Awe-some Sauce, Weekend Whats
Let’s take a break from the daily awful and focus instead on the awe-full. Dana Milbank went looking for some awe and wonder on the walls of the National Art Museum. It turns out that’s not a bad place to start. “New research out of King’s College London gauged people’s physiological responses while they viewed works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for 20 minutes. The study, now in preprint, found that participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol dropped by 22 percent on average, while markers of inflammation dropped even more sharply and heart rhythms indicated greater relaxation.” (I’m guessing that those results have almost as much to do with what you’re not looking at as what you are; it’s a distinction between experiencing the power of wonder and looking at your phone and wondering what the hell is happening.) Whether art is your awe-seeking drug of choice or not, there are probably some lessons here that we can all use over the holiday season. WaPo (Gift Article): Feeling wonder every day improves our health. Here’s how to do it. “In the days after my visit, I found myself pausing to marvel at things I often take for granted: A Christmas fern poking through the snow, the intricate forms of lichens on a tree, a sweet birch clinging to a rocky hillside, the pink and orange in a winter sunset, the power of a house-rattling windstorm. The more you seek awe, the more you find it.” (By opening about 75 news tabs a day, I’m probably looking for wonder in all the wrong places. But as long as I can keep digging up some examples, I’ll try to combine our daily series of unfortunate events with the occasional splash of awe-some sauce.)
Reddit Credit
Ending an incredibly stressful week in Providence, the Brown shooting suspect killed himself after being cornered by authorities (with a lot of help from citizens). The break came when the shooter was linked to another crime. CNN: How investigators zeroed in on the Brown University shooting suspect and linked him to the killing of an MIT professor.
+ NYT (Gift Article): A Reddit Post Led to a Breakthrough in the Brown Shooting Investigation. “Three days after the deadly shooting at Brown University, officers received an anonymous tip that stuck out from a flood of information. It directed the authorities to a post on Reddit. ‘I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,’ the Reddit user posted, according to an affidavit filed by the police in Providence, R.I. That tip would later lead to a breakthrough not only in the search for the campus attacker but also the hunt for the suspect in the murder of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also ended the dayslong manhunt that had put both the Brown and M.I.T. communities on edge.”
+ NPR: Trump suspends U.S. green card lottery after Brown University and MIT shootings. “Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals.”
This is Just How They Roll
“When Carlos Gomez’s recent flight from Guadalajara was delayed, he asked a gate attendant why. It wasn’t weather or crew shortages. There were 25 wheelchair passengers holding up boarding. There were no such delays when Gomez’s flight landed. Most of the same passengers stood up without assistance and bounded off toward the baggage claim.” WSJ (Gift Article) on a seemingly viral travel hack you might witness during your holiday journeys, as some of your fellow travelers are using wheelchairs to board a little quicker. They Get Wheeled on Flights and Miraculously Walk Off. Praise ‘Jetway Jesus.’
Weekend Whats
What to Movie: One Battle After Another is now available to watch on HBO. It’s nearly three hours of pretty heavy duty and quite entertaining action, and seems to be the best picture frontrunner at this point.
+ What to Doc: “In 1975, an era of social and political upheaval inspires a wave of groundbreaking movies from Oscar winner Morgan Neville.” This is both a documentary and a pretty good list of movies to binge over the holidays. Breakdown 1975 is on Netflix. (Breakdown 1975 is also how I describe the era when my fourth grade girlfriend dumped me. It’s worth noting that the guy she chose over me doesn’t have anything close to my subscriber numbers.)
+ What to Book: No one is a better book picker than my wife, Gina. If you’re looking for some holiday reads, her What List Bookshelf is the right place to start.
Extra, Extra
The Exed Files: You better sit down for this one. I don’t want to shock you. US legislators say the Justice Department is violating the law by not releasing all Epstein files. (They’ll release the files that make others look bad…)
+ Own Goal: “The TikTok sale is officially happening, with a consortium of American investors set to take over U.S. operations of the video platform next month on Jan. 22, 2026.” (This will likely do more to enrich the new investors than to protect American interests. The key thing to watch is whether the algorithm gets tweaked to be more supportive of a certain someone’s politics.)
+ Cheap Shots: “Cheap drones have changed combat as we know it.” And nowhere is that more obvious than on the front lines in Ukraine. NYT (Gift Article): What It Takes to Pilot a War Drone.
+ The Latest Things Consumers Imagined: “Americans are heading into the holidays feeling worse about jobs and inflation than they did this time last year, with consumer sentiment hovering near record lows.” (Hoax!)
+ Cutting Ties With Yourself: This is a headline that perfectly captures our craven age. Zuckerberg Cut Ties With Pro-Immigration Organization He Founded.
+ Defaced Property: Laws (and decency) be damned: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington donned a new name — the Trump-Kennedy Center — on the exterior of the building Friday.” (We’re going to spend the rest of our lives pounding the delete button…)
Feel Good Friday
“Mr. Dalton and Mr. May work 24-hour shifts (yes, you can knock on their trailer door in the middle of the night) selling trees for $30 to $500. Although they say the money is good — around $5,000 to $10,000 for the season, depending on the area and foot traffic — they aren’t out there just for the cash.” NYT (Gift Article): Up All Night in New York, Selling Christmas Trees.
+ AP: Behind the scenes of Saves 78-Year-Old Man’s Life After He Stopped Showing Up for His Daily Dinners at Local Restaurant.
+ Seven feel-good science stories to restore your faith in 2025. Yes, science and feeling good are both still legal!
+ GPS collars on cattle are letting ranchers remove fences in the West. That’s good for wildlife and for the land. Wyoming Cowboys Are Breaking Down Barriers, Literally.
+ Jelly Roll Receives Full Pardon in Tennessee for Past Crimes.
+ “Yes, There’s a Parallel Parking Championship, and I Was a Contender.”
+ A fun rundown of some of the year’s notable book covers.
