I mostly consume print books, but I do read some online shorter-form writing and listen to podcasts while I’m driving. Below are a few that grabbed me over the past year. I don’t endorse all the ideas, but they were informative, made me think, or both.

Essays

I don’t have a handy way to keep track of the articles and essays I read this past year that I enjoyed, but here are a few that still stick with me.

“What Was the Fact?”—Jon Askonas

“What Was the Fact?” was an over 11,000 word behemoth that was so good I tried forcing other people to read it. I don’t know if any of them did, but it’s their loss.

In this essay, Jon Askonas continued his series in the journal The New Atlantis titled “Reality: A Post-Mortem.” He begins the essay back around the time of the Scientific Revolution when we developed the idea of facts and began measuring and cataloging the natural and manmade world. He then follows gathering of facts up to the present day where we have so many conflicting facts from so many different sources that it is nearly impossible to determine what is true and who can be trusted. Once you finish this essay, you should have a much clearer idea of how we got to where we are now and why we seem so disconnected from reality.

A short excerpt from the last page of the essay.

The temptation will be to listen to the people—the pundits, the politicians, the entrepreneurs—who weave the most appealing story. They may have facts on their side, and the story will be powerful, inspiring, engaging, and profitable. But if it bears no allegiance to reality, at some point the music will stop, the fantasy will burst, and the piper will be paid.
But there will be others who neither adhere to the black-and-white simplicity of the familiar stories nor appeal to our craving for colorful spectacle. Their stories may have flecks of gray and unexpected colors bisecting the familiar battle lines. They may not be telling you all that you want to hear, because the truth is sometimes more boring and sometimes more complicated than we like to imagine. These are the ones who maintain an allegiance to something beyond the narrative sandcastle of superabundant facts. They may be worth following.

“Nature Is Obsessed With Me”—Annemarie Konzelman

Well-written, funny, and moving, this essay from Plough begins with a humorous tale of how the author hates nature and how nature won’t leave her alone, but then it ends with a sobering reminder that sometimes we are called to love those things that seem unlovely. It’s easy to love nature and people when they remain an abstraction, but when we see the terrible reality, the dirt, grime, stings, and sin, then we find it much harder to actually love them.

The end of every summer in Scotland brings a plague. Wasps. One would think that as the days and nights get colder through September the wasps would die. But wasps have this meanness, this audacity that keeps them alive. They’re everywhere, and I’m sure they’re everywhere purely out of spite.

“The Actual Point of Literature That Most Readers Forget”—Clifford Stumme

This essay was good enough that I subscribed almost immediately to the writer’s Substack. It does exactly what the title of it says, it explains what the real purpose of literature is, and why those who try to always get something from it tend to completely miss the point.

They see the story as a means to an end. And because of this, the story can never work on them. They never feel anything they haven’t felt before. They never grow in a way they didn’t expect. Even those readers looking for morals only find morals they already know. Pragmatic readers are too pragmatic to be surprised.

“The Universal”—Paul Kingsnorth

This past year I spent some time reading and thinking about AI and its potential impact on us. During part of that research, I stumbled upon this essay, and although I don’t see things as gloomily as the writer, his essay did a great job shaking up the way I view technology. His thesis is that we are not understanding technology not controlling it, and technology is even taking on its own intelligence and volition, and we should be afraid.

Whatever is quite happening, it seems obvious to me that something is indeed being ‘ushered in’. Through our efforts and our absent-minded passions, something is crawling towards the throne. The ruction that is shaping and reshaping everything now, the earthquake born through the wires and towers of the web, through the electric pulses and the touchscreens and the headsets: these are its birth pangs. The Internet is its nervous system. Its body is coalescing in the cobalt and the silicon and in the great glass towers of the creeping yellow cities. Its mind is being built through the steady, 24-hour pouring-forth of your mind and mine and your children’s minds and your countrymen. Nobody has to consent. Nobody has to even know. It happens anyway. The great mind is being built. The world is being readied.
Something is coming.

