The 25 Most Interesting Ideas I've Found in 2025 (So Far)

Charts and history lessons—across culture, politics, AI, economics, health, science, and the long story of progress

When I’m reading on my phone, I take a screenshot of whatever interests me. After a few months, I’ll have dozens to hundreds of morsels to serve as inspiration for essays and podcasts, including excerpts from books, photographs of magazine text, charts from economic papers, and screen grabs of tweets.

Before I had a newsletter, there was nowhere for me to publish this information inventory. Now that I have this newsletter, and I thought it might be fun and useful to organize the most interesting things I’ve seen this year by subject matter and write something about why they struck me and what story they tell about America or the world.

CULTURE

1. Marriage is rapidly becoming a high-quality luxury good.

Marriage is getting rarer, older, and more stable. Consider the typical 25-year old American woman. If she was born in 1940, she had an 80 percent chance of being married. If born in the 1990, she had a ~20 percent chance of being married. That’s an enormous shift in the typical life experience of American twentysomethings. As marriage has been both delayed and reduced as a social phenomenon, divorce rates have also declined significantly. First marriages that began in the 2010s are on track to have the lowest divorce rate since World War II.

One thing happening in the background here is that marriage rates are declining most among low-income and low-education groups. That means the marriages that do happen are more likely to involve higher-education, higher-income couples who have always had a lower divorce rate.

2. The young American religious revival is overrated.

There are a lot of news stories about Gen Z finding god, going to church, and generally leading America's religious revival. But how much of this trend is real? In an analysis of General Social Survey data, Ryan Burge finds that Gen Z is still the least likely to attend weekly religious services and the most likely to be so-called “never-attenders.” The second of the two graphs reproduced below compares Boomers (now in their 60s and above) with Zoomers (now in their 20s and below) and looks at their attendance rates between the ages of 18-29. When Boomers were young adults, just 15 percent of them never attended religious services. Among Zoomers today, it’s 38 percent.

3. Half of Americans don’t get their news from the news.

I don’t know how the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch publishes so many interesting things every year. He’s like a warlock who’s mastered the dark art of interestingness, so you’ll see several of his graphics in this piece. I don’t think the following graph is surprising so much as it’s essential for people in the news industry (or people whose entire online schtick is blaming the news industry for every bad thing that happens) to remember: Half of Americans don’t get their news from print or online news organizations. They get it from social media, which means they follow influencers, or they let the newsfeed wash over them, or both. Traditional news organizations are still powerful, but they’re arguably less powerful than ever when it comes to shaping people’s attitudes toward current affairs.

4. The anti-social century is the anti-meaning century

Young people are spending less time socializing and less time partying than previous generations. What are they doing instead? Gaming alone, watching TV alone, scrolling on social media alone, and relaxing (often alone). None of that is particularly evil. But by their own testimony, Americans say these activities are significantly less meaningful than caring for children and socializing, both of which we’re doing less of. As a result, young adulthood today seems to be a tradeoff, in which the conveniences of entertainment-rich solitude are winning out over the meaningfulness of time spent with others.

5. Young people hate alcohol now … and it shows.

One of the more remarkable diet and health shifts of the last few years is the astonishing rise of young adults who say “drinking in moderation” is bad for their health. (I have a lot to say about that.)

Alcohol makes me less neurotic, more agreeable, and more extroverted. So perhaps it’s not totally surprising that young people today are more neurotic, less agreeable, and less extroverted than they used to be. Another Burn-Murdoch banger, of course.

6. Perhaps relatedly, young people aren’t having nearly as much sex as they used to.

Most notably, the share of young men between 22 and 34 who say they haven’t had sex in the last year doubled between the mid-2010s and 2022.

POLITICS

7. Was 1872 the most important year for political freedom in the world?

… Uh, maybe?! If we define political freedom as the ability to choose who governs us in a manner that’s protected from coercion or social pressure, 1872 belongs in the conversation.

