2025 In Review

It was one hell of a year. It's over now. 2026 should be... interesting.

For scholars like myself, who study the political economy of the symbolic professions, the events of 2025 provided fertile soil for observation and reflection. On balance, however, it was a very trying year for symbolic capitalists and aligned institutions and communities. 2026 is likely to be quite unpredictable too.

At the tail end of next year, the midterm elections are certain to be informative and highly consequential. And once again, I’m slated to have a book come out contemporaneous with a pivotal election cycle.

In the meantime, allow me to provide a roundup of my essays, interviews and events from the past 12 months.

In The News

This year, I published a handful of essays in mass media outlets contextualizing topics from the news that bear upon my areas of interest:

• “Democrats’ Wins May Not Mean What They Seem.” Boston Globe, 26 November.

• “Will the Public Side With the Protestors in LA? Here Are Some Lessons from History.” The Guardian, 17 June.

• “Queer Elites Are Still Elites.” Queer Majority, 15 June.

• “Trump’s War on Universities Will Not End Well.” Washington Post, 16 April.

• “Don’t Just Blame Trump — Democrats Paved the Way for This Campus Crackdown.” The Guardian, 26 March.

As my fellow symbolic capitalists were struggling to make sense of what was happening in the U.S., why, and where things were headed, journalists regularly turned to me for comment on contemporary issues. Some noteworthy stories that were shaped by my input include:

• “Zohran Mamdani: Can the Toast of New York Actually Run the City – and Stay Out of Donald Trump’s Crosshairs?“ London Evening Standard, 14 November.

• “Move Over, Gender Studies: The Conservative Tide Coming for US Universities.” The Guardian, 31 October.

• “Why Progressives May Not Be as ‘Woke’ As They Think.” CBC Ideas, 6 October.

• “The Battle for ‘Viewpoint Diversity’.” Inside Higher Ed, 2 September.

• “Are Progressive Elites Hypocrites?” ABC Radio National, 7 July.

• “What If Trump’s Gains With Minorities Weren’t About Trump At All?” Washington Post, 4 July.

• “Are Anti-‘Woke’ Academics Enjoying Donald Trump’s Presidency?” Times Higher Ed, 19 June.

• “Harvard Students Seek ‘Viewpoint Diversity’ Outside the School’s Gates.” New York Times, 3 June.

• “The Era of DEI for Conservatives Has Begun.” The Atlantic, 27 May.

• “Can Universities Still Diversify Faculty Hiring Under Trump?” Inside Higher Ed, 17 April.

• “A Professor’s Thoughts on Reforming DEI.” NPR, 15 April.

• “No More Woke.” Die Zeit, 30 March.

• “Colleges Must Answer ‘Why’ — or Die.” Compact, 23 March.

• “How Corporate America is Retreating from D.E.I.” New York Times, 12 March.

• “Woke is Over. Is Antiwoke About to Go the Same Way?” Bloomberg, 9 March.

• “Is Wokeness Social Justice for the Comfortable?” ABC Radio National, 5 March.

• “Alarmed, Employers Ask: What Is ‘Illegal D.E.I.’?” New York Times, 10 February.

• “Author Argues Social Justice Efforts Are Often Performative.” NPR, 22 January.

• “The Right is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds.” New York Times, 21 January.

I also took part in tons of podcast episodes in the U.S. and abroad.

My work was cited or featured in many other stories in the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, Jacobin, Chronicle of Higher Education and beyond without my direct participation.

Symbolic Capital(ism)

On average, between my essays, mentions in prominent outlets, and published interviews, I got at least one media hit each week in 2025.

Yet, although my name appeared in media a lot this year, I published significantly fewer pieces in external outlets than usual because I dedicated most of my publicly-oriented writing efforts to producing deep-dive essays on Symbolic Capital(ism) rather than lots of shortform pieces in third-party outlets. This year’s essays included:

• “A Graveyard of Bad NYC Mayoral Election Narratives.”

• “Inserting ‘Culture’ Into the Culture Wars.”

• “Censorship is Primarily a Problem of Institutional Selection.”

• “The Cultural Contradictions of the Anti-Woke.”

• “The Limitations of Partisan Politics.”

• “Trump Changes Nothing.”

I also produced an epic FAQ answering questions I’ve often received in interviews and events for We Have Never Been Woke:

• Why focus so intensely on symbolic capitalists for understanding contemporary society? Aren’t the politicians, military leaders, et al. the people with real power?

• What about the actual capitalists? What about the millionaires and the billionaires? Aren’t they the folks we should be focusing on to understand social problems?

• Aren’t Trump, his “deplorable” followers and his greedy financial backers the real obstacle to social justice? Isn’t the focus on “us” a distraction?

• We Have Never Been Woke doesn’t define “woke.” This seems like a problem…

• We Have Never Been Woke does not seem to care about “wokeness” per se. What’s up with that?

• If the book is not about “wokeness,” why use this (highly-polarizing) word in the title?

• Are you a cynic? Doesn’t the book’s presentation of human nature run contrary to the idea that symbolic capitalists could or would better embody their expressed ideals?

• I’m a symbolic capitalist. You’ve sold me on your basic argument. Now what?

As a result of these essays, and growing interest in my work more broadly, Symbolic Capital(ism) saw significant growth this year. This newsletter saw a 48 percent increase in subscribers compared to the end of 2024. My social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, BlueSky) saw comparable follower growth as well.

