Mets not a better team than us: Phillies’ Nick Castellanos

Hudson Meek's representatives fondly remembered the actor, who died last week.

The Dallas Cowboys, officially eliminated from playoff contention, have shut down star receiver CeeDee Lamb for the remainder of the season due to a shoulder injury.

An alleged deadbeat dad who owes thousands in child support was arrested last week after exiting a cruise ship in Miami, according to reports.

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Gong Yoo's brief but visionary performance as the Recruiter sets the tone for Season 2.

Former NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey was exposed for his allegedly link to a sexual misconduct scandal at 1 Police Plaza -- and his wife had enough.

Owen Kasozi, 30, was found dead at a nature preserve in Massachusetts, with authorities saying that she fell through an icy lake while walking her dog.

Houston Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud isn't blaming fans for booing after the team's crushing 31-2 loss to the Baltimore Ravens Christmas Day.

Pete Alonso remains a free agent for this reason.

The couple’s 15-year-old son stepped in to help his dying mom, but ended up with a slash wound on his hand during the Sunday evening fight, according to cops and a criminal complaint. 

With the presidential campaigns and President Biden’s historic, last-minute pullout, 2024 was quite a year — for fibs, lies, gaslighting and truly wacky statements, that is.

Parsons was named chief executive officer of AOL Time Warner in 2002 after the $124-billion merger of the dial-up internet provider and the largest entertainment and media company started to fall apart.

Felices fiestas de parte de Bad Bunny, quien anunció el jueves que lanzará un nuevo álbum el 5 de enero.

La muerte de un gato doméstico en Oregon y el retiro de un alimento para mascotas están generando preguntas sobre el brote en curso de gripe aviar y cómo los propietarios pueden proteger a sus mascotas.

Ahora Lamar Jackson y los Ravens de Baltimore pueden descansar un poco.

Investigators are looking into whether Russian anti-aircraft defenses may have played a role in the deadly plane crash in Kazakhstan. Many questions remain about why the plane was diverted and what led to the crash that killed dozens. CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay has more.

The Chicago-area mansion featured in the 1990 Christmas classic "Home Alone" may be expensive, but it's a bargain compared to the New York City townhouse in the sequel.

The 25 planned shelters — which will each have the capacity to hold 500 people — will open their doors on President-elect Trump's inauguration day, an official said.

"We’re not trapped in a box anymore," the director shared.

He was one of the leading Black executives of his generation, steering media and financial institutions through turbulent periods.

Dulce, a vocalist who became one of Mexico's best-known female voices in pop music in the 1980s, has died. She was 69.

It's a resolution revolution.

The bill would build on the Americans with Disabilities Act.

An inmate allegedly assaulted and killed a veteran corrections officer on Christmas Day at an Ohio prison, an attack authorities said was "beyond comprehension."

Blood tests are common, but can cause fear or anxiety for some. Fox News Digital spoke with a doctor about what you can do to be prepared and comfortable before your next blood draw.

The limb was found in the 800 block of Paseo Del Mar, the same spot where a capsized boat belonging to two fishermen washed up earlier this week.

Series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk explains that devastating ending and introduces us to Young-hee's boyfriend, Cheol-su.

