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As long as people have been able to dress in color, we’ve been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow’s worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color.The press created a minor moral panic (“un scandale optique,” a French journal called it), which it then attempted to solve. An 1859 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read American women’s magazine of the antebellum era, promised to help “ill-dressed and gaudy-looking women” by invoking a prominent color theorist, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and his ideas about which colors were most “becoming” on various (presumably white) women. Chevreul advocated “delicate green” for those with fair skin “deficient in rose”; yellow for brunettes; and “lustreless white” for those with a “fresh complexion,” whatever that means.Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but had the platform been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it. There, and elsewhere on the social web, millions of people are still trying to figure out which shades look best on them. They are doing it via seasonal-color analysis, a quasi-scientific, quasi-philosophical discipline that holds that we all have a set of colors that naturally suit us, and a set that do not—that wash us out, make us look ruddy or green, emphasize our flaws, and minimize our beauty.According to this method, everyone belongs to a “season,” and a “subseason,” determined by the coloring of their skin and features. Bright winters, for example, tend to have sparkling eyes and dark hair and look great in jewel tones; true autumns are defined by their golden undertones and should wear earthy colors.The theory first became popular in the U.S. in the 1980s, only to resurface in South Korea and then surge on the English-speaking internet over the past few years. Today, Reddit’s seasonal-color-analysis community has 167,000 members, putting it in the site’s top 1 percent. Search seasonal-color analysis on Instagram, TikTok, or Pinterest, and you will find seemingly endless results: posts that “type” celebrities such as Mindy Kaling (a dark winter) and Sabrina Carpenter (a light summer); offer advice for people who are autumns but wish they were winters; and present the ideal jewelry, eye-shadow palettes, prom dresses, Halloween costumes, and just about every other item of clothing imaginable for each color season. Seasonal-color consultants, credentialed and otherwise, are racking up hundreds of thousands of followers and charging hundreds of dollars for in-person sessions.[Read: How color shapes our lives]The savviest among them film their sessions for social media. In a typical video, a client sits, makeupless, facing the camera, an adorable white bonnet covering her hair. A color consultant drapes her in a succession of colored fabrics, and evaluates each for its ability to make her complexion pop. In one TikTok, a young woman with high cheekbones and gray eyes is identified as a summer and shown a series of shades that make her look, as the color consultant Tatum Schwerin says approvingly, “like a baby doll.” (The difference was, to my eyes, noticeable but underwhelming. The video has more than 32 million views.) In another video, a young woman describes her experience flying to South Korea for color analysis, the results of which were, she says, “shocking”—vivid spring.This seasons-based approach traces back to Carole Jackson’s 1980 book, Color Me Beautiful. In it, Jackson promised that “color is magic” and asserted that “women—and men—have discovered its power to make the world regard them with awe.” She used seasons to describe her readers:For just as nature has divided herself into four distinct seasons, Autumn, Spring, Winter, and Summer, each with its unique and harmonious colors, your genes have given you a type of coloring that is most complemented by one of these seasonal palettes.(Like Chevreul, Jackson was writing primarily with white readers in mind.)The book was a sensation. It spent seven years on the New York Times best-seller list and spawned what we now might call a lifestyle brand: Jackson published a sequel specifically for men, and began licensing the Color Me Beautiful system and name to other consultants. Across the country, people would congregate to get their colors done at events described by the Times as “halfway between a Tupperware party and group therapy.” Women kept color swatches in their pocketbook, in case of a shopping emergency. Reader’s Digest subsidized the cost of consultations for employees, under a benefits policy that covered self-improvement.More than four decades later, Color Me Beautiful still exists, and still sells certification for consultants, though it has added AI color analysis to its suite of products. And its wisdom has escaped onto social media, where teenagers and 20-somethings are discovering it. The modern version of color analysis is, like so many modern versions of so many things, both more sophisticated—color analysis now acknowledges the existence of a wide range of skin tones—and more complicated. Jackson’s four seasons have been cleaved into 12 and sometimes 16 subseasons, depending on one’s philosophy. The nuances are detailed in long blog posts filled with pictures of color wheels and terms such as chroma.The appeal to contemporary audiences is obvious. First of all, draping videos are eminently watchable, in the same way a cooking video is: simple process, observable result. But the concept also fills, I think, a genuine need brought on by the collision of technology and the fashion and beauty industries. Today’s young women are probably photographed more than any other cohort in history—but they live on the internet, which is a firehose of quick-moving trends, targeted advertising, cheap fashion, conflicting advice, and color-correcting software. It has never been more important to know what looks good on you, and never have there been more sources of information to sort through in order to find out.Much like astrology memes and internet quizzes—two of the most enduring online products of the past decade—color analysis is diverting and narcissistic, and it promises an immutable, essential self-knowledge that can be put into action. It offers a small sense of belonging in a tribal society (online, you can find groups for people who identify with each of the subseasons) and guarantees simplicity in a complex world.The fashion and beauty industries seem to be embracing a kind of faux empiricism these days. A person’s hair can be classified into one of 12 types, based on texture, density, and thickness. If a decade ago your average bottle of skin goo advertised itself using vague terms such as hydrating, today’s skin-care products foreground their formulas and invite customers to “cosplay as cosmetic chemists,” as the beauty reporter Jessica DeFino has written. Canny seasonal-color-analysis influencers play into this; some even wear lab coats in their videos. Jenny Mahoney opened a seasonal-color consulting firm in New York in 2023 and has already expanded to Orange County, California, and the Washington, D.C., area. The first thing she told me about color analysis is that it’s “logical, it is systematic, and it’s based on science.”Sure, sort of. Color theory really is a science, in that it is an organized