The 10 most read stories on Future Perfect in 2025

As Future Perfect has in past years, we’re spending this holiday season rounding up our most-read stories of 2025 - a quick way to see what landed with you when you had the whole internet to choose from. The 10 most read stories on Future Perfect in 2025 De-extinction, drinking, and a whole new thing that could end the world. Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox’s Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Looking over the list, two themes dominated. One is intensely everyday: what we eat and drink, what we do with our minds, and what’s happening to our bodies. The other is big-picture: the growing power of the tech industry, and the risks that come with being clever primates with CRISPR. If there’s a throughline to the stories below, it’s skepticism cut with curiosity. You’ll click for fluffy wolves, sure - and did you ever click - but you’ll stay for the uncomfortable questions about incentives, ethics, and unintended consequences. Here are the 10 stories you read the most in 2025. 1) These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals by Marina Bolotnikova What can I say? Cute, fluffy wolves, especially those with a Games of Thrones genealogy, will always win the algorithm. Marina used Colossal Biosciences’ gene-edited canids - the pups Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, basically gray wolves with a handful of dire-wolf traits - to puncture the hype around “de-extinction,” skeptical quotes very much intended. “De-extinction,” it turns out, isn’t resurrection; it’s engineering, with all the messiness that implies. The welfare costs are real (failed embryos and surrogate animals), and the conservation logic can get twisted. If we convince ourselves we can “bring species back,” it gets easier to tolerate losing them - and easier for policymakers to treat extinction as a PR problem instead of a moral one. 2) You’re being lied to about protein by Marina Bolotnikova In 2025 protein became less a nutrient than a personality characteristic, which is why it was satisfying to see a story grounded in physiology crack the top of the list. Marina walks through what the evidence suggests: the recommended daily allowance is about 0.36 grams per pound of body weight per day for most adults, while muscle-building benefits tend to top out around 0.73 grams per pound. Beyond that, you’re mostly paying for “high protein” branding. Evidence beats influencer math. 3) The decline of drinking, explained in one chart by Bryan Walsh Hey, I know that guy. This story comes from the Good News newsletter , which I launched this year, and it’s the perfect example of the kind of optimistic trend news I’m always looking for. Gallup reports that...

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