A Christmas List 🎄🎅🏻✨
Your favorite Gen Z stories of the year, and mine
Merry Christmas and happy holidays! In the spirit of the season, today’s edition is above the paywall.
2025 was full of Gen Z storylines. Reviewing our year in content, there are three key themes that breakthrough: economic anxiety, cultural realignment, and a widening gender gap.
In honor of today’s holiday, I put together a roundup of our favorite — and best performing — stories of the year. Tell us which ones earned a spot on the nice list, and which sparked the most conversation.
There’s been a 22-point drop in teen girls’ desire to get married over the past three decades. And now, teen girls are less likely than teen boys to say they want to get married, according to Pew Research Center. The Up and Up’s take: Girls and boys are diverging, not only in ideology, but in the futures they imagine for themselves. In most of my conversations with teen girls, they aren’t saying they don’t want kids at all. They’re just saying it feels like they have important things to accomplish first, including their own financial stability.
The Conservative It-Girls, and How The Right is Rebranding Womanhood (our most viewed story of the year)
Young women are mostly liberal, but there’s a vocal faction (of white women especially) leaning into a more conservative “trad” lifestyle — and many of these girls voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. The Up and Up’s take: Some of these shifts are ideological, while others are more aesthetic or lifestyle-driven. While party allegiance is fickle, a recalibration of work-life balance has certainly started to cement and Gen Z women are quite different from their millennial cousins, with a more traditional approach.
Why We Should Care About The ‘West Village Girls’ – and What They Tell Us About Gen Z Women (our second most viewed story of the year)
A rising generation of internet-savvy, yet ironically ostensibly carefree young women are raising brows and generating NY Magazine headlines as they frolic through life, somehow affording $10 matcha lattes and $14 Aperol spritzes (even on weekdays). The Up and Up’s take: They’re strong in number, have buying power, and share a window into the zeitgeist of young women nationwide and their priorities: community, shared culture, and trying to not give a f*ck.
The Trump 2.0 era is setting the scene for Gen Alpha’s politics. The Up and Up’s take: In conversations with tweens as young as 11, I’m noticing an acute awareness and sensitivity to human rights, political division, and what they perceive as perpetual arguing.
Young men are more likely than young women to see being married, having children, and making their family or community proud as key to their personal definition of success, according to NBC Decision Desk data. Young women, on the other hand, report higher levels of anxiety about the future, and are more likely to prioritize being spiritually grounded. The Up and Up’s take: The Gen Z gender gap is real — and cause for concern. But across partisan divides, there are areas of agreement. Reconciling young men and women’s differences starts with recognizing financial independence as common ground and creating spaces for them to disagree, and agree, respectfully.
Democrats are underperforming themselves when it comes to new voter registrants. The Up and Up’s take: The content coming out of right-leaning or MAGA-aligned initiatives has felt savvier and more squarely in the cultural zeitgeist, whereas Democrats’ content often feels out of date and cringe because it tries to recycle old trends, celebrities, and issues from a bygone era of political culture.
In all three major 2025 races — the New York City mayoral, New Jersey governor, and Virginia governor’s races — young women were FAR more likely than young men to vote for the Democratic candidate. The Up and Up’s take: Gen Z women are not a monolith, but the majority have a few things in common, including support for Democratic candidates. And by blaming young women for election outcomes while taking away their rights, Republicans risk further alienating them.
There are real and complex reasons why Gen Z is having less sex, a shift with far-reaching implications for American culture. The Up and Up’s take: But what often looks like sexual disinterest is often deep anxiety, or even trauma, masked as personal agency.
The Class of 2025 graduated into a perfect storm of chaos. The Up and Up’s take: Economic anxiety, dismal job prospects, and a need for real connection were this cohort’s top three concerns last spring.
Via his massive social media profile and the resonance of his videos, Kirk was at the center of bringing MAGA to the mainstream — and his tragic death could very well be the reason the party is now splintering. The Up and Up’s take: Whether it was his college tours or the campus debate videos he brought to the forefront of social media, Kirk changed the way young people think about, consume, and engage in political discourse.
Other important reads