Every year in late December, my childhood home transformed into a vision of American bliss. We’d gather to ornament a tree, drape string lights around the house, and sit down to an elaborate feast. Not long after dawn the next day, while our little sister still slept, my brother and I would impatiently sneak downstairs to see our gifts, which we understood to have been delivered by a kindly old man. It could have been a scene out of A Christmas Story. Except we weren’t celebrating Christmas.

On a chilly December morning, I descended a flight of stairs and entered the New York Transit Museum. Housed in a decommissioned subway station in downtown Brooklyn, the museum was packed with elementary-school children on a field trip. All around me, tour guides shepherded groups of them through the various exhibits. Later on, I heard one guide ask if any of the students knew how to pay for the subway. “You tap a phone,” a child volunteered.

In case you’re settling into winter and lamenting not having read everything The Atlantic has published this year, you’re in luck. I’ve created a list of stories you may have missed that are very much worth your time. The assortment ranges widely: eating an organ feast in Mark Twain’s Paris, experiencing a comedy-show adventure in Riyadh, drifting after a shipwreck in the Pacific, and diving into the secrets of the Inca empire.

How much effort should a country expend to rescue someone who appears to hate its values? That is the question posed by the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
Abd el-Fattah is an Egyptian pro-democracy campaigner who has been in and out of prison since 2006 for opposing the regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and for drawing attention to torture and other abuses.

In the opening scene of the black comedy The Death of Stalin, a violinist in Moscow is told her orchestra is giving a command performance for Joseph Stalin, and refuses to play on political grounds. A frantic radio director, fearing he will be arrested or shot if he fails to produce the concert in time, begs her to reconsider, finally prevailing with an offer of 20,000 rubles.
Recently, the Trump administration faced a similar situation.

For all of the political chaos that American science endured in 2025, aspects of this country’s research enterprise made it through somewhat … okay. The Trump administration terminated billions of dollars in research grants; judges intervened to help reinstate thousands of those contracts. The administration threatened to cut funding to a number of universities; several have struck deals that preserved that money.