Quote of the Month
“You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you will never get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls, p. 169
My recent scribblings:
1. Why industrial unions remain the key to addressing climate change
Why you should read it: In Breakthrough Journal, writer Leigh Phillips argues that environmental advocates and progressive activists need to listen to industrial unions rather than dismissing them and their concerns in the pursuit of a chimerical Green New Deal.
“The idea that any disagreement with the Green New Deal represents a rising conservatism within unions is risible—as are right-wing commentators’ predictions of unions coming to back Trump. To categorize the building trades as dupes of bosses and lobbyists and as historically and intrinsically conservative, even if it were true, is to dismiss almost the entirety of America’s industrial unions. It would be giving up on all industrial workplaces as a site of social justice struggle… The frustration from these unions is instead an entirely legitimate rage at what they feel is yet another attack on working-class standards of living, a repetition of such assaults that have been unremitting since the 1980s. If there is no effort made at understanding why they feel this way and course-correcting in response, then there can be no Just Transition at all.”
“That’s a sentiment built on the oldest traditions of unions, which are perhaps the original environmentalists. From William Blake’s “dark satanic mills” of Industrial Revolution-era Yorkshire to the mid-20th-century chemical industry spills requiring Superfund cleanups to the black lungs of Welsh and Appalachian coal miners, workers have always had an immediate, personal interest in environmental protection—and have fought for it, often struck for it, winning in the form of regulations and health and safety standards. Wherever unions are strong, environmental protections are strict… So if both labor and Green New Deal proponents care about the environment, and if they are both fighting for workers’ rights, what went wrong? For labor, the main issue is that few Green New Deal promoters thought to formally talk to workers—the people most directly affected by the legislation—before drafting it. Such an oversight is astounding. The AFL-CIO Energy Committee brings together almost all the unions that work in the energy sector, both fossil and clean, but also the [United Mine Workers of America] and the formidable United Steelworkers. There is perhaps no greater collective body of tacit and formal knowledge about energy and the machines and processes it involves than what sits in the heads of members of these North American industrial unions… By ignoring those voices, the Green New Deal leaves out technological climate solutions that the sector has been advancing for decades. The resolution introducing the deal ‘is not rooted in an engineering-based approach and makes promises that are not achievable or realistic,’ the letter from the AFL-CIO’s Energy Committee to Ocasio-Cortez and Markey noted. At the same time, all the unions concerned have not just endorsed aggressive climate action, but have also said in various ways that they are even open to a Green New Deal-style policy framework of government funding of clean infrastructure and tech. But they have multiple conditions: Green New Deal proponents must speak to trade unions before developing their policies; they must drop their opposition to a number of technologies and practices, such as nuclear power, carbon capture, and the idea that all fossil fuel combustion can be turned off tomorrow, which industrial unions put forward as key to greener development; and above all, they must start fighting alongside energy sector workers in particular to defend and enhance their wages, working conditions, pensions, and benefits.”
Why it matters: “… it is precisely because industrial workers and farmers are embedded within the very energy, transport, manufacturing, extractive, and agricultural sectors most relevant to decarbonization—and also (when in the private sector) regularly deal with bosses who must maximize profits—that they know perhaps better than anyone why decarbonization is difficult. They are able to hold in their head both that carbon-intensive companies have worked hard to delay climate action and that fossil fuels have historically delivered tremendous benefits to humanity. It is not merely obvious to them that coal has kept people warm in winter and powered the factories that built the modern world, but this is something they are proud of. They were the ones who did all of this, made all of this, with their hands and brain… Workers and their unions have enormous social and political weight. Far more weight than the very vocal but numerically limited and geographically concentrated climate Left, and also more weight than the sometimes ecomodernism-curious climate wonks in think-tank land. The climate Left hardly makes the difference in electing anyone, and wonks, for all their utility in crafting clever policy, never do. Unions, meanwhile, make or break election after election, for blue and for red. Understandably so; the term ‘working class’ describes the vast majority of people in modern society. Workers also have the ability to withdraw their labor and go on strike. The fear of such during the Depression was what put the fear of God into elites to prompt the original New Deal.”
