Medium’s Evan Williams has been promoting a new way to measure our interaction with stories; one that focuses not on clicks, but rather on the total time we spend reading something. The NYT borrowed that idea to come up with a new — and probably slightly less depressing — way to determine its most impactful stories of the year. Here are the stories that held you the longest in 2015.

+ On Facebook, our most discussed topic of the year was the 2015 presidential election. That explains why so many people have been clamoring for an Unlike button.