This year's best things (2025)

Following on from last year's roundup, I thought I'd try and make this an annual thing.

Once again, throughout 2025, every Friday morning I have sent out a round-up of the best things I've seen that week.

I (still) like end-of-year roundups, so I went back through everything I've sent and put together a Review of the Year edition that contains the most clicked and most read, my favourites, and some highlights from shows, books, music and stuff. Enjoy!

Top 6 most viewed and shared newsletter editions:

• Beyond the Promise - my research project looking at digital failure in the cultural sector.
• The Illusion of Alignment - a piece about that feeling when everyone nods along enthusiastically about the new [digital thing], but three months later you realise you all had completely different definitions of what success looked like, this piece is about why that keeps happening and how politeness can wreck digital projects.
• The discipline of focus, what makes a digital strategy work - my argument that digital strategy only works when it makes hard choices, sets clear priorities, and gives people permission to stop doing quite so many 'important' things at once.
• The Rotten Cult of Busyness - a look at why the cultural sector’s default setting is 'permanently slammed', and the impact of that constant motion on priorities, thinking, and actual progress.
• What do we actually mean when we say "digital" - an attempt to unpick what we actually mean by "digital", why the word has become so unhelpfully elastic, how clearer language might lead to better decisions, strategies, and expectations, and a few suggested frameworks to use when thinking and talking about your work.
• How organisations lose what they learn - the half-life of discovery insights, and how myths sneak into our digital work - a look at how useful user insights quietly expire, vanish, or mutate into "things everyone knows", and why a couple of very boring habits could save you from confidently making decisions based on vibes from 2018.

The most downloaded episodes of the Digital Works Podcast were my conversations with Neil Williams (Exec Director of Technology & Digital Transformation at the BFI), and Emma Keith (former Managing Director, Digital at the National Theatre).

Some of my favourite things

Karl Ove Knusgaard's essay on technology, The Reenchanted World, was one of the best things I read all year, it's a long read but it is a brilliant piece of writing.

I enjoyed this case study about how the V&A Academy became more user-centred.

This reflection from ACMI's Jasmine Aslan has lots of useful lessons for projects of all kinds.

Clickens.

There have been a lot of good things from Adam Thomas's newsletter this year, two favourites were this video on 'glimmerscrolling', and this piece on GESET (Good Enough for now, Safe Enough to Try).

Messenger, a beautiful little game.

I have also enjoyed reading great stuff from my pals, like Lauren (content strategy), Hugh (ethics, AI, general digital musings), Annette (storytelling), Seb (museums, digital, music, life), and Neil (digital leadership and transformation, and movies).

Most clicked links from the 'this week's best things'

Some of most clicked links over all the editions I sent this year were:

• "I Love Generative AI and Hate the Companies Building It" - a frank evaluation from Christine Wodtke of the companies who are building the AI products many of us now use (tl;dr they're all awful, but in different ways).
• "Let's Get Real 10: Using digital to add value" - the findings from the Audience Agency's 10th annual programme of action research.
• "Reasserting an iconic cultural institution for the modern era" - on the Royal Albert Hall's rebrand.
• "The impact of AI Overviews in the cultural sector" - a useful report from One Further on how AI Overviews are impacting traffic to cultural websites.
• "Aliveness and where to find it" - a good 'theory of life' from Ben James, "maximise the time spent in quadrant four".
• "Content of the week #15: Tone of Voice" - Adam Koszary exploring tone of voice at cultural organisations.
• "Diabolus Ex Machina" - an account from Amanda Guinzburg about what happened when she tried to get ChatGPT to help her choose some of her work to send to an agent (a total meltdown)
• The Yale School of Art's website

Best books

I really like how many replies I get in response to what I'm reading each week (is this secretly just a reading club and no-one told me?), so here are the best things I read this year:

The Names by Florence Knapp, difficult subject matter but a masterfully told story. It's a sort of 'sliding doors' narrative told across three versions of events. It felt like there was so much truth and depth and life in this book. And it was her debut novel, wildly impressive. Hugely recommended.

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende. An extraordinarily good book - beautiful, funny, wise, vivid. I loved it. It looked at a part of history I didn't know anything about (the migration of Spanish refugees to Chile, after the Spanish Civil War, on a ship chartered by Pablo Neruda, and the 60 years following that).

Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan. I struggled slightly with the first half although I think it's a brilliantly vivid and mostly accurate depiction of teenage boys (and how annoying they can be), but the second half of this book is why I've included it here - I thought it was staggeringly good, it left such a mark on me. The last few pages are a beautiful reflection on life and living.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. Epic in all aspects so many pages, so many characters, told over so many years. But it was so good, I was totally immersed in this world and it was really satisfyingly drawn together at the end.

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. Another sprawling, multi-generational, multi-decade story. Beautifully written and focusing on some stories I knew shamefully little about.

If you want a list of everything I've read this year then that lives on Goodreads.

Best shows, music, TV etc

I didn't see that much in the way of shows or exhibitions this year but a couple of standout highlights were the Sparks show we saw in Copenhagen, and the Anohni show we saw at Dalhalla (what a setting for a venue).

The best thing I saw in a theatre was Perfect Show for Rachel, which we saw as part of the Aarhus performing arts festival. It was perfect.

On TV, The Diplomat was brilliant, as was Dying For Sex.

My album of the year was LUX by Rosalía.

The best thing I saw at the cinema was probably One Battle After Another which felt very absolute cinema.

2026

What's ahead? Who knows! Mostly because I will become a dad for the first time which I think will subvert and explode even my wildest expectations.

Because of this, I'm also going to be taking some time off from writing this newsletter and I will be back in March (is the current plan). I have a few things scheduled to go out to you all over the coming weeks but I won't be writing anything new for a few months now.

Thanks to you for taking the time to read, share, comment, and reply to what I send out, I genuinely love putting these together every week.

If you'd like to work with me next year, then do get in touch. I've got some capacity from April onwards.

I hope you have a good festive break. Happy new year, see you in the Spring.

Ash