2. Why American companies keep caving into Chinese government demands
Why you should read it: Axios reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian details the reasons why American and European companies continually capitulate to the demands of the Chinese government.
“The Chinese government increasingly is using its economic weight to reshape global behavior and strengthen its own authoritarianism. And democratic governments have left companies to fend for themselves… Through state-fanned patriotic boycotts, website shutdowns and other retaliatory measures, the Chinese government pressures international firms and other organizations to avoid statements or actions that cross Chinese Communist Party red lines. Those often include support for democracy in Hong Kong, acknowledging human rights abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang, upholding Taiwan's autonomy, or discussing the coronavirus pandemic's origin in China.”
“But the results of Beijing's strategy increasingly go far beyond just censorship. The Chinese government has tightened its legal environment, forcing companies to hand over technology and data in order to continue operating there, threatening the security of users and the integrity of markets… Some firms such as LinkedIn and Yahoo announced this year they were leaving the Chinese market due to the difficult regulatory environment. But others have stayed, handing over key aspects of their business as they have done in no other market. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in November that Apple has a "responsibility" to do business wherever it can, including China, despite the government's human rights abuses there. Apple censors apps from its China app store. Apple also stores encryption keys at the Chinese state-owned company that operates Apple's data center in China, the New York Times reported in June. Amazon has also transferred cloud technology to local Chinese companies to comply with China's regulations and remain in the market, Reuters reported this month.”
Why it matters: “Despite its tough policies on China in the past several years, the U.S. government has not yet established new mechanisms to support U.S. businesses facing CCP coercion, such as emergency aid to support them when facing revenue loss in China. In October, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a draft bill that if passed would create an interagency task force to come up with recommendations to address China's economic coercion. The EU is considering a new set of anti-coercion trade instruments designed to blunt the force of Beijing's economic retaliation. The bottom line: In a showdown between a powerful government and a single company, the government usually wins — unless an outside government steps in.”
3. What Xi Jinping wants
Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, China expert Elizabeth Economy outlines how the Chinese Communist Party aims to reshape the world for its own survival and benefit.
“China already occupies a position of centrality in the international system. It is the world’s largest trading power and greatest source of global lending, it boasts the world’s largest population and military, and it has become a global center of innovation. Most analysts predict that China’s real GDP will surpass that of the United States by 2030 to make it the largest economy in the world. Moreover, as the evolution of the pandemic has illustrated, China’s response to global challenges has profound implications for the rest of the world… This shift in the geostrategic landscape reflects and reinforces an even more profound transformation: the rise of a China-centric order with its own norms and values. However imperfectly, the post–World War II international order was shaped primarily by liberal democracies that were committed in principle to universal human rights, the rule of law, free markets, and limited state intervention in the political and social lives of their citizens. Multilateral institutions and international law were designed to advance these values and norms, and technology was often used to bolster them. Yet Xi seeks to flip a switch and replace those values with the primacy of the state. Institutions, laws, and technology in this new order reinforce state control, limit individual freedoms, and constrain open markets. It is a world in which the state controls the flow of information and capital both within its own borders and across international boundaries, and there is no independent check on its power.”
“Xi’s ambition for Chinese centrality on the global stage is exquisitely captured by his Belt and Road Initiative… Yet the BRI has become increasingly bumpy. Although it can bring the benefits of China’s infrastructure-heavy development model, it also carries with it all the externalities: high levels of debt, corruption, environmental pollution and degradation, and poor labor practices. Popular protests have proliferated throughout host countries… Beijing itself may be reconsidering its BRI commitments. Investment levels have declined steadily since 2016, and some of the presumed political benefits have not materialized. A review of the top ten recipients of BRI investments, for example, reveals no direct correlation between the levels of investment and the countries’ support for China on critical issues, such as Hong Kong, the South China Sea, and Chinese actions in Xinjiang. As with China’s assertiveness on its borders, the BRI has also stoked a backlash. It has sparked competitive initiatives by Japan and other countries to offer infrastructure financing and support with higher standards and more benefits for local workforces… Initiatives such as the BRI and the Confucius Institutes offer an attractive vision of Chinese centrality that has been somewhat undermined by unattractive Chinese governance practices, but much of Beijing’s effort to advance Chinese centrality relies explicitly on coercion. China’s pandemic diplomacy, for example, highlighted for many people the coercive nature of Chinese efforts to shape the world around them. China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomats weaponized the production of personal protective equipment (PPE) by threatening to cut off supplies to countries that criticized China. They also went on the offensive to spread disinformation about the origins of the virus to deflect attention from Chinese culpability. When Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, Beijing slapped restrictions and tariffs on some of Australia’s most popular exports.”
