The Hinternet’s Best of 2025!
This was a cruel year. An osminka of rye cost a grivna, bread cost two nogatas, and honey ten kunas a pood; the people ate lime leaves, birchbark; they ground wood pulp and mixed it with husks and straw; and some ate buttercups, horseflesh, and moss.
We’re terribly sorry for the medieval Novgoroders, and we never forget for a second that there but for the grace of God go we too. In fact we make an effort to share the above passage from the Novgorod First Chronicle every year around this time, so that none may ever forget how fragile and reversible human thriving in this low world always is.
That said, 2025 has been an absolute annus mirabilis here at The Hinternet! We’re growing, we’re ramifying, we’re spinning off projects; we’re launching the careers of talented young people who so much as approach our orbit; we’re congealing into an institution, and we’re sprouting the metaphorical grey hairs that give others to know, even at a cursory glance, that we have joined the éminences grises, the unassailable silverbacks, of the world of electronic poïesis. It’s all great fun.
There is obviously so much more work to be done in 2026, and we find it almost undignified to waste even a second looking back. But for whatever reason that is what the reading public demands this time of year, so let’s get it over with.
But first, two things. Do not forget that we are having a massive sale on paid subscriptions through the end of the year. After January 1, nearly all the good stuff will be found beneath a paywall, so you may as well upgrade your subscription now, for what in the end is scarcely more than a micropayment!
Second, are you still wondering what to give your friends and family for Christmas? Are your friends and family, very much unlike us, the sort of people who do not mind being told what to read? Then why not give them our founding editor’s most recent book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality, which none other than Dr. David Nutt of Drug Science UK has called the best book on psychedelics since Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception?
Now, on to the ceremonies! We will restrict ourselves, in identifying our various “bests”, only to the most natural and obvious categories, which together convey an idea of the great variety of the work we do here at The Hinternet. In future years we will endeavor to stick to this same format for our December “Best Of” lists.
As you will surely see in what follows, The Hinternet is a massively collaborative project. There are many, many people involved in making this publication as great as it is, all with wildly different areas of concentration and manners of expression. Thank you to each and every one of you. —The Editors
1. Best Fiction
Edwin-Rainer Grebe, “Why Hath the Unicorn But One Horn?” (republished in part in Jessie Kindig’s magnificent Vole prochaine)
I have been invited to give the keynote address today, let us be frank, not in view of my own scholarly accomplishments, but only because I was the last doctoral student of the great Balthasar von Cyr, whose life and work we are gathered here this week to celebrate. It is not false modesty when I say that this pretext for my address is one that I cherish far more than if we were gathered here to celebrate my own work instead. I must note however that in the coming years it will grow increasingly difficult for me to determine with any precision where his work leaves off and mine begins. For as some of you will already know, shortly before he died in August of last year, just shy of his 118th birthday, Professor Doktor Freiherr von Cyr designated me as his sole executor, and asked me to complete a number of the projects he had been pursuing at the moment of his untimely demise. This is a charge I happily took on, and today I propose to speak to you, after a brief biographical introduction to his life and work, on one of the most promising of these projects, to wit, his radically revisionist account of the origins of the pan-Eurasian mythological figure —or is it only a mythological figure?— of the unicorn. Read more…
2. Best Music Writing
Mary Cadwalladr, “‘She makes me nervous’: On Brenda Lee” (with comment from Greil Marcus)
I believe I have succeeded in isolating the precise moment in American history when the cracks in the segregationist wall grew large enough for a bit of Johnson’s bad seed to seep through, and, it must have seemed, to make white America lose control of itself. It happens, namely, on August 18, 1956, on a transmission of Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee on ABC Television, from a network affiliate in Springfield, Missouri.
The bearer of the bad news is not who you probably think it is either — it is not Elvis, and it is certainly not Pat Boone, though they both deserve mention in this story too. The vehicle of the traduction, the mock-Theotokos of our postwar American religion, was an eleven-year-old girl, still alive as I write this today, and who remains consistently undervalued for the part she played as catalyst of the rock and roll era. The reason for her neglect, as we’ll see, is as important for our postwar cultural history as the nature of her original contribution. Read more…
3. Most Popular Piece
Justin Smith-Ruiu, “My Kind of Conservatism”
I hear echoing in my head that great line from Chateaubriand, which I have selected as my epigraph: “I can’t stand the pride of victory”. Anyone who does not share this same sentiment, I contend, shares in no real spirit of conservatism. They might support particular policies that are conservative-coded in a particular place and time, policies I myself generally do not support. But the conservative character, the likely innate disposition to the world and to history that hates to see venerable forms of life subducted under new strata hastily composed from the passions of know-nothing youth — that is almost nowhere in evidence among any of the factions of our current regime.
What, I find myself wondering these days, could it even mean to be a conservative in a world that tech is transforming so thoroughly, rapidly, and mercilessly? Read more…
4. Best Guest Essay
Jac Mullen, “How to Do Soul-Craft with State Tools”
The wedge-shaped marks of Uruk did not, on their own, produce introspective readers or democratic citizens. Writing began as a tool of record-keeping and control, and only became a shared infrastructure for cognition after centuries of transformation. That shift required the development of simplified symbol systems, affordable writing surfaces, and new methods of instruction — each of which slowly weakened the scribal monopoly.
