Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• The Year in Labor Strife - COVID-19 appears to have lit a match beneath at least a decade’s worth of late-stage-capitalist tinder. - link

• The Solo Performances of Hasaan Ibn Ali Expand the History of Jazz - The pianist’s “Retrospect In Retirement Of Delay” is a historic outpouring of musical imagination. - link

• Ringing in the New Year (on Zoom) - Should auld acquaintance be—wait, I think you’re muted. - link

• How Do You Get Dental Care When You Can’t Afford It? - At an annual dental fair in Philadelphia, Americans wait in line and hope to get through the door. - link

• Joe Biden’s Year of Hoping Dangerously - It was a brutal start for the new President. - link

From Vox

• Rare turtles keep washing up on Cape Cod. “Turtle movers” fly them to Texas. -

  

  Inside the 1,800-mile rescue operation helping the world’s most endangered turtle. 

  Sea turtles appear to fly as they swim beneath ocean waves. With long, gray-green flippers that move like slow wingbeats, they glide through the water as birds do through the sky. Actually flying through the air, though, at 10,000 feet above the ground, the reptiles seem anything but graceful.

  Inside the airplane, 120 sea turtles, 118 of which are juvenile Kemp’s ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii), shift uncomfortably among beach towels inside stacked Chiquita banana boxes, their crusty eyes and curved pearlescent beaks peeking through slot handles. The windowless metal cabin vibrates with the sound of propellers as the pilots work to keep the plane aloft and the internal air temperature at a turtle-friendly 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s December 2020, and outside, the cold air above New England slowly gives way to balmier southern temperatures. The pilots are taking the turtles on a 2,900-kilometer (1,800-mile) trip from Massachusetts to Texas’s Gulf Coast.

  Eight hours later, they’re nearly there. “We’re coming into Corpus Christi,” says Mike Looby, a pilot with a sea turtle rescue organization called Turtles Fly Too, as airport runways come into view among the sprawling buildings below. Looby and co-pilot Bill Gisler, both from Ohio, will visit four different locations in Texas to offload the animals. This is the largest number of turtles the organization has transported to date.

  

Once the plane is on the tarmac, staff and volunteers from several aquariums and marine rescue facilities crowd around. The pilots gently slide each box of turtles toward the cargo door, and the group lines up to carry them to vans parked nearby.

“What happened to these guys?” someone asks.

“They were found stranded on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts,” says Donna Shaver, chief of the division of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery at Padre Island National Seashore, as she grabs a box.

In the summer months, the waters in the Gulf of Maine where Cape Cod is located are warm, calm, and full of food, serving as a natural nursery for 2- to 4-year-old Kemp’s ridleys, the smallest and most endangered sea turtle in the world. Migrating loggerheads (Caretta caretta), green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas), and the occasional leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) also visit Cape Cod Bay. But as water temperatures plummet in November, December, and January, the cold-blooded turtles must migrate out or perish. Many lose their way and wash up, cold-stunned, on the inside edge of the hook-shaped Cape, which curls into the ocean like a flexing arm, forming what some locals call “the deadly bucket.”

The phenomenon is the largest recurring sea turtle stranding event in the world. While it’s natural — local records of sea turtle bones date back centuries — the scale is new and may, paradoxically, be a product of successful efforts to recover Kemp’s ridley populations, in addition to the effects of climate change.

“This area is increasing in water temperature faster than 99 percent of water bodies in the world,” says Kate Sampson, sea turtle stranding and disentanglement coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who helps coordinate turtle transport. “Because of that, it seems like it’s drawing more sea turtles.”

Fortunately for the turtles, hundreds of volunteers and several staff members organized by the nonprofit Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary stand at the ready to patrol every inch of the 105-kilometer (65-mile) stretch of beach lining the inner Cape, twice a day, from November through December, no matter the weather. When they find a turtle, the animal begins a logistically complex journey from rescue to rehabilitation and, eventually, to release. Saving each flight’s worth of little lives involves approximately five vans, 1,000 miles, four organizations, and 50 people. Without this monumental collaboration across North America’s Eastern Seaboard, other efforts to save the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle from extinction might be futile.

Why turtle strandings are on the rise

Three weeks before Looby and Gisler’s departure with their precious herpetological cargo, Nancy Braun and her border collie Halo walked a stretch of Great Hollow Beach, near Cape Cod’s outermost tip. The unrelenting wind blew hard and Braun’s cheeks were rosy with cold, her hair frantically trying to escape from beneath a fuzzy winter hat. Every so often, she raised binoculars to her eyes to scan the sand and any promising-looking lump of seaweed. A resident of nearby Truro and a Mass Audubon volunteer, Braun was on the lookout for turtles.

Walking quickly, she passed small cottages in the dunes with window shutters closed tightly against the elements. Brightly colored beach chairs lined the shore like memorials to summers past. Along the way, Braun saw a group of people gathered around something in the distance, and she broke into a run in their direction, Halo bounding by her side. When she arrived, there they were: four sea turtles, clearly in need of care. As the group waited for the arrival of a Mass Audubon vehicle to take the turtles for initial processing, Braun and the others covered them with seaweed to protect against the wind chill.

“This is so cool,” said Richard Lammert, a visitor from New York. “We were just walking the beach and came across these turtles. I had no idea that sea turtles even came up this far. I’ve never seen one up close, let alone helped to rescue it.”

