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.

Hey, remember April?
When President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office at the end of that month, he was on a seemingly unstoppable roll. After taking four years out of office to prepare, he and his team returned to power with a blitz of more than 140 executive orders. He bent the Republican-controlled Congress to his will and dismantled much of the federal bureaucracy.

This particularly cursed holiday week kicked off in earnest last night when my father turned his iPad in my direction. On its screen was a terribly disturbing post on X containing two images. In the first, Jeffrey Epstein was hugging and kissing a little girl. In the second, that girl was bound and gagged on a bed.
Dad was rightly outraged and disgusted. He asked me if I’d seen the photos in my time going through the Epstein files.

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Updated with new questions at 3:40 p.m. ET on December 23, 2025.
It’s a short holiday week here for Atlantic Trivia; I’ll be quizzing you Monday and Tuesday, and then we’ll part until the new year.
But note that Anders Celsius developed his centigrade system for measuring temperature on December 25, 1741. The first predicted return of Halley’s Comet was observed precisely 17 years later. The keen mind can still accomplish a lot at Christmas.

A friend of mine had just traveled across the country to see his family when he texted me, deeply concerned. The chaos of holiday travel is always a drag, but usually, it was offset by getting a break and watching his kids spend quality time with their grandparents. But this year was different, he said: “They were just absorbed in their phones a lot of the time, and distant.” He wasn’t talking about the kids, but the grandparents.