Two winners emerged from the recent poll on a piece I wrote about made-for-TV holiday movies in the Hallmark-Lifetime vein. The question was which movies I, or we, should watch, and the answers were Hanukkah on Rye by a landslide, followed by Christmas at the Golden Dragon.
Notably, both of these—though actual Hallmark productions—were big departures from the formula.
UPDATE: Saturday, Dec 24, 2022 · 9:45:52 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
#NewsMap Great news from #Opytne, just south of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian forces regained around 80% of the settlement. pic.twitter.com/FDsbTIjoJG— Julian Röpcke🇺🇦 (@JulianRoepcke) December 24, 2022
The latest advances show that Ukraine has reportedly liberated a series of four villages just west of Svatove.
I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.
–Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a letter to publisher Herbert Putnam
When people list the worst jobs to have, few would probably have picked being a librarian in Lafayette, Louisiana.
It’s that time again, Christmas Eve, with everyone gathered round the fire with their liquid warmer of choice and visions of sugar plums. Here’s your slightly more eco-friendly hearth. May your holiday and your new year be full of warmth, love, and happiness.
YouTube Video
(P.S. If you want a little more action in your evening’s background, head below the fold.)
Here’s what the Oklahoma Humane Society presented for Giving Tuesday this year.
Psaki remarked that Donald Trump must have been “so disgusted” by the witness testimony transcripts released earlier this week.
Lake was among the most vocal 2022 Republicans promoting former President Donald Trump’s election lies, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign.
When the Republican leader called the omnibus bill “one of the most shameful acts” he’s seen in the House, Pelosi asked if he was forgetting something.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) is among the scores of House Republicans who have criticized the $1.7 trillion package.
This story contains major spoilers for the film Avatar: The Way of Water.Avatar: The Way of Water, like any good world-building sequel, introduces a deluge of new elements to its extraterrestrial setting of Pandora. There are different locations to visit, such as the home of the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling clan. There are strange species to meet, such as the whalelike tulkun.
Photographs by Acacia JohnsonStephen Payton has spent a lot of time planning for disaster. The environmental program coordinator for the Seldovia Village Tribe in Southcentral Alaska and a board member of the Seldovia Oil Spill Response Team, he’s helped organize countless drills with volunteers, preparing to respond to an oil spill in nearby Cook Inlet. Over and over, he’s practiced setting out containment booms, floating barriers designed to slow the spread of slicks.
My first true Christmas in France, 12 years ago, almost didn’t happen. The day before flying to meet my fiancée in Paris, I’d gone to a Walgreens near my parents’ house in central New Jersey to get a flu shot. Though I trust the science, and had been assured this was impossible, within 24 hours of getting jabbed I was convulsing on my mother’s couch with one of the severest fevers and respiratory infections I had ever experienced.
A baby born in 2021 can expect to live 76.4 years, down from 78.8 in 2019.
With Republicans taking the House majority next year, progressives had framed the bill as a critical opportunity.
The Congressional Budget Office assumes the public health emergency for Covid will expire in July — barring another extension by the Biden administration.
More than 50 Democratic and Republican elected officials, campaign aides and consultants took POLITICO inside the first campaign after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.
Even with last month’s further easing of inflation, the Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates.
Inflation has cooled only slightly and job growth remains strong.
A new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll suggests voters’ views of the economy are baked in.
Housing investment, though, plunged at a 26 percent annual pace, hammered by surging mortgage rates.
We speak with Fordham University political science professor Christina Greer and theologian Cornel West about the January 6 committee’s recommendation that former President Donald Trump and his allies be criminally charged for their role in the insurrection and attempts to overturn the 2020 election. “Just because it’s unprecedented doesn’t mean that we can’t have prosecutions,” says Greer.
“This sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” Trump laughed in the Oval Office while talking to Powell on the phone, according to testimony.
Independent and swing voters have been turned off by Trump’s presentation of Republicans as “nasty and tended toward chaos,” McConnell said.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently said that if she’d planned the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, “we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.” Greene went on to make clear that she was talking specifically about guns, but let’s check out what she considers to have been an inadequately armed mob, because the Jan. 6 committee has some details on that.
It took way too much yapping from Republicans, plus a vote on a motion to adjourn from Republican Rep. Chip Roy trying to take up extra time, before the House was able to vote on the omnibus bill to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to win over the extremists he needs to get elected speaker in January, spewing out a series of far-right talking points that, in many cases, had little connection to the bill up for a vote.
UPDATE: Friday, Dec 23, 2022 · 9:33:32 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
This is what they are doing now to Kharkiv – a city that they totally believed was part of the “Russian world”. What will they do to the OTHERS?? pic.twitter.
A Chick-fil-A in North Carolina was busted by the Department of Labor (DOL) this week after a federal investigation uncovered that the franchisee was using underage workers and paying others in food vouchers. The store was fined $6,450, the DOL announced.
If you had any thought that the insurrection that we all saw unfold on Jan. 6 might have just been a one-day affair—rather than the ongoing attack on American democracy that it in fact has become—you just needed to see Steve Bannon wrapping up this week’s eliminationism-themed “America Fest 2022” put on by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA outfit in Phoenix.
He wanted thousands of National Guard troops to shield him and supporters from any imagined “threat from left-wing counterprotesters,” according to testimony.
U.S. military forces around the world will no longer be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.This year, the state of Alabama botched three consecutive executions by lethal injection: One man died after three hours of apparent torture, while two others lived. “The state’s incompetence,” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last month, is “a civil-rights crisis.