While the mood was light, there was also a sense of urgency among the group. “I called Mass Audubon to let them know what we found,” said Michael Weinstein, another Truro resident. That’s exactly the type of response turtle rescuers hope for and why rescuers prioritize educating the community in addition to recruiting and training volunteers, according to Carol “Krill” Carson, president and founder of the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance and a volunteer with Mass Audubon. Without a clear understanding of why the turtles are stranded in the first place, some well-intentioned people might think they should throw the animals back into the ocean. “Anyone can walk the beach and find a sea turtle,” Carson says. “It’s what that person does when they find a turtle that is critical.”

Former director of Mass Audubon Bob Prescott started the sea turtle rescue program back in 1979. At the time, Prescott says he would find only a handful of turtles each year. The number has since skyrocketed. In 2014, volunteers found a record-breaking 1,242 turtles stranded on Cape Cod beaches. In 2020, there were 1,045, the second-highest number on record.

The most common species found is Kemp’s ridley, which nests in only two places in the world: a stretch of beach in Mexico and one in Texas. Between the late 1940s and the mid-’80s, Kemp’s ridley populations plummeted from more than 40,000 nesting females to fewer than 300, due to entanglement in fishing gear and the harvesting of adults and eggs for human consumption. Today, Kemp’s ridleys still face a wide variety of threats, including habitat loss, coastal development, ship strikes, plastic waste, and climate change. With so few ridleys left, “every life counts in the survival of this species,” says Prescott, which makes the turtle rescue effort that much more important. “It’s all hands on deck.”

Connie Merigo, executive director of the National Marine Life Center, in Bourne, Massachusetts, agrees. “You hear a lot in biology, ‘Why are you interfering? Shouldn’t you just let nature run its course?’ In this case, a lot of these threats are not under control. So, if we let thousands of these turtles die every year in a cold-stunning event, the population is that much smaller.”

Interestingly, though, the success of ongoing conservation efforts is likely one of the factors driving the increased need for rescues. That’s because there are simply more turtles around to strand. Conservation efforts on nesting beaches in Mexico, strict regulations on pollution, and new technological advancements in fishing equipment have all helped, as have new nest sites developed in Texas since the 1970s. Today, there are an estimated 5,500 Kemp’s ridley females nesting in Mexico and 55 in Texas.

Although this is a good sign, the current population is still critically low. According to NOAA, the number of nests grew steadily until 2009 but has fluctuated since then, underscoring the importance of ongoing monitoring and conservation. “Endangered species recovery is the long game,” says Shaver, who leads the Kemp’s ridley nesting program in Texas. “It’s so heartwarming to work with people who have the same mission at heart to try and give back to preserve and sustain this population.”

The other likely factor contributing to turtle strandings is the warming of the Gulf of Maine. Climate change has caused the water here to warm earlier each year and to stay warm for longer, keeping young Kemp’s ridleys in the fertile shallows of Cape Cod Bay later each fall. But the temperatures of the outer Cape and the North Atlantic still plunge as summer comes to a close. When fall arrives and the turtles attempt to navigate northward around the cape’s hook, they hit a disorienting wall of cold and turn around in search of the warmer water of their southerly ocean habitats.

This leads them back to the shallow flats inside the bay, where they encounter land instead of the open ocean. When the waters inside the cape reach a consistent 50 degrees Fahrenheit, any turtles still there will become hypothermic and eventually die unless they get help. Given the compounding factors, there’s no obvious end in sight to the trend.

“We are going to continue to see an increase of cold- stuns on Cape Cod,” says NOAA’s Kate Sampson.

That increase has only heightened the need for collaboration. In 2010, the New England Aquarium built a sea turtle rehabilitation facility in Quincy, Massachusetts, to meet demand. And with the high stranding numbers in 2020, breaking the record for live admitted turtles at 754, and limited staff due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Marine Life Center in Bourne, Massachusetts, also opened its doors to help with triage of incoming turtles, on top of the rehab services it already provided.

In addition to being hypothermic, Kemp’s ridleys usually arrive at these facilities with pneumonia or develop the condition within the first week or two of their arrival. Turtles also sometimes show up with traumatic injuries like broken bones and cracked shells from ocean waves tossing their bodies repeatedly into rocks, jetties, and seawalls when the animals are too cold to swim out of the surf.

Initially, when the turtles arrive, the goal is simply to assess their injuries through physical examinations and X-rays and to stabilize them. Rehabilitation staff members give the turtles fluids to rehydrate them and antibiotics to treat infections. They also work to slowly bring the animals’ internal body temperatures back up.

Still, the two Massachusetts facilities can only care for so many turtles. At some point, the animals, including those that Braun and the others found on Great Hollow Beach, must be transported to other aquariums and facilities to complete their rehabilitation and ready them for release back into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. In total, 29 additional rehab facilities are prepared to take in sea turtles for long-term rehabilitation. And flying, it turns out, is the fastest, least stressful, and safest way to transport the animals. That’s where Turtles Fly Too and its team of dedicated volunteer pilots come in.

The first — and only — US operation permitted to airlift sea turtles

On a frigid, clear December day, the early morning sun peeks over the horizon as four vans pull onto the tarmac at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts. Yawning, their breath turning into clouds before them, Kate Sampson of NOAA, Connie Merigo of the Marine Life Center, and a handful of other turtle rescuers from the New England Aquarium, pour out of the vehicles to meet with pilots Looby and Gisler. They strategize about the loading process to get dozens of turtles into the air as quickly and safely as possible. And that’s just one phase of the process.

Among the myriad details that must be worked out are how many turtles the rehabilitation facilities need to move, what planes are available and their capacity, where the pilots are coming from, where they’re going, and who will be on hand for pickup — all right up to the moment when the turtles arrive at their destination.

