeared: New Yorker won Pulitzer Prize in audio reports. And the short film we released received Oscar– our second.
But I believe that New Yorker will always be an enterprise based on words, even decades from now when the world may seem unrecognizable to a person in 2025. Here we celebrate words and how they can be arranged on the page or screen to surprise, delight and inform; how they can transport you; how they can hold the powerful to account. Millions of people continue to read them. And we believe that this will remain the case for many years to come.
It is in this spirit that we present to you the most popular New Yorker stories of 2025, measured by the total time people spent reading them. Consider this your personal year-end reading list that we hope will provide you with hours of enjoyment.
Tatiana Schlossberg
“When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t happen to me, to my family.”
Photo by Thea Traff for The New Yorker.
Ronan Farrow
When a prosecutor began pursuing an accused serial rapist, she lost her job but created a scandal. Why did the police refuse to investigate Sean Williams?
Barbara Demick
Thousands of Chinese families are taking DNA tests, and the results are upending what overseas adoptees thought they knew about their ancestry.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
