\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
How to describe this year \u2026 Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Yes, and: The Katie Miller Podcast.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re wondering who Katie Miller is and why high-level officials keep going on her podcast: She made a name for herself during the first Trump administration by denying that the Department of Homeland Security was separating families. This year, she was an adviser to the Department of Government Efficiency, a brilliant effort that did not in fact save money but certainly did destroy a lot of goods and services! She is also Stephen Miller\u2019s wife. Yes, that Stephen Miller\u2014the architect of the administration\u2019s immigration policy, an exercise in wanton cruelty that has demanded 3,000 arrests of undocumented immigrants daily and has taken a wrecking ball to thousands of lives.<\/p>\n
Since August, Katie has hosted a soft-focus podcast in which she interviews administration-adjacent figures and people who I guess must be, by some definition, celebrities? (A large potted plant is there also.) At the end of almost every episode, she poses the question: \u201cIf you could host a dinner party with three people, dead or alive, who\u2019s at the table, and what are you eating?\u201d So far, the guests, and their varied answers, have offered what I think is the perfect encapsulation of this very strange year. Forget your top 10 movies and top 11 news stories\u2014\u201cThe Top 10 Dream Dinners Hosted by Guests on The Katie Miller Podcast\u201d is the year-end ranking that 2025 deserves.<\/p>\n
I have taken the liberty of organizing these dinners into a list, from most to least likely to go well. Let\u2019s begin.<\/p>\n
10. Kellyanne Conway, media commentator and President Donald Trump\u2019s former adviser<\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: Jesus, her grandmother<\/em><\/p>\n This is Jesus\u2019s first cameo at one of these dinners! It will not be his last. Kellyanne Conway has a lot to ask him, and she anticipates that he would also have a lot to ask her. (Speaking of people trying to go directly to the Roman-Catholic source, we got a new Chicago-style pope this year! Note that he is not invited to this dinner.) This is the first episode to introduce what will become a persistent problem: the debate over whether Jesus counts as a dinner guest who\u2019s dead or alive. Theologically this is a rich question, I feel! I am Episcopalian, though.<\/p>\n 9. Kash Patel, FBI director\/influencer<\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: the entire Miracle on Ice men\u2019s hockey team from 1980<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWho are you?\u201d I picture the men\u2019s hockey team asking. \u201cI\u2019m Kash Patel, children\u2019s-book author and director of the FBI,\u201d Kash Patel responds, through a mouthful of chicken-parm hero sandwich (his meal of choice). \u201cRecently I\u2019ve been in the news because the FBI keeps detaining the wrong people of interest in high-profile cases, and I keep making agents provide security to my country-singer girlfriend.\u201d I feel that the conversation would trail off quickly after this point.<\/p>\n 8. Cheryl Hines, actor and wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: Her grandmother Ruth, Carol Burnett, and Maya Angelou<\/em><\/p>\n I am arriving at the theory that if your grandma is going to your imaginary dinner, it should just be all family. I\u2019d love to have my grandma at such an event, but I think if Carol Burnett were also at the dinner, she might clam up.<\/p>\n In case you\u2019re wondering why Cheryl Hines is getting interviewed\u2014her husband is the current health secretary, who is diligently working to reintroduce the measles virus to its original habitat (inside of people\u2019s respiratory systems), where it had been hunted almost to extinction. It is rare to have a measles conservationist in this sort of position, but that\u2019s the Trump administration for you: trying things that have never been tried before. What if the conspiracy theorists were inside the FBI instead of outside it? What if we didn\u2019t have an East Wing?<\/p>\n 7. Adena Friedman, Nasdaq president and CEO<\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the astronaut Sally Ride<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m getting worried about the stock market! It kept going up this year, largely because we keep spending more on AI in hopes that this certainly-not-bubble will lift all boats and eventually result in profits. The architects of AI even got to be Time magazine\u2019s Person(s) of the Year. STOP PUTTING AI INTO ALL OF MY THINGS! I don\u2019t want it there. It\u2019s like the letter u that British people are always dropping into words: It adds nothing and leaves me unsettled.<\/p>\n Friedman\u2019s dinner features three \u201ctrailblazers\u201d who would be eating a Thanksgiving dinner. She said these might be very different conversations, but I can actually see this meal going well! As long as they don\u2019t discuss the stock market\u2014having led the country through the Great Depression, FDR might bring up some questions that could kill the mood.<\/p>\n 6. J. D. Vance, vice president<\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: Isaac Newton, Donald Trump, and Abraham Lincoln (a popular pick)<\/em><\/p>\n Given that Trump described Abraham Lincoln as someone who \u201cdid something that was a very important thing to do, and especially at that time,\u201d I think it is likely that Trump does not know who Abraham Lincoln is or what he did, and the possibility of a dinner party where Trump is forced to reveal this in real time is intriguing to me. My sense is that he would try to bring up that his uncle was a professor at MIT and then compliment Lincoln on his height. He might be disappointed to hear that Lincoln spent so much time fighting against the Confederacy. I don\u2019t know what Isaac Newton would do; maybe drop an apple.<\/p>\n Including Trump in this dinner when that seat could go to literally any human being living or dead is the kind of pandering we have come to expect from the vice president, whose other 2025 highlights include complaining to Europe about the \u201cenemy within,\u201d being one of the last to see Pope Francis alive, and suggesting that he hopes his Hindu wife will awaken to Jesus one day.