The service that Turtles Fly Too provides is unique. Besides the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which has the authority to move any endangered animal, “we have the first and only permits in the nation to fly sea turtles,” says Leslie Weinstein, the organization’s president. Turtles Fly Too got its start in 2014, the record- breaking year of strandings. Weinstein was running an aviation parts manufacturing company full time and had just transported a green sea turtle successfully to a facility in Dubuque, Iowa, that summer. In November, when cold-stranded sea turtles began washing up, turtle rescuers put Weinstein in touch with Sampson and Merigo, who was then directing the New England Aquarium’s Rescue Rehab Program. And thus, Turtles Fly Too was born.

Weinstein found the organization’s first pilot through a volunteer group called Pilots N Paws that transports domestic animals. A full- time dentist in New York, Ed Filangeri’s assignment was to fly eight turtles from Massachusetts to Baltimore, Maryland. Filangeri was immediately hooked, and the two joined forces. These days, Filangeri doesn’t hesitate to cancel dental appointments, because, he says, “the turtles can’t wait” and the clients understand. The organization now counts more than 350 pilots among its ranks and provides emergency transport to other species too, including sea otters, pelicans, and seals.

The flights vary in cost from $1,500 to $100,000 depending on the plane used, the number of drop locations, and the number of turtles on board. According to Weinstein, the average ticket price comes in at about $1,000 per turtle. Public contributions to Turtles Fly Too help cover that, as do airfields that waive landing fees or provide discounts on fuel. One Christmas Eve, when Filangeri had a mission to Virginia, he showed up in a Santa hat, and he and the crew named each of the eight traveling turtles after a flying reindeer. “I thought it was funny that they were flying with a man with a white beard on Christmas Eve,” Filangeri laughs. But, joking aside, “We do what’s necessary. We are the turtle movers,” adds Weinstein. “You can’t put a value on one Kemp’s life.”

After months spent healing from injuries, being treated for their illnesses, and regaining their strength, the turtles that Looby and Gisler transported in December are ready for release. “These guys come in chronically ill, and it takes time to get them healed,” says Joe Flanagan, senior veterinarian at the Houston Zoo. On the appointed day in March 2021, the beaches of Galveston, Texas, are warm, and the spring sun reflects off the light-colored sand. Boxes filled with Kemp’s ridley sea turtles gathered from the New England coastline sit in the shade of a small tent. Several beach-goers line up behind strips of bright pink tape wafting in the wind, marking a safe corridor for the turtle parade. Aquariums and rehabilitation centers coordinate with each other to combine their releases and allow the public to attend. “We’ll probably not see these guys ever again, I hope. But if we do it would be nice to see them nesting,” says Flanagan.

Staff and volunteers carefully grasp the small Kemp’s ridleys just behind their front flippers and carry them one by one down the sandy strip toward the ocean. The people gathered to watch cheer, clap, take selfies, smile, and wave as the animals complete the final leg of their strange, human-assisted migration. “Goodbye, little one! Good luck!” someone yells. “Look at how cute they are,” says another bystander. The sea turtles seem equally enthusiastic, waving their flippers wildly as if in anticipation of the swim, longing for the embrace of warm water, at last, eager to once again fly beneath the waves.

“Oh my god, he is so ready to go!” says one of the turtle rehabilitators as she places a small pale-green Kemp’s, named Hagrid, slowly into the water. With several fast pumps of his flippers, the young turtle disappears into the Gulf of Mexico.

This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an online magazine about nature and solutions powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

• 22 things we think will happen in 2022 -

  

  Forecasting what’s shaping up to be another bumpy year.

  Predicting future events is hard, but it’s among the most important tasks a journalist can perform. Especially if you work at a section called Future Perfect.

  Our mission is to explain the world around us to our readers, and it’s impossible to do that without anticipating what comes next. Will inflation continue to rise in the US and Europe, or level off? Will the Supreme Court allow states to ban abortion, eliminating legal access in red states? Will Brazil’s 212 million people be led by a left-wing populist, or a far-right anti-vaxxer?

  All of these questions matter, and preparing ourselves for potential outcomes — and having a good sense of how likely specific outcomes are — is a major part of explaining the world accurately. And if policymakers could rely on accurate predictions about the outcome of a foreign war or the advisability of a budget proposal, they could make much better policy decisions.

  Being good at predictions is a skill like any other — you have to practice it. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock studies forecasting, holding tournaments to identify the skills that make people better than their peers at predicting future events. He finds that the most critical skills for forecasting are thinking numerically, being open to changing your mind, updating your beliefs incrementally and frequently instead of in rare big moments, and — most encouragingly — practicing. Practice makes perfect for prediction-making, but you need to do it all the time, note your successes, learn from your failures, and refine your understanding of where your forecasting abilities are strongest.

  So for the third year in a row, the staff of Future Perfect is providing predictions on the year to come. As with last time, we assign each event a probability between 10 percent and 95 percent (Tetlock found that the best forecasters thought in terms of probabilities rather than simple yes/no predictions). To say that something has an 80 percent chance of happening doesn’t mean it’s definitely happening; it means that if we make five predictions at 80 percent confidence, we’re expecting to have four of them come true. (This kind of probabilistic thinking can trip people up, as Nate Silver has documented.)

  You can also read our retrospectives on our 2021 predictions, our 2020 predictions, and our 2019 predictions. We don’t speak for Vox, or even for each other, and we hope that where you disagree, you’ll weigh in with predictions of your own. If you want to try your hand, the site Metaculus is a good place; the successor company to Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project also runs competitions.

