25 things we think will happen in 2025

For the sixth year in a row, the staff of Future Perfect convened in December to make predictions about major events in the year to come. Will Congress pass a tariff bill that makes President-elect Donald Trump happy? Will the H5N1 bird flu become an honest-to-god pandemic? Will the war in Ukraine stop? Will a major sports figure get caught up in a gambling scandal?

It’s fun to make predictions about the future, which is part of the reason why we do it so often. But this isn’t just blind guessing. Each prediction comes with a probability attached to it. That gives you a sense of our confidence (high in the case of, say, Charli XCX’s Grammy chances, less so in the case of Iran’s nuclear plans). And don’t make the same mistake that people seem to make every presidential cycle. Even a probability as high as 75 percent or 80 percent doesn’t mean we’re sure something will happen. Rather, it means we think that if we made four or five predictions, we’d expect three or four of them to come true, respectively.