Our Top Five Stories of 2025 🎊
Here's what you missed
Neighbors,
Happy New Year!
One piece of feedback I heard from readers last month? More regular recaps.
When we officially launched this newsletter a year ago, we began publishing two pieces a week, adding our Thursday Neighborhood Watch reviews to my Sunday column. Combine that with two hundred pages worth of new stories across three print magazines (plus eighteen longform videos on our YouTube channel), and yeah…it’s a lot to keep track of.
Therefore, I thought I’d kick 2026 off by recapping our Top Five Stories From 2025. Scroll down to read more—and note we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming next Sunday.
— NGL
P.S. Wanna launch your dream brand in 2026? Build your shop on Fourthwall today—and use our referral link for $25 in product sample credits.
P.P.S. Last blog, we shared three takeaways from our new interview with TikTok creator and congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh. You can read it here.
1.
There is a level of reverence that folks reserve for talking about Maya. Her peers (other streamers) may enjoy gassing themselves up — for one to go live every day, it’s a feature of the occupation, not a bug — but they all seem to ascribe Maya’s unique strain of chatter to a higher purpose. “She is saving the world,” her friend and former podcast co-host QTCinderella said in July.
Scientists and researchers who know her tend to marvel at Maya’s ability to distill convoluted information on conservation and the environment into a substance that even scroll-happy, vertical video viewers can get behind. And upon visiting Alveus, which Maya founded when she was just twenty-one, CBS News came away from Texas with a bold proclamation: They’d found “Gen Z’s Jane Goodall.”
When you’re done reading the cold open to our Maya Higa profile, check out the full story on our website.
2.
My interviews with Hank and John took me everywhere from the Missoula Fairgrounds in Montana to Room 204 of the Anaheim Convention Center to the Improv Theater in Brea, CA. I met dozens of active members of their online community, Nerdfighteria, who reside in places such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Oslo, Norway. I also watched quite a lot of Vlogbrothers videos—there are two thousand three hundred of them, after all.
My goal was not just to understand why Hank and John do what they do, all these years later, but also to grapple with the brothers’ impact on the people, industries, and institutions around them, particularly as YouTube (the platform) nears legal drinking age. I wanted to explore the Greens’ commitment to “making the world suck less” at a cultural moment in time when it’s never been easier to wield influence in an unsavory fashion, from spreading conspiracy theories to promoting pump-and-dump crypto schemes.
While we’re all sold out of Issue Five, we’ll be sharing this piece elsewhere soon 👀
3.
NGL: There’s a certain inherent irony in needing to use social media in order to broadcast this message to use social media less, right?
JC: Yeah.
NGL: But people have already been tagging you in photos and videos of them spending time outdoors.
JC: There’s lots of people at the ocean touching sand. You see pictures of people with the water lapping over their feet, and that sort of thing. They’re asking me, Does this count? It’s great because they’re outside and they’re getting the message.
In case you were wondering: Yes, Touch Grass Day did end up happening. And yes, a certain YouTube creator was behind the whole thing.
4.
Zack Evans: When you’re a kid, you’re in Make Believe Land all the time. I was always playing games with the neighbors, throwing concerts—doing all these little things. But I remember in fifth grade, I got my dad’s old camcorder, and one of my best friends was really good at skateboarding. And I remember telling him that I could make a skate video for him.
I had never really worked the camera before. We’d go to a skate park every weekend, and then my dad showed me how to edit. We used Avid, which is, like, an OG editing software. And I set the video to a Weird Al Yankovic parody song, “Eat It.”
I thought Weird Al was the coolest guy in the world. Because I was, ya know, in fifth grade.
Morgan Evans: Dude, fifth grade was so lit.
Thanks to Zack and Morgan for the fireside conversation at our most recent Block Party!
5.
Performative people feel so antiquated in this contemporary search for aura and aesthetic. “It could only be in the twenty-first century that someone could be accused of faking an addiction for attention—and that accusation possibly being correct,” Arpi says in his video.
I’m reminded of how “cool and sentimental” the infamous cigarette quote from The Fault in Our Stars character Augustus Waters was when I was a teenager, but when viewed in the context of how “cool” people try to be today, I can’t help but find Augustus so phony. When I meet a performative person, they reek of the same corniness. And I fear they’d actually let the cigarettes kill them too! Or at least hurt their wallet.
Our Art Director, Moy Zhong, took the reins on this one—our top Neighborhood Watch review from 2025.
And some last Editor’s Picks, from reported stories and interviews with inspirations to shockingly good Minecraft video reviews and a deep-dive on clipping.
Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.