Why it matters: “… appears equally plausible, if not more so, that China has won a few battles but is losing the war. Xi’s bullish assessment of China’s pandemic response may resonate at home, but the international community retains vivid memories of Beijing’s bullying diplomacy, coercive PPE practices, military aggression, repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and continued belligerence around determining the origins of the virus. Xi wants China to be “credible, lovable, and respectable” in the eyes of the international community, but his actions have yielded public opinion polls that reflect record-low levels of trust in him and little desire for Chinese leadership. Many initiatives to cement Chinese centrality, such as the BRI, the Confucius Institutes, and global governance leadership, are now sputtering or stalling as the full economic and political costs of acquiescence to Chinese leadership become clear to the rest of the world.”
4. Why China overreacted to Biden’s democracy summit
Why you should read it: Asia experts Mareike Ohlberg and Bonnie S. Glaser explain why the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy got under Beijing’s skin in Foreign Policy.
“Some China watchers have pointed to Taiwan’s participation as the main reason China is agitated. Having Taiwan join a forum from which China is excluded is an unacceptable offense to the Chinese party-state… But Taiwan only partly explains China’s fierce response. There are larger dynamics at play. Although the Chinese government often cynically accuses others of having a ‘Cold War mentality’ and of being guided by a ‘zero-sum mindset,’ it views itself in a global contest for power against the United States that it indisputably approaches in a zero-sum fashion.”
“But for Beijing, being convinced the ‘East is rising and West is declining’ isn’t enough; other major powers must be persuaded as well. The Summit for Democracy threatens to undermine China’s narrative by portraying the West, and the United States in particular, as resilient… Biden’s democracy-promotion agenda also poses a threat to Beijing because it is a vehicle to strengthen the United States’ relations with its allies and like-minded partners based on shared values, and specifically is aimed at bolstering the country’s global leadership. China has worked assiduously to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies and wants to demonstrate that Washington is no longer fit to lead on any issue.”
Why it matters: “Although Beijing denies it is engaged in an ideological battle with the United States, China’s reaction to the Summit for Democracy is evidence that ideology is central to U.S.-China competition. China’s attacks on U.S. democracy are more than just Beijing’s usual tit-for-tat diplomacy. China is serious about wanting to redefine what democracy means and push its own political model as a superior form of democracy… It may also be that the Chinese government has fallen victim to its own propaganda that the erosion of U.S. power has left the United States a weakened state, so much so that China sees little risk in boldly seizing the opportunity presented by the ‘changes unseen in a century’ to promote Chinese ‘democracy”’as an alternative political model superior to U.S. democracy.”
5. How Russia staffs its shadowy mercenary groups
Why you should read it: In New Lines Magazine, Michael Weiss and a team of researchers present their findings about the casualties taken by Russian mercenary groups, including the notorious Wagner Group.
“Among the 4,184 individuals in the database [assembled by former Ukrainian government officials], fighters have come from 15 different countries, and some have multiple citizenships. The majority, 2,708, unsurprisingly hail from Russia, 222 from Ukraine, 17 from Belarus, 11 from Kazakhstan, nine from Moldova, eight from Serbia, four from Armenia, four from Uzbekistan, three from Bosnia and Herzegovina, two from Kyrgyzstan, two from Tajikistan, two from Syria, two from Turkmenistan and one from Georgia. (One fighter possesses triple citizenship: Lebanese, Ukrainian and Russian, although New Lines could not confirm his country of origin.) For the remainder in the dataset, 1,188, nationalities are unknown… Of the 372 confirmed dead, 75 are known to have died from 2014 to 2016, 186 in 2017 and 86 in 2018. In the past two years, 23 fighters have died either on the battlefield or in other uncertain circumstances. The country with the largest number of fatalities is Syria, with 315 dying there; 35 died in eastern Ukraine and one near Kyiv; eight in Libya; and one in St. Petersburg.”