  The United States

  Democrats will lose their majorities in the US House and Senate (95 percent)

  Midterm elections are fairly predictable. With extremely rare exceptions, the party in power loses seats. Public opinion is, as political scientist Christopher Wlezien has argued, thermostatic: The public elects one party, then finds that its policies are a little too far left or right for its tastes, and compensates by moving the other way in the midterms.

  Wlezien, along with Joseph Bafumi and Robert Erikson, has also found that polling many months ahead of midterms can be quite predictive of the eventual results. As of this writing, Democrats are slightly behind in national House polling, which suggests they’ll lose the popular vote for the House this coming November. Data analyst David Shor told me that as of December 9, 2021, the generic ballot polling suggests Democrats losing the House popular vote, 48 percent to 52 percent. With the current razor-thin Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress, such a performance would translate to a near-certain Republican takeover. —Dylan Matthews

  Inflation in the US will average under 3 percent (80 percent)

  The definition of “inflation” I’m using here is annualized rate of growth in the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price index, excluding food and energy. This measure, known as “core PCE,” is the one preferred by the Federal Reserve, and thus the one most relevant for public policy. I’m also specifically looking at the average of the first three quarters of 2022, as we plan on reviewing these predictions in December 2022, when the final quarter’s data won’t be available.

  While higher-than-expected demand and worse-than-expected supply chains have led to elevated inflation in 2021, I suspect that problem will resolve itself in 2022. The Fed predicts core PCE inflation of 2.7 percent in 2022; the Congressional Budget Office predicts 2 percent. Professional private-sector forecasters predict it will decline from 2.5 percent in quarter one to 2.3 percent in quarter three. All of this suggests to me that inflation will fall below 3 percent, toward a much more comfortable range than experienced in 2021. —DM

  Unemployment in the US will fall below 4 percent by November (80 percent)

  The current US unemployment rate is only a hair above 4 percent, so one might think it’d be an easy call to predict it will dip below 4 next year. But I do have a couple of hesitations, with the big one that the omicron coronavirus variant is here and looks likely to be at least temporarily devastating. And it might not be the last game-changing variant.

  The pandemic has done bizarre things to the US employment situation, and predicting where the next year will take us requires predicting the pandemic’s course from here. That means that while I’m broadly optimistic about job growth in 2021, it’s hard to be too sure of anything. But on the whole, it seems to me that we ought to see at least a moderate degree of economic recovery over next summer and fall, and that moderate degree should be enough for unemployment to fall below 4 percent at some point. —Kelsey Piper

  The Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade (65 percent)

For nearly 50 years, anti-abortion activists have engaged in a highly organized campaign to appoint judges willing to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to enact outright bans on abortion. The savvy opinion has traditionally been that conservative jurists will seek to narrow, not overrule, Roe by gradually allowing more and more restrictions short of outright bans. I think this is mistaken. While Chief Justice John Roberts may be pragmatic enough to take that option, my sense is that the other five Republican appointees genuinely believe Roe was wrongly decided and likely believe overturning it will be an admirable part of their legacy.

    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-

The Court is currently weighing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case considering Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks. After oral arguments, court observers like my colleague Ian Millhiser were confident that all the conservatives but Roberts were ready to overturn Roe. The prediction market at FantasyScotus concludes the same. I defer to their expertise and think 2022 will see the emergence of a divide between red states where abortion is outright banned and blue ones where it is legally protected and funded. —DM

Stephen Breyer will retire from the Supreme Court (55 percent)

In September, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the Court’s oldest and most senior member, published a book warning against “politicizing” the Court. To me, this is absurd: The Court is, has always been, and always will be a political institution. Indeed, his colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s willful obliviousness to partisan political concerns will likely soon cause the overturn of Roe and the undermining of one of her biggest legacies. Partially as a reaction to Ginsburg’s colossal mistake, I predict Breyer will buckle to public pressure to retire before the 2022 midterms. Without a Democratic Senate, President Biden can’t replace Breyer with a like-minded jurist. Breyer is not a fool — he knows this is the dynamic, and while it likely pains him to be seen as responding to political concerns, I suspect he will ultimately let Biden pick his successor. —DM

The world

Emmanuel Macron will be reelected as president of France (65 percent)

Three years ago, when Emmanuel Macron’s public approval rating dipped below 25 percent, it appeared plausible that he would either decline to seek reelection (like his unpopular predecessor François Hollande) or fall to far-right leader Marine Le Pen. But Macron gained substantial ground over 2020, despite a chaotic handling of Covid-19, including repeated attempts at “reopening” usually followed by a new lockdown when the reopening inevitably led to a surge in the disease.

Macron also benefits from a divided far right, with newcomer Éric Zemmour digging into Le Pen’s base. Macron’s best-case scenario is that Zemmour and Le Pen continue to attack each other viciously, leaving whoever prevails in a weak position to take him on in the second round of the election. If he loses, my guess is it’s because mainstream center-right candidate Valérie Pécresse snuck past Zemmour and Le Pen and made it to the runoff, where she stands a better shot than the far-right leaders. —DM

Jair Bolsonaro will be reelected as president of Brazil (55 percent)

If you consult the opinion polls, you’ll see that Bolsonaro — the radical right-wing anti-vaxxer and death squad fanboy currently running Brazil — is behind leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a decent margin. And I think it’s certainly possible Lula prevails.

