The Hinternet’s Best of 2025!
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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David Nutt
13 min read
Linked in the article (18 min read)
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Novgorod First Chronicle
9 min read
The article opens with a direct quote from the Novgorod First Chronicle describing medieval famine conditions. Understanding this primary source—one of the oldest Russian chronicles documenting life in medieval Novgorod from the 11th-15th centuries—provides crucial context for why the author invokes it as a reminder of historical fragility.
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François-René de Chateaubriand
18 min read
The article quotes Chateaubriand's line 'I can't stand the pride of victory' as central to defining authentic conservatism. Chateaubriand was a pivotal French writer and politician whose Romantic conservatism and complex relationship with revolution and restoration shaped modern conservative thought in ways most readers may not fully appreciate.
This was a cruel year. An osminka of rye cost a grivna, bread cost two nogatas, and honey ten kunas a pood; the people ate lime leaves, birchbark; they ground wood pulp and mixed it with husks and straw; and some ate buttercups, horseflesh, and moss.
We’re terribly sorry for the medieval Novgoroders, and we never forget for a second that there but for the grace of God go we too. In fact we make an effort to share the above passage from the Novgorod First Chronicle every year around this time, so that none may ever forget how fragile and reversible human thriving in this low world always is.
That said, 2025 has been an absolute annus mirabilis here at The Hinternet! We’re growing, we’re ramifying, we’re spinning off projects; we’re launching the careers of talented young people who so much as approach our orbit; we’re congealing into an institution, and we’re sprouting the metaphorical grey hairs that give others to know, even at a cursory glance, that we have joined the éminences grises, the unassailable silverbacks, of the world of electronic poïesis. It’s all great fun.
There is obviously so much more work to be done in 2026, and we find it almost undignified to waste even a second looking back. But for whatever reason that is what the reading public demands this time of year, so let’s get it over with.
But first, two things. Do not forget that we are having a massive sale on paid subscriptions through the end of the year. After January 1, nearly all the good stuff will be found beneath a paywall, so you may as well upgrade your subscription now, for what in the end is scarcely more than a micropayment!
Second, are you still wondering what to give your friends and family for Christmas? Are your friends and family, very much unlike us, the sort of people who do not mind being told what to read? Then why not give them our founding editor’s most recent book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality, which none other than Dr. David Nutt of Drug Science UK has called the best book on psychedelics since Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception?
Now, on to the ceremonies! We will restrict ourselves, in identifying our various “bests”, only to the most natural
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