Updated at 2:48 p.m. ET on December 14, 2025
It’s long past time to stop saying “Anti-Semitic violence has no place in our society.” Outrage upon outrage confirms that anti-Semitic violence has a large and expanding place in Western societies—that it is supported by many, that it is tolerated by many more, and that it is often appeased or even enabled by governments fearful of confronting large and militant factions within their populations.

Last night, SNL weighed in on a modern annual rite: taking stock of the past year through data-driven retrospective lists. But the usual exercise in mapping one’s consumption patterns soon transformed into an uncomfortably real humiliation ritual.

Updated at 1:20 p.m. ET on December 14, 2025
Nothing encapsulates the failures of our society more than what just happened to Mia Tretta. When she was 15, she was shot in the stomach by a classmate at her high school in California. Yesterday, she survived the second school shooting of her short life: A person opened fire at Brown University, where Tretta is a junior.

ESA / Hubble & NASA, L. Kelsey
Day 14 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: Ripples of a Galactic Merger. The Hubble Space Telescope recently gathered this image of lenticular galaxy NGC 4753, about 60 million light-years away. Scientists believe this object to be the result of an earlier merging of two galaxies, which is still flattening and throwing off waves of dust lanes.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.

As a homeland-security expert, I often get unexpected calls telling me of some horrible mayhem. Typically these come from television producers or magazine editors who want to know how long I’ll need to get ready and respond. But last night was different. The first call I received didn’t come from a producer or editor but from my daughter, an alum of Brown University, where yesterday a shooter walked into a final-exam-review session, killed two students, and injured nine more.

Before each episode of America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes begins, a surreal mix of images and video clips runs, like a screen saver, for an unpredictable and seemingly eternal amount of time. Gentle plains of swaying grass, trickling streams, and the show’s logo flash across the screen. EDM kicks in. Psychedelic depictions of Christian imagery, including Jesus’s crucifixion, come and go. So do snippets of Fuentes talking about, among other things, borders, drag queens, and his faith.

ESA / Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Rihtaršič, R. Tripodi
Day 13 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: A Sea of Galaxies. The James Webb Space Telescope pointed its Near-Infrared Camera toward the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 and captured this image of hundreds of galaxies at varying distances and of different sizes, shapes, and colors—showing only a small section of the cluster.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.

Donald Trump continues to put pressure on Ukraine to accept his administration’s peace proposal, despite how the plan favors Russia. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what this may suggest about the administration’s shifting international priorities, and more.   
If the Ukrainians were to stop fighting today, “they don’t have any kind of security guarantee,” Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explained last night.