But I still give Bolsonaro the edge for three reasons: 1) in Brazil in particular and modern South America more generally, incumbents very often win reelection; 2) in both 2010 and 2018, the party consistently leading in polling for months in the run-up to election season wound up dropping ground rapidly and losing the election; and 3) Lula was knocked out of the 2018 race because of since-overturned corruption charges, and while there’s probably not enough time to convict him of new charges before the 2022 election, I think it’s possible that Bolsonaro and allies will succeed in pushing Lula out of the race. —DM

Bongbong Marcos will be elected as president of the Philippines (55 percent)

The runup to the 2022 Philippine presidential election has been chaotic, to say the least. Sara Duterte, daughter of term-limited incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte, was widely expected to run but opted instead to try for the vice presidency. Duterte then endorsed longtime aide Bong Go, but Go has since withdrawn. And Duterte seems displeased with Bongbong Marcos, the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, even though Marcos is Duterte’s daughter’s running mate. Among other things, Duterte has started spreading rumors that Marcos uses cocaine.

That said, the younger Duterte is a powerful ally for Marcos, as is the somewhat surprising phenomenon of autocratic nostalgia. Keiji Fujimori, the daughter of Peru’s former dictator, has come close to winning the presidency there several times, and the right-wing candidate in this year’s Chilean presidential election is the scion of a family closely allied to the late dictator Augusto Pinochet. A similar romanticization of an autocratic past could help put Marcos over the top.

Marcos seems to be ahead of Manila mayor Isko Moreno and boxer Manny Pacquiao in the (admittedly sparse) polling of the race, and I suspect his last name and canny alliance-building will win him the presidency. —DM

Rebels will NOT capture the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa (55 percent)

Two years after Ethiopia’s prime minister Abiy Ahmed won a Nobel Peace Prize, he finds himself losing a brutal civil war. From 1991 to 2018, Ethiopia was ruled by a coalition centered around the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. As its name suggests, the TPLF is based in the Tigray region in the country’s north, and during its rule repressed the Amhara and Oromo ethnic groups. Growing discontent led to the Oromo politician Abiy coming to power. After a couple of calm years, during which Abiy made peace with neighboring Eritrea, conflict between Abiy and the TPLF turned violent, with the national government sending the military into Tigray and bombing the capital. The humanitarian consequences have been brutal, to say the least.

Abiy’s decision to purge the national army of Tigrayans (when half the officer corps was Tigrayan) weakened his position and helped set up a TPLF comeback. Now, the TPLF has not only pushed the national army out of Tigray, but allied with a powerful group of Oromo rebels.

Disclosure: When I wrote the draft article initially in early December, I predicted that the TPLF would capture the capital of Addis Ababa, as seemed likely around that time. But since then, the national army has regained ground and the TPLF has withdrawn from strategically important neighboring regions. So I reversed my prediction, albeit with considerable remaining uncertainty. —DM

Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images

China will not reopen its borders in the first half of 2022 (80 percent)

China has been intent on preserving a zero-Covid policy, even as other governments have abandoned that strategy. When a single person tests positive there, it can trigger a lockdown for tens of thousands of people. The country mandates quarantines for even remote contacts of positive cases. And the authoritarian government has tied up its prestige with its ability to crush the virus.

There’s no indication that China’s approach will change in the coming months. In fact, when one of its top scientists suggested relaxing the zero-Covid policy in 2022, he was ridiculed. Economically, China can afford to keep its borders closed; exports and foreign investment are doing just fine. And politically, it may actually be in China’s interest to stay closed: With the Beijing Winter Olympics coming up in February, and followed by the session of its rubber-stamp parliament and, later, party congress, the government may not be keen to let in foreigners who might critique its policies, especially its human rights abuses.

So I predict that China will not reopen its borders in the first half of the year. Specifically, I mean that China will not allow in foreigners for nonessential purposes like tourism. —Sigal Samuel

Chinese GDP will continue to grow for the first three quarters of the year (95 percent)

Per World Bank data, the last year that Chinese GDP fell was 1976, when Mao Zedong died and the Gang of Four was deposed. The 2008 global financial crisis and the pandemic in 2020 (originating in China) couldn’t stop the country’s economy from growing. I’m therefore very confident that Chinese GDP in the first three quarters of 2022 (which are the quarters we’ll consider for this prediction) will grow. —DM

Covid-19

20 percent of US children between 6 months and 5 years old will have received at least one Covid vaccine by year’s end (65 percent)

Vaccine makers are busy testing the safety and efficacy of their shots in children under 5. Pfizer/BioNTech is furthest along, with Phase 2/3 trials currently running that may yield initial data within the next month. Of course, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will still need to issue an approval before shots can go into arms, but Pfizer/BioNTech is already saying it expects to deliver the doses by April 2022.

Dr. Anthony Fauci seems to think a spring vaccination rollout is doable. “Hopefully within a reasonably short period of time, likely the beginning of next year in 2022, in the first quarter of 2022, it will be available to them,” he said, referring to kids under 5.

That said, according to polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 30 percent of parents with kids under 5 say they will “definitely not” vaccinate the kids. As of this writing, only about 17 percent of kids aged 5-11 have gotten at least one dose. When it comes to even younger kids, the hesitation may be more pronounced as some parents choose to “wait and see” about side effects; polling suggests that parents become more hesitant about getting their kids the Covid vaccine the younger the children are. So, although I think there’s a decent chance that 20 percent of kids between 6 months and 5 years old will have gotten at least one shot if we give the “wait and see” crowd until the end of 2022, I’m not going to bet on a higher percentage. —SS

The WHO will designate another variant of concern by year’s end (75 percent)

I really hope I’m wrong on this one. But I fear a new variant of concern will appear on the WHO’s list, for a simple reason: Between rich countries hoarding doses and some populations showing hesitancy to get immunized, we’re not vaccinating the globe fast enough to starve the virus of opportunities to mutate into something new and serious. In low-income countries, only 7.3 percent of people have received at least one dose.

