This article was updated on December 31 at 6:15pm.
The cast of Saturday Night Live has said lots of things over the course of the show’s 50-year history that have drawn wild cheers from its audience. But two Saturdays ago may have been the first time the person drawing shrieks of delight had been arrested for a cold-blooded assassination.
The spontaneous ovation was for Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged in the December 4 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

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From a young age, I respected the Croc. But somewhere along the way, I got the message that my favorite orange clogs were not chic, and I moved on.
Then, something remarkable happened. After years of being periodically trendy, comfy shoes took off during the early pandemic.

I could have been a tech entrepreneur, but my parents let me go to sleepovers. I could have been a billionaire, but I used to watch Saturday-morning cartoons. I could have been Vivek Ramaswamy, if not for the ways I’ve been corrupted by the mediocrity of American culture. I’m sad when I contemplate my lazy, pathetic, non-Ramaswamy life.
These ruminations were triggered by a statement that Ramaswamy, the noted cultural critic, made on X on Thursday.

Elon Musk spent Christmas Day online, in the thick of a particularly venomous culture war, one that would lead him to later make the un-Christmas-like demand of his critics to “take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face.”
Donald Trump had ignited this war by appointing the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan to be his senior AI-policy adviser.

As long as people have been able to dress in color, we’ve been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow’s worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color.

Richard Tikey builds coke-oven doors for U.S. Steel. He’s a union guy, through and through: He’s been a union member for 26 years, and is now the vice president of his local, the United Steelworkers 1557 in Clairton, Pennsylvania. He has spent much of his adult life voting for Democrats.
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden lobbied hard for votes like Tikey’s. The Biden administration increased tariffs on foreign steel and spent hundreds of billions on heavy infrastructure.