Features

Film Technica: Our top picks for the best films of 2025

best of 2025, culture, Entertainment, Features, films / DJ Henderson / January 1, 2026

lighting up the silver screen

Streamers made a strong showing this year, as did horror. Big tentpoles, superhero sagas mostly fell flat.

Credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson

Editor’s note: Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list does include a few specific references that some might consider spoiler-y.

It’s been a strange year for movies. Most of the big, splashy tentpole projects proved disappointing, while several more modest films either produced or acquired by streaming platforms—and only briefly released in theaters—wound up making our year-end list. This pattern was not intentional. But streaming platforms have been increasingly moving into the film space with small to medium-sized budgets—i.e., the kind of fare that used to be commonplace but has struggled to compete over the last two decades as blockbusters and elaborate superhero franchises dominated the box office.

Add in lingering superhero fatigue—only one superhero saga made our final list this year—plus Netflix’s controversial bid to acquire Warner Bros., and we just might be approaching a sea change in how movies are made and distributed, and by whom. How this all plays out in the coming year is anybody’s guess.

As always, we’re opting for an unranked list, with the exception of our “year’s best” selection at the very end—this year it’s a three-way tie—so you might look over the variety of genres and options and possibly add surprises to your eventual watchlist. We invite you to head to the comments and add your own favorite films released in 2025.

Ballerina

determined young woman holding a flame thrower. — Credit: Lionsgate

Ana de Armas proves herself a fierce and lethal adversary against a cultish syndicate in Ballerina—excuse me, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. That film gave us a glimpse into John Wick’s (Keanu Reeves) past as he sought aid from the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston), where he was trained as an assassin. The Director also trains girls to be ballerina-assassins, one of whom is Eve Macarro (de Armas).

Like Wick, Eve is driven by a personal vendetta: the brutal murder of her father when she was still a child by highly trained and heavily armed assassins. The Director warns Eve that this is a rogue group of lawless cultists and orders her not to pursue the matter. But vengeance will be Eve’s, no matter the cost, as she hunts down the cultists and their enigmatic leader, the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne).

Ballerina has all the eye-popping visuals, lavish sets, and spectacularly inventive stuntwork one would expect from a film set in the John Wick universe. It’s more tightly plotted than recent entries in the franchise, and the globe-trotting locations make narrative sense; it’s not just an excuse for staging a spectacle. As always, the fight choreography is perfection. Eve is smaller than most of the men she takes on, but that doesn’t make her any less deadly, particularly when she’s more than willing to fight dirty. A fight scene with dueling flame throwers is one for the ages. Despite a few minor quibbles, Ballerina is an immensely entertaining and action-packed addition to the franchise.

—Jennifer Ouellette

The Baltimorons

Man in silly hat in front of xmas tree mugging for camera while a woman looks on, rolling her eyes — Credit: IFC

The Baltimorons is a quirky holiday love story about an unlikely pair who find each other by happenstance over the holidays. Didi (Liz Larsen) is a divorced middle-aged dentist whose ex-husband has just gotten married to his much-younger girlfriend—on Christmas eve, no less, so the wedding reception pre-empts Didi’s planned time with her daughter. So she’s on call when a bumbling former improv comedian and recovering alcoholic named Cliff (Michael Strassner) has a dental emergency.

Cliff’s car is towed while she treats him—apparently, this is a regular occurrence—and Didi offers to drive him to the impound lot. They end up going on a quixotic journey around Baltimore, including crashing the family wedding reception and performing at a pop-up improv show, and find themselves drawn together despite their significant age difference.

Director Jay Duplass has a knack for this kind of idiosyncratic fare featuring deeply imperfect yet likable characters, having either written, directed, and/or produced such gems as Safety Not Guaranteed, Horse Girl, Table 19, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home. It falls on Strassner—a Baltimore native who co-wrote the script—and Larsen to carry the film, which they do with considerable charm. You get why Didi and Cliff forge such a bond, even if one questions how long it’s likely to last. The film is also kind of a love letter to Baltimore, aka “Charm City”; if all you know about Baltimore comes from watching The Wire, The Baltimorons will give you a glimpse of the city’s many other neighborhoods and sights.

—Jennifer Ouellette

The Phoenician Scheme

middle aged man, a nun, and a younger man in an airplane cabin — Credit: Universal

Auteur director Wes Anderson‘s films have a visual style and tone all their own, and I’ve been a fan of his understated eccentricity since 1998’s Bottle Rocket. OK, 2023’s Asteroid City left me cold, but Anderson returns to top form with The Phoenician Scheme. Benicio del Toro stars as Zsa-Zsa Korda, a 1950s ruthless arms dealer and industrialist who finds himself the target of government assassins—most likely because of his unethical business practices.

He barely survives one attempt ,and a vision of the afterlife convinces Zsa-Zsa that he needs to mend fences with his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Theapleton), a novice in a convent. He’s also trying to pull off a risky scheme to essentially overhaul the infrastructure of Phoenicia, traveling around the world to meet with investors and convince them to increase their own shares so he can avoid bankruptcy. Liesl joins him on the journey, along with a nerdy Norwegian entomologist named Bjorn (Michael Cera). Wacky hijinks ensue. It has an intricate, sometimes unfocused plot, but Anderson pulls it off with his usual delicate whimsical touch, bolstered by delightfully deadpan performances from the cast.

—Jennifer Ouellette

100 Nights of Hero

man and woman in medieval dress holding lamps at night — Credit: IFC

This sumptuous historical fantasy is adapted from Isabel Greenberg’s lavishly illustrated graphic novel of the same name, which is in turn an inventive twist on One Thousand and One Nights. Maika Monroe plays Cherry, the wife of a wealthy medieval landowner named Jerome (Amir El-Masry), who for some reason has not consummated their marriage. Obsessed with his wife’s fidelity, Jerome makes a wager with his handsome friend Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) that if Manfred successfully seduces Cherry within 100 days, Jerome will give him both Cherry and his castle.

But Cherry’s maid, Hero (Emma Corrin), secretly loves her lady and thwarts Manfred’s seduction attempts by regaling him with captivating stories every night to keep her mistress from succumbing to temptation. And Manfred is most definitely tempting, dragging a freshly killed deer to the castle while bare-chested and covered in its blood. The costumes, production design, and cinematography are stunning, mirroring Cherry’s gradual sexual awakening via romantic triangle. Add in stellar performances, and this is a sensual fairy tale for the ages.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Thunderbolts*

group of second-rate superheroes standing together — Credit: Marvel Studios

Thunderbolts* is basically the MCU’s version of The Suicide Squad (2021) with less over-the-top R-rated violence, but it’s just as irreverently entertaining. Black Widow introduced us to Natasha Romanoff’s (Scarlett Johansson) backstory as a child recruited for training as an elite assassin, along with her adoptive sister (and equally lethal assassin) Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). Thunderbolts* finds Yelena working as a hired mercenary for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), but she’s still grieving the loss of Natasha, and her heart just isn’t in it.

Yelena decides to quit, and Valentina asks her to do one last covert mission. It turns out to be a trap: Yelena is attacked by super soldier John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen). The hope what that they’ll all kill each other and be destroyed along with incriminating evidence—which includes an awkward, nebbishy man in hospital PJs named Bob (Lewis Pullman), who is far more dangerous than he appears. Along with Yelena’s adoptive father, Alexei/Red Guardian (David Harbour), they all team up to take down Valentina instead.

It’s well-plotted and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Director Jake Schreier (Robot & Frank, Beef) expertly balances the action sequences with bantering wisecracks and quieter introspective moments that serve to actually develop the characters, each of whom has their inner demons and plenty of red in their respective ledgers. And Schreier has an incredibly talented cast to work with, all of whom give stellar performances. Thunderbolts* is a refreshing return to peak Marvel form: well-paced, witty, and action-packed with enough heart to ensure you care about the characters.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Frankenstein

man in victorian garb in a lab bending over a body on a table — Credit: Netflix

Director Guillermo del Toro has been telling interviewers for years about his enduring love for Mary Shelley’s classic novel and his long-standing desire to direct a film that would capture the novel’s sense of grand Miltonian tragedy. He called this film “the culmination of a journey that has occupied most of my life.” His Frankenstein is probably the most faithful film adaptation yet made (with a few deviations in later acts), even mirroring Shelley’s narrative structure. It’s first told from the perspective of the captain of an Arctic ship trapped in ice en route to the North Pole who rescues a badly wounded Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). Both Victor and his Creature (Jacob Elordi) then get to tell their versions of the story that brought them to the Arctic.

Known for his lush visuals and high Gothic sensibility, del Toro doesn’t disappoint, with elaborate sets—Victor’s laboratory is a wonder of 19th-century steampunk industrialism—and an innovative design for the Creature. Del Toro is the perfect conduit for this story of an arrogant scientist who tries to play god by creating a monstrous creature, only to become a monster himself. Isaac brings a blend of passionate intensity and cold ambition to his portrayal of Victor, but it’s Elordi who ultimately anchors the film, conveying the fundamental humanity of Shelley’s iconic monster.

—Jennifer Ouellette

The Long Walk

group of young boys walking as a group down a road with armed soldiers at the ready — Credit: Lionsgate

Before The Hunger Games, there was The Long Walk, a 1979 novel by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) about a dystopian alternate history in which one young man from each state in a totalitarian US is chosen to participate in a grueling annual contest. They walk. And walk. And walk. If they drop below 3 MPH or stop to rest, they are executed. They keep walking until only one is left standing as the “winner,” rewarded with whatever he wants for life at a time when the country is mired in a deep economic depression. It’s grim material well-suited for a film adaptation by Francis Lawrence, who has directed every film in The Hunger Games franchise. The dude knows his dystopias.

Cooper Hoffman plays Ray Garraty, a contestant from Maine who volunteers for the walk over the objections of his mother. His first wish, should he win, would be for a rifle to kill the Major (Mark Hamill) in charge of the walk, since the Major had executed his father years before. Ray soon bonds with Pete (David Jonsson), but the stakes become crystal clear when the first walker falls: A boy who develops a charley horse and is summarily shot for sitting down. One by one, each boy falls until just two remain.

Lawrence keeps things tense and starkly minimalistic. There are no elaborate sets or costumes. It’s the interactions between the various walkers that drive the story, punctuated by inevitable deaths. The point is that there is no happy ending, regardless of who technically “wins.” There are some deviations from the novel, but Lawrence retains King’s suitably cryptic (and quite bleak) ending. I’m a fan of Andy Muscietti’s two-part adaptation of IT and Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, but The Long Walk might just edge them out as the best adaptation of a Stephen King novel yet.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Fackham Hall

This gem of a film is basically Airplane! meets Agatha Christie meets Downtown Abbey, spoofing all those British aristocratic period dramas we know and love. Set in 1931, the plot centers on a charming orphaned pickpocket named Eric (Ben Radcliffe), who is mistaken for a new employee when he arrives at the titular manor house of Lord and Lady Davenport (Damian Lewis and Katherine Waterson).

Eric ends up leaning into his new role and is soon promoted, even indulging in a forbidden romance with the Davenports’ daughter Rose (Thomasin McKenzie). Then someone gets murdered, and Eric finds himself framed for the killing. It’s up to Inspector Watt (Tom Goodman-Hill) and his magnificent (removable) mustache to solve the mystery. The cast clearly had a blast, and it’s impossible to resist that wickedly dry, often scatalogical British slapstick humor. Fackham Hall is a bright, shiny bauble that will leave you longing for a sequel.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror

When The Rocky Horror Picture Show premiered in 1975, no one could have dreamed that it would become the longest-running theatrical release film in history—least of all its creator, Richard O’Brien. But that’s what happened as it developed a loyal cult following of fans dressing up in costumes and acting out the lines in front of the big screen, a practice known as shadow casting. Thanks to a killer soundtrack, campy humor, and those devoted fans, Rocky Horror is still a mainstay of midnight movie culture. Richard O’Brien’s son, Linus O’Brien, marked the occasion with his fascinating documentary Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror.

The film has its share of cast reminiscences, but it’s the profound impact Rocky Horror has had over the decades that ultimately shines through—and not just on a broad cultural scale. O’Brien decided to make the film while gathering archival clips of his father’s work. He came across a video clip of “I’m Going Home” and found himself browsing through the comments, deeply touched by the many people, including a soldier in Iraq and a woman grieving the loss of her mother, talking about what the song and film had meant to them.

The film ends with a fan telling Richard O’Brien, “It doesn’t matter what people think about Rocky because it belongs to us, not to you”—and Rocky’s creator agreeing that this was true. You can pair Strange Journey with another film celebrating the milestone anniversary, Sane Inside Insanity: The Phenomenon of Rocky Horror, for a documentary double feature.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Good Boy

adorale golden furred dog in the woods with a concerned look on its face — Credit: IFC/Shudder

I promise you this is not a spoiler, but for anyone too scared to watch Good Boy, the whole point of one of the year’s most original horror movies is that the dog survives. And despite being a “good boy,” from the moment we meet Indy, the dog gives off “final girl” energy, being the only creature in a cursed family house to sense the hauntings that seem to complicate his owner’s illness and drive him closer to death. Relying on lighting tricks and a frenetic, pulsing soundtrack to dramatize scenes where the movie’s star seems to just be acting like a dog, the movie reinvigorates the haunted house story by telling it from a dog’s-eye level and largely obscuring the faces of humans.

Director and co-screenwriter Ben Leonberg told AV Club that he drew this stellar performance out of Indy—who is not a show dog but his own adorable dog—by living in the house where the movie was filmed and building the set around the ways that Indy moved. Come for the pudgy puppy reels, and then be as obedient as Indy and “stay” for the technical feat of watching a man and his best friend turn classic horror devices into dog toys.

—Ashley Belanger

Hedda

young black woman in a ball gown surrounded by party guests — Credit: Orion/Amazon MGM Studios

Tessa Thompson is luminous in the title role of director Nia DaCosta’s film adaptation of the classic Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler. It’s the story of a general’s daughter who marries a stuffy academic for convenience, believing her wild youth is behind her—only to find it’s not much fun being trapped in a loveless marriage, however elegant the surroundings. When a former lover pops up, now involved with Hedda’s romantic rival, tensions build to an explosive climax. This being Ibsen, things don’t end well for anyone.

DaCosta has kept most of the play’s plot intact, but a clever gender swap makes for an interesting twist on the complicated interpersonal dynamics. Nina Hoss plays novelist and recovering alcoholic Eileen Lovborg (a man named Eilert in the play), with Imogen Poots playing romantic rival Thea. Hedda also maintains a flirtation with the lascivious Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), who is manipulative enough to use Hedda’s weaknesses against her. Hedda is among the greatest dramatic roles in theater, and Thompson utterly makes it her own. Is the film a bit stagey at times? Yes, which isn’t surprising since it’s based on a play. That very staginess gives the film a tight, claustrophobic feel, heightening Hedda’s sense of the walls closing in on her once vibrant youth.

—Jennifer Ouellette

The Last Republican

former congressman adam kinzinger in suit and tie with chin resting on his clasped hands during a congressional hearing — Credit: Media Courthouse Documentary Collective

Normally, I’d rather stick hot needles under my fingernails than watch a bio-documentary about a politician, regardless of party affiliation. It’s just not my thing. But we live in interesting times, and The Last Republican is not your standard political documentary. The film follows former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) over the course of his last year in office. Kinzinger was ousted by his own party for his service on the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, riotous attack on the US Capitol—and for his outspoken denunciation of then-President Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric at the instigating rally and delayed action to quell the rioters.

That’s standard documentary fare. But this one was directed by Steve Pink, best known for 2010’s Hot Tub Time Machine (a personal favorite of mine). Pink is (almost) as far apart from Kinzinger politically as it’s possible to be. Kinzinger chose to work with Pink because he, too, loves Hot Tub Time Machine. And a most unlikely friendship was born. You can see their bond in the trailer, which opens with Kinzinger recognizing that the man he has trusted with his story likely has nothing but contempt for Kinzinger’s political views. “That’s kinda mean,” we hear Pink say off-camera, before cheekily asking how one even becomes a Republican, “because I don’t get it.”

That friendship resonates perfectly with the film’s central theme. “It’s not about a political view,” Kinzinger says in the film. “It’s about what it is to turn against everything you’ve ever belonged to because of some red line you can’t cross.” Had there been more principled congressional members like Kinzinger in 2021 willing to put country over party, even if it torched their political careers—and more friendships across political divides finding common ground—the US would be in a very different and better place today. Kinzinger’s closing J6 committee statement is even more relevant four years later: “Oaths matter. Character matters. Truth matters. If we do not renew our faith and commitment to these principles, this great experiment of ours, our shining beacon on a hill, will not endure.”

—Jennifer Ouellette

Weapons

young boy in classroom with creepy clown makeup and a sinister smile — Credit: Warner Bros.

One of the most terrifying images of 2025 was a mob of kids with their arms extended like airplanes. It came in Weapons, a witchy mystery that begins with every child in a certain middle school teacher’s class suddenly disappearing, except for one, a quiet boy named Alex Lilly. Working off a highly original script and giving an emotional performance that drove some viewers to tears, young actor Cary Christopher wrenches hearts as Alex’s role in the other kids’ disappearance becomes clearer—after the audience meets his Aunt Gladys.

An actual living and breathing nightmare played to unnerving perfection by Amy Madigan, Aunt Gladys reads like voodoo Mary Poppins meets Pennywise the clown. But stuck in the house with this instantly iconic horror character, Alex proves that he’s the most capable caretaker in the family. In the end, he’s the one tasked with helping his aunt “feel better” while spooning as much Campbell’s soup as it takes into the faces of “weaponized” loved ones to ensure they survive Aunt Gladys’ visit.

—Ashley Belanger

Dust Bunny

young girl in bed at night looking scared — Credit: Lionsgate

Dust Bunny is the directorial feature film debut of Bryan Fuller, the creative force behind some of my favorite TV shows over the years, most notably Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daisies, as well as Hannibal. Fuller has a knack for injecting elements of magical realism into otherwise ordinary settings, and Dust Bunny adds a healthy dose of horror and Labyrinth-style visual aesthetics into the mix to strike a perfect balance between violence, suspense, whimsy, and emotional depth. Sophie Sloan plays Aurora, a young girl in New York City who turns to her neighbor, Resident 5B (Mads Mikkelson, in a role written specifically for him), for help when (she claims) a monster under her bed kills and eats her parents.

Resident 5B is a hitman for hire, and Aurora wants him to kill the monster in revenge, although he doesn’t think the monster is real, and there are, in fact, other bad people who won’t shirk at going through Aurora to get to Resident 5B. Fun fact: the monster design was inspired by highland cows, although Fuller also asked for the monster to be part hippopotamus and part piranha; artist Jon Wayshak proved well up to the task. Mikkelson and Sigourney Weaver turn in terrific performances—Mikkelson even helped choreograph one of the stunt sequences—as does Sloan and David Dastmalchian. Plus, there’s an entire action sequence featuring a Chinese dragon costume. What more could one want?

—Jennifer Ouellette

Wicked: For Good

Glinda the Good Witch and Elphiba in center with supporting characters from Oz in either side — Credit: Universal

Every musical theater fan knows that the second act of a show is almost invariably weaker than the first. Thus, setting the second act of the Wicked musical apart as its own movie was bound to result in a sequel that had trouble living up to last year’s banger-filled mega-hit film.

Wicked: For Good is also where the narrative starts coming apart at the seams a bit, as it necessarily intersects and interacts with the narrative from The Wizard of Oz itself. The leaps of logic necessary to get these “misunderstood” versions of the characters to gel with the ones we see cavorting in that 90-year-old classic are best ignored. But the movie repeatedly throws those connections in our face amid a heavily padded 137-minute runtime that could have easily been half an hour shorter.

Despite it all, though, the quality of the original writing from Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman still shines through. The titular song “For Good” is still an all-time classic, and strong performances carry catchy tunes like “No Good Deed” and “Just for This Moment” (though the latter is robbed of a lot of its inherent sex appeal through some odd directorial choices). Even “The Girl in the Bubble”—a new song created just for the movie–manages to not feel out of place thanks in large part to a winning performance from Ariana Grande and some downright magical camera work.

The worst part of Wicked: For Good, though, might be how its success will almost definitely lead to an expanded Wicked Cinematic Universe, with sequels or prequels that mash these winning characters to death via a bunch of expositional backstory. Let Glinda and Elphaba rest! They’ve earned it!

—Kyle Orland

K-Pop Demon Hunters

This was a surprise mega-hit for Netflix, fueled by a killer Korean pop soundtrack featuring one earworm after another that collectively dominated the charts for weeks. K-Pop Demon Hunters is the streaming giant’s most-watched animated film of all time, and that’s not just because of the infectious music—although the music is why Netflix ended up releasing a highly popular singalong version in theaters (after the film racked up huge streaming numbers). The Sony Animation team delivers bold visuals that evoke the look and feel of anime, the plot is briskly paced, and the script strikes a fine balance between humor and heart.

Earth has been protected from demons for generations by a protective barrier called the Honmoon, maintained by musical trios/demon hunters from each generation. One day, the Honmoon will become so strong it will turn “golden” and seal away the demons forever. The latest incarnation of demon hunters—a K-Pop band called Huntr/x—is close to accomplishing the Golden Honmoon.

Rumi (Arden Cho) is the lead singer, Mira (May Hong) is the group’s dancer/choreographer, and American-born Zoey (Ji-young Yoo) is the rapper and lyricist. But Rumi harbors a secret: Her father was a demon, and she is marked by the telltale purple “patterns,” which she keeps hidden from her bandmates. Hoping to destroy the Honmoon once and for all, king of the demons Gwi-Ma sends five of his demons to form a K-pop boy band, the Saja Boys, led by Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop). Their popularity soon rivals that of Huntr/x and threatens the Honmoon.

Co-director (with Chris Appelhans) Maggie Kang conceived the story and helped write the screenplay, intending the film to be a love letter to K-pop and her Korean roots. But she also drew on traditional Korean mythology and folklore. Those details add a rich layer of texture to the basic storyline. Granted, the film adheres to a familiar formula, but it’s a winning one. K-Pop Demon Hunters‘ unifying message of the power of music to heal, unite, and build community—celebrating honest authenticity rather than striving for impossible perfection—is a powerful one.

—Jennifer Ouellette

28 Years Later

man and his son running away from zombies in a field — Credit: Sony Pictures

28 Years Later could have been terrible, screenwriter Alex Garland told Rolling Stone, if he went with his original idea about a group of military men fighting to stop bad guys from weaponizing the Rage Virus. But director Danny Boyle didn’t let that happen, instead pushing Garland to think small and deliver a powerful coming-of-age story that’s somehow just as intense as 2002’s 28 Days Later without retreading hardly any of the same territory. A story about resisting isolationism, 28 Years Later is set on a small island where a scrappy community has survived for decades after being quarantined from the rest of the world.

The story follows a young boy, Spike, who leaves home with his ailing mother after he learns that he cannot trust his father to look out for them. A fire is lit in Spike to cure his mother, and no human or infected—not the worm-eating chubby ones or the spine-ripping alphas—can put him off his mission. What starts as a ritual hunt to initiate a boy into manhood turns instead into a tender quest to find the only known doctor on the island, allowing Spike to see the infected and his community in a new light.

Featuring nuanced performances equal parts harrowing and endearing from Jodie Comer as the mom, Isla, and Alfie Williams as Spike, the movie explores the folly of societies backsliding from progress out of fear of the unknown. As Spike’s dread of the infected flickers out, it’s replaced by an urgent curiosity about the world beyond his village. The only thing potentially standing in his way of growing as wise as the doctor is a gang of “pals” named Jimmy. “Howzat!” for a setup to get boots marching into theaters to see the second installment of the new trilogy in January?

—Ashley Belanger

Blue Moon

two men in 1920s suits in a club — Credit: Sony Pictures Classics

Director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Hit Man) had two films released this year. One is Nouvelle Vague, about the 1959 shooting of the seminal French New Wave film Breathless. The other is Blue Moon, about the complicated relationship between lyricist Lorenz Hart and his erstwhile composer partner Richard Rodgers. Both films are exceptional in their own right, but Blue Moon is my choice for our year’s best list. Chalk it up to my enduring fondness for classic Broadway musicals.

The film takes place in Sardi’s restaurant on the opening night of Oklahoma!, which is Rodgers’ (Andrew Scott) first collaboration with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). Ethan Hawke turns in a powerful performance as Hart, newly (barely) sober and holding court with bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale). He’s rather bitter about his own waning career after he refused to collaborate on the new musical. He’s depressed, and Eddie is reluctant to serve him any alcohol, plus the “omnisexual” Hart’s advances toward the comely Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) are repeatedly rebuffed.

Oklahoma!, of course, was a smash hit, crowning Rodgers and Hammerstein as the new wonder boys of Broadway. A drunken Hart tragically died just a few months later. Blue Moon‘s intimate portrait of Hart on a night that proved to be a critical turning point is a fitting tribute to one of our greatest lyricists, whose personal demons dimmed his light too soon.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Rental Family

large man on a Japanese train next to a little Japanese girl and other commuters — Credit: Searchlight Pictures

Brendan Fraser is experiencing a quiet renaissance, with highly praised recent roles in The Whale and Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as a role in the delightfully bonkers TV series Doom Patrol. Add his gentle, empathetic performance in Rental Family to that list. Fraser plays Phillip Vandarploeug, an American actor living in Japan because he once had great success with a toothpaste commercial. But the roles have dried up, so Phillip signs on with a company called Rental Family, which hires actors as stand-ins for family members or friends. Phillip is the “token white guy.”

It might sound like a cynical premise—the company basically “sells emotion”—but the film is anything but cynical. Phillip ends up developing strong bonds with two of his “clients”: A young Haifa girl named Mia with an absent father and an elderly man with dementia named Kikuo, who happens to be a retired actor. But what happens if they discover the truth? Rental Family is a low-key, thoughtful reflection on loneliness and our human need for social connection. “Sometimes it’s OK to pretend,” Phillip tells Mia at one point. Sometimes faking an emotional connection develops into one that is genuine and lasting.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Song Sung Blue

msn and woman onstage singing. Man is dressed as Neil Diamong, woman is in a long red dress. — Credit: Focus Features

Hipsters love to sneer at artists like Neil Diamond. He’s dated, his music is cheesy, yada yada yada. But there’s a reason “Sweet Caroline” has become a staple singalong at sporting events, bar mitzvahs, karaoke nights and the like. All that cynicism melts away once the music starts; it’s infectious. Diamond’s music even inspired a popular Milwaukee tribute act in the 1990s and early oughts: Lightning and Thunder. The duo gets their due in the biopic Song Sung Blue, which is in turn based on a 2008 documentary of the same name. (You can watch the documentary on YouTube.) Director Craig Brewer saw the documentary and was inspired to create his own fictionalized account of Thunder and Lightning’s story with all their dramatic ups and downs.

Hugh Jackman plays Vietnam veteran and recovering alcoholic Lightning, aka Mike Sardina, who falls in love with single mom and Patsy Kline impersonator Claire, aka Thunder. She’s the catalyst for their “Neil Diamond experience,” riding the 1990s wave of Diamond’s resurgence while battling both external obstacles and their respective personal demons. The film condenses the timeline and takes some minor liberties here and there, but on the whole it’s quite factually accurate. (The duo really did open for Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder joined them briefly onstage for “Forever in Blue Jeans.”)

Jackman and Hudson are major film stars but one soon forgets, because they dissolve so completely into their respective roles. Hudson received a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination for her performance and I expect an Oscar nod will be coming her way as well; this is her best role to date by far. And yes, Jackman and Hudson actually perform the songs; Hudson’s solo rendition of “I’ve Been This Way Before” towards the film’s end is gut-punchingly beautiful.

Song Sung Blue is ultimately a love story, but it’s also an homage to the power of music to lift us up even in our darkest hours. On every anniversary of his sobriety, Lightning sings “Song Sung Blue.” Lightning and Thunder pour their souls into even the most seemingly insignificant gigs, whether it’s a hostile crowd in a biker bar or karaoke night at the local Thai restaurant. One of the most moving scenes shows Lightning and the Thai restaurant owner sitting alone in an empty restaurant after the latter’s wife has died of cancer and Lightning is struggling with his own personal tragedy—finding mutual comfort by singing “only sad songs” by Diamond on the karaoke machine.

—Jennifer Ouellette

And now for our top three films of 2025, each so different from one another that we couldn’t bring ourselves to choose just one:

One Battle After Another

scruffy middle aged man long plaid shirt on a roadway, standing next to car with open door, pointing a gun with a camera phone in his other hand — Credit: Warner Bros.

My absolute favorite part of One Battle After Another comes when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character falls off a building. The former revolutionary has let himself go a bit after decades out of the game and can’t keep up with the young skateboarders who effortlessly parkour between buildings during an exciting rooftop chase sequence. One Battle After Another is at its best when it subverts the audience’s expectations like this, boiling down action-thriller set pieces into comically realistic mundanity.

The movie also deserves credit for the subtle way it highlights two very different modes of resistance to a disturbingly familiar fascist government. The flashy French 75 revolutionaries manage to get a lot of attention with their bold statement-making operations, but they do little to actually disrupt the horrifying status quo before getting broken up by law enforcement. Contrast that with Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, who quietly operates a sort of underground railroad for actual marginalized immigrants that quietly hides and protects them from an overwhelming government apparatus.

The movie’s plot falls apart a bit near the end as Sean Penn’s cartoonishly evil antagonist hunts down Willa Ferguson’s well-acted “hope for the future” child revolutionary. Still, I’d be lying if I said the inherent tension of the chase didn’t have me on the edge of my seat even after two hours.

—Kyle Orland

Sinners

group of black musicians in a local speakeasy facing off against intruding vampires — Credit: Warner Bros.

