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2025 is finally coming to a close and the Diasporist is looking back at our first year of publishing. One of our highlights has been working with contributors from around the globe, who have helped us demonstrate the kind of quality independent reporting and storytelling that we believe in.
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We have asked some of our writers to provide us with their own personal highlights of the year, be it a book they read, a podcast they listened to, or a film they watched, as well as an article that moved them. We hope you enjoy the list and can seek out some of these recommendations in the new year.
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And please consider an end-of-year gift to the Diasporist, so we can continue offering a much-needed home to perspectives overlooked by larger media outlets and bring English- and German-speaking audiences together in dialogue on topics that matter.
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What Our Writers Liked in 2025:
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I recommend Miraculous Accident, a short film by Assaf Gruber. The film explores the cultural and political entanglements between communist Poland, Morocco, and Israel by depicting human fates randomly corrupted by state violence, a familiar story everywhere.
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I would also recommend One Target at a Time by Yuval Abraham, a mixture of journalism and essay, that puts into words the mechanism I saw everywhere but couldn't name myself: how small-scale decision-making enables participation in a genocide.
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In her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy dares to speak truths that until now belonged only to her and her brother. She writes about what it meant to be the child of Mary Roy, a women’s rights activist who was a liberator to many, but not to her own children. This is not a brutal settling of scores, but a rigorous act of reflection that refuses both reverence and erasure.
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We live in a world where the dominant public imagination can hold no more than two major atrocities at once, and Afghanistan slipped out of view after the images from Kabul airport faded in August 2021. What vanished with that silence were not only the people left behind, but also the unresolved truths of twenty years of occupation, war crimes, and the quiet systems of profit that thrived alongside devastation. As this article by Jan Jirát makes clear, some of those who profited now respond to scrutiny not with answers, but by weaponizing European courts against journalists.
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My year was marked by reading Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times (1935), a feverish and angry attempt at describing fascism as cultural synthesis — while it is violently synthesizing, in real time. Walter Benjamin called it an “inappropriate book,” written like spreading "lavish Persian carpets over a devastated landcape," published in exile. It is, as they say, instructive.
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I really loved the adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Seeing Adeel Akhtar and Nina Hoss so closely I could smell them — all of it made me want to jump into the East River, in a good way.
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Ava Kofman showed it's possible to profile a fascist without normalizing fascism, instead giving a withering insight into one of their minds. And Daniel Denvir is our left-expert-generalist-in-chief, his podcast The Dig is a constant gift.
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I read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time while working on my own book FASCHOLAND and was appalled at how little has changed since the 60s, especially in terms of how brutal and arrogant our Eurocentric society is right now. Another novel I read was The Drinker by Hans Fallada. A word of caution though: Fallada, perhaps better known for Little Man, What Now?, published successfully during the Nazi regime, so his oeuvre has to be read critically. But the way he describes addiction in The Drinker is something I only knew from my own life. It’s very accurate; I have never read, seen or felt anything like it before.
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And here’s a fun movie recommendation as well: Man, just go and watch Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
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I would encourage everyone to (re)read Grégoire Chamayou's Drone Theory and reflect on it in light of our present situation. The coming year is likely to be even more unsettling for Europe. I can't help noticing a certain lack of engagement among parts of the left with what is the largest war in Europe since World War II, perhaps because the forces driving it are not the West, but Russia and its allies.
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In this context, I would like to recommend an obituary written by Robert Putzbach for his friend, French photographer Antoni Lallican, who was killed by a Russian drone this autumn.
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The YouTube show Pablo Torre Finds Out is so smart, so fun, so good at the shoe-leather shit, and honest enough about its few journo-ethical shortcomings (brought to you by DraftKings) that you don't feel like you're slowly being poisoned, which in 2025 is maybe the highest compliment you can pay to media.
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Everyone should read this Rolling Stones article by Miles Klee.
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I absolutely loved Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot, which made it into English thanks to Tess Lewis's brilliant translation, as well as Wajsbrot's essays.
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A recent article I think worth reading is McNeil Taylor's Against insularity: Hellenism, Zionism, and the Greek archipelago in Issue 71 of Cabinet.
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And our editors recommend:
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This year was many things, but for me it will always be the year I read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook for the first time. This book is about so many things: the search for order in times of accelerating chaos, the collapse of the British communist party, the staving off of cynicism and bitterness, and, of course, the intersection between love and freedom. There was much in here for our times.
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I thought Ismail Ibrahim's essay House Arab, published in Bidoun, was an essential and moving look at language, the media, identity, and hierarchy in times of genocide. We were pleased to feature it in German translation.
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I think I saw well over 250 films in 2025, but I didn’t expect the year's biggest drama, suspense, and heartbreak to come from the French Open final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. That’s one cultural highlight from 2025 that still lingers on my mind rent-free, as the cool kids say.
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Talking of which, Judith Scheytt was the youngest member on board the Global Sumud Flotilla in September that set sail to break the Israeli blockade and deliver much-needed aid to Gaza during the ongoing genocide. I found this interview with her by Hanno Hauenstein after her captivity by Israeli soldiers and subsequent return to Germany essential reading this year.
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I recommend the second season of Andor alongside this very fitting review by Tim Lorenz, and I also recommend Eva Menasse’s razor-sharp piece The Boy Who Cried Wolf on the German feuilleton, which we published in June.
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My cultural highlight was Why We Fear AI, the only book revealing why bosses are pushing obviously faulty text generators into every product and using it to fire qualified humans. And one article that stuck with me this year was Adam Tooze’s What fires burned at Auschwitz?, in which he re-examines some aspects of the Holocaust in which myth and rumor have overtaken facts in our memory.
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