<\/p>\n 5. Jillian Michaels, fitness influencer <\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: Maya Angelou (again!), Albert Einstein, and Ozzy Osbourne<\/em><\/p>\n This one gets points subtracted for the menu, which is: French fries, red wine, peanut butter, hot sauce, and ice cream\u2014I have to assume not together, but Michaels did say that this was all that they would need, so, who knows! \u201cWhat is The Biggest Loser\u2019s trainer doing on this podcast?\u201d you ask. This year, she came out swinging in defense of Trump\u2019s directive to the Smithsonian to say nicer things about America and stop harping on about slavery. \u201c\u200b\u200bDo you realize that only less than 2 percent of white Americans owned slaves? You realize that slavery is thousands of years old?\u201d she said on a CNN panel. \u201cI\u2019m surprised that you\u2019re trying to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery,\u201d the CNN host Abby Phillip responded. Have fun at your dinner with Maya Angelou, Jillian.<\/p>\n 4. Mike Johnson, speaker of the House<\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington<\/em><\/p>\n Mike Johnson calls this dinner \u201cvery American-centric,\u201d which raises some questions for me. Did I miss important information in the Bible about Jesus\u2019s nationality, or, conversely, important information about the establishment of religion in the Constitution? Will Jesus bring a translator with him? In Johnson\u2019s episode, he sounds stressed, as he should be\u2014he\u2019s had a busy year: passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and as few other bills as possible, shutting the government down, and blocking and then reluctantly allowing the release of the Epstein files. An ambitious brief for anyone! And that\u2019s not all that he has to worry about: In the course of this interview, he agreed that his brain (and, perhaps, the brains of all men?) was like a waffle.<\/p>\n 3. Pete Hegseth, defense secretary <\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vladimir Putin<\/em><\/p>\n When he hasn\u2019t been ordering the extrajudicial killings of people in boats or kicking the press out of the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has spent most of 2025 lecturing people who have better things to do about how much he hates beards. I wonder if he will be able to restrain himself from doing so at this dinner. (Then again, the Ukrainian president is used to being lectured on his appearance in lieu of any progress on the war engulfing his country.) Knowing Vladimir Putin, he may skip the dinner entirely, forcing Trump and Hegseth to pursue him down the tarmac to his plane, with their steak (well-done) and Thousand Island dressing in hand. (That\u2019s the menu Hegseth picked. \u201cThe unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable,\u201d as Oscar Wilde put it.)<\/p>\n 2. Elon Musk, CEO of too many companies to name, former DOGE honcho<\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin<\/em><\/p>\n Elon Musk imagines that his guests would enjoy an epic 12-course meal of probably not cheeseburgers, but maybe little, tiny cheeseburgers, which never taste as good as the big ones, but if someone really tried, they could be made to. (He riffed, if that is the word I want, on this cheeseburger question for what felt like ages.) Having to hear from Musk and be subject to his whims has been, unfortunately, a feature of 2025. His DOGE efforts are why we don\u2019t have USAID any more\u2014resulting in an estimated hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, providing him with a new first line in his obituary, and forcing Tesla owners to buy a little disclaimer bumper sticker for their car.<\/p>\n I have put this dinner pretty high on the list because I think that if Nikola Tesla had the whole Musk situation properly explained to him, fisticuffs would almost certainly ensue. The idea of Tesla and Musk fighting each other over tiny cheeseburgers while William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on \u2026 to me, this is an ideal party.<\/p>\n 1. Katie Miller, podcast host extraordinaire<\/strong><\/p>\n Guests: Queen Victoria and ???<\/em><\/p>\n As far as I can tell, we never hear who is joining beyond the \u201cGrandmother of Europe.\u201d Katie Miller starts to tell Senator Katie Britt about her own dinner picks and never finishes! Tantalizingly incomplete. Who would the other guests be? Perhaps Stephen Miller, who, allegedly, \u201conly eats mayonnaise.\u201d (\u201cWith french fries, or, like, period?\u201d J. D. Vance asked during his episode. \u201cPeriod,\u201d Miller said, later elaborating: \u201cIt\u2019s whatever.\u201d) The only dinner worse than one where Elon Musk fights Nikola Tesla while William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on is one where Katie Miller and Queen Victoria try to carry on a conversation while Stephen Miller sits silently next to them, eating mayonnaise.<\/p>\n Related:<\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.<\/p>\n The New Family Vacation<\/p>\n By Michael Waters<\/p>\n The next time you\u2019re at the airport or checking into a hotel, you might notice a traveling group that looks, at least at first glance, a little unwieldy: young kids, their parents, and their grandparents, all vacationing together regardless of age or mobility limits.<\/p>\n A scene like this would have been rare a few decades ago, according to Susan Rugh, a history professor at Brigham Young University who wrote about the history of family travel in her book Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations. The classic 20th-century family vacation was typically a nuclear one, comprising a mom, a dad, and their young kids. Grandparents and other relatives seldom came along. But more and more, research shows, families tend to bring multiple generations with them. This, in turn, has changed people\u2019s preferred travel destinations, and even the very purpose of travel: Multigenerational groups are much more likely to take simple, relaxed beach vacations than to embark on logistics-heavy city visits or road trips.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Photo-illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.<\/p>\n Read. In 2023, Ilana Masad recommended six books to read during a stressful family holiday.<\/p>\n Explore. Many grocery-store self-checkout lines are now longer than the staffed ones. Valerie Trapp explores the one line that Americans (weirdly) choose to wait in.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. How to describe this year \u2026 Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Yes, and: The Katie Miller Podcast. 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