2025 in review: doing my small part to document an experiment in national self-harm
I had thought that 2017’s introduction to President Trump’s chaos, corruption and cruelty would be an adequate preparation for the 2025 sequel that American voters ordered up in a vote that I may never be able to understand fully. I was wrong.
That foolish choice has given us “this moral slum of an administration,” to quote noted liberal squish George F. Will: fascism-curious contempt for Constitutional limits on presidential power, trampled human rights at home and abroad for the sake of a racist and isolationist agenda, a pointless ransacking of useful government agencies that among other costs has probably left hundreds of thousands of people dead overseas, economically and scientifically ignorant policies like up-and-down tariffs and ordering obsolete coal power plants to stay online while trying to strangle offshore wind power, the most openly corrupt White House in history, and a cringe-inducing cult of personality that invites comparisons to North Korea.
I also did not expect so many Republicans to hold their political manhood cheap and sign off on even the stupidest ideas of their Dear Leader, which is how we now have a Confederacy-whitewashing, war-crime cheerleader lording over the Department of Defense and a science-denying quack hijacking the Department of Health and Human Services.
Nor did I predict that we would see so many tech CEOs not only nod politely but grovel for favor before this administration.
(To judge from the beatings that Republican candidates have received in elections this year–in particular, in the state of my birth and in the state of my choice–many Trump voters also didn’t expect this state of affairs and can no longer endorse it.)
My own lot this year seems strikingly easy: I haven’t had to learn what tear gas smells or tastes like, had my job DOGEd out of existence, or seen friends or family members thrown into a foreign gulag. Nor have I had a single client ask me to go easy on this administration in a story or edit my copy to ensure that I would.
I have had the usual struggles of freelancing, both in the sense of managing my time and in terms of managing my client relationships (I did much better at selling to Fast Company but once again dropped the ball with AARP). But I learned a lot, found purpose in sharing what I learned even when it was bad news, and had some fun along the way–including rides on such interesting modes of transportation as a Zoox robotaxi, Arc and Candela battery-electric sport boats, and the USPS’s duckface Next Generation Delivery Vehicle.
Out of the hundreds of stories I wrote this year, these 10 stand out to me as I look back at my own 2025.
- In February, I returned to a topic that I’ve been covering since 2018 in a post for PCMag documenting 8K TV’s embarrassing lack of appeal to consumers who smartly value price above resolution specifications.
- After years of meaning to tee off on Venmo’s horrible privacy settings, I finally wrote that piece in April for Fast Company–in the process, learning that even privacy professionals can miss some of that payments app’s data-leaking defaults.
- In June, I made my first appearance in the Virginia Mercury to write about Richmond’s overdue recognition that ceding online tax prep to Intuit and its ilk in 2010 was a dismal failure. It feels great when you see a gap in news coverage of where you live, then fill it yourself.
- In a July post for PCMag, I broke down how the GOP’s fossil-fuel fetishists were killing off the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for clean-energy purchases–and how many states still had not put in place their own mechanisms to claim some of these expiring incentives.
- I wrote a great many posts about Trump announcements, and each time I tried to provide useful context to help readers judge them independently. Among all those, I particularly like the unpacking of Trump’s “AI Action Plan” that I did in a post later in July for PCMag.
- Sitting down to talk to some managers of the Black Hat cybersecurity conference’s network for PCMag yielded a small lesson about the need for a little empathy in information security.
- In September, I returned to Berlin’s Stasi Museum for the first time since my 2018 introduction to it and had to point out to PCMag readers how I now saw uncomfortable parallels with certain aspects of American politics today.
- Reporting a story for Worth magazine published online in September about the energy use of AI data centers opened my eyes to how certain AI providers don’t want to talk about where they get the electricity for these sprawling facilities or how they plan to avoid stiffing existing ratepayers in the process.
- I spent more time than I expected finding people willing to talk about how the Trump administration’s indifferent and sometimes inept approach to cybersecurity is weakening the nation’s defenses, but that piece finally ran in Fast Company in October.
- Also in October, Fast Co. ran my longest story there yet about how Amtrak’s NextGen Acela remains stuck on previous-generation infrastructure–and how high-speed rail projects throughout the U.S. have been held back by an unwillingness to steal the best practices of other countries.
AI figured in much of my coverage and played an even larger role in my side hustle of moderating panels at conferences. That technology may be eating away at the underpinnings of my industry, but in the short term it has been a boost to my traveling on other people’s money.
This year, those trips and the ones I bankrolled myself introduced me to four new airports and one country, also taking me farther east from home than I’d ever traveled before. I liked seeing new places, making new connections there, and running into old friends along the way, but as ever I especially liked coming home after each of these often-tiring adventures.
(You can see a map of those flights after the jump; just looking at that may make you feel tired.)
I created the map below at the Great Circle Mapper site, following the instructions Tiffany Funk first shared in 2016 at the One Mile At A Time blog. The predominant shade of blue represents flights on United Airlines and codeshare and same-itinerary flights on Azul, GOL and Lufthansa; other colors, some of which may be difficult to differentiate, represent Alaska Airlines and Lufthansa (other hues of blue); American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Swiss International Air Lines, and Turkish Airlines (various shades of red); Qatar Airways (burgundy); and TAP Air Portugal (green).
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