A 2025 Ranking You Won’t Read Anywhere Else

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 … Slop? Rage-baiting ? Pantone white ? Yes, and: The Katie Miller Podcast . If you’re 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’s wife. Yes, that Stephen Miller—the architect of the administration’s 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. 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: “If you could host a dinner party with three people, dead or alive, who’s at the table, and what are you eating?” 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—“The Top 10 Dream Dinners Hosted by Guests on The Katie Miller Podcast ” is the year-end ranking that 2025 deserves. I have taken the liberty of organizing these dinners into a list, from most to least likely to go well. Let’s begin. 10. Kellyanne Conway, media commentator and President Donald Trump’s former adviser Guests: Jesus, her grandmother This is Jesus’s 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’s dead or alive. Theologically this is a rich question, I feel! I am Episcopalian, though. 9. Kash Patel, FBI director/influencer Guests: the entire Miracle on Ice men’s hockey team from 1980 “Who are you?” I picture the men’s hockey team asking. “I’m Kash Patel, children’s-book author and director of the FBI,” Kash Patel responds, through a mouthful of chicken-parm hero sandwich (his meal of choice). “Recently I’ve been in the news because the FBI keeps detaining the wrong people of interest in high-profile cases, and I keep making agents provide...

Preview: ~500 words