I didn’t expect to do well on this quiz and I didn’t, getting only 12 out of 20.

 With Audience Volunteers

Hard to believe this was 50 years ago. After working in small comedy clubs in the early 1970s, Kaufman gained national attention in 1975 with an appearance on SNL. He would go on to play Latka Gravas on the TV series Taxi from 1978 to 1984, when he died of lung cancer at only 35.

Some called him an anti-comedian because of his proclivity towards rudeness, which is displayed here. But equally evident is the absurd genius of this idea.

There are almost certainly millions of articles posted on the internet today offering predictions for 2026. And yet I’m offering you another one.

Why would you want to read this one?

Well, for one thing… my predictions come with pictures!

* Concerns about cyber- and digital-security will grow due to increased threats and attacks. Deepfakes in local advertising, fake business news in major media outlets, major thefts of customer accounts and information, AI-generated false claims and fake dates being reported to government regulatory agents will result, towards the end of the year, in a major loss of confidence in financial reporting by both government and corporate accounting.

* A digital trust crisis will emerge, and digital gurus will become more highly valued. Concerns about deepfakes, fraud, and synthetic data will escalate throughout 2026, culminating in a loss of confidence in digital reporting. This is already happening as AI is making all forms of digital deception cheaper and more scalable. Detection and verification technology will become more important than ever, but the technology for detection and verification will become more costly. And since it will always lag behind digital deception, public confidence in it will diminish. The ultimate result will be that consumers of information will no longer look for digital security and protection, but will turn instead to digital influencers they trust. That will give rise to a huge increase in both the number of digital gurus and the dollar impact that they have on not just commerce, but on politics and culture.

* The EU will mandate universal digital IDs and introduce a new digital euro. Both will be sold as instruments to drastically reduce crime, drastically increase financial security, and make all aspects of life – from traveling to buying groceries – easier. Libertarians will object, but the public at large will embrace them. Within months of implementation, crime will be drastically reduced, but so will personal liberty and privacy. Eventually, this will lead to a hyper-Orwellian state of living where the government will have complete knowledge of everything its citizens do and the complete ability to control their behavior by government-controlled digital monitoring, policing, and confiscation and taxation systems.

* Beijing and its geopolitical allies will continue to test the supremacy of the US dollar – and with some success, as Beijing rolls out a gold-linked offshore yuan for redenomination of its trade. By the end of the year, the dollar will still be a major reserve currency, but not the only one.

* NATO will continue to lose its influence – and by the end of the year will face replacement by another defense treaty whose members are exclusively European.

* The US and other American countries, including Canada, Central America, and most of South America will begin talks for a new defense treaty for them and them only.

* Tensions between stasis and change in the Middle East will increase. By the end of the year, the Trump administration will have secured a new peace agreement.

* Defense technology will change how wars are fought. Military investment in technology will surge, both by governments and in the private sector. The speed of innovation will increase, with the timeline from battlefield to civilian application compressed, and it will fundamentally reshape infrastructure, emergency response, and healthcare worldwide.

And, finally…

Re my Dec. 29 “Best of 2025” issue: 

“Terrific post! Nice job!” – AF

“For inventors: Thomas Edison and Charles Steinmetz. And I love Bukowski.” – BB

“I have to add a movie that is certain to be in any Top 10 this year: Hamnet.” – JS

My Response: Oddly, Hamnet was one of the very few movies I did see in 2025. It was very good… and I forgot about it!

Finnish bluegrass band Steve ’n’ Seagulls performs an up-tempo cover of “The Number of the Beast.” Check it out here.

Then watch the original performed by Iron Maiden here.

I like the idea of what the Finnish band is doing, but it doesn’t measure up to the original. What do you think?

My “Best of 2025” lists – and not just films and books. I also take a look at key political and cultural moments of the year.

But first…

I’m putting this issue together on Saturday night, just after the last of our many guests for the holiday week departed. Rather than give you an account of the entire (very) busy week, I’ve reproduced the contents of my Christmas Day journal below.