To all my new readers — welcome aboard! To my longtime subscribers, thanks so much for your continued engagement and support.

Events

The We Have Never Been Woke book tour continued throughout this year (and will extend through early 2026 too).

In the United States, I did 18 book events in 11 cities and 9 states, getting out to many communities and institutions that I couldn’t get to in 2024.

Thanks to support from the Free Speech Union (International), the Open Society Foundations, Heterodox Academy and local partners, I was able to tour in other countries throughout the summer too.

In the UK, I did 4 events in London, Oxford and Buckingham. In Australia, I did 8 events in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. In New Zealand, I did 4 events in Aukland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. In Canada, I did three events in Toronto, Windsor and Vancouver respectively.

Most of my book talks were not recorded and/or are not available online. Some noteworthy exceptions include:

A keynote address for the annual sociology conference at University College London that situates We Have Never Been Woke in the discipline:

A lecture for the MIT Free Speech Alliance surveying the core argument of the book, followed by a lively Q&A:

A talk and conversation for the expanding viewpoints at Tufts that extends the arguments of the book to the current moment:

Some additional 2025 book-related events are available on my YouTube channel. All said, I did 37 in-person book tour events this year, averaging about 3 each month. Many thanks to my booking agent, Molly Grote, who made this tour possible.

In addition to these events tied to We Have Never Been Woke, I did a number of talks unrelated to my book.

For instance, at the 2025 American Sociological Association meeting in Chicago, I took part in a panel on normativity in the discipline. It was a standing-room-only crowd followed by a very lively conversation that continued in the hallway for a long time after the session – revealing a deep interest in my arguments among faculty and students in the discipline. While I was there, I also moderated a session on how university leaders navigate this precarious political and cultural moment. And in anticipation of this year’s meeting, I did a great interview with the ASA Culture section.

At the tail end of last year, I did a short interview with the ASA’s public-facing magazine, Contexts, that was apparently the most read/ streamed interview they’ve done to date.

When I was on the job market, the discipline didn’t seem to know what to make of me (which is why I’m an assistant professor of journalism and communication instead). Now, sociologists seem to “get” me more fully, and seem much more openly receptive to my work and arguments.

On that topic, I did a brief talk for the American Enterprise Institute explaining the value of sociology while sketching out some of the ways the discipline can and should be reformed:

Most of my other 2025 non-book-related public events are not available online. However, some are, including:

A talk on censorship and self-censorship in science (recently transformed into a Substack post):

And my keynote address for the 2025 HxCanada conference, where I look at the meaning and value of viewpoint diversity for scientific inquiry:

Between my book events and other talks, I had an in-person event every single week this year, on average. Lots of planes, trains and automobiles (and walking through cities I’ve never been to).

Alongside my travels, I also did a number of virtual events, including a keynote address for a conference on science communication in populist times (to my knowledge, there’s no video of the conference but a paper summarizing some conclusions from that conference may be published in a prominent journal in 2026, God willing) and an event with the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative:

It was a busy 12 months! It would not have been possible to do all I do without the support of my wife and the flexibility and understanding of my kids.

Headed into the new year, and as I’m getting deeper into writing my second book, I’m reducing events. Right now, I’m trying to keep it at one per month until the manuscript is in. The goal is to have the book in the publisher’s hands by the end of this summer, with a planned release in late 2026.

Scholarship

This year was a transitional year in terms of academic research.

In June, I sold the rights for my next book, Those People, to Princeton University Press. (hats off to my agent, Andrew Stuart and my editor Rachael Levay).

We Have Never Been Woke had a great year. Princeton University Press did a huge initial print run of the book. It sold out, leading to subsequent printings. A paperback edition of We Have Never Been Woke launched this October with a new preface. The digital and audio versions of the book have continued to perform well too. A big thank you to readers for your interest in the book. If you loved the book, some ideas to help increase its reach and impact are available here.

The time in between writing my first book and my second has been filled to the brim with events and media interviews and, of course, my actual job: teaching students at Stony Brook University.

Consequently, no new papers or books were published this year. Nonetheless, my work generated almost twice as many new citations in Google Scholar over the course of 2025 as compared with 2024 – driven heavily by academic engagement with two works published last year: a co-authored essay for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences exploring censorship and self-censorship in science and, of course, We Have Never Been Woke which launched at the end of last year.

Next year should be full of new scholarship. One piece slated for publication next year that’s available now is from an edited volume on intellectual humility:

al-Gharbi, Musa (2026). “How Journalists Can Foster Humble Inquiry In their Work and Readers.” Humble Inquiry: New Perspectives on Intellectual Humility (eds. Nathan Ballantyne, Jared Celniker & Norbert Schwarz). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Additionally, I have a major effort launching in 2026 with regular collaborator David Rozado (enabled with support from Arnold Ventures) to analyze the relationships between crime trends, public perceptions about crime, and media narratives on crime with a level of granularity and statistical power that has been hitherto impossible.

And then there’s my second book.

And on top of that, with a little luck, there could be a co-authored paper on science communication in populist times. Stay tuned!

That’s it for my dispatch from 2025. Thanks so much for your support throughout this year. I’m looking forward (albeit with some trepidation) to see what 2026 has in store for all of us. For better or worse, we’re condemned to live in interesting times.