Best of 2025 - Ted Gioia

I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco

How to respond to a millionaire who’s willing to pay big money to conduct your orchestra? The TSO said yes. Its musicians said, Seriously? And Mandle Cheung got to raise his baton at Roy Thomson Hall. A story about outsized ambitions, cash-strapped arts organizations and the limits of wish fulfillment

Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.

The Chief Chess Officer of Chess.com describes the crisis he confronted when Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen lost a tournament match to a suspected cheater.

Conversations and revelations about an ailing nation along Interstate 95.

Growing up in countercultural California, ‘enlightenment’ had real glamour. But decades of practice have changed my mind

Publications like Time Out New York were my bible and my road map.

Decades ago, a generation of UK schoolchildren unwittingly took part in an initiative aimed at boosting reading skills - with lasting consequences

On similes, good and bad

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

A scholar on China reflects on the moment he was denied access to the country, and the compromises others must make to maintain it.

These fantasy character performers take BookTok to IRL balls.

The long read: Online dissent is a serious crime in China. So why did a Weibo censor help me publish posts critical of the Communist party?

The long read: For the first time, the man the KGB codenamed ‘the Inheritor’ tells his story

100 YEARS OF PRAMOEDYA On October 6, 1973, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was ordered by prison guards to run double-time across Buru Island. The writer had been arrested eight years before, taken into custody in the middle of the night. Detained without charges alongside thousands of other men and women, Toer was sent to Buru, a prison […]

Amway sold my family a life built on delusion.

Alice Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram once thrived with music and spiritual devotion. See how its history and teachings live on after wildfire devastation.

From India to the Amazon to Israel, bulldozers have left a path of destruction that offers a cautionary tale for how technology without safeguards can be misused.

It wouldn’t take much, the fan explained, just some radioactive material inside the players, who would then undergo a physical examination.