Disclaimer: All names, characters and incidents mentioned in this column, however believable, are entirely satirical. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, organisations and products is intended or should be inferred.
More spontaneous than your anxiety but more fragile than your ego, New Year’s resolutions come in all shapes and sizes of hypocrisy. It is far more advisable then to start a fresh 12 months with regrets, certain that this will be one more year where you fail to find your ideal alarm, email signature and weight. Nobody, though, has more regrets to kick off 2025 than Joe Biden, whose New Year’s revelation was to discover that Hunter Biden had voted Republican.
Meanwhile, The Economist, the world’s most eloquently wrong forecaster, previews 2025 in five key events — Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un to bond over French fries, Taylor Swift to perform in Syria to rebuild its economy, Emmanuel Macron to move inside the Notre-Dame, Andrew Tate to interview Jordan Peterson (or vice versa), and Greta Thunberg to start a PhD and a podcast.
Elsewhere, Israel has paused its pounding of Gaza for a few days to give some time to its influencer infantry to make New Year reels.
Wondering what else happened as your optimism for 2025 lasted shorter than your hangover? Here’s presenting the top stories from the week that should have been.
December 30
“Even after leaving the White House, Carter taught us all how to fail upwards,” mentions the collective tribute by six former British Prime Ministers Getty Images
- Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak jointly pen a 5,000-word tribute (with Johnson contributing 80 per cent of the word count) to Jimmy Carter, crediting him “for blazing a trail and showing us that the highest office in the land is nothing but the stepping stone to identifying one’s true purpose in life”.
- Having read 154 obituaries on India’s most educated leader, the Propaganda Management Office (PMO) commissions eight volumes on economics and political theory that explain the academic rigour behind the epiphanies of India’s Prime Thinker.
December 31
“Given how much of the German economy relies on the US, Americans should get to vote in German elections,” claims Elon Musk Getty Images
- Bored of interfering in US politics, Elon Musk vows to provide free verification on X to all those who vote for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) during the upcoming German elections.
- With Russian gas no longer flowing into European homes, support for Ukraine plummets among Gen Z activists forced to cancel cosplay parties.
January 1
“I have no complaints with Justin Baldoni the director; my issues are solely with Justin Baldoni the actor,” clarifies Blake Lively Getty Images
- Blake Lively signs on as the female lead for Justin Baldoni’s next film, It Doesn’t End with Us, on the condition that Lively and Baldoni shoot their scenes with each other using body doubles.
- Following eight years of non-stop negotiations, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt formalise their divorce settlement, having finally arrived at a consensus on how to share their most prized asset — their PR manager.
January 2
Magnus Carlsen is looking forward to turning up for FIDE contests in his Real Madrid kit Getty Images
- Magnus Carlsen, who is convinced that trousers promote tyranny, has reached an agreement with FIDE that will let him play fantasy football whenever his chess matches “relapse into one-sided boredom”.
- In a significant blow to Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, BCCI slashes the funding of their respective hype armies in half, moving much of the money to assemble a troll team to downplay Sunil Gavaskar.
January 3
“Even I stopped whistling at my own entry after watching ‘Baby John’ for the 38th time,” admits Varun Dhawan Getty Images
- Varun Dhawan spends more time watching Baby John than he spent shooting for it, before reflecting in an Instagram post: “I’m sorry to all the Dhawanites I let down with this film. I’ve realised that I’m not yet one-dimensional enough as an actor to be a box office superstar.”
- For the fourth year in succession, West Bengal finishes bottom of the Centre’s good governance index for having the lowest cows-to-cafes ratio among all Indian states.