This year, Number One and Number Two sons were spending the holidays with their in-laws. However, we’ve had K’s siblings and their offspring here at the beach house, as well as the usual family-less friends. All of which made for a group of about 30 – more than enough to make the house merry for a full week.

I woke at 8:00 this morning, feeling noticeably more clearheaded and more energetic than usual. Some of that improvement was due to having had a full eight hours of sleep rather than six or seven, which has, in recent years, become the norm for me.

But some of that improvement must have been due to my having drunk much less alcohol last night than usual – less than two ounces of rum. My “usual” – about 1,000 calories of alcohol a day – may seem excessive. I’m sure it would qualify me as alcoholic in some of the analytical diagnostics. But it never stopped me from putting in a full day of work – i.e., six to eight hours of “work” work, two to three hours of research and writing, and another hour or two of exercise. So “alcoholic” never felt like me.

Still… I remember that I had the same sense of improvement the last time I cut out or reduced my alcohol consumption. It’s not something I have a definite opinion about now, but it deserves to have some attention given to it.

Breakfast was served at 10:00 as usual, and in the usual Christmas Day manner – buffet-style in the kitchen with seating in the living room or dining room or at one of the tables outdoors. The menu was much like it has always been, leading off with K’s mouth-watering, once-a-year egg frittatas; sliced ham; refried mashed potatoes (my one specialty); a stack of maple-syrup-coated Canadian bacon; somebody’s Christmas casserole; cereals (for the kiddies); honey-flavored Greek yogurt; a cornucopia of fresh fruits; muffins and coffee cake; and bagels with lox and cream cheese.

The mood was holiday festive, the conversation cheerful. And for those in need, there were holiday quaffs and Christmas libations – sufficient to carry one into the new year.

Afterwards, came the first of three gift unwrappings (the first for the children, the next for the adults, and the last one, later, in private, for K and me). And after that, there were phone calls to siblings and cousins, stop-by visits from friends and neighbors, and pool time for the families with small children.

It was a beautiful clear day, the temperature in the low 70s. At about 4:00, some of us crossed the street to sit on the beach and watch the children, eager for more excitement, play in the surf. I brought a beach chair and a copy of a book I remembered having read and enjoyed many years ago: Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer Adler. It wasn’t, admittedly, Christmas fare, but it was just what the doctor ordered. I spent a very pleasant hour reading the preface, introduction, and first chapter.

Back home as the sun was setting, I found the music room deserted, and opened my laptop to check on my email. There were, as always, about 200 new messages, most of which I was able to scan, sort, and discard or save for the following day. I did respond to the personal notes, though, including a thread of emails courtesy of my Myrtle Beach golf buddies. asking: “If Theodore Roosevelt were removed from the face of Mt. Rushmore, which president would you replace him with?”

The answers posted ranged from Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump. (That last one was from yours truly and succeeded in stirring the pot.) And that had led to nominations for a “Mt. Rushmore of Sports.” It had produced the usual suspects: Michael Jordan, Mohammad Ali, Babe Ruth, etc., etc. But while I was reading that, seven other “Mt. Rushmore” categories were suggested in a surprising range of subjects. Here they are, along with my nominations for each:

Inventors/Scientists: Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein

Philosophers: Aristotle, Confucius, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke

Humanitarians: Marcus Aurelius, Jesus of Nazareth, Martin Luther King, and Elon Musk

Comedians (American): Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle

Novelists (English-Language): Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Vladimir Nabokov

Poets (English-Language): William Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot

Dramatists (English-Language): William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, and Tom Stoppard

Painters (European): Hieronymus Bosch, Caravaggio, Paul Cezanne, and Pablo Picasso

Modern Dancers: Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine, Fred Astaire, and Michael Jackson

If you’re sitting around during the holidays with relatives and nothing left to talk about, try challenging them to come up with their own “Mt. Rushmore” categories… and let me know what happens.

The “Mt. Rushmore” exercise inspired me to create my “Best of 2025” lists of films and books.