approach to observing the natural world. Color can be measured, categorized, and studied; Chevreul was onto something when he proposed that the eye reacts in specific and sometimes surprising ways to certain color combinations. The color-consultation industry, though, is “scientific” in the way the wellness industry is—some of its principles may be based in truth, but the marketplace that has sprung up around them is trading in something else. Often, it feels less like a solution than part of the problem: more vocabulary, more rules, more ways to be led astray, more reasons not to trust your own eyes. Winter is a cool-toned season, but so is summer—in defiance, perhaps, of what you might think the word cool means. Yellow like a marigold is warm, but yellow like a daffodil is cool, or at least suitable for people who are cool seasons. According to one website, if you are a soft autumn, like Tyra Banks, you should wear “lots of nuts, rose and wheat colours,” and if you are a true spring, like Blake Lively, you should dress in shades “reminiscent of colouring pencils.”Online, people talk about avoiding colors they love, or throwing away favorite articles of clothing. One Reddit user, who said she’d spent 26 years and almost $1,000 on color analysis, recently posted that she was close to quitting the enterprise altogether. She had, over the years, been identified as several different types and had replaced all her clothes, jewelry, and makeup each time, but “I’ve never felt 100% comfortable in any of them,” she wrote. It’s enough to drive a person a little crazy.I know this because seasonal-color analysis drove me a little crazy. Though I hate being told what to do, I am always searching for ways to look hot with little sustained effort. But I can’t seem to find myself in any of the seasons. My hair could fairly be described as blond, red, or brown, depending on the light and the time of year, and because of a benign genetic abnormality, my left eye is the muddy color of a New England pond, while my right is a bright, cool blue. I have read tens of thousands of words about what this might mean, and paid for two different color-analysis apps. They declared me, variously, a soft autumn, a warm autumn, a cool winter, a bright spring, and a soft summer, which means black is either one of my power colors or the express lane to looking pallid, maybe even very ill. And so I walk this Earth knowing that every day is another wasted opportunity to make my features pop. I sleep okay, most of the time.*Lead-image sources: Plume Creative / Getty; Belterz / Getty; Reading Room 2020 / Alamy; Historic Illustrations / AlamyThis article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “What Not to Wear.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Richard Tikey builds coke-oven doors for U.S. Steel. He’s a union guy, through and through: He’s been a union member for 26 years, and is now the vice president of his local, the United Steelworkers 1557 in Clairton, Pennsylvania. He has spent much of his adult life voting for Democrats.Kamala Harris and Joe Biden lobbied hard for votes like Tikey’s. The Biden administration increased tariffs on foreign steel and spent hundreds of billions on heavy infrastructure. It supported union drives, stocked the National Labor Relations Board with worker-friendly lawyers, banned noncompete clauses, expanded eligibility for overtime, cracked down on union busting, and extended protections for civil servants. Biden was the first president in history to walk a picket line.In contrast, Donald Trump has supported “right to work” laws, attempted to gut federal worker protections, and named union busters to lead the Department of Labor and the NLRB. He has also supported firing workers on strike, stiffed contractors for his campaigns and businesses, described American wages as “too high,” and bragged that he denied his own workers overtime pay.Even so, weeks before the election, Tikey appeared in a lime-green hard hat and a Steelworkers for Trump T-shirt, giving a thumbs-up for cameras alongside the once and future president. “Why would we support Democrats?” Tikey told me this month. “Every time we have a Republican in office, things are better.”Millions of other union members feel the same way. Exit polls indicate that nearly half of union households voted Republican in 2024, up from 43 percent in 2016 and 37 percent in 2000. Other polling shows that Trump commanded a 26-point lead among white voters without a college degree in union homes, up nine points since 2020. Conversely, Democratic support dropped 35 percentage points among Latino voters in union households, and also waned among Black union voters.These trends are part of a long, slow tectonic electoral realignment. This century, the country has become less polarized in income terms, with Democrats gaining among coastal elites and Republicans among the working class. In the past decade, it has also become less racially polarized, with Black, Asian, and Latino voters shifting red. And education has become a much stronger predictor of a person’s partisanship. Democrats now dominate among the college-educated, and Republicans dominate among white people without a degree.The Republican coalition has become more diverse, while the Democrats have seen their working-class base—the working-class base that delivered them election after election in the 20th century—walk away. What would it take to get voters like Tikey to come back?First, Democrats need to understand how they lost them. The commonly told story is an economic one, which I have heard from union leaders, the Bernie left, and blue-collar voters who have started voting Republican. The Democrats have more liberal economic policies than the GOP: They support higher taxes on the wealthy and more progressive spending. But this is not the same thing as being pro-worker. And the party has shed voters as it has become more corporatist, pro-globalization, and cosmopolitan.A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed NAFTA, which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the heartland and suppressed wages. A Democratic president, Barack Obama, failed to pass “card check,” which would have made forming unions radically easier. He also negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which unions argued would send American jobs overseas. More broadly, Democrats failed to prevent the collapse of the unionized workforce, two decades of stagnation in middle-income wages, and the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt. Their answer was to “compensate the losers,” rather than avoid policies that generated losers to begin with. This cost them votes, as well as credibility among many working-class voters.