What happened since the first volume of Folly came out? The editors, fanned out across the globe, asked ourselves this while sitting down to lay-in the latest volume, the volume sitting in your hand or on your screen at this very moment.
Since May 2025, a socialist rocketed to the top of New York mayoral pact and secured a stunning majority. Donald Trump, concurrently, sought to subordinate the Federal Reserve through an investigation of a member of the board of governors and a criminal indictment of Jay Powell. In only a few heady days in Nepal, the parliament, supreme court, prime minister and president’s residences, Communist Party headquarters, and Hilton were burned down. The United States launched a violent coup in Venezuela, and briefly threatened a quixotic, surreal war in Greenland. Capital expenditure on AI in the United States reached two percent of GDP. Green bond issuance topped out globally at just under 1 trillion dollars. In China, sales of electric vehicles were higher than all US vehicles sold last year, and around 380 gigawatts worth of solar panels were installed, a total larger than the US’s entire existing installed solar capacity. 2025 was the second warmest year in world history at 1.48º Celsius above historic levels. Over a thousand people were killed in floods in Pakistan; thousands were shot dead in Iran in a matter of days; everyday bodies were dug out of rubble in Gaza, raising the official death count in the strip to over 71,391 people. The largest coral bleaching event in recorded history, affecting 84% of the Earth’s reefs, caused what the NOAA described as a “near complete mortality” event. Air pollution killed between seven to nine million people. According to one poll, about a third of American adults “almost constantly” speak to machines whose voices reflect an elaborate, eerie fluency. A record 84 million workers in China now rely on gig work – delivering food or ride-hailing apps – for their daily livelihood. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere peaked again at 428.93 ppm. Just a few days before this issue went out to print, a man was kicked and then shot at least 10 times by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, and Xi Jinping purged one of the last remaining members of the central military committee.
These set of images and numbers on their own reveal very little. They are less than the sum of their parts. They invite incomprehension. Folly continues to be our minimalist intervention, behind which there is a maximalist injunction (the sort only hubristic youth can make) read and read, write and write, put aside needless distractions, take long, substantial rests, go for swims; learn the flowers; live and study; make sense of things.