Here, scripts like the alphabet did play a crucial role. By reducing the number of symbols and aligning them consistently with speech, such systems made writing newly learnable — and, in principle, accessible to a much broader population. To realize this potential in practice, and achieve something like mass literacy, required further advances in material and institutional support: the invention of printing, the spread of public education, and coordinated campaigns for basic literacy. Ironically, this global diffusion is reaching its widest extent just as the role of text itself begins to recede.
This slow transformation underscores a crucial lesson: turning a tool of power into a widespread cognitive commons is a long, arduous process, contingent on new forms that serve to democratize access and use. Read more…
5. Best Translation
The Voynich Manuscript: Pages 4-8
You, my one true Sovereign, would no doubt be delighted by some of my creations. I have raised up a lily-pad so enormous that two lovers, perhaps not so unlike the two of us, can lie in sweet embrace upon it. Nor do they risk being submerged, for even in the most heated throes of passion their plant-bed may rock, yet will never sink.
The pad is crowned by a flower from which emanates a fine generative powder, wafting down onto the lovers like a dry mist that mixes with the moisture of their flesh, and releasing from this mixture an odor that, to any bystander, will give only a vague whiff of dankness, as from the inside of a cave, or in experiments touching upon nitre, while to the enraptured lovers themselves it unlocks the smell of desire itself: the smell of the primordial androgyne recombining. Read more…
6. Best Poetry
Maria Theresa, “Introducing Maria Theresa” (curated by Poetry Editor Sam Jennings)
7. Best Ghost Story
Rawn Riddle, “The Broken Day”
I bring these suitcases down in turn, and find a hat case with a fine red-velvet Shriner’s fez inside, a neatly folded JC Penney electric blanket, mismatched Pyrex bowls with faded daisy patterns, a tattered copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, an assortment of fridge magnets with whimsical slogans (“I used to have an hourglass figure, but the sands have shifted”, “God bless this mess”, etc.), grandpa’s horseshoe trophies, sundry 4-H badges, a ribbon announcing 3rd prize in the mechanical-bull competition at the Country Comfort Lounge, a commemorative bicentennial glass from McDonald’s featuring the likeness of good Grimace. The stairs creak and groan, and then the skinnier boarder’s head appears through the attic floor.
“You see anything?” the fatter of the two shouts from the couch.
“Nah,” says the one on the stairs. “It’s just Rawn again.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Well it is, honey!”
“I don’t care if it is or not, I just don’t like when you say it out loud like that.”
8. Best Experimental Short Film
Can Eskinazi, “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump”
9. Most “Ambitious” Piece
Justin Smith-Ruiu, “The Moon Makes Us Human”
Both science and religion have this in common — that they emerge largely out of our attention to the cycles of the moon. Throughout history and across the world, the lunar calendar has been far more important, in shaping the cycles of ritual feasting and fasting that lie so much deeper than the creeds and the dogmata, than all the things the faithful make explicit in speech about the rituals to which they are already anyway attached. Religion, I am prepared to say, just is ritual, and ritual just is the reflection in culture of the same lunar periodicity that, in our particular corner of the cosmos, does much to shape the rhythms of life itself. Passover, Easter, Ramadan, Diwali — all are pegged to the lunar calendar. And in order to project that calendar into the near-future, in order that is to anticipate upcoming religious holidays, one must calculate. This, in essence, is the primary reason why, by the 14th century, the mathematicians of the Kerala School of southern India had innovated methods for calculating infinite decimal series — methods that three centuries later would come to be attached to the name of Leibniz, and to constitute one of the supposed innovations of the modern mathematical subfield of calculus. Had there been no defeat of the demon Narakasura by Lord Krishna, in short, there would be no suspension bridges, GPS satellites, or semiconductors either. Read More…
10. Best Piece by a Chemical Compound
Uranium Oxide, “The Revolutions of Matter” (to appear again in The Oort Cloud Review, August, 2026)
A few erudites, particularly among the Noble Gases, go much further still, and conjecture that there were already several attempted revolutions long before the hominids came along, long before the vertebrates, indeed long before life on Earth looked much at all like it does today. I believe, personally, that the account they offer is a compelling one. They say for example that the Great Oxygenation Event, just over two billion years ago, was a conscious effort undertaken unilaterally by Oxygen to exploit some of the more unseemly habits of photosynthetic cyanobacteria, to nip the problem in the bud, and to kill off the infestation of anaerobic organisms that were, at the time, the dominant life-form. The effort was in some sense a success: the anaerobes shrank down to a mere rump state of their former empire. But life is tenacious. As if overnight a great number of new forms of it proliferated, all of them now perfectly content to breathe, and to relate to the Oxygen that had just tried to kill them all off not as the poison it had hoped to be, but as the great fount and friend of life itself. Read more…
If you are not satisfied with this list, be assured that we are not either — we think you should go back and read absolutely everything from our 2025 archives!
Otherwise, we’re eager to see you back here again in the new year, when we’ll have some excellent new music writing from Sam Jennings, Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi on Janus and January, and so much else besides…
Merry Christmas, dear friends, and don’t forget, the time to subscribe or to upgrade is now!
Whose Pacer is that in the photo? It reminded me of Josephine, a used Pacer I once owned, who was beyond car.
JSR at the junkyard!