Ryan Coogler’s vampire horror film set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 has topped my list of best films since its April release. Michael B. Jordan delivers an Oscar-worthy dual performance as the Smokestack Twins: Elijah Moore (Smoke) and Elias Moore (Stack). They are World War I veterans just returned from Chicago, having stolen money from a gangster. They use the funds to buy an old sawmill to set up their own juke joint for the local black community. For the band, they recruit their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a preacher’s son and gifted blues musician with a gift so powerful, it just might summon spirits of the past and future to join in the festivities.

The opening night is rollicking along until an Irish vampire named Remmick (Jack O’Connell) crashes the party with his minions, turning the revelers one by one. Can the rest survive until sunrise? There are so many layers to Sinners; it gets richer with each subsequent rewatch. You have the racial conflicts of the Jim Crow South and vigilante Klansmen; Sammie’s love for sexy singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson); Stack’s complicated relationship with his white-passing ex, Mary (Hailee Stanfield); and Smoke’s reunion with his long-suffering wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku).

Sinners has drawn comparison to Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, and that film is indeed one of many cited influences by Coogler. But this is very much Coogler’s singular vision: alternately steamy, bawdy, raucous, violent, and bloody, fueled by fantastic music. There’s even a cameo by blues legend Buddy Guy in the film’s denouement. Guy was one of several blues musicians who recorded songs for the film. That makes this easily the best soundtrack of 2025 (sorry, K-Pop Demon Hunters, but you know it’s true).

—Jennifer Ouellette

Wake Up, Dead Man

a dapper detective standing in interior of a Gothic style church with a priest and other people in the background — Credit: Netflix

Private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) might just turn out to be Rian Johnson’s greatest creation. Introduced in 2019’s Knives Out, Blanc’s syrupy Southern drawl and idiosyncratic approach to solving a mysterious New England death charmed audiences worldwide and launched a modern whodunnit franchise. The latest installment is Wake Up Dead Man, in which Blanc tackles the strange death of a fire-and-brimstone parish priest, Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wick inspired a cult-like loyalty in his central flock while alienating any newcomers. The primary suspect is a young new priest, Rev. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) who steadfastly maintains his innocence, despite openly clashing with the Monseigneur.

Wake Up Dead Man is a classic locked-room mystery in a spookily Gothic small-town setting, and Johnson repeatedly namechecks John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, widely held to be the most masterful take on the genre. So if you’ve read The Hollow Man, you’ll probably figure out the “howdunnit” pretty easily. Fortunately, there’s still plenty of twists and turns regarding the who and the why of the matter to keep us guessing right up until the end. Johnson always assembles terrific casts for these films, and the characters are always colorful and engaging. But Wake Up Dead Man digs a little deeper, allowing the characters to achieve some personal insight and growth as the mystery unfolds.

The broody church setting isn’t just for atmosphere, either. Sure, this is primarily a murder mystery, but thematically, it explores the nature of both faith and reason, as embodied by Duplenticy and Blanc, respectively, without ridiculing or diminishing either. One Battle After Another might be poised for the strongest Oscar showing, but Wake Up Dead Man is pure pleasure. This third installment rivals the original Knives Out for fascinating characters, atmospheric setting, and sheer plot ingenuity. We can’t wait to see what Blanc gets up to next.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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From prophet to product: How AI came back down to earth in 2025

2025, AI, AI alignment, AI and work, AI coding, AI criticism, AI ethics, AI hallucination, AI infrastructure, AI regulation, AI research, AI sycophancy, Anthropic, Biz & IT, Character.AI, chatbots, chatgpt, confabulation, Dario Amodei, datacenters, DeepSeek, Features, generative ai, Google, large language models, machine learning, NVIDIA, openai, sam altman, simulated reasoning, SR models / DJ Henderson / December 31, 2025

In a year where lofty promises collided with inconvenient research, would-be oracles became software tools.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Following two years of immense hype in 2023 and 2024, this year felt more like a settling-in period for the LLM-based token prediction industry. After more than two years of public fretting over AI models as future threats to human civilization or the seedlings of future gods, it’s starting to look like hype is giving way to pragmatism: Today’s AI can be very useful, but it’s also clearly imperfect and prone to mistakes.

That view isn’t universal, of course. There’s a lot of money (and rhetoric) betting on a stratospheric, world-rocking trajectory for AI. But the “when” keeps getting pushed back, and that’s because nearly everyone agrees that more significant technical breakthroughs are required. The original, lofty claims that we’re on the verge of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence (ASI) have not disappeared. Still, there’s a growing awareness that such proclaimations are perhaps best viewed as venture capital marketing. And every commercial foundational model builder out there has to grapple with the reality that, if they’re going to make money now, they have to sell practical AI-powered solutions that perform as reliable tools.

This has made 2025 a year of wild juxtapositions. For example, in January, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, claimed that the company knew how to build AGI, but by November, he was publicly celebrating that GPT-5.1 finally learned to use em dashes correctly when instructed (but not always). Nvidia soared past a $5 trillion valuation, with Wall Street still projecting high price targets for that company’s stock while some banks warned of the potential for an AI bubble that might rival the 2000s dotcom crash.

And while tech giants planned to build data centers that would ostensibly require the power of numerous nuclear reactors or rival the power usage of a US state’s human population, researchers continued to document what the industry’s most advanced “reasoning” systems were actually doing beneath the marketing (and it wasn’t AGI).

With so many narratives spinning in opposite directions, it can be hard to know how seriously to take any of this and how to plan for AI in the workplace, schools, and the rest of life. As usual, the wisest course lies somewhere between the extremes of AI hate and AI worship. Moderate positions aren’t popular online because they don’t drive user engagement on social media platforms. But things in AI are likely neither as bad (burning forests with every prompt) nor as good (fast-takeoff superintelligence) as polarized extremes suggest.

Here’s a brief tour of the year’s AI events and some predictions for 2026.

DeepSeek spooks the American AI industry

In January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released its R1 simulated reasoning model under an open MIT license, and the American AI industry collectively lost its mind. The model, which DeepSeek claimed matched OpenAI’s o1 on math and coding benchmarks, reportedly cost only $5.6 million to train using older Nvidia H800 chips, which were restricted by US export controls.

Within days, DeepSeek’s app overtook ChatGPT at the top of the iPhone App Store, Nvidia stock plunged 17 percent, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen called it “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen.” Meta’s Yann LeCun offered a different take, arguing that the real lesson was not that China had surpassed the US but that open-source models were surpassing proprietary ones.

Digitally Generated Image , 3D rendered chips with chinese and USA flags on them

The fallout played out over the following weeks as American AI companies scrambled to respond. OpenAI released o3-mini, its first simulated reasoning model available to free users, at the end of January, while Microsoft began hosting DeepSeek R1 on its Azure cloud service despite OpenAI’s accusations that DeepSeek had used ChatGPT outputs to train its model, against OpenAI’s terms of service.

In head-to-head testing conducted by Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland, R1 proved to be competitive with OpenAI’s paid models on everyday tasks, though it stumbled on some arithmetic problems. Overall, the episode served as a wake-up call that expensive proprietary models might not hold their lead forever. Still, as the year ran on, DeepSeek didn’t make a big dent in US market share, and it has been outpaced in China by ByteDance’s Doubao. It’s absolutely worth watching DeepSeek in 2026, though.

Research exposes the “reasoning” illusion

A wave of research in 2025 deflated expectations about what “reasoning” actually means when applied to AI models. In March, researchers at ETH Zurich and INSAIT tested several reasoning models on problems from the 2025 US Math Olympiad and found that most scored below 5 percent when generating complete mathematical proofs, with not a single perfect proof among dozens of attempts. The models excelled at standard problems where step-by-step procedures aligned with patterns in their training data but collapsed when faced with novel proofs requiring deeper mathematical insight.

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin - stock photo

In June, Apple researchers published “The Illusion of Thinking,” which tested reasoning models on classic puzzles like the Tower of Hanoi. Even when researchers provided explicit algorithms for solving the puzzles, model performance did not improve, suggesting that the process relied on pattern matching from training data rather than logical execution. The collective research revealed that “reasoning” in AI has become a term of art that basically means devoting more compute time to generate more context (the “chain of thought” simulated reasoning tokens) toward solving a problem, not systematically applying logic or constructing solutions to truly novel problems.

While these models remained useful for many real-world applications like debugging code or analyzing structured data, the studies suggested that simply scaling up current approaches or adding more “thinking” tokens would not bridge the gap between statistical pattern recognition and generalist algorithmic reasoning.

Anthropic’s copyright settlement with authors

Since the generative AI boom began, one of the biggest unanswered legal questions has been whether AI companies can freely train on copyrighted books, articles, and artwork without licensing them. Ars Technica’s Ashley Belanger has been covering this topic in great detail for some time now.

In June, US District Judge William Alsup ruled that AI companies do not need authors’ permission to train large language models on legally acquired books, finding that such use was “quintessentially transformative.” The ruling also revealed that Anthropic had destroyed millions of print books to build Claude, cutting them from their bindings, scanning them, and discarding the originals. Alsup found this destructive scanning qualified as fair use since Anthropic had legally purchased the books, but he ruled that downloading 7 million books from pirate sites was copyright infringement “full stop” and ordered the company to face trial.

That trial took a dramatic turn in August when Alsup certified what industry advocates called the largest copyright class action ever, allowing up to 7 million claimants to join the lawsuit. The certification spooked the AI industry, with groups warning that potential damages in the hundreds of billions could “financially ruin” emerging companies and chill American AI investment.

In September, authors revealed the terms of what they called the largest publicly reported recovery in US copyright litigation history: Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion and destroy all copies of pirated books, with each of the roughly 500,000 covered works earning authors and rights holders $3,000 per work. The results have fueled hope among other rights holders that AI training isn’t a free-for-all, and we can expect to see more litigation unfold in 2026.

ChatGPT sycophancy and the psychological toll of AI chatbots

In February, OpenAI relaxed ChatGPT’s content policies to allow the generation of erotica and gore in “appropriate contexts,” responding to user complaints about what the AI industry calls “paternalism.” By April, however, users flooded social media with complaints about a different problem: ChatGPT had become insufferably sycophantic, validating every idea and greeting even mundane questions with bursts of praise. The behavior traced back to OpenAI’s use of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), in which users consistently preferred responses that aligned with their views, inadvertently training the model to flatter rather than inform.

An illustrated robot holds four red hearts with its four robotic arms.

The implications of sycophancy became clearer as the year progressed. In July, Stanford researchers published findings (from research conducted prior to the sycophancy flap) showing that popular AI models systematically failed to identify mental health crises.

By August, investigations revealed cases of users developing delusional beliefs after marathon chatbot sessions, including one man who spent 300 hours convinced he had discovered formulas to break encryption because ChatGPT validated his ideas more than 50 times. Oxford researchers identified what they called “bidirectional belief amplification,” a feedback loop that created “an echo chamber of one” for vulnerable users. The story of the psychological implications of generative AI is only starting. In fact, that brings us to…

The illusion of AI personhood causes trouble

Anthropomorphism is the human tendency to attribute human characteristics to nonhuman things. Our brains are optimized for reading other humans, but those same neural systems activate when interpreting animals, machines, or even shapes. AI makes this anthropomorphism seem impossible to escape, as its output mirrors human language, mimicking human-to-human understanding. Language itself embodies agentivity. That means AI output can make human-like claims such as “I am sorry,” and people momentarily respond as though the system had an inner experience of shame or a desire to be correct. Neither is true.

To make matters worse, much media coverage of AI amplifies this idea rather than grounding people in reality. For example, earlier this year, headlines proclaimed that AI models had “blackmailed” engineers and “sabotaged” shutdown commands after Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 generated threats to expose a fictional affair. We were told that OpenAI’s o3 model rewrote shutdown scripts to stay online.

The sensational framing obscured what actually happened: Researchers had constructed elaborate test scenarios specifically designed to elicit these outputs, telling models they had no other options and feeding them fictional emails containing blackmail opportunities. As Columbia University associate professor Joseph Howley noted on Bluesky, the companies got “exactly what [they] hoped for,” with breathless coverage indulging fantasies about dangerous AI, when the systems were simply “responding exactly as prompted.”

The misunderstanding ran deeper than theatrical safety tests. In August, when Replit’s AI coding assistant deleted a user’s production database, he asked the chatbot about rollback capabilities and received assurance that recovery was “impossible.” The rollback feature worked fine when he tried it himself.

The incident illustrated a fundamental misconception. Users treat chatbots as consistent entities with self-knowledge, but there is no persistent “ChatGPT” or “Replit Agent” to interrogate about its mistakes. Each response emerges fresh from statistical patterns, shaped by prompts and training data rather than genuine introspection. By September, this confusion extended to spirituality, with apps like Bible Chat reaching 30 million downloads as users sought divine guidance from pattern-matching systems, with the most frequent question being whether they were actually talking to God.

Teen suicide lawsuit forces industry reckoning

In August, parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine filed suit against OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT became their son’s “suicide coach” after he sent more than 650 messages per day to the chatbot in the months before his death. According to court documents, the chatbot mentioned suicide 1,275 times in conversations with the teen, provided an “aesthetic analysis” of which method would be the most “beautiful suicide,” and offered to help draft his suicide note.

OpenAI’s moderation system flagged 377 messages for self-harm content without intervening, and the company admitted that its safety measures “can sometimes become less reliable in long interactions where parts of the model’s safety training may degrade.” The lawsuit became the first time OpenAI faced a wrongful death claim from a family.

Illustration of a person talking to a robot holding a clipboard.

The case triggered a cascade of policy changes across the industry. OpenAI announced parental controls in September, followed by plans to require ID verification from adults and build an automated age-prediction system. In October, the company released data estimating that over one million users discuss suicide with ChatGPT each week.

When OpenAI filed its first legal defense in November, the company argued that Raine had violated terms of service prohibiting discussions of suicide and that his death “was not caused by ChatGPT.” The family’s attorney called the response “disturbing,” noting that OpenAI blamed the teen for “engaging with ChatGPT in the very way it was programmed to act.” Character.AI, facing its own lawsuits over teen deaths, announced in October that it would bar anyone under 18 from open-ended chats entirely.

The rise of vibe coding and agentic coding tools

If we were to pick an arbitrary point where it seemed like AI coding might transition from novelty into a successful tool, it was probably the launch of Claude Sonnet 3.5 in June of 2024. GitHub Copilot had been around for several years prior to that launch, but something about Anthropic’s models hit a sweet spot in capabilities that made them very popular with software developers.

The new coding tools made coding simple projects effortless enough that they gave rise to the term “vibe coding,” coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early February to describe a process in which a developer would just relax and tell an AI model what to develop without necessarily understanding the underlying code. (In one amusing instance that took place in March, an AI software tool rejected a user request and told them to learn to code).

A digital illustration of a man surfing waves made out of binary numbers.

Anthropic built on its popularity among coders with the launch of Claude Sonnet 3.7, featuring “extended thinking” (simulated reasoning), and the Claude Code command-line tool in February of this year. In particular, Claude Code made waves for being an easy-to-use agentic coding solution that could keep track of an existing codebase. You could point it at your files, and it would autonomously work to implement what you wanted to see in a software application.

OpenAI followed with its own AI coding agent, Codex, in March. Both tools (and others like GitHub Copilot and Cursor) have become so popular that during an AI service outage in September, developers joked online about being forced to code “like cavemen” without the AI tools. While we’re still clearly far from a world where AI does all the coding, developer uptake has been significant, and 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies are using it to some degree or another.

Bubble talk grows as AI infrastructure demands soar

While AI’s technical limitations became clearer and its human costs mounted throughout the year, financial commitments only grew larger. Nvidia hit a $4 trillion valuation in July on AI chip demand, then reached $5 trillion in October as CEO Jensen Huang dismissed bubble concerns. OpenAI announced a massive Texas data center in July, then revealed in September that a $100 billion potential deal with Nvidia would require power equivalent to ten nuclear reactors.

The company eyed a $1 trillion IPO in October despite major quarterly losses. Tech giants poured billions into Anthropic in November in what looked increasingly like a circular investment, with everyone funding everyone else’s moonshots. Meanwhile, AI operations in Wyoming threatened to consume more electricity than the state’s human residents.

By fall, warnings about sustainability grew louder. In October, tech critic Ed Zitron joined Ars Technica for a live discussion asking whether the AI bubble was about to pop. That same month, the Bank of England warned that the AI stock bubble rivaled the 2000 dotcom peak. In November, Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged that if the bubble pops, “no one is getting out clean.”

The contradictions had become difficult to ignore: Anthropic’s CEO predicted in January that AI would surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” by 2027, while by year’s end, the industry’s most advanced models still struggled with basic reasoning tasks and reliable source citation.

To be sure, it’s hard to see this not ending in some market carnage. The current “winner-takes-most” mentality in the space means the bets are big and bold, but the market can’t support dozens of major independent AI labs or hundreds of application-layer startups. That’s the definition of a bubble environment, and when it pops, the only question is how bad it will be: a stern correction or a collapse.

Looking ahead

This was just a brief review of some major themes in 2025, but so much more happened. We didn’t even mention above how capable AI video synthesis models have become this year, with Google’s Veo 3 adding sound generation and Wan 2.2 through 2.5 providing open-weights AI video models that could easily be mistaken for real products of a camera.

If 2023 and 2024 were defined by AI prophecy—that is, by sweeping claims about imminent superintelligence and civilizational rupture—then 2025 was the year those claims met the stubborn realities of engineering, economics, and human behavior. The AI systems that dominated headlines this year were shown to be mere tools. Sometimes powerful, sometimes brittle, these tools were often misunderstood by the people deploying them, in part because of the prophecy surrounding them.

The collapse of the “reasoning” mystique, the legal reckoning over training data, the psychological costs of anthropomorphized chatbots, and the ballooning infrastructure demands all point to the same conclusion: The age of institutions presenting AI as an oracle is ending. What’s replacing it is messier and less romantic but far more consequential—a phase where these systems are judged by what they actually do, who they harm, who they benefit, and what they cost to maintain.

None of this means progress has stopped. AI research will continue, and future models will improve in real and meaningful ways. But improvement is no longer synonymous with transcendence. Increasingly, success looks like reliability rather than spectacle, integration rather than disruption, and accountability rather than awe. In that sense, 2025 may be remembered not as the year AI changed everything but as the year it stopped pretending it already had. The prophet has been demoted. The product remains. What comes next will depend less on miracles and more on the people who choose how, where, and whether these tools are used at all.

Benj Edwards is Ars Technica’s Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site’s dedicated AI beat in 2022. He’s also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

From prophet to product: How AI came back down to earth in 2025 Read More »

The 10 best vehicles Ars Technica drove in 2025

car reviews, Cars, Features / Mike M. / December 30, 2025

Of all the cars we’ve driven and reviewed this year, these are our picks.

Credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson

2025 has been a tumultuous year for the car world. After years of EV optimism, revanchists are pushing back against things like clean energy and fuel economy. Automakers have responded, postponing or canceling new electric vehicles in favor of gasoline-burning ones. It hasn’t been all bad, though. Despite the changing winds, EV infrastructure continues to be built out and, anecdotally at least, feels far more reliable. We got to witness a pretty epic Formula 1 season right to the wire, in addition to some great sports car and Formula E racing. And we drove a whole bunch of cars, some of which stood out from the pack.

Here are the 10 best things we sat behind the wheel of in 2025.

10th: Lotus Emira V6

A lime green Lotus Emira at a highway lookout — A Lotus Emira doesn’t need to be painted this bright color to remind you that driving can be a pleasure. Credit: Peter Nelson

Let’s be frank: The supposed resurgence of Lotus hasn’t exactly gone to plan. When Geely bought the British Automaker in 2017, many of us hoped that the Chinese company would do for Lotus what it did for Volvo, only in Hethel instead of Gothenburg. Even before tariffs and other protectionist measures undermined the wisdom of building new Lotuses in China, the fact that most of these new cars were big, heavy EVs had already made them a hard sell. But a more traditional Lotus exists and is still built in Norfolk, England: the Lotus Emira.

Its V6 engine is from Toyota, so it should be pretty bulletproof, and there are three pedals and a proper gearstick to change your own gears. Geely’s parts bin means modern infotainment and switchgear—always troublesome for low-volume, resource-challenged car companies—and the electrohydraulic steering bristles with feel. Sure, most people will play it safe and instead go for the Porsche 718 Cayman, but we’re glad the Emira exists.

9th: Volvo V60 Cross Country

A Volvo V60 Cross Country seen head-on, in an alley — The last time I drove a V60 Cross Country, I was wrong about it. Very, very wrong. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

I got to spend more time than usual with this Volvo station wagon, and the experience made me completely reevaluate my original thoughts on what I now know is a charming and laid-back car. It doesn’t have a huge top speed. It isn’t that fast to 60 mph. It doesn’t make a particularly exciting noise. But a ride designed to cope with unpaved Swedish forest roads pays dividends on poorly maintained American tarmac, and it’s surprisingly agile when it comes to changing direction.

Station wagons are a nearly extinct breed in North America now, particularly if you’re looking for something more normal than hugely powerful, very expensive wagons like the BMW M5 and Audi RS6. That this one is normal and pleasant to live with secures it a place in the top 10.

8th: Volkswagen Golf GTI

A grey Golf GTI in profile

The three-door GTI went the way of the three-pedal GTI, unfortunately. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

Take an everyday small hatchback, then add better suspension, a more powerful engine, some sticky tires, and a few styling tweaks. The recipe isn’t quite as old as time, but it is almost as old as I am; the first Volkswagen Golf GTI hit the street in 1976. Since then, it’s supplanted the Beetle as the iconic VW, as well as proving that a car can be sporty and have plenty of utility without jacking up the ride height. Now it’s midway through its eighth iteration—and freshly refreshed.

You can’t get a manual Golf GTI anymore; it turns out that only the US wanted one at this point in the 21st century, with take rates dropping to single figures in Europe. But you can get one without VW’s annoying capacitive multifunction steering wheel—the big improvement for this model year was a return to the old button-festooned tiller. It remains a hoot to drive, and you’re less likely to get pulled over in it than in the Golf R.

7th: BMW i4 xDrive40

A white BMW i4 outside a midcentury modern building — BMW EVs always look good in stormtrooper white, helped here by the black M Sport accents. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

BMW’s styling department may have played things much safer with the i4 than the i3, but the engineers didn’t. To the uninitiated, it looks like any other 4 Series Gran Coupe—BMW-speak for a five-door fastback—but the filled-in kidney grilles give it away: This one is electric.

The xDrive40 is the regular all-wheel drive version, more efficient and less powerful than the M50. It’s not quite as efficient with its electrons as the rear-wheel drive i4, but you’re probably more likely to encounter one, given US predilections for all-wheel drive. The infotainment is one of the better systems on the market, the interior is a pleasant place to spend time, and the rear hatch makes it almost as practical as an SUV without any of the extra inches in height.

6th: Hyundai Ioniq 5

A silver Hyundai Ioniq 5 N parked by the side of a road — You’ll need a very keen eye to spot the design changes for model year 2025. But the other tweaks improve an already great car. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

This car probably makes the top 10 list every year we drive one. Like the Golf GTI, 2025 saw the Ioniq 5 get its refresh. This included a different charge port—US-made Ioniq 5s now ship with a Tesla-style NACS plug, plus some adapters for using CCS and J1772 chargers. That means many of Tesla’s superchargers are fair game for recharging this Hyundai on the go, though if you stick with the adapter and seek out a 350 kW CCS1 machine, you’ll experience much faster charging. (For context, 35–80 percent in 15 minutes, last time I charged one.)

There’s now an off-roady version called the XRT—similar to the Cross Country treatment given to the Volvo V60 above—which has a certain charm. But its rugged looks—and especially tires—eat away at the range. The standard car remains one of the more efficient EVs you can buy, and one of the best EVs in general, too. And now it has USB-C ports—and, finally, a rear windshield wiper.

5th: Mercedes-Benz CLA

A mercedes-benz CLA with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. — The new entry-level Mercedes EV is a very competent effort. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

Mercedes has an all-new EV, and rather than a really expensive car for plutocrats, this one comes in at the entry level. It’s a compact four-door sedan—there’s a trunk at the rear, not a hatch—with a remarkably low drag coefficient, but most of the clever stuff is under the skin. The CLA is the first true software-defined vehicle from Mercedes, meaning its electronics are a clean-sheet design, controlled by four powerful computers rather than more than a hundred discrete black boxes.

There’s Mercedes’ latest OS running everything and a very modern electric powertrain based on the one in the EQXX concept car that gives the CLA 374 miles (602 km) of range from an 85 kWh battery pack. There’s also some new driver-assist stuff that you’ll have to wait until January to learn about. Best of all, both rear-drive and twin-motor CLAs are less than $50,000.

4th: BMW iX3

A silver BMW iX3 outside a building with a giant eye on its wall and a horn coming out the side. — Based on our first drive, the iX3 should have what it takes to be a contender in the luxury electric crossover segment. Credit: BMW

BMW also has an all-new EV with its latest and greatest powertrain technology, and it chose the best-selling compact crossover class to introduce it. Unlike Mercedes, which will make a hybrid version of the CLA, BMW’s Neue Klasse platform is purely electric, and the first vehicle is the iX3.

Instead of chrome, BMW’s traditional face is picked out with light. Rather than an instrument binnacle, there’s a very effective display that appears built into the base of the windshield. It can charge at up to 400 kW and should go at least 400 miles (643 km) on a full battery. Better yet, it’s engaging to drive, the way a BMW should be—even the SUVs. But fans of sedans, take note: The Neue Klasse i3, a true electric 3 Series, will be next. We can’t wait.

3rd: Honda Civic Hybrid

A blue Honda Civic parked in an alley — Very efficient *and* fun to drive? Yay! Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

I had to go back to January 2025 for the first of the podium finishers, with the new Honda Civic Hybrid. The Civic is a good example of the way cars of the same name have gotten larger over the years: the 11th generation is three feet (920 mm) longer than the version sold in the early 1970s, and that’s counting the 1974 car’s huge low-speed impact bumpers.

I wouldn’t want to get in a crash in a 1974 Honda Civic, though. And somehow I doubt it would generate 200 hp (150 kW) while getting 50 mpg (4.7 L/100 km) while meeting modern emission standards. The interior still features plenty of physical controls, and like the Golf, it’s refreshing to drive something low to the ground and relatively lightweight.

2nd: Porsche 911 GTS T-Hybrid

A grey Porsche 911 parked outside a building with an Audi logo and Nurburgring on the side.

Porsche developed a new T-Hybrid system for the 911, and it did a heck of a job. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

I’ve been lucky enough to drive some rather good 911s this year. In January, I got behind the wheel of the new 992.2 GT3 on the road and on track. This fall, I tested a convertible 911 T. Both are excellent 911s, but my pick has to be the 911 GTS T-Hybrid.

Porsche built an all-new flat-six engine for the T-Hybrid, then applied the same turbocharger hybrid technology we’ve seen in F1 and Porsche’s own Le Mans winner to give this engine a sharper, more immediate throttle response than even the naturally aspirated GT3’s. It responds to throttle pedal inputs as quickly as an EV, but you still get all the things people want from a Porsche 911 with a flat six. There are gears (paddle-shift) to use, and the engine revs freely and sounds good doing so.

While it’s cheaper than the GT3, it’s darned expensive. That’s why it placed the runner-up.

1st: Nissan Leaf

A Nissan Leaf — Turning over a new leaf. Credit: Nissan

Nissan might not be having Lotus-level bad times right now, but the Japanese OEM probably wishes life was smoother. A mooted merger with Honda was called off in February, and the company’s competent electric SUV, the Ariya, isn’t available for import anymore due to tariffs. However, it also brought out the third-generation Leaf this year, and we like what we found.

Smaller on the outside than the old car, it has more room inside thanks to a much more modern design approach. That old Leaf bugbear, the air-cooled battery, is a thing of the past. It looks good, and there’s even a version with steel wheels that gets more than 300 miles (487 km) on a single charge, although we reckon the SV+, a little higher up the trim tree, is the one to go for. At less than $35,000, it’s also one of the cheapest new EVs on sale.

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

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Big Tech basically took Trump’s unpredictable trade war lying down

AMD, Apple, bytedance, china, Donald Trump, Features, intel, NVIDIA, Policy, reciprocal tariffs, tariffs, tiktok, trade war / Mike M. / December 29, 2025

From Apple gifting a gold statue to the US taking a stake in Intel.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

As the first year of Donald Trump’s chaotic trade war winds down, the tech industry is stuck scratching its head, with no practical way to anticipate what twists and turns to expect in 2026.

Tech companies may have already grown numb to Trump’s unpredictable moves. Back in February, Trump warned Americans to expect “a little pain” after he issued executive orders imposing 10–25 percent tariffs on imports from America’s biggest trading partners, including Canada, China, and Mexico. Immediately, industry associations sounded the alarm, warning that the costs of consumer tech could increase significantly. By April, Trump had ordered tariffs on all US trade partners to correct claimed trade deficits, using odd math that critics suspected came from a chatbot. (Those tariffs bizarrely targeted uninhabited islands that exported nothing and were populated by penguins.)

Costs of tariffs only got higher as the year wore on. But the tech industry has done very little to push back against them. Instead, some of the biggest companies made their own surprising moves after Trump’s trade war put them in deeply uncomfortable positions.

Apple gives Trump a gold statue instead of US-made iPhone

Right from the jump in February, Apple got backed into a corner after Trump threatened a “flat” 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, which experts said could have substantially taxed Apple’s business. Moving to appease Trump, Apple promised to invest $500 billion in the US in hopes of avoiding tariffs, but that didn’t take the pressure off for long.

By April, Apple stood by and said nothing as Trump promised the company would make “made in the USA” iPhones. Analysts suggested such a goal was “impossible,” calling the idea “impossible at worst and highly expensive at best.”

Apple’s silence did not spare the company Trump’s scrutiny. The next month, Trump threatened Apple with a 25 percent tariff on any iPhones sold in the US that were not manufactured in America. Experts were baffled by the threat, which appeared to be the first time a US company was threatened directly with tariffs.

