Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with five representatives of a 12-person fantasy-football league called Raccoon Nation. Their commitment to the league has led to an elaborate infrastructure of regulations and statistics, a trophy for the winners, punishments for the losers, and even merch.

The poet Marianne Moore had a deeply close—perhaps too close—relationship with her mother, Mary. This idiosyncratic bond intrigued Moore’s contemporaries and her biographer Linda Leavell, who trains her eye on it in Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore.

In The Nest, a family moves into an English mansion in the countryside filled with opulent rooms, creaky staircases, and secret passages. The setup is familiar for a horror film: A happy couple buys a mysterious property and discovers, upon arrival, that something is terribly wrong with the house. The movie, directed by Sean Durkin, opens with appropriate portentousness, a discordant piano score clanging over the title card.

At 4:30 a.m. on the Monday before Thanksgiving, the dry-ice manufacturing floor at Noble Gas Solutions in Albany, New York, was hopping. The machine that compresses carbon-dioxide gas into dry ice was cranking out pellets of the stuff—1,500 pounds an hour—and Noble’s staff was racing to fill hundreds of bags so that a mission-critical product could be distributed on an unforgiving deadline.The product: cheesecake.The deadline: Thanksgiving dinner.

“The guardrails of our system actually worked,” the political analyst Amy Walter marveled on Monday evening, capturing how many reacted to the Trump administration initiating a formal transition of power to the Biden administration. American democracy had survived its weeks-long brush with disaster, despite President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims, surreal press conferences, and shaky legal challenges.