I had a problem with the films. Because when I looked through my journal, I realized that I hadn’t watched even a dozen from beginning to end all year long. The excuse I gave myself was that, between the four businesses for which I’m actively working and the half-dozen books I was trying to finish in 2025, I didn’t have the time. But another factor – perhaps the real factor – was that my attention span for video entertainment has been attenuating steadily since I began watching YouTube shorts almost every night. To make matters worse, the best movies that I watched in 2025 were classics I had seen two or three times before (The Godfather I & II, The Conversation, Blow Up, and Five Easy Pieces).

So since it would do you no good for me to recommend those universally acclaimed films to you, I am, instead, giving you a list of 10 movies I intend to watch in 2026 because the reviews I had read of them convinced me they would be worth the effort.

My Top 10 Films (I Didn’t Watch) 
1. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
2. Nouvelle Vague
3. 28 Years Later
4. One Battle After Another
5. Marty Supreme
6. Orwell: 2+2=5
7. Best Wishes to All
8. No Other Choice
9. Train Dreams
10. My Undesirable Friends

My book selections, however, were easy because I’d already written reviews of all the books I’d read during the year in my journal. (I had met my goal of reading a book a week: 20 books of fiction and 32 of non-fiction.)

My Top 10 Books (Fiction & Poetry) 
1. Dubliners by James Joyce
2. The Reivers by William Faulkner
3. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
4. Factotum by Charles Bukowski
5. The Iliad by Homer
6. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
7. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
8. The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
9. West Into the Night by Beryl Markham
10. It Bleeds by Stephen King

My Top 10 Books (Non-fiction) 
1. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
2. Introduction to Cognitive Science by Thad A. Polk
3. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
4. How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
5. Einstein in Time and Space by Samuel Graydon
6. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
7. Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
8. Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles Munger
9. Stoic Paradoxes by Cicero, translated by Quintus Curtius
10. Milton Friedman, The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns

Those three lists should have satisfied my “Mt. Rushmore” inspiration. Alas, it only triggered several more, three of which follow…

The 10 Best Karmic Moments in Pop Culture 
1. Sean “Diddy” Combs Convicted
2. Tilly Norwood Almost Got an Agent
3. Disney’s Snow White Went Woke and Then Broke
4. Disney CEO Bob Iger Sues AI and Then Embraces It
5. Jimmy Kimmel Suspended for Tasteless Humor
6. Stephen Colbert Cancelled for Angry Banter
7. Robert De Niro’s The Alto Nights Flops at Box Office
8. Prince Andrew Dethroned
9. Jeff Bezos Reaches New High in Garish Weddings
10. NYC Liberals Inherit Zohran Mamdani

The 10 Best Geopolitical Moments for the US 
1. US/Mexico Border Finally Closed
2. US Brokers Ceasefire in Gaza
3. Thailand and Cambodia Sign Peace Treaty
4. India and Pakistan Sign Peace Treaty
5. US Brokers Ceasefire in Decades-Long Congo/Rwanda War
6. US and Israel Disable Iran’s Nuclear Capabilities
7. Withdrawal of US from World Health Organization
8. Nasry Asfura Elected in Honduras
9. Javier Milei Elected in Argentina
10. José Antonio Kast Elected in Chile

The 10 Worst Political Moments for Wokesters and Leftists 
1. Federal agencies must now list 10 existing regulations for repeal for every new one they propose.
2. The Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning transgender surgeries for minors.
3. The “Rescissions Act of 2025” cut $9 billion in federal spending.
4. Taxpayers are no longer required to fund National Public Radio (NPR).
5. USAID loses federal funding.
6. The Laken Riley Act passed, ensuring criminal illegal aliens are no longer released into US territory.
7. The Take It Down Act passed, forcing criminalizing the non-consensual distribution of intimate images on social media.
8. The HALT Fentanyl Act passed, classifying fentanyl as a Schedule I drug, and giving law enforcement stronger tools against fentanyl trafficking.
9. $7 billion shutdown ended without bankrupting US healthcare.
10. The “No Kings” march proved that Donald Trump is not a king.