December 31, 2020

Top Ten Predictions for 2021

Sergi Reboredo/ZUMA

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Now, let’s see if I can come up with ten predictions.

  1. We will recover pretty nicely from the pandemic. Personal savings are high and stimulus spending has been generous.
  2. Things will mostly return to normal when the country opens back up. A few little things will get a boost, but humans are fundamentally social animals and will remain so. We will very quickly return to nearly all of our old habits.
  3. Mitch McConnell will do his best to block every single thing Joe Biden tries to do. (I know, this is kind of a gimme.)
  4. Within a few months of January 20, Donald Trump will be forgotten like a bad nightmare. Virtually everybody has an incentive to ignore him, especially after the wholly deranged behavior of his final two months.
  5. Self-driving cars will not hit the mainstream. But they’ll come very, very close. Probably 2022 will be their breakout year.
  6. As usual, the world will continue to do nowhere near enough to make a dent in climate change.
  7. Congress will reschedule marijuana and it will be effectively legalized. This is not a prediction I have high confidence in, but public support for legalization has passed the two-thirds threshold that often means a subject finally has enough public support to move Congress to action. Legalization even has very close to majority support among Republican voters.
  8. I’ve already predicted that the 2020s will be the decade of CRISPR, and this year additionally saw advances in protein folding, cheap genome sequencing, and unbelievably fast development of mRNA vaccines. I don’t know what will happen in 2021, but I suspect that something fairly spectacular may emerge from the biological sciences.
  9. Cats will continue to rule the internet.
  10. Cats will continue to rule the universe.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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