Within the past year, five variants of concern have made it onto the WHO’s list. I don’t have high hopes that we’ll go all of 2022 without adding at least one more to that sad litany. —SS

12 billion shots will be given out against Covid-19 globally by November 2022 … (80 percent)

The global vaccine rollout has not been as good as was hoped for, or as good as it needs to be to prevent the emergence of new variants. But compared to what the world was capable of even a few decades ago, it has been pretty impressive. It is about one year since the first countries issued approval for vaccines developed against Covid-19, and already more than 8.5 billion doses have been administered. If that rate continued into next year, the world would easily hit 12 billion shots given out, or enough for every person over 20 to get two shots.

Fadel Itani/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Countries probably won’t maintain that rate or even close to it, because people easy to reach for vaccination have largely already been reached, and the remaining vaccination efforts are going to have to involve delivery in poor and rural areas and overcoming vaccine hesitancy. But I still expect the world to hit this milestone, probably sometime in the summer.

Of course, those 12 billion shots will still be nowhere near evenly distributed; many rich countries are now encouraging boosters and vaccinating children, and there are still some parts of the world where vaccination rates are very low. —KP

… but at least one country will have less than 10 percent of people vaccinated with two shots by November 2022 — (70 percent)

For vaccination to help protect the world against the emergence of future variants, there can’t be huge gaps in vaccination coverage. Unfortunately, that’s probably exactly what we’re going to get. In many areas, a lot of people are reluctant to get vaccinated; in others, access to vaccines has been severely limited, and changing that will require funding and dedicated effort that rich countries have been unwilling to extend.

In many parts of the world, health care clinics are viewed as an expensive option for emergencies, not as resources for preventive care; they’re also thought of as primarily serving pregnant people and young children. That makes it hard to get older people at highest risk from Covid-19 vaccinated. Underresourced vaccination campaigns won’t succeed, and sufficient resources means not just access to enough physical vaccines but also the capacity to get them to people. I’d love to see this happen in 2022, but unfortunately I don’t expect to see it everywhere it’s needed. —KP

Science and technology

A psychedelic drug will be decriminalized or legalized in at least one new US state (75 percent)

Psychedelics have been undergoing a renaissance over the past few years as the evidence mounts that they have potential to help treat mental health conditions like depression and PTSD. A movement to decriminalize or legalize such drugs is gaining traction. In 2020, Oregon voters elected to legalize psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, in supervised therapeutic settings (the state also decriminalized all drugs). In Washington, DC, voters effectively decriminalized psychedelic plants. A handful of US cities, including Detroit and Denver, have decriminalized psilocybin.

As momentum continues to build, I think there’s a solid chance we’ll see a psychedelic drug decriminalized or legalized in at least one more US state. I’ll be keeping my eyes on California, which will put decriminalization of a wide class of psychedelics to a vote in a 2022 ballot measure. —SS

AI will discover a new drug — or an old drug fit for new purposes — that’s promising enough for clinical trials (85 percent)

For years, there’s been a ton of hype about AI’s potential to transform drug discovery. We’re finally starting to see the hype turn into reality. In 2020, AI researchers based at MIT found a new type of antibiotics, and a British startup called Exscientia said its new pill for OCD would be the first AI-designed drug to be clinically tested on humans. In 2021, Exscientia followed that up with two more drugs, one for patients with tumors and another for Alzheimer’s disease psychosis.

Based on the track record of the past two years, I predict that another such discovery will happen in 2022, yielding a drug that’s promising enough to merit a clinical trial. This could be either a totally new compound or an existing drug that AI has found can be repurposed for a new use. One big new player to watch in this arena is Isomorphic Labs, just launched by Alphabet to discover new drugs using DeepMind’s AI. (Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, will also serve as Isomorphic’s CEO.) —SS

US government will not renew the ban on funding gain-of- function research (60 percent)

In 2014, after a series of disastrous lab accidents made it clear that lab procedures weren’t adequate to prevent the release of deadly pathogens, the US government temporarily paused funding for “gain of function” research in diseases that could affect humans and make viruses more deadly or transmissible.

To my mind, this was an incredibly sensible call by the Obama administration. Biology research is valuable, and we should as a society invest more in it, but lab research that involves engineering what could effectively function as deadly weapons isn’t acceptable and shouldn’t be funded. Researchers engaged in gain-of- function work pushed back on the ban, and in 2017 it was reversed — the US is now funding such experiments again.

This is outrageous, and if anything could prompt the government to revisit it, you’d think it’d be the millions of deaths from a new pandemic over the past two years. But I haven’t yet seen any moves by the US government to put this policy back in place. I sincerely hope that changes in 2022. —KP

Environment

The Biden administration will set the social cost of carbon at $100 per ton or more (70 percent)

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a measure, in dollars, of how much economic damage results from emitting 1 ton of carbon dioxide. SCC is an important measure because it guides policymaking — and there’s good reason to think we’ve been radically underestimating it. Although the Obama administration had set the SCC at $51 per ton, the Trump administration put it as low as $1. In early 2021, the Biden administration restored it to $51 as an interim move, promising to study the matter in depth and release its final determination in early 2022.