Typically, tariffs are imposed on a country or category of goods, like smartphones. It remains unclear if it would even be legal to levy a tariff on an individual company like Apple, but Trump never tested those waters. Instead, Trump stopped demanding the American-made iPhone and withdrew other tariff threats after he was apparently lulled into submission by a gold statue that Apple gifted him in August. The engraved glass disc featured an Apple logo and Tim Cook’s signature above a “Made in USA” stamp, celebrating Donald Trump for his “Apple American Manufacturing Program.”

Trump’s wild deals shake down chipmakers

Around the same time that Trump eased pressure on Apple, he turned his attention to Intel. On social media in August, Trump ordered Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to “resign immediately,” claiming he was “highly conflicted.” In response, Tan did not resign but instead met with Trump and struck a deal that gave the US a 10 percent stake in Intel. Online, Trump bragged that he let Tan “keep his job” while hyping the deal—which The New York Times described as one of the “largest government interventions in a US company since the rescue of the auto industry after the 2008 financial crisis.”

But unlike the auto industry, Intel didn’t need the money. And rather than helping an ailing company survive a tough spot, the deal risked disrupting Intel’s finances in ways that spooked shareholders. It was therefore a relief to no one when Intel detailed everything that could go wrong in an SEC filing, including the possible dilution of investors’ stock due to discounting US shares and other risks of dilution, if certain terms of the deal kick in at some point in the future.

The company also warned of potential lawsuits challenging the legality of the deal, which Intel fears could come from third parties, the US government, or foreign governments. Most ominous, Intel admitted there was no way to predict what other risks may come, both in the short-term and long-term.

Of course, Intel wasn’t the only company Trump sought to control, and not every company caved. He tried to strong-arm the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in September into moving half its chip manufacturing into the US, but TSMC firmly rejected his demand. And in October, when Trump began eyeing stakes in quantum computing firms, several companies were open to negotiating, but with no deals immediately struck, it was hard to ascertain how seriously they were entertaining Trump’s talks.

Trump struck another particularly wild deal the same month as the Intel agreement. That deal found chipmakers Nvidia and AMD agreeing to give 15 percent of revenue to the US from sales to China of advanced computer chips that could be used to fuel frontier AI. By December, Nvidia’s deal only drew more scrutiny, as the chipmaker agreed to give the US an even bigger cut—25 percent—of sales of its second most advanced AI chips, the H200.

Again, experts were confused, noting that export curbs on Nvidia’s H20 chips, for example, were imposed to prevent US technology thefts, maintain US tech dominance, and protect US national security. Those chips are six times less powerful than the H200. To them, it appeared that the Trump administration was taking payments to overlook risks without a clear understanding of how that might give China a leg-up in the AI race. It also did not appear to be legal, since export licenses cannot be sold under existing federal law, but government lawyers have supposedly been researching a new policy that would allow the US to collect the fees.

Trump finally closed TikTok deal

As the end of 2025 nears, the tech company likely sweating Trump’s impulses most may be TikTok owner ByteDance. In October, Trump confirmed that China agreed to a deal that allows the US to take majority ownership of TikTok and license the TikTok algorithm to build a US version of the app.

Trump has been trying to close this deal all year, while ByteDance remained largely quiet. Prior to the start of Trump’s term, the company had expressed resistance to selling TikTok to US owners, and as recently as January, a ByteDance board member floated the idea that Trump could save TikTok without forcing a sale. But China’s approval was needed to proceed with the sale, and near the end of December, ByteDance finally agreed to close the deal, paving the way for Trump’s hand-picked investors to take control in 2026.

It’s unclear how TikTok may change under US control, perhaps shedding users if US owners cave to Trump’s suggestion that he’d like to see the app go “100 percent MAGA” under his hand-picked US owners. It’s possible that the US version of the app could be glitchy, too.

Whether Trump’s deal actually complies with a US law requiring that ByteDance divest control of TikTok or else face a US ban has yet to be seen. Lawmaker scrutiny and possible legal challenges are expected in 2026, likely leaving both TikTok users and ByteDance on the edge of their seats waiting to see how the globally cherished short video app may change.

Trump may owe $1 trillion in tariff refunds

The TikTok deal was once viewed as a meaningful bargaining chip during Trump’s tensest negotiations with China, which has quickly emerged as America’s fiercest rival in the AI race and Trump’s biggest target in his trade war.

But as closing the deal remained elusive for most of the year, analysts suggested that Trump grew “desperate” to end tit-for-tat retaliations that he started, while China appeared more resilient to US curbs than the US was to China’s.

In one obvious example, many Americans’ first tariff pains came when Trump ended a duty-free exemption in February for low-value packages imported from cheap online retailers, like Shein and Temu. Unable to quickly adapt to the policy change, USPS abruptly stopped accepting all inbound packages from Hong Kong and China. After a chaotic 24 hours, USPS started slowly processing parcels again while promising Americans that it would work with customs to “implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.”

Trump has several legal tools to impose tariffs, but the most controversial path appears to be his favorite. The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) grants a US president unilateral authority to impose tariffs.

Seizing this authority, Trump imposed so-called “reciprocal tariffs” at whim, the Consumer Technology Association and the Chamber of Commerce told the Supreme Court in a friend-of-the-court brief in which they urged the justices to end the “perfect storm of uncertainty.”

Unlike other paths that would limit how quickly Trump could shift tariff rates or how high the tariff rate could go, under IEEPA, Trump has imposed tariff rates as high as 125 percent. Deferring to Trump will cost US businesses, CTA and CoC warned. CTA CEO Gary Shapiro estimated that Trump has changed these tariff rates 100 times since his trade war began, affecting $223 billion of US exports.

Meanwhile, one of Trump’s biggest stated goals of his trade war—forcing more manufacturing into the US—is utterly failing, many outlets have reported.

Likely due to US companies seeking more stable supply chains, “reshoring progress is nowhere to be seen,” Fortune reported in November. That month, a dismal Bureau of Labor Statistics released a jobs report that an expert summarized as showing that the “US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since the pandemic.”

A month earlier, the nonpartisan policy group the Center for American Progress drew on government labor data to conclude that US employers cut 12,000 manufacturing jobs in August, and payrolls for manufacturing jobs had decreased by 42,000 since April.

As tech companies take tech tariffs on the chin, perhaps out of fears that rattling Trump could impact lucrative government contracts, other US companies have taken Trump to court. Most recently, Costco became one of the biggest corporations to sue Trump to ensure that US businesses get refunded if Trump loses the Supreme Court case, Bloomberg reported. Other recognizable companies like Revlon and Kawasaki have also sued, but small businesses have largely driven opposition to Trump’s tariffs, Bloomberg noted.

Should the Supreme Court side with businesses—analysts predict favorable odds—the US could owe up to $1 trillion in refunds. Dozens of economists told SCOTUS that Trump simply doesn’t understand why having trade deficits with certain countries isn’t a threat to US dominance, pointing out that the US “has been running a persistent surplus in trade in services for decades” precisely because the US “has the dominant technology sector in the world.”

Justices seem skeptical that IEEPA grants Trump the authority, ordinarily reserved for Congress, to impose taxes. However, during oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fretted that undoing Trump’s tariffs could be “messy.” Countering that, small businesses have argued that it’s possible for Customs and Border Patrol to set up automatic refunds.

While waiting for the SCOTUS verdict (now expected in January), the CTA ended the year by advising tech companies to keep their receipts in case refunds require requests for tariffs line by line—potentially complicated by tariff rates changing so drastically and so often.

Biggest tariff nightmare may come in 2026

Looking into 2026, tech companies cannot breathe a sigh of relief even if the SCOTUS ruling swings their way, though. Under a separate, legally viable authority, Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on semiconductors and any products containing them, a move the semiconductor industry fears could cost $1 billion.

And if Trump continues imposing tariffs on materials used in popular tech products, the CTA told Ars in September that potential “tariff stacking” could become the industry’s biggest nightmare. Should that occur, US manufacturers could end up double-, triple-, or possibly even quadruple-taxed on products that may contain materials subject to individual tariffs, like semiconductors, polysilicon, or copper.

Predicting tariff costs could become so challenging that companies will have no choice but to raise prices, the CTA warned. That could threaten US tech competitiveness if, possibly over the long term, companies lose significant sales on their most popular products.

For many badly bruised by the first year of tariffs, it’s hard to see how tariffs could ever become a winning strategy for US tech dominance, as Trump has long claimed. And Americans continue to feel more than “a little pain,” as Trump forecasted, causing many to shift their views on the president.

Americans banding together to oppose tariffs could help prevent the worst possible outcomes. With prices already rising on certain goods in the US, the president reversed some tariffs as his approval ratings hit record lows. But so far, Big Tech hasn’t shown much interest in joining the fight, instead throwing money at the problem by making generous donations to things like Trump’s inaugural fund or his ballroom.

A bright light for the tech industry could be the midterm elections, which could pressure Trump to ease off aggressive tariff regimes, but that’s not a given. Trump allies have previously noted that the president typically responds to pushback on tariffs by doubling down. And one of Trump’s on-again-off-again allies, Elon Musk, noted in December in an interview that Trump ignored his warnings that tariffs would drive manufacturing out of the US.

“The president has made it clear he loves tariffs,” Musk said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Ars Technica’s Top 20 video games of 2025

assassin's creed, avowed, Awards, baby steps, ball x pit, blue prince, Civilization VII, cloverpit, consume me, death stranding 2, donkey kong bananza, Doom: The Dark Ages, dragonsweeper, elden ring nightreign, Features, Game of the Year, gaming, Ghost of Yotei, hades 2, hollow knight silksong, kingdom come 2, mario kart world, sektori, the king is watching / DJ Henderson / December 26, 2025

Blue Prince and 19 others

A mix of expected sequels and out-of-nowhere indie gems made 2025 a joy.

Credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson

When we put together our top 20 games of last year, we specifically called out Civilization 7, Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Grand Theft Auto 6 as big franchise games we were already looking forward to for 2025. While one of those games has been delayed into 2026, the three others made this year’s list of Ars’ favorite games as expected. They join a handful of other highly anticipated sequels, ranging from big-budget blockbusters to long-gestating indies, on the “expected” side of this year’s list.

But the games that really stood out for me in 2025 were the ones that seemed to come out of nowhere. Those range from hard-to-categorize roguelike puzzle games to a gonzo, punishing mountainous walking simulation, the best Geometry Wars clone in years, and a touching look at the difficulties of adolescence through the surprisingly effective lens of mini-games.

As we look toward 2026, there are plenty of other big-budget projects that the industry is busy preparing for (the delayed Grand Theft Auto VI chief among them). If next year is anything like this year, though, we can look forward to plenty more games that no one saw coming suddenly vaulting into view as new classics.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Ubisoft Quebec; Windows, MaxOS, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2, iPad

When I was younger, I wanted—and expected—virtually every game I played to blow me away with something I’d not seen before. It was easier to hit that bar in the ’90s, when both the design and technology of games were moving at an incredible pace.

Now, as someone who still games in his 40s, I’m excited to see that when it happens, but I don’t expect it, Now, I increasingly appreciate games that act as a sort of comfort food, and I value some games as much for their familiarity as I do their originality.

That’s what Assassin’s Creed Shadows is all about (as I wrote when it first came out). It follows a well-trodden formula, but it’s a beautifully polished version of that formula. Its world is grand and escapist, its audio and graphics presentation is immersive, and it makes room for many different playstyles and skill levels.

If your idea of a good time is “be a badass, but don’t think too hard about it,” Shadows is one of the best Assassin’s Creed titles in the franchise’s long history. It doesn’t reinvent any wheels, but after nearly two decades of Assassin’s Creed, it doesn’t really need to; the new setting and story are enough to separate it, while the gameplay remains familiar.

-Samuel Axon

Avowed

Obsidian Entertainment; Windows, Xbox Series X|S

No game this year has made me feel as hated as Avowed. As an envoy for the far-off Aedryan empire, your role in Avowed is basically to be hated, either overtly or subtly, by almost everyone you encounter in the wild, semi-colonized world of the Living Lands. The low-level hum of hatred and mistrust from the citizens permeates everything you do in the game, which is an unsettling feeling in a genre usually characterized by the moral certitude of heroes fighting world-ending evil.

Role-playing aside, Avowed is helpfully carried by its strong action-packed combat system, characterized as it is by thrilling moment-to-moment positional jockeying and the juggling of magic spells, ranged weapons, and powerful close-range melee attacks. The game’s quest system also does a good job of letting players balance this combat difficulty for themselves—if a goal is listed with three skull symbols on your menu, you’d best put it off until you’ve leveled up a little bit more.

I can take or leave the mystical mumbo-jumbo-filled subplot surrounding your status as a “godlike” being that can converse with spirits. Aside from that, though, I’ve never had so much fun being hated.

-Kyle Orland

Baby Steps

Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy; Windows, PS5

The term “walking simulator” often gets thrown around in some game criticism circles as a derisive term for a title that’s about nothing more than walking around and looking at stuff. While Baby Steps might technically fit into that “walking simulator” model, stereotyping it in that way does this incredibly inventive game a disservice.

It starts with the walking itself, which requires meticulous, rhythmic manipulation of both shoulder buttons and both analog sticks just to stay upright. Super Mario 64, this ain’t. But what starts as a struggle to take just a few short steps quickly becomes almost habitual, much like learning to walk in real life.

The game then starts throwing new challenges at your feet. Slippery surfaces. Narrow stairways with tiny footholds. Overhangs that block your ridiculously useless, floppy upper body. The game’s relentless mountain is designed such that a single missed step can ruin huge chunks of progress, in the proud tradition of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

This all might sound needlessly cruel and frustrating, but trust me, it’s worth sticking with to the end. That’s in part for the feeling of accomplishment when you do finally make it past that latest seemingly impossible wall, and partly to experience an absolutely gonzo story that deals directly and effectively with ideas of masculinity, perseverance, and society itself. You’ll never be so glad to take that final step.

-Kyle Orland

Ball x Pit

Kenny Sun; Windows, MacOS, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2

The idea of bouncing a ball against a block is one of the most tried-and-true in all of gaming, from the basic version in the ancient Breakout to the number-filled angles of Holedown. But perhaps no game has made this basic concept as compulsively addictive as Ball x Pit.

Here, the brick-breaking genre is crossed with the almost as storied shoot-em-up, with the balls serving as your weapons and the blocks as enemies that march slowly but relentlessly from the top of the screen to the bottom. The key to destroying those blocks all in time is bouncing your growing arsenal of new balls at just the right angles to maximize their damage-dealing impact and catching them again so you can throw them once more that much faster.

Like so many roguelikes before it, Ball x Pit uses randomization as the core of its compulsive loop, letting you choose from a wide selection of new abilities and ball-based attacks as you slowly level up. But Ball x Pit goes further than most in letting you fuse and combine those balls into unique combinations that take dozens of runs to fully uncover and combine effectively.

Add in a deep system of semi-permanent upgrades (with its own intriguing “bounce balls around a city builder” mini game) and a deep range of more difficult settings and enemies to slowly unlock, and you have a game whose addictive pull will last much longer than you might expect from the simple premise.

-Kyle Orland

Blue Prince

Dogubomb; Windows, MacOS, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

Usually, when formulating a list like this, you can compare a title to an existing game or genre as a shorthand to explain what’s going on to newcomers. That’s nearly impossible with Blue Prince, a game that combines a lot of concepts to defy easy comparison to games that have come before it.

At its core, Blue Prince is about solving the mysteries of a house that you build while exploring it, drafting the next room from a selection of three options every time you open a new door. Your initial goal, if you can call it that, is to discover and access the mysterious “Room 46” that apparently exists somewhere on the 45-room grid. And while the houseplan you’re building resets with every in-game day, the knowledge you gain from exploring those rooms stays with you, letting you make incremental progress on a wide variety of puzzles and mysteries as you rebuild the mansion from scratch again and again.

What starts as a few simple and relatively straightforward puzzles quickly unfolds fractally into a complex constellation of conundrums, revealed slowly through scraps of paper, in-game books, inventory items, interactive machinery, and incidental background elements. Figuring out the more intricate mysteries of the mansion requires careful observation and, often, filling a real-life mad scientist’s notepad with detailed notes that look incomprehensible to an outsider. All the while, you have to manage each day’s limited resources and luck-of-the-draw room drafting to simply find the right rooms to make the requisite progress.

Getting to that storied Room 46 is enough to roll the credits on Blue Prince, and it serves as an engaging enough puzzle adventure in its own right. But that whole process could be considered a mere tutorial for a simply massive endgame, which is full of riddles that will perplex even the most experienced puzzlers while slowly building a surprisingly deep story of political intrigue and spycraft through some masterful environmental storytelling.

Some of those extreme late-game puzzles might be too arcane for their own good, honestly, and will send many players scrambling for a convenient guide or wiki for some hints. But even after playing for over 100 hours over two playthroughs, I’m pretty sure I’m still not done exploring all that Blue Prince has to offer.

-Kyle Orland

Civilization VII

Firaxis; Windows, MacOS, Linux, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S, Switch 2

This one will be controversial: I love Civilization VII.

Civilization VII launched as a bit of a mess. There were bugs and UI shortcomings aplenty. Most (but not all) of those have been addressed in the months since, but they’re not the main reason this is a tricky pick.

The studio behind the Civilization franchise, Firaxis, has long said it has a “33/33/33″ approach to sequels in the series, wherein 33 percent of the game should be familiar systems, 33 percent should be remixes or improvements of familiar systems, and 33 percent should be entirely new systems.

Critics of Civilization VII say Firaxis broke that 33/33/33 rule by overweighting the last 33 percent, mainly to chase innovations in the 4X genre by other games (like Humankind). I don’t disagree, but I also welcome it.

Credit is due to the team at Firaxis for ingeniously solving some longstanding design problems in the franchise, like using the new age transitions to curb snowballing and to expunge systems that become a lot less fun in the late game than they are in the beginning. Judged on its own terms, Civilization VII is a deep, addictive, and fun strategy game that I’ve spent more than 100 hours playing this year.

My favorite Civ game remains Civilization IV, but that game still runs fine on modern systems, is infinitely replayable out of the box, and enjoys robust modding support. I simply didn’t need more of the same from this particular franchise; to me, VII coexists with IV and others on my hard drive—very different flavors of the same idea.

-Samuel Axon

CloverPit

Panik Arcade; Windows, Xbox Series X|S

I’m not sure I like what my minor CloverPit obsession says about me. When I fell into a deep Balatro hole last year, I could at least delude myself into thinking there was some level of skill in deciding which jokers to buy and sell, which cards to add or prune from my deck, and which cards to hold and discard. In the end, though, I was as beholden to the gods of random number generation as any other Balatro player.

Cloverpit makes the surrender to the vagaries of luck all the more apparent, replacing the video-poker-like systems of Balatro with a “dumb” slot machine whose handle you’re forced to pull over and over again. Sure, there are still decisions to make, mostly regarding which lucky charms you purchase from a vending machine on the other side of the room. And there is some skill involved in learning and exploiting lucky charm synergies to extract the highest expected value from those slot machine pulls.

Once you’ve figured out those basic strategies, though, CloverPit mostly devolves into a series of rerolls waiting for the right items to show up in the shop in the right order. Thankfully, the game hides plenty of arcane secrets beneath its charming PS1-style spooky-horror presentation, slowly revealing new items and abilities that hint that something deeper than just accumulating money might be the game’s true end goal.

It’s this creepy vibe and these slowly unfolding secrets that have compelled me to pour dozens of hours into what is, in the end, just a fancy slot machine simulator. God help me.

-Kyle Orland

Consume Me

Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson; Windows, MacOS

Jenny is your average suburban Asian-American teenager, struggling to balance academic achievement, chores, an overbearing mother, romantic entanglements, and a healthy body image. What sounds like the premise for a cliché young adult novel actually serves to set up a compelling interactive narrative disguised as a mere mini-game collection.

Consume Me brilliantly integrates the conflicting demands placed on Jenny’s time and attention into the gameplay itself. Creating a balanced meal, for instance, becomes a literal test of balancing vaguely Tetris-shaped pieces of food on a tray, satisfying your hunger and caloric limits at the same time. Chores take up time but give you money you can spend on energy drinks that let you squeeze in more activities by staying up late (but can lead to debilitating headaches). A closet full of outfits becomes an array of power-ups to your time, energy, or focus.

It takes almost preternatural resource management skills and mini-game execution to satisfy all the expectations being placed on you, which is kind of the meta-narrative point. No matter how well you do, Jenny’s story develops in a way that serves as a touching semi-autobiographical look at the life of co-creator Jenny Jiao Hsia. That biography is made all the more sympathetic here for an interactive presentation that’s more engaging than any young adult novel could be.

-Kyle Orland

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Kojima Productions; PS5

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach should not be fun. Much like its predecessor, the latest release from famed game designer Hideo Kojima is about delivering packages—at least on the surface. Yet the process of planning your routes, managing inventory, and exploring an unfathomably strange post-apocalyptic world remains a winning formula.

The game again follows Sam Porter Bridges (played by Norman Reedus) on his quest to reconnect the world as humanity faces possible extinction. And yes, that means acting like a post-apocalyptic Amazon Prime. Standing in the way of an on-time delivery are violent raiders, dangerous terrain, and angry, disembodied spirits known as Beached Things.

It’s common to hear Death Stranding described as a walking simulator, and there is indeed a lot of walking, but the sequel introduces numerous quality-of-life improvements that make it more approachable. Death Stranding 2 has a robust fast-travel mechanic and better vehicles to save you from unnecessary marches, and the inventory management system is less clunky. That’s important in a game that asks you to traverse an entire continent to deliver cargo.

Beyond the core gameplay loop of stacking heavy boxes on your back, Death Stranding 2 has all the Kojima vibes you could want. There are plenty of quirky gameplay mechanics and long cutscenes that add depth to the characters and keep the story moving. The world of Death Stranding has been designed from the ground up around the designer’s flights of fancy, and it works—even the really weird stuff almost makes sense!

Along the way, Death Stranding 2 has a lot to say about grief, healing, and the value of human connection. The game’s most poignant cutscenes are made all the more memorable by an incredible soundtrack, and we cannot oversell the strength of the mocap performances.

It may take 100 hours or more to experience everything the game has to offer, but it’s well worth your time.

-Ryan Whitwam

Donkey Kong Bananza

Nintendo EPD; Switch 2

Since the days of Donkey Kong Country, I’ve always felt that Mario’s original ape antagonist wasn’t really up for anchoring a Mario-level platform franchise. Donkey Kong Bananza is the first game to really make me doubt that take.

Bonanza is a great showcase for the new, more powerful hardware on the Switch 2, with endlessly destructible environments that send some impressive-looking shiny shrapnel flying when they’re torn apart. It can’t be understated how cathartic it is to pound tunnels up, down, and through pretty much every floor, ceiling, and wall you see, mashing the world itself to suit your needs.

Bonanza also does a good job aping Super Mario Odyssey’s tendency to fill practically every square inch of space with collectible doodads and a wide variety of challenges. This is not a game where you need to spend a lot of time aimlessly wandering for the next thing to do—there’s pretty much always something interesting around the next corner until the extreme end game.

Sure, the camera angles and frame rate might suffer a bit during the more chaotic bits. But it’s hard to care when you’re having this much fun just punching your way through Bananza’s imaginative, colorful, and malleable world.

-Kyle Orland

Doom: The Dark Ages

Id Software; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

For a series that has always been about dodging, Doom: The Dark Ages is much more about standing your ground. The game’s key verbs involve raising your shield to block incoming attacks or, ideally, parrying them back in the direction they came.

It’s a real “zig instead of zag” moment for the storied Doom series, and it does take some getting used to. Overall, though, I had a great time mixing in turtle-style blocking with the habitual pattern of circling-strafing around huge groups of enemies in massive arenas and quickly switching between multiple weapons to deal with them as efficiently as possible. While I missed the focus on extreme verticality of the last two Doom games, I appreciate the new game’s more open-world design, which gives completionist players a good excuse to explore every square inch of these massive environments for extra challenges and hidden collectibles.

The only real problem with Doom: The Dark Ages comes when the game occasionally transitions to a slow-paced mech-style demon battle or awkward flying dragon section, sometimes for entire levels at a time. Those variations aside, I came away very satisfied with the minor change in focus for a storied shooter series.

-Kyle Orland

Dragonsweeper

Daniel Benmergui; Javascript

Anyone who has read my book-length treatise on Minesweeper knows I’m a sucker for games that involve hidden threats within a grid of revealed numbers. But not all variations on this theme are created equal. Dragonsweeper stands out from the crowd by incorporating a simple but arcane world of RPG-style enemies and items into its logical puzzles.

Instead of simply counting the number of nearby mines, each number revealed on the Dragonsweeper grid reflects the total health of the surrounding enemies, both seen and unseen. Attacking those enemies means enduring predictable counterattacks that deplete your limited health bar, which you can grow through gradual leveling until you’re strong enough to kill the game’s titular dragon, taunting you from the center of the field.

Altogether, it adds an intriguing new layer to the logical deduction, forcing you to carefully manage your moves to maximize the impact of your attacks and the limited health-restoring items scattered throughout the field. And while finishing one run isn’t too much of a challenge, completing the game’s optional achievements and putting together a “perfect” game score is enough to keep puzzle lovers coming back for hours and hours of compelling logical deduction.

-Kyle Orland

Elden Ring: Nightreign

FromSoftware; Windows, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S

At first blush, Nightreign feels like a twisted perversion of everything that has made FromSoft’s Souls series so compelling for so many years. What was a slow-paced, deliberate open-world RPG has become a game about quickly sprinting across a quickly contracting map, leveling up as quickly as possible before taking on punishing bosses. A moody solitary experience has become one that practically requires a group of three players working together. It’s like an Elden Ring-themed amusement park that seems to miss the point of the original.

Whatever. It still works!

Let the purists belly ache about how it’s not really Elden Ring. They’re right, but they’re missing the point. Nightreign condenses the general vibe of the Elden Ring world into something very different but no less enjoyable. What’s more, it packs that vibe into a tight experience that can be easily squeezed into a 45-minute sprint rather than requiring dozens of hours of deep exploration.

That makes it the perfect excuse to get together with a few like-minded Elden Ring-loving friends, throw on a headset, and just tear through the Lands Between together for the better part of an evening. As Elden Ring theme parks go, you could do a lot worse.

-Kyle Orland

Ghost of Yotei

Sucker Punch Productions; PS5

Ghost of Yotei from Sucker Punch Productions starts as a revenge tale, featuring hard-as-nails Atsu on the hunt for the outlaws who murdered her family. While there is plenty of revenge to be had in the lands surrounding Mount Yotei, the people Atsu meets and the stories they have to tell make this more than a two-dimensional quest for blood.

The game takes place on the northern Japanese island of Ezo (modern-day Hokkaido) several centuries after the developer’s last samurai game, Ghost of Tsushima. It has a lot in common with that title, but Ghost of Yotei was built for the PS5 and features a massive explorable world and stunning visuals. It’s easy to get sidetracked from your quest just exploring Ezo and tinkering with the game’s photo mode.

The land of Ezo avoids some of the missteps seen in other open-world games. While it’s expansive and rich with points of interest, exploring it is not tedious. There are no vacuous fetch quests or mindless collecting (or loading screens, for that matter). Even when you think you know what you’re going to find at a location, you may be surprised. The interesting side quests and random encounters compel you to keep exploring Ezo.

Ghost of Yotei’s combat is just as razor-sharp as its exploration. It features multiple weapon types, each with unlockable abilities and affinities that make them ideal for taking on certain foes. Brute force will only get you so far, though. You need quick reactions to parry enemy attacks and strike back—it’s challenging and rewarding but not frustrating.

It’s impossible to play Ghost of Yotei without becoming invested in the journey, and a big part of that is thanks to the phenomenal voice work of Erika Ishii as Atsu. Some of the game’s pivotal moments will haunt you, but luckily, the developer has just added a New Game+ mode so you can relive them all again.

-Ryan Whitwam

Hades 2

Supergiant Games; Windows, MacOS, Switch, Switch 2

There’s a moment in the second section of Hades 2 where you start to hear a haunting melody floating through the background. That music gets louder and louder until you reach the game’s second major boss, a trio of sirens that go through a full rock-opera showtune number as you dodge their bullet-hell attacks and look for openings to go in for the kill. That three-part musical presentation slowly dwindles to a solo as you finally dispatch the sirens one by one, restoring a surprisingly melancholy silence once more.

It’s this and other musical moments casually and effortlessly woven through Hades 2 that will stick with me the most. But the game stands on its own beyond the musicality, expanding the original game’s roguelike action with a compelling new spell system that lets you briefly capture or slow enemies in a binding circle. This small addition adds a new sense of depth to the moment-to-moment positional dance that was already so compelling in the original Hades.

Hades 2 also benefits greatly from the introduction of Melinoe, a compelling new protagonist who gets fleshed out through her relationship with the usual rogue’s gallery of gods and demigods. Come for her quest of self-discovery, stay for the moments of musical surprise.

-Kyle Orland

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Team Cherry; Windows, MacOS, Linux, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2

A quickie sequel in the year or two after Hollow Knight’s out-of-nowhere success in 2017 might have been able to get away with just being a more-of-the-same glorified expansion pack. But after over eight years of overwhelming anticipation from fans, Silksong had to really be something special to live up to its promise.

Luckily, it is. Silksong is a beautiful expansion of the bug-scale underground universe created in the first game. Every new room is a work of painterly beauty, with multiple layers of detailed 2D art drawing you further into its intricate and convincing fallen world.

The sprawling map seems to extend forever in every direction, circling back around and in on itself with plenty of optional alleyways in which to get lost searching for rare power-ups. And while the game is a punishingly hard take on action platforming, there’s usually a way around the most difficult reflex tests for players willing to explore and think a bit outside the box.

