our favorite interviews, recommendations, and more
best of passerby 2025
In 2025, we spoke to director Sepideh Farsi about making films in exile and hosted a retrospective of her films with Metrograph, listened to music with Margeaux Labat, visited Penelope Fletcher, the owner of one of our favorite bookshops in Paris, chatted with Rachel Seville Tashjian about how she gets dressed, talked to Zara Rahim about Zohran Mamdani’s winning campaign, and sat down with Leah Faria to talk about the campaign to close Rikers Island.
We hosted a conversation about the long history of diasporic publishing in the city at the New York Public Library and screened some of our favorite films of 2025, like Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You and Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby.
We published recs from the team each week, including essays on setting healthy boundaries, tips for hosting dinner parties, and a compilation of films from the SWANA region. We shared our advice for navigating a divorce, traveling to Istanbul, and visiting Les Recontres d’Arles. We also took a peek into the open tabs of writers including Celine Nguyen, jamie hood, Zeba Blay, and Suzy Exposito in our monthly recs.
It’s meant the world to share all of this with you here — 2025 marks our third year on Substack. We are so grateful to everyone who’s stuck with us over the years and really appreciate the community here. We love the writing we’ve found on this platform, including passersby Kaitlin Phillips’s Gift Guide, Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me, Liana Satenstein’s NEVERWORNS, Shop Rat by Emilia Petrarca, Hunter Harris’s Hung Up, and Fariha Róisín’s How To Cure A Ghost. We also love the newsletters Why is this interesting?, Deep Read | Phoebe Lovatt, Selling Out, The Iranist, Nymphet Alumni, Affection Archives, Habiter, and The Pleasure Lists, to name a few. We can’t wait to connect with more of you, in and out of your inboxes, in 2026.
As the year draws to a close, passerby will be taking a break until January 5th (but we’ll pop into your inbox on New Year’s Eve to share reflections on 2026 from the passerby community!). If you’re looking for some reading to do over the holidays, scroll down for some of our favorite stories we published over the last year.
We'll return ready to start the new year with more interviews, recommendations, and events. We hope you have a lovely couple of weeks, and that you, like us, are able to find some stillness and calm at the end of the year.
best of our 2025 interviews
best of our 2025 guest editors
best of our 2025 recommendations
best of the 2025 passerby club
This year, we hosted free screenings of Paint Me a Road Out Of Here, three films by Sepideh Farsi, Magic Farm, Sorry, Baby, and If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, for our paid subscribers, and hosted a tour of the NYPL’s new exhibition, Niyū Yūrk.
We brought on new partners to the passerby club, giving our paid subscribers discounts to Coucou Intimates, Brownkind, HiBar, Live the Process, Hudson Wilder, Café Forgot, and Rocky’s Matcha.
And on our Discord, our private community for our paid subscribers, we shared advice on new careers, recommended life-changing sunscreens, and helped each other find a last-minute facial in LA, an acupuncturist in Paris, a sweater repair place in NYC, and places to stay in Milan.
Member laura reilly described our Discord as a "Craigslist made up of your cool and stylish Instagram mutuals… you can find New York and Paris (and elsewhere) sublets in the best neighborhoods that are furnished by people who get paid well for their good taste, and which aren't found on, say, Facebook marketplace because the generally tight-knit nature of the group means a trusted renter base.”
If you’re already a member of the passerby club, thank you for your support. You’re the reason we can keep doing what we do. If you’re not a member yet, consider joining for additional interviews, access to advance movie screenings, exclusive weekly recommendations, access to our private Discord server, exclusive discounts from more than 20 partner brands, including Cou Cou Intimates and Metrograph, and more.
If you want to support passerby as we move into the new year, join the passerby club, gift a subscription to a loved one, or make a one-time contribution to help us on our mission to spotlight stories not typically told.
🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷
what a collection !!! what a year !!!