Recent findings indicate that the official social cost of carbon should be substantially increased. One study found that when factoring in projected heat-related deaths — the “mortality cost of carbon” — the SCC jumps to a whopping $258 per ton. The Biden administration probably won’t go that far, but it really should go at least as high as $100, economists say. Two top experts on SCC — Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University and Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics — have said around $100 would be appropriate. Other experts, not to mention New York state, have decided $125 is a better estimate. Taking all this into consideration, I think it’s reasonable to predict that Biden will go with at least $100. —SS

2022 will be warmer than 2021 (80 percent)

One of the more obvious — yet sometimes overlooked — consequences of climate change is that almost every year is warmer than the last, meaning experiencing the warmest year in recorded history is now routine. This means that a recurring prediction here at Future Perfect is this gloomy one: that it is 80 percent likely that each year will be warmer than the last. This is based on looking at the last 25 years of atmospheric temperature data: On average, in four out of five years, this prediction would be right. —KP

Culture

Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast will win Best Picture (55 percent)

This is not a very brave prediction; bet365, BetMGM, and Betfair all give Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical film about his childhood in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the edge to win Best Picture. All of those betting sites give it odds of roughly 25 percent, so I’m going out on a bit of a limb by giving it higher odds than the field, but I think that’s justified.

The Oscars like giving late-career awards to directors they forgot to honor earlier, even if the awarded films are inferior to their best. (Think Martin Scorsese for The Departed rather than Taxi Driver or Goodfellas, or Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water and not Pan’s Labyrinth). Branagh, whose reputation rests on his Shakespeare adaptations in the 1980s and ’90s, fits the bill. Repeat wins for directors are rare, which is bad news for del Toro’s Nightmare Alley and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. The best competition I can see are Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, but both of those directors are, to be frank, too good to win Oscars. Branagh is in the midcult sweet spot. —DM

Norway will win the most medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics (60 percent)

Similar to my Oscar prediction, here I’m relying on the odds of experts. Gracenote, a division of Nielsen, predicts the Olympics by looking at recent results in non-Olympic competitions in various events. It gives Norway a strong edge in Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, with 45 medals to the Russian Olympic Committee’s 33. Norway also came in first in Pyeongchang in 2018, and while the Russians are formidable opposition (they came first on their home turf in Sochi in 2014), the fact that they’re still not allowed to compete as the nation of Russia, due to doping scandals, holds them back. They underperformed in 2018, and I see them coming up short again this time. —DM

• One Good Thing: The impish joy of the board game Sushi Go Party! -

  

This holiday season, Sushi Go Party! may be the best solution to big gatherings or cabin fever.

Many board games are best when there are just four people at the table. While the instructions might say a game can be played by two people or six people, something is often lost when the game scales up or down.

Great games explicitly designed for two or three players are tricky to find, but it’s possible to do if you know what you’re looking for. Great games for five or six are harder still. And if you want to go above six, forget about it. At that point, you’re in the territory of things like Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, where the fun is less in strategy and more in trying to make everybody at the table laugh.

Far be it from me to say that making all of your friends and relatives laugh is a bad goal, but I’m always on the lookout for a game that’s perfect to play with a group as large or as small as you want. For those occasions, I always turn to Sushi Go Party! The game offers just enough strategy and just enough pure luck that it will be fun for almost anyone, no matter their play style, and it’s maybe the only game I’ve consistently found to be as fun for any group size. (I recommend Party because it features special rules for small or large groups. The original Sushi Go! is best with a group of four.)

At its heart, Sushi Go Party! is a bit like gin rummy. You are trying to form combinations out of a hand of cards to score more points than the other players at the table. Some combinations are easier to attain than others, but the number of points you’ll get for those trickier combinations is much higher as well. The cards all have adorable drawings of various items on the menu at a sushi restaurant, though you might not want to think too much about, say, your sashimi having googly eyes and a winning smile the next time you order sushi.

    <img alt="A shot of the various cards and other pieces of the game Sushi Go Party! " src="https://cdn.vox-

What makes the game unique, however, is that your hand is never the same hand. After you select a card and play it on the table in front of you, where everyone can see it, you pass the hand clockwise to the person next to you, then take the hand of the person on the other side. The idea is to replicate the sushi traveling around on a revolving path, like on a conveyer belt. If you don’t grab the tempura you want right now, someone else might grab it as it goes around the circle, especially if they see that you want it and that it’s vital to your point-scoring strategy.

Since the number of cards in each hand is fixed and since everybody is playing one card per turn, the number dwindles the longer the round goes on. (There are three rounds in total in a game.) So if your friend plays that nigiri card you let go a couple of turns ago in the hope it might find its way back to you, you’d better have a backup strategy for scoring points. It’s just the right combination of cute and cutthroat, so you can have fun competing with friends, but things will never get too harried.

Notably, Sushi Go Party! offers a wide variety of different kinds of play. Once you’ve got the basic rules down, the game’s instructions provide a variety of different setups for many potential experiences. One setup is ideal for just two players, and another works best with seven or eight. One is great for those who want to strategize, and another is great for those who want to score lots and lots of points.

This sheer number of potential setups is what takes the game from something enjoyable to one that I bring to almost every gathering I go to. It plays just as well if it’s just my wife and me as it does if her entire family will be joining us. Sushi Go Party! has grown beyond its humble roots as a board game mostly known to hobbyists to a place where you can purchase it in most major big-box stores. Most of the time, when a game pulls off that journey, that’s because it’s a really well-designed game and because it does something few other games out there can.

