The latest contributor to our series recommends a song to get your New Year’s resolution on its feet:
I don’t know how weird this is, but one of my favs for workouts is Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia.” It’s got a great beat and a relentless momentum that just builds and builds and keeps me moving.
Update from another reader:
In my humble opinion, no mention of Knights is complete without a link to Muse’s amazing performance at Wembley in 2007.
A long-time reader looks back at an old studio session for the new year:
J.J. Cale and a kick-ass band do “After Midnight.” For after the ball drops.
A reader responds to Adrienne’s bleg with some German electronic:
“Exterminate, Annihilate, Destroy” by Rotersand is probably the weirdest song on my running playlist. It’s damn effective, because it has the pace of a march sped up for the purposes of being an EBM [electronic body music] track. It also samples Dr. Who for the duration. So it’s an EBM Dalek march, but it’s wonderful.
More recommendations from readers here and here. Send yours to [email protected].
A reader joins this one:
M83’s “Oblivion” is my weirdest, greatest pick for your running playlist. It’s from a science fiction movie of the same name that didn’t do very well critically or at the box office, but the track makes up for all of that. There’s M83 creating these immense walls of sound while Susanne Sundfør’s vocals crash against massive drums and a swelling orchestral accompaniment. As it ends, it suddenly vanishes into a tranquil piano outro.
A reader starts off our series of the “weirdest, greatest” songs to run to:
I start my run to “O… Saya” from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack (A R Rahman feat. MIA). It starts slowly, not unlike my body at the beginning of a run. It builds intensity with Taiko drums, which reminds my legs that yes, running is a thing they do. The guitar starts, legs slightly warm, head up—yep, I can do this. By the time MIA starts singing about running, speed, and ninjas, I feel like I too could conquer Who Wants to Be A Millionaire—or at least feel smarter than the Fox News talking head on the screen on my treadmill (it’s there by default; I’m just too lazy to change the channel).
Have a running track to recommend for our New Year’s list? Drop us an email.
From a reader on the Christian Sabbath:
Your mentions of Thundercat reminded me of some music I’ve been blown away by this year. A tiny bit of context. I grew up in a midwestern Christian family, listening to dc Talk in the early ‘90s and thinking they were cool—before realizing they weren’t and then spending years cringing at the mention of “Christian hip-hop.” But this year, after resisting fiercely, I was shocked to learn that there actually is (for the first time) excellent music coming out in that genre. Two albums I want to mention:
When you said Thundercat, I thought of this record by KB—another one of Kendrick’s bassists appears on it. Check out tracks 1, 2, 3, 6 and 13 [embedded above]. Today I listened all the way through this record by J.Givens for at least the 20th time. From a lyrical standpoint it’s on par with what Lin-Manuel Miranda did with Hamilton, and in terms of production and album construction I put it on the same shelf as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. (It opens a little abruptly, but push through and by the second track it hooks you and the rest of the way through it’s a ride.)
Both of these artists wear their Christianity on their sleeve in every song, so they’re never going to get the play Kendrick does. But their music is phenomenal, and I think there are a lot of people who secretly yearn to see Christian hip-hop, as a genre, redeemed.
Have a track to recommend for the feature? Drop us an email. The archive is here.
A reader recommends one for the day:
I’m really enjoying the Christmas songs series and wanted to point you to John Gorka’s sublime take on “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” It, more than any version, I think, truly captures the power and feeling of the lyrics.
The song was originally a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a co-founder of The Atlantic and contributor. Here’s some backstory on the poem:
During the American Civil War, Longfellow’s oldest son Charles Appleton Longfellow joined the Union cause as a soldier without his father’s blessing. Longfellow was informed by a letter dated March 14, 1863, after Charles had left. “I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer,” he wrote. “I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good.”
Charles soon got an appointment as a lieutenant but, in November, he was severely wounded in the Battle of New Hope Church (in Virginia) during the Mine Run Campaign. Coupled with the recent loss of his wife Frances, who died as a result of an accidental fire, Longfellow was inspired to write “Christmas Bells.” He first wrote the poem on Christmas Day in 1863.
Every year for years, I’ve dreaded the arrival of Christmas music. How many times can you hear “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” in one month? One of the few exceptions was that WAPS, a local radio station in Akron, would always play the Kinks’ “Father Christmas.” Forget all the gushy mumbo-jumbo and crass commercialism—as befits the Kinks, it’s irreverent, witty, pissed-off Christmas music. Here’s the chorus:
Father Christmas, give us some money
Don’t mess around with those silly toys.
We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over
We want your bread so don’t make us annoyed
Give all the toys to the little rich boys
It’s a funny punch line, but I’ve always found this verse to be rather poignant:
But give my daddy a job ‘cause he needs one
He’s got lots of mouths to feed
But if you’ve got one, I’ll have a machine gun
So I can scare all the kids down the street
Economists have found that giving people cash is the most effective way of providing welfare to the poor.