“Salaries start at 150,000 rubles, roughly $2,000 a month, a competitive wage by Russian or Ukrainian standards. Additional evidence seen by New Lines suggests that people with solid military experience can easily earn twice that amount, a small fortune. But evidence also suggests that candidates are wary of being tricked; they might earn their promised pay in the first few months before their salaries either stop coming in or are less than before. These are the occupational hazards, apart from death, of joining a private military company in Russia… All of them are men, most lacking more than a meager education; age ranges vary between 18 and 50, but most fighters are ages 25 to 30. They come from unstable home lives in which steady or reliable role models are often absent. They prefer isolation to company and tend not to trust other people. They find it hard to create or maintain friendships or start families.”
Why it matters: “Wagner’s mercenaries have been fighting on the side of the separatists in eastern Ukraine, propping up Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria and backing the warlord Gen. Khalifa Haftar in Libya, as well as fighting anti-government rebels in the CAR. They have also been deployed to Sudan, initially in support of since-ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir, and Mozambique, where they mounted a disastrous and swiftly abandoned offensive against Islamist insurgents… Wagner is closely intertwined with and subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, a sanctions enforcement agency, has designated Wagner a ‘proxy force’ of that ministry. Reporting has also shown it is very close to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. One of the group’s training facilities is located in the Russian region of Krasnodar, right next to a heavily guarded GRU Spetsnaz (special forces) military base.”
6. When bioethics kills
Why you should read it: UnHerd science editor Tom Chivers takes the field of bioethics to task for its failures during the COVID-19 pandemic, where medical professionals use negligible and uncertain side-effects to prevent access to vaccines and life-saving drugs out of “an abundance of caution.”
“Over the last two years, again and again, the fears of some possible risk caused by something we might do have outweighed the fears of a thoroughly real, utterly obvious risk which was killing people at the time. And it has, I think, been a failure of the field, or at least the practice, of bioethics…But during the pandemic, something has gone terribly wrong, and I think that the system of ethical approval in medicine has probably cost tens of thousands of lives, at a conservative estimate.”
“In bioethics, though, we’ve overcomplicated things. For instance, early in the pandemic, people were campaigning for ‘human challenge trials’ into Covid vaccines… As the philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell points out, there are obvious-seeming objections to human challenge trials. You have to give people a potentially dangerous disease: what if it kills one of them?… But one plausible estimate is that roughly 18 million people have died of Covid during the pandemic – that’s an average of about 28,000 a day. Bringing the end of the pandemic forward by even a single day could easily save thousands of lives. A small risk to a small number of young, healthy volunteers was hugely outweighed by a very likely large reduction in risk to many thousands of old, vulnerable people.”
Why it matters: “There are two important points to make, here. First, while I’m talking about ‘bioethics’, it’s not clear that it’s actually bioethicists who are the problem. For instance, Peter Singer of Princeton, probably the world’s most famous bioethicist, is on the board of 1DaySooner, the human challenge advocacy group, as is his fellow bioethicist Nir Eyal, of Harvard. Leah Pierson, a Harvard bioethicist who is writing a book about the failings of bioethics during the pandemic, stresses that when the CDC paused the use of the J&J vaccine, lots of the bioethicists she knows were appalled at the decision. But the practice of bioethics as actually carried out in major institutions, such as the FDA and CDC, often leads to these bad decisions… It’s rare that academic philosophy can have such a direct impact on people’s lives. But how we apply bioethics really can save or kill thousands, just by changing the speed with which we approve drugs. In peacetime, perhaps, it’s OK to argue the toss and act with caution. But in a pandemic, perhaps we really ought to apply the standard of ‘Do the thing that kills fewer people.’”
7. How legal proceduralism inhibits effective government
Why you should read it: For the Niskanen Center, Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley wonders if and how deregulation - or more precisely, reduction in procedural obstacles to policy implementation - can serve progressive rather than conservative ends.
“Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state. The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rulemaking, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on. Collectively, these procedures frustrate the very government action that progressives demand to address the urgent problems that now confront us… What gives? Part of the answer, I think, is that our legal and political culture is in thrall to the belief that strict procedural rules are necessary to address pervasive anxiety about state power. This belief is rooted in at least two stories we tell about the regulatory state. The first is about legitimacy: Robust, legally mandatory procedures are necessary to legitimize an administrative leviathan that rests on a precarious constitutional foundation and that the public views with suspicion. The second is about accountability: that procedural rules, by stitching the public into agency decision-making, guard against the risk that influential minorities will wield undue influence… Yet these beliefs are wildly overdrawn; indeed, they are myths. Procedural rules have a role to play in preserving legitimacy and discouraging capture, but they advance those goals more obliquely than is commonly assumed and can even exacerbate the problems they’re meant to solve. Addressing our common problems and achieving our collective aspirations will require us to revive a much more positive vision of the administrative state — one in which its legitimacy is measured not by the stringency of the constraints under which it labors, but by how well it works.”
“On the page, the [Administrative Procedure Act of 1946’s] procedural strictures were spare. They were not to remain so. Against the backdrop of Watergate and the Vietnam War, liberal lawyers in the 1960s and 1970s grew increasingly disenchanted with the idea that agencies could act as disinterested experts. They likewise grew attuned to the risk of agency capture, and came to believe that intensive judicial review was necessary to prevent powerful interest groups from getting special favors in the regulatory process. At the vanguard were newly formed public interest organizations staffed by idealistic young lawyers who had been inspired by the courtroom successes of the Civil Rights Movement. Their heroes were not the New Dealers who had once labored in agency trenches, but crusaders like Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, and Thurgood Marshall… The [historical] pattern seems to be that an ever-present (indeed, ever-increasing) anxiety about the state periodically generates calls for stiffer procedural rules. The sediment deposited by this accretion of procedures can channel agency action into unproductive courses or even dam it altogether. There’s an analogy here to complaints about how a multiplicity of government rules can stifle business activity. Complaints about overzealous regulation, however, are taken seriously in our political culture. Fears that procedural rules make it hard for agencies to do their jobs are not.”
Why it matters: “It is reasonable to believe that procedural regularity is an important facet of government legitimacy. But legitimacy is not solely — not even primarily — a product of the procedures that agencies follow. Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair. Mandatory procedures may sometimes advance those values. They can focus agencies on priorities they may have ignored, orient bureaucracies to broader public goals, and improve the quality of agency deliberations. But procedures can also burn agency resources on senseless paperwork, empower lawyers at the expense of experts, and frustrate agencies’ ability to act. When procedures impair an agency’s ability to do its job, they can drain an agency of legitimacy. “
8. What Josh Hawley of all people gets right about men and American society
Why you should read it: Journalist Liza Featherstone comments in the New York Times on the kerfuffle created by Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) proclamation of a “crisis of American men,” noting that while Hawley may be a dolt liberals shouldn’t dismiss the problem he purports to identify.
“Mr. Hawley is not alone in sensing that masculinity is a popular cause; around the world, male politicians are tapping into social anxieties about its apparent decline, for their own ideological ends. The Chinese government, for instance, has declared a ‘masculinity crisis,’ and it is responding by cracking down on gaming during school days and by investing in gym teachers and school sports… But Mr. Hawley, for all his winking bigotry, is tapping into something real — a widespread, politically potent anxiety about young men that is already helping the right.”
“[Hawley] is right about some things. Deindustrialization has stripped many men of their ability to earn a decent wage, as well as of the pride they once took in contributing to prosperous communities. Boys are sometimes overdisciplined and overmedicated for not conforming to behavioral expectations in school. And while more women than men are diagnosed with anxiety or depression, men are more likely to commit suicide or die of drug overdoses… But liberalism hasn’t offered a positive message for men lately. In the media, universities and other liberal institutions, it sometimes seems that every man is potentially guilty of something. As Mr. Hawley puts it, men are being told by liberals that ‘they’re the problem.’ Our side — the progressive side — has struggled to articulate what a ‘nontoxic’ masculinity might look like, or where boys might look for models of how to become men.”
