This week, we’re doing something a little different: taking a spin through our most-read stories of the year. We hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane, and we’ll be back with our usual What We’re Reading fare in 2025.

  1. A Post-Election Day Poem by Rebecca Faulkner

    In the weeks leading up to Election Day, we asked our readers to fill in the blank: No matter who wins, ______. The responses were so inspiring that in addition to sharing 109 of them on Election Day, we published a poem the next day that Rebecca Faulkner — our managing director and an accomplished poet — assembled from the responses. Though different in form from our usual stories, this one really resonated.

  2. How a Colombian City Cooled Dramatically in Just Three Years by Peter Yeung

    It’s hard to argue with a solution whose results are so clear and impressive: In Medellín, “green corridors” full of plants and trees are driving down temperatures. As Contributing Editor Peter Yeung reports, “Medellín’s temperatures fell by 2°C in the first three years of the program, and officials expect a further decrease of 4 to 5°C over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change.”

    A vertical garden at Medellin's City Hall.
    A vertical garden at Medellin’s City Hall. Credit: Peter Yeung

  3. ​​How One Indian State Went 100% Organic by Geetanjali Krishna

    This is an example of one of our favorite types of stories: looking at a place that has accomplished something big and retracing how it happened — with useful takeaways for other places that might want to try something similar. The state of Sikkim took a slow and thoughtful approach to going organic, and as Contributing Editor Geetanjali Krishna explains, it paid off.

  4. How Electric Harps Are Protecting Honey Bees by Charlie Metcalfe

    We have to confess: There was a lot of talk in the office about this one. At first we were surprised by how many readers were drawn to a story about, well, electrocuting hornets in droves. But we shouldn’t have been. Our smart and savvy readers understood that this is really a story about protecting vulnerable pollinators. Plus, electric harps sound pretty cool.

    An Asian hornet outside a hive.
    Asian hornets first arrived in France in 2004 via a shipping crate. Credit: S. Richard Cervera / INRAE

  5. A Surprising Way to Stop Bullying by Michaela Haas

    When Contributing Editor Michaela Haas began looking into this story, she was shocked that the “No-Blame Approach” — a counterintuitive method that hinges on asking the bullies to help solve the problem — wasn’t more well-known. We’re glad our story could help spread the word!