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.I retired from a long teaching career a few years ago, but during my later years in the classroom, I offered a course on the Cold War and American pop culture, to try to help younger students understand the fears that dominated so much of American life in the 20th century. When my students saw how many times images of nuclear devastation (and references to Ronald Reagan) popped up on MTV back in the day, they started to get it. We also discussed The Twilight Zone, a series full of barely disguised allegories about the Cold War; the series’ head writer and creator, Rod Serling, a World War II veteran, explored traumas from his past and his worries about the future in many of the episodes he wrote.But the students were surprised—as you might be—to find that Star Trek, one of my childhood favorites, was an ongoing and intentional commentary about the Cold War during its three original seasons from 1966 to 1969.A number of science-fiction luminaries wrote for Star Trek, including Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison. But the creator and executive producer of the series, Gene Roddenberry, was the show’s moral center. Roddenberry was a former Los Angeles police officer who, like Serling, served in World War II and shared his preoccupation with issues of war, peace, and social justice. As the writer Marc Cushman documents in These Are the Voyages, an exhaustive multivolume history of the series, Roddenberry often drove these famous writers to fury with his heavy-handed rewrites. (He and Ellison, for one, remained enemies to the end of their lives.)To be sure, some Star Trek episodes were just fantasy and fluff. (“Spock’s Brain,” in which the first officer has his brain stolen by a planet of gorgeous but apparently daft women, is often regarded as the worst episode, but there are several contenders.) Others commented on American social problems, such as racism, with thuddingly obvious symbolism: “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” describes an endless war between two races on the same planet, one black on the right side of their body, one black on the left side, and … well, you get the picture.But to appreciate the Cold War setting of Star Trek, you need only to understand that the Earth-led United Federation of Planets (a free and democratic association committed to equality among all beings) was NATO. Captain James T. Kirk—born and raised in Iowa, according to the show—commanded its finest flagship, the USS Enterprise. The bad guys, standing in for the Soviet Union, were the Klingons, whose empire was a brutal and aggressive dictatorship.Two Cold War themes run through Star Trek: the risks of great-power confrontation, and the danger of ultimate annihilation. In “The Omega Glory,” a mediocre episode that Roddenberry pushed to have produced, the Enterprise finds an underdeveloped planet where Asian-looking “Kohms” oppress the white “Yangs.” Turns out it’s a planet that developed just like Earth in every way—there is some sci-fi hocus-pocus to explain how planets sometimes do this—including an America and a Red China (Kohms and Yangs, Communists and Yankees, get it?), and then wiped itself out with biological warfare.Other episodes were a bit more sophisticated. In “The Return of the Archons,” Kirk encounters a society that is run like a beehive by a single leader named Landru, who demands that all citizens be “of the body.” (Spoiler: He’s a computer. Out-of-control computers were another common theme.) As Cushman notes, the crushing of the individual for the good of the collective was an intentional statement about life under communism.Likewise, just as the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed against each other in the developing world of the 20th century, the Klingons and the Federation were often at odds with each other over developing planets in the future. In “The Trouble With Tribbles,” a famous episode and one of the show’s few comedic attempts, the Klingons and the Federation are competing to develop and win control of a neutral planet. The Federation’s bid is to offer to plant wheat; the Klingons respond by secretly poisoning the seeds. And in “Errand of Mercy,” the Enterprise races to stop a Klingon takeover of Organia, a strategically located planet seemingly run by annoying pacifist simpletons. But the Organians, it turns out, are actually super-advanced, nearly omnipotent beings who have had enough of all this conflict, and they impose a peace treaty on both sides, thus averting an interstellar war. (“It would have been glorious,” the disappointed Klingon commander says at the end.)In 1968, Star Trek made one of its most obvious comments on the Cold War in “A Private Little War,” an episode written about the Vietnam War. Once again, the Federation and the Klingons struggle over an underdeveloped and internally divided planet, but this time the Klingons start shipping weapons to one of the warring sides. The script went through various changes as the writers wrestled with whether Kirk should intervene and arm the planet’s more peaceful faction—which he finally does, with deep sadness.The original Star Trek often fudged the question of whether Earth experienced a nuclear war. (Later entries in the show’s canon, including the Star Trek movies, confirmed that a nuclear World War III did, in fact, take place.) But nuclear weapons were often on the writers’ minds. Spinrad, for example, created the “Doomsday Machine,” an alien device that devours entire planets; when it wanders into our galaxy, Kirk ruminates on how Earth once foolishly thought of thermonuclear bombs as an ultimate weapon.At times, the producers responded directly to Cold War events. In early 1968, the U.S. Navy ship Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans, who claimed that it was in their waters on a spy mission. They held the crew prisoner for nearly a year. The Star Trek writer Dorothy C. Fontana decided to put Kirk and Spock in a similar situation, with the Enterprise trapped after entering Romulan territory. The episode, titled “The Enterprise Incident,” aired while the Pueblo’s crew was still in captivity.One function of popular culture is that it helps artists and audiences work out their anxieties. The Cold War was a terrifying time, and its themes dominated American culture, whether in spy send-ups such as Get Smart or the weekly adventures of the Mission: Impossible team in fictional locales that were barely disguised representations of Communist countries. Science fiction is an excellent medium for allegory, and Star Trek promised that, somehow, we were all going to get through the 20th century and eventually live under the wise aegis of the Federation.Unfortunately, it also suggested that mankind was going to have to live through another Cold War all over again—at least until the Organians put a stop to it.Related: “My MTV Cold War retrospective” A brief history of Soviet rock and roll Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The big thing to know about pain The agony of indulging in Squid Game again Bob Dylan broke rules. A Complete Unknown follows them. Dispatches Time-Travel Thursdays: In the 19th century, fear of rabies drove New York residents to complain about dogs. Some 150 years later, the city’s canine population is rabies free, but New Yorkers haven’t stopped complaining, Kate Cray writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Millennium Images / Gallery Stock Why Rich People Don’t Cover Their WindowsBy Michael Waters Walk down the block of a wealthy neighborhood at night, and you might be surprised by how much you can see. One uncovered window might reveal the glow of a flatscreen TV across from a curved couch; through another, you might glimpse a marble kitchen island and a chandelier. Of course, some of the curtains are closed—but many are flung open, the home’s interiors exposed, like you’re peering into a showroom. Uncovered windows have quietly become a fixture of high-end homes across America … Although this phenomenon is most visible in cities, the link between wealth and exposed windows extends across the United States. Most people do still close their shades, but Americans who earn more than $150,000 are almost twice as likely to leave windows uncovered as those making $20,000 to $29,000, according to a large 2013 study for the U.S. Department of Energy—nearly 20 percent of the first group compared with just over 10 percent of the second. The line isn’t smooth as you slide up and down the income scale, but the overall trend is clear: The choice to draw or not draw the curtains is in part driven by class. Read the full article.Culture Break MGM Studios Watch. Blink Twice (available to rent online) anticipated the culture shift that defined 2024.Read. These eight books will inspire you to move your body.Play our daily crossword.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

