Happy New Year! With Omicron sloshing around this great country, I’ve been asked by more and more people what mask they should be wearing. Or they have a health-compromised loved one and they’re asking for them. I’ve put a lot of time into researching this question – both as a journalist and a breather – and if you didn’t see it last week I put together a primer on the basics. You can read it here.

Back in 2016 there was a knowing social media go-to about how 2016 was the year from hell – one that would come to an end when Trump was defeated in November. Of course, that didn’t happen. It was followed by 2017, the beginning of Trump’s dismal and destructive presidency. Then there was 2020, a year of historic disruption, mortality, economic displacement and social chaos and unrest, which was to be followed by renewal in 2021. And well, here we are. We’ve run through a succession of ‘hell years’ beneath which rumbles a growing trepidation or assumption that maybe none of this stuff is the exception. Maybe this is just a downward trajectory with no snapback to something more normal, something more on a progress toward betterment.

On the eve of a new year where do we fall on this terrain of doomism?