A reader pivots off our year-end list:
Instead of listing my favorite song/album of the year, I thought I’d mention my favorite music video. Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment’s "Sunday Candy" is a joyous mini-musical with scene and costume changes, wonderful dancing and a “let’s put on a show” energy. Filmed in one continuous take, the rapping is by Chance the Rapper and the gospel inflected chorus is sung by Jamila Woods. It makes me smile every time I watch it and, really, what else do you need?
Working from Sophie’s great idea, we’ve been working through a sort of double-canon of Christmas music the last couple weeks—songs both secular and holy. But where there’s a canon, there must also be an anti-canon. And for me, the greatest song in the Christmas anti-canon will always be Big Star’s “Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ” comes comes from the great, underappreciated power-pop group’s shambling, incoherent, brilliant third record, (creatively titled) Third. It’s hard to say that anything really belongs on the album, but “Jesus Christ” sticks out in particular:
Why is there a Christmas song in the middle of a non-Christmas album? What does it mean? The track begins, for no clear, reason with the goofy tune “Mañana,” then grinds to a halt and pivots into the main song, announced by a jangly guitar riff and Jody Stephens’ thunderous drums. The lyrics are a strange mash-up of hymns (“Angels from the realms of glory/Stars shone bright above/Royal David's city/Was bathed in the light of love”) with a straightforward chorus: “Jesus Christ was born today, Jesus Christ was born.”
Was singer and songwriter Alex Chilton serious? Unlike his erstwhile bandmate Chris Bell, Chilton doesn’t seem to have been particularly religious. The rest of the record is full of other oddities: the tear-jerkingly earnest “Blue Moon”; “Thank You Friends,” almost Dylanesque in its spite; and misleading covers of “Nature Boy” and “Whole Lotta Shaking.” Chilton does a wry parody of a bandleader introducing the sax solo—“Now we’re gonna get born”—a suggestion of a sneer. But there’s so much sarcasm and so much aching sincerity across Big Star’s catalog that you have no idea whether to take a line like “And the wrong shall fail, and the right prevail” as mockery of Christian piety or a tribute to genuine faith.
I think that ambiguity makes the song—which, as Stewart Mason notes, has become a college-rock December staple. As both a wiseass and a believer, I like to listen to it all year, but it takes on particular meaning around Christmas.
Tis the season to drown in holiday music (check out our “12 Days of Christmas Songs” series), but legends must be paid respect. And the one true and pure Christmas carol is, of course, “Fa La La” by Justin Bieber featuring Boys II Men. This song is sacred and does not need defending, but for the non-believers:
In case you missed it, the staff put together three dozen of their favorite tracks from 2015. I especially dig David’s pick here:
This superb R&B track isn’t a cover of the Buddy Miles classic, though there’s a family resemblance—a locomotive funk, an infectious hook. But where Miles is ragged and rocked up, Thundercat’s is slinky, slow burning, restrained, wounded, and harmonically richer. The singer and bassist—he plays a six-string instrument, which he strums and plucks like a guitar, slaps and pops like Larry Graham, or uses to lay down a groove like Jaco Pastorius—is a collaborator of Kendrick Lamar and Kamasi Washington. When did jazz fusion get cool again?
Any song that definitely should have made the list? Drop us an email to make your case.
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
Modi styled himself a global leader but can’t seem to get ahead of events in the Middle East.
Pakistan is having a diplomatic moment, and India’s political elites are not enjoying it.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent the past decade promoting the notion that India is the leader of the global South and, as such, is indispensable to world affairs. Now a conflict in the Middle East has thrown the global economy, and, with it, India’s, into crisis. On top of that, Islamabad, not New Delhi, has hosted at least one round of talks between the United States and Iran and is preparing to mediate others, leaving the Indian government to ponder its irrelevance.
Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar first dismissed Pakistan’s role in the U.S.-Iran talks, using a pejorative Hindi word for a kind of unsavory middleman. But in Indian political circles, particularly after the April 8 cease-fire was announced, criticism has been trained on the Modi government. Jairam Ramesh, a spokesperson for the opposition Congress Party, wrote on X that Pakistan’s role was “a severe setback to both the substance and style of Mr. Modi’s highly personalised diplomacy.” Ramesh mocked the Indian prime minister for calling himself vishwaguru, meaning “teacher of the world.” Asaduddin Owaisi, the country’s most prominent Muslim politician, lamented that India would have been the natural venue for the U.S.-Iran talks, if not for the Modi government’s missteps.
The economist Adam Posen on the effect of the war in Iran on the world’s economy and the darkening economic outlook for the United States. Plus: A shifting partisan balance of power and Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, by Maureen Callahan.
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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of the likelihood that the partisan balance of power will shift from Republicans to Democrats at state-government level.
Then, David is joined by the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen, for a conversation about the state of the world’s economy. Frum and Posen discuss the economic effect of the war in Iran, the United States’ reputational hit caused by Trump’s tariffs, and the chance of global recession.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, by Maureen Callahan, and reflects on why reactions to the abuse of women by men in power seem to have become a partisan issue.
Patients are getting stuck in the emergency department for days while waiting for a spot in an inpatient ward.
