...And Days of Auld Offline

My 2025 in review, from a year of finding better things to do

I wrote a lot less in 2025. This is just the nineteenth piece I have published at The Lewsletter this year. That’s about half the pace at which I posted from 2022 and 2024, and a far cry from the weekly-ish publication schedule to which I aspired when I first launched this blog.

With fewer essays to reflect on, plotting out my traditional year-in-review post — in which I find some schmaltzy common thread that connects my favorite things I wrote in the preceding 12 months — at first seemed like a daunting challenge. Until I realized that my reduced output was itself a reflection of the biggest thing I learned this year: The importance of being deliberate with my time, and therefore spending less of it in front of a screen.

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In my first post of 2025, on Inauguration Day, I predicted that I would cut down on my political writing in the Trump Era. Not because there would be less to critique under the new administration than there had been with Biden. To the contrary — most of my political commentary was motivated by my frustration that those in power purported to share my values yet were failing to uphold them. As the Republicans gained trifecta control of the federal government, that people like me disapproved of their policies shifted from an annoyance to our leaders to their goal:

These people do not portend to share my priorities or my beliefs about what bettering the world means. The premise that underlay my recent political writing no longer applies. … For the moment, the notion of writing about more important things than my normal beats of sports and food seems futile. What’s the point?

Looking back, perhaps it’s not surprising that the two other political essays I wrote this year were on subjects where the critiques extended to Democrats too: the disingenuous weaponization of antisemitism, which has dangerously escalated under Trump yet must be understood as a continuation of the prior administration’s offensive tokenizing of the Jewish community and the astroturfed bipartisan insistence on equating my safety with unconditional support for Israel; and the utter humiliation of Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign, as party leaders demonstrated both how much depravity they would prefer to swallow rather than cede even an inch to the coalition’s left wing, and their own impotence in their failure.

But the bigger reason why I wrote less in 2025 was simpler: I found more-fulfilling ways to use my time.

The best thing I did this year, for my community and for myself, was volunteering for Lasagna Love. Lasagna Love is a nonprofit group that takes one of the core principles of being a good neighbor — if someone is having a hard time, you bring them a lasagna — and applies it at scale, pairing willing home chefs with nearby families who could use some comfort food. No judgment, no questions asked. I delivered my first lasagne around the holidays a year ago and gradually increased my involvement over the next few months. Now I am the local volunteer coordinator for the Providence area, in addition to my typical schedule of cooking for four families a week. By my count I made 172 lasagne this year for folks in need in northern and central Rhode Island. (Not including the ones we ate ourselves or brought to social gatherings, which it turns out is much easier when you make them often enough that you can do it from muscle memory.)

I recount this not to toot my own horn but in hopes that my experience clicks with someone reading this. At a time of widespread suffering, when the news is full of so much pain being inflicted on so many people in so many ways, you may feel personally obliged to follow every tragedy. Yet finding some small way to make a difference in your community does more good than doomscrolling, both for the world and for you. I heartily recommend Lasagna Love as such an outlet: it’s quick to sign up, you set your own schedule, and you can even use my surprisingly simple recipe. Wherever you’re reading this, there’s probably a Lasagna Love team in your area that could use the help. But the most important part is to do something.

This volunteering is one of many things I’ve done this year that have made my life feel more well-rounded. I joined a brass band. Making music with other people is a remarkable experience, and one that I hadn’t done regularly since college. So is bringing merriment to marches, civic events, and celebrations of local advocacy groups. I’ve started a more-consistent exercise regimen. I’ve been more deliberate about planning social events and instigating meeting friends for a beer. In my first post on this blog nearly four years ago, I wrote about the freeing sensation of my identity no longer being defined by my job. Since then, for various reasons — partly due to life circumstances, partly thanks to my base reflexive introversion — I often lacked a good answer for what I was doing with the extra time that my improved work-life balance afforded. In 2025, for the first time since college, I built a routine of extracurricular activities that didn’t revolve around staring at a screen.

Which isn’t to say I’m done writing. Far from it! I am grateful to have an independent home for the kind of baseball research I have been doing since I was a teenager — like estimating how much the league’s best swing-off hitter would be worth if the thrilling tiebreaker for this year’s All-Star Game’s replaced extra innings for other games too, or reviving and spiffing up my old Simple WAR Calculator, or (in my most-read post of the year) finding quantitative evidence that modern managers are pulling their starters too early, as overexposing the bullpen offsets the gains from mitigating the times-through-the-order penalty — without the pressure to publish on a certain schedule. The Hall of Fame selection process, about which I’ve always had a lot to say, was both the subject of one of my first posts of the year (on the takeaways from the 2025 BBWAA vote) and the main focus of my recent writing (whom I would include on my ballot, and particularly why Chase Utley deserves more support than he’s received).

I am also incredibly lucky to have an audience — which surpassed 1,000 email subscribers in October, not counting the many of you who may read this through Substack’s internal ecosystem or links on social media — who indulges and even appreciates my myriad musings on other subjects. It was heartening to hear from readers that I captured emotions that readers had wanted to articulate this year, from the collective thrill of watching World Series Game 7, one of the best displays of the sport of baseball ever broadcast; to the horror of a school shooting happening two miles from where we live, in a classroom in which I have sat. You have helped me commiserate about the Cleveland Browns, whose organization-wide commitment to mediocrity is resulting in a season that’s as aimless as I gloomily forecast it would be. You may have made the “wicked” deviled-egg recipe I shared or used my brewery reviews from our trip to Portland to help you sort through the overwhelming beer landscape of southern Maine. I even got engaging responses to the story of my worst day of Little League and the latest chapter of my longrunning obsession with optimizing holiday music. At a time when so much of society is pushing AI-based content down our throats, it warms my heart that so many of you are willing to humor my hobby. Whatever you think of my writing, I hope you always find it at least recognizably human.

But do you know who is definitely a real being and not ChatGPT? The next person you see in real life after you read this sentence. And the next one. And the one after that.

I am not the first person to encourage you to spend less time on your screens. I don’t want to sound preachy, and I often do not follow my own advice. What I can tell you is that, in 2025, I made a concerted effort to avoid defaulting to doomscrolling, and my day-to-day life has been all the better for it. I made friends I never would have met if I had stayed home. I found connections I never would have forged if I had been looking at my phone. I saw parts of my own city that I never would have been to if I had given in to inertia and my instinctive introversion. Using half-baked ideas as fodder for conversations with friends instead of turning my hot takes into a couple-thousand-word blog posts means I have fewer pieces to look back on with pride than I did at the end of the prior few years. It was worth it.

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Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support and readership this year. I hope that you will stick around for whatever ephemera I feel like writing in 2026, that you will understand if there continues to be less of it, and that you too will find joy and fulfillment in your offline endeavors.