Most frightening and/or depressing story: A China-Taiwan military conflict is a potential start-of-World-War-III scenario. This could happen today, or this year, or never. Let’s hope for the latter. This is a near-term existential risk, but I have to break my own “rule of one” and give honorable mention to two longer-term scary things: crashing sperm counts and the climate change/fascism/genocide nexus.

Most hopeful story: Computer modeling, done well, can inform decisions better than data analysis alone. An obvious statement? Well, maybe to some but it is disputed every day by others, especially staff at some government regulatory agencies I interact with.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There have been fabulous advances in note taking techniques! Well, not really, but there are some time honored techniques out there that could be new and beneficial for many people to learn, and I think this is an underappreciated productivity and innovation skill that could benefit people in a lot of areas, not just students.