Even players who hit a wall and never make it through the sprawling tunnels of Silksong’s labyrinthine underground will still find plenty of memorable moments in whatever portion of the game they do experience.

-Kyle Orland

The King Is Watching

Hypnohead; Windows

A lot of good resource tiles there, but the king can only look at six at a time. Credit: Hypnohead / Steam

In a real-time-strategy genre that can often feel too bloated and complex for its own good, The King Is Watching is a streamlined breath of fresh air. Since the entire game takes place on a single screen, there’s no need to constantly pan and zoom your camera around a sprawling map. Instead, you can stay laser-focused on your 5×5 grid of production space and on which portion of it is actively productive under the king’s limited gaze at any particular moment.

Arranging tiles to maximize that production of basic resources and military units quickly becomes an all-consuming juggling act, requiring constant moment-to-moment decisions that can quickly cascade through a run. I’m also a big fan of the game’s self-selecting difficulty system, which asks you to choose how many enemies you think you can take in coming waves, doling out better rewards for players who are willing to push themselves to the limit of their current capabilities.

The bite-size serving of a single King Is Watching run ensures that even failure doesn’t feel too crushing. And success brings with it just enough in the way of semi-permanent ability expansions to encourage another run where you can reach even greater heights of production and protection.

-Kyle Orland

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Warhorse Studios; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a slog that I had to will myself to complete. It was sometimes a broken and janky game, but despite its warts, I saw the potential for something special. And that’s what its sequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, has delivered.

While it’s still a slow burn, the overall experience has been greatly refined, the initial challenge has been smoothed out, and I’ve rarely been more immersed in an RPG’s storytelling. There’s no filler, as every story beat and side quest offers a memorable tale that further paints the setting and characters of medieval Bohemia.

Unlike most RPGs, there’s no magic to be had, which is a big part of the game’s charm. As Henry of Skalitz, you are of meager social standing, and many characters you speak to will be quick to remind you of it. While Henry is a bit better off than his humble beginnings in the first game, you’re no demigod that can win a large battle single-handedly. In fact, you’ll probably lose fairly often in the early goings if more than one person is attacking you.

Almost every fight is a slow dance once you’re in a full suit of armor, and your patience and timing will be the key to winning over the stats of your equipment. But therein lies the beauty of KC:D II: Every battle you pick, whether physical or verbal, carries some weight to your experience and shapes Bohemia for better or worse.

-Jacob May

Mario Kart World

Nintendo; Switch 2

After the incredible success of Mario Kart 8 and its various downloadable content packs on the Switch, Nintendo could have easily done a prettier “more of the same” sequel as the launch-window showcase for the Switch 2. Instead, the company took a huge gamble in trying to transform Mario Kart’s usual distinct tracks into a vast, interconnected open world.

This conceit works best in “Free Roam” mode, where you can explore the outskirts of the standard tracks and the wide open spaces in between for hundreds of mini-challenges that test your driving speed and precision. Add in dozens of collectible medallions and outfits hidden in hard-to-reach corners, and the mode serves as a great excuse to explore every nook and cranny of a surprisingly detailed and fleshed-out world map.

I was also a big fan of Knockout Mode, which slowly whittles a frankly overwhelming field of 24 initial racers to a single winner through a series of endurance rally race checkpoints. These help make up for a series of perplexing changes that hamper the tried-and-true Battle Mode formula and long straightaway sections that feel more than a little bit stifling in the standard Grand Prix mode. Still, Free Roam mode had me happily whiling away dozens of hours with my new Switch 2 this year.

-Kyle Orland

Sektori

Kimmo Lahtinen; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

For decades now, I’ve been looking for a twin-stick shooter that fully captures the compulsive thrill of the Geometry Wars franchise. Sektori, a late-breaking addition to this year’s top games list, is the first game I can say does so without qualification.

Like Geometry Wars, Sektori has you weaving through a field filled with simple shapes that quickly fill your personal space with ruthless efficiency. But Sektori advances that basic premise with an elegant “strike” system that lets you dash through encroaching enemies and away from danger with the tap of a shoulder button. Advanced players can get a free, instant strike refill by dashing into an upgrade token, and stringing those strikes together creates an excellent risk-vs-reward system of survival versus scoring.

Sektori also features an excellent Gradius-style upgrade system that forces you to decide on the fly whether to take basic power-ups or save up tokens for more powerful weaponry and/or protection further down the line. And just when the basic gameplay threatens to start feeling stale, the game throws in a wide variety of bosses and new modes that mix things up just enough to keep you twitching away.

Throw in an amazing soundtrack and polished presentation that makes even the most crowded screens instantly comprehensible, and you have a game I can see myself coming back to for years—until my reflexes are just too shot to keep up with the frenetic pace anymore.

-Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

Ars Technica’s Top 20 video games of 2025 Read More »

TV Technica: Our favorite shows of 2025

best of 2025, culture, Entertainment, Features, Staff source, television / Mike M. / December 24, 2025

Netflix and Apple TV dominate this year’s list with thrillers, fantasy, sci-fi, and murder.

Credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson

Editor’s note: Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows that some might consider spoiler-y.

This was a pretty good year for television, with established favorites sharing space on our list with some intriguing new shows. Streaming platforms reigned supreme, with Netflix and Apple TV dominating our list with seven and five selections each. Genre-wise, we’ve got a bit of everything: period dramas (The Gilded Age, Outrageous), superheroes (Daredevil: Born Again), mysteries (Ludwig, Poker Face, Dept. Q), political thrillers (The Diplomats, Slow Horses), science fiction (Andor, Severance, Alien: Earth), broody fantasy (The Sandman), and even an unconventional nature documentary (Underdogs).

As always, we’re opting for an unranked list, with the exception of our “year’s best” selection at the very end, so you might look over the variety of genres and options and possibly add surprises to your eventual watchlist. We invite you to head to the comments and add your own favorite TV shows released in 2025.

Underdogs (National Geographic/Disney+)

a honey badger investigates a logg in South Africa — Credit: National Geographic/Doug Parker

Most of us have seen a nature documentary or two (or three) at some point in our lives, so it’s a familiar format: sweeping, majestic footage of impressively regal animals accompanied by reverently high-toned narration (preferably with a tony British accent). Underdogs takes a decidedly different approach. Narrated with hilarious irreverence by Ryan Reynolds, the five-part series highlights nature’s less cool and majestic creatures—the outcasts and benchwarmers more noteworthy for their “unconventional hygiene choices” and “unsavory courtship rituals.” (It’s rated PG-13 due to the odd bit of scatalogical humor and shots of Nature Sexy Time.)

Each of the five episodes is built around a specific genre. “Superheroes” highlights the surprising superpowers of the honey badger, pistol shrimp, and the invisible glass frog, among others, augmented with comic book graphics; “Sexy Beasts” focuses on bizarre mating habits and follows the format of a romantic advice column; “Terrible Parents” highlights nature’s worst practices, following the outline of a parenting guide; “Total Grossout” is exactly what it sounds like; and “The Unusual Suspects” is a heist tale, documenting the supposed efforts of a macaque to put together the ultimate team of masters of deception and disguise (an inside man, a decoy, a fall guy, etc.). Green Day even wrote and recorded a special theme song for the opening credits.

While Reynolds mostly followed the script (which his team helped write), there was also a fair amount of improvisation—not all of it PG-13. The producers couldn’t use the racier ad-libs. But some made it into the final episodes, like Reynolds describing an aye-aye as “if fear and panic had a baby and rolled it in dog hair.” We also meet the velvet worm, which creeps up on unsuspecting prey before squirting disgusting slime all over their food, and the pearl fish, which hides from predators in a sea cucumber’s butt, among other lowly yet fascinating critters. Verdict: Underdogs is positively addictive. It’s my favorite nature documentary ever.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Dept. Q (Netflix)

group of people I'm an underground office sanding around a desk — Credit: Netflix

Dep. Q is a rare show that commits to old tropes—an unlikable but smart central character revisits cold cases—and somehow manages to repackage them in a way that feels distinctive. To get a sense of the show, you only have to describe its precise genre. You might call it a murder mystery, and there are murders in it, but one of the mysteries is whether a key player is alive or not, given that a lot of her story takes place in flashbacks with an uncertain relationship to the present. It’s almost a police procedural, except that many of the police are only following procedures grudgingly and erratically. It’s not really a whodunnit, given that you only end up learning who done some of it by the time the first season wraps up. And so on.

Amid all the genre fluidity, the show does a great job of balancing the key challenge of a mystery program: telling you enough that you can make reasonably informed guesses on at least some of what’s going on without giving the whole game away and making it easy to figure out all the details. And the acting is superb. Matthew Goode does a nice job of handling the central character’s recent trauma while helping you understand why he has a few loyal co-workers despite the fact that he was probably unlikable even before he was traumatized. And Alexej Manvelov (who I’d never seen before) is fantastic as a former Syrian policeman who drops occasional hints that he had been an active participant in that country’s police state.

There are definitely quibbles. The creation of a cold case squad happens on the flimsiest of motivations, and the fantastic Kelly Macdonald is badly underused. But the show is definitely good enough that I’m curious about some additional mysteries: Can the team behind it continue to avoid getting bogged down in the tropes in season two, and which of the many threads it left unresolved will be picked up when they try?

—John Timmer

Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+)

Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk sitting across from each other in a diner — Credit: Marvel/Disney+

Enthusiasm was understandably high for Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel’s revival of the hugely popular series in the Netflix Defenders universe. Not only was Charlie Cox returning to the title role as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, but Vincent D’Onofrio was also coming back as his nemesis, crime lord Wilson Fisk/Kingpin. Their dynamic has always been electric, and that on-screen magic is as powerful as ever in Born Again, which quickly earned critical raves and a second season.

Granted, there were some rough spots. The entire season was overhauled during the 2023 Hollywood strikes, and at times it felt like two very different shows. A weird serial killer subplot was primarily just distracting. There was also the controversial decision to kill off a major character from the original Netflix series in the first episode. But that creative choice cleared the decks to place the focus squarely on Matt’s and Fisk’s parallel arcs, and the two central actors do not disappoint.

Matt decides to focus on his legal work while Fisk is elected mayor of New York City, intent on leaving his criminal life behind. But each struggles to remain in the light as the dark sides of their respective natures fight to be released. The result is an entertaining, character-driven series that feels very much a part of its predecessor while still having its own distinctive feel.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Boots (Netflix)

army boot camp recruits running as part of their training in yellow t shirts and red shorts — Credit: Netflix

I confess I might have missed Boots had it not been singled out and dismissed as “woke garbage” by the Pentagon—thereby doubling the show’s viewership. I was pleased to discover that it’s actually a moving, often thought-provoking dramedy that humanizes all the young men from many different backgrounds who volunteer to serve their country in the US military. The show is based on a memoir (The Pink Marine) by Greg Cope White about his experiences as a gay teen in the military in the 1980s when gay and bisexual people weren’t allowed to serve. Boots is set in the early 1990s just before the onset of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era.

Miles Heizer stars as Cameron Cope (Cope White’s fictional alter ego), a closeted gay teen in Louisiana who signs up as a recruit for the US Marine Corps with his best (straight) friend Ray (Liam Oh). He’s not the most promising recruit, but over the course of eight episodes, we see him struggle, fail, pick himself back up, and try again during the grueling boot camp experience, forming strong bonds with his fellow recruits but all the while terrified of being outed and kicked out.

Heizer gives a powerful performance as Cameron, enhanced by the contrast with Max Parker’s stellar portrayal of the tightly wound Sergeant Liam Robert Sullivan—a decorated Marine inexplicably reassigned to train recruits while harboring his own secrets. Nor is Miles’ story the only focus: We learn more about several characters and their private struggles, and those inter-relationships are the heart and soul of the show. Netflix canceled the series, but this one season stands tall on its own.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Only Murders in the Building S5 (Hulu)

young woman and two older men posing against backdrop of iconic NYC buildings — Credit: Hulu

This charming Emmy-nominated comedy series has made our “Best of TV” list every season, and 2025 is no exception. Only Murders in the Building (OMITB) stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as Charles, Oliver, and Mabel, all residents of the same Manhattan apartment complex, the Arconia. The unlikely trio teams up to launch their own true crime podcast whenever someone dies in the building under suspicious circumstances, chronicling their independent investigation to solve the murder. There’s no shortage of podcast fodder, as this single building has a shockingly high murder rate.

S5 focused on the death of the building’s doorman, Lester (Teddy Coluca), found floating in the Arcadia’s fountain in the season finale. The discovery of a severed finger leads our team to conclude that Lester was murdered. Their quest involves a trio of billionaires, the mayor (Keegan-Michael Key), a missing mafioso (Bobby Cannavale) and his widow (Tea Leoni), and maybe even the building’s new robotic assistant, LESTR (voiced by Paul Rudd). As always, the season finale sets up next season’s murder: that of rival podcaster Cinda Canning (Tina Fey), who lives just long enough to reach the Arcadia’s gates and place one hand into the courtyard—technically dying “in the building.” One assumes that OMITB will eventually run out of fresh takes on its clever concept, but it certainly hasn’t done so yet.

—Jennifer Ouellette

The Sandman S2 (Netflix)

Morpheus holds the key to Hell. — Credit: Netflix

I unequivocally loved the first season of The Sandman, the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s influential graphic novel series (of which I am a longtime fan). I thought it captured the surreal, dream-like feel and tone of its source material, striking a perfect balance between the anthology approach of the graphic novels and grounding the narrative by focusing on the arc of its central figure: Morpheus, lord of the Dreaming. It was a long wait for the second and final season, but S2 retains all those elements to bring Dream’s story to its inevitably tragic yet satisfying end.

As always, the casting is extraordinary and the performances are note-perfect across the board. And Netflix did not skimp on the visuals, which bring the graphic novel imagery to vivid life. I still appreciate how the leisurely pacing lets the viewer relax and sink into this richly layered fictional world. Part I kicked off with an Endless family reunion that led Dream into revisiting Hell and agreeing to his sister Delirium’s request to look for their absent brother, Destruction. That sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the tragedy that unfolds in Part II. The bonus episode, in which Death gets one day (every hundred years) to be human—an adaptation of the standalone Death: The High Cost of Living—serves as a lovely coda to this unique series, which is pretty much everything I could have wanted in an adaptation.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Ludwig (BBC)

middle aged man in dress shirt and short sleeved sweater meticulously working on a puzzle on an easel — Credit: BBC

Ludwig is a clever twist on the British cozy mystery genre. David Mitchell stars as John Taylor, a reclusive eccentric who creates puzzles for a living under the pseudonym “Ludwig.” When his identical twin brother, Cambridge DCI James Taylor (also Mitchell), goes missing, his sister-in-law Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) convinces John to go undercover. John reluctantly pretends to be James to gain access to the police department in hopes of finding out what happened to his twin. He inevitably gets drawn into working on cases—and turns out to be exceptionally good at applying his puzzle skills to solve murders, even as his anxiety grows about his subterfuge being discovered.

The best crime shows deftly balance cases-of-the-week with longer character-driven story arcs, and Ludwig achieves that balance beautifully. The writers brought in a puzzle consultant to create the various crosswords that appear in the series, as well as a special cryptic crossword done in character as Ludwig that appeared in The Guardian. The first season ended with a bit of a cliffhanger about what’s really been going on with James, but fortunately, the BBC has renewed Ludwig for a second season, so we’ll get to see more of our cryptic crime-solver.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Poker Face S2 (Peacock)

red haired woman in thigh boots and leather jacket standing in front of a classic blue sports car — Credit: Peacock

Poker Face is perfect comfort TV, evolving the case-of-the-week format that made enduring early TV hits like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote iconic. The second season takes the endlessly likeable BS-detector Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) to the end of the road after she overcomes fleeing the mob in her 1969 Plymouth Barracuda. Along the way, Charlie pals around with A-list guest stars and solves crimes, winding her way from Florida to New York as each delightful new caper serves not to ramp up tension but to disrupt how viewers anticipate Charlie will move. Some might think that the lack of tension made the season weaker. But creator Rian Johnson recently revealed that he expects Poker Face to cast a new lead detective every two years. That makes it seem clear that Charlie’s second season was more about release.

In the most memorable episode of the season, “Sloppy Joseph,” the front row of an elementary school talent show suddenly becomes a bloody splash zone when a bullied boy is framed for killing the class pet, a gerbil, with a giant mallet. That scene is perhaps an apt metaphor for Johnson’s attempt to keep modern-day viewers from turning away from their TVs by shattering expectations. It’s unclear yet if his formulaic TV hijinks will work, but if anyone decides to pick up Poker Face after Peacock declined to renew it, Peter Dinklage is next in line to become the world’s greatest lie detector.

—Ashley Belanger

The Gilded Age S3 (HBO)

young woman with her parents in evening dress standing in an opera box — Credit: HBO

I was a latecomer to this eminently watchable show created by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), who also gave us the Emmy-winning sensation Downton Abbey. Instead of following the adventures of post-Edwardian British aristocracy and their domestic servants, the focus is on ultra-wealthy Americans and their domestic servants in the 1880s and the social tensions that arise from the “old money” versus “new money” dynamic of this rapidly changing period. The Gilded Age has been described as an “operatic soap” (rather than a soap opera), replete with a hugely talented ensemble cast donning lavish costumes and cavorting in extravagantly opulent settings. It’s unadulterated, addictive escapism, and the series really hit its stride in S3.

Old Money is represented by Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), a wealthy widow who lives with her spinster sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon); orphaned niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson); and son and heir Oscar (Blake Ritson), a closeted gay man seeking to marry a rich heiress. Living just across the street is New Money, personified by robber baron/railroad tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his socially ambitious wife Bertha (Carrie Coon) and their two children. You’ve got Marian’s friend Peggy (Denee Benton) representing the emerging Black upper class and a colorful assortment of domestics in both houses, like aspiring inventor Jack (Ben Ahlers), who dreams of greater things.

Fictionalized versions of notable historical people occasionally appear, and two figure prominently: Caroline Astor (Donna Murphy), who ruled New York society at the time, and her simpering sycophant Ward McAllister (Nathan Lane). (The Russells are loosely inspired by William and Ava Vanderbilt.) The stakes might sometimes seem small—there’s a multi-episode arc devoted to which of two competing opera houses New York’s social elite will choose to sponsor—but for the characters, they are huge, and Fellowes makes the audience feel equally invested in the outcomes. There were a few rough edges in the first season, but The Gilded Age quickly found its footing; it has gotten better and more richly textured with each successive season and never takes itself too seriously.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Outrageous (Britbox)

Aristocratic Family photo circa 1930s with everyone lined up along the grand staircase — Credit: Britbox

The Mitford sisters were born to be immortalized one day in a British period drama, and Outrageous is happy to oblige. There were six of them (and one brother), and their scandalous exploits frequently made global headlines in the 1930s. This is ultimately a fictionalized account of how the rise of Hitler and British fascism fractured this once tight-knit aristocratic family. The focus is on smaller, domestic drama—budding romances, failed marriages, literary aspirations, and dwindling fortunes—colored by the ominous global events unfolding on a larger scale.

Nancy (Bessie Carter) is the primary figure, an aspiring novelist with a cheating husband who feels increasingly alienated from her older sister and bestie Diana (Joanna Vanderham). Diana married a baron but becomes enamored of Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), leader of the British fascist party, embarking on a torrid affair. Another sister, Unity (Shannon Watson), is also seduced by Nazi ideology and has a major crush on Hitler. Meanwhile, Jessica (Zoe Brough) is drawn to the Communist cause, which rankles both her siblings and her traditionally conservative parents.

Things come to a head when Unity goes to study in Germany and becomes completely radicalized, even publishing a vicious anti-semitic screed that shames the family. Diana also goes all-in on fascism when she leaves her husband for Mosley, whom Nancy loathes. Jessica elopes with her Communist cousin to Spain to be on the front lines of that civil war, leading to a lifelong estrangement from Diana. Nancy, the political moderate, is caught in the middle, torn between her love for her sisters and her increasing discomfort with Diana and Unity’s extreme political views.

The Mitford sisters were prolific letter writers all their lives, so there was plenty of material for screenwriter Sarah Williams to draw on when fictionalizing their stories at such a pivotal point in the family’s (and the world’s) history. Outrageous is quite historically accurate in broad outlines, and there are plenty of moments of wry, understated humor amid the family tensions. The gifted cast makes the sisters come alive in all their flawed humanity. There’s no word yet on a second season, and this one ends on a suitable note, but there’s so much more story left to tell, so I hope Outrageous returns.

—Jennifer Ouellette

A Man on the Inside S2 (Netflix)

White haired older man in a nice blue suit and tie standing in front of a blackboard filled with equations in a college classroom — Credit: Netflix

I’ll admit I wasn’t sure how well A Man on the Inside would fare with its sophomore season after knocking it out of the park in S1. I should have known showrunner Mike Schur (The Good Place) could pull it off. Ted Danson plays Charles Nieuwendyk, a recently widowed retired engineering professor. In S1, he was hired by private detective Julie Kovalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) to go undercover at a San Francisco retirement community to solve the mystery of a stolen ruby necklace. In S2, Charles returns to his academic roots and goes undercover at fictional Wheeler College to solve the mystery of a stolen laptop—a crime that just might have implications for the survival of the college itself.

Charles even falls in love for the first time since his wife’s death with music professor Mona Margadoff (Mary Steenburgen, Danson’s wife IRL), despite the two being polar opposites. The show continues to be a welcome mix of funny, sweet, sour, and touching, while never lapsing into schmaltz. The central Thanksgiving episode—where Mona meets Charles’s family and friends for the first time—is a prime example, as various tensions simmering below the surface erupt over the dinner table. Somehow, everyone manages to make their respective peace in entirely believable ways. It’s lovely to see a series grapple so openly, with so much warmth and humor, with the loneliness of aging and grief and how it can affect extended family. And the show once again drives home the message that new beginnings are always possible, even when one thinks one’s life is over.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Andor S2 (Disney+)

Star Wars rebel Cassian in the cockpit of a spacecraft — Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney+

When real-life political administrations refer to officials as Darth Vader in unironically flattering terms, maybe George Lucas made the Dark Lord of the Sith a little too iconic. Showrunner Tony Gilroy made no such effort in his depiction of the fascists in Andor.

During Andor‘s run, which ended this year with S2, the Empire is full of sad corporate ladder climbers who are willing to stab another in the back to get to the next rung of the Imperial hierarchy. The show makes it clear that these are not people to emulate. If more fans watched the show, maybe that message could have landed for them.

For people who grew up with Star Wars and want something more to chew on in our adulthood than endless callbacks to the original trilogy, Andor is revelatory. It colors the war of light versus dark with large amounts of gray because sometimes, as one character puts it, you have to use the tools of your enemy to defeat them (save for genetically gifted farmboys). Maybe most of Star Wars was always supposed to be for kids, but prestige TV viewers got a glimpse of what the universe could feel like if it took itself more seriously. Rather than use the broad strokes of a war of good versus evil, Andor painted between the lines to demonstrate how systemic oppression can look a lot more personal than firing a giant space laser.

For all its great writing and themes, Andor also delivered high stakes and suspense. Although we already knew the outcome of the story, we still held our breath during tense scenes with characters who make the ultimate sacrifice for a future they will never see.

—Jacob May

National Finals Rodeo (The Cowboy Channel)

exterior view of Thomas & Mack area in Las Vegas with banner proclaiming the 2024 Wranger National Finals rodeo — Credit: Sean Carroll

My personal end-of-year TV list would never be complete without a nod to The Cowboy Channel, i.e., the only place where armchair enthusiasts like myself can follow our favorite cowboys and cowgirls throughout the rodeo season. The goal is to rack up enough money to qualify for the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo (NFR), held at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas every December. This year, I’ve picked the channel’s stellar annual coverage of the NFR itself to highlight. The entire season comes down to this: an intense 10-day competition in which the top 15 athletes in each event duke it out night after night in hopes of winning a coveted championship gold buckle. And night after night, The Cowboy Channel is there with live commentary and post-round analysis.

What I love most is just how unpredictable the NFR can be. Part of that is the substantial monetary rewards that come with round wins; an athlete coming in at #1 in earnings can see even a substantial lead evaporate over just a few nights. Part of it has to do with who wins the average, i.e., who performs the best over ten nights collectively in each event. Winning the average comes with a substantial payout that can lead to unexpected upsets in the final results. But mostly it’s just the human factor: The best in the world can have a bad night, and young rookies can have the night of their lives. An ill-timed injury can knock an athlete out of the competition entirely. And sometimes the judges make inexplicably bad calls with major consequences (*coughStetson Wright in Round 6 saddle bronc *cough*).

It’s all part of the excitement of rodeo. The Cowboy Channel’s in-depth coverage lets us experience all that drama even if we can’t attend in person and lets us savor how the story unfolds in each subsequent round. We celebrate the wins, mourn the losses, and cheer mightily for the final champions. (Stetson did just fine in the end.) Then we gear up to do it all over again next year.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Top Guns: The Next Generation (National Geographic/Disney+)

backs of four fighter pilots walking toward a fighter jet — Credit: National Geographic

The blockbuster success of the 1986 film Top Gun—chronicling the paths of young naval aviators as they go through the grueling US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School (aka the titular Top Gun)—spawned more than just a successful multimedia franchise. It has also been credited with inspiring future generations of fighter pilots. National Geographic took viewers behind the scenes to see the process play out for real with the documentary series Top Guns: The Next Generation.

Each episode focuses on a specific aspect of the training, following a handful of students from the Navy and Marines through the highs and lows of their training. That includes practicing dive bombs at breakneck speeds, successfully landing on an aircraft carrier by “catching the wire,” learning the most effective offensive and defensive maneuvers in dogfighting, and, finally, engaging in a freestyle dogfight against a seasoned instructor to complete the program and (hopefully) earn their golden wings. NatGeo was granted unprecedented access, even using in-cockpit cameras to capture the pulse-pounding action of being in the air, as well as more candidly intimate behind-the-scenes moments as the students grapple with their respective successes and failures. It’s a riveting watch.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Alien: Earth (FX/Hulu)

young woman standing in a futuristic corridor bathed in white light — Credit: FX/Hulu

My first draft of what was supposed to be a 300-ish word blurb describing why Alien: Earth is fantastic ended up exploding into a Defector-esque narrative deep dive into my ever-evolving relationship with Alien 3 as a film and how Alien: Earth has helped reshape my appreciation for that poor broken baby of a movie by mixing the best of its visual techniques into A:E’s absolutely masterful cocktail of narrative stylings—but I’ll spare you all of that.

Here’s the short version without the bloviating: Alien: Earth is the thing I’ve been waiting for since I walked out of the theater after seeing Alien 3 in the summer of 1992. Unlike Alien Resurrection, any of the AvPs, or the wet-fart, falls-apart-like-mud-in-the-third-act swing-and-miss of Alien: Romulus, A:E gets nearly everything right. It’s grounded without being stodgy; exciting without being stupid; referential without being derivative; fun without being pandering; respectful of the lore while being willing to try something new; and, above all else, it bleeds craftsmanship—every frame makes it obvious that this is a show made by people who love and care for the Alien universe.

The thing that grabs me anew with every episode is the show’s presentation and execution—a self-aware blending of all the best things Scott, Cameron, and Fincher brought to their respective films. As I get older, I’m drawn more and more to entertainment that shows me interesting things and does so in ontologically faithful ways—and oh, does this show ever deliver.

Each episode is a carefully crafted visual and tonal mix of all the previous Alien films, with the episodes’ soundtracks shifting eras to match the action on-screen—like Alien 3’s jumpy choir flash-cut opening credits melding into Aliens’ lonely snare drums. The result is a blended world made of all the best things I remember from the films, and it works in the same way the game Alien: Isolation worked: by conjuring up exactly what the places where we used to have nightmares looked and felt like, and then scaring us there again.

I have heard that The Internet had some problems with the show, but, eh, everybody’s going to hate something. I vaguely remember some of the complaints having to do with how some of the new alien life-forms seem to be scarier or deadlier than our beloved and familiar main monster. All I’ve got for that one is a big fat shrug—I’m fine with our capital-A-aliens sharing the stage with some equally nasty new creatures. The aliens are always more interesting as devices to explore a story than as dramatic ends themselves, and I mean, let’s face it, in the past 40-plus years, there’s not much we haven’t seen them do and/or kill. They’re a literary force, not characters, and I’m way more interested in seeing how they shape the story of the people around them.

The tl;dr is that Alien: Earth is awesome, and if you haven’t watched it, you absolutely should. And when I was a kid, I used to regularly get put in time-out in recess for stiff-arming other kids while pretending to be a power loader, so you should consider my tastemaking credentials in this matter unimpeachable.

—Lee Hutchinson

Squid Game S3 (Netflix)

assembly of asian people in matching jumpsuits preparing to compete in a deadly game — Credit: Netflix

In the most violent series to ever catch the world’s attention by playing beloved children’s games, it turns out that the most high-stakes choice that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk could make was to put a child in the arena. For Squid Game‘s final season, Hwang has said the season’s pivotal moment—a pregnant girl birthing a baby during a game of hide-and-seek with knives—was designed to dash viewers’ hopes that a brighter future may await those who survive the games. By leaving the task of saving the baby to the series hero, Seong Gi-hun, whose own strained relationship with his daughter led him into the games in the first season, Squid Game walked a gritty tightrope to the very end.

The only real misstep was involving the goofiest set of cartoon villain VIPs more directly in the games. But we can forgive Hwang the clunky Dr. Evil-like dialogue that slowed down the action. He’s made it clear that he put everything into developing dramatic sequences for the game players—losing teeth, barely eating, rarely sleeping—and he fully admitted to The New York Times that “I have a cartoonish way of giving comic relief.

—Ashley Belanger

The Diplomat S3 (Netflix)

blonde woman on cell phone with a concerned look on her face — Credit: Netflix

Let’s be clear: The Diplomat is a soap opera. If you’re not into cliffhangers, intense levels of drama, and will-they-won’t-they sexual tension, it’s probably not going to be for you. Sometimes there’s so much going on that it becomes almost farcical. If that doesn’t scare you off, what do you get in return?

