Human-shaped sensemaking
Why essays see what algorithms can't (the themes in The Best Internet Essays 2025)
I remember flipping through TIME’s 1999 Year in Review in elementary school, thinking some all-seeing committee had seen it all, reporting on the celebrities, wars, and gadgets that would one day make a history textbook. It wasn’t just a recap of the year, but a pivot into the millennium. It immortalized Jeff Bezos, Harry Potter, Bill Clinton, Yugoslavia, the Y2K bug, the dot-com boom, The Matrix. It’s a reasonable way to honor the death of a year, the unit we measure our lives by. But it seems like the typical “best of” effort skews towards pop culture, the very thing that many of us are trying to tune out. The 2025 TIME person of the year was “the architects of AI”: Zuckerberg, Altman and Huang. The 2025 words of the year (according to Big Dictionary) were slop, tariff, rage bait, and 67 (pronounced “six, seven”). These are mass-media lenses: newspapers telling us to reflect back on things viral and loud enough to make newspapers. It filters for mass-consciousness events, unable to really know the consciousness of the average person. It’s as if what we see on a screen is more remarkable than what we see in real life.
This is article-brained thinking: it’s focused on external facts and authority through scale, the antithesis of the essay. David Foster Wallace said essays are “occasions to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.“ An essay puts you directly into the mind and circumstance of a stranger, to the extent that language permits. The potential of an annual essay anthology, then, is in creating a human-shaped way to understand the culture these writers live in—a mosaic of experience, where each tile helps triangulate the hidden but central truths that animate and haunt us.
To be clear, The Best American Essays has made annual anthologies for forty years now, but after reading the 2024 edition, I learned 70% of the essays were memoiristic flashbacks, written in 2023, but not about it. And so this was the only constraint around my 2025 essay prize: capture the spirit of this year. Both timely and timeless, it was an open-ended prompt. All sorts of essay were submitted—personal essays, nature essays, lyrical essays, fragmented essays—around very different topics, and yet they all seem to revolve around a similar thing.
The approximate theme of The Best Internet Essays 2025 is this: there’s a yearning for an intentional life in face of the dizzying and disembodying effects of a technocratic society trying to commoditize you, to commoditize everything. The modern world brings a slew of benefits: convenience, speed, efficiency, optionality. But secretly bundled with its many promises are invisible amputations: an erosion of place, a numbing of the senses, a hollowing of our interior. Each essay feels lodged in a modern struggle, but is defined by a writer’s earnest attempt to derive their own way to see and live through it. There are endless things to worship, to grant our attention to, and that is the most consequential choice we can make.
Personally, this collection resonates because a month or so after the prize window closed, I had my first child, my daughter. Having a kid is possibly the most out-of-the-matrix and into-your-skin experience you can have. It’s something like ego-death—to switch from a language-based reality to one of burps, farts, coos, and smiles—and it challenges me to be slower, more perceptive. Something my daughter loves doing is “the grand tour,” where I bring her up to my shoulder and walk her around the apartment, showing her all the art we’ve hung up, the art of my wife, her mother and grandmother. I’m surprised how transfixed she can get on visual objects. She stares at paintings for much longer than we usually do, and so I try to join her. I’ve started noticing all these subtle details, marks and mistakes, easter eggs, things I never truly saw on the walls surrounding me for years. In some way, that’s a metaphor for the theme of this book: we’re all tapped into a vast stream of information, a totalizing dream of work and play and doom, but even all of that is dwarfed by an infinite canvas of texture and meaning in the world around us, in the space beyond the edges of our screens, if we care to look. There are walking-distance mysteries.
Maybe it’s because I’ve read through the essays in this anthology 5 or 10 times by now, but they’re imprinting on me, and I find myself seeing through them as if they’re lenses. The essay is unique, compared to the article, because it packages insight into a scale you can relate to. It’s less about the facts and stats; more about ideas you can transpose into your own life and try out. I’m only formulating this now, but I think sensemaking is better assimilated when it’s paired with first-hand experimentation, rather than the exhausting attempt to be informed, well-read, and intellectually-versed in the happenings of a somewhere else.
Have you tried being informed recently? I’ve recently made the mistake of signing back into X to make sense of world events. Why I did this is a topic for another post, but what I want to comment on here is the nature of our biggest sensemaking apparatus. Elon criticizes the legacy media of spin, but it seems the default “For You” algorithm on X uses spin as its reward function; the more distanced from the truth, the more extreme it is, the more likely everyone will see it. It’s barely about left vs. right anymore, it’s more so aimed at Total Shock, to paralyze your mind and keep your fingers moving. A few examples: the Epstein files shifted the Overton Windows for celebrity corruption, to the point where it’s now apparently feasible for Ellen Degeneres to be a satanic cannibal that ate Stanley Kubrick in 1999 (not mentioned in TIME); real combat events are being augmented with plausible but apocalyptic CGI footage, with a thousand comments of “@grok is this true??”; AI product updates quickly spiral into predictions and bets on when a superintelligence will commandeer the entire economy. And so yes, there is a confluence of extraordinary events, but the ever-escalating media machine is refracting all of the chaos through conspiracy, fabrication, and extrapolation— a schizophrenic filter. Anyone trying to make sense is bound to get paranoid. The X feed is not just slop, it’s a strong anti-signal, a distillation of our collective fear.
