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Seasonally appropriate music from Robert Earl Keen. "Merry Christmas from the Family." 3 Quarks Daily: Understanding Santa and A Wish for the New Year. Left Jabs: Don’t Let the New York Times Do Your Thinking. Stumbling and Mumbling: Repairing the public sphere. Attention space nerds! The fastest human-made object ever made flies closer to the Sun than we've ever been. Round Up by driftglass of the Professional Left Podcast and Science Fiction University Send tips to mbru (AT) crooksandliars (DOT) com read more

by Jesse Coburn and Andy Kroll ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. As Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner may soon oversee the nation’s efforts to build affordable apartments, protect poor tenants and aid the homeless.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy. For those of us who would be described in HR packets at progressive workplaces as “gender nonconforming” or “of non-normative gender presentation,” it can sometimes be really hard to get a haircut. The places where one might get one are usually gender-segregated zones, where cisgender people go for what one might call gender-affirming care—that is, cosmetic care toward redeclaring their man- or womanhood. Still, enough gender studies papers have been written about the barbershop as a masculine space and the hair salon as the center of an all-women’s social world.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy. When was the 2024 presidential election really lost? Maybe you’d argue (though I would not) that it was the rubber-stamp nominating process for Vice President Kamala Harris.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Dozens of rare animals including tigers, lions, and cheetahs are dying as bird flu infiltrates zoos, with potentially “grave implications” for endangered species, researchers have warned. As a growing number of zoos report animal deaths, scientists are concerned that infected wild birds landing in enclosures could be spreading it among captive animals.

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