The Year in How Things Work
We're a good team, you and me.
In a moral and political sense, 2025 has been an utter disaster, laying waste to decades of painstaking progress in this nation. On the other hand, in terms of the independent publication How Things Work, the year has been exciting. So… mixed bag, overall?
This publication was launched in May of 2023. Since then it has gained more than 40,000 subscribers, including you. Nice! As is the custom in these last days before everyone checks out for the holidays, let us briefly review the year that was.
The Ten Most Popular Posts of 2025
They Are a Minority. On maintaining perspective.
You’re a Bunch of Cowards! On ICE’s pathetic goons.
The Subway Is Not Scary. On transportation.
It’s Not Looking Great. On the assassination of the free press.
The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid. On the economic implications of dictatorship.
Getting Yelled at by Dumbasses. On the defining experience of fascism.
They Are Going to Take Everything If We Don’t Stop Them. On the Trump administration’s war against unions.
Tesla Is More Vulnerable Than You Think. On how to attack Elon’s fortune.
Uninsurable Futures. On climate disaster.
Reporting
Once upon a time not long ago I had a “job” as a journalist, and when I wanted to go do some reporting, I would book flights and hotels and rental cars and then my employer would pay for all of that. This is no longer the case. In our wonderful new age of journalistic entrepreneurism, when I want to go do some reporting, I have to pay for all of that myself. Multiply this hurdle by an entire industry, and you can understand the reason why there is simply less on-the-ground reporting today than there was before the traditional economic model of journalism was shattered.
But I like reporting, and I believe it is Good In General for there to be as many reporters as possible doing reporting on all types of things. One of my goals for 2025 was to start doing more in-person reporting on this site. I’m happy to say that we did that, with the help of all of you who donated to our reporting fund.
I wrote a number of pieces about Washington, DC as the Trump cretins took it over. Revolution Town, in the early days of DOGE; A Television Show Called the USA, about the city during a Trump speech; Symbolic Battlefields, about the deployment of the National Guard; and What Is Centrism?, about the centrist conference WelcomeFest, a grand and wrongheaded spectacle.
I also covered Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for NYC mayor: Up With Zohran, on the campaign trail for the primaries, and New York Socialist City, about a rally with Bernie Sanders, and a broader vision for a new city. Later, I followed Bernie to Terre Haute, Indiana and wrote about the legacy of Eugene Debs, in Eugene Debs and All of Us.
I wrote about the Houston Rodeo in Ride or Die, Cowboy. In America Is Becoming Dallas, Part One and Part Two, I considered megachurches and urban sprawl as the ascendant version of our nation’s future. And I closed out the year by chasing ICE around New Orleans, and marveling at the city’s grassroots resistance, in New Orleans Is Watching You, Fuckers.
You may have enjoyed some of these pieces and not enjoyed others and that is fine. It’s fine! The larger point is that we have created, together, an independent publication that is capable of supporting some on-the-ground reporting. I am proud of that, and I have you all to thank. My ambitions for reporting here are grander. I would like to be able to go to more places, to talk to more people, to bear witness to more of the wonders and outrages of our era. As long as I can keep this site growing and increase its financial resources, I promise you that I will do even more reporting here in 2026. Some of which you might even like! Which brings me to…
How Things Work in Independent Media
Sustaining any independent publication is tricky. I have worked at two different places that folded while I was working there. Therefore I have developed, I think, a decent appreciation of the fact that each year that I get to do this work is a gift.
All journalists are part of a grand function that is absolutely vital to our democracy, the erosion of which contributes directly to the fucked up state of plutocracy and lies that we are all now living through. This grandiose truth is a little funny to contemplate while you’re writing, you know, “A Definitive Ranking of the Five Tastiest Nuts.” But it’s still true: In aggregate, we need a lot of all of the writing—the weighty, the comprehensive, the insightful, the funny, the ridiculous—in order to produce the robust level of public discourse that fuels all of the discussions that allow us all to stumble, eventually, towards various forms of truth. We need a whole lot of writers in a whole lot of places producing investigations and on-the-scene reporting and features and essays and everything else. We need all of it, because in its absence, the attention that it used to command is applied to algorithmic manipulations that tend to facilitate our national drift towards a worse place.
America once had a healthy ecosystem of ad-supported journalism. Now we don’t, because big tech companies figured out how to suck all the ad money out of the industry without producing any of the journalism. Now, we all have to chip in a little bit to support the things we read. This can seem inconvenient, but it is a quite minor price to pay in order to continue having a decent public discourse.
I often compare the funding model of this publication to a donation box at a public park. Just as a park is free for everyone to use, this publication is free for everyone to read. If you have used it this year, and if you feel that it has contributed something to your life, you toss in a few bucks at the end of the year to keep the place open and clean and allow it to carry on, for the benefit of all. You can do that right now by becoming a paid subscriber, for a modest six bucks a month or $60 a year. Then you can lean back and forget about that until this time next year. Your support also allows me to keep this site paywall-free, so that people who can’t afford to pay don’t find themselves cut off from the public discourse we mentioned.
Even if you don’t pay for How Things Work, I hope that you will make a point to pay for three or five or ten or however many publications you can afford this year. The situation we are all in is, quite simply, if people pay to support the things that they like, those things will continue to exist, and if they don’t, those things will cease to exist. I have to remind myself of this, as a reader of many other publications. I understand that it can be a little annoying. But we all chip in a little and we all have a nicer world than we would otherwise. The alternative is that all the money that used to support fifty thousand writers goes to Mark Zuckerberg so he can build a bigger private island apocalypse compound.
Besides becoming a paid subscriber, you can donate to our reporting fund, buy a fly How Things Work t-shirt, or order my book about the labor movement, “The Hammer,” from an independent book store. You can email me if you’re interested in having me come speak to your school, union, or organization about labor, politics, and class war. And, if you are able, you can also support other great independent publications like In These Times, Labor Notes, The Real News, Defector, Autonomy News, Kim Kelly, or any others that have made your life a little bit richer this year. It matters.
Finally
All of these little obstacles that stand in the way of building long-term, sustainable independent publications like this one drive home to me the fact that: This place depends on you, the readers. I really, really do appreciate the time that you all give to reading the things that are published here. Being a writer is, simultaneously, a perfectly honorable and even necessary job, and a job that anyone is very lucky to do—I have worked at McDonald’s and it is harder than this. I’m grateful for all of you being here, supporting this place as much as you can, and engaging in the big pageant of The Public Conversation.
We won’t stop. Have no fear, my friends. Santa hates fascists.
- Hamilton
I come back to that They Are a Minority post every now and again to be bolstered… and it works every time!
Nearly a year later now, its prescience is really something.
Thanks for your excellent writing this year. Wishing you a prosperous 2026.