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Updated at 4:22 p.m. ET on December 19, 2024.
Low winter sun casts slanted light, a specific hue that’s at once happy and sad—highly fitting for this time of year. Nearly every city-dweller I know clings to the fleeting moments of gratifying glow during the final dark days of the calendar.

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Last month, Rose Horowitch wrote the article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” which sparked a lot of debate. Professors told Horowitch that their students felt overwhelmed at the thought of finishing a single novel, much less 20, so they’ve begun to drastically shrink their assignments.

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My father-in-law, with whom I was very close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody civil war taking place literally in front of his house. His family experienced a lot of suffering. Some died; others spent years in jail or were forced into exile.

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A few months ago, a men’s suit jacket appeared on my doorstep. What I had actually ordered was a pink dress. I emailed the retailer, and thus began a weeks-long back-and-forth involving photos of the jacket, photos of tags, and check-ins with customer-service representatives.

Now that the election is over, Donald Trump has returned to one of his most cherished pastimes: filing nuisance lawsuits. Abusing the legal system was a key precept of Trump’s decades-long career as a celebrity business tycoon, and he kept it up, out of habit or perhaps enjoyment, during his first term as president.
The newest round of litigation is different. Trump has broadened his targets to include not just reporters and commentators but pollsters.

Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of the Proud Boys, was extremely upset with me. He started listing things that I should feel (ashamed and terrible about myself) and that he wished would happen to me (trouble sleeping at night). “You should,” he told me gravely and slowly, as though he were about to give me some very important advice, “slit your wrists.”
The transgression I’d committed against him was being a journalist in his presence.

When the tanker ships come toward the tiny town of Cameron, Louisiana, Travis Dardar, a shrimp fisherman, can hear their wake coming before he sees it, he told me earlier this year. They’re there to pick up natural gas that’s been supercooled to a liquid state at a sprawling export facility, built atop hundreds of wetland acres in the past few years, and to transport that gas to ports in Europe and Asia.