2025 Year-End Awards

From "best behavior change" to "color of the year"

After a one-year hiatus, the extremely world famous Range Widely year-end awards are back by popular demand. (Ok, one reader asked for them, but he comments thoughtfully on nearly every post so he gets what he wants.)

As in the prior two editions of year-end awards, I — I mean we, because there’s an international panel of highly esteemed judges — decided to introduce some novel categories. We hope you enjoy, and we wish you happy holidays, and invite you to share your own year-end award in the comments below this post. Without further ado, the envelopes, please…

Best Meet-Cute

The award goes to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, and his wife, Lori Mills Huang. In his new book, The Thinking Machine, author Stephen Witt describes their meeting at Oregon State University, where Lori was randomly assigned to be Jensen’s lab partner:

“There were, like, 250 kids in electrical engineering, and maybe three girls,” Huang said. “She was the best-looking.” Competition broke out among the male undergraduates for Mills’s attention, and Huang felt he was at a disadvantage. “I was the youngest kid in the class,” he said. “I looked like I was about twelve.”

Not liking his chances with conventional flirting, Huang took a different approach. “I tried to impress her—not with my looks, of course—but with my strong capability to complete homework,” he said. Every weekend, Huang would call Mills and pester her to do homework with him. And he was good at homework, which he sometimes called his “superpower.” Lori accepted, and the two became study partners.

David’s Most Effective Behavior Change of the Year

Going to sleep in workout clothes. It is remarkable how effective that has been in getting me to run or lift first thing in the morning. Somehow, my brain just says: “Look, you’re already dressed, are you really going to change out of running clothes? No. Let’s get after it.” A little weird? Maybe. Working for me? Definitely. Make it easy to make it easy.

Best Practical Takeaway from a Book That I Implemented This Year

The award goes to “looping for understanding” from Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators. Looping for understanding works like this: You ask someone a question; you listen carefully to the answer; you summarize the answer back in your own words — not mimicry, it should be in your own words; and then ask if you got it right.

It is remarkably effective both for making the other person feel heard (and earning good listening in return) and for real-time fact-checking of your own understanding. I realized that I do this in my work when I’m interviewing people, but after reading Charles’s book, I started doing it more in my personal life.

Color of the Year

Kafka orange. That’s a name the awards committee made up, but it refers to the color of orange on a reissue of Kafka’s Aphorisms. The cover of that reissue was designed by Peter Mendelsund, The Atlantic’s creative director, and also a musician, novelist, painter, and sought-after book cover designer. I love Peter’s designs, and that color, and so it will also be on the cover of Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, the book I have coming out in May. My publisher has even started referring to the color as Kafka orange! I think we can all agree that Kafka, in examining the individual’s struggle against opaque and irrational authority, clearly expected to be associated with a bright shade of orange. You’re welcome, Franz.

Hardest Training Quote

“Welcome, lad, to a lady’s bower. If you can find any comfort here, it’s something I have overlooked.”

That is the lady Lyne, to the young knight Ewain, in John Steinbeck’s version of The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. But for being a woman, Lyne says, she would have been the greatest knight in the world. Instead, she has dedicated her life to forging the fiercest fighters in the land. As she puts it: “My tiltyard is the womb of knights.” Lyne takes a young and overconfident Ewain to her home, where his accommodations are barely different from those of the animals. But that is the point. Lyne proceeds to take this fancy young man and harden him in every way. If you manage to find something comforting here, Ewain, it’s an accident. Time to work. It got me fired up; I had to put the book down and go work out.

Reading it, I was reminded of a visit I made more than a decade ago to the MVP Track Club in Jamaica, which was producing some of the world’s greatest sprinters, including ten-time world champion and triple Olympic gold medalist Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce. They trained early in the morning on a grass track, and none of the athletes seemed sure exactly how long it was. The weight room featured benches with torn covers from which little foam explosions were erupting. When I talked to coach Stephen Francis, he told me that Nike had offered to replace all that equipment, but he wanted it that way so the athletes wouldn’t get too used to comfort. The lady Lyne was centuries ahead of him.

