The joy of hypotheticals

BREXIT, President Donald Trump, President Emmanuel Macron: in Western politics, at least, it has been a time to expect the unexpected. Seemingly far-fetched developments turn out to be the new reality the world must to adjust to. Our own fanciful imagining of the first 100 days of a Trump presidency, published a year ago in , our annual collection of scenarios, proved in parts to be uncannily close to what actually transpired, especially its speculation that Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails might have helped to swing the 2016 election.So it would be tempting to suggest that readers should search our latest batch of hypothetical conjecture for signs of the next surprises about to upend conventional wisdom. Yet the point of asking “what if” questions is not to make predictions. It is to stretch thinking. Predictions are rightly constrained by a sense of probabilities; scenarios can leap enjoyably beyond that, to explore all sorts of possibilities.