AI cheaters, crypto maniacs, MAGA cool kids, and furious Canadians.

As we near the end of 2025, we like to reflect on the stories that most captivated our readers’ attention, and as always, certain themes tend to emerge. Readers turned to us to make sense of new cultural trends, as when Brock Colyar defined the West Village Girl and helped articulate the young new conservative crowd ascendant in Washington, D.C., or when Bridget Read helped us understand the new facelift we now seem to see on every red carpet.

Our readers also loved when our stories exposed the secret lives of powerful famous men, as with Lila Shapiro’s shocking feature on writer Neil Gaiman and Ben Terris’s equally penetrating look at Senator John Fetterman. And as always, readers gravitated toward twisty yarns of regular people behaving badly: college students cheating, fake philanthropists, a mother cyberbullying her own child. And yet, underneath it all, it turns out you all are big softies, as two epic love stories also made the list — along with one encounter with Axl Rose, for good measure. If you missed any of these, there are worse ways to spend the waning days of this very long year than catching up on our top 20 stories of 2025, ranked by total minutes of audience engagement. And to never miss a must-read next year, sign up for One Great Story, our daily recommendation newsletter, and, of course, subscribe to New York Magazine. Enjoy.

20.

By Chantal Fernandez

How Quince, the one-stop shop for everything from cashmere........

© Daily Intelligencer