In the last months, weeks, and days of his life, “I will not go to the emergency room” became my husband’s mantra. Andrej had esophageal cancer that had spread throughout his body (but not to his ever-willful brain), and, having trained as a doctor, I had jury-rigged a hospital at home, aided by specialists who got me pills to boost blood pressure; to dampen the effects of liver failure; to stem his cough; to help him swallow, wake up, fall asleep.
“I will not go to the emergency room”—emphasis on not—were his first words after passing out, having a seizure, or regurgitating the protein smoothies I made to pass his narrowed esophagus. He said it again and again, even as fluid built up in his lungs, rendering him short of breath and prone to agonizing coughing spells. He had been a big, athletic guy, but now, in the ugly process of dying, he was looking gaunt. Ours was a precarious existence, but I understood his adamant rejection of the emergency department. Most prior visits had morphed into extended trips into a terrifying medical underworld—to a purgatory known as emergency-department boarding.
The Republican redistricting effort backfires.
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When President Trump last summer implored Republicans to launch a nationwide gerrymandering blitz to pad their narrow House majority, the fight he started did not seem fair. GOP lawmakers had both the will and the power to draw their party new seats, while Democrats were hamstrung by limits of their own making. The question was not whether Republicans could expand their edge in Congress, but by how much.
This morning the landscape looks a lot different, after Virginia voters yesterday approved a lopsided new House map that could hand Democrats an additional four seats that Republicans currently hold. The Democratic redistricting victory is the party’s second in a statewide referendum. When combined with new lines that California voters endorsed in November, Democrats have now succeeded in drawing districts that will likely yield them nine more seats this fall, at least matching what Republicans have been able to achieve in states that they control. By some measures, Democrats have jumped into the redistricting lead, bolstering their chances of winning back the House majority in the midterm elections.
Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
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On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.
Negotiations have stalled. Trump keeps changing his policies. Ukrainians, backed by Europeans, are taking matters into their own hands.
Updated at 10:58 ET on September 25, 2025
In one section of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these electronic panels from scratch: This company wants to use as few imported parts as possible, avoiding anything American, anything Chinese. Jewelers, I was told, have turned out to be well suited for this kind of finicky manufacturing. Ukraine’s justly celebrated manicurists are good at it too.
They are not alone in being new to the job. Everyone in this factory had a different profession three years ago, because this factory did not exist three years ago. Nor did the Ukrainian drone industry, of which it forms part. Whatever their job description before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everyone at this production site is now part of a major shift in the politics and economics of the war, one that hasn’t been fully understood by all of Ukraine’s allies.
It is, in a way, a remarkable achievement.
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The mystery of the missing scientists began with a Silver Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force major general named Neil McCasland left his house in New Mexico for a walk and never returned. Rumors spread on social media that the elderly former astronautical engineer had been abducted or killed. Forget Nancy Guthrie, they said. Here was a guy who used to run a “UFO-linked” lab. Here was a guy with knowledge of “America’s deepest, darkest secrets.” So where was this guy?
McCasland’s wife did her best with a post on Facebook to address what she called the “misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance,” but wild notions only multiplied. Dots were added, then connected: Another scientist—an advanced-materials researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) named Monica Reza—had disappeared while hiking near Los Angeles in June 2025. A physicist at MIT had been murdered in December. “What is going on seems to be an enemy action,” Walter Kirn, the novelist and podcast contrarian, said last month.
Each is animated by the author’s love—for their subject, for language, and for pushing the boundaries of what the genre can do.
Literary biography is a cruel genre. The authors of these books—by which I mean not just biographies about literary figures but also those that aspire to writerly excellence—have been described by the writer Janet Malcolm as “professional burglars.” After rifling through a person’s affairs, they must conjure inside their pages a living, breathing human being—and then, inevitably, they’ll have to close the coffin on their resurrected subject. But I like to think the “literary” element can temper the sting of these dastardly deeds, insofar as the author is tasked with perpetrating them in the most humane way possible: with the appropriate amount of reverence, style, and, yes, love. This is, at least, what I tried to do in my own literary biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, about James Baldwin’s life and relationships.
Republicans seem to have expected that Democrats would continue to follow rules they had long since enthusiastically abandoned.
Voters in Virginia approved a lopsided congressional map on Tuesday, reducing the expected number of Republican-leaning districts in the Democratic-controlled state from five to one. Republicans have reacted by complaining that conservative-leaning voters in the state have been disenfranchised by gerrymandered maps that reduce the influence of their vote.
And they’re right. That is exactly what the new Virginia map does.
Gerrymandering is an attempt to thwart the will of the voters. It circumvents the vital process of democratic feedback by insulating politicians from political backlash. It should not happen, and yet this latest chapter of the redistricting wars did not begin in Virginia. It did not even begin last year, when Donald Trump openly urged red states to gerrymander their congressional maps so Republicans might retain possession of the House during the midterms. He did so despite the fact that the maps had been drawn after the 2020 census and would normally be expected to last until 2030.
From a moral standpoint, it makes the world worse.
