Editor's Note: Our year-in-review roundtable is a tradition, and it comes with two house rules: each editor must nominate one story as the year's headline, and each must confess one thing they got wrong. Lightly edited for length and clarity; the confessions have not been softened.
Minwoo Jung
Welcome to our final conversation of 2025 — and, I will note with some feeling, the last year-in-review this particular table will hold together. House rules apply. One headline. One confession.
I will open. My headline is the Gaza ceasefire. In October a war that had defined two years of world politics simply stopped: hostages home, guns quiet, every hard question deferred but deferred in peace. I called it at the time a pause with paperwork. The paperwork is holding better than I feared.
My confession: I underestimated exhaustion as a strategic force. We are trained to model interests and capabilities. The variable that ended the war was that everyone, everywhere, could not bear it any longer.
Anthony Min
Headline: the AI economy going circular. Chipmaker invests in the lab. Lab buys the chips. Five trillion dollars of market value in one company. Then November, when the market finally asked what's real.
We'll spend years learning whether 2025 was 1996 or 1999.
Confession: the shutdown. In October I wrote a measured explainer assuming the usual script. Few weeks of theater, then a deal. It ran forty-three days. Longest ever. Debt crossed thirty-eight trillion mid-blackout. There's a note above my desk now: "Dysfunction can always exceed your model of it."
Yonghyuk Choi
Headline's easy. Dodgers go back-to-back in an eleven-inning Game 7 that two countries will retell forever.
Honorable mention to my personal chaos: LG winning the Korean Series the same weekend. I watched both. I regret only the sleep.
Confession: at the October table I took Toronto and the shaking building. On this masthead we honor our failed predictions in public. Like adults. Slightly broken adults.
Saerom Kim
Mine is quieter, and I'm keeping it anyway. The headline of my year, from where I sit in Georgia, was the ordinary persistence of communities under strain — the churches, the Saturday schools, the small towns I spent twelve months knocking on. None of it trends. All of it holds the world together while the headlines happen.
Confession: when I started my series I quietly believed I was writing about other people. Somewhere around Part 5 I understood I'd been writing my own application for belonging the entire time. The interviewer was always in the story.
Yehee Jung
Headline: the dismantling of American vaccine architecture. Panels remade in a season. Guidance rolled back. By November, Canada losing its measles elimination status — and with it, the whole Americas region losing a designation that took generations to earn.
It is slow, technical, and enormous, which is exactly the kind of story that gets missed.
Confession: I spent the year on medicine's miracles — the gene therapies, the million-dollar cures — and underweighted the unglamorous half of public health, which is trust. A therapy can be engineered in a decade. Trust, the data now shows, can be un-engineered faster.
Ethan Yang
My headline is a split-screen, and I've stopped apologizing for that. Left side: COP30 in the Amazon, a real forest fund with real money, clean power breaking every deployment record on Earth. Right side: a Category 5 stronger than anything Jamaica ever measured, and a thousand dead in one month of Asian floods.
Anyone who shows you only one side of that screen is selling something.
Confession: I began 2025 believing AI demand would be straightforwardly good for the grid — capital that funds the clean build-out. Then I spent October in the cornfields. I still hold the optimist's position. I now hold it with both hands and a checklist.
Minwoo Jung
Before we close — someone must speak for the culture desk, which is off this week. A pop star sold four million albums in seven days as if it were 1999. The most anticipated video game on Earth was delayed again, to next November. And an animated rabbit policewoman became the biggest cartoon in history, substantially because of China.
Patrick declared the monoculture dead in October. It spent December staging selective resurrections. Culture declines to obey its obituaries.
Yonghyuk Choi
And Nepal, Minwoo. Don't let the ceasefire hog your beat. A government fell to a group chat this year.
Minwoo Jung
Duly noted — and watch that story, because the election is in March. Which is a fitting place to end: 2026 arrives with its calendar already crowded. A Winter Olympics. A World Cup on this continent. Elections from Kathmandu to Budapest.
And for several of us at this table, certain envelopes in the spring. See you all in January.
Closing statements
Minwoo Jung
2025 was the year exhaustion outperformed strategy — wars paused, governments fell, and the young stopped asking permission.
Anthony Min
The economy ran on promises about 2027. Invoices arrive eventually. Keep receipts.
Yonghyuk Choi
A sport is healthiest when its best team and its best story are different things. This year baseball had both, and they met in Game 7.
Saerom Kim
The news measures what changed. Most of what matters is what held.
Yehee Jung
Medicine's frontier advanced and its foundation cracked in the same twelve months; only one of those made headlines.
Ethan Yang
The transition is winning and the weather is worsening, and 2025 refused to simplify that sentence. So should we.
What was your headline of 2025? Tell us in the comments — and thank you, sincerely, for a year of reading.