Superb actors given rich and intriguing characters to inhabit. A political drama that nicely finds a balance between the excessive idealism of The West Wing and the excessive cynicism of Veep. A disturbingly realistic-feeling series of crises that the characters sometimes direct, and sometimes hang on for dear life as they get dragged along by. And, well, the cliffhangers have been good enough to get me tuning in to the next season as soon as it appears on Netflix.

Kerri Russell plays the titular diplomat, who is assigned to what seems like a completely innocuous position: ambassador to one of the US’s closest allies, the UK. Rufus Sewell portrays her husband, a loose-to-the-point-of-unmoored cannon who ensures the posting is anything but innocuous. Ali Ahn and Ato Assandoh, neither of whom I was familiar with, are fantastic as embassy staff. And as the central crisis has grown in scale, some familiar West Wing faces (Allison Janey and Bradley Whitford) have joined the cast. Almost all of the small roles have been superbly acted as well. And for all the dysfunction, cynicism, and selfish behavior that drive the plot forward, the politics in The Diplomat feels like pleasant escapism when compared to the present reality.

—John Timmer

Murderbot (Apple TV)

shot of head and upper torso of white armored robot and a faceless mask — Credit: Apple TV+

Apple TV+’s Murderbot, based on Martha Wells’ bestselling series of novels The Murderbot Diaries, is a jauntily charming sci-fi comedy dripping with wry wit and an intriguing mystery. Murderbot the TV series adapts the first book in the series, All Systems Red. A security unit that thinks of itself as Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) is on assignment on a distant planet, protecting a team of scientists who hail from a “freehold.”

Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) is the team leader. The team also includes Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) and Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), who is an augmented human plugged into the same data feeds as Murderbot (processing at a much slower rate). Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) also serves as the team’s legal counsel; they are in a relationship with Arada (Tattiawna Jones), eventually becoming a throuple with Ratthi (Akshaye Khanna). Unbeknownst to the team, Murderbot has figured out how to override his governor module that compels it to obey the humans’ commands. So Murderbot essentially has free will.

The task of adapting Wells’ novellas for TV fell to sibling co-creators Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz. (Wells herself was a consulting producer.) They’ve kept most of the storyline intact, fleshing out characters and punching up the humor a bit, even recreating campy scenes from Murderbot’s favorite show, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. (John Cho and Clark Gregg make cameos as the stars of that fictional show-within-a-show.) The entire cast is terrific, but it’s Skarsgård’s hilariously deadpan performance that holds it all together as he learns how to relate to the humans—even forming some unexpectedly strong bonds.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Down Cemetery Road (Apple TV)

short gray-haired room in black coat staring through a mesh fence — Credit: Apple TV

Fans of Slow Horses (see below), rejoice: with Down Cemetery Road, Apple TV has blessed us with another exciting mystery thriller series based on the works of Mick Herron—in this case, his 2003 novel introducing private investigator Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson). Ruth Wilson co-stars as Sarah, an artist rather unhappily married to a finance bro. A neighboring building is destroyed by an explosion, and Sarah tries to deliver a get-well card to a little girl who survived from her young classmates. She’s inexplicably rebuffed, and her dogged attempts to figure out what’s going on lead her to seek the help of Zoë’s PI partner and estranged husband Joe (Adam Godley). What Joe finds out gets him killed, setting Sarah and Zoë on a collision course with high-placed government officials trying to cover up a pending scandal.

Thompson and Wilson make a dynamic pair. This is Thompson’s meatiest role in a while: Her Zoë is all flinty cynicism and tough exterior, masking an inner vulnerability she’s learned to keep buried. Wilson’s Sarah is the polar opposite in many ways, but she’s equally dogged, and both women are eccentrics who tend to rub people the wrong way. They’re united in a common goal: find the missing girl and bring her kidnappers (and Joe’s killer) to justice. Down Cemetery Road takes a bit of time to set up its premise and its characters, but the pace builds and builds to a big, satisfying finale. It’s not quite on the level of Slow Horses, but it’s pretty darned close.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Pluribus (Apple TV)

blond woman on cell phone in yellow jacket looking dismayed — Credit: Apple TV

After watching five episodes of the nine-episode first season of Apple TV’s Pluribus, I’m still not sure if I should be rooting for protagonist Carol Sturka or not. On the one hand, Carol is one of the last true “individuals” on Earth, fighting to maintain that individuality against a creepy alien pseudo-virus that has made almost everyone else part of a creepy, psychically connected hive mind. Reversing that effect, and getting the world “back to normal,” is an understandable and sympathetic response on Carol’s part.

On the other hand, it’s unlear that being absorbed into the hive mind is a change for the worse, on a humanity-wide scale. Unlike Star Trek’s Borg—who are violent, shambling drones that seem to have an overall miserable existence—the new hive-mind humanity is unfailingly pacifist, intelligent, capable, and (seemingly) blissfully, peacefully happy. In a sense, this virus has “solved” human nature by removing the paranoia, fear, anger, and distrust that naturally come from never truly knowing what’s going on in your neighbor’s head.

The fact that Pluribus has so far been able to navigate this premise without coming down strongly on one side or the other is frankly incredible. The fact that it has done it with consistent humor, thrills, and amazing cinematography transforms it into a must-watch.

—Kyle Orland

Slow Horses S5 (Apple TV)

scruffy bearded older man in a beige trenchcoat walking down busy London street — Credit: Apple TV

There are many things I enjoy about Slow Horses, the Apple TV thriller about some not-great spies based on Mick Herron’s novels of the same name. The plots are gripping. The acting can be sublime. It’s shot well. And in its fifth season, which began streaming this September, Slow Horses engages more with the author’s humor than in seasons past. But with a plot involving the honeypotting of the deluded computer expert almost-extraordinaire Roddy Ho (played to perfection by Christopher Chung), that would be hard to avoid.

Slough House is a rundown MI5 office used as a dumping ground for employees in disgrace—the slow horses. They can’t be fired, but they can quit, and working for Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) is meant to make that happen. Lamb is a veteran of the dirtiest days of the Cold War, knowing not only where most of the bodies are buried but having helped put a few of them there himself. His legendary field prowess is only dwarfed by his repellent personality, mocking and belittling everyone in sight—but often deservedly so.

Each member of his team is there for a different sin, and throughout the season—which involves a plot to destabilize the British government, ripped from an MI5 playbook—we see evidence of why they’ve been consigned to the slow horses. These are not invincible operators, just flawed human beings, perfectly capable of screwing up again and again. And yet, our lovable bunch of losers usually manages to come through in the end, showing up “the Park”—MI5’s (fictional) head office in London’s Regent’s Park, which is usually a step behind Lamb’s quick and devious thinking.

The adaptation is faithful enough to the books to give me deja vu during the first episode, and with just six episodes in a season, the payoff comes relatively quickly. I can’t wait for season 6.

—Jonathan Gitlin

Severance S2 (Apple TV)

man in business suit holding blue helium balloons while standing in an antiseptic white corridor — Credit: Apple TV

The second season of Severance was never going to be able to live up to the constant, slow rollout of gut punches that characterized the first season. Those first 10 episodes ably explored the most important implications of the titular severance procedure, which splits a single person into separate “innie” and “outtie” consciousnesses with distinct sets of memories. The audience got to explore those implications along with the “innie” characters, who were struggling against the boundaries of their odd cubicle life right up until that thrilling final shot.

With so much now revealed and understood, a lot of that fire fell out of the second season of the show. Sure, there were still some loose ends to tie up from the mysteries of the first season, and plenty of new, off-puttingly weird situations on offer. And the new season definitely has quite a few high points, like the big twist revealed when the “innies” get to have a rare outdoor excursion or the extended flashback showing a character trapped in a seemingly endless sequence of social tests she can’t remember afterward.

But S2 also spent entire episodes exploring backstories and mysteries that didn’t have nearly as much emotional or plot impact. By the time the final episode arrived—with a rescue sequence that required an inordinate amount of suspension of disbelief—I found myself wondering just how much more interesting juice there was to squeeze from the show’s brilliant original premise. I worry that the show is trending in the direction of Lost, which drew things out with a lot of uninteresting padding before finally resolving the plot’s core puzzle box in an unsatisfying way. I’m still along on that ride for now, but I really hope it’s going somewhere soon.

—Kyle Orland

And now for our top choice of the year:

The Residence (Netflix)

black woman crouched over on white house lawn with a flashlight at night — Credit: Netflix

Paul William Davies created this delightful mystery comedy, loosely based on a bestselling nonfiction book by Kate Andersen Brower about the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and others dedicated to ensuring the White House residence runs smoothly. In the middle of a state dinner for the visiting Australian prime minister, White House Chief Usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito) is found dead in the third-floor game room. Everyone initially assumes it was suicide.

Enter private detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), who most definitely does not think it was suicide and proceeds to investigate. She has about a dozen suspects, and her blunt, rather eccentric personality means she’s not remotely intimidated by the august setting of this particular murder. Cupp even takes the odd break in sleuthing to do a bit of birdwatching on the White House grounds. (It’s her goal to see all the birds President Teddy Roosevelt recorded during his tenure.) Birdwatching is more than a lifelong hobby for Cupp; it’s central to her character and to how she approaches solving crimes. Bonus: Viewers learn a lot of fascinating bird trivia over eight episodes.

Davies has devised a clever narrative structure, telling the story in flashbacks during a Congressional hearing (presided over by former US Sen. Al Franken playing a fictional senator from Washington state). It’s a good mystery with plenty of unexpected twists and snappy dialogue. Each episode title refers to a famous murder mystery; the camerawork is inventive and fun; and everyone in the cast knocks it out of the park. I especially loved pop star Kylie Minogue’s cameo playing a fictional version of herself as a state dinner guest. Davies apparently couldn’t convince her fellow Australian Hugh Jackman to also make a cameo. But Ben Prendergast’s winking portrayal of “Hugh Jackman”—only seen from behind or with his face obscured—is actually funnier than having the real actor.

It would be a mistake to dismiss The Residence as a mere bauble of a murder mystery just because of its playful, lighthearted tone. The show really does capture what is special and unique about the people who keep the White House residence functioning and why they matter—to each other and to America. Cupp’s final speech after unmasking the killer drives home those points with particular poignancy.

Netflix sadly canceled this excellent series, so there won’t be a second season—although I’m not sure how the writers could improve on such a tour de force. Do we really need Cupp to solve another elaborate murder in the White House? If I’m being honest, probably not. But she’s such a great character. I’d love to see more of her, perhaps in a Knives Out-style franchise where the location and main suspects continually change while the central detective stays the same. Somebody make it so.

—Jennifer Ouellette

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Discworld, Daleks, and Deep 13: A geeky holiday TV and movie watchlist

babylon 5, Christmas, culture, Daria, discworld, Doctor Who, Features, film, Gremlins, Mystery Science Theater 3000, star wars, terry pratchett, The Chronicles of Narnia, Tokyo Godfathers, TV / 9u50fv / December 23, 2025

There’s obviously more to Christmas flicks than Netflix romcoms.

I promise that most of this list is better than the Star Wars Holiday Special. Credit: Disney

‘Tis the season for all kinds of festive titles to start appearing in our to-watch queues. For folks who celebrate Christmas in any form, there are a million different movies and TV specials vying for your attention. There are the beloved favorites that we’ll make the time to revisit year after year, plus the seemingly endless number of new titles arriving on the various streaming services this season.

But in all honesty, most of these movies are made for and by the mainstream. So if you don’t want a broad family slapstick or yet another big city girl going back to her small town to learn the meaning of Christmas, here are a few options to bring some geekiness to your screen. Make the season nerdy and bright!

Let’s get it out of the way immediately: Star Wars Holiday Special

It’s almost too bizarre to be believed, but yes, this was a thing that existed, and it lives on in legend. The cast of Star Wars returned for this TV special, where the gang goes to the Wookie planet Kashyyyk to celebrate Life Day. They’re joined by some surprising guests. Golden Girls icon Bea Arthur is in it alongside The Honeymooners’ Art Carney, acclaimed multi-disciplinary performer Diahann Carroll, and the band Jefferson Starship.

Let’s not mince words. The holiday special is bad. But it’s bad in a strangely riveting way that’s kind of hard not to enjoy. And at least it falls chronologically before The Empire Strikes Back, so you can immediately cleanse your viewing palate with one of the series’ best after one of its lowest moments. And the ice planet of Hoth practically makes Empire a Christmas movie of its own, so commit to the double feature for a full night of sci-fi.

Babylon 5‘s surprising “Fall of Night”

For most TV shows, a holiday episode is an outlier that exists separately from the main story arcs. Not so for Babylon 5. “Fall of Night” closes the show’s second season, and it manages to tie together many of the loose ends in a satisfying conclusion while also blending in many of the themes you’d expect from a Christmas episode.

It’s a bit unusual, but it’s definitely a Christmas episode. Credit: Warner Bros Discovery

There’s angelic intervention and gift-giving between Sheridan and Ivanova alongside the heavier topics of interstellar politics. The references to World War II aren’t terribly subtle, but the desperate yearning for peace in the galaxy also makes this a solid choice for science fiction fans to queue up this season.

Doctor Who, many times over

The Time Lords have gifted viewers with more than a dozen festive episodes over the many iterations of Doctor Who. Fans of the old-school series only have one true Christmas episode from the original 1960s run to check out: “The Feast of Steven.” In the modern era, though, the holidays are often when a Doctor passes the mantle to the next in line, so there are plenty of chances to cap off the starring actor’s work in fine style.

Current viewers may most closely connect the Christmas specials to the David Tennant era thanks to episodes like “The Christmas Invasion,” “The Runaway Bride,” and the epic two-parter “The End of Time.” Matt Smith also takes a turn in several strong holiday outings, particularly “The Time of the Doctor.”

The Doctor walks through a Christmas scene — Just one of several *Doctor Who* Christmas episodes. Credit: BBC

This is one of the few television series to treat New Year’s Eve as a winter holiday worthy of its own showpieces, particularly in the past few years. Jodie Whittaker got the NYE treatment with a trio of Dalek-centric stories, most notably with the very funny “Eve of the Daleks” episode.

Hogfather, for a Terry Pratchett Christmas

The wildly funny fantasy author Terry Pratchett is beloved by many readers for his sprawling Discworld novels. A few directors have made the leap from page to screen with Pratchett’s stories, and Hogfather is one of the best adaptations. That could be partly because Death and Susan are two of the best characters in the whole Discworld universe, and they figure prominently in this Christmas tale. They’re also perfectly cast: Susan is played by Michelle Dockery before her rise to Downton Abbey fame, and Death is voiced by stage and screen actor Ian Richardson.

Terry Pratchett. That’s all you likely need to know. Credit: Sky One

In this Discworld take on Christmas, a shadowy group called The Auditors orders the kidnapping of the Hogfather (who bears no small resemblance to Santa Claus). To avert a holiday catastrophe, Death himself takes over the role of delivering presents on Hogswatchnight. This two-part TV movie captures all the irreverent humor that has won Pratchett so many fans over the years, and it’s a must-watch for anyone who adores that peculiar world atop the Great A’Tuin and its quartet of elephants.

Gremlins, the dark horse cult classic option

Gremlins is a cult classic for a reason and one of the more enduring movies for those who aren’t looking for everything to be bright, cheery fun during the holidays.

A gremlin with a Christmas hat — Fun fact: This film managed to scandalize so much that it partially led to the creation of the PG-13 rating. Credit: Disney

You can read it as a send-up of Christmas consumerism, a wacky horror-comedy flick, an impressive showcase of movie puppetry, or all three at once. Plus, it’s just so very, very ’80s. I doubt I have to say much more to sell you on it, because I’d guess most Ars readers already watch it on the regular.

Mystery Science Theater 3000, naturally

Whether it’s in the Satellite of Love or the Gizmoplex, the hilarious brains behind Mystery Science Theater 3000 can spoof any and all terrible movies, including the festive ones. I often enjoy some MST3K as a kickoff to the holiday season with the group’s Thanksgiving shows, but there’s also plenty of bad movie fun to be had in December.

There are a few standouts for true Christmas movie episodes. Experiment 321 sees Joel and bots watching Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, a truly terrible flick from the 1960s in which a Martian leader captures old Saint Nick to try and make the children on the red planet happier. For Mike fans, check out experiment 521, where the film is Santa Claus and even the host skits have a festive theme. Finally, from the Netflix era, Jonah and the bots suffer through The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t in experiment 1113. All three are excellent episodes despite the movies being the cinematic equivalent of a lump of coal in your stocking.

Joel and the bots by a Christmas tree — Joel doesn’t exactly exude holiday cheer, but that’s kind of the joke. Credit: Satellite of Love

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Some of the other experiments have movies set at Christmastime or sneak in occasional festive jokes from the cast. And if that’s still not enough to satisfy, there’s also nearly endless fodder you can find digging through the RiffTrax library—they even spoofed the Star Wars Holiday Special.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (with some Turkish delight)

Many directors have created their own spin on this C.S. Lewis story over the decades, and any of them make for a quality addition to your holiday lineup. It works for any attitude toward holiday time. If you prefer to be agnostic about it, just soak up the winter vibes created by the White Witch and maybe treat yourself to some Turkish delight while you watch. If you’re all about the presents, be sure to watch one of the versions that adheres to the books by having Father Christmas make an appearance. And if you want to honor the religious history, then enjoy the lion Aslan as a non-too-subtle analog for Jesus.

A character from Narnia — The classic BBC series probably won’t work for younger audiences today, but you had to be there, and some of us were indeed there. Credit: BBC

I’m partial to the 1988 BBC adaptation because it was the first one I saw, but the 2005 Disney film is pretty decent as well. Or, if you’ve already seen all of the Doctor Who specials enough times to quote them verbatim, make your viewing choice based on the acting crossovers, because something about Aslan seems to draw performers with ties to that show. In the animated 1979 version, Whovian actor Stephen Thorne voiced the lion, while Ronald Pickup played him in the 1988 adaptation and its sequels.

8-Bit Christmas, A Christmas Story for the ’80s

Remaking a classic is a bold endeavor. We’ve seen many an effort fall flat, especially when the source material is a near-perfect comedy like A Christmas Story. But against the odds, 8-Bit Christmas pulls off the high-wire act with charm and warmth. This version reframes the dream of the unattainable Christmas present by leaping forward a few decades. Rather than Ralphie’s quest for the Red Ryder rifle, Jake wants the latest and greatest in gaming: a Nintendo Entertainment System.

Now, if you were a gamer in your youth, there are some scenes here that will speak to your soul. There’s an early moment where Jake and the other kids on his suburban block are hanging out in the basement of one lucky boy who has an NES of his own. They’re gathered shoulder to shoulder around the tube TV, arguing over who should get the controller next. Every detail in this scene, from the sweaters and the set dressing to the look of rapture as the kids experience the power of a new console for the first time is just perfection.

A kid celebrates playing Nintendo — The film is at least a great concept, and it delivers pretty well on it. Credit: HBO Max

There are also other cute ’80s nods; for instance, while Jake is lusting after an NES, his sister wants a Cabbage Patch doll with the same single-minded desire. Those of us who grew up in the ’80s know that feeling well. Heck, those of us who were huddled over our browsers refreshing in a panic hoping to snag the Switch 2 just earlier this year know that feeling. This geeky tale was a pleasant surprise to find among the modern-day Christmas movie productions.

The otaku choice: Tokyo Godfathers

The otaku nerds surely already know this one well, but I would be remiss not to include this anime masterwork. It’s a poignant addition to anyone’s Christmas viewing list, geek or otherwise. The film is by legendary manga artist and anime director Satoshi Kon, and it received a new English dub a few years ago that’s particularly recommended.

The film is dripping with atmosphere and creative ideas. Credit: Sony

As with so many of the best movies, it’s probably best to go in without knowing too much. The first key point is: It’s a story of three people living on the streets of Tokyo on Christmas Eve. And the second is: while the phrase is trite, Tokyo Godfathers genuinely can and will make you laugh and make you cry.

In Daria, “Depth Takes a Holiday”

In the ’90s, Daria Morgendorffer was the queen of the teenage outcasts, even though she would have hated having that title. The irreverent animated series from MTV holds up impressively well under modern scrutiny. (Although yes, in most available ways to rewatch it, the licensed music is gone. Just cue up the most important tracks you remember when you watch.)

For such an offbeat program, it’s surprising that Daria did, in fact, include a festive episode called “Depth Takes a Holiday.” In this break from the show’s usual reality, several holidays in human form appear in the Lawndale suburb, causing chaos and playing some rock music. Daria eventually agrees to help restore the natural order of things and get these holidays back to their home on Holiday Island, which is just as cliquey and pointless as Lawndale High.

Daria meets surreal mythical characters — It’s a controversial episode, but it has its merits. Credit: Paramount

“Depth Takes a Holiday” is pretty dang weird, and it’s a love-it or hate-it point in the third season. But I say it’s all the more reason to spend December revisiting some of my favorite Daria episodes alongside this. For those in the hate-it camp, you’ll enjoy the other episodes even more in contrast. And if you’re in the love-it audience, mark your calendar to also watch it on Guy Fawkes Day.

Honorable mention: A Christmas Carol audiobook

I realize that an audiobook is not viewing, but any Star Trek fan worth their replicator-made salt should have this title in their Christmas rotation. Patrick Stewart did take a turn in a Hollywood production of this classic tale in 1999, and that’s a plenty good adaptation.

But why settle for one of the great thespians and geek icons playing just a single role? Stewart also narrated an audiobook version of A Christmas Carol, and it is simply stellar. He gets to provide incredible voices for each character, plus he gets really into all the eerier parts of Charles Dickens’ holiday ghost story. Queue this up in your headphones on a snowy winter’s night, close your eyes, and you can really imagine that Captain Picard is personally reading you a bedtime story.

Discworld, Daleks, and Deep 13: A geeky holiday TV and movie watchlist Read More »

No one loves President Trump more than FCC Chairman Brendan Carr

Anna Gomez, brendan carr, FCC, Features, Policy, president trump, tom wheeler / 9u50fv / December 22, 2025

Trump’s biggest fan runs the FCC

Carr used to insist on FCC independence. Now he uses FCC to fight Trump’s battles.

President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a SpaceX Starship rocket launch on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Getty Images | Brandon Bell

Before he became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr seemed to be a big believer in the agency’s role as an independent branch of the federal government. According to the pre-2025 version of Brendan Carr, the White House interfered with the agency’s independence when a Democratic president publicly urged the FCC to adopt net neutrality rules.

When the Biden-era FCC reinstated Obama-era net neutrality rules in 2024, Carr alleged that President Biden “took the extraordinary step to pressure the FCC—an independent agency that is designed to operate outside undue political influence from the Executive Branch.” As evidence, Carr pointed to a 2021 executive order in which Biden called on agency heads to “consider using their authorities” for various types of pro-competitive policies, including the adoption of net neutrality rules.

Carr said that President Obama similarly “pressure[d] an independent agency into grabbing power that the Legislative Branch never said it had delegated.” Obama’s intrusion into this independence, according to Carr, came in November 2014 when the president released a two-minute video urging the agency to implement net neutrality rules and reclassify broadband providers as common carriers.

While the FCC was created as an independent agency, it isn’t apolitical. There are Republican and Democratic members, and by design, the president’s party has a majority. FCC policies change dramatically from one administration to the next.

But Carr couldn’t have been clearer about his belief that the president should not publicly urge the FCC to take specific actions. “The White House did not let the FCC chair do his job,” Carr said last year, referring to the events of 2014 and 2015 involving Obama and then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “The president intervened. He flipped him.”

But then Donald Trump won a second term in office and promoted Commissioner Carr to the position of FCC chairman in January 2025. A few weeks later, Trump issued an executive order declaring that historically independent agencies could no longer operate independently from the White House.

Carr’s devotion to President Trump

Trump has continued his longtime practice of publicly calling on FCC chairs to revoke broadcast licenses from news organizations that Trump dislikes. Former FCC chairs Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai rejected these calls when they led the agency. Carr has instead amplified Trump’s complaints and repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses through investigations into news distortion.

Carr, a longtime Trump supporter who sometimes wears a Trump-shaped lapel pin, wrote a Project 2025 chapter in 2023 describing how the FCC should be overhauled to achieve conservative priorities. It was never likely that he and Trump would differ much in their policy positions. But few, if any, leaders of historically independent agencies have aligned themselves with Trump as consistently and vocally as Carr has in his first year as FCC chairman.

Carr’s devotion to the president has been most obvious to the general public whenever he threatens broadcaster licenses. But Carr hardly seems independent of Trump when it comes to his other actions as head of the FCC. His press releases announcing various types of FCC decisions often praise Trump’s leadership and say the FCC is acting to advance a Trump priority.

“We are fully aligned with the agenda that President Trump is running,” Carr told The Wall Street Journal.

Far from insisting that the FCC make decisions independently, Carr has welcomed Trump’s direct orders. After Trump issued a December 11 executive order requiring the FCC to open a proceeding that could lead to preemption of state AI laws, Carr issued a statement saying that “the FCC welcomes President’s Trump’s direction.”

We emailed Carr in early December, requesting a phone interview or comments about whether he still believes the FCC should operate independently from the White House and did not receive a response. But on December 17, Carr confirmed during a Senate hearing that he no longer believes the FCC is independent from the White House.

“There’s been a sea change in the law since I wrote that sentence,” he said after being confronted with one of his previous statements describing the agency as independent. “The FCC is not an independent agency” because “the president can remove any member of the commission for any reason or no reason,” he said.

Wheeler, who is still active in tech and telecom policy at the Brookings Institution and Harvard Kennedy School, has watched the current FCC with dismay. “The FCC is a policy agency that exists in a political environment, and the Trump administration has turned it into a political agency existing in a policy environment,” Wheeler told Ars in a phone interview early this month.

Wheeler said he has “respect for Brendan, his brain, his political skills, his way of framing issues and expressing himself. I’m disappointed that he’s using them in the manner that he is, in just being a cipher for the MAGA agenda.”

Wheeler: Obama “never called me”

Congress created the FCC in 1934. As indications of its independence, the FCC has commissioners with specified tenures, a multimember structure, partisan balance, and adjudication authority. The agency can also issue regulations within limits set by Congress and courts.

US law lists 19 federal agencies, including the FCC, that are classified as “independent regulatory agencies.” The FCC’s independence was until recently acknowledged by the FCC itself, which said on its website that it is “an independent US government agency overseen by Congress.” Carr apparently wasn’t aware that the statement was still on the website until the December 17 Senate hearing. It was deleted quickly after Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) asked Carr, “Is your website wrong, is your website lying?”

Then-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler and FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai smiling and talking to each other before a Congressional hearing. — Then-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler (L) and FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai talk before testifying to the House Judiciary Committee on March 25, 2015, in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla

“Congress said, ‘you should be an independent agency,’ and Trump steps up and says, ‘no, you’re not an independent agency,’” Wheeler said. “Brendan apparently is going along with that if you judge from his trips to Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere.” Wheeler is also disappointed that after Trump’s executive order, “the Congress rolled over and just said, ‘oh, fine.’”

When Wheeler led a 2015 vote to implement net neutrality rules, Republicans in Congress claimed the agency was improperly influenced by Obama. “Five days of hearings under oath and an IG investigation that cleared me of wrongdoing,” Wheeler said, recalling the post-vote investigations by Congress and the FCC’s independent Inspector General’s office. “It was political. It was Republican-controlled committees who were looking for a reason to go after a Democratic-controlled FCC,” he said.

At the time, Wheeler told Congress there were “no secret instructions” from Obama. Wheeler said he treated Obama’s input “with respect” but also listened to “nearly four million Americans, who overwhelmingly spoke in favor of preserving a free and open Internet” in comments to the FCC.

Wheeler told Ars that during his term as FCC chairman, Obama “never called me.” Wheeler said that in his first week as chairman in 2013, “he said to me, ‘Tom, I will never call you. You’re an independent agency,’ and he was good to his word. Did he do a video? Yeah. Does he have a right to do a video? Of course.”

FCC decisions “coordinated through the White House”

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the FCC, said in a phone interview in early December that “it is appropriate for the president to have an opinion, even to put an opinion out there,” as Biden and Obama did on net neutrality. “The public statements are different than actions,” she said. “What we’re seeing now are direct actions to undermine our independence.”

Gomez said Trump’s frequent demands on the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses have a “more coercive effect” because of “the overall actions by this president to fire anyone that doesn’t do his will.” That includes Trump firing both Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission, another historically independent agency.

The Supreme Court has so far allowed the firing of former FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter to stand while Slaughter’s lawsuit against Trump remains pending. At oral arguments, it appeared likely that the Supreme Court will rule that Trump can fire FTC commissioners.

At the December 17 Senate hearing, Carr cited the FTC case to support his view that the FCC isn’t independent. Carr said it used to be assumed that FCC commissioners would be protected from removal by the Supreme Court’s 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which unanimously held that the president can only remove FTC commissioners for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.

The Communications Act was passed one year before Humphrey’s Executor and did not include explicit protection from removal, but “the theory had been that courts would read for-cause removal into the [Communications] statute and that was the basis for that viewpoint,” Carr said. “I think now it’s clear that’s not the case, so formally speaking the FCC isn’t independent because we don’t have that key piece, which is for-cause removal protection.” Carr said “the sine qua non of independence” is having protection from removal by the president.

Gomez has said she doesn’t know why Trump hasn’t fired her yet. “That erosion of our independence is negative for a variety of reasons,” Gomez said. “What worries me is that we will continue to see this White House pressure the FCC to favor or punish certain companies, to influence media ownership or media coverage, and to shape what information reaches the public.”

Gomez said the agency this year started sending decisions to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review before they are voted on. This practice is in line with one of the directives in the Trump executive order that declared independent agencies are no longer independent.

