That is an version of The Atlantic Every day, a publication that guides you thru the most important tales of the day, helps you uncover new concepts, and recommends one of the best in tradition. Join it right here.
Learn how to describe this 12 months … Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Sure, and: The Katie Miller Podcast.
If you happen to’re questioning who Katie Miller is and why high-level officers hold happening her podcast: She made a reputation for herself throughout the first Trump administration by denying that the Division of Homeland Safety was separating households. This 12 months, she was an adviser to the Division of Authorities Effectivity, a superb effort that didn’t actually get monetary savings however actually did destroy plenty of items and companies! She can also be Stephen Miller’s spouse. Sure, that Stephen Miller—the architect of the administration’s immigration coverage, an train in wanton cruelty that has demanded 3,000 arrests of undocumented immigrants each day and has taken a wrecking ball to 1000’s of lives.
Since August, Katie has hosted a soft-focus podcast through which she interviews administration-adjacent figures and individuals who I assume have to be, by some definition, celebrities? (A big potted plant is there additionally.) On the finish of virtually each episode, she poses the query: “If you happen to may host a cocktail party with three individuals, lifeless or alive, who’s on the desk, and what are you consuming?” Up to now, the friends, and their various solutions, have supplied what I believe is the proper encapsulation of this very unusual 12 months. Overlook your high 10 films and high 11 information tales—“The Prime 10 Dream Dinners Hosted by Friends on The Katie Miller Podcast” is the year-end rating that 2025 deserves.
I’ve taken the freedom of organizing these dinners into a listing, from most to least prone to go effectively. Let’s start.
10. Kellyanne Conway, media commentator and President Donald Trump’s former adviser
Friends: Jesus, her grandmother
That is Jesus’s first cameo at considered one of these dinners! It is not going to be his final. Kellyanne Conway has loads to ask him, and she or he anticipates that he would even have loads to ask her. (Talking of individuals attempting to go on to the Roman-Catholic supply, we received a brand new Chicago-style pope this 12 months! Word that he’s not invited to this dinner.) That is the primary episode to introduce what’s going to turn out to be a persistent drawback: the talk over whether or not Jesus counts as a dinner visitor who’s lifeless or alive. Theologically this can be a wealthy query, I really feel! I’m Episcopalian, although.
9. Kash Patel, FBI director/influencer
Friends: the complete Miracle on Ice males’s hockey group from 1980
“Who’re you?” I image the lads’s hockey group asking. “I’m Kash Patel, kids’s-book writer and director of the FBI,” Kash Patel responds, by means of a mouthful of chicken-parm hero sandwich (his meal of alternative). “Just lately I’ve been within the information as a result of the FBI retains detaining the flawed individuals of curiosity in high-profile circumstances, and I hold making brokers present safety to my country-singer girlfriend.” I really feel that the dialog would path off shortly after this level.
8. Cheryl Hines, actor and spouse of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Friends: Her grandmother Ruth, Carol Burnett, and Maya Angelou
I’m arriving on the principle that in case your grandma goes to your imaginary dinner, it ought to simply be all household. I’d like to have my grandma at such an occasion, however I believe if Carol Burnett had been additionally on the dinner, she would possibly clam up.
In case you’re questioning why Cheryl Hines is getting interviewed—her husband is the present well being secretary, who’s diligently working to reintroduce the measles virus to its authentic habitat (inside of individuals’s respiratory techniques), the place it had been hunted nearly to extinction. It’s uncommon to have a measles conservationist on this form of place, however that’s the Trump administration for you: attempting issues which have by no means been tried earlier than. What if the conspiracy theorists had been contained in the FBI as a substitute of outdoor it? What if we didn’t have an East Wing?
7. Adena Friedman, Nasdaq president and CEO
Friends: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the astronaut Sally Journey
I’m getting anxious concerning the inventory market! It saved going up this 12 months, largely as a result of we hold spending extra on AI in hopes that this certainly-not-bubble will elevate all boats and ultimately lead to income. The architects of AI even received to be Time journal’s Particular person(s) of the Yr. STOP PUTTING AI INTO ALL OF MY THINGS! I don’t need it there. It’s just like the letter u that British individuals are all the time dropping into phrases: It provides nothing and leaves me unsettled.
Friedman’s dinner options three “trailblazers” who can be consuming a Thanksgiving dinner. She stated these is likely to be very totally different conversations, however I can truly see this meal going effectively! So long as they don’t focus on the inventory market—having led the nation by means of the Nice Melancholy, FDR would possibly convey up some questions that would kill the temper.
6. J. D. Vance, vice chairman
Friends: Isaac Newton, Donald Trump, and Abraham Lincoln (a well-liked choose)
On condition that Trump described Abraham Lincoln as somebody who “did one thing that was an important factor to do, and particularly at the moment,” I believe it’s probably that Trump doesn’t know who Abraham Lincoln is or what he did, and the opportunity of a cocktail party the place Trump is compelled to disclose this in actual time is intriguing to me. My sense is that he would attempt to convey up that his uncle was a professor at MIT after which praise Lincoln on his peak. He is likely to be disillusioned to listen to that Lincoln spent a lot time combating towards the Confederacy. I don’t know what Isaac Newton would do; possibly drop an apple.
Together with Trump on this dinner when that seat may go to actually any human being dwelling or lifeless is the type of pandering we have now come to count on from the vice chairman, whose different 2025 highlights embrace complaining to Europe concerning the “enemy inside,” being one of many final to see Pope Francis alive, and suggesting that he hopes his Hindu spouse will awaken to Jesus someday.
