What Was Hot in 2014?

As I do on New Year's Day each year, I have taken a look back at the most popular items in the past years. Who are the winners among the more than 300 that I posted in 2014, based on the number of hits on each one? Here they are:

1. By a wide margin, the biggest hit of 2014 was about the road to successful aging:
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/10/work-long-and-save-key-to-aging.html

2. Migration lessons from the World Cup in Brazil came in second (I actually did a double-take remembering that the World Cup was this past year--a lot has happened since then):
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/06/world-cup-offers-its-migration-lessons.html

3. Migration was also the topic of the third most popular post, although in this case it referenced the global migration flow maps put together by the Vienna Demographic Institute:
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/03/visualizing-global-migration-flows.html

4. The rather sad story about the demographics of Puerto Rico was fourth on the list:
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-dismal-demographics-of-puerto-rico.html

5. Aging was back in the spotlight for the fifth most popular post, which appeared on April 1st, but it was no April Fool's joke--it was about aging in Spain:
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/04/playgrounds-for-elderly-spain-prepares.html

6. Only a few days later I posted a fairly lengthy piece on Russian demographics which are, in my opinion, important for our understanding of Putin's political maneuvering:
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/04/russian-demographics-who-to-believe.html

7.  My link to the Population Reference Bureau's 2014 World Population Data Sheet was seventh on the list, and I'm glad to see that it is still very popular. In the old days, it was one of those things that I always had in my briefcase, and I always required students to buy--"never leave home without it!" Now, you can "carry" it with you on your mobile device.
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/08/prbs-2014-world-population-data-sheet.html

8.  The number of Muslims in India was eighth most hit upon. You could win a lot of bets at bars, I'm guessing, by asking people which country in the world has the second greatest number of Muslims (you might even win most of the time if you asked who was #1 in the category):
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-many-muslims-are-in-india.html

[Note--if you are into quizzes and have an iPhone or iPad, check out the PopQuizzes on my iPhone app--see above for the link, if you don't already have it]

9. I was in Copenhagen when I posted the ninth most popular item about the new surge out of Syria. Danes, like other Scandinavians, are very accepting people, although of course in a relatively small country there is only so much room for foreigners:
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/09/new-surge-out-of-syria.html

10. The tenth most popular story takes us back to the Indian sub-continent, to news that fertility in Pakistan is not declining as quickly as most demographers had projected:
http://weekspopulation.blogspot.com/2014/01/pakistans-birth-rate-not-declining-as.html

While this is technically a look back, most of these stories will still be affecting us in 2015--as will the others that I have posted that didn't make the top ten list.

Happy New Year!