“Beginning with Jimmy Carter, there was an increasing effort to see unions and labor as a special interest, rather than a foundational part of the party,” Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “There hasn’t been a political party in this country with working people at the table for decades. This is the bed the Democrats made for themselves, and it obviously has not paid off in the way they anticipated.”At the same time, particularly in the past decade, Republicans have become more economically populist. The mainstream of the party now promotes restricting trade and running enormous deficits, even during economic expansions. They may threaten to make huge cuts to popular social programs, but rarely actually do so. The Affordable Care Act lives on; Medicare and Social Security remain untouched. Trump signed a stimulus bill twice as large as Obama’s.Neither party delivered what it promised, economy-wise. It cost the Democrats and helped the GOP.Political scientists and pollsters layer a cultural story onto this economic story. Since the 1970s, academics have noted that as societies have become wealthier, their voters have tended to care less about bread-and-butter financial issues and life-and-death defense ones. They begin voting on topics such as the environment, immigration, gender equity, and civil rights. (Academics call this “postmaterialism.”) People can “choose parties on the basis of their overall social and cultural views,” Matthew Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, told me.Voters on both the right and the left have become postmaterial. The college-educated have aligned with the Democrats, attracted by the party’s views on climate change and racial equality. Non-college-educated voters have shifted toward the Republicans on the basis of immigration, abortion, and race. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and strategist, told me that Trump’s coalition might have been slightly lower-income than Harris’s during this election. If so, it would likely be the first time the Republican coalition was less wealthy than the Democratic coalition in decades. “You have the party of the working class versus the professional class,” he said, but it’s “cultural issues that are driving these changes.”The greater emphasis on cultural issues has posed problems for both parties in their appeals to the American center, even as it has attracted votes too. In 2022, voters turned away from the GOP after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. (Some pollsters expected the same in 2024, but other issues predominated.) In the past three elections, the left’s position on immigration has alienated it from Latino voters it was desperately trying to hang on to. As my colleague Rogé Karma writes, these voters didn’t care about immigration as much as they cared about kitchen-table economics, and many had less liberal opinions about the border than professional Democrats.The Democrats’ positions have proved the more alienating ones for the small-c conservative American public—something the party has been slow to acknowledge. “The Democratic Party is incredibly well educated and has incredibly liberal views on social issues, relative to the population as a whole,” Grossmann noted. “It is just not very easy to change that.”For all that cultural issues help explain how Democrats lost the working class over the past two decades, the economy nevertheless seems to have been the decisive factor in Trump’s 2024 victory.In polls, voters consistently named high prices as their top concern. They consistently said they trusted Trump to do better on the issue of inflation. Democrats pointed to the good headline numbers in terms of GDP growth, inequality, jobs, and wages, as well as the inflation-rate decline since 2022. Voters felt like the Democrats were ignoring or gaslighting them. Harris did not criticize the Biden administration for its role in stoking inflation. This cost her votes and perhaps the election, a pattern that has played out for incumbent parties around the world.The Biden administration also fumbled in making the case for its policies to middle-income voters. Biden and Harris passed a tremendous amount of legislation but struggled to distill the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and thousands of finicky provisions into tangible policy deliverables that the public could grasp. “While voters across party lines strongly supported Biden’s populist economic policies, many were not aware that his administration had enacted them,” an election postmortem by the left-of-center polling group Data for Progress found.When I talked with voters during the campaign, I would often ask them what they thought Harris and Trump would do once in office. People tended to give specific answers for Trump, whether they themselves were a Democrat or a Republican. He’d enact tariffs, close the border, fire civil servants, and deport undocumented criminals. Even motivated Democrats, I found, struggled to name Harris’s top priorities. Someone might respond with 10 answers or sometimes none.The candidates the Democrats ran and the strategies their campaigns deployed were less-than-ideal too. Biden’s age and Harris’s lack of authentic connection with voters, something that’s hard to measure but not hard to see, were obstacles to victory. The Democrats’ character-based vilification of Trump failed to connect for many voters who liked the guy and supported his policies. “People underestimated the appeal of Trump’s message to nonwhite working-class audiences,” Ruffini told me. “They didn’t think it could cross over.”History suggests that things will get easier for Democrats, in some ways. If past trends hold, the party will pick up five or more points in the midterms without doing anything. The Republicans will start passing policies and instantly become less popular in the eyes of voters, left and right. And in the next presidential campaign, the Democrats will benefit from being able to run unencumbered by incumbency, against Trumpism, if not Trump himself.Still, pollsters and political scientists told me, the party needs to change. The “Brahmin left”—meaning the educated elite that now makes up the Democratic Party’s base—is not a big enough bloc to defeat Republicans going forward. Democrats have to get back at least some members of the middle class, the working poor, and the unions.In terms of kitchen-table policies, well, the Democrats need to have some. Just a few. Big ones. Popular ones that are easy to understand. A bill that caps the price of all prescription drugs at $25 a month, say, rather than a 19-point policy white paper.The content of such proposals matters too. The Brahmin left tends to be more supportive of redistribution than the working class, which tends to prefer something that economists call “predistribution”: high minimum wages rather than welfare payments, pro-union policies rather than refundable tax credits, antitrust measures rather than food stamps. Moderate families also give higher marks to social spending that feels like infrastructure: universal pre-K, guaranteed jobs programs, and public internet.The cultural drift of the party will be harder to change, political analysts told me. Tacking to the center would mean repudiating activists on immigration, the environment, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and abortion—the same activists who have marched in the streets, raised money, and knocked on doors for Democrats, and have become its most loyal voters. It would mean ignoring many of Washington’s most powerful nonprofits and interest groups. “I’m a progressive,” Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, told me. “I’m not even sure it would work, because the reputation of the party is so set in.”Indeed, Harris brought up that she was a gun owner and ran on her record as a prosecutor. She did not emphasize trans-rights issues, nor did she use the term Latinx in speeches. What did her relative centrism get her?Still, pollsters noted that some politicians have had success with their cultural appeals to more conservative voters: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington. It might not take much more than loudly rejecting some far-left positions, Ruffini told me. “You have to have someone come out and say: ‘Here’s what I’m for and I’m against. And I don’t like some of this cultural stuff.’ Create a clear moment of contrast and differentiation.”I asked Tikey which issues drew him to the Republicans. He made more money under Republicans, he told me (though union data show that workers got large profit-sharing payments under Biden). He thought Trump would do better on inflation, and he appreciated the GOP’s stance on abortion, gender, and guns. Plus, he said, “I don’t understand why unions endorse Democrats when they want to shut down” plants like the one he works in. He has a point. Democrats are not vowing to save coal plants, for instance. They’re promising to compensate the losers.In the future, could a more centrist Democrat, in cultural and economic terms, win Tikey over? “The Democratic Party has changed,” he told me. It just isn’t the party that he and many of his neighbors supported back in the 1990s. “I don’t think so,” he said.

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Making predictions is a tricky business, and here at Future Perfect, we don’t pretend to have a crystal ball. But we do think there’s real epistemic value in putting our forecasts out there and — just as importantly — owning up to how they turned out. (Something that happens too rarely in the media, as we learned after November’s election.) Looking back at our predictions for 2024, we had a wild ride trying to anticipate a year that threw more than a few curveballs our way. For 2024, we made 24 predictions in total, covering everything from who would win the White House to whether Elon Musk could actually get those Cybertrucks on the road. When the dust settled, we got 14 right and 10 wrong — batting .583. That’s Shohei Ohtani on a hot streak, though down somewhat from our 2023 results. But I did say it was a topsy-turvy year. Some calls were right on the money, though. We correctly saw Trump’s comeback and the GOP taking back the Senate. We nailed it when we said Oppenheimer would grab Best Picture (I mean, who didn’t love watching Cillian Murphy brood for three hours?). And we were spot-on about some big international news, like Claudia Sheinbaum making history as Mexico’s first woman president and Modi keeping his grip on power in India. But hey, nobody’s perfect. We thought the FDA would greenlight MDMA therapy for PTSD — that was a swing and a miss. We seriously underestimated how many Cybertrucks Tesla would crank out. And while we got some tech predictions right (looking at you, Waymo and SpaceX), we whiffed on predicting OpenAI’s moves. The whole point isn’t just to keep score — it’s about getting better at this prediction thing through practice and learning from our mistakes. And in a world that seems to get more unpredictable by the day, we think that’s a pretty useful skill to develop. —Bryan Walsh The United States Donald Trump will return to the White House (55 percent) — RIGHT I like to imagine that at least one incredibly sheltered person is learning this fact from this article: Donald Trump was elected to a second nonconsecutive term as president. There wasn’t much courage or confidence in this prediction, which I put at only 55 percent odds. My basic approach was to try to use a political science model incorporating national polling, and I came up with a prediction of a narrow Trump victory. President Joe Biden was fairly unpopular, and Trump was narrowly leading him in polling. I wasn’t confident that advantage would persist — but it did. I will say that if I had updated my prediction throughout the year, it would have changed a lot. I remember in June, before the disastrous Biden-Trump debate, telling friends I gave Trump a 75 percent chance to win; after the debate, I bumped it up to around 90 percent. When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden and surged in polling compared to her predecessor, I reverted to something like 50-50 odds. The actual race and its contours were changing dramatically, and my sense of the race changed dramatically too. Almost by coincidence, the ultimate election wound up being the narrow contest that polling would’ve predicted at the end of 2023. —Dylan Matthews Republicans will recapture the Senate (85 percent) — RIGHT I think my past self explained the reasoning here well: “There are many, many ways for Republicans to retake the Senate. Everything has to go right simultaneously for Democrats to keep it.” Everything did not go right simultaneously for Democrats this election. They had already lost a seat forever when Joe Manchin decided to retire in West Virginia, a place where no other Democrat-caucusing candidate could ever win, which left them with a 50-seat maximum in 2024. Then they lost Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, red statesthat were going to be tough for Democrats to hang on to in a presidential election year. Then, in something of a shock, Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey was defeated by a private equity multimillionaire who doesn’t really live in the state and can’t tell the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers apart. When that guy wins, you know Democrats are having a bad year. On the plus side, it could’ve been much, much worse for Democrats. Despite Harris losing Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won the Senate race there narrowly. Tammy Baldwin barely hung on in Wisconsin, and Elissa Slotkin won an open seat in Michigan by 0.3 percentage points, even as those two states went for Trump. If the Senate results had followed the presidential map, Republicans would have a 56-seat majority and no trouble confirming anyone Trump wants in his Cabinet. Instead, they ended up with 53 seats, which might be just small enough to cause Trump actual trouble. —DM Democrats will recapture the House (55 percent) — WRONG My reasoning here was that Republicans held a very small majority in the House going into the election, and Democrats seemed likely to pick up a number of seats in New York in particular due to redistricting. Sure enough, the party picked up three seats in New York, but lost others to pick up only one seat on net — not enough to flip the chamber. In my defense, I was clear this might happen, writing, “There’s still an easy-to-imagine world where Republicans hold the House, especially if Trump wins the presidential race and if he pulls out a popular vote victory this time.” As it happens, that is the world we live in. But with 220 Republicans in the House and 218 needed to pass anything, there might not be much that Trump can do with this majority. —DM Inflation will come in under 3 points (65 percent) — RIGHT I have not always had the best track record when it comes to inflation predictions, but this one worked out. It was clear in 2023 that inflation had started to decline rapidly in the wake of the Fed’s interest rate hikes, and that decline continued through 2024, enough so that the Fed was able to start cutting again. By the Fed’s preferred measure — the personal consumption expenditures price index, minus food and energy — prices grew by 2.8 percent from October 2023 through October 2024. That’s an annual rate below 3 points, though not by a whole lot. The Fed’s goal is to get the number down to 2 percent. I find it hard to see prices stabilizing that much, especially if tariffs from the Trump administration cause consumer prices to spike in a one-off event. But we’re clearly doing better than a few years ago. —DM 2023 US car crash deaths will again exceed 40,000 (60 percent) — RIGHT I like to make this prediction mainly to draw our readers’ attention to the scandalous number of Americans killed by our transportation system. In 2023, according to statistics released this year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, that number dropped by about 3.6 percent from 2022, to a still-abysmal 40,990, a figure that remains significantly elevated after a Covid-era spike erased more than a decade of progress in reducing car crash deaths. How many is that, exactly? It’s about as many Americans as are killed by guns and more than double the number killed in homicides overall, though it’s far fewer than the numbers of Americans who die from diseases like heart disease and cancer. It’s twice the number of people killed by cars in the European Union, even though the EU has 100 million more people. And the federal car fatality statistics are actually around 10 percent lower than the true number of Americans killed by cars because they exclude some cases, including crashes on private roads and parking lots. If today’s rates remained steady, a rough estimate would suggest that about 1 percent of all Americans would be killed by cars — a stunningly high cost of admission into our car-dependent society. —Marina Bolotnikova The worldNetanyahu will be unseated as Israeli prime minister (75 percent) — WRONG I almost always predict that Netanyahu will stay in power, but I made an exception when writing last year’s predictions because the Israeli public was so incredibly furious at him after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Polls were showing that voters wanted him out — by a wide margin. I figured if ever there was a time when he could be pushed out, this was it. But even this wasn’t enough. Israel has a parliamentary system, where governments typically form on the basis of coalitions. Netanyahu is really, really good at pacifying his allies in the governing coalition — and they have kept him in power. —Sigal Samuel The world will be hotter in 2024 than it was in 2023 (80 percent) — RIGHT Climate change is very obviously making its effects felt. This summer was the hottest on record globally. By November, scientists said this year is “virtually certain” to break 2023’s record. They also noted that 2024 marks the first year that Earth is more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than in the pre-industrial period. Sadly, this prediction was a pretty solid bet: You can make it every year and you’ll get it right about 80 percent of the time. As my colleague Kelsey Piper has noted, “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.” —SS Narendra Modi will remain as prime minister of India after the country’s 2024 elections (85 percent) — RIGHT Modi secured a third straight term as India’s prime minister after this spring’s massive elections, which saw over 640 million voters turn out. It’s an achievement equaled only by India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and one that was about as easy to predict as any outcome in this record-breaking year of global elections. Modi rolled into the elections with an approval rating in the mid-70s, or roughly twice as high as Biden’s popularity around the same time. In a year when incumbent leaders around the world fell in election after election, Modi and his BJP party were a sure thing — so much so that my only regret was not choosing a probability of 99 percent. Even so, this election did not turn out the way many prognosticators expected, myself included. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance secured a majority in Parliament with 293 seats, but that was well short of the 400 seats the alliance was shooting for. And the BJP itself only won 240 seats, a significant drop from the 303 seats it had won in the previous election. As a result, the party lost its solo majority in the lower house of parliament for the first time in 10 years. As my colleague Josh Keating wrote, the results were bad for Modi but good for India as a whole, showing that the world’s biggest democracy remains a democracy. An overwhelming victory would have fed into Modi’s growing authoritarian inclinations, which were on display this year as the Indian government attacked critics at home and abroad — including in the US. India was a rare example in 2024 of the people successfully pushing back against a would-be autocrat. —BW Claudia Sheinbaum will become Mexico’s first female president (90 percent) — RIGHT There was no courage in the prediction that the massively popular, but term-limited, left-wing President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (AMLO) would be succeeded by his protégée, Claudia Sheinbaum, a past mayor of Mexico City and climate scientist. The polling, even that early on, showed Sheinbaum with a massive lead over challenger Xóchitl Gálvez, an indication of both Sheinbaum’s talent and the popularity of AMLO and his Morena party. Sheinbaum’s election was historic: She is not only the first woman elected president of Mexico, but the first Jewish person and (to the best of my knowledge) the first scientist. Climate advocates shouldn’t be too sanguine, though. Despite her professional background, Sheinbaum has no interest in shrinking the popular state-owned petroleum sector. —DM Ukraine will not break the “land bridge” between Donbas and Crimea (70 percent) — RIGHT After the chaos of 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and 2023, when Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group of mercenaries mutinied and nearly took Moscow, 2024 was a less momentous year in the war. There were major shifts, to be sure: Ukraine seized part of the Kursk region in Russia, giving it Russian land it might be able to trade for Ukrainian territory now under Russian occupation, and North Korea sent troops to the front line, signaling both that Russia has serious allies in the war and that it’s desperate enough to call upon them. But there were no major battlefield breakthroughs, and one of the biggest goals of the Ukrainian military (splitting Russian troops on the Crimean peninsula from troops in the Donbas, the east of Ukraine) did not come to pass. Here is the map of military control I used in last year’s predictions: This is what the map looks like today: If you look carefully, you can see some modest differences between the maps. But overall, they’re nearly identical. The lines of control haven’t moved much in the past year, and with Trump ascending to office and seemingly hostile to extending aid to the Ukrainian military, the future is looking rather grim for Ukrainians defending their sovereignty. —DM Science and technology The FDA will approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD (85 percent) — WRONG I don’t feel too bummed about having erred in my prediction here because the FDA’s rejection came as a surprise to almost everyone involved. When I made this prediction a year ago, patients, therapists, and policymakers alike were anticipating that Lykos Therapeutics, the company trying to get MDMA-assisted therapy approved, would be successful. After all, Lykos had collaborated with the FDA on the trial design, and the latter had signed off on the methodology. But in March, a report raised fresh concerns about the trial design and unreported adverse events. In May and June, more researchers and advocates started to sound the alarm — not just about the psychedelic part of psychedelic-assisted therapy but about the therapy part. Some went so far as to accuse Lykos of being a “therapy cult,” one with a style that could increase risk to patients. Ultimately, the FDA responded to this new information by deciding not to approve Lykos’s application. —SS OpenAI will release ChatGPT-5 by the end of November 2024 (75 percent) — WRONG Did OpenAI release a whole lot of stuff in 2024? It sure did — so much so that the company decided to rebrand 12 days during the holiday season this December as “Shipmas,” releasing everything from ChatGPT Pro (a $200/month plan that includes unlimited access to its top model OpenAI o1) to its video creation model Sora to something called “Santa mode.” The blizzard of product shipping — one matched by competitors like Google and Meta — is a sign of what my colleague Kelsey Piper identified as a shift in AI, away from a single-minded focus on advancing technical progress and toward creating products that people will actually be able to use (and even more importantly, given how expensive frontier AI work is, actually buy). It came as concerns were growing over whether AI was hitting a scaling wall and AI companies were hitting “peak data.” But as I wrote last year, “for the purposes of this prediction, OpenAI will need to release a product called ‘ChatGPT-5’ — no ‘ChatGPT-4.5 Turbo’ or whatever.” Whether because it was running out of data or because it didn’t want to lock itself into ever-escalating model versions, OpenAI did not. I’ll take the L. —BW Starship will complete a launch without either stage exploding (65 percent) — RIGHT 2024 was a banner year for SpaceX’s Starship, which saw four test launches. The first in March is a difficult case for my prediction: While the launch itself was successful, the booster stage burned up while hurtling back to the ocean and the ship itself appears to have disintegrated at some point. I predicted that neither stage would “explode,” and it’s hard to know if either did in this test. They certainly didn’t operate the way SpaceX had hoped. Luckily for the company, and for my prediction, its three subsequent launches were all smashing successes. In its June 6 launch, the booster and second stage splashed down, intact, in the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean respectively. The November 19 launch, viewed in person by SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s political ally Donald Trump, got the same results. But the one for the history books came on October 13, when the booster stage returned not to the Gulf of Mexico but to the very same launchpad in Texas from whence it came, where it was caught by two massive mechanical “chopsticks.” Whatever else you think about Musk — and I think a lot of negative things — that was a fairly awe-inspiring achievement, and easily met my prediction that the Starship project would notch major successes this year. —DM Fewer than 1,000 Cybertrucks will be delivered to customers (60 percent) — WRONG I biffed this one pretty bad. For quarters one through three of 2024, Cybertruck sales totaled 28,250 in the US. Anecdotally, they seem to be everywhere in Washington, DC. My rationale was that the extremely unusual design of the truck, complete with a metal rather than painted exterior and a truly massive windshield, would prove challenging to produce at scale. Moreover, Tesla tends to operate with extreme delays, which made me pessimistic that it would meet its timelines for the vehicle. Ultimately, though, it’s a company with a lot of experience building EVs at scale, and the Cybertruck proved to be no exception. I did predict, however, that the nearly 4-foot “monowiper” used on the windshield would break down immediately in inclement weather. Guess what? Tesla had to launch a recall in June over exactly this. —DM Waymo will expand to a new city (80 percent) — RIGHT The industry leader on self-driving cars, a sister company to Google, entered the year operating in San Francisco and Phoenix but had announced plans to expand to Los Angeles and Austin. The latter city has seen testing among Waymo’s own employees but is not yet available to the general public through either the Waymo One app or Uber (which has partnered with Waymo in Phoenix). In Los Angeles, however, driverless taxi rides are now widely available: In March, Waymo started letting Angelenos off its waitlist so they could hail rides, and as of November 12, anyone in LA County can use the service, without any waitlist. That fits my prediction that at least one city would see driverless rides become widely accessible the way they already were in SF and Phoenix. —DM Animal welfare Antibiotics sales for farmed animals will increase at least 1 percent in 2023 (65 percent) — WRONG Most antibiotics sold in the US don’t go to hospitals or pharmacies, but to farms. These antibiotics are used to make animals grow faster and keep them alive in overcrowded, unsanitary factory farms, and they’ve given rise to new antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” When humans fall ill from these superbugs, the typical course of antibiotics may not do the trick to heal them. Former Future Perfect fellow Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg called the growth in antibiotic resistance a “hidden epidemic.” Tracking the amount of antibiotics sold to meat producers is a good proxy for understanding whether we’re backsliding or making progress on this epidemic, and last year, I predicted antibiotic sales for livestock would have increased by 1 percent in 2023. Instead, they went down by 2 percent. It makes sense that they declined because beef production decreased by almost 5 percent, and cattle account for around 40 percent of livestock antibiotic sales, while pork production remained stable. (I predicted 2023 sales because data is delayed by about a year.) I more or less knew this would happen, as the US Department of Agriculture predicted decreased beef production, and they’re usually right about these things. Nevertheless, I ignored common sense and predicted livestock antibiotic sales would increase because they had been on the rise for the previous five years. It’s a mistake to assume that trend lines will always continue, and a lesson I’ll incorporate into future predictions. —Kenny Torrella Oatly’s stock price will not exceed $5 in 2023 (60 percent) — RIGHT Sadly, I was right on this one. Oatly’s stock has remained below $1.40 all year, hitting a low of just 61 cents in mid-November (it peaked at nearly $29 per share in the summer of 2021). It’s been a long fall from grace for the company that single-handedly made oat milk cool, moving it from the fringes of the dairy aisle to seemingly every coffee shop menu in America. As I wrote about last year, the company has been beset by manufacturing problems and an onslaught of imitators. And it just hit another roadblock: In early December, a UK judge decided that Oatly can’t use the word “milk” on its