As we wind toward the end of the year, Vox is taking a look back with some of our best stories of 2025. To build this list, I took recommendations from my colleagues for their favorites and tried to give you a range of topics to dive into. Whether you’re slogging through a day of work or taking some time off, I hope these entertain and inform you. Here they are, presented in no particular order:

1. We’ve unlocked a holy grail in clean energy. It’s only the beginning. by Umair Irfan

In April, Umair Irfan reported on one of the most hopeful clean energy stories of the year: really big batteries. New grid-scale batteries, he writes, are a key ingredient to harnessing the potential of wind and solar energy, as well as a much-needed improvement to America’s archaic grid: “the peanut butter to the chocolate of renewable energy, making all the best traits about clean energy even better and balancing out some of its downsides.”

2. Most animals on this island nation are found nowhere else on Earth. And now they’re vanishing. by Benji Jones and Paige Vega

It’s possible that no one at Vox has had a more interesting year than my colleague Benji Jones, who reported this incredible package of three stories from the island nation of Madagascar, shortly before the country’s government was overthrown in a military coup. Benji covered the crises facing Madagascar’s coral reefs, lemurs, and chameleons — and how conservation efforts can succeed by addressing economic needs as well.

3. What podcasts do to our brains by Adam Clark Estes

Adam Clark Estes has done so much amazing work this year about the way tech rewires our brains and how to fight back (including

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