Get ready to feel old, whether or not your socks peek out from your sneakers, because there’s a new generation on the rise. The babies born on New Year’s Day 2025 not only got to be featured in feel good local news pieces, they’re also the first members of Generation Beta, which will include children born this year through 2039.

These kids, whose parents will mostly hail from Gen Z (born 1995 to 2009) and the youngest millennial (born 1980 to 1994) ranks, represent the second generation born entirely in the 21st century, and many of them may live to see the 22nd.

Their lives are expected to be shaped by AI and other rapid technological advances. Depending on how many Silicon Valley dreams come true, many from this new generation may not even remember the first time a human walks on Mars or ever sit in the driver’s seat of a car that can’t drive itself.

• Mark McCrindle, the demographer who also coined the name Generation Alpha for people born between 2010 and 2024, isn’t just overly nostalgic for his fraternity days: His firm said in a blog post that they opted to use the Greek alphabet for these successive generations “to signify how these different generations will be raised in a new world of technological integration.”
• The new generation will be the first to be surrounded by automation and immersive virtual environments, per McCrindle.

McCrindle predicts that by 2035, Generation Beta will make up 16% of the global population.

Looking ahead…McCrindle expects to keep naming new generations with Greek letters every 15 years to keep things standardized and analyzable, so future generations may not get cool monikers like The Silent Generation (born 1928–1945). But others caution against reading too much into generational labels anyway. In 2023, Pew Research Center said it would stop depending on them, noting that other demographic factors, like race, might do more to shape viewpoints than birth year.—AR

At least 15 killed after driver rams into New Orleans New Year’s crowd. More than 30 people were also injured when the driver plowed a pickup truck into the celebrating crowd on the city’s famous party spot Bourbon Street. The suspected driver, identified by authorities as US Army veteran Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police. The FBI is investigating the incident as an act of terrorism and does not believe he acted alone. An Islamic State flag and explosives were found in the truck, according to the Associated Press. Notre Dame and the University of Georgia were scheduled to play the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans yesterday, but the game was postponed 24 hours.

A Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. The person inside the truck was killed and several people nearby were wounded. Videos quickly spread on social media that appeared to show the vehicle on fire near the entrance to the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. Law enforcement officers said yesterday that the incident near the president-elect’s hotel was being investigated as a possible terror attack and that they were exploring any possible connection to the New Orleans attack. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is close to Trump, said on X “the whole Tesla senior team” was looking into what happened and that the blast was caused by “very large fireworks and or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and unrelated to the vehicle itself.”

Ukraine stopped the flow of Russian gas to Europe. Nearly three years after beginning its invasion, Russia can no longer send gas to continental Europe via pipelines in Ukraine after a deal brokered before the war allowing its passage expired. Ukraine refused to renew the deal, saying it helped fund Russia’s war effort. Russia had been sending gas that way for decades, and much of Europe depended on the cheap gas before the war. However, the EU began weaning itself off Russian energy in response to the conflict: 10% of the EU’s natural gas came from Russia in 2023, compared with 40% in 2021, per the BBC.

This month, tens of millions of Americans will order espresso martinis—but hold the martini.

Yesterday was the start of Dry January, the annual event when people challenge themselves to lay off the booze during the first month of the new year. While it feels like it’s been around forever, the Dry January challenge was actually created in 2013 by a UK charity to promote a healthier relationship with alcohol.

For a growing share of Americans, Dry January may not be too difficult to pull off, because many are drinking less as it is:

• Per capita pure alcohol consumption in the US has dropped to its lowest level since 2002, according to beverage data company ISWR.
• That drop is led by younger people: The share of 18- to 34-year-olds who say they ever drink has fallen by 10 percentage points in the last two decades, Pew Research found.

Meanwhile, Dry January is more popular than ever, with web searches for the term in the first week of 2024 doubling from 2023. The internet is now littered with tips and strategies for helping you achieve your 31-day alcohol detox.

Alcohol businesses have come to expect a lean month. Observed alcohol sales at three major US liquor chains plunged 52% in the first week of January 2024, Bloomberg reported. Many bars have wised up to the trend by offering special mocktails and other promotions to get people in the door.—NF

As of yesterday, the one-eyed, spinach-fueled sailor became one of thousands of copyrighted works to enter the US public domain, allowing a new generation of artists to adapt, share, and rediscover old characters, books, music, and more.

It’s an annual tradition: Every year on Jan. 1, the copyrights for works introduced 95 years prior expire, per US intellectual property law. So yesterday, art from 1929 came up for grabs: In addition to the first version of Popeye, highlights include the character Tintin and legendary books The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

The goal of the public domain is to unleash creativity by releasing locked-up stories, and recent hits show what’s possible:

• The box-office smash musical Wicked is a prequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books.
• One of the most celebrated novels of last year, James by Percival Everett, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• But things could take a turn to the macabre: A wave of Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse horror movies have been released since those characters’ copyrights expired in the past two years. Three Popeye slasher flicks are already in the works, per NPR.

Looking ahead…the coming years will bring more iconic characters into the public domain, including Mary Poppins in 2030, Superman in 2034, and Bugs Bunny in 2036.—NF

The 10th and final round of payments to people scammed by Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff was sent out on Monday, bringing the total recovered to 94% of the estimated total losses. Officials called it an “unprecedented conclusion” to a compensation process that will have repaid $4.3 billion to over 40,000 people in almost 130 countries, per the DOJ.

Where’d they scrounge up the money from? Most (~$2.2 billion) came from the estate of Madoff investor Jeffry Picower, while $1.7 billion was recovered from JPMorgan as part of a 2014 DOJ agreement. Madoff died in prison in 2021 while serving a 150-year sentence for orchestrating what prosecutors described as the world’s largest Ponzi scheme.