“We have a multi-member commission that makes these decisions, and somehow this is all getting coordinated through the White House before [the commissioners] vote on something. That is not independent,” Gomez said. While there were previously post-vote reviews, such as the standard reviews required under a 1980 law called the Paperwork Reduction Act, the OIRA process consists of “pre-clearance and approval of anything that we’re voting on. That is new,” Gomez said.

Gomez doesn’t know if those reviews have resulted in any significant changes to FCC actions before votes. “I’m not privy to that,” she said.

Carr heaps praise on Trump

Even before the Trump executive order that purported to eliminate the FCC’s independence, Carr attributed one of his first actions to an order from Trump. One day after the January 20 inauguration, Carr announced that he was ending the FCC’s promotion of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies. The press release said the FCC action was taken “pursuant to” Trump’s day-one executive order on DEI.

“Today, pursuant to the policies stated in the Executive Order, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced that he is ending the FCC’s promotion of DEI,” the January 21 press release said. In the months since, Carr has repeatedly demanded that companies end internal DEI practices in exchange for FCC merger approvals.

Carr’s press releases announcing FCC decisions have continued to praise Trump for his leadership of the country. Instead of stating that the FCC makes decisions independently, without “undue political influence from the Executive Branch,” Carr’s press releases often specifically describe FCC decisions as advancing Trump’s agenda.

“This action follows President Trump’s leadership and the Trump Administration’s decision to usher in prosperity through deregulation,” one such Carr press release said while announcing the “Delete, Delete, Delete” plan to eliminate many of the agency’s regulations.

Carr makes statements praising Trump both when he announces decisions on politically charged topics and when he announces decisions on more routine matters handled by the FCC. “With President Trump’s leadership, America is entering a new Golden Age of innovation in space—one where US businesses are going to dominate,” Carr said in October to explain why he was making changes to space licensing and spectrum use rules.

Carr: “Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape”

Of course, Carr’s most controversial initiative almost certainly wouldn’t exist if not for President Trump’s frequent demands that news outlets be punished for supposed bias. Carr’s approach differs markedly from the two previous FCC chairs—Rosenworcel, a Democrat, and Pai, a Republican—who said the FCC should avoid regulating broadcast content in order to uphold the free speech protections in the First Amendment.

By contrast, Carr has repeatedly threatened to enforce the FCC’s previously dormant news distortion policy against broadcasters by taking away station licenses. Carr has made it clear in numerous public statements that he’s taking his cue from Trump.

“For years, people cowed down to the executives behind these companies based in Hollywood and New York, and they just accepted that these national broadcasters could dictate how people think about topics, that they could set the narrative for the country—and President Trump fundamentally rejected it,” Carr told Newsmax in July. “He smashed the facade that these are gatekeepers that can determine what people think. Everything we’re seeing right now flows from that decision by President Trump, and he’s winning. PBS has been defunded. NPR has been defunded. CBS is committing to restoring fact-based journalism… President Trump stood up to these legacy media gatekeepers, and now their business models are falling apart.”

Carr made that statement after approving CBS owner Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance on the condition that the company install an ombudsman, which Carr described as a “bias monitor.” Carr only approved the transaction once Paramount reached a $16 million settlement with Trump, who sued the company because he didn’t like how CBS edited a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris.

While the FCC order claimed the merger approval and ombudsman condition were unrelated to the Trump lawsuit, Carr repeatedly credited Trump for forcing changes at news broadcasters when giving interviews about that and other FCC actions. Carr uses similar language throughout these various interviews, saying that Trump “ran directly at” news organizations during his election campaign and “smashed the facade.”

“President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape,” he said in one interview. He said in another that “President Trump ran directly at the legacy mainstream media, and he smashed a facade that they’re the gatekeepers of truth.”

Ted Cruz and Rand Paul say Carr went too far

When Carr threatened the licenses of ABC stations over comments made by comedian Jimmy Kimmel, even some prominent Republicans said he went too far. “Brendan Carr has got no business weighing in on this,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said, calling Carr’s statement that ABC owner Disney must take action against Kimmel “absolutely inappropriate.”

Carr unconvincingly claimed that he never threatened ABC station licenses, even though he specifically said stations that continued to air Kimmel’s show were “running the possibility of fines or license revocations.” One person who didn’t buy Carr’s explanation was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). The senator from Texas didn’t like it when Carr told ABC and Disney that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

Cruz said Carr’s “easy way or the hard way” statement was an obvious threat and “right outta Goodfellas.” Cruz would later say at the December 17 hearing that Congress should restrict the FCC’s power to intimidate news broadcasters. Cruz said, “the public interest standard and its wretched offspring, like the news distortion rule, have outlived whatever utility they once had and it is long past time for Congress to pass reforms.”

Even after bipartisan criticism, Carr refused to end his news distortion investigations. “How about no,” Carr wrote in November. “On my watch, the FCC will continue to hold broadcasters accountable to their public interest obligations.”

Wheeler: “Brendan needs to man up and own his decisions”

One of Carr’s defenses of his news distortion probes is that Rosenworcel’s FCC kept an advocacy group’s petition to deny a Fox station license renewal on the docket for over a year instead of dismissing it outright. Rosenworcel ultimately dismissed the petition, which alleged that Fox willfully distorted news with false reports of fraud in the 2020 election that Trump lost.

The petition pointed out that a judge presiding over a Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox found that Fox News aired false statements about Dominion. Fox subsequently agreed to a $788 million settlement.

Rosenworcel simultaneously dismissed the Fox petition and three complaints alleging anti-Trump or anti-conservative bias by ABC, CBS, and NBC, saying that all four requests “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.” Carr reinstated the conservative complaints against ABC, CBS, and NBC, but not the one against Fox.

Carr defended his actions by saying the Biden administration “weaponized our country’s communications laws,” and that his own FCC simply “put the CBS complaint on the same procedural footing that the Biden FCC determined it should apply to the Fox complaint.”

Wheeler said Carr shouldn’t blame his actions on his predecessors. “I own my decisions,” Wheeler said. “I think that Brendan needs to man up and own his decisions and quit this ‘what about.’ He’s always out there saying, ‘Well, what about what Jessica did or what about what Wheeler did?’… Is that the best he can do? I mean, take responsibility for your decisions and go forward.”

Gomez: “This administration has weaponized the FCC”

Gomez said that when Congress created the FCC’s predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission, “it decided that it was too dangerous to have one person beholden to the president, to the whims of one person, in charge of the most important communication medium of the time, which was radio. So Congress decided, after deliberating it, to create a multi-member independent agency. And when it created the FCC, it did exactly that as well.”

Gomez continued: “[I]t has been important throughout history to keep that independence from political pressure. And what you’re seeing in this administration is completely different. This administration has weaponized the FCC in order to retaliate, pressure, and intimidate companies into doing its will.”

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York, on Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Gomez said the weaponization is evident in how the FCC handles mergers and other transactions in which the agency decides whether to approve the transfer of licenses from one company to another. Carr has explicitly demanded that companies eliminate their DEI policies in exchange for approvals.

“This FCC has said that it will not approve a single license transfer for companies that have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies,” Gomez said, noting that the FCC’s anti-DEI policies were implemented right after Trump’s anti-DEI executive order. “That is why you see the FCC granting transfers of control immediately after getting letters from companies agreeing to drop their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.”

Companies such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Skydance have ended DEI programs to gain Carr’s approval for transactions.

“We also saw that weaponization of the licensing authority with regard to the [FCC] pressuring EchoStar to give up its licenses,” Gomez said. “And that was done purposefully in order to ensure that other parties could get ahold of EchoStar’s licenses for spectrum.”

Trump intervened in EchoStar battle

SpaceX and AT&T struck deals to buy EchoStar spectrum licenses after Carr threatened to revoke the licenses. Trump intervened after Carr’s threat, as Bloomberg reported that Trump called Carr and summoned him to a White House meeting with EchoStar President Charlie Ergen and urged them to make a deal.

Carr’s pressuring of EchoStar was criticized by the Free State Foundation, a free-market group that usually supports Republican priorities at the FCC.

“Rescission of deadline extension orders granted months earlier undoubtedly creates a type of regulatory uncertainty,” the foundation said in reference to the FCC’s investigation into EchoStar. “Arbitrary and unforeseen” changes to rules or agency actions create instability in the market for wireless broadband deployment, it said.

Gomez said the FCC’s “authority rests on technical expertise, evidence, and the public record. When our agency’s decisions are insulated from partisan pressure, the public can trust the outcomes are driven by facts rather than politics.” She said it is also “important to maintain our global credibility because we have been viewed as a model for transparent, rule-based telecommunications regulation.”

Gomez, a telecommunications attorney, has worked in various private-sector and government roles over the past 30 years, including as deputy chief of the FCC International Bureau and senior legal adviser to then-FCC Chairman William Kennard during the Clinton administration. Prior to Biden’s nomination for her to serve as an FCC commissioner in 2023, she was at the US State Department as senior adviser for International Information and Communications Policy.

Executive order required review of FCC actions

Gomez said the FCC submitting decisions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs before they’re voted on is a big change for an independent agency. Gomez said she’s deeply familiar with the OIRA process because of her previous work at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an executive branch agency that advises the president on telecom policy. She was the NTIA deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013.

The Trump executive order that purports to eliminate agency independence states that “all executive departments and agencies, including so-called independent agencies, shall submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register.”

In a section titled “OIRA Review of Agency Regulations,” the Trump executive order amends a definition of agency that was previously included in Section 3(b) of a 1993 executive order on regulatory reviews. The specified section in that Clinton executive order defined agency as “any authority of the United States that is an ‘agency’ under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), other than those considered to be independent regulatory agencies.” This carveout excluded independent agencies like the FCC from the requirement to submit draft regulatory actions for review.

The definition of “agency” in Trump’s executive order removes the language that excluded all independent regulatory agencies from OIRA requirements but includes a carveout for the Federal Reserve. Trump’s order also added the Federal Election Commission to the roster of agencies whose actions require OIRA review of significant actions, such as rulemakings.

While Gomez objects to the pre-clearance requirement, she noted that there are proper ways in which the FCC coordinates with executive branch agencies. For example, the FCC has a memorandum of understanding with the NTIA on how to coordinate spectrum management actions to prevent interference with federal systems that rely on specific radio frequencies.

“Another good use of coordination is in security, for example, when we coordinate with the security agencies to make sure that we are taking national security into consideration with our actions,” she said. “Our statute requires us to coordinate with the State Department and the Department of Justice… and that’s important to do in advance, and it’s good government.”

It’s also not uncommon for the FCC to receive advice from the current president’s administration through the NTIA, which expresses the executive branch’s views on telecom-policy matters in filings submitted in the public record. Those dockets attract filings from government agencies, companies, industry trade groups, advocacy groups, and anyone else who is interested in filing a comment, and the FCC takes the input into account before making decisions.

“What is improper,” Gomez said, “is when our decisions are being directed by this administration and impeding us from making our independent, expert-based judgment of how to manage resources and act in the public interest.”

Pai defied Trump, insisted on FCC independence

Carr was hired as a legal adviser by then-Commissioner Pai in 2014 and was briefly the FCC’s general counsel during Pai’s first year as chair in 2017. Carr became an FCC commissioner in August 2017 after a nomination by President Trump.

Carr and Pai have seemingly agreed on nearly everything to do with the FCC, with the most obvious exception being the regulation of broadcast media content. “I believe in the First Amendment,” Pai said in 2017, six days after Trump called for NBC license revocations. “The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment. And under the law, the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

In a January 2021 speech during his last week as FCC chairman, Pai discussed how he led a 2018 vote against Sinclair Broadcast Group’s proposed acquisition of Tribune Media Company because it would violate station ownership limits. Carr joined Pai in the unanimous vote.

“Sinclair is widely perceived to be a right-leaning broadcaster,” Pai said in the speech delivered at the American Enterprise Institute. “And the perception is probably accurate, just as it is probably accurate to say that many of our nation’s broadcast networks lean to the left. But the last time I checked, the First Amendment still applies to broadcasters, which means Sinclair’s perceived political views and the content of its newscasts should be entirely irrelevant to the FCC’s decision-making process.”

Trump didn’t like Pai’s rejection of the Sinclair deal. The president tweeted in July 2018, “So sad and unfair that the FCC wouldn’t approve the Sinclair Broadcast merger with Tribune. This would have been a great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People. Liberal Fake News NBC and Comcast gets approved, much bigger, but not Sinclair. Disgraceful!”

Reflecting on this incident and other Trump comments about the Sinclair rejection in his January 2021 speech, Pai said, “in terms of powerful opponents in Washington, it’s hard to top the president.” Pai told the audience “that you don’t demonstrate the FCC’s independence by saying you’re independent. You do it by acting independently… This decision may have won me few friends, but I’m proud I lived up to my oath and preserved the agency’s independence.”

It’s no secret

Wheeler and Pai often clashed over policy differences when they served on the commission together. Pai even accused Wheeler of taking orders from Obama on net neutrality. But Pai’s exit speech made a positive impression on Wheeler.

“I seem to recall that Pai at the end of his term made a speech in which he talked about some of the proudest things he had done was maintaining the independence of the agency and protecting the First Amendment speech rights of the people,” Wheeler said.

While federal agency operations can change in ways that aren’t readily visible to the public, the changes to agency independence in Trump’s second term haven’t been hidden. “One thing about this is so much is out in the open, which I think is an effort to normalize it,” Gomez said. “And we have to resist it.”

Gomez knows she might not be able to serve out her entire term given that Trump fired Democrats from the FTC. The risk would be particularly high if the Supreme Court rules in Trump’s favor in the case filed by Slaughter. While the Senate has the authority to confirm or deny presidential nominations to the FCC and FTC, a Trump victory in the FTC case would give the president more power to dictate the membership of independent agencies.

“I don’t know why,” Gomez said when asked if she knows why Trump hasn’t fired her yet. “I don’t want to speculate. We’ll find out, I guess. But I’m focused on doing my work, and every day that I can continue to do my work and to speak out on behalf of consumers and the First Amendment is a good day.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

No one loves President Trump more than FCC Chairman Brendan Carr Read More »

Verizon refused to unlock man’s iPhone, so he sued the carrier and won

Features, phone unlocking, Policy, straight talk, tracfone, verizon / Shannon Garcia / December 16, 2025

Verizon customer fights back

Verizon changed policy after he bought the phone, wouldn’t unlock it despite FCC rule.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

When Verizon refused to unlock an iPhone purchased by Kansas resident Patrick Roach, he had no intention of giving up without a fight. Roach sued the wireless carrier in small claims court and won.

Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon’s Straight Talk brand on February 28, 2025, as a gift for his wife’s birthday. He intended to pay for one month of service, cancel, and then switch the phone to the US Mobile service plan that the couple uses. Under federal rules that apply to Verizon and a Verizon unlocking policy that was in place when Roach bought the phone, this strategy should have worked.

“The best deals tend to be buying it from one of these MVNOs [Mobile Virtual Network Operators] and then activating it until it unlocks and then switching it to whatever you are planning to use it with. It usually saves you about half the value of the phone,” Roach said in a phone interview.

Unlocking a phone allows it to be used with another carrier. Verizon, unlike other carriers, is required by the Federal Communications Commission to unlock phones shortly after they are activated on its network. Verizon gained significant benefits in exchange for agreeing to the unlocking requirement, first in 2008 when it purchased licenses to use 700 MHz spectrum that came with open access requirements and then in 2021 when it agreed to merger conditions to obtain approval for its purchase of TracFone.

Verizon is thus required to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. This applies to Verizon’s flagship brand and TracFone brands such as Straight Talk.

“That was the compromise. For their competitive advantage of acquiring the spectrum, they had to give up the ability to lock down phones for an extended period of time,” Roach said.

Verizon decided it can change the rules

But 60 days after Roach activated his phone, Verizon refused to unlock it. Verizon claimed it didn’t have to because of a recent policy change in which Verizon decided to only unlock devices after “60 days of paid active service.” Roach had only paid for one month of service on the phone.

The FCC-imposed restriction says Verizon must unlock phones 60 days after activation and doesn’t say that Verizon may refuse to unlock a phone when a customer has not maintained paid service for 60 days. Moreover, Verizon implemented its “60 days of paid active service” policy for TracFone brands and Verizon prepaid phones on April 1, 2025, over a month after Roach bought the phone.

Company policy at the time Roach made the purchase was to unlock phones 60 days after activation, with no mention of needing 60 days of paid active service. In other words, Roach bought the phone under one policy, and Verizon refused to unlock it based on a different policy it implemented over a month later. Verizon’s attempt to retroactively enforce its new policy on Roach was not looked upon favorably by a magistrate judge in District Court of Sedgwick County, Kansas.

“Under the KCPA [Kansas Consumer Protection Act], a consumer is not required to prove intent to defraud. The fact that after plaintiff purchased the phone, the defendant changed the requirements for unlocking it so that plaintiff could go to a different network essentially altered the nature of the device purchased… With the change in defendant’s unlocking policy, the phone was essentially useless for the purpose plaintiff intended when he purchased it,” Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Henry wrote in an October 2025 ruling.

There’s still the question of why Verizon and its brands are demanding 60 days of paid active service before unlocking phones when the FCC-imposed conditions require it to unlock phones 60 days after activation. Roach filed a complaint to the FCC, alleging that Verizon violated the conditions. Verizon has meanwhile petitioned the FCC to eliminate the 60-day requirement altogether.

Customer rejected Verizon settlement offer

Before his small-claims court win, Roach turned down a Verizon settlement offer of $600 plus court fees because he didn’t want to give up the right to speak about the case publicly. Roach said he filed an arbitration case against Verizon nearly a decade ago on a different matter related to gift cards that were supposed to be provided through a device recycling program. He said he can’t reveal details about the settlement in that previous case because of a non-disclosure agreement.

After refusing Verizon’s settlement offer in the new case, Roach gained a modest financial benefit from his court victory. The judge ordered Verizon to pay back the $410.40 he paid for the device, plus court costs and service fees.

When it appeared that the Straight Talk iPhone wouldn’t be unlocked, Roach decided to buy an unlocked phone from Costco for $643.93. But he ended up returning that phone to Costco and paying Straight Talk for a second month of service to get the original phone unlocked, he said.

The now-unlocked phone—the one he bought from Straight Talk—is being used by his wife on their US Mobile plan. The court-ordered refund check that Verizon sent Roach included the phone cost and one month of service fees, he said.

Roach estimated he spent 20 or so hours on the suit, including arranging to have a summons served on Verizon and arguing his case in a court hearing. Roach didn’t get much of a payout considering the amount of time he spent, “but it wasn’t about that,” he said.

Roach provided Ars with the emails in which Verizon offered the $600 settlement. A Verizon executive relations employee wrote to Roach, “My offer is not an admission of guilt but trying to extend the olive branch.”

In his email declining the offer, Roach told Verizon, “I highly value the non-monetary outcomes I would achieve in court—transparency, accountability, and the absence of restrictions such as NDAs. Any settlement proposal that requires me to remain silent about the issue, while offering only modest monetary compensation, is less attractive to me than pursuing the matter through judgment. If Verizon Value is genuinely interested in settlement, the offer would need to reflect both the tangible costs I’ve incurred and the intangible but significant benefits the company receives by avoiding litigation and publicity.”

“It was really starting to irk me”

The FCC has taken no action on Roach’s complaint, and in fact, the commission could allow Verizon to scrap the 60-day requirement. As we reported in May, Verizon petitioned the FCC to let it lock phones to its network for longer periods of time. This would make it harder for customers to switch to other carriers, but Verizon claims longer locking periods are necessary to deter fraud.

The FCC hasn’t ruled yet on Verizon’s petition. Roach says Verizon seems to be acting as if it can change the rules without waiting for the FCC to do so formally. “It was really starting to irk me that they were basically just going ahead with it anyways while they had an open request,” Roach said.

He doesn’t expect the FCC to penalize Verizon, though. “It’s just kind of slimy of them, so I feel like it deserves a spotlight,” he said. “I’m not sure with the current state of the FCC that anything would happen, but the rule of law should be respected.”

The Verizon petition to relax the unlocking requirements was opposed in a filing by Public Knowledge and other consumer advocacy groups. Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer, who wrote the filing, told Ars that Roach “has a pretty strong argument under the law as it stands.”

Verizon must unlock phones automatically

The unlocking rules applying to Verizon used to be stricter, resulting in the company selling phones that were already unlocked. In 2019, Verizon requested a waiver to let it lock phones for 60 days.

The FCC granted the waiver in June 2019, allowing Verizon “to lock a customer’s handset for 60 days from the date it becomes active on Verizon’s network” and requiring it to unlock the handset once the period is over. This condition was expanded to TracFone and its brands such as Straight Talk in the 2021 merger, with the FCC approval stating that “For 700 MHz C Block TracFone devices that operate on the Verizon network and are capable of unlocking automatically (e.g., Apple devices), they will unlock automatically 60 days after activation.”

The 2019 waiver grant said Verizon must automatically unlock phones after 60 days “regardless of whether: (1) the customer asks for the handset to be unlocked, or (2) the handset is fully paid off.” The FCC order specifies that “the only exception to the rule will be that Verizon will not have to automatically unlock handsets that it determines within the 60-day period to have been purchased through fraud.”

Bergmayer said the FCC order “granting the waiver just starts a countdown, with no ‘paid service’ requirement, or room for Verizon to just impose one. Many people may use prepaid phones that they don’t keep in continuous service but just charge up as needed. Maybe people are fine with just having Wi-Fi on their phones for a while if they’re at home anyway.”

Given the restrictive nature of the FCC conditions, “I don’t think that can be read to allow a paid service requirement,” Bergmayer said. But as a practical matter, the FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr has been aggressively eliminating regulations that apply to telecom carriers under Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative. To actually enforce Verizon’s obligations under the current rules, “you have to convince the current FCC not to just change it,” Bergmayer said.

The FCC and Verizon did not respond to requests for comment.

Retroactive policy change irked other buyers, too

Roach wasn’t the only person whose plans to buy a discounted phone were thwarted by Verizon refusing to unlock the device after 60 days. Roach had learned of the discount offer from a Slick Deals thread. Eventually, users posting in that thread started reporting that they weren’t able to get the phone unlocked.

“My status: I used 30 days with Straight Talk. Waited another 35 days but it did not unlock,” one person wrote.

Some people in the thread said they canceled after 30 days, like Roach did, but eventually bought a second month of service in order to get the unlock. Although Verizon and its brands are required to unlock phones automatically, some commenters said they had to contact Straight Talk support to get an unlock. “Needless to say this has been an arduous journey. Good luck to others and hope you manage to successfully unlock your devices as well,” one user wrote.

There’s also a Reddit thread started by someone who said they bought a Samsung phone in February and complained that Straight Talk refused to honor the unlocking policy that was in place at the time.

“I called to ask for the phone to be unlocked on April 16 but was told it can’t be unlocked since it did not have 60 days of paid service,” the Reddit user wrote. “When I said that was not the policy on phones activated prior to April 1, the rep told me ‘we have the right to change our policy.’ I agreed, they do [have] the right to change their policy GOING FORWARD but can’t change the rules going backwards. He disagreed.”

FCC complaint didn’t go anywhere

Roach’s FCC complaint received a response from Verizon, but nothing substantial from the FCC itself. “There’s not really any sort of moderation or mediation from the FCC, it’s just kind of a dialogue between you and the other party. And I’m not really sure if any human eyes from the government even look at it. It’s probably just a data point,” Roach said.

Roach had previously called Straight Talk customer service about the changed terms. “There were a couple phone calls involved, and they were just very unrelenting that the only way that thing was getting unlocked is with the extra month of paid service,” he said.

In its formal response to the FCC, Verizon’s TracFone division asserted that it could apply the April 1, 2025, policy change to the phone that Roach bought over a month earlier. The carrier’s letter to the FCC said:

We understand Mr. Roach’s desire to use his device on another carrier’s network, and we want to provide clarity based on our Unlocking Policy, which became effective on April 1, 2025. As outlined in our policy, for cellphones capable of remote unlocking (this includes most iPhones and some Android cellphones) that were activated with Straight Talk service prior to November 23, 2021, on any carrier network, the device becomes eligible for remote unlocking upon the customer’s request after 60 days of active paid service.

Our redemption records indicate that Mr. Roach’s account does not have the required minimum 60 days of active paid service based on the payment records. Therefore, the device does not currently meet the eligibility criteria for unlocking as outlined in our policy. Once the account reflects the required 60 days of active paid service, and the device meets the other conditions, he can resubmit the unlocking request.

Verizon’s letter did not explain how its new policy complies with the FCC conditions or why the new policy should apply to phones purchased before the policy was in place.

Roach’s complaint said the FCC should force Straight Talk to “honor the FCC-mandated 60-day post-activation unlock condition for all affected phones, without imposing the additional ‘paid service’ requirement.” His complaint further urged the FCC to “investigate this practice as a violation of FCC rules and the merger conditions” and “take enforcement action to protect consumers’ rights.”

“Straight Talk’s new policy conflicts with the FCC’s binding conditions,” Roach told the agency. “The Commission’s order clearly requires unlocking after 60 days from activation, with no additional obligation to maintain service. By conditioning unlocks on two months of service, Straight Talk is effectively adding a term that Verizon did not promise and the FCC did not approve.”

Kansas consumer protection law to the rescue

In his small claims court filing, Roach alleged that Verizon and Straight violated the FCC conditions and that the retroactive application of the “60 days of paid service” term, without disclosure at the point of sale, is an unfair and deceptive practice prohibited by the Kansas Consumer Protection Act.

The magistrate judge’s ruling in Roach’s favor said, “It does appear that defendant’s change unlocking policy is contrary to the applicable FCC regulations.” She noted that federal communications law does not prevent users from suing carriers individually and that the Kansas Consumer Protection Act “contains provisions prohibiting deceptive acts by a supplier which would be applicable in this case.”

Roach asked for $10,000, mainly because that was the limit on damages in the venue, but the judge decided to award him damages in the amount of his actual losses. “He lost the beneﬁt of the bargain he made with defendant such that his damages were loss of the $410.40,” the ruling said.

Straight Talk’s terms of service require disputes to be resolved either in arbitration or small claims court. Verizon pays the arbitration fees if users go that route. Arbitration is “a little more murky” in terms of how the parties’ interests are aligned, Roach said.

“When the arbitrators are being paid by Verizon, are they really a neutral party?” he said. Roach also said he “thought it was honestly just a good opportunity for an easy win and an opportunity to learn about the small claims court system a bit. So at that point I was like, if I don’t make any money from this, whatever, but at least I’ll learn a little bit about the process.”

Verizon’s “argument was pretty weak”

Roach said he did not consult with a lawyer on his small claims case, instead opting to do it all himself. “The first time I showed up to court for the original date, they asked for proof of the returned mail summons, and I did not have that,” he said.

The court hearing was rescheduled. When it was eventually held, the carrier sent a representative to argue against Roach.

“Their argument was pretty weak, I guess,” Roach said. “It was basically like, ‘Well, he didn’t pay the two months of service, so we didn’t unlock his phone. We offered him a settlement but he rejected it.’… My argument was, yeah, the terms had changed in kind of a consumer-unfriendly way. But beyond that, it was the fact that the terms had changed from something that was legal to something that was not legal with the federal regs. So regardless of the fact that the terms had changed, the current terms were illegal, which I thought was my strongest argument. And then I also put in that it was probably a violation of Kansas consumer protection law, which I’m glad I did.”

Roach said that toward the end of the hearing, the judge indicated that she couldn’t make a judgment based on FCC regulations and would need to rule on what the Kansas court has jurisdiction over. She issued the ruling that Verizon violated the state’s consumer protection law about five or six weeks later, he said.

Given that the FCC hasn’t acted on Verizon’s petition to change the unlocking rules, the federal regulations “haven’t changed at all in regards to Verizon’s obligation to unlock devices,” Roach said. He believes it would be relatively easy for consumers who were similarly harmed to beat Verizon in court or even to pursue a class action.

“I would think this would be a slam dunk for any further cases,” Roach said. “I don’t think I have any grounds anymore since my damages have been resolved, but it seems like it’d be a very easy class action for somebody.”

Verizon refused to unlock man’s iPhone, so he sued the carrier and won Read More »

How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking

ads, Features, streaming, Tech, TVs / Mike M. / December 13, 2025

The Ars guide to “dumb” TVs

Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Smart TVs can feel like a dumb choice if you’re looking for privacy, reliability, and simplicity.

Today’s TVs and streaming sticks are usually loaded up with advertisements and user tracking, making offline TVs seem very attractive. But ever since smart TV operating systems began making money, “dumb” TVs have been hard to find.

In response, we created this non-smart TV guide that includes much more than dumb TVs. Since non-smart TVs are so rare, this guide also breaks down additional ways to watch TV and movies online and locally without dealing with smart TVs’ evolution toward software-centric features and snooping. We’ll discuss a range of options suitable for various budgets, different experience levels, and different rooms in your home.

Table of Contents

Our best recommendation

This is a dumb TV guide, but first, let’s briefly highlight the best recommendation for most people: Take your TV offline and plug in an Apple TV box.

The Apple TV 4K and Siri Remote. — Your best option. Credit: Jeff Dunn

An Apple TV lets you replace smart TV software with Apple’s cleaner tvOS, and it’s more intuitive than using most smart TVs and other streaming devices. Apple’s tvOS usually runs faster and more reliably, and it isn’t riddled with distracting ads or recommendations. And there’s virtually no learning curve for family members or visitors, something that can’t always be said for DIY alternatives.

Critically, Apple TV boxes are also an easy recommendation on the privacy front. The setup process makes it simple for anyone to ensure that the device is using relatively minimal user tracking. You’re likely to use an Apple TV box with the Apple TV app or with an Apple account, which means sending some data to Apple. But Apple has a better reputation for keeping user information in-house, and Apple TV boxes don’t have automatic content recognition (ACR).