In the essay "My Freedom, My Choice” about the book The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfield, author David A. Bell points out that for most of democracy’s history, voting was a performative and communal act, with public declarations and even open parades. The secret ballot that most Americans associate with the ballot box is a relatively recent invention, at least in modern Western history. In 1872, the town of Pontefract in West Yorkshire held an election for Parliament that took place by secret ballot. Bell writes:

Observers deemed the experiment a success, and within decades most of the Western world adopted this method of voting. Previously elections in the West had largely involved public meetings—often highly raucous ones—in which everyone could see how everyone else voted. Such settings made it difficult to conceive of the act as anything other than an expression of communal as opposed to individual preference.

But once voting became secret, it became far easier to imagine it as an expression of purely personal choice, in accordance with an individual's deepest beliefs and values. Another change encouraged this shift: the development of voting booths— tellingly known in French and German as "isolation spaces"—in which closed voters could, before marking their ballots, commune solemnly with their con-sciences.

The U.S. only began to adopt the secret ballot a decade later. But by World War I, the secret ballot was nearly universal in Western democracies. Imagine what people would say if the White House said it was banning secret ballots and forcing all voting to be public and thus open to state coercion, and you get a sense of why 1872 can be plausibly considered a formative moment in political freedom.

8. Trump turned white American politics upside down.

The graph below charts white Americans’ propensity to vote for each party based on their income decile. Between the end of World War II and the 1990s, rich white Americans largely voted for Republicans and poor white Americans typically voted for Democrats. In many years—1976, 1980, 1984, 1992, 1996, 2008—the relationship was practically linear, suggesting that every additional $10,000 in earned income correlated with an increased likelihood of voting for the Republican. But the Trump era has completely reversed the trend, and now it’s the poorest white Americans who are the most Republican while the richest white Americans are the most Democratic. As you can see, this is arguably the most dramatic inversion in the white electorate in modern history.

HOUSING

9. The South builds more houses

Here is a graph of housing units permitted per 1,000 residents per year in the U.S. (Sorry for the small font.) What you’re seeing is that southern states like South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia have consistently built more houses per capita than coastal states like California, New York, and Massachusetts. Illinois’s home building record looks putrid, too. Noah Smith offered a punchy summary of this graph: Blue states don’t build. Red states do. And some bozos offered a theory for what might be uniquely hampering blue-state housing construction here.

10. Why is the English-speaking world so bad at building homes?

Now here’s a look at housing growth per capita in the last 10 years (along the X axis) versus total dwellings per capita (along the Y axis). A lot is going on here, so let’s start in the bottom right-hand corner. South Korea has added a ton of homes in the last decade but from a low base. Countries like Finland, France, and Portugal have done an admirable job adding homes and also have some of the highest levels of dwellings per capita in the OECD.

And then, there are the English speaking countries. The U.S., the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand all suck at adding housing. I don’t have a good explanation for this. Maybe, hundreds of years ago, England nurtured an anti-royal legalist culture that pilgrims, criminals, religious-freedom folks, and expats took to the Americas and Australia, and centuries later, these countries have developed societies with strong legal rights to push back against physical-world construction projects. I would love to solve the mystery of “Why does the English speaking world build so few houses?”

11. Dense walkable neighborhoods can save (at least several months of) your life.

A 2025 study followed 2 million smartphone users and traced the ones who relocated within the U.S. This natural experiment allowed researchers to learn whether people got more exercise when they moved to denser and more walkable cities. From the paper:

We find that increases (decreases) in walkability are associated with significant increases (decreases) in physical activity after relocation. For example, moving from a less walkable (25th percentile) city to a more walkable city (75th percentile) increased walking by 1,100 daily steps, on average ...

When exposed to the built environment of New York City after relocating, these participants increased their physical activity by 1,400 steps

In their conclusion, the authors find that large increases in walkability were associated with an increase in moderate to vigorous exercise of “about 1 hour per week.” Under the theory that every minute of moderate to vigorous exercise extends your life by five minutes, every week spent in a walkable city extends your life by five hours, every month adds 21 hours, every year adds 10 days, and every decade adds about 3 months of extra life.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE