Hello, and Happy New(ish) Year from London, where we are all trying our best to get on with our lives while a certain particularly DOGE-y friend of Donald Trump’s plots to oust our prime minister. Just another week in the 21st century, then.

I do hope those of you who made any New Year’s resolutions have managed to stick to them so far, and that those of you that haven’t managed are not feeling too guilty about it. Personally, for the avoidance of that precise feeling, I don’t make “resolutions” any more. Instead, since 2021 I have been writing lists of intentions for the whole year, using the last two digits of the year to tell me how many intentions I should set. Unlike resolutions, these must not be the kind of punitive vows that one can “break” in the first week of January but more positive ideas about what we might want to bring into our lives over the coming 12 months. They range from the frivolous to the profound and everything in between. For any of you who are interested in doing the same, I wrote a whole column about this for the 2024 New Year. (And yes, I know we are 10 days into 2025, but I always reckon we should have until the lunar new year — January 29th this year — to finalise them.)

I hope you enjoy my pick of the week’s stories, plus a few from elsewhere you shouldn’t miss. 

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A grinning Donald Trump Jr landed in Greenland on “Trump Force One” private jet on Tuesday, a day after his father refused to rule out using military force to annex the territory, which felt like some kind of message (though I’m not sure quite what). But why is Donald Trump Sr so interested in taking this frozen island of 57,000 people, and could it actually happen? Our Nordic and Baltic correspondent Richard Milne takes us through what’s going on, in this very interesting piece.

If you were wondering how and why the aforementioned Dogefather has became so utterly obsessed with British politics, this excellent analysis will provide you with some clues. Elon Musk has been amplifying and responding to a handful of popular right-leaning accounts on his social media platform X that have posted extensively — and selectively — about the handling of historic sex crimes in the UK.

I really enjoyed this column by Miranda Green on the distinctly emotionally manipulative owl that is the mascot of language-learning app Duolingo. “You made Duo sad — but he kept learning without you,” the digital bird tells her. Apparently passive aggression is an effective learning tool, but Miranda doesn’t seem wholly convinced (neither am I).

We all know by now that most forecasts are wrong, but what if accuracy were not the best way to judge how good or useful they are? That is what data wiz Tim Harford suggests, using his column this week to argue that we should judge forecasts on the basis of whether or not they prompt some kind of useful action.

This month marks the debut of a new quarterly column from me in our glossy HTSI mag called, rather wonderfully, “Adventures in Woo Woo”. I am taking a deep dive into the worlds of “wellness”, spirituality, mysticism and alternative medicine, to work out what’s hot, what’s not and what’s a load of old tosh. First up, I try a technique known as “tapping”.

Quick hits

OTHER FT STORIES THAT HAVE CAUGHT MY EYE THIS WEEK

• The criminologist Yvonne Jewkes is trying to change the design of UK prisons so that they feel more like homes. In this “At Home With the FT” feature, the author of An Architecture of Hope takes us into her own Victorian cottage.

• What will be the effect of “Maganomics”, and how is Trump changing the way that America thinks about trade? Gillian Tett suggests it is now Homo politicus, not Homo economicus, who dominates — “trade is no longer ‘just’ about economic exchanges, but power, particularly of the hegemonic sort”.

• I love Leo Lewis’s writing, and his piece about turning 50 in Japan is great. He writes: “In an ageing society, we are all technically getting younger. Relatively speaking.”

• At this time of year, I really crave warming, comforting food, ideally with some spice to it. I currently have some fennel knocking around my vegetable drawer, too, so I’m looking forward to trying out this dhal with citrus and fennel slaw recipe over the weekend.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING ELSEWHERE

1. The antisocial century Americans are spending more time on their own than ever before (as do many of the rest of us). Derek Thompson argues that this is changing the way people think and behave, and might just be “the most important social fact of the 21st century”. (The Atlantic)

2. Musk’s obsession with Britain is complicated I spent an inordinate amount of time staring at this chart showing the increasing frequency of Elon’s posts on X about UK politics, and the times of the day that he posts them. All times, it turns out. (Tortoise)

3. Watching Your House Burn on a Ring Camera It has been very upsetting to watch the awful fires that have engulfed large parts of Los Angeles this week — and that’s from several thousand miles away. Many LA residents watched their own homes being burnt down in real time via their security cameras. (New York Magazine)

It is probably a little gauche to recommend two of one’s own pieces in a single email. But with precisely 10 days to go until Trump returns to the White House, it feels appropriate to share the dispatch I wrote for FT magazine when I first visited his Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, in 2022. At that time, Trump had just been humiliated after many of the candidates he’d backed in the midterms lost their races, and Ron DeSantis (remember him!?) was being talked up as the man to beat. But up close to the former president, it seemed to me that Trump had a lot of fight, energy and stamina left in him, and that counting him out, as many were doing at the time, would be a mistake . . .

We always want to hear your thoughts and feedback, so do feel free to drop me a line at jemima.kelly@ft.com, or on the site formerly known as Twitter at @jemimajoanna, or on Bluesky at @jemima.bsky.social, or you can email the team at longstoryshort@ft.com. Have a lovely weekend and a wonderful, love-filled 2025!

Jemima