Podcasts

Productivity

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

I listen to Newport’s podcast for the reasons that I outlined in my review of his book in my previous post. Much of the podcast is answering productivity and life questions from listeners, with the occasional interview or deep dive into a productivity concept thrown in.

Redeeming Productivity

His podcasts are usually short enough that I can listen to an entire episode during my twenty-minute drive to work. He talks about productivity and living an intentional life from a Christian perspective.

Religion and Theology

The Commentary

This podcast is pretty new to me, but I’m expecting that I’ll keep listening to it in 2025. It covers a number of different topics that interest me such as how the decline in reading might be affecting the church (episode link) and how the proliferation of religious podcasters, YouTubers, and bloggers have affected the authority of the local church (episode link).

Good Faith and The Russell Moore Show

Before this year, I didn’t listen to many theology and religious podcasts other than Anabaptist Perspectives. But once I learned about these podcasts, they quickly became my go-to mowing podcasts. I lumped them together because they have a similar feel and audience—conservative Christians who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and that we should follow the example of Christ in our daily lives. Both podcasts focus on addressing current issues and answering hard questions to help us live faithfully in confusing times. Below are few episodes I enjoyed.

• Good Faith: ”Spiritual Preparation for the AI Era” (with Andy Crouch)
• Good Faith: ”What We Get Wrong About Heaven” (with Skye Jethani)
• Russell Moore: ”Bridging Generational Divides” (with Jean Twenge)

The Biggest Story

This is a podcast by Crossway, the publishers of The Biggest Story Bible storybook for children. It goes through the storybook week by week with some discussion of the lessons and themes of the story by the host. My children love listening to episodes while we are driving since they are short enough (10-12 minutes) that most episodes can be finished before we arrive.

News

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Sometime in the last year or so I learned about The Free Press, an independent news organization started by Bari Weiss. Weiss is a journalist who worked at the New York Times until she resigned in 2020, citing a hostile work environment that stifled free speech. I will admit that I’m maybe not the best person to say where The Free Press, and by extension Honestly fall in the political spectrum, but I would say that it tends to be slightly left of center, with a variety of guests with different viewpoints. While I driving to Georgia to visit family over Christmas, I listened to an episode that Weiss did with Tom Holland, a well-known Christian historian that explored how Christianity has influenced the world in the 2000 years since the birth of Christ.

The Daily by the New York Times

The Daily is my peek into the thinking and mindset of those who see the world very differently than I do. And since it is a daily podcast, there is often a lot of good in-depth journalism of breaking news around the world such as the conflict in Gaza and Lebanon and analysis of the events. It’s all from a moderate-left to far-left perspective, so that needs to be considered. Here are a few recent episodes that I enjoyed.

• “How China Hacked America’s Phone Network”
• “A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods”
• “The Manhunt, the Manifesto and the Murder Charge”

Concluding Thoughts

What is the impact of the media we consume? This question has weighed on me over the last few years and I don’t want to take content recommendations lightly. For this reason, I hope that you can be discerning in what you read, listen, and watch in the New Year to be sure that you aren’t being slowly moved away from God’s Truth toward man’s “truth.” As we consume media, even from ostensibly Christian sources, we need to be discerning and not assume that everything a professing Christian says is true, or anything a Christian recommends.

And with that sobering note, I wish you all a blessed 2025 filled with ideas and information that brings you closer to God, not further away.

Bonus Book Recommendation

As I was writing the conclusion of this post, I remembered a book that I read a few years ago that applied to our media diet. The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World by Brett McCracken clearly outlines the different types of content we have available to us and gives direction on what we should consume and how we should consume it. He believe that like a diet high in junk food will make our bodies sick, a junk media diet will make us spiritually sick. In an ironic twist, McCracken has some recommendations about consuming visual media that I am uncomfortable with, but much of the rest of the book is valuable.