I published over a dozen papers this year. But when I read them together, they don’t look like a list—they look like a map. Academic publishing is a strange business. You spend months (or years) staring at datasets, arguing with reviewers, and tweaking p-values, often with your nose pressed so close to the grindstone that you can’t see the rest of the workshop. But 2025 was different. As the year winds down and I look at the stack of papers my colleagues and I released—from Nature Mental Health to the Journal of Psychology and Theology—I realized something startling. I hadn’t just published a list of disconnected studies. Without planning it,…