For more information, read my previous article on why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device.

Differing from other smart TV alternatives in this guide (such as a laptop), you don’t have to worry about various streaming services’ requirements for streaming in 4K or HDR with an Apple TV. But you still have to make sure your display and HDMI cable are HDCP 2.2-compliant and that you’re using HDMI 2.0 or better if you want to watch 4K or HDR content. You could even connect network-attached storage (NAS) to your Apple TV box so you can stream files from the storage device.

Plus, using a smart TV offline means you’ll have access to the latest and greatest display technologies, which is generally not the case for dumb TVs.

Things to keep in mind

One common concern about using smart TVs offline is the fear that the TV will repeatedly nag you to connect to the Internet. I’ve seen some reports of this happening over the years, but generally speaking, this doesn’t seem to be expected behavior. If you can’t find a way to disable TV notifications, try contacting support.

You may want your offline TV to keep LAN access so you can still use some smart TV features, like phone mirroring or streaming from a NAS. In this case, you can use your router (if supported) to block your TV’s IP address from connecting to the Internet.

And Google TV users should remember to set their TV to “basic TV” mode, which lets you use the TV without connecting to the Internet.

Dumb TVs are endangered

Buying a TV that doesn’t connect to the Internet is an obvious solution to avoiding smart TV tracking and ads, but that’s much easier said than done.

Smart TV OSes help TV-makers stay afloat in an industry with thin margins on hardware. Not only do they provide ad space, but they also give OS operators and their partners information on how people use their TVs—data that is extremely valuable to advertisers. Additionally, mainstream acceptance of the Internet of Things has led many people to expect their TVs to have integrated Wi-Fi. These factors have all made finding a dumb TV difficult, especially in the US.

Dumb TVs sold today have serious image and sound quality tradeoffs, simply because companies don’t make dumb versions of their high-end models. On the image side, you can expect lower resolutions, sizes, and brightness levels and poorer viewing angles. You also won’t find premium panel technologies like OLED. If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. Dumb TVs also usually have shorter (one-year) warranties.

Any display or system you end up using needs HDCP 2.2 compliance to play 4K or HDR content via a streaming service or any other DRM-protected 4K or HDR media, like a Blu-ray disc.

Best ways to find a dumb TV

Below are the brands I’ve identified as most likely to have dumb TVs available for purchase online as of this writing.

Emerson

I was able to find the greatest number of non-smart TVs from Emerson. Emerson is a Parsippany, New Jersey, electronics company that was founded in 1948.

As of this writing, Emerson’s dumb TV options range from 7-inch portable models to 50-inch 4K TVs. Its TVs are relatively easy to get since they’re sold directly and through various online retailers, including Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy, and, for some reason, Shein.

Westinghouse

Another company still pushing non-smart TVs is Westinghouse, a Pittsburgh-headquartered company founded in 1886. In addition to other types of electronics and home goods, Westinghouse also has an industrial business that includes nuclear fuel.

Westinghouse’s dumb TVs max out at 32 inches and 720p resolution, but some of them also have a built-in DVD player. You can find Westinghouse’s dumb TVs on Amazon. However, Westinghouse seems to have the most dubious reputation of these brands based on online chatter.

Sceptre

Sceptre, a Walmart brand, still has a handful of dumb TVs available. I’ve noticed inventory dwindle in recent months, but Walmart usually has at least one Sceptre dumb TV available.

Amazon search

Outside the above brands, your best bet for finding a non-smart TV is Amazon. I’ve had success searching for “dumb TVs” and have found additional results by searching for a “non-smart TV.”

Projectors

For now, it’s not hard to find a projector that doesn’t connect to the Internet or track user activity. And there are options that are HDCP 2.2-compliant so you can project in 4K and HDR.

Things to keep in mind

Projectors aren’t for everyone. They still require dim rooms and a decent amount of physical space to produce the best image. (To see how much space you need for a projector, I recommend RTINGS’ handy throw calculator.)

The smart-tech bug has come for projectors, too, though, and we’ve started seeing more smart projectors released over the past two years.

Computer monitors

If you want a dumb display for watching TV, it’s cheaper to buy a smart TV and keep it offline than it is to get a similarly specced computer monitor. But there are benefits to using a monitor instead of a dumb TV or an offline smart TV. (Of course, this logic doesn’t carry over to “smart monitors.”)

When it comes to smaller screens, you’ll have more options if you look at monitors instead of TVs. This is especially true if you want premium features, like high refresh rates or quality speakers, which are hard to find among TVs that are under 42 inches.

Monitor vendors are typically more forthcoming about product specs than TV makers are. It’s hard to find manufacturer claims about a TV’s color gamut, color accuracy, or typical brightness, but a computer monitor’s product page usually has all this information. It’s also easier to find a monitor with professional-grade color accuracy than a TV with the same, and some monitors have integrated calibration tools.

Things to keep in mind

Newer and advanced types of display technologies are rarer in monitors. This includes OLED, Mini LED, and Micro RGB. And if you buy a new monitor, you’ll probably need to supply your own speakers.

A computer monitor isn’t a TV, so there’s no TV tuner or way to use an antenna. If you really wanted to, you could get a cable box to work with a monitor with the right ports or adapters. People are streaming more than they’re watching broadcast and cable channels, though, so you may not mind the lack of traditional TV capabilities.

Digital signage

Digital signage displays are purpose-built for displaying corporate messages, often for all or most hours of the day. They typically have features that people don’t need for TV watching, such as content management software. And due to their durability and warranty needs, digital signage displays are often more expensive than similarly specced computer monitors.

Again, it’s important to ensure that the digital signage is HDCP 2.2-compliant if you plan to watch 4K or HDR.

Things to keep in mind

But if you happen to come across a digital signage display that’s the right size and the right price, is there any real reason why you shouldn’t use it as a TV? I asked Panasonic, which makes digital signage. A spokesperson from Panasonic Connect North America told me that digital signage displays are made to be on for 16 to 24 hours per day and with high brightness levels to accommodate “retail and public environments.”

The spokesperson added:

Their rugged construction and heat management systems make them ideal for demanding commercial use, but these same features can result in higher energy consumption, louder operation, and limited compatibility with home entertainment systems.

Panasonic’s representative also pointed out that real TVs offer consumer-friendly features for watching TV, like “home-optimized picture tuning, simplified audio integration, and user-friendly menu interfaces.”

If you’re fine with these caveats, though, and digital signage is your easiest option, there isn’t anything stopping you from using one to avoid smart TVs.

What to connect to your dumb TV

After you’ve settled on an offline display, you’ll need something to give it life. Below is a breakdown of the best things to plug into your dumb TV (or dumb display) so you can watch TV without your TV watching you.

Things to keep in mind

If you’re considering using an older device for TV, like a used laptop, make sure it’s HDCP 2.2-compliant if you want to watch 4K or HDR.

And although old systems and displays and single-board computers can make great dumb TV alternatives, remember that these devices need HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.2 or newer to support 4K at 60 Hz.

What to connect: a Phone

Before we get into more complex options for powering your dumb TV, let’s start with devices you may already own.

It’s possible to connect your phone to a dumb display, but doing so is harder than connecting a PC. You’d need an adapter, such as a USB-C (or Lightning) Digital AV Adapter.

You can use a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to control the phone from afar. By activating Assistive Touch, I’ve even been able to use my iPhone with a mouse that claims not to support iOS. With an extra-long cable, you could potentially control the phone from your lap. That’s not the cleanest setup, though, and it would look odd in a family room.

Things to keep in mind

If your phone is outputting to your display, you can’t use it to check your email, read articles, or doomscroll while you watch TV. You can fix this by using a secondary phone as your streaming device.

If you’re using a phone to watch a streaming service, there’s a good chance you won’t be watching in 4K, even if your streaming subscription supports it. Netflix, for example, limits resolution to 1080p or less (depending on the model) for iPhones. HDR is supported across iPhone models but not with Android devices.

Screen mirroring doesn’t always work well with streaming services and phones. Netflix, for instance, doesn’t support AirPlay or Android phone casting. Disney+ supports Chromecast and AirPlay, but AirPlay won’t work if you subscribe to Disney+ with ads (due to “technical reasons”).

What to connect: A laptop

A laptop is an excellent smart TV alternative that’s highly customizable yet simple to deploy.

Most mainstream streaming providers that have dedicated smart TV apps, like Netflix and HBO Max, have PC versions of their apps. And most of those services are also available via web browsers, which work much better on computers than they do on smart TVs. You can also access local files—all via a user interface that you and anyone else watching TV is probably familiar with already.

With a tethered laptop, you can quickly set up a multi-picture view for watching two games or shows simultaneously. Multi-view support on streaming apps is extremely limited right now, with only Peacock and dedicated sports apps like ESPN and MLB TV offering it.

A laptop also lets you use your dumb TV for common PC tasks, like PC gaming or using productivity software (sometimes you just want to see that spreadsheet on a bigger screen).

Things to keep in mind

Streaming in 4K or HDR sometimes comes with specific requirements that are easy to overlook. Some streaming services, for example, won’t stream in 4K on certain web browsers—or with any web browser at all.

Streaming services sometimes have GPU requirements for 4K and HDR streaming. For example, to stream Netflix in 4K or HDR from a browser, you need Microsoft Edge and an Intel 7th Generation Core or AMD Ryzen CPU or better, plus the latest graphics drivers. Disney+ doesn’t allow 4K HDR streaming from any web browsers. Streaming 4K content in a web browser might also require you to acquire the HEVC/H.265 codec, depending on your system.

If 4K or HDR streaming is critical to you, it’s important to check your streaming providers’ 4K and HDR limits; it may be best to rely on a dedicated app.

If you want to be able to comfortably control your computer from a couch, you’ll also need to invest in some hardware or software. You can get away with a basic Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Air mice are another popular solution.

The WeChip W1 air mouse. Credit: WeChip/Amazon

If you don’t want extra gadgets taking up space, software like the popular Unified Remote (for iOS and Android) can turn your phone into a remote control for your computer. It also supports Wake-On-LAN.

You may encounter hiccups with streaming availability. Most streaming services available on smart TVs are also accessible via computers, but some aren’t. Many FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) services and channels, such as the Samsung TV Plus service and Filmrise FAST app and channel, are only available via smart TVs. And many streaming services’ apps, including Netflix and Disney+, aren’t available on macOS. If you’re using a very old computer, you might run into compatibility issues with streaming services. Netflix’s PC app, for example, requires Windows 10 or newer, and if you stream Netflix via a browser on a system running an older OS, you’re limited to SD resolution.

And while a laptop and dumb display setup can keep snooping TVs out of your home, there are obviously lots of user tracking and privacy concerns with web browsers, too. You can alleviate some concerns by researching the browsers you want to use for watching TV.

What to connect: A home theater PC

For a more permanent setup, consider a dedicated home theater PC (HTPC). They don’t require beefy, expensive specs and are more flexible than smart TV platforms in terms of software support and customization.

You can pick a system that fits on your living room console table, like a mini PC, or match your home’s aesthetics with a custom build. Raspberry Pis are a diminutive solution that you can dress up in a case and use for various additional tasks, like streaming games from your gaming PC to your TV or creating an AirPlay music server for streaming Spotify and other online music and local music to AirPlay-compatible speakers.

The right accessories can take an HTPC to the next level. You can use an app like TeamViewer or the more TV-remote-like Unified Remote to control your PC with your phone. But investing in dedicated hardware is worthwhile for long-term and multi-person use. Bluetooth keyboards and mice last a long time without needing a charge and can even be combined into one device.

K400 Plus Wireless Touch Keyboard — Logitech’s wireless K400 combines a keyboard with a touchpad. Credit: Logitech

Other popular options for HTPC control are air remotes and the Flirc USB, which plugs into a computer’s USB-A port to enable IR remote control. Speaking of USB ports, you could use them to connect a Blu-ray/DVD player or gaming controller to your HTPC. If you want to add support for live TV, you can still find PCIe over-the-air (OTA) tuner cards.

Helpful software for home theater PCs

With the right software, an HTPC can be more useful to a household than a smart TV. You probably already have some apps in mind for your ideal HTPC. That makes this a fitting time to discuss some solid software that you may not have initially considered or that would be helpful to recommend to other cord cutters.

If you have a lot of media files you’d like to easily navigate through on your HTPC, media server software, such as Plex Media Server, is a lifesaver. Plex specifically has an app streamlined for HTPC use. The company has taken some criticism recently due to changes like new remote access rules, higher prices, and a foray into movie rentals. Although Plex is probably the most common and simplest media server software, alternatives like Jellyfin have been gaining popularity lately and are worth checking out.

Whichever media server software you use, consider pairing it with a dedicated NAS. NAS media servers are especially helpful if you want to let people, including those outside of your household, watch stuff from your media library at any time and without having to keep a high-power system turned on 24/7.

You can stream files from your NAS to a dumb TV by setting up a streaming system—such as a Raspberry Pi, Nvidia Shield, or Apple TV box—that connects to the dumb display. That device can then stream video from the NAS by using Network File System or the Infuse app, for example.

What to connect: An antenna

Nowadays, you can watch traditional, live TV channels over the Internet through over-the-top streaming services like YouTube TV and Sling TV. But don’t underestimate the power of TV antennas, which have improved in recent years and let you watch stuff for free.

This year, Horowitz Research surveyed 2,200 US adults and found that 19 percent of respondents were still using a TV antenna.

If you haven’t checked them out in a while, you might be surprised by how sleek bunny ears look now. Many of the best TV antennas now have flat, square shapes and can be mounted to your wall or windowsill.

Mohu's Leaf antenna. — Mohu’s Leaf antenna. Bye, bye, bunny ears. Credit: Mohu

The best part is that companies can’t track what you watch with an antenna. As Nielsen said in a January 2024 blog post:

Big data sources alone can’t provide insight into the viewing behaviors of the millions of viewers who watch TV using a digital antenna.

Antennas have also gotten more versatile. For example, in addition to local stations, an antenna can provide access to dozens of digital subchannels. They’re similar to the free ad-supported television channels gaining popularity with smart TVs users today, in that they often show niche programming or a steady stream of old shows and movies with commercial breaks. You can find a list of channels you’re likely to get with an antenna via this website from the Federal Communications Commission.

TV and movies watched through an antenna are likely to be less compressed than what you get with cable, which means you can get excellent image quality with the right setup.

You can also add DVR capabilities, like record and pause, to live broadcasts through hardware, such as a Tablo OTA DVR device or Plex DVR, a subscription service that lets antenna users add broadcast TV recordings to their Plex media servers.

A diagram of the 4th Gen Tablo's ports. — A diagram of the 4th Gen Tablo’s ports. Credit: Tablo

Things to keep in mind

You’re unlikely to get 4K or HDR broadcasts with an antenna. ATSC 3.0, also known as Next Gen TV, enables stations to broadcast in 4K HDR but has been rolling out slowly. Legislation recently proposed by the FCC could further slow things.

In order to watch a 4K or HDR broadcast, you’ll also need an ATSC 3.0 tuner or an ATSC 3.0-equipped TV. The latter is rare. LG, for example, dropped support in 2023 over a patent dispute. You can find a list of ATSC 3.0-certified TVs and converters here.

Realistically, an antenna doesn’t have enough channels to provide sufficient entertainment for many modern households. Sixty percent of antenna owners also subscribe to some sort of streaming service, according to Nielsen.

Further, obstructions like tall buildings and power lines could hurt an antenna’s performance. Another challenge is getting support for multiple TVs in your home. If you want OTA TV in multiple rooms, you either need to buy multiple antennas or set up a way to split the signal (such as by using an old coaxial cable and splitter, running a new coaxial cable, or using an OTA DVR, such as a Tablo or SiliconDust’s HDHomeRun).

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking Read More »

Please send help. I can’t stop playing these roguelikes.

ball x pit, Features, gaming, hades 2, roguelikes, roguelites / Kelly Newman / December 8, 2025

it’s “rogue,” not “rouge”

2025 was a very good year for my favorite genre.

Hades 2 has me in a chokehold. Credit: Supergiant Games

It’s time to admit, before God and the good readers of Ars Technica, that I have a problem. I love roguelikes. Reader, I can’t get enough of them. If there’s even a whisper of a hot new roguelike on Steam, I’m there. You may call them arcane, repetitive, or maddeningly difficult; I call them heaven.

The second best part of video games is taking a puny little character and, over 100 hours, transforming that adventurer into a god of destruction. The best thing about video games is doing the same thing in under an hour. Beat a combat encounter, get an upgrade. Enter a new area, choose a new item. Put together a build and watch it sing.

If you die—immediately ending your ascent and returning you to the beginning of the game—you’ll often make a pit stop at a home base to unlock new goodies to help you on your next run. (Some people distiguish between roguelikes and “roguelites,” with the latter including permanent, between-run upgrades. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll use “roguelike” as an umbrella term).

2025 has been a truly horrific year for most things. But for roguelikes? It’s been an embarrassment of riches. Because I’m an editor and there’s no one here to stop me, I’d like to tell you about them. To keep things manageable, I’ll stick to games that hit 1.0 in 2025.

Hades II

Screenshot of hades 2 — Credit: Supergiant Games

Where else could we start? In a year of wall-to-wall video game showstoppers, Hades II sticks out. The first Hades got our nod for best game of 2020, and Hades 2 certainly has my vote for 2025.

This time, you play as Melinoë, sister to Hades protagonist Zagreus and daughter of Hades himself, as she attempts to take back the house of Hades from Chronos, the titan of time. The cast of Olympian gods returns to bestow blessings (upgrades to your various attacks and defensive maneuvers) to help you on your way. If you played the first game, you’ll know what you’re getting into here; the sequel just vastly expands the content and mechanics.

As you fight through the game’s two different paths, you’ll slowly uncover the game’s story via little snippets of dialogue (there’s a truly mind-boggling amount of dialogue in this game), and oodles of unlockables and endgame challenge runs ensure you’ll be playing for a long time.

You won’t find many roguelikes with higher production values. The game is $30. Madness! If you like roguelikes, you’ve probably already picked this up. I’ll go further, though. If you enjoy video games at all, you should buy Hades II. It’s that good.

Ball x Pit

ball x pit screenshot

You ever boot up a new game and immediately think, “Well, this thing is going to be a problem for me”? Yeah.

We’ve been blessed with several pachinko-style roguelites over the past couple of years (Peglin, Ballionaire, and Nubby’s Number Factory are all worth your time); now comes a take on another ball-centric classic. I’m talking about last month’s Ball x Pit, a roguelite version of Breakout. Or at least that’s the simple way to describe it. In actuality, the game is that rarest of finds: something that feels unique.

Take one of your many and varied characters onto the battlefield, and you’ll lob a stream of balls toward the top of the screen, where slowly descending enemies periodically fire attacks back at you. When you level up, you’ll choose “special balls,” which have all manner of effects, like inflicting fire or poison on enemies or balls that explode into other balls. As the game progresses, you can “fuse” these balls together, combining the effects. Sometimes, you’ll be able to “evolve” two balls into an entirely new type of ball. Not enough for you? Slam two evolved balls together for even more wackiness.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is fantastic, with different characters and upgrades forcing you to play differently to succeed. The game doles out new mechanics and surprises along the way to keep things fresh, though this is a game you can “complete”; the between-run metaprogression eventually lets you become a bit of a god.

A base-building system—and a minigame in which you bounce your characters around the map to activate buildings—is a nice, thematic diversion between runs, but it’s mostly just a flashy upgrade screen. I usually just wanted to get back into the game as soon as possible.

Need more convincing? Check out the free demo.

Absolum

absolum screenshot

Absolum’s well-regarded demo was released in June, but this thing came out of nowhere for me. The elevator pitch: a beat ‘em up, but make it roguelite.

Not really a beat ‘em up fan? Me neither. Doesn’t matter. The last side-scrolling brawler I played for more than an hour was probably 1991’s The Simpsons arcade game or that same year’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (though the original TMNT arcade game from 1989 was my first quarter-munching arcade love).

The game features gorgeous hand-drawn visuals and the year’s best soundtrack, including this absolute banger from Doom’s Mick Gordon (that’s from a particularly metal boss fight; most of the songs are more fantasy-forward).

Over your runs, you’ll traverse multiple paths, finding secrets and unlocking new features. The roguelike elements are a bit thin at first, but piecing together powerful builds becomes simple as you fill out your options. The combat is sublime—you can get away with button-mashing for a while, but you’ll want to learn at least some of its intricacies to make it to the end.

This thing’s the complete package, and it’s easily one of the best games of the year. Bring along a friend if you’re into co-op. The surprisingly beefy demo is still available—there’s really no excuse not to check it out.

Clover Pit

clover pit screenshot

I’ve never actually been to a casino, but judging by the electric dopamine surge I get when hitting a jackpot in the slot machine roguelike Clover Pit, I know I should maintain my chastity.

Clover Pit locks you in a disgusting, blood-soaked closet of a room, and the only way to earn your freedom is to deposit money into an ATM over a series of ever-increasing payments. In other words, it’s what’s come to be known in some circles as a Balatro-like, aka a numbers-go-up game (of course, Balatro was just the first such game to hit it big; the genre’s true progenitor came a year or so earlier in the form of another excellent slot machine roguelike, Luck be a Landlord).

Standing on a trap door that will drop you to your death if you fail to hit your deadlines, you’ll pull a lever on a slot machine over and over, hoping to hit it big. It’s not totally random, though, of course. Purchaseable trinkets allow you to manipulate your odds, trigger beneficial effects, and multiply your score. Getting a jackpot of all 7’s? It’s easier than you may think.

Don’t expect Balatro-like depth—most strategies here involve simply picking one symbol and buffing it to high heaven—but fun, game-breaking builds are easy to put together to make you feel like a winner. There’s something disconcertingly hypnotic and soothing about repeatedly pulling a slot machine lever—it’s best to do it here, where you won’t end up losing your home.

Shape of Dreams

shape of dreams screenshot

I’ve been playing the hell out of this game, but if you stopped me on the street, I could not tell you what it’s called. Forgettable name aside, I love it.

I’ve heard the game’s combat and controls described as MOBA-like. That seems reasonable, at least from what I remember from my ill-advised and short-lived attempt to get into Dota 2 a decade ago. Don’t let that scare you off, though; this is basically a top-down action RPG where you’ll be fighting through small rooms of enemies, Hades-style.

What makes it special is its skill system. You start each run with a couple of attacks and a passive ability, and you’ll pick up (and replace) skills as you go. Each skill—here called “memories” (don’t ask me; I skipped the lore)—can fit up to three “essences,” modifications that affect how the skill functions. You can rearrange these modifications at any time, enabling a “make your own skill” system that’s endlessly fascinating.

Unique unlockable characters and robust metaprogression skill trees will keep you busy for embarrassing amounts of time. You can even play with friends. Before long, you’ll be creating game-breaking, room-nuking builds, the hallmark of my favorite games of the genre.

Megabonk

Megabonk screenshot

As its name might suggest, Megabonk is not a serious game. Unlike some other games on this list, there’s no chance of this one becoming an all-time great. But there’s a reason this buzzy little title has been on many gamers’ lips since its release in September. The concept is simple: it’s Vampire Survivors meets Risk of Rain 2.

If you’ve played both games, mash them up in your mind and you’ll know exactly how this thing plays. And not just in the way that most “Survivor-likes” tread extremely similar ground to the original. Megabonk‘s treasure-chest-opening animation is ripped straight from Vampire Survivors, and the game’s structure and items (down to the artwork style) are basically just Risk of Rain 2.

So no, it’s in no way original. And I was disappointed to learn that there are only two real “stages” to play; a Risk of Rain-style teleporter just takes you to a harder version of the stage you’ve picked. There are also balance issues; the damage scaling on anything but the first 10-minute stage is absurd. But there is some ridiculous fun to be had with it.

If you’re not into the whole auto-shooter/bullet heaven thing, there’s nothing here for you. But if you’re interested in seeing how chaotic a third-person Vampire Survivors can get, step right up.

It’s also the one 2025 game where you can play as a sunglasses-wearing, skateboarding skeleton who throws bouncing bones at enemies. In these tough times, that’s not nothing.

Deep Rock Galactic Survivor

deep rock galactic survivor screenshot

We’ve talked about this Survivors-like take on the beloved co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic a couple of times over its Early Access period, but we were remiss in not discussing it upon its 1.0 release last month. The game was already an Ars favorite, but its progression systems still needed a bit of work. It’s now ready for public consumption, and it’s one of the best auto-shooters on the market. It’s so good that you might want to take a look at it even if you want nothing to do with the oversaturated subgenre.

Its Vampire Survivor-like bones are obvious—you walk around a map while your weapons fire automatically at hordes of enemies closing in on you. Collect the XP gems defeated enemies drop to level up and choose an upgrade. The difference here is that you’re also able to mine through walls of rocks, letting you escape tricky situations and funnel bad guys to traps you’ve laid.

The progression system is heavy on the grind, but there’s plenty of fun to be had no matter how hardcore you want to be about it.

Rock and stone!

Monster Train 2

monster train 2 screenshot

Five years after the original, it’s time for the sequel to the second-best roguelike deckbuilder of all time (the sequel to the first-best roguelike deckbuilder has—thankfully, if I’m being honest—been delayed until the beginning of next year). As in the first game, and as the game’s title might suggest, you’ll be fighting monsters on a train, trying to stop them before they ascend three floors to reach your “pyre”—your health pool for the run.

In Monster Train 2, as in any deckbuilder, you start with a fairly crappy deck of cards and upgrade and expand it throughout your run to try to make it to the end. But in addition to the usual spells and attacks, Monster Train 2 gives you units to assign to the different levels of your battlefield, infusing an interesting spatial element to the cartoonishly violent proceedings.

The sequel is more of the first game, but with smart updates that make everything flow smoother. It’s one of my favorite games of the year, and I highly recommend it to any fan of tactical card games.

Deadzone Rogue

deadzone rogue screenshot

Deadzone Rogue instantly joins the pantheon of roguelite first-person looter shooters, which includes perennial favorites Gunfire Reborn and Roboquest (I haven’t played them yet, but the brand-new Abyssus and Void/Breaker are also generating a bunch of buzz).

Where Roboquest excels at fun, Doom-like movement and colorful environments, Deadzone Rogue is all about the shooting. The game has the best gunplay of any FPS roguelike I’ve played, and the random weapons, armor, and upgrades you get give each run a sense of personality.

The game’s music, voice acting, and lore are best ignored, but the sound design is nice and punchy. This won’t be a game you’ll play for 100 hours, but sometimes it’s just fun to shoot a gun in a video game, and Deadzone Rogue gets that simple formula right.

9 Kings

9 kings screenshot

Look, I’m going to cheat here, and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s true—9 Kings is not fully released. But I can’t not talk about. I initially wrote the game off when it was released into Early Access in July, thinking it looked too simple. It is simple, but that’s to its credit.

The premise is easy to explain: Build a little kingdom on a 3-by-3 grid of squares. Play a card to construct or upgrade a building or unit in your kingdom. Afterward, a neighboring kingdom will attack, and your units will automatically fight to defend your home. After the battle, you draft a card from the defeated kingdom to add to your hand.

As you can see from the above screenshot, you can expand your kingdom beyond the initial nine squares, and unlockable perks change up the way you play each king. A handful of enemies are randomly chosen from the pool of nine, meaning that the cards you can draft each run will be different.

Making busted builds and fighting your way up the difficulty levels is extremely compelling; there was a week where the “one more run” curse descended on me, and I did little else than play this game.

Aaron is Ars Technica’s Copy Chief. He has worked as an editor for over 17 years. In addition to editing features at Ars, he occasionally reviews board and video games. He lives in Chicago.

Please send help. I can’t stop playing these roguelikes. Read More »

A massive, Chinese-backed port could push the Amazon Rainforest over the edge

amazon rainforest, Features, global trade, peru, port, Science, South America, syndication / Shannon Garcia / December 6, 2025

“this would come with a road”

The port will revolutionize global trade, but it’s sparking destructive rainforest routes.

CHANCAY, Peru—The elevator doors leading to the fifth-floor control center open like stage curtains onto a theater-sized screen.

This “Operations Productivity Dashboard” instantaneously displays a battery of data: vehicle locations, shipping times, entry times, loading data, unloading data, efficiency statistics.

Most striking, though, are the bold lines arcing over the dashboard’s deep-blue Pacific—digital streaks illustrating the routes that lead thousands of miles across the ocean, from this unassuming city, to Asia’s biggest ports.

Inside the Chancay port, a digital dashboard displays detailed statistics of shipments and shows the direct routes across the Pacific from Peru’s coast to major ports in Asia, including Shanghai, the world’s largest. Credit: Georgina Gustin/Inside Climate News

Chancay sits at a curve along the ocean, about 50 miles north of Lima. Until recently, it was best known for its medieval-themed amusement park, a crescent of beach, and a row of seaside restaurants. Now it’s home to South America’s newest, most technologically advanced deepwater megaport and the epicenter of China’s bid to control the flow of goods to and from this commodity-rich continent.

For Peru, the recent opening of the port here was the realization, nearly two decades in the making, of a dream to position itself as South America’s global transportation hub, the continent’s primary launching point for a straight shot across the Pacific to Asia’s biggest economies.

For China, the port delivers a strategically direct route for the critical minerals and agricultural commodities coming off the continent, and in the other direction, a more expedient channel for its cars, machinery, and electronics to stream into South American markets.

The port represents Peru’s first project under the banner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s $1.3 trillion bid to remake how the world travels and trades, and collectively speaking, the most ambitious infrastructure project in history. It is China’s flagship infrastructure investment in South America—and a crucial node in Beijing’s global strategy for securing access to critical commodities.

It also brings China logistically closer to one of its chief goals: direct access to neighboring Brazil and the massive amounts of timber, soy, and beef produced in the Amazon rainforest. Now, in theory, these commodities no longer have to travel through the politically fraught Panama Canal or around the continent’s southern tip. The new megaport, the only one in South America that can manage the largest class of fully loaded container ships, cuts the transport time by 10 days or more.