products after a UK dairy trade group sued the company over the matter. It’s part of a larger trend of the livestock industry’s effort to restrict how plant-based companies can market their products. In brighter news, the company recently reported its third-quarter revenue was up about 10 percent compared to 2023, with growth in the main regions in which it operates. Despite a flagging stock price, Oatly is down but not out. —KT 45 percent of the US egg supply will be cage-free by late November (70 percent) — WRONG The US egg industry is still headed toward a cage-free future, but in 2024, it moved slower in that direction than I thought it would. Instead of amounting to 45 percent of the egg supply, cage-free reached 40.3 percent, just a 1.5 percent increase from late 2023. I was confident it would reach 45 percent for three reasons: Since 2019, the share of egg-laying hens raised cage-free had been growing by about 5 percent annually, several states had cage-free laws — banning the sale and production of caged eggs — going into effect in 2024, and many large food companies had committed to a 100 percent cage-free egg supply by 2025. Why was I so off? I likely discounted the impact the bird flu has had on the US egg industry; this year,the virus hasresulted in the mass killing of 44.1 million hens as of mid-December — morethan double that of 2023. I was also overconfident on corporate progress; according to the animal protection group the Humane League, many large food companies are behind on fulfilling their cage-free pledges. Lastly, I probably overestimated the impact of the 2024 state laws in Nevada, Oregon, and Washington; each havesmall egg industries and relatively small populations. We might see the pace of progress accelerate in 2025: The states implementing cage-free laws next year — Michigan and Colorado — have a slightly bigger combined population than the three states from last year and, more importantly, they have much bigger egg industries. Meanwhile, the country’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine, will have a number of new cage-free farms going online in summer 2025. But the ongoing bird flu outbreak — combined with the unpredictability of corporate pledges — could shift the trajectory. —KT More than 20 million poultry birds will be culled due to bird flu (60 percent) — RIGHT I hate that this is true, but I was right on this one two times over. More than 40 million chickens and turkeys were killed in the poultry industry’s H5N1 bird flu outbreak. And that’s just this year — since the outbreak began in early 2022, over 120 million have been culled. Most of those are not killed by the avian flu itself; rather, any time there’s a single detection of the disease at a poultry facility, all of the birds are exterminated, often with gruesome methods, like literally overheating them to death with industrial heaters. Three years into this never-ending nightmare, both the factory farm industry and animal advocates are faced with the reality that the bird flu may be here to stay. And one disturbing development we couldn’t have predicted last year: H5N1 is now pervasive in another farm animal species, dairy cows, across the country. Next year, I think this disease will keep surprising us. —MB More animal rights activists will be sentenced to jail or prison (40 percent) — WRONG My reasoning here was based on criminal trials being incredibly unpredictable — so while I thought it was more likely that at least one animal rights activist would be incarcerated than any other single outcome, I put the probability at less than 50 percent. The prediction was mostly a product of recency bias: Barely a month before we made our 2024 predictions, Wayne Hsiung, one of the most prominent US animal rights activists and a co-founder of the group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), was convicted and sentenced to jail for his involvement in actions at two California factory farms. DxE activists have run many similar actions over the last decade, employing a strategy they call “open rescue,” in which they enter factory farms and other places where animals are exploited, remove a few animals and take them to live at a sanctuary, and invite confrontation with the criminal legal system. The first few criminal cases I covered involving the group ended in either dismissals or miraculous acquittals. But Hsiung’s 2023 jail sentence made it feel like the bill was coming due. This year, I suspected that a long-awaited DxE court case, involving the rescue of three beagles from a company that breeds them for animal testing, would end in prison time because I knew it would be harder for the activists to make a legal argument for acquittal than in farm animal cases. But sure enough, the case was dismissed shortly before trial. More DxE trials are scheduled for next year, but now I know better than to try to predict the outcome. —MB Culture and sports Billie Eilish will win a Grammy for “What Was I Made For?” (90 percent) — RIGHT This was a big year for Billie! I didn’t predict her new album or extensive world tour, but it’s not rocket science to know that the academy lovesher work. With a previous win for the James Bond theme she did back in 2020, the Song of the Year award was a shoo-in. This year’s Future Perfect 50 honoree and superstar is only missing a Tony and an Emmy for that sweet, sweet EGOT status. —Izzie Ramirez One of the Kardashian-Jenners will appear in a Schiaparelli dress for the Met Gala (60 percent) — WRONG I was wrong on this one — it wound up being Jennifer Lopez who looked beautiful in Schiaparelli. Whichever Kardashian-Jenner decided to read this and prove me wrong: noted. But honestly it’s better this way. J. Lo was a co-chair for the event alongside fashion darling Zendaya, so she needed the extra zhuzh. —IR Oppenheimer will win Best Picture at the 2024 Academy Awards (70 percent) — RIGHT What did I write last year? “The Academy loves biopics, it loves period pieces, and for some reason, it weirdly loves modern films that feature black-and-white scenes.” To no one’s surprise, Oppenheimer ran away with the show at the 96th Academy Awards, winning seven Oscars, including Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, Best Director for Christopher Nolan, and yes, Best Picture. Hot dog! So, since explaining why something we knew would happen happened is pretty boring, I’m going to instead discuss an all-time-great Oppenheimer-related query posted on the subreddit r/NoStupidQuestions: Well, Rafe_Cameron_OBX, is it weird that your boyfriend watches Oppenheimer for as much as 15 hours a week? I think it depends on a few things. Does he obsessively watch and rewatch the bravura scene of the Trinity test? Has he started mumbling something about being “death, destroyer of worlds” in his sleep? (Assuming he sleeps.) You say he always makes time for you, which is great, but does he insist on reciting lines from the Bhagavad Gita when he’s, uh, making time? While I’m hesitant to interfere in another person’s relationship, if the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” I strongly suggest you drop him immediately. I’m worried that if he doesn’t get treatment he may progress to a more advanced stage of Christopher Nolanism and start making you watch Interstellar three to five times a week. —BW Shohei Ohtani will lead the major leagues in home runs in the 