Why it matters: “I don’t hate this message, taken alone, for our sons. Who would? But that vision of shared purpose and civic virtue won’t come from Mr. Hawley any more than funding for more public baseball fields will. He, after all, has opposed just about every common public project recently proposed… Meanwhile, the left will need to find a better way to talk to men; half of the population is far too many people to abandon to the would-be strongmen of the far right.”
9. Why “woke” organizations all sound the same
Why you should read it: In City Journal, UCLA sociologist Gabriel Rossman uses the sociology of organizations to explain why major American institutions have embraced “woke” ideology almost in unison.
“America’s major institutions have gone woke the same way that someone goes bankrupt: slowly, then all at once. How is it that so many of us have had the experience of being in a diversity-training session divided into racially segregated ‘affinity groups’ or reading yet another sackcloth-and-ashes statement from management and thinking: They can’t possibly believe this, right? Any answer should begin with the dominant theory from the sociology of organizations: neo-institutionalism and isomorphism. The theory explains that organizations go beyond their core competencies to imitate market leaders and to meet the demands of their trading partners, the regulatory state, and key employees.”
“Based on his study of a Stone Age culture in New Guinea, Bronisław Malinowski argued that when people face uncertainty, they turn to magic to propitiate the capricious spirits responsible for their incomprehensible misfortune. Being ever-so-sophisticated people who attended business school, corporate executives don’t hire shamans to replenish fisheries or to avoid a storm. Instead, they bring in consultants to help the firm embrace best practices. John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s 1977 paper in the American Journal of Sociology, ‘Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,’ argues that this distinction is a farce—that much behavior as practiced by modern corporations, NGOs, and government agencies is not about technical efficacy that rationally orients means to ends but ritual, vaguely intended to elicit good fortune by achieving legitimacy with the firm’s ‘environment’… Neo-institutionalism helps explain why we see organizations engage in practices that don’t serve the bottom line. Ultimately, legitimacy trumps efficacy. Suppose that you’re a manager who reads the academic literature, sees that the heavy-handed self-criticism styles of sexual-harassment or racial-diversity training are somewhere between useless and counterproductive, and proposes canceling next year’s training. Legal is going to complain that this will look bad if you face a wrongful-dismissal suit anytime soon. And some of your biggest contracts require that co-located employees from your firm have to be certified as having received the training. Many employees will complain that they expect the firm to express their values, which includes holding seminars featuring ‘privilege walks’ to reaffirm the firm’s commitment to ending white supremacy and other forms of domination. These stakeholders will point to the fact that all your leading rivals in the industry hold such seminars; it is a ‘best practice.’ So you go on propitiating the gods, even knowing full well that they don’t exist, because everyone around you believes in the spirits and even more so in the rituals that honor them and would consider neglect of such piety a sign of illegitimate leadership.”
Why it matters: “This is the essence of the social construction of reality: objective facts can matter less than intersubjective consensus. Since other people’s perceptions are an objective fact, you had best conform to their expectations—no matter how radical or irrational they might be.”
Odds and Ends
How astronauts celebrate winter holidays like Hannukah and Christmas in space…
How a well-preserved embryo fossilized inside its egg shows just how dinosaurs might have hatched…
What the ancient builders of Stonehenge may very well have eaten as they build the megalithic monument…
How the U.S. Postal Service’s air mail program gave birth to commercial aviation in the United States…
How the United States, Europe, and Canada worked together to build and launch the James Webb Space Telescope despite political upheaval and the COVID-19 pandemic…
An Assemblage of Vaguely New Year’s-Themed Music
“New Year’s Day” from U2’s 1983 album War.
“New Year’s Day” from Taylor Swift’s 2017 album reputation.
“Next Year” from Foo Fighters’ 1999 album There Is Nothing Left To Lose.
“Brand New Day” from Sting’s 1999 album of the same name.
“What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” from Norah Jones’ 2021 album I Dream of Christmas.
Image of the Month
