NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, NASA-JPL, Caltech, UCLA
Day 6 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: The Shell of a Dying Star. About 1,500 light-years from Earth, a dying star at the heart of planetary nebula NGC 1514 is performing a spectacular final act. One of a pair of binary stars has been shedding huge amounts of gas and dust for more than 4,000 years, blasting into the surrounding space and lighting it up from within.

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“Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode,” the journalist Elizabeth Harris wrote last year.

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This week, the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense released a report that found Secretary Pete Hegseth could have put U.S. troops and national security at risk with messages sent in a Signal chat about strikes in Yemen.

When Mad Men arrived on HBO Max earlier this week, after years languishing on the less-subscribed-to AMC+ service, the streamer’s parent company, Warner Bros., heralded it as a triumph. Finally, the much-acclaimed Emmy magnet would be available to watch in glorious 4K resolution; viewers would now have “the opportunity to enjoy the series in a fresh way,” as the WB executive Royce Battleman trumpeted.

Photographs and videos by Owen Harvey
The week before the biggest bullfight of her career, in Cádiz, Spain, this past July, 24-year-old Miriam Cabas posted a carefully produced video on Instagram. Cabas appears not in a traditional matador costume but in a cream pantsuit, watching a little girl—4, maybe 5—wave a red muleta at an imaginary bull. “Dreams come true,” she wrote in the caption. “The little girl I used to be still guides me.

The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender.

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President Donald Trump has promised not only that America will be “great again” but also that it will be “healthy again,” “wealthy again,” “beautiful again,” and—crucially—“affordable again.

Catalina Jaramillo is beginning to envision what her life in South Florida will look like without the financial help that allows her to afford health insurance, medication, and treatment for a series of ailments. Jaramillo has been insured through the Affordable Care Act since being diagnosed with acute kidney disease in 2022, when she was 39. Expanded subsidies help her afford the coverage—and they will expire at the end of the year unless Congress extends them.

Updated with new questions at 4:50 p.m. ET on December 5, 2025.
I have much extolled here the value of new knowledge. Let us now hear a counterargument: Some months after Yale gave Mark Twain an honorary degree in 1888, the writer’s schedule cleared up enough for him to pull together a speech advising that the good people of the college learn less.
“I found the astronomer of the university gadding around after comets and other such odds and ends,” he wrote.

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy has landed, with not so much a thud as a kind of greasy flutter. Most of the document consists of bombast, sycophancy, lies, inconsistencies, and grotesque self-contradictions. But it also—and this is something missed by the deservedly contemptuous reviews it has received—clarifies some policy preferences and touches on real problems.