Best Appendix

The award goes to the 50th anniversary edition of John Williams’s Stoner. This novel was published in 1965, but only gained steam after it was republished forty years later. It is nearly plotless, in the sense of action—which made Williams’s agent nervous. Farm boy becomes English professor and struggles with administrative and marital challenges. That’s it. But the execution is absolutely exquisite as it portrays the full life of a man, from birth to death. The back of the anniversary edition features an appendix of letters in which Williams is trying to convince his seemingly skeptical agent that somebody might actually read this novel, despite the lack of scintillating plot points.

“I am sure it does not sound nearly so exciting as it will be in fact,” Williams wrote to his agent. “It is a novel about a man who finds no meaning in the world or in himself, but who does find meaning and a kind of victory in the honest and dogged pursuit of his profession.”

Williams responds repeatedly and patiently to his agent’s insistence that “I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sales.”

Williams comes across in the letters as soft-spoken, but he continues to advocate for his work, marshaling any evidence he can to convince his agent that the book will resonate if given a chance. “One afternoon a few weeks ago,” he wrote, “I walked in on my typist while she was finishing typing chapter 15, and discovered great huge tears coursing down her cheeks. I shall love her forever.”

His agent seems generally unmoved. “I suspect that I agree with you about the commercial possibilities,” Williams writes at one point, “but I also suspect that the novel may surprise us in this respect. Oh, I have no illusions that it will be a ‘best seller’ or anything like that; but if it is handled right…it might have a respectable sale.”

In 2013, nearly a half-century after its initial publication, Stoner became a best seller, and has now sold several million copies.

Best Quote Given for One’s Own Obituary

This is actually a repeat category — Charlie Munger won in 2023 — in which the winner effectively helps write their own obit.

The winner is biologist David Baltimore, who died in September at 87. Baltimore, whose work overturned the “central dogma” of molecular biology and turbocharged our understanding of viruses and retroviruses (like HIV), gave an interview for his own New York Times obit, and it included a number of wonderful quotes. He recounted how his wife, also a scientist, happened to learn at a conference that her husband would soon be awarded the Nobel Prize. Naturally, she called him. Baltimore suggested to the Times that he was “the only person who ever was told he had won a Nobel Prize by his wife.” Imagine getting to make that call. Beautiful! But the committee’s favorite quote in the obituary was when Baltimore recounted a high school experience in which his mother arranged for him to spend time at a lab that was studying mouse genetics. “I made the discovery that a person with only the education I have could work at the forefront of science,” Baltimore said. “I came back and said, ‘This is what my life is going to be.’”

Best Description of Squirrels

“Most days, squirrels pilfer from the birds. I’m happy to feed the squirrels — tree rats with the agility of point guards — but in fair weather they frighten my finches.”

Tree rats with the agility of point guards. That’s the inimitable Donald Hall on the first page of Essays After Eighty.

Most Popular Range Widely Post of the Year

It was this one: “How to Use ChatGPT Without Brain-Rot.” Brain first, tool second, people.

Best Newsletter Readers

For the second straight year (if you don’t count last year when there were no awards) Range Widely readers won! You should take enormous pride in this achievement.

As I’ve said in the comments below many times, the readers have been the great surprise of this newsletter. I had all but given up on online comment sections, and this newsletter has restored my faith. Comments here are frequently encouraging, regularly fascinating, and I’m constantly learning from them or just being entertained by someone sharing their own story or insights. Even when (sometimes especially when) readers disagree with me on something or have a different perspective, the conversations have been fantastic and generative.

The number of readers has grown slowly but steadily, so I often can’t respond to every comment these days the way I used to. But I still read absolutely every single comment, and respond frequently. I never imagined that would be the case when I started this newsletter, but you all keep me coming back.

So thank you, thank you, thank you. And a special thanks to those subscribers who chose to support this newsletter with a paid subscription. Wishing you all the happiest holidays.

As ever, if you think others might enjoy this post, please share it.

And, for the last time in 2025, you can subscribe here:

Until next year…

David