Welcome to 2025, Weekend Reader readers! This is the fourth day of the new year, so it’s time to ask this question: How are you doing with your resolutions? Mine are hanging on by a thread, but still, that’s something to celebrate.

Let’s start with a couple of stories that could lend a useful perspective to your resolution battle: First, here’s some advice from a New York Times writer who urges you not to punish yourself with your resolutions. (But, wait: I always thought punishment was kind of the point.)

And here’s a story from The Atlantic about how your “invisible habits” — the ones you do without thinking — could either be helping or hindering the pursuit of your goals.

In somewhat related resolution news: Earl Blumenauer, the Democrat who represented Oregon for 28 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, started each new term in office by writing a personal letter of advice to new members of the House. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf quizzed him about this year’s letter — the last one he’ll write — and was surprised to learn that much of it was advice about eating right, getting some exercise, making time for family and making connections with other representatives. Blumenauer’s essential argument: Healthy members of Congress function better. I was about to say something else right here, but I’ll let the moment pass.

In yet another resolution-related story: The Atlantic’s Ellen Cushing has a new article in which she urges all of us to throw more parties. It’s our civic obligation, she argues: “Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them. We just expect them to appear when we need them, like fire trucks.”

That advice would seem to conflict with the surgeon general’s call to slap cancer warnings on alcoholic beverages. A report this week from Dr. Vivek Murthy cites studies linking alcoholic beverages to at least seven malignancies, including breast cancer. As Roni Caryn Rabin of The New York Times explains in this story, the recommendation is a new twist in an increasingly intense debate about the health benefits and risks of alcohol consumption.

The Times also has a surprisingly engaging story about a new study that takes another crack at this age-old question: Could an infinite number of monkeys, each given an infinite amount of time and a steady supply of typewriters, eventually produce, by pure chance, the complete works of Shakespeare? (The problem has been pondered by eminent scholars such as the writers of “The Simpsons.”) The key authors of the new study — a pair of somewhat bored scientists from Australia — have come to this conclusion: It’s a trick question, because the monkeys could not complete the task before our universe dies. Bummer.

Former President Jimmy Carter died Dec. 29 at age 100. You’ve doubtless read many retrospective pieces about Carter and his legacy (both as president and afterward) over the last week, but the Times has found a unique way to summarize his career with this piece, “Jimmy Carter’s Life, in 17 Objects.”

An interesting story about the poaching of wolves in Oregon likely won’t come as a surprise to anybody in the eastern part of the state: Gosia Wozniacka of The Oregonian/OregonLive reports that, even though state officials and conservation groups have offered up to $130,000 in rewards for information about illegal wolf killings over the last two years, the rewards almost never lead to prosecutions. What the story doesn’t quite cover is the idea that people east of the Cascades have a very different view of wolves than people on the western side of the state. In fact, as a couple of years working for newspapers in eastern Oregon taught me, if you’re looking for something to symbolize the state’s rural-urban divide, the wolf wouldn’t be a bad choice.

You probably forgot to celebrate Public Domain Day on Jan. 1. (Mark your calendar for 2026 now!) A big batch of important literary works, movies, musical compositions and even characters (hello, Popeye!) now have entered the public domain. The list includes William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” the first Marx Brothers film, “The Cocoanuts,” Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, “Blackmail,” the songs “Singing in the Rain” and “Ain’t Misbehaving,” Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and many, many others. Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain (it’s right next door to the “Monkeys Typing Shakespeare” lab) has a much longer list for your enjoyment.

If you follow the state of local journalism in the United States, thank you for doing so. As someone who keeps an eye on journalism, you might have heard about “solutions journalism,” roughly defined as an approach to news coverage that tries to focus on solutions to the major challenges facing our communities. It’s one way to counter the claim that journalists focus on bad news exclusively. (Which is not true, although it is true that humans are hardwired to focus first on bad news — for my whole spiel on this topic, buy me a beer sometime — but just one; thank you, surgeon general!)

In any event, research suggests that solutions journalism can help journalists reconnect with their communities. But a new study points at a couple of hurdles: First, it’s hard, especially in smaller newsrooms, to find the time to tackle this sort of deeper story. In addition, this sort of story often doesn’t fare very well with the metrics newsrooms use these days to track readership — and it’s just as true as it was 100 years ago that bad news attracts more readership. (I think I will have that beer now.) Joshua Benton at the Nieman Lab has more on the study.

Finally: If you decide to do your patriotic duty and throw a party, you’ll need to come armed with an array of fascinating facts to keep the conversation going in those short breaks between Sabrina Carpenter tunes on the stereo. Fortunately, our friends at the Pew Research Center are here to oblige, with a collection of “Striking Findings from 2024.”

That’s it for this week. If you spy me in a corner at your party, singing along to “Espresso,” please bring me another beer.