M
Medium Staff
Guest
Reflections on community, new writer spotlights, and the most popular topics with our readers this month
Image by Bill Jelen from Unsplash, edited by Jason Combs
What does community mean to you? The answer probably changes depending on how you’re feeling about yourself and the world.
Right now, many stories on Medium paint a vivid picture of the dark side of community. Not belonging to one when you need support, feeling like you don’t matter to your community, losing your community, feeling burned out from showing up for your community — writers share all those experiences and more.
For example, Mike Hoffman writes about how, as a man struggling with IVF and infertility, he didn’t have a community to help him cope. “Men often find themselves in an emotional vacuum, unsure of whether they’re even allowed to grieve or struggle.” jess journals shares how her mother was illegally adopted out of Pinochet’s Chile, and intentionally separated from her siblings by a well-meaning case worker. Jay Wilkinson, Psychologist, writes about how much it hurts when we feel our community doesn’t care about us. “There are seasons of our lives when we feel haunted by the sense that we don’t really matter to other people,” he writes.
But they all touch on the beauty of community, too. “…[T]he way we teach men to be fathers has to start long before their child is even born…To men like me going through this process, know that you are not alone,” writes Mike Hoffman, building his own community where he found none. Jay Wilkinson, Psychologist, follows up with how to matter to your community: figure out what matters to them, and uphold those values. And jess journals describes how it felt when she was able to find her mother’s long-lost siblings, and her own cousins: “[T]he heritage that felt impossibly distant is now close. I am a part of it. I can see how I fit into it.”
For us here at Medium, community means that anyone else who has a story to tell can find a place to share that story (or stories!) with readers. We’re proud to be doing the work to build that place.
— Zulie @ Medium
By the numbers:
- Writers started over 600k drafts. (Need a helping hand to get a draft published? Why not come to our Medium 101 webinar for new writers?)
- 5 million readers came to Medium stories through the Daily or Weekly Digest
- Members viewed stories 30 million times
- Medium readers spent over 2 million minutes reading stories by writers who published their first story on Medium this month
New writers to Medium
Here are some of the stories from new-to-Medium writers that most resonated with our readers this month.
“Maybe Fairies and Leprechauns Are Real” by Bob Gance in Crow’s Feet. Like jess journals, Bob Gance was able to reconnect with his roots in his family’s ancestral home in Ireland.
“Ableism Nearly Killed Me — Recognizing It Saved My Life” by disability justice advocate and public philosopher Karin E. Boxer in Human Parts. As a philosophy professor, OCD stopped her from being able to write. Her university employer offered no support and didn’t try to find workarounds, while still demanding she adhere to unreachable output levels.
“AI won’t kill UX — we will” by neurodivergent UX strategist Kym Primrose in UX Collective. She challenges UX professionals to ask themselves, rather than blaming AI for flattening UX/UI creativity, why it was so flat to begin with?
“This Is What Censorship Looks Like in a National Park: The First Park Sign That Came Down” by former National Park Service ranger Elizabeth Villano. She tells the story of the history behind the sign that the Trump Administration took down in Muir Woods.
“The Price of Becoming the All-American Girl” by writer and creative director Liane Dowling in Fourth Wave. She digs into the image of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders from a media representation perspective.
Most highlighted
- “So if you’re feeling invisible, keep going. Write for the one reader who needs you. Because that’s how real art outlives the noise,” by brand marketer Felicia C. Sullivan in her story, “I’m Still Writing, Even If Nobody’s Watching,” published in Feeling Crafty.
- “To say someone’s name correctly is to honor where they come from. And to learn it is to affirm that they belong,” by writer Mwangi Wanjau in his piece, “I Stopped Using My White Name With White People,” published in An Injustice!
- “It’s about noticing things other people don’t and having a strategy for the unexpected,” by former cop Malky McEwan in his piece, “How to Think Like a Cop — Lessons Learned From 30 Years,” published in E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower.
- “Law enforcement and child safety workers say generative AI is making it harder to identify and rescue real-life victims,” by Linda Caroll in her piece, “Pedophiles Using AI To Target Kids And No One Can Make It Stop,” published in Fourth Wave.
Most read in…
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular stories on Medium this month across some of the topics our readers found most interesting.
Science and health:
- “Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?” by Baird Professor of Science Avi Loeb
- “To Statin Or Not To Statin: What Neither Side Is Telling You,” by researcher Dr. Lutz Kraushaar in Read or Die HQ
- “How I Cut Body Fat Without Losing Muscle,” by engineer and fitness entrepreneur Jeremy Fox, CNC, CPT in In Fitness and In Health
Tech, design, and programming:
- “Apple is Poised To Upset The PC Market Like Never Before,” by tech recruiter and photographer Dori Kasa in Mac O’Clock
- “Behind the Streams: Three Years Of Live at Netflix. Part 1,” by Sergey Fedorov, Chris Pham, Flavio Ribeiro, Chris Newton, and Wei Wei in Netflix Technology Blog
- “I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since,” by web developer Mike Hall
- “Abandonware Is The New Software,” by staff software engineer Attila Vágó in Level Up Coding
Politics and economy:
- “The GOP’s Big Beautiful Betrayal: Why Republicans Are Jumping Ship,” by software startup architect Dick Dowdell in The Political Prism
- “Resist. None of us knows how this moment will turn out.” by marketing professor and author Scott Galloway
Self and relationships:
- “Five Weird Habits That Were Actually Signs Of Undiagnosed AuDHD,” by author Christie Sausa, MS in Invisible Illness.
- “If Discipline Feels Like Punishment, You’re Doing It Wrong,” by applied linguistics and teacher Viktoria Verde, PhD in Never Stop Writing
- “How to Create a Life You Love,” by freelance copywriter and illustrator Jason McBride
On the Medium blog
We had a busy month here at Medium — here’s what we shared with our readers, writers, and publication editors:
- 30+ small, fast fixes. We paused all other engineering projects to spend a week focusing on small, meaningful fixes for our users. Headline improvements include removing 100 million spam records from search results, new default preview images for stories published without images, and an easier log-in process.
- Medium versus Substack: What’s the difference? TL;DR: There are good reasons to use both. We broke down the six most common reasons we hear writers choosing Medium.
- Readers and publication editors should find it more straightforward to navigate publications. On the surface, this product change looks like just a few visual changes. Out of sight, it represents a huge amount of work from our engineers to bring all the code that powers publications into one cohesive codebase, bringing code from over 10 years, during different eras, written by different teams, all into a single language.
- Not on the Blog, but for your reading: Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine wrote about how Medium turned itself around to become profitable. Medium changed how it defined and rewarded quality writing, renegotiated loans, cut costs, restructured investment, and more.
For more great stories from Medium’s writers and publications, check out our Staff Picks. To learn something new from Medium writers every week, subscribe to our latest newsletter, the Medium Newsletter.
It happened on Medium: July 2025 roundup was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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