Richard Koenig: 2025 in review
It is not fair being a sourpuss and poor wit who picks over the news of an expiring year to find the controversial and appalling, the novel and odd and utterly absurd — not fair because the pickings are too easy.
From 2022: Environmentalists seek to save the planet by throwing soup at a Van Gogh in the National Gallery in London. From 2023: A flash mob ransacks Center City retailers. From 2024: AI suggests glue in response to a question about how to make cheese stick to pizza. And, as below for 2025, an Ivy League discussion leader asks that “they” be called, among other appellations, “xe” or “xir.”
Too easy indeed.
So here is a New Year’s resolution: If a year-in-review is to continue into 2026, it will highlight only items about intelligence, courage, benevolence and other such qualities that make hearts glad.
But we must yet look back on 2025:
The pictures on the walls are still lovely:
Sasha Suda, three years into her term as the new director of what until recently was the Philadelphia Museum of Art and is now the Philadelphia Art Museum, or PhAM, was fired following a controversial “rebranding” executed by a Brooklyn design studio. Whether she was entirely in tune with the museum’s Board of Trustees before the launch of the promotional changes appeared to be only one point of contention after she and the Board sued each other, she alleging the board reneged on promises to give her leeway in making changes to boost interest in PhAM, the board contending she misappropriated funds while taking salary increases on her starting annual pay of $720,000.
Excuse me, I must visit my sculpture:
An 18-karat-gold toilet that had been displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York sold at Sotheby’s to an unidentified buyer for $12.1 million. The precious receptacle had been sculptured by the same “visual artist” whose banana fixed to a wall with duct tape had sold a year earlier for $6.2 million to a Chinese cryptocurrency tycoon who said he planned to eat his purchase.
Your Honor, I was just training for the 110-meter high hurdles:
SEPTA criminally charged thousands of turnstile jumpers who rip off the agency for some $50 million a year.
How does a dolphin say: “Float on your back and tell me your troubles?”
Two psychotherapists in Hawaii who have their patients spend time with spinner dolphins sued the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over a ban on close encounters with these mammals famous for their aerial spins above water. The therapists say being around the dolphins helps people work through their distress. NOAA says dolphins socializing with homo sapiens risk expending too much energy needed for finding food.
Sounds worse than prepping for a colonoscopy:
U.S. Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, fasted for days and stopped drinking fluids the night before his 25-hour Senate speech so he wouldn’t have to cede the floor for a bathroom break and so give up his invective against the Trump administration.
Why did we ever think Lamaze classes were enough?
Two psychologists at Palo Alto University managed to get published a paper titled: “A decolonized mental health framework for black women and birthing people.”
Maybe SEPTA can get old Sherman tanks for cheap:
Responding to assaults on bus drivers, SEPTA tested bullet-proof compartments.
And what if he was mad only because he’d ordered mayo and got mustard?
A paralegal in the U.S. Justice Department was fired and charged with assault after he threw a Subway sandwich at a federal agent deployed in the nation’s capital. His attorney won an acquittal for her client, arguing that he could do no harm while acting like a child who “takes that stuffed animal with which he sleeps … and throws it at you.”
A close call on the tush push:
NFL teams came within two votes of banning the tush push, the short-yardage quarterback shove the Eagles have used with overwhelming success. The proposed ban got 22 of the 24 votes needed from the league’s 32 teams.
Who said Shakespeare isn’t relevant?
The Modern Language Association convened to discuss such topics as “Disability and Homonationalism in Shakespeare’s Pericles,” to say nothing of “Contemporary Astrological Media of Minatorian Self-Making,” and “Storying Youth Climate Activism in the Face of Political Repression.”
Would it be okay if we just say, “Heh, you”?
A discussion leader of a DEI-training session for Princeton University dorm counselors kicked off the event by saying: “My pronouns are they, them, or xe, xir, or you can use my name.”
This whole idea seems a stretch:
The health-security agency of the UK government mentioned yoga as one therapy for “eco-anxiety” induced by climate change.
They failed to mention raking can be terrific exercise:
Citing noise and air pollution, Lower Merion Township on the leafy Main Line decided to restrict and eventually ban the use of gas-powered leaf blowers in favor of electric lawn equipment
“Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust…” (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
New Jersey made human composting legal. A New Jersey resident who has her husband’s remains in soil around her plants said she feels as if he “came home.” Recompose, a company with a composting patent pending, was founded by a Haverford College graduate.
Good thing Washington didn’t finance gas stations:
The Government Accountability Office found that a $7.5 billion federal program authorized in fiscal 2022 to pay for electric-vehicle chargers had resulted in the construction of only 384 charging ports at 70 stations as of April 2025. The Trump administration sought to rescind $6 billion of unspent funds, which would apparently leave the average cost of installed ports approximating $3.9 million each.
The Big Bambino is back but in hiding:
A 10-foot-tall statue of former Philadelphia Mayor and Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo was removed from storage and its ownership transferred from the city to Frank L. Rizzo Monument Committee. The committee, to which the city paid $80,000 for damages to the statue, agreed to keep it on unspecified private property out of public view. The statue had been removed from its place in front of the Municipal Services Building after it was defaced during the George Floyd protests of 2020. Rizzo’s time in office had been marred by racial strife.
Oxonia imbecillis:
Oxford University, in a bow to the non-binary, considered but then backed off a proposal to remove from graduation ceremonies grammatically gendered Latin words, especially uses of the generically masculine in plural references to men and women both.
He’s everywhere:
Governor Josh Shapiro, often said to have presidential aspirations, increased his taxpayer-funded communications staff to 21 (up from thirteen under his predecessor, Tom Wolf). HIs teams have produced some 120 videos on Instagram and expanded his social-media presence to TikTok. His budget secretary explained that the governor is “trying to get information out to as many people as possible in different ways.”
We’ve concluded no one in Congress is even counting anymore:
The national debt surpassed $38 trillion, about $115,000 for every U.S. citizen.
May you enjoy this season and take cheer from the news in the year ahead.
Richard Koenig is the author of the Kindle Single No Place to Go, an account of efforts to provide toilets during a cholera epidemic in Ghana.
