Marty Mauser cannot stop the hustle. In Marty Supreme’s electrifying opening moments, the audience is introduced to the wiry 20-something (played by Timothée Chalamet) in 1950s New York. He’s working as a shoe salesman, talking a fussy older customer into buying a fancier brand with easy confidence. Almost immediately thereafter, we learn that his boss (who happens to be his uncle) wants to make him the store manager. But Marty, a working-class Jewish kid, won’t hear of it.

In middle age, some sports fans become reactionaries. Due to dwindling neuroplasticity, or some general souring toward the world, they can no longer appreciate how a game evolves. It’s similar to when a music fan stops checking for new artists and plays only albums that they loved in high school. As an aging NBA fan, I’m trying to stay vigilant. I never want to catch myself ranting endlessly at the bar about the inferiority of younger stars.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts
If Warner Bros. Discovery was only a movie house, it would have had one of its best years ever. Two of its films (One Battle After Another and Sinners) are front-runners for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it had a string of critical hits and box-office successes with Superman, Weapons, and A Minecraft Movie.

Nearly two years ago, Donald Trump kicked off the presidential-campaign season with a declaration: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island,” he posted on Truth Social in January 2024. Reports to the contrary, he insisted, were the fault of AI—and of his political rivals: “This is what the Democrats do to their Republican Opponent, who is leading them, by a lot, in the Polls.

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Christmas has always made me nostalgic, but I have come to realize, with something of a jolt— perhaps because I just turned 65—that my sense of nostalgia is not what it used to be.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the Trump administration’s hostility toward NATO. David discusses why NATO was created, what it does, and why we should care about it. David also analyzes the United State’s global leadership role and why so many bad actors advocate for isolationism.

The year is 2029. President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, having spent years raging against Fox News as a propaganda organ whose very operation is illegal, has found a pressure point to control it. She enables its sale to owners who are friends of hers, and whose business depends on regulatory favors she has made a practice of doling out to allies. As the new editor in chief of Fox News, the owners install Tim Miller, a skeptic of conservatism who has never previously worked in television news.

ESA / Webb, NASA & CSA, H. Atek, M. Zamani
Day 24 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: A Gravitational Lens. Galaxies in this James Webb Space Telescope image appear to be stretched into arcs and lines, their appearance warped and magnified by powerful gravitational lensing in Galaxy Cluster Abell S1063, which bends the light of more distant galaxies as it passes through on its way to Earth.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.