I started this blog on January 1^st, 2024, so I’ve now been publishing weekly essays here for over two years. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’m grateful to everyone who reads and engages. Even the haters and losers (of which, happily, there aren’t many) often provide interesting and informative critiques.

I’m especially thankful to those who have paid subscriptions. I’m aware that many of you subscribe not simply to access paywalled articles but to support my writing. I’m truly moved by this. It’s also a helpful corrective to my broadly cynical views about human nature.

As of 5th January 2026, the blog has roughly 19,800 subscribers. It averages approximately 120,000 views per month, though with substantial variance.

In this post, I will review the blog’s output from 2025, recommend the best things I read last year (as well as other favourites), and then briefly outline how I will approach this newsletter in 2026.

Year in Review

Based on the number of readers, here were my top ten essays in 2025:

1. Status, Class, and The Crisis of Expertise — This argues that one underappreciated factor driving the “crisis of expertise”, and hostility towards knowledge-producing institutions more broadly, is feelings of humiliation and resentment among conservative voters with low levels of education, who view experts as a condescending and hostile social class. Among many others, it draws on the work of Thorstein Veblen (whose concept of conspicuous consumption inspires this blog’s title), Marcel Mauss, Will Storr, Musa al-Gharbi, David Hopkins, and Matt Grossman.

2. Let’s Not Bring Back The Gatekeepers — This argues that the media transformations of the digital age have created new pressures and responsibilities for small “l” liberals like me. Put simply, if you can no longer control the public conversation, you must participate in it, which, especially in recent years, too many liberals have been unwilling to do.

3. Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It To Us Good And Hard? — Much of the discourse about how social media is terrible blames engagement-maximising algorithms. Because companies profit by keeping people engaged and glued to their screens, algorithms feed people the epistemic equivalent of junk food: content that generates outrage and resentment, inflames our tribal instincts, and taps into negativity bias. Although important, I argue that a bigger factor is simply that social media has radically democratised