Sushi Go Party! is, yes, a very well-designed game (I’ve probably played it several dozen times, and I still enjoy it). But it’s also one of the single best games out there to break out at almost any occasion, because no matter your group, there will be a way to find a variation of this game that will fit.

Also, the little anthropomorphic sushi drawings are just unbearably cute. I can’t get enough of them.

Sushi Go Party! is available on Amazon. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Beating India in T20 World Cup best moment of 2021 for Pak team: Babar Azam - Win lifted the profile of the team and gave the players enormous confidence, says Pakistan skipper

• England players should not miss international duty to play in IPL: Atherton - Atherton felt Ben Stokes is a “viable alternative” to replace Joe Root as skipper for the five-day format

• Bumrah’s elevation as ‘stop-gap’ ODI deputy ahead of Pant, Iyer is selectors’ way of “avoiding clutter” - Bumrah elevation as vice-captain is a message to both Pant and Iyer to show supreme all-format consistency

• Raducanu pulls out of Australian Open warm-up event in Melbourne - The 19-year-old was scheduled to headline one of the two women’s WTA 250 warm-up tournaments taking place at Melbourne Park — dubbed the ‘Melbourne Summer Set’ — from January 4-9

• NZ vs Bangladesh | Conway century guides New Zealand to 258-5 on day 1 - Conway navigated the difficult first hour, then flourished, reaching his century after tea from 186 balls

From The Hindu: National News

• Scarce funding, unchanged style behind Mayawati’s conspicuous absence - BSP chief says she ‘does not want to change’ her party’s ways of working and campaigning

• CITU to host CPSU coordination meeting in Vizag on January 2 - Meet holds significance as protest is being organised against sale of steel plant

• Amit Shah expresses gratitude to PM for releasing ₹ 20,900 crore to farmers - Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday expressed his gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for transferring ₹ 20,900 crore to 10 crore farmers

• Naxals on back boot, large part of Bastar free of their menace: Chhattisgarh CM - Bhupesh Baghel said his government has changed Chhattisgarh’s image as an insurgency-affected State

• List of major stampedes at temples, other religious gatherings in India - A list of some such major tragedies in India after 2000.

From BBC: Europe

• Covid-19: WHO chief optimistic disease will be beaten in 2022 - The organisation ends the year on a positive note but warns about “nationalism and vaccine hoarding”.

• French ban on plastic packaging for fruit and vegetables begins - Officials hope the law will prevent a billion items of single use plastics every year.

• Ukraine tensions: Putin tells Biden new sanctions could rupture ties - The US and Russian presidents spoke by phone for almost an hour amid rising tensions over Ukraine.

• Covid: France suspends transit ban for UK nationals during Christmas period - EU-based Brits trying to get home will be allowed to cross France during the Christmas period.

• Covid: Woman isolates in toilet for five hours after positive mid-flight test - A US teacher says she spent five hours in the toilet after testing positive for Covid-19.

From Ars Technica

• To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us - NuqneH! Saluton! A linguistic anthropologist studies those who invent new tongues. - link

• Physicists captured, quantified the sound of champagne’s effervescence - The production of the sound coincides with the rupture of the bubble at liquid surface. - link

• Attempt to compare different types of intelligence falls a bit short - Bots and Beasts gets at what makes for intelligence, but SciFi may have done it better. - link

• How leaded fuel was sold for 100 years, despite knowing its health risks - It’s been 100 years since leaded fuel was introduced, a purely profit-driven move. - link

• TV Technica 2021: Our favorite shows and binges helped us combat pandemic fatigue - From dark comedies to classic sci-fi adaptations, here’s what we loved in 2021. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• What does Bill Clinton say to Hillary after having sex? -

  “I’ll be home in 15 minutes.”

  submitted by /u/SyllabubSecret7727
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• There was an old professor who started every class with a vulgar joke. -

  After one particularly nasty example, the women in the class decided to walk out the next time he started.

  The professor got wind of this plot, so the next morning he walked in and said, “Good morning, class. Did you hear the one about the shortage of whores in Newfound Land?”

  With that, all the women stood up and headed for the door.

  “Wait, ladies,” called the professor, “The boat doesn’t leave until tomorrow!”

  submitted by /u/RudraTheDestroyer
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• “Good morning Sir, what’s your name?” “M…M…M…Michael…” -

  “Oh, i see, you are a stammerer, i am sorry for that!”

  “Well no, actually my father was… but the registry office guy was a son of a bitch”

  submitted by /u/nikan69
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• Betty White Has Passed Away… -

  The Queen and Keith Richards move on to the Finals

  submitted by /u/JohnJackField
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• An American, An Indian, And A Russian Meet The Devil -

  An American, an Indian, and a Russian end up in Hell and plead to the Devil that they don’t belong here. The Devil, bored, makes them an offer: “I will strike you 3 times with my whip, and if you survive, I’ll let you go. You can use anything you want as a shield”.

  The American goes first. He builds a high-tech shield from depleted uranium and composites, and hides behind it. The Devil strikes once - the shield cracks; twice - the shield falls apart; thrice - the American is no more.

  Next goes the Indian. He puts himself in some advanced Yoga position and goes into deep hibernation. The Devil strikes once - nothing; twice - the Indian shivers a bit; thrice - the Indian grunts, but lives. The Devil is amazed and tells him he’s free to go.

  The Indian asks, “May I stay and watch? In all jokes the Russians somehow come out on top. I want to see how he will do it this time”.

  The Devil nods and turns to the Russian: “So, what will you use as a shield?”

  The Russian replies, “The Indian, of course”.

  submitted by /u/ClassroomTotal4025
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