Happy New Year, People! 🎉
Wishing you a year ahead that’s all "bright days" and zero "cuddling pong"! Before you start your New Year’s resolutions (and inevitably break them by next week), here is the ultimate cultural list of 2025.
Important Note: No fireworks pls.
🧠 Word of the Year for 2025.
Every year the English Dictionaries selects a Word of the Year. This year's words captured how we scroll, argue, build with AI, and emotionally attach ourselves—sometimes to people, sometimes to algorithms. Here is a list of words of the year and its meanings by different dictionaries:
Rage-bait (Oxford Dictionary): online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.
AI slop (Macquarie Dictionary): low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user.
Parasocial (Cambridge Dictionary): involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.
Vibe coding (Collins Dictionary): use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.
6-7 (Dictionary.com): means “so-so,” or “maybe this, maybe that,”.
Cuddling pong (our pick): referring to "complexity, trouble, or a mess.
🤔SHOWER THOUGHT
Your birthday is your Actual New Year's Day.
💡 Tech & Innovation of the Year for 2025.
🤖 Innovations: To say 2025 was a big year for AI is obvious—but it barely scratches the surface. Startups and big companies alike pushed boundaries in everything from robotics and quantum computing to consumer gadgets and space tech. Either way, these are the Next Big Things that shaped the year:
🎮 Consumer tech: From Tiimo’s AI-powered visual planner to Essayist for paper formatting, and from Strava on Apple Watch to Pokémon TCG Pocket and Cyberpunk 2077: 2025 gave us apps, games, and gadgets that were useful, fun, even weird.
🔬 Science: 2025 quietly packed some huge discoveries: a hidden moon around Uranus, stabilized quantum bits, CRISPR gene edits, and AI innovations that actually matter. Even with layoffs and budget cuts, scientists pushed forward in everything from AI to zoology.
📈 Companies: From AI startups to robotaxi pioneers, 2025’s most innovative firms showed us a possible peek at the future.
📊Data Point
Bad Bunny was streamed 19.8B times on Spotify in 2025.
🤖 ART of the Year for 2025.
🎶 Music: 2025’s music was a crazy train: Bad Bunny kept Spotify’s top artist crown, while Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Drake, and Billie Eilish ruled streams, albums, and charts. For local music it's a breakthrough year too—rock and indie artists/brands delivered some great music.
The Daily Star’s picks of 2025: Mainstream Hits, Class of '25.
📺 TV Shows: Even in a messy TV year, 2025 gave us plenty of reasons to stay home. As Netflix shook the industry by acquiring Warner Bros. Shows like Severance, Andor, The Last of Us, and Adolescence pulled us into uneasy futures and very human stories—proving good TV didn’t go anywhere.
🎬 Films: It was a relatively healthy year for Bangla cinema—Utshob, Delupi, and Daagi created a Taandob, pushing the industry toward a better place. Globally, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was a clear critics’ favorite, while scarier films like Sinners, 28 Years Later, Frankenstein and Weapons also dominated the conversation.
50 best films of 2025 by British Film Institute.
📚 Books: Although most people are busy scrolling, book reading—both print and ebooks—has been on the rise in recent years. Here are some of the best books of 2025, according to Literary Hub, The Guardian, and Goodreads.
📲 Others: Other notable mediums of 2025 include podcasts, articles-essays and TikTok dominated trends.
Reddit: Year’s Best Longform Articles.
📸 Story in picture.
Palestinians displaced to southern Gaza journey homeward to northern Gaza through the central Gaza Strip on January 27, 2025, during the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. [Ramadan Abed/Reuters]
Netra News’s Bangladesh in 2025: The most influential ten.
Al Jazeera’s Global stories of 2025 in pictures.
📺 Joke of the year
We’re still learning. Any thoughts on us?👂
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