The 10 most read stories on Future Perfect in 2025 |
As Future Perfect has in past years, we’re spending this holiday season rounding up our most-read stories of 2025 — a quick way to see what landed with you when you had the whole internet to choose from.
Looking over the list, two themes dominated. One is intensely everyday: what we eat and drink, what we do with our minds, and what’s happening to our bodies. The other is big-picture: the growing power of the tech industry, and the risks that come with being clever primates with CRISPR.
If there’s a throughline to the stories below, it’s skepticism cut with curiosity. You’ll click for fluffy wolves, sure — and did you ever click — but you’ll stay for the uncomfortable questions about incentives, ethics, and unintended consequences. Here are the 10 stories you read the most in 2025.
1) These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals by Marina Bolotnikova
What can I say? Cute, fluffy wolves, especially those with a Games of Thrones genealogy, will always win the algorithm. Marina used Colossal Biosciences’ gene-edited canids — the pups Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, basically gray wolves with a handful of dire-wolf traits — to puncture the hype around “de-extinction,” skeptical quotes very much intended.
“De-extinction,” it turns out, isn’t resurrection; it’s engineering, with all the messiness that implies. The welfare costs are real (failed embryos and surrogate animals), and the conservation logic can get twisted. If we convince ourselves we can “bring species back,” it gets easier to tolerate losing them — and easier for policymakers to treat extinction as a PR problem instead of a moral one.
2) You’re being lied to about protein by Marina Bolotnikova
In 2025 protein became less a nutrient than a personality characteristic, which is why it was satisfying to see a story grounded in physiology crack the top of the list. Marina walks through what the evidence suggests: the recommended daily allowance is about 0.36 grams per pound of body weight per day for most adults, while muscle-building benefits tend to top out around 0.73 grams per pound. Beyond that, you’re mostly paying for “high protein” branding. Evidence beats influencer math.
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