We take a look back at 13 of our favorite projects from 2025.
Bari Weiss killed a 60 Minutes story on CECOT, the El Salvador prison where the Trump administration has ben deporting people. A senior correspondent noted that the story had been cleared by Standards and Practices, as well as the company’s lawyers, calling the decision “political.” Why does this seem familiar? I feel like maybe someone predicted this?
Beyond part one’s exposure of affiliate revenue hijacking, MegaLag digs into Honey’s “extortion” by adding limited-use “friends and family” type discounts and lying to the store owners about never removing codes for unaffiliated businesses while trying to sign them up as partners.
Other misdeeds described include marketing Honey’s for-adult-use-only browser extension to kids in partnership with channels like Mr Beast, who encouraged kids to install it everywhere they could, while collecting data on everyone who installed its extension, even if they never signed up. And despite a cease-and-desist from PayPal’s lawyers, this series isn’t over yet.
The Justice Department posted a large trove of documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein on Friday. But on Saturday afternoon, some previously available files were suddenly missing. Curiously, many of those disappeared files featured a certain president whose name rhymes with Ronald Rump. According to NPR:
NPR identified more than a dozen files released by the DOJ on Friday that are no longer available Saturday afternoon, including one that shows President Trump’s photo on a desk among several other photographs.
The EV maker was known for its outdoor-themed off-roaders. Why is it now chasing Elon Musk down an AI rabbit hole?
Amazon’s next-gen voice assistant has been rolling out slowly but surely, shipping on new Echo devices, and hitting the web for some users. Now Prime members with older Echoes can get Alexa Plus by saying “Alexa, upgrade.” The only question is, is it really an upgrade?
Superman: Man of Tomorrow is scheduled to hit theaters in 2027, and James Gunn has found his big bad. Lars Eidinger is relatively unknown in the US, but he has been nominated for a European Film Award and appeared in Noah Baumbach’s White Noise.
It’s no secret that RAM prices are absolutely Out. Of. Control. Paradox Customs is taking an interesting approach, selling “prebuilt” PCs that skip memory entirely. The idea being, if you happen to have spare sticks lying around, you can save some money. Of course, it’s also an alarming sign of what the PC market has come to.
A curated mix of tech-y standouts, everyday favorites, and other delights for everyone on your list.
Wikipedia is under attack — from accusations of bias, from AI scrapers, from Elon Musk — but the encyclopedia’s founder believes that transparency is the key to survival.
Some people think they can pull a fast one by “returning” something they’ve bought, but replacing the original with a knockoff and keeping the real deal. UPS’s return centers are using machine learning to spot minor differences that might get missed by their human auditors. But the real fun in this video from Reuters is the swarm of robots that ferry returns around the warehouse.
On Thursday night, the White House Live News section featured YouTuber @RealMattMoney, for reasons that remain unclear. According to Bloomberg, “The White House is aware of the incident and looking into the matter, a White House official said on the condition of anonymity.”
That’s according to a support doc, at least. Based on Digital Foundry’s video, the input latency for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, which launched earlier this month, seemed pretty bad.
The energy demands of AI are driving investment in futuristic fusion reactors from Big Tech and now Trump Media. Is it viable?
The short will exclusively premiere at an event in Japan, as reported by Gizmodo; it’s unclear if or when the short might be available more widely.
[EVANGELION:30+；30th ANNIVERSARY OF EVANGELION]
Not nearly enough people are talking about Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s masterpiece of a film, Bugonia. But that should change once the movie makes its Peacock streaming debut on December 26th.
Bloomberg reports that Sterling Anderson is in line to succeed Mary Barra as CEO of General Motors. Anderson was a co-founder at Aurora when he left to join GM as chief product officer. He also led Tesla’s Autopilot program during the crucial years 2015-2016. If he succeeds in his mission to revamp GM’s vehicle software, he could eventually find himself in the top spot. Notably, Anderson recently sat in with Barra for her recent interview on Decoder.