President-elect Donald Trump spent Christmas Day laying out his foreign policy aspirations for his second term, including his threat to retake control of the Panama Canal. He also suggested the U.S. could take control of Greenland and Canada. CBS News political reporter Taurean Small has more on his recent statements and how the world reacted.

One of the most expensive pieces of real estate currently on the market in the United States is on exclusive Indian Creek Island off of Miami's coast.

A New York judge opted to keep the identity of the woman who accused Jay-Z of raping her when she was 13 years old more than two decades ago a secret — after the rap mogul’s attorney pushed for her name to be revealed. Judge Analisa Torres scolded the rapper’s lawyer Alex Spiro for being...

Chargers running back Gus Edwards will miss Saturday's game against the Patriots because of an ankle injury, but it appears J.K. Dobbins could be back.

“They’re making decisions literally every few seconds about where to go," said one of the study's authors.

A California man died in a Christmas morning house fire while searching for an engagement ring for his girlfriend.

The probe will focus on the findings of a recent investigative news program on alleged actions of Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister's wife, officials said.

"Home Alone" director, Chris Columbus, shared on The Hollywood Reporter's "Awards Chatter" podcast how Macaulay Culkin was cast and what the characters did for work.

Kevin Durant was incredible to watch. And Nets fans are hoping whoever they land in the lottery will be as well.

Miami Heat president Pat Riley addressed rumors that the organization is willing to trade six-time All-Star Jimmy Butler, shutting them down as they've become a "distraction."

It’s textbook Squid Game: Turn up the pressure on everyone to see how they crack.

Alex Cooper revealed the very generous gift she gave her parents for Christmas. On the latest episode of “Call Her Daddy,” the podcast host reflected on the “emotional moment” she and husband Matt Kaplan told her parents the big news. Watch what she had to say in the clip! Subscribe to our YouTube for the latest on all your...

Substances reportedly did not play a role.

The Princess of Wales revealed her cancer diagnosis in March and confirmed in September that she had completed her chemotherapy treatments.

Something smells fishy. A Bed-Stuy fire-hydrant-fueled street aquarium that went viral on social media was forced to close due to frigid temperatures and snow — but organizers claim the fish are alive and swimming in a secret location. The attraction in a shallow tree put has drawn concern from animal activists who said the conditions...

U.S. officials say they asked for — and got — the retraction of an independent monitor's warning of imminent famine in north Gaza.

A wave of storms is hitting the South with most of northeastern Texas and parts of Louisiana under tornado watches. Texas also faces potential hail, flash floods and wind gusts up to 70 miles per hour. CBS News national reporter Kati Weis reports.

An Oklahoma basketball coach was found dead, and his 8-year-old daughter remains missing after the family's car was swept away by raging floodwaters on Christmas Eve.

Newly engaged Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Ainsley Earhardt originally bonded over their deep faith and the two have placed God first in their relationship.

A pizza delivery worker, upset over a tip, allegedly repeatedly stabbed a pregnant woman at a Florida motel, a sheriff's office says.