A closing thought that hopefully ties this all together: articles, videos, and shortform content are more prone to bend around hysteria than essays are. Essays, of course can and do go viral, but the requirement of reading thousands of words throttles the reach. It’s an ineffective form of propaganda. More importantly, the whole point of even writing an essay is to attempt to make sense of something that matters to you. This means truth-seeking is baked into the process, and the reader is invited to join in the sensemaking.
The potential of an essay anthology is to create a cadence of timeless reflections, all anchored in the same timely moment, trying to make sense of it. If fast-paced viral news atrophies your attention, then slow-paced essays should expand it.
(100% of royalties go to the writers, judges, the 2026 prize pool)
The original driver of this post was really to share a small excerpt from each writer in The Best Internet Essays 2025. Each paragraph taps into the larger theme that emerged. Here they are:
"I could throw around loose and loaded terms like presence or attention or intentionality (or worse, embodiment) and we could both pretend we know what I mean. But the truth, the real answer, is something more slippery: to willingly and voluntarily and stubbornly choose a slower, sometimes boring, more inconvenient mode of living, viscerally experiencing the endless minutes inside an hour, flying in the face of what everyone else is doing and your instinctual animal impulse to be stimulated, to avoid discomfort and fear, to light up your brain's pleasure center like a 1980's pinball machine, which, as you know, is short-term rewarding and fun, but long-term not the most meaningful way to spend a life and lends a kind of flatness to your days that is indistinguishable from despair."
"What we should want is to be experientially old, not biologically young. There is a way to harmonize the two without becoming deranged by the constant measurement and management of biomarkers, without resorting to a transhuman diet, or an antisocial sleep schedule, or a fear of dying. The way we currently think about longevity mostly misses the forest for the trees. It measures age based primarily on 'biological time'—on relative organ and 'biomarker' health—a proxy for expected lifespan, which can't even guarantee a longer life. 'Experiential age,' on the other hand, can guarantee the perception of having lived for longer, through a rich abundance of memories and impressions."
"And I daresay Charlie Kirk, dead, is even riper for the picking than Charlie Kirk, alive. If Jacques Ellul lived to see his public execution, he would say the algorithm is the greatest propagandist of all, a mechanical black priest with a singular virtue: attention. It crowns what best captures our eyes, even a snuff film. It baptizes fear, shock, disgust, making us gag out of reflex even as we lick our screens clean, begging for more horror. Even though I’d avoided Charlie’s graphic murder, I’m still a “21st-century schizoid” like you: I found out just last week that Charlie wasn’t shot in front of his family. Who spread that lie? Who benefitted from spreading that lie? Perhaps you’re tempted to blame specific people, groups, foreign adversaries, as I am. But from a bird’s eye view, it’s the machine. It’s the machine that serves Charlie’s death, the machine that turns even my 5 ft 4 mom into a Dragon Lady fit to kill. We haven’t descended into 4chan or Kiwi Farms or LiveLeak; we’ve given the beasts escape velocity from quarantine. And there’s no unringing this bell. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."
"In The Odyssey, Odysseus is held captive on an island after the Trojan war. Holding him there is the goddess, Calypso promising him eternal life, eternal youth and eternal sex. This is the image of hookup culture, in case you thought it was something new. It’s the age-old promise of never having to grow up—the ability to continuously find newness and youth in others and to therefore renew the youth in yourself. You can easily imagine how a man like Great Odysseus would be tempted to rest on his laurels. [ ... ] His wife back home, Penelope, though very beautiful, does not compare to Calypso. Worse, she will quickly become old and ugly and tired, like Odysseus himself would, if he left the island. He chooses Penelope. He chooses to go home. And he is punished for the length of the novel as a test of the graveness of that choice."
"We hadn’t told our friends yet, but now I announced both in one successive sentence: “I’m pregnant but I think I’m miscarrying.” And even as I said it, I knew I was partially saying it as a talisman: if I said it was possible, then it would not be so. And it’s a funny thing, an English teacher realizing she’s miscarrying in Parliament Hill Fields, the very place Sylvia Plath writes about wandering with her miscarriage grief. The knife of January is in her first line: “On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.” Thinking of Plath then was enough to make me second guess my intuition—I’m so impressionable, I shored myself, striding across the frost-charred grass and mud, arms stitched around my middle. But it’s a strange thing about being an organism, to know and not know our own interiors at all times, but then to have certain moments of intense understanding about exactly what’s going on in the inside, like strangers on a train suddenly kissing."
