The final sketch of a Saturday Night Live episode is usually reserved for the show’s weirdest concepts. Airing in what’s known as the “10-to-1” slot, these bits evoke the feeling of a night gone a little too late. Think of Steve Martin and Bill Murray repeatedly wondering “What the hell is that?” at something off-screen, or a group of profane sloths reciting ridiculous “facts” about themselves in a digital short. These setups are bizarre, provocative, and often hit-or-miss.

Filing out of the family van, we saw snowflakes
could float, dust-like, up from the monochrome
rug that God had unfurled before Maranatha
Baptist Church. There, at eye level,
they kept us for a second from seeing
what we’d driven an hour to see,
a life-sized nativity, its figures arranged
in semicircle, golden, exotic against
the chapel whitescape.

ESA / Hubble & NASA, M. Postman, P. Kelly
Day 21 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: Warped Space. This Hubble view of Galaxy Cluster Abell 209, about 2.8 billion light-years away, shows more than 100 galaxies. The incredible mass of the galaxies together warps and magnifies images of background galaxies and stars in a process called gravitational lensing, which can be seen in the stretched and smeared clumps toward the center of the image.

It’s about a five-hour drive from Akron to South Bend. Things get a little tricky on the outskirts of Cleveland, but after that you just stick to I-80. I stopped for gas and a Subway sandwich and reached my brother’s apartment around two in the afternoon. He lived in an old hotel, which had been dolled up and turned into residential units.

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Late on the Friday before Christmas, just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known colloquially as the Epstein files. The contents are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, and heavily redacted.
At The Atlantic, we’ve been up, poring over the documents to contextualize what they mean.

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Something about getting older makes it easier to say “No, thank you.” On average, older Americans score higher on well-being than younger adults, and much of this is thanks to developing a clearer sense of what’s worth time and attention. At 61 years old, Arthur C.

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, J. DePasquale
Day 20 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: The Cosmic Cliffs. The James Webb Space Telescope peered inside a region at the edge of a gigantic gaseous cavity within the star cluster NGC 3324. The cluster, about 9,100 light-years away, near the Carina Nebula, is believed to be fairly young, only about 12 million years old.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.