Hello! It’s the last day of 2025, which means it’s a time of transition and renewal. It’s also a time to phone it in. Which means, in the interest of getting another email out there (more on that in a second), I’m going to go over some of the best and worst Rabbit Holes of the year, based on the metrics I have at hand.

About that! If you didn’t notice, I flipped newsletter providers from Substack to Beehiiv earlier this month. I don’t think you’ll notice TOO much on your end. The aesthetics are a little different, and I’m still working out a few kinks, but all five years worth of Rabbit Holes are still online and at the same links as they were before. I’ve noticed that some things didn’t make the transition (captions, embedded tweets, footnotes, comments, likes, and so on), and if you see something missing, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Lord knows you all can fire off an email whenever you see a typo, but to be fair, I give you plenty of typos to work with.

If you’re a paid subscriber, everything should have been flipped over automatically. Let me know if you’re having a billing issue! And If you were a commenter in the past, the login process should be pretty easy if you want to chime in with your own thoughts in the future. If you want to test that out, log in, and leave a comment about the things you’re most thankful for. It’d be good to hear from you all again.

But overall, I think the big switcheroo went as well as it possibly could have. That said, you should know two things. One: Beehiiv charges me a flat yearly fee based on my subscriber list (which is now at 12,668!). Substack took 10% per subscriber. I’ve mentioned this before, but for free, or small newsletters, Substack makes it really easy to grow your subscriber list without fronting a lot of money. Once you get big, however, you’re sort of locked into the Substack ecosystem, which is more like a social network than a newsletter platform. Based on my numbers, most of you read the Rabbit Hole in your email app, and not on the ncrabbithole.com website or the Substack App. I wasn’t doing a lot of live video, making any Substack-only podcasts, or using some of the social networking features like Notes. Most of you, I think, came for the actual, written Rabbit Hole. It just made financial and personal sense to leave Substack. Again, my entire archive is still online at ncrabbithole.com. But I still have a token Substack presence at jeremymarkovich.substack.com, mostly to point people over to the correct website.

However! This newsletter is coming from a new address: [email protected] (the old one was [email protected]). Which means I’m trying to drop a few things into your inbox just to make sure my subscribers have a good chance of seeing everything. Hopefully you’re seeing this in your inbox. And based on the last email I wrote, about Blinkies, I think most of you are.

One last thing before I get to the best-of list, though. Because Substack took a 10% cut of every paid subscription, I was incentivized to keep most of my best content on that site. But because Beehiiv does not (I still get hit with credit card fees from Stripe), I feel, at least in my own mind, that your support is a little more direct. I’m still interested in tinkering around with stuff like video and audio, or doing more experimental things that didn’t work well on Substack. The North Carolina Rabbit Hole is still my home base, and anything I’m doing will end up here first, but I think 2026 will bring me the freedom to try out some cool stuff. Will I fail spectacularly! Sure! Why not! But for those of you who have supported the Rabbit Hole financially for years now, I really appreciate what you’re done for me. It’s a privilege to keep making stuff for you all, and I hope you continue to like it.

So, here’s the best and worst Rabbit Hole-related stuff of 2025:

Remember Fort Liberty? Well, it’s gone now, replaced by the Fort Bragg, which was its old name, but its old namesake was a Confederate racist that nobody liked, so the Trump defense department went out and found some other guy named Bragg. This is that Bragg’s story, which is both heartwarming and cynical.

Hey, remember Jefferson Griffin? The guy who tried to change the voting rules after the election so he’d win an election that he barely lost? Well, because this story was both topical and political, all of you decided to weigh in on it in the comments, which are now gone, because they didn’t make the voyage over from Substack land. But I’m sure they were all terrific!

I don’t exactly trust the metrics on this one (because it doesn’t nearly capture email forwards), but according to the numbers, a story I wrote about the origins of Raleigh’s most notorious snow picture was the most chain letter-iest Rabbit Hole of 2025.

Remember The White Lotus and all of the Duke/UNC connections? That was such a long time ago! And yet, poor Jason Isaacs’s explanation of his “Durham accent” really got you all into a damn mood. How do I know? Because this particular Rabbit Hole was sent to about 10,000 people, but had 13,000 opens. In short, that meant you kept rage-reading it or forwarded it on to a lot of people you know.

You know what happens when you put the word “sex” in a subject line? You scare a lot of people off. Hence, the Rabbit Hole about the strange, trippy, and weirdly erotic life of a guy who wrote a nonsensical fight song was clearly my least-opened email of 2025. That said, a lot of you found it in other ways. That includes a large amount of people overseas who, according to Google Search Console, found this story when they googled some permutation of “sex porn.” If that’s what you were looking for, I’m so sorry that you stumbled upon this instead.

I was hoping that a Roberta Flack-Lee Greenwood duet would have been the most musically-driven story of the year, but nope! It was a story about The King telling a dirty joke about a small North Carolina town. Even in 2025, 50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong.

That’s all! If you’re looking for more good reads from 2025, check out the entire archive. Happy New Year, and I’ll see you all in 2026.