2024 season (75 percent) — WRONG You don’t have to be Bill James to know that two-way baseball super-duper megastar Shohei Ohtani had a pretty good year in 2024, his first with the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though an elbow injury kept him from pitching. He hit .310, good for fifth in the majors. He recorded 130 RBIs (second in the majors) and had an OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage, the gold standard hitting stat) of 1.036, also good for second in baseball. He became the first player in major league history to hit more than 50 homers and steal more than 50 bases, becoming the only player in the 50/50 club. On September 19, he had what many people consider the single best offensive game in the 121-year history of Major League Baseball, going 6-for-6 with three home runs, two doubles, 10 RBIs, and two stolen bases. Oh, and he went on to win a championship, too. The one thing Ohtani did not do is the one thing I predicted he would do: lead the major leagues in home runs in 2024. Ohtani mashed 54 taters, which would have been good enough to at least tie for the majors lead in all but three of the past 24 seasons. Unfortunately, very big boy Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees took the crown this season with 58 home runs. I’ll admit, my mistake here was forgetting that as spectacular as Ohtani is across the board in baseball, the 6-foot-7, 282-pound Judge is really, really good at mashing dingers, at least in the regular season. He flamed out in his championship series against Ohtani’s Dodgers, going 4-for-18 with just one homer and three RBIs, enraging Yankees fans across the country. So even though my prediction failed, I’d say advantage: Ohtani. —BW

The souring mood on the breakthroughs won by progressive criminal justice advocates in the years leading up to the pandemic has clearly taken hold. | Giles Clarke/Getty Images The spike in crime rates prompted by the pandemic in 2020 cemented the backlash to progressive criminal justice reform. In the years that followed, lawmakers from both major parties passed laws that rolled back changes to the criminal justice system that had aimed to lower penalties and reduce the prison population. And in 2024, tough-on-crime laws, it seems, made a decisive comeback. Over the past year, New York sent the National Guard to patrol the New York City subways, Louisiana passed a law to try 17-year-olds as adults, and Oregon recriminalized drugs it had decriminalized not so long ago. It also wasn’t just lawmakers who were eager to make these changes. In March, San Francisco voters approved ballot measures that expanded police surveillance and imposed drug tests on welfare recipients, and in November, California voters passed a ballot measure to toughen penalties for drug- and theft-related crimes, while Colorado voters chose to reduce parole eligibility for people convicted of violent crimes. The souring mood on the breakthroughs won by progressive criminal justice advocates in the years leading up to the pandemic has clearly taken hold. And that’s in spite of the fact that, on average, crime rates have actually been falling since 2021. This backlash will likely continue in the coming year, given Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his campaign promises of enacting harsher law enforcement, including by expanding the federal death penalty. So what does the road ahead look like for criminal justice reform advocates? Understanding the backlash In many ways, lawmakers are responding to the public’s sentiments about crime. But as I’ve written several times over the past year, the way people feel about crime doesn’t always reflect what crime trends actually look like. In fact, it almost never does. Over the last two decades, polls consistently showed that the majority of Americans believed crime was getting worse, even though during that same timespan, crime rates typically fell year over year. But that doesn’t mean that people are entirely misguided and that crime isn’t an issue that lawmakers should take seriously. After all, the United States is a more violent country than its peers, and lawmakers have to address that fact. It’s also the case that after an actual rise in crime — particularly violent crimes like murder, rape, and assault — as was the case in 2020, people are understandably worried and might be slow to digest the good news. Where lawmakers go wrong, however, is how they respond to public sentiments. It’s very difficult to pinpoint the cause of a crime wave or figure out how to reduce crime in the short term. Responding by reflexively passing tough-on-crime measures might alleviate people’s fears, but doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. In fact, as politicians try to outcompete each other over who or which party is tougher on crime, they contribute to a vicious feedback loop that only reinforces the notion that crime is getting out of control. Law-and-order campaigns, for example, exaggerate and often lie about crime trends. And so instead of reassuring the public that things are getting better, lawmakers have only been adding fuel to the fire. What this means for 2025 and beyond Major policy changes constantly go through a push and pull, and criminal justice reform is no different. The tough-on-crime laws that were adopted across the country in the 1990s imposed overly harsh penalties, including long sentences that contributed to a growing incarcerated population. But as the prison population reached its peak in the late 2000s, public attitudes about the criminal justice system changed, and many reforms — including lowering sentences, eliminating cash bail, and expanding parole — passed and resulted in reducing the number of people in prisons in the United States. Now, as the reforms reverse, we’re already seeing the prison population rise again after over a decade of slow but steady decline. Given the persistence of the backlash, and how widespread it seems to be, with voters themselves passing tougher crime laws, criminal justice reform advocates will face an uphill battle in the coming years. Yet while public attitudes around criminal justice reform have clearly changed, some of the lessons of the criminal justice reform movement have stuck around. Americans, for example, support decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana — something that at least five more states did in 2023, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. There are also signs that efforts to pass more forgiving sentencing laws can still succeed. Just this year, for example, Massachusetts became the first state to ban life without parole for people under the age of 21. That followed other states, including Illinois, Minnesota, and New Mexico, that abolished that sentence for people under 18 in 2023. And while Trump is likely to roll back some of the progress made at the federal level, there’s reason to believe that criminal justice reform advocates might eventually see friendlier territory in Democratic states where governors will want to draw sharp contrasts with the incoming president, potentially opening the window for more progressive reforms. So while 2024 may have been the year of the tough-on-crime comeback, it’s still too soon to say that the backlash to criminal justice reform is here to stay.

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