Here's how you need to approach 2025

Our Dearest Holiday Letter Recipient,

The events of 2024 have left many of us strained. Fearful. Unsure where to look for guidance. We need a new symbol, a new familiar or mascot in these times. Something to inform our actions, to ask “what would they do?” 

Look no further. We wish you to enter 2025 with the energy of the true American Mascot: Meleagris gallopavo, the wild turkey.

Here are 10 reasons why the turkey should inspire us:

1. Turkeys are native to North America, and while we almost wiped them out due to our endless appetite for deli meat, they have proceeded to flock again into suburbs and cities. This makes turkeys inherently decolonizing, reclaiming what is rightfully theirs.

2. Turkeys strut with the confidence of surviving Thanksgiving and knowing the next two are ham holidays. 

3. Ben Franklin famously wanted the turkey as the national bird, and he hasn’t been fully cancelled yet, which means things he liked are still ok, for the moment. 

4. Frankie was right. Unlike other mascots (cough, bald eagles, cough)*, no one has to dub the turkey in with another bird’s call to make it sound cooler. Turkeys know their gobble is inherently majestic. 

5. The noble turkey is a bird that remembers that it was once a dinosaur. 

6. Turkeys sold their souls to the devil to learn to play guitar. The devil taught them accordion instead, and the birds are left now with only tone-deafness and bitter resentment. 

7. Turkeys wake up every morning, look in the mirror, see another turkey looking back, and choose violence. 

8. Turkeys can run up to 25 miles an hour and fly up to 55 miles per hour for short distances, but they still stand on the left side of the escalator while you’re late for work. 

9. If you encounter a wild turkey, you are now the endangered species. Turkeys want to remind you they're not the only ones made out of meat.

10. Whenever you bring up who started the Franco-Prussian War, turkeys get surprisingly cagey and try to change the subject.

Enter 2025 with confidence. With determination. With red-hot, brainless rage. Enter 2025, and think of the turkey. 

Embrace chaos. Share.

Where have you been?

• Is it making your New Year’s resolution to try the public transit in your town? If you think it sucks…well how do you know? Try it and find out. By Kendra Pierre-Louis.

• Squirrels look cute, sweet. Vegan. Except they are sometimes COLD BLOODED VOLE KILLERS. Oh yeah. By Jennifer Ouellette.

• Love this piece from Alan Henry on thriving out of spite…and on op-eds, and how we should probably get them out of newspapers and magazines.

• A very important piece on what to do if someone has a miscarriage in a state where abortions are illegal or highly restricted. What care is for it, and how to get it.

• Was so proud to hear my former colleague Jon Lambert on NPR’s Up First talking about new species in 2024! Here for the frogs!

• So many good points in this piece about why male college enrollment is dropping. The real reason? Male fragility. Men are freaked out by spaces that are more than half women.

Where have I been?

• Thanks so much Nicole Rust for including me in a piece about spreading science communication online!

• Finding out how the brain plans for the future means a lot of EEG caps, virtual reality…and eye movements?! Eye movements.

*This is true. The scream you hear associated with a bald eagle is actually a red-tailed hawk. Real bald eagles sound very, very silly. 

**Not all claims in this letter are factual. There is no scientific evidence that turkeys are tone-deaf.