"I am released into the park. There is not a cloud in the sky. Vendors sell potato chips drenched in hot sauce by the lake, sling beverages from coolers, while kids squirt water at each other from ubiquitous Changuito Mion hats [ ... ] I’ve come to ponder this very essay, but no clarity strikes me. [ ... ] I do not know what I am trying to say. I do not know what anything means. And then, for a second, I see the kids squirting water, really see them, see them laughing and running and annoying their parents, and I see the parents, and I think of my own family, and there are so many people in the park, so many people, in this day and age, alive, and for a second I understand, I see it all—I understand what everything means, that although everything has changed everything, actually, is the same, has always been so, and this light of sameness lives on in each of us, despite the lever pullers, the power brokers, and, though we may be killed, may be broken or displaced, this spirit, this beautiful and painful constancy, will remain whole. Try as villains might, this thing, this mysterious thing, will not be broken. And I watch the parents and wonder what they’re thinking. Do they know? Do they know what they are seeing? But then the thought leaves. It simply leaves, and I am swept back into the hollow meditation of my walk. Everything returns to the way I saw it before. Essentially, I no longer see at all. I leave the park and return home on the metro, allowing my small epiphany to be blasted to the fringes of my consciousness by the news cycle."
“Brain rot,” surprisingly, was first coined in Thoreau’s Walden in 1854. It is the decline of one’s ability to concentrate, think critically, and “be in the world appropriately.” The definition hurts only because its aim is true. Go ahead and cast the first stone, those who have not experienced even a moment of this rot. Consider a girl: hunched over her heavy book, tearfully moving from one page to the next, and in the midst of it, checking her phone at the slightest hint of a dopamine lull. It’s noteworthy that “brain rot” is linked with excessive exposure to low-quality content, and one of the suggestions to combat it is engaging in non-digital activities. Thankfully, reading a physical book falls in that category.
"This convention for the sexually repressed (and just curious, or committed to improvement) boasted many workshops, but most of them boiled down to: get out of your own head, and push your boundaries. Men were instructed to stomp their feet or shove each other to be embodied. They swapped nervous system regulating techniques. They were instructed to unclench their jaws. Privately, I was taking notes. [ ... ] I like embracing perversion, the control it offers my own sexual experience and also the way it cracks open what can be considered erotic. But seduction takes risk, and the lower the risk, the lower the potential payout. If I don’t allow myself discomfort, if I eliminate risk completely and only entertain my specific predilections, how can I expect to experience the potential highs eroticism can deliver?"
"Back in the Era of Guys, you didn’t even need to actually do drugs, because merely acquiring them was an adventure in and of itself. And all the effort you’d put into getting them made you enjoy the experience that much more, IKEA-effect style. That’s all gone now, and not just for weed. Psychedelics may still technically be illegal, but they’ve fallen victim to this same process of enlameification. Ecstasy used to come in sketchy little pills with skulls or Pikachus stamped on them, and you took it at clubs so you could feel up strangers or trick yourself into liking terrible music. Now it’s called MDMA, and your stepdad takes it with his therapist to help process his divorce. LSD used to make you drop out of society, or at least get you kicked off the Harvard faculty; now it’s something you microdose so you can be 10% more productive at your job optimizing Google ads."
"The danger of all this convenience is that one begins to live inside a very narrow band of the visceral world. I believe our surroundings exert themselves on us, gently but continuously. Everything we see and touch day to day conspires to shape our moods. When places are too antiseptic, we grow unaccustomed to noticing visceral details. We start to use less of our senses. Over time, our surface for pleasure thins."
"John Keats, in his poem "Lamia," warns that analysis dispels Nature's mystery, that rationalism kills wonder: "Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?" He describes the anti-romantic business of analysis as "unweaving the rainbow." Keats means that to reduce something so awe-some and wonder-full as a rainbow to the physics of light-refraction, for instance, is to "clip an Angel's wings," to "empty the haunted air," to "conquer all mysteries by rule and line." Keats places analysis and science at odds with wonder and romance, but this has not been my experience. His theory does not hold in the case of my first encounter with a horseshoe crab. By researching this animal's anatomy and physiology and history, something that was foreign and, at first, frightening to me became more awesome and wonderful."
"There was a period in my twenties when I didn’t get art. I thought artists were trying to say something, but I felt superior because I thought there had to be better ways of getting their ideas across (and also, better ideas). But then I realized that good art—at least the art I am spontaneously drawn to—has little to do with communication. Instead, it is about crafting patterns of information that, if you feed them sustained attention, will begin to structure your consciousness in interesting ways. Art is guided meditation. The point isn’t the words, but what happens to your mind when you attend to those words (or images, or sounds). There is nothing there to understand; it is just something to experience, like sex. But the experiences can be very deep and, sometimes, transformative."
This is the best thing I've read all year. I almost highlighted the whole thing until I realize that was flattering, but impractical. 10/10.
Hi Michael, just wanted to point out that the metalabel link embedded is redirecting readers to a preview site. Keep up the great work.