That's all, folks

2025, a year in writing

This will be my last post of the year. When I joined Substack back in late January, I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea or a smart investment of my time. But, thanks to everyone who has read, commented, and subscribed, I think it’s safe to say that getting on here was very much worth it.

I hadn’t had a blog in years, and I’d completely forgotten how liberating it is to be able to write about whatever is on your mind whenever you feel like it. Very often, I find that sort of spontaneity is what yields my best writing and, in 2025, much of that appeared here. To the thousands of you who’ve subscribed and the hundreds who’ve taken out paid subscriptions, my deepest thanks. Your support has meant I can keep doing this, and your generosity in sharing the pieces is a big reason some have found their way into places like The Walrus and the Financial Times. I’m also grateful to the good folks at Truthdig for republishing my stuff regularly.

In terms of what’s ahead in 2026, I plan to keep doing much the same though I may experiment with a subscribers-only chat and more regular livestreams like the one I did last month with Corbin Trent, Evelyn Quartz, and Grace Blakeley. To send out the year, I’ve compiled a short year in review featuring some of my favourite pieces from here and elsewhere — a few of which people who’ve subscribed more recently might have missed.

2025, a year in review

At the end of 2024, I figured I’d be spending the first four months of 2025 working on the big project I’ve teased a few times here and elsewhere. Instead, Donald Trump’s re-election and the monumental shakeup his annexationist rhetoric spurred in Canada had me thinking about nationalism, trade, and a mostly forgotten 60-year old book.

Amid Justin Trudeau’s exit from the prime minister’s office, the early months of 2024 saw the rapid ascendence of Mark Carney — whose frontrunner status in the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership contest inspired my favourite among the first batch of pieces I did here on Substack. In light of where the Carney project has travelled since, I think my early critique of it has very much been borne out since. In August, I also wrote a retrospective review of Carney’s book for The Baffler.

If, in Canada, 2025 was the year of the technocrat, it has been the year of the wonk among American liberals. Between the so-called Abundance movement, and the various related internecine debates throughout the Democratic Party, elite liberals responded to Trump’s second victory with a fresh round of rebranding attempts — the most ambitious of which found wonks like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias at the vanguard. I hadn’t planned to review Abundance, but I’m glad I did because it yielded the longest piece I’ve published on Substack to date, and my personal favourite among the four wonk-related pieces compiled below.

Something else I’ve been thinking about this year is what I’ve taken to calling the problem of commodification (something related to, though also somewhat distinct from Cory Doctorow’s ideas about “enshittification”). More and more, I’ve found myself preoccupied by the question of what it really means for a society to embed the transactional logic of the marketplace in every aspect of individual and community life. Throughout the year, I attacked this question in various ways — prompting, among others, the following two pieces about influencer culture and video games.

Elsewhere, I wrote several pieces on political language, culminating in my recent engagement with George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay on the subject.

By way of some honourable mentions, here are two more entries for 2025 — the first about Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, the second about Jordan Peterson. Both were particularly fun to write, and hopefully they’re fun to read as well.

Among the most surprising and heartening developments of the year was the political ascendence of Zohran Mamdani in New York City — which had me reflecting on the rather stark choice I think we’ll increasingly face as people living in the 21st century. Between the still ongoing genocide in Gaza, the relentless depredations of the Trump administration, and the increasingly rightward bent of institutional liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, I expect 2026 will only underscore this even further.

For now, wherever you’re reading from, I send warm wishes and my deepest thanks for being here. See you in 2026.

-Luke