The Most Read Garbage Of The Year

The year is winding down, so I hope you’ll forgive me for being a little self-indulgent. It was a very big year for Garbage Day, and its increasingly large cinematic universe of related projects. And I wanted to take stock of what we did this year and share some thoughts about where we, Garbage Day — but, also, we, the US, the world, the internet lol — are headed next.

First, let’s spin through what you, the reader, read the most this year. There’s a few ways to measure that when you publish a newsletter — email views, web views, open rate, etc. — and we’re going to jam them all together here. According to every metric, our post from September, “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme,” was far and away the most popular thing we published this year and, also, ever. It was viewed close to 600,000 times. And it was actually a big experiment for us.

Garbage Day has, since it started, actively avoided trying to compete with the daily news cycle. I wanted our issues to arrive at a lazier pace, something you look forward to in the afternoons when you’re big and round from lunch and want to do something that looks like work, but isn’t. We broke that rule for the Kirk shooting.

All year I’ve been trying to figure out ways to expand Garbage Day so that I could, you know, take a sick day or whatever. Which is kind of tricky for creator-led projects. My manager Jake, who knows I only understand things when they’re described in terms relating to mid-2000s mall emo, once told me, “When Fall Out Boy was blowing up, they didn’t hire more band members, they hired people to help them be Fall Out Boy better.” Last year I hired Adam Bumas’ as Garbage Day’s head of research, whose research informs everything we do now, and this year I brought on a managing editor, Cates Holderness, and, more recently, Ellie Hall as an investigator. You’ve no doubt seen their names pop up in issues. We also now have a producer, Grant Irving, and a production coordinator, Josh Fjelstad, for our podcast Panic World. During the Kirk shooting, we all huddled up in our Discord and ran a mini newsroom, publishing three single-topic newsletters (also known as “feature stories”) across that weekend, “The logical endpoint of 21st-century America,” the aforementioned “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme,” and “Utah Gov. Cox, please read Garbage Day.” And we kept covering the Kirk fallout in the following weeks, with issues like “The rise of the edgelord shooter,” and “The pressure cooker of political violence.” It was our biggest month ever.

We don’t have any plans of becoming a massive newsroom anytime soon (we can’t afford it), but the lesson is clear. We’ll be leaning into the news cycle more when we think we have an interesting way to do it. We’ve also heard the reader feedback coming in recently and we’re going to pull back on swarming Trump World stuff. We’re burnt out on it too. In fact, on our list of most-read stories from 2025, our second biggest issue of the year was a classic Garbage Day meme report.

Our January issue, “America's youth longs for Chinese e-commerce,” was our most-read email of the year, pulling in nearly 100,000 views, just from inbox traffic. It was all about the US migration to Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, the Instagram of China, following the initial TikTok ban. The lesson here is equally clear. You guys want to know what’s going on online and I feel comfortable saying we can do that better than anyone.

The last issue I want to single out is “The national masculinity conversation continues to devolve,” from October, which was our most-opened email in 2025. It was also a paywalled issue, another experiment we ran this year. In July, Cates and I ran the numbers and realized that the business model I had relied on for years — two free issues a week, with ads, and a paid weekender issues — wasn’t really working anymore. We only offer flat-rate ads and to hit the financial target we wanted we either needed to push for three-times as much from our advertisers or grow our paid audience by about 60%. Seemed clear which one to try.

Our paid audience has already grown 40% since August AND our ad rates are going up because of scarcity. Business! Even better, you guys are reading what we’re putting behind a paywall. It’s, frankly, a huge relief. Thank you all for your support this year.

Putting everything together here, we’re going to do our best to mix the new stuff that’s working with the old stuff you love. Revolutionary, I know. But when I started Garbage Day six years ago, it was a silly email of dumb posts I’d send around to friends. I could never have predicted how the world would change. That the federal government would be effectively run by those same kinds of dumb posts. That which video app teenagers chose to post on would become the frontline of the second Cold War. That the same network effects that birth strange online subcultures would be the frontline for America’s second Civil War. That things would become so topsy-turvy that a redditor with a Nazi tattoo would be a favored socialist candidate in Maine. Amid all of that, we’ve come a long way from the newsletter whose first official issue was titled, “Sonic The Hedgehog's Stinky Feet,” but, also, not really. And that’s a little scary.

A Maesteg Sunday Sesh

KOSA Is Coming

The Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA), along with a slate of over a dozen other bills focusing on “children’s safety online” were advanced this week by the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade. In other words, KOSA is one step closer to becoming a reality.

