NFL Wild Card predictions: Picks against the spread for both Saturday games

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. Some of Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks will appear before the Senate next week. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the tough questions that Democrats are promising.Meanwhile, as Senate confirmations loom, Trump has taken to criticizing U.S. allies including Canada, Panama, and Greenland. These comments may, in part, be an element of the president-elect’s strategy, Tom Nichols explained last night. “We’re talking about things that are never going to happen: We’re not going to war with Denmark over Greenland; we’re not going to seize the Panama Canal,” he said. “This whole strange foreign-policy fandango has kind of obliterated a lot of other discussions.”Ahead of his inauguration, Trump has also made many promises about how the government will work once he takes office for his second term. But, as panelists discussed, whether he will be able to deliver, and how his supporters and political opponents could react if he can’t produce his pledged results, remains to be seen.Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS News Hour; Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent at The New York Times; Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Vivian Salama, a national-politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.Watch the full episode here.

Surgeon general's new warning about the connection between alcohol and cancer is time for us to better understand the threat. Sixty percent of Americans knew nothing about the danger.

Longtime journalist Fuzz Hogan was the first CNN staffer to take the stand in the high-stakes defamation case against the network brought by Zachary Young.

Prosecutors are seeking at 15-year sentence for disgraced former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who was convicted in a bribery case after a nine-week-long trial.

The debate over immigration in America has taken a strange turn recently. Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s wealthiest backer and a prolific spreader of dehumanizing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, finds himself defending an immigrant-visa program against his fellow right-wingers. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most prominent leftist in the country, has taken to harshly criticizing the same program for undermining American workers. Odder still, the richest man on the planet and the senator who thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist actually agree on what should be done to reform the program.The policy in question is the H-1B program, which allocates about 85,000 temporary visas every year to foreign workers who hold at least a bachelor’s degree and have expertise in a “specialty occupation,” such as engineering or information technology. The program is relatively small, but the debate around it could have deep implications for both major political parties. For Republicans, it is a harbinger of a looming intra-MAGA war over skilled immigration that might intensify when Trump enters office. For Democrats, it represents a key front in the fight over whether the party should turn in a nativist direction to repair its toxic brand on immigration. In both cases, the struggle is a preview of just how unpredictable the country’s immigration politics could be over the next four years.The debate began just before Christmas, when Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born former Twitter executive and a vocal supporter of skilled immigration, to be a senior AI-policy adviser in his incoming administration. Laura Loomer, the openly xenophobic MAGA influencer, criticized the decision on X and attacked Krishnan for his views on immigration. Other right-wing figures piled on. This prompted members of the tech right wing, most notably Musk, to defend both Krishnan and high-skilled immigration more broadly. The dispute quickly turned to the merits of the H-1B visa program, as the nativist right argued that the program was designed to replace American workers with foreign labor and the tech right countered that it is necessary to fill a shortage of highly skilled workers and help the U.S. compete with its rivals. “The ‘fixed pie’ fallacy is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking,” Musk posted on X. “There is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation.” (The back-and-forth also featured less high-minded arguments. “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India,” Loomer posted on X. Indians make up more than 70 percent of H-1B holders.)[Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]Eventually, Donald Trump weighed in on the side of Musk, claiming he’d always been supportive of the H-1B program. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” the president-elect told the New York Post. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” (In fact, Trump campaigned against H-1B at points in 2016, and he might have been mistakenly referring to his use of the H-2B visa program for lower-skilled immigrants who work on his properties.) Trump’s intervention caused the controversy to quiet down temporarily. Then an unexpected interlocutor entered the fray.“Billionaires like Elon Musk claim it is crucial to our economy,” Sanders wrote in an op-ed for Fox News on Wednesday, referring to the H-1B program. “They are dead wrong.” The Vermont senator went on to accuse H-1Bs of allowing wealthy corporations to enrich themselves by importing cheap labor (or, in Sanders’s phrasing, “indentured servants”) at the expense of native-born workers.Both Sanders and Musk turn out to have a point. Sanders is correct that the H-1B program has major flaws that are often exploited by corporations at the expense of workers. A 2021 analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, for instance, found that at least a quarter of H-1B visas are allocated to outsourcing firms, which use the program to import foreign workers, train them up while paying below-market wages, and ultimately return them to their home countries, where they can