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Some people view reading as though it’s homework, making a list of the books they intend to get through in a given month or year. But perhaps a better approach is to view reading as a mental workout.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.
Mike Johnson keeps the speaker’s gavel after Donald Trump persuades holdouts to switch their vote. And we are days away from Kamala Harris presiding over the certification of Trump’s win.

The dinner was to be at Galina’s apartment, in the East 70s. She had been watching a lot of Visconti and wanted to re-create the salons and dinners of The Innocent, Ludwig, and Death in Venice.
For approximately a decade, her husband, Igor, had been dying from a series of treatable cancers in nonessential tissues. “Dying is so boring after a while,” he said. In the spring, his doctors had told them that nothing more could be done and the time had come to transition to hospice care.

Freedom is a word that turns up with embarrassing frequency in rock-and-roll songs. How we love to free-associate about freedom. On occasion, we’re good for a “Chimes of Freedom” (at least Bob Dylan is), but if we’re honest, the freedom musicians are most interested in is our own.

Donald Trump wasted little time after the election in claiming an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” and floating a series of extreme proposals with varying degrees of legal dubiousness. The president-elect has already winkingly suggested that he might stay in office for an unconstitutional third term, indicated that he intends to end the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and said that he plans to deport U.S. citizens.