If you haven’t been following this, the version of KOSA on the table right now — along with all of the other bills it’s being packaged with — would, no hyperbole, make the internet in the US virtually unusable, instituting age verification across the web. And as The Verge wrote last month, there are worse bills in that package, “among them is the App Store Accountability Act, the federal version of a bill that’s passed in several states requiring age verification at the app store level and transmitting age signals to developers.”

There’s another bill in the package that would result in a complete under-16 ban for social media, similar to the one that went into effect in Australia this week. Which, btw, kids have already figured out how to bypass.

For more info on this, you can head over to badinternetbills.com.

Gen Z Is Still Remembering The Internet Wrong

On Wednesday, I wrote about the funny hipster nostalgia that’s spreading across TikTok right now. My take is that young people are confusing two very distinct cultural moments because they don’t remember a world without short-form video. And thus don’t remember that TV shows, like HBO’s Girls in this case, came an embarrassingly long amount of time after the youth movement they were documenting had already ended.

I made the mistake, however, of sharing that piece on X and, boy, were the zoomers made at me. Which is fair. There are a lot of feral children on X with a lot of very bad opinions. But I want to highlight one of those bad opinions because I thought it was very telling. “Mass media didn't have that major of a delay lmao,” one user snarked at me. “There were still threads of monoculture then that were intensified because of the connectivity! Bed Intruder song, Pants On Tha Ground, Ain't Nobody Got Time For That...”

Which was kind of wild to read. Not only do young people seem to not remember that Hollywood was not pumping out shows where characters spoke in tweets from three months ago, they also don’t seem to remember that memes were not very popular. Even the most popular ones! I know this because for a short time in the early 2010s, I would have to go on The Today Show to explain them to people.

I’m not the only millennial being attacked by deeply confused zoomers about this right now. Writer Ashley Reese, who is constantly getting dogpiled by weird teens on X, has been trying to explain to the kids that people who were “internet famous” in 2011 were not, definitionally, influencers. They were mostly normal people who had real jobs doing something else. A X user @bigsnugga wrote, “Hot people weren’t centered online until the advent of Instagram. Before that, the internet was run by uggos and freaks. That’s how it should be.”

Normies Sure Do Love Those Diaper Diplomacy AI Videos

Some very nice family members have forwarded these to me before and I had hoped I would never have to figure out what the heck is going on here. Unfortunately, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who is in the news right now after entering the Texas Senate race, shared a Diaper Diplomacy video about her, well, entering the Texas Senate race and so now people are talking about it.

Taylor Lorenz over at User Mag has a good primer if you’ve never seen these videos before. But I’d like to take a second to add this account to a shortlist I’ve been building this year of, seemingly genuine, AI-generated hits. My list is not exhaustive, nor is it in chronological order, but here’s how it looks right now:

The real unifying trend here, aside from the use of AI, is that people don’t seem to care that AI is being used. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of allegedly revolutionary technology, but notable, nonetheless. And maybe this is a spicy take, but I think it would a bit premature to write off AI-generated “entertainment” because it’s currently being used for stupid viral slop. That was the same thing establishment media said about internet content, as a whole, 20 years ago and I just watched a four-and-a-half hour documentary on YouTube about Disney theme park animatronics that might be one of my favorite movies of the year!

Anyways, we’ll be continuing to watch this space next year. Maybe this is the cultural ceiling for AI content, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Speaking of betting…

Prediction Market Guys Are Pretty Pissed About The TIME Magazine Cover

TIME released their 2025 Person Of The Year cover this week. It’s “The Architects Of AI,” which has pissed off a lot of people. We do this every year, but the Person Of The Year designation is not meant to say if it’s good or bad. Adolf Hitler was TIME’s “Man Of The Year” in 1938. And the subtitle of that cover was, “From the unholy organist, a hymn of hate.” It’s meant to, quite simply, identify who defined the year. But, also, reactionary Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff bought TIME Magazine in 2018, so I don’t fucking know.

The only people more mad about the cover than besides anti-AI leftists were prediction market users, specifically on Kalshi, who did not get the payout they assumed they would when it was announced.

“AI” was the leading pick on Kalshi for who would be on the cover. Kalshi, apparently, did not think that “The Architects of AI” counted there. So everyone lost the pool. Which actually leads to a fun game we should all start playing with prediction markets.

I think it would be very funny for all of the subjects of these betting pools to not-quite do the thing leading the pool. They’re betting you’ll mention “China” in a White House Press Briefing? Mention the Chinese Communist Party, specifically. Even better, bet on yourself. Make these guys as miserable as humanly possible until they all stop gambling and go outside.

Give Me An Entire Modern Baseball Musical, Please

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a very happy sheep.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***