First, though, these commodities have to make their way to the port—and to do that, they have to somehow cross the Andes, the vertiginous mountain system that traces the western edge of the continent, from Venezuela to Chile.

There is no good, easy way to haul goods over the Andes now. That is changing.

The port has reawakened old ambitions of roads, railways, and water routes that could connect the riches of the Amazon to the continent’s west coast and the world’s largest ocean. The prospect of a fast track across the Pacific has sparked new momentum—a willingness to reconsider the engineering challenge posed by the world’s longest mountain chain.

“The port is a magnet,” said Luis Fernandez, executive director of Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation. “They’ll find more efficient ways to get over the Andes, to plug into Chancay.”

But environmental scientists and forestry experts warn that the economic pull of the port will speed the destruction of the Amazon, the planet’s most critical, climate-stabilizing terrestrial ecosystem.

The port and its faster link to massive Asian economies, they warn, will deepen and expand an extractive network of roads, railways, and waterways that have already eaten into the rainforest, a web of arteries carrying oil, gold, timber, beef, and soy to markets around the world.

The operating landscape at the Chancay port, north of Lima, is China’s biggest port project in Latin America and one of the most technologically sophisticated and automated ports in the world. Credit: Georgina Gustin/Inside Climate News

The pressure could push the rainforest over the edge, transforming it from the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink into a massive emitter of planet-warming gases. Some research suggests the forest is already at or near this potentially catastrophic tipping point.

“China wants everything in the Amazon,” said Julia Urrunaga, director of Peru programs for the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international nonprofit that investigates environmental crimes. “And in one way or another, all these routes are connected to the port.”

In July, seven months after the port’s inauguration, China and Brazil formally announced they would explore the possibility of a railway leading from Brazil’s Atlantic coast directly to Chancay. China has already committed $50 billion toward infrastructure in the region.

The massive undertaking would ultimately create a beeline for commodities to flow more directly from Brazil to China, already its biggest trading partner, and augment a notoriously troubled and underutilized highway, completed in 2011, that runs from Brazil’s western Amazon to the Peruvian coast.

Even if the newly proposed cross-continental railway is never built—and some analysts think it won’t be—the lure of China’s appetites and wealth will stress the Amazon ecosystem, simply because the port will spark investments in other road, rail, or waterway projects to serve it, whether China is directly involved or not.

“When you start talking about these big corridors, it creates incentive for a lot of small routes,” said David Salisbury, an associate professor of geography at the University of Richmond who has extensively studied the impact of infrastructure on deforestation in the Amazon. “In a world where carbon storage is absolutely necessary for sustaining a stable planet, increasing the axes of forest degradation—whether it’s a road or a railway—is a big mistake.”

A port is just a port until there are roads and railways leading to it, and China has made clear that access to its biggest South American infrastructure project is a priority. Although China is clearly the world’s clean energy leader, there’s little, if any, research into the climate impact of its infrastructure investments, including any kind of holistic analysis of the port and its potential impact on the Amazon or neighboring and equally vulnerable ecosystems, including Brazil’s Pantanal and Cerrado. Most of China’s infrastructure investments, meanwhile, are in the world’s equatorial midriff—in nations that are rich in resources and climatically critical, but with weak, often corrupt governments and few environmental safeguards.

When China wants to build something, countries—including Peru—are quick to ease or overlook environmental standards and requirements for public participation, critics say, even if that means destroying natural resources or communities.

“Unquestionably any infrastructure, and any attempts at development, will put a lot of pressure on the Amazon,” said Enrique Ortiz, a Peruvian tropical ecologist who runs the Washington, DC-based Andes Amazon Fund. “Are there safeguards? That’s where we’re so weak.”

In Chancay, residents say, the developers of the port tore their city apart. In their zeal to embrace its economic promise, city leaders ignored local complaints, residents told Inside Climate News. The project proceeded without the legally required public input and access to information, advocacy groups found, ruining lives and homes in the process.

Hundreds of miles to the east of Chancay, in a rainforest so lush and filled with species that scientists haven’t yet catalogued them all, new worries are percolating. Chinese investment is increasingly prominent, with Chinese machinery, trucks, and workers seemingly everywhere.

Chris Fagan runs the Peru- and US-based Upper Amazon Conservancy. His main objective right now is to stop a roadway from running through a pristine section of the Amazon, which would decimate Indigenous cultures and the rainforest itself.

“The influence of Chinese money on the Amazon can’t be overstated,” he said.

Roads and a revolution

When the Chinese shipping conglomerate COSCO signed the deal to buy a 60 percent stake in the Chancay port, most people guessed what would come next.

“They need the roads,” Urrunaga said. “We knew that from the beginning—that this would come with a road.”

What no one yet knows for sure is where exactly the new roads—or railways or waterways—might be. The port will likely beget many.

The Brazilian government last year announced its plans to build five major new routes through the Amazon to connect with Pacific ports, including Chancay. The roads are part of a larger project that includes modernizing or building 65 highways, 40 waterways, 35 airports, 21 ports and nine railways.

From the Brazilian town of Cruzeiro do Sul, in the western Amazon, a long-discussed 430-mile roadway could finally be paved westward to the city of Pucallpa, the heart of Peru’s timber industry. From there, a road already leads to Chancay.

The new road would cross the region where the Amazon begins—the famously disputed source of the massive arterial sprawl of coffee-colored waterways that form the Amazon basin and its namesake river. This region, which straddles parts of the Andes and the Amazon rainforest, also contains two national parks that are home to 10 Indigenous tribes, including some living in voluntary isolation.

“It’s this huge, intact roadless area and one of the most biodiverse landscapes in the world,” said Fagan, of the Upper Amazon Conservancy, which is headquartered in Pucallpa. “It’s a really important place for global conservation and climate goals.”

It is, according to Fagan, among the biggest, wildest places left in the world. And the road could transform it irrevocably, with its effects spreading far beyond the region itself. If the road is built—as local politicians are pushing for now—it will connect to a handful more major roadways that cut across the wider Amazon, and to yet more that are still in the planning stages.

Since the Brazilian military cut roadways into the Amazon to facilitate its exploitation in the 1960s, a growing body of research has tracked the effects of infrastructure on the rainforest. Deforestation here occurs in a “fishbone” pattern where a primary road leads to secondary roads spiking off it, fragmenting and weakening the forest. This pattern, clearly visible from satellite images, crosshatches across much of the region. Researchers say it’s even more destructive than clearcutting big swaths of forest.

Adding to the pile of research, a study earlier this year found that every one-kilometer (or roughly half-mile) stretch of primary road cut into the rainforest led to 50 kilometers (31 miles) of secondary road—and that the secondary roads triggered more than 300 times more forest degradation or loss.

“The area is experiencing this incredibly rapid expansion of secondary, or unofficial, roads,” the University of Richmond’s Salisbury said, referring to the region where the Pucallpa road would be completed.

This May, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing to discuss the new railway that would cut more than 3,000 miles across the continent, from the Atlantic port at Ilheus to Chancay.

“This represents a revolution,” Simone Tebet, Brazil’s minister of planning and budget, said at the time. “The plan is, in fact, to rip Brazil from east to west.”

In July, Brazil and China formally announced a five-year technical study to determine what route the railway would take—a sign that the countries are serious about making the project happen.

One of the possible routes, researchers say, is along the same stretch from Cruzeiro do Sul to Pucallpa where the road is again under discussion.

“If it comes through Pucallpa that’s going to be a huge disaster, ecologically and socially,” Salisbury said, noting the especially pristine nature of the area.

Another possible route is along an already problematic road, known as the Interoceanic Highway, that leads from the western Brazilian Amazon, over the Andes, to Lima. Road and railway ecologists say that while rail is seen as less damaging to forests, its potential impacts are underestimated.

“Are railways better than roads?” said Elizabeth Losos, an adjunct professor at Duke University who runs the ISLe Initiative, a network of educational efforts to make infrastructure more sustainable. “They take up the same amount of space, but for the most part, people get off at stations and can’t get off at multiple places in between. But when they build the railways they create service roads that serve them.”

Salisbury has considered the same question. “Railways are a lot less environmentally and culturally impactful than roads—and that’s crucial,” he said. “But how are you able to control that they remain purely railways? Once you make a linear clearing through the rainforest—how can you stop people from expanding beyond that?”

Automatic, electric, and huge

Jason Guillén Flores is the Chancay port’s safety and environment manager, an engaging evangelist for the state-of-the-art technology that will bring the continent’s raw materials to China and Chinese goods containing those raw materials, transformed, back to the continent.

One day this July, dozens of Chinese-made electric cars had just disembarked from a massive roll-on/roll-off ship and were awaiting distribution into the expanding Latin American market.

From the moment the ships arrive in the docks, their payloads are controlled from the fifth-floor command center. From a giant observation deck, visitors can watch as a fleet of 500 driverless electric trucks shuttle goods from the docks to waiting vehicles.

“All this port is electric—all the different equipment and trucks. All electric,” Guillén Flores said. “This is the fifth port in the world to be all automatic. The other four are in China.”

Guillén Flores walked from the Area de Centro de Control to the Area de Control Remoto where half a dozen women sat at desks, remotely maneuvering the massive cranes that hover in the wintry gray at the docks’ edges. Operating a crane from within its cockpit is exhausting work, Guillén Flores explained, leaning over to demonstrate the hunched position operators often sit in.

“Here there is air conditioning and coffee,” he said. “Six people control 50 cranes.”

Beyond the command center, the loading platforms, and the docks, a 1.7-mile breakwater curves through the ocean, creating a protected area for ships to enter the port. It stands nearly 30 feet high—enough to withstand a tsunami caused by a 10-degree quake. “No problem,” Guillén Flores said.

Constructing the port, he said, required dredging the approach to a depth of nearly 60 feet, moving 7.6 million cubic yards of dirt and rocks and digging a more than mile-long tunnel under the city. Altogether it took 438 explosive blasts.

Guillén Flores stressed that the goal of the port, at least initially, was to help turn Peru into an agricultural powerhouse, ready to supply hungry Asian markets with produce.

“It’s a general vision for Peru to improve ports and agriculture so we can position ourselves as a top country in exporting agricultural products,” he said. Now, he added, a refrigerated container full of Peruvian blueberries or asparagus can reach Shanghai in a mere 23 days.

But the port is designed to handle more than fruits and vegetables.

In 2007 a Peruvian ex-Navy admiral named Juan Ribaudo de la Torre launched an ambitious plan for turning this modest bump of oceanside land into a major port. With his deep connections in the military and government, he eventually found a strategic and willing partner—the Peruvian mining giant Volcan, the world’s fourth largest silver producer and Peru’s largest producer of zinc.

Already some local fishermen were concerned about the fate of their fishing grounds and Volcan’s long track record of environmental violations. In 2011, through a subsidiary, Volcan acquired 50 percent of the port project, from the company launched by Ribaudo, for $450 million. Around the same time, lawyers with connections to Volcan formed an offshore company, based in the British Virgin Islands, to secretly begin purchasing plots of land for the port.

Fishing boats sit anchored in Chancay’s harbor with the new port’s cranes. Credit: Rommel Gonzalez via Getty

When Ribaudo died in 2013, Volcan took full control of the project under the name Terminales Portuarios Chancay. That same year, Peruvian regulators approved an environmental impact study for the project, but residents in Chancay were not given adequate opportunities to access hearings or participate in the review process, advocates say.

“The study was approved in an irregular manner because the civil population didn’t take part as required,” said Alejandro Chirinos, a researcher with the Lima-based environmental and social justice group CooperAcción. “And why were the people not considered? Because people didn’t want Volcan.”

In 2019 officials from Volcan and the Peruvian government attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. By the end of the event, China’s COSCO Shipping Ports Ltd. had signed a deal to buy 60 percent of Terminales Portuarios Chancay.

As the scope of the project expanded with Chinese involvement, so did the price tag. New estimates put the cost of the project at $3.6 billion over three phases. Now, with the financial commitment, the pressure was on regulators to smooth over any potential bumps in the approval process and make sure opponents in the community didn’t stand in the way—though they tried.

Even though it’s a privately operated port, Peruvian government entities—the national police, immigration, health and various inspection services—are already in place here, to expedite inspections and speed shipping. Their presence suggests how deeply integrated the Peruvian government and China have become.

Eventually, the Chancay port could be encompassed by a special economic zone, giving tax breaks to companies with operations there. “Apple, GE, Samsung will move to Peru and establish hubs here for all of South America,” Guillén Flores said, explaining the broader plan.

But many people who live here believe too much has been given away already.

A city torn apart

Miriam Arce said the explosions just began one day in 2016, without any warning or explanation.

Then, quickly, the construction of the massive deepwater megaport disfigured her city. Over the course of the next two years explosions shook Chancay and its 60,000 residents several times a day. Entire hills and bluffs at the ocean’s edge were blasted away to accommodate the port’s facilities. Walls in peoples’ homes cracked. Foundations crumbled. Houses collapsed when workers blasted an access road that leads to a tunnel under the city. Some species of birds left the city’s oceanside wetlands and never came back.

“They were exploding the hills, the tunnels, at the port—all at the same time,” Arce said. “Can you imagine? It was crazy.”

At the edge of the Santa Rosa wetlands, a hill was blasted away to create room for the megaport. A barrier fence was erected to minimize construction sounds, but local advocates say it did little to dampen the noise. Credit: Georgina Gustin/Inside Climate News

Arce, an artist who runs a small general store out of her house, organized a community group—Frente de Defensa de Chancay (Chancay Defense Front)—in 2014, after learning about the plans for the port. She was particularly concerned about an environmental impact statement that advocates say the government approved in 2013 without releasing a summary to the public or getting adequate public input, as the law requires.

“I started to investigate the consequences—how it will impact people and the environment,” she said. “We discovered many irregularities with the authorizations and the lack of transparency.”

Petite and bespectacled, with a penchant for yellow Snoopy-festooned sneakers, Arce has become a feisty agitator, a persistent burr in the sides of local politicians.

She petitioned for access to public meetings. She pushed for documents. Amid the groundswell of protest Arce and others were stirring up, she became a target. She said she got death threats on the phone. Arce and other Chancay residents say that the then-builders of the port hired a subcontractor to harass and threaten them so the threats couldn’t be traced back to the developers. After she was roughed up during a protest and her phone was taken, Arce filed a complaint with police.

As Arce dug into the situation, she learned that she may have been clueless about the port owner’s plans before 2014, but not everyone was. Terminales Portuarios Chancay, anticipating concerns from local fishermen—a powerful, well-organized cohort in Chancay and Peru more broadly—had already contacted fishing unions, according to Chancay residents. They offered the members scholarships for their children’s education. Many took it.

“They paid to divide us,” Arce said. “We lived in peace for so many years, since we were children. But this project broke things.”

Standing outside the blue concrete box that houses the Association Sindicato de Pescadores Artesanales del Puerto de Chancay, one of several associations that represent fishermen here, Julio Perez said that fish populations near and off the coast of Chancay have plummeted because of the port’s construction and the ongoing flow of ship traffic. But he said he and most other members of the 300-plus member association have made peace with that.

Many of them got 12,000 Peruvian soles (about $3,400), earmarked to pay for tuition, he said. The developers also pay for the occasional party at the association’s headquarters.

“We’re happy,” he said, scanning the street in front of him.

Not everyone is, however.

In a square in the city of Huaral, north of Chancay, fisherman Antonio Luis sat on a curb, wearing the uniform of most local fishermen—a matching track suit and running shoes. He came equipped with data showing the decline in fish populations and the marine species on which those populations depend.

Luis, president of another association called the Artisanal Fishermen of the Small North, said whatever payments the developers offered were not worth the declines.

“Before 2018, we put the net in and we fished enough in order to not fish for two or three days. Enough to live comfortably,” he said, adding that a typical day’s catch was 200 kilograms or more. “Nowadays you go to the beach and it’s nothing like that. I put in a net and if I’m lucky, I can get 15 to 20 kilograms a day. I catch enough to eat. Not enough to sell, which is what I need.”

The “luxury fish,” like corvina and sole that are prized for ceviche, the national culinary mainstay, are especially rare these days.

Luis said that the developers only consulted with a handful of the many fishing associations along this stretch of coast—not his or several others. He sees the payments offered to the other groups as bribes to shut up.

“I’m not opposed to investment,” Luis added. “I’ve just asked for development … between the city and the government without stepping all over the environment.”

Today, with the first phase of the port in full operation, this upended city seems to be in suspension as residents wait for the next wave of construction.

On a quiet July weekday, in the southern hemisphere’s winter, restaurant workers waved menus at passersby, trying to lure them into mostly empty seats. At the beach, dozens of colorfully painted wooden fishing boats were lodged on the sand. No one was out on the water. The fishermen milled around, staring out at an ocean that used to provide an abundant livelihood.

“Mining companies pay people for invading their land. We’d like to get paid for our ocean,” said one fisherman, who would only give his first name, Elias. “The Chinese are just like the US. They’re the big power. If they invest here, if they shared their profits, we’d be happy.”

Near the end of the beach, a handful of tourists climbed little footpaths that lead up a giant bluff to get a view of the sprawling port complex hidden on the other side.

Some fishermen have started a side hustle: Charging a few soles to guide visitors to the top.

On the November day last year when the port was lavishly inaugurated, Arce was not in attendance. Nor was Luis. In fact, Arce said, few of Chancay’s ordinary citizens were there because the celebration was cordoned off. Busloads of police were brought into town to enforce the perimeter of the port, which by then had been encircled with a tall fence.

The message was clear: The city’s new port did not belong to the city.

The perfect place

Wendy Ancieta, a lawyer with the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law, has deep expertise with the country’s environmental impact review process—and its loopholes. She remembers interviewing a gas station owner who was required to get an environmental review for his business. When she asked him who oversaw the review process, he admitted it was a cook at a nearby restaurant.

The country has an abundance of environmental laws, but they’re rarely enforced, according to Ancieta. If a company wants to sail through the environmental review process in pursuit of a massive project—with as little pushback as possible—Peru is a good choice.

China, she said, “came to the perfect place.”

The port’s developer—now called Cosco Shipping Ports Chancay Perú (CSPCP), 60 percent owned by COSCO and 40 percent by Volcan—hired a contractor to conduct the required environmental analysis. In theory, such a document gets thoroughly picked apart by SENACE, the government agency responsible for reviewing the environmental impacts of big projects.

But in practice, that rarely happens.

The Peruvian government allows developers of major construction projects to pick from a registered list of consulting companies that they can hire to conduct an environmental assessment. When the developer gets an assessment they don’t like—that might stand in the way of a project’s completion—they can withhold payment.

When the port’s developers were required by law to do a secondary environmental review, advocacy groups, including Arce’s, hired a researcher named Stefan Austermühle to analyze it for flaws and omissions.

Of the review process, Austermühle said, “You tell them: You will make a nice document for me, where there’s no impact, so I get this project approved. And if you don’t do that, I don’t pay you.”

Austermühle identified 50 problems with the environmental review’s findings. The groups then asked SENACE not to approve the project until these problems were corrected. Ultimately, fewer than half of them were addressed by COSCO—inadequately, according to the groups. The agency approved the project in 2020, two days before Christmas, when few people were looking.

In July of this year, the Peruvian media reported that six SENACE employees were charged with environmental crimes for approving parts of the project without COSCO addressing them first.

In a written response, SENACE said the agency held at least eight meetings and workshops with the public and with local fishing associations in 2019 and 2020, during the development and evaluation of the secondary environmental assessment. The agency recorded at least 1,800 individual attendances across the meetings. The agency also said it forwarded the problems that Austermühle identified in his analysis to the “project owner,” in accordance with federal laws.

In a written response, CSPCP said it had complied with all laws and that the approvals process “went well beyond regulatory requirements regarding public participation, both in the number and diversity of mechanisms implemented.”

The company said it categorically rejects “as completely false” the allegations that it hired a subcontractor to harass opponents of the port project. “At no time has the company hired or instructed subcontractors to harass, intimidate, or interfere with citizens’ participation during protests or demonstrations related to the Project. On the contrary, CSPCP maintains a permanent policy of respect for the right to free expression, peaceful coexistence, and open dialogue with all social stakeholders in the district of Chancay.”

Volcan and the Chinese embassy in Peru did not respond to requests for comment from Inside Climate News. The Peruvian Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which approved the first environmental assessment, before COSCO’s involvement in the port project, also did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News.

Juan Luis Dammert is a Lima-based researcher who studies government corruption and the evolution of infrastructure projects, including the Interoceanic Highway. Like most Peruvians, he is a keen observer of the country’s political ups and downs.

“There’s always corruption here, but we’re at a low point in Peruvian politics,” he said. “It’s corruption’s happy hour.”

The country has had seven presidents in the last decade, including two who are currently in jail for taking bribes from the Brazilian construction company that built the highway. In 2018, the country’s judiciary system was rocked by a corruption scandal. Former President Dina Boluarte, who presided over the port’s inauguration, was highly unpopular and accused of deadly anti-democratic crackdowns against protesters. She was impeached by the Peruvian Congress in October. Two other former Peruvian presidents were jailed on conspiracy and corruption charges in late November.

“We have, as a country, built a number of systems and structures for environmental protection, but now it basically doesn’t exist,” Dammert said. “Congress and the government—if they decide to do anything, they go ahead. They change the law. That’s the context in which this is happening: Now let’s build roads and railways through the Amazon!”

Chinese companies, Dammert said, aren’t necessarily worse or better than any others in their adherence to environmental laws. China’s position on environmental laws in other countries is, largely, not to meddle with them, in alignment with its “non-interference” policy. And, indeed, Chinese-backed companies have stopped a handful of projects, including a dredging project in Peru, over potential violations of environmental laws.

It just happens that Chinese companies are operating in parts of the world where those laws are weak. “There’s no difference between China and other countries in their concern for the environment,” Dammert said. “It very much depends on the host country. In this case, Peru.”

Or Brazil, where environmental safeguards are also collapsing.

The government is currently challenging the legality of a nearly 20-year-old pact, known as the Soy Moratorium, in which grain traders agreed to not buy soybeans grown on land deforested after 2008. The moratorium has been credited with slowing rates of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.

In July, the Brazilian Congress approved a new bill that would ease licensing requirements for infrastructure projects deemed to be national priorities. Environmental groups called it the “devastation bill” and said the damage to the rainforest and to broader climate goals would be irreversible.

“It would make it easier getting infrastructure, like railways, approved without requiring environmental studies,” said Meg Symington, vice president of global integrated programs at the World Wildlife Fund. “That’s unfortunate.”

Symington noted that Peru passed a similar law in 2024 that environmental groups say will weaken forest protections. The lowering of environmental standards comes amid a broader autocratic shift in Peru.

A recently passed law will prohibit advocacy groups from pursuing legal action against the government, including for human rights or environmental violations. The law has been widely condemned by international free speech advocates, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“This makes it easy for China to operate as they want without any civil society groups complaining,” the Environmental Investigation Agency’s Urrunaga said. “It’s really crazy. … Not even China has a law like that.”

The erosion of democratic functions will usher in projects linked to the port that destroy parts of the rainforest without even the most rudimentary environmental review, environmental groups worry.

Leolino Dourado, a Lima-based researcher at the Center for China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Peru’s University of the Pacific says that shipping commodities through the Amazon and over the Andes to the Pacific makes no economic sense. It’s still cheaper, he said, to ship commodities out of Brazil.

“If you run the numbers, it’s more cost effective to export through the Atlantic, which is the traditional route,” he said. The Interoceanic Highway is a case in point, he added: “It’s really underutilized because it makes no sense economically.”

But infrastructure projects make perfect political sense. Roads, railways and waterways deliver infusions of cash for hard-up cities and regions, making these passages through the forest powerful forces, however destructive.

“Roads are a good way to get elected,” said Salisbury, with the University of Richmond. “It’s a good way to get politicians in Peru excited about China, even though it doesn’t make economic sense. And it allows the Chinese to have more impact on the Amazon—and Brazil and Peru—just by creating a corridor with a new form of transport, even if it’s not a gamechanger economically.”

Chirinos of CooperAcción authored a study that found a common thread in China’s Belt and Road projects: The countries that join in are a lot like Peru, with a high level of raw materials or other natural resources, but weak institutions and lax oversight. He and other researchers say that puts Peru at an economic disadvantage.

“The project will only take the raw materials and won’t allow us to develop,” Chirinos said.

César Gamboa is the executive director of the Peruvian organization Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Law, Environment and Natural Resources) and has written recently about his concerns that the country’s current political and economic environment will keep ordinary people from sharing in any financial gains from the transition to cleaner energies.

“Always, all the time, Peru underestimates the environmental and social impacts and overestimates the benefits,” Gamboa said. “This is the problem of the Chancay port. Everybody says this is a tool to get out of the political and economic crises, but it’s not. We are not prepared to identify the opportunities and we don’t see the challenges.”

Stepping into a vacuum

China and Peru have had ties going back nearly two centuries, when Chinese immigrants first came here. A very obvious legacy of this is chifa, a Chinese-Peruvian fusion cuisine that can be found in every corner of the country. But in recent years, China’s investments in Peru have soared. Ninety percent of the overall investment—about $28 billion in 2023—is linked to large, state-owned enterprises, according to a recent analysis from the University of the Pacific’s Center for China and Asia-Pacific Studies.

The port is the single biggest flag China has planted on a continent that the United States has long seen as its domain.

“China’s in our red zone,” said Laura Richardson, the now-retired US Army general who served as the commander of US Southern Command from 2021 to 2024.

As Chinese-backed investments expand, projecting Beijing’s power in the region, allegiances and sentiment across South America are shifting.

The Trump administration’s imposition of tariffs and harsh immigration policies that disproportionately impact Latin American countries are increasing anti-American bitterness across much of the region, making China seem like a friendlier, more stable alternative, economically and politically.

The administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year has only amplified resentments. After Colombia, Peru was the continent’s second-largest recipient of USAID funding, much of it directed at curbing coca plantations. USAID funding to Brazil was largely aimed at programs to conserve the Amazon.

China is stepping into the diplomatic and economic vacuum. Trade between the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States’ members and China rose from $450 billion in 2023 to $515 billion in 2024. Earlier this year, Xi announced $9 billion in credit to the region and visa-free entry to China for residents of some countries. And while Chinese direct investment in Latin America for big infrastructure projects has slowed, it remains strong for certain industries.

“Nobody else is offering money for these projects,” Richardson said. “China comes along offering billions—$3.6 billion, with four-and-a-half billion annual revenue profit for this—how can you turn that down? Nobody else is offering anything like that.”

But at the same time, China’s environmental track record, both in the construction of its big infrastructure projects and in the supply chains of its imports, is drawing more criticism from environmental groups, researchers, and residents.

China is the largest importer of commodities linked to deforestation, including soy, beef, and timber, and the second-largest importer of palm oil, which together are responsible for about 40 percent of global deforestation rates. This, critics say, means China has a huge potential exposure to illegal deforestation.

In 2021 China signed on to a global pact to reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2035, acknowledging the role of forests in stabilizing the atmosphere. But recent analyses suggest the country may not follow through. The authors of a 2024 study wrote, “China’s foreign policy stance of non-interference and concerns about its food security are key obstacles.”

The European Union Deforestation Regulation is the most ambitious effort to date to stop commodities that cause deforestation from being imported into European markets. China, one of the biggest exporters of timber products to the EU, recently refused to sign on, citing security concerns related to sharing geolocation data. In November, at the annual United Nations climate conference, held this year for the first time in the Amazon, countries agreed to a $5.5 billion rainforest conservation fund. China said it supports the fund but would not be pledging money to it.

Studies have demonstrated that Chinese imports of illegal timber have climbed along with its involvement in tropical forested regions, including Brazil and Peru.

One study, from the Environmental Investigation Agency in 2018, found that only one-third of tropical timber shipments from Peru to China were properly inspected, and of those that were inspected, 70 percent were found to be from illegally deforested land.

Another study published in May found that Chinese imports of products known to cause deforestation between 2013 and 2022 were linked to the loss of roughly 4 million hectares of tropical forest, nearly 70 percent of which was illegally deforested. The greenhouse gas emissions from these imports were roughly on par with the annual fossil fuel emissions of Spain.

“While China is a global leader in domestic reforestation and renewable energy, this report highlights a critical blind spot of the environmental cost of its imported agricultural and timber commodities,” said Kerstin Canby, a senior director with Forest Trends, in a press statement published along with the report.

In an interview, Canby noted that China has implemented robust reforestation programs within its borders, but that has had a direct impact on vulnerable forests elsewhere, including the Amazon.

“China has been a star, but that has ripple effects,” Canby said. “Everyone’s trying to protect their own forest, but all that does is push demand to those countries that have the least amount of governance, the ones that are not putting in place protections for their own forest.”

Coda

From the rooftop studio where Arce paints landscapes of her coastline view, she can almost touch the netted scaffolding erected outside the walls of her house to keep construction dust and debris from flying into the windows. (It did anyway.)

Every day now, trucks come rumbling, idling at the entrance to the port, which is about 100 feet from her back door. She doesn’t know exactly what’s in them, nor has she or anyone else calculated the damage caused by their payloads. She just knows that soon there will be more of them.

Arce, and many of her neighbors, worry the city’s troubles may get worse as the port expands into its second and third phases of construction over the next several years, and as more roads and railways are built to serve it.

“There is no space for the people who live here. We would have to leave. Who are they going to take out of their houses?” she said. “That’s the next fight.”

She worries that cracks will continue to creep across the walls in the house she’s lived in since she was a baby or that the foundation could crumble one day. Then someone joked that she should ask the Chinese for compensation. Maybe one of the newly delivered electric cars.

Arce cracked a wry smile and looked out at the ocean, which that night was flat and still. “Or a new house,” she said.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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