From left: Players celebrate during the grannies soccer tournament in South Africa. A Dalit kitchen in India. Plumpy’Nut bars manufactured at the Edesia Nutrition plant in Rhode Island. Mary Mayongana, 42, lost access to her HIV medicine as a result of U.S. aid cuts in Zambia.
From left: Ryan Brown for NPR; Diaa Hadid/NPR; Gabrielle Emanuel/NPR; Ben de la Cruz/NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
From left: Ryan Brown for NPR; Diaa Hadid/NPR; Gabrielle Emanuel/NPR; Ben de la Cruz/NPR
Instagram reels are reely … er … really popular. (Editor’s note: It turns out that “reely” is really an alternate spelling for “really” from long ago — way before reels were invented.)
Is there data to back this up? Mark Zuckerberg says so. The CEO of Meta, which owns Instagram as well as Facebook, reports that in 2025 reels have reached new heights on these platforms: 200 billion plays a day.
NPR’s global health and development blog was responsible for millions of those views. Here are our biggest Instagram reels this year.