5. Jillian Michaels, health influencer
Friends: Maya Angelou (once more!), Albert Einstein, and Ozzy Osbourne
This one will get factors subtracted for the menu, which is: French fries, crimson wine, peanut butter, scorching sauce, and ice cream—I’ve to imagine not collectively, however Michaels did say that this was all that they would want, so, who is aware of! “What’s The Largest Loser’s coach doing on this podcast?” you ask. This 12 months, she got here out swinging in protection of Trump’s directive to the Smithsonian to say nicer issues about America and cease harping on about slavery. “Do you understand that solely lower than 2 p.c of white Individuals owned slaves? You understand that slavery is 1000’s of years previous?” she stated on a CNN panel. “I’m stunned that you just’re attempting to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery,” the CNN host Abby Phillip responded. Have enjoyable at your dinner with Maya Angelou, Jillian.
4. Mike Johnson, speaker of the Home
Friends: Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington
Mike Johnson calls this dinner “very American-centric,” which raises some questions for me. Did I miss essential info within the Bible about Jesus’s nationality, or, conversely, essential details about the institution of faith within the Structure? Will Jesus convey a translator with him? In Johnson’s episode, he sounds burdened, as he must be—he’s had a busy 12 months: passing the One Massive Stunning Invoice Act and as few different payments as potential, shutting the federal government down, and blocking after which reluctantly permitting the discharge of the Epstein information. An bold transient for anybody! And that’s not all that he has to fret about: In the midst of this interview, he agreed that his mind (and, maybe, the brains of all males?) was like a waffle.
3. Pete Hegseth, protection secretary
Friends: Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vladimir Putin
When he hasn’t been ordering the extrajudicial killings of individuals in boats or kicking the press out of the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has spent most of 2025 lecturing individuals who have higher issues to do about how a lot he hates beards. I’m wondering if he’ll have the ability to restrain himself from doing so at this dinner. (Then once more, the Ukrainian president is used to being lectured on his look in lieu of any progress on the warfare engulfing his nation.) Realizing Vladimir Putin, he could skip the dinner solely, forcing Trump and Hegseth to pursue him down the tarmac to his airplane, with their steak (well-done) and Thousand Island dressing in hand. (That’s the menu Hegseth picked. “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable,” as Oscar Wilde put it.)
2. Elon Musk, CEO of too many corporations to call, former DOGE honcho
Friends: William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin
Elon Musk imagines that his friends would take pleasure in an epic 12-course meal of in all probability not cheeseburgers, however possibly little, tiny cheeseburgers, which by no means style pretty much as good as the large ones, but when somebody actually tried, they may very well be made to. (He riffed, if that’s the phrase I would like, on this cheeseburger query for what felt like ages.) Having to listen to from Musk and be topic to his whims has been, sadly, a function of 2025. His DOGE efforts are why we don’t have USAID any extra—leading to an estimated lots of of 1000’s of preventable deaths, offering him with a brand new first line in his obituary, and forcing Tesla homeowners to purchase a bit disclaimer bumper sticker for his or her automotive.
I’ve put this dinner fairly excessive on the listing as a result of I believe that if Nikola Tesla had the entire Musk scenario correctly defined to him, fisticuffs would nearly actually ensue. The concept of Tesla and Musk combating one another over tiny cheeseburgers whereas William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on … to me, this is a perfect occasion.
1. Katie Miller, podcast host extraordinaire
Friends: Queen Victoria and ???
So far as I can inform, we by no means hear who’s becoming a member of past the “Grandmother of Europe.” Katie Miller begins to inform Senator Katie Britt about her personal dinner picks and by no means finishes! Tantalizingly incomplete. Who would the opposite friends be? Maybe Stephen Miller, who, allegedly, “solely eats mayonnaise.” (“With french fries, or, like, interval?” J. D. Vance requested throughout his episode. “Interval,” Miller stated, later elaborating: “It’s no matter.”) The one dinner worse than one the place Elon Musk fights Nikola Tesla whereas William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on is one the place Katie Miller and Queen Victoria attempt to stick with it a dialog whereas Stephen Miller sits silently subsequent to them, consuming mayonnaise.
Associated:
Night Learn
The New Household Trip
By Michael Waters
The subsequent time you’re on the airport or checking right into a resort, you would possibly discover a touring group that appears, no less than at first look, a bit unwieldy: younger children, their mother and father, and their grandparents, all vacationing collectively no matter age or mobility limits.
A scene like this might have been uncommon a couple of a long time in the past, in keeping with Susan Rugh, a historical past professor at Brigham Younger College who wrote concerning the historical past of household journey in her e-book Are We There But?: The Golden Age of American Household Holidays. The traditional Twentieth-century household trip was usually a nuclear one, comprising a mother, a dad, and their younger children. Grandparents and different family members seldom got here alongside. However an increasing number of, analysis reveals, households have a tendency to convey a number of generations with them. This, in flip, has modified individuals’s most well-liked journey locations, and even the very goal of journey: Multigenerational teams are more likely to take easy, relaxed seashore holidays than to embark on logistics-heavy metropolis visits or street journeys.
Tradition Break
Learn. In 2023, Ilana Masad advisable six books to learn throughout a nerve-racking household vacation.
Discover. Many grocery-store self-checkout strains are actually longer than the staffed ones. Valerie Trapp explores the one line that Individuals (weirdly) select to attend in.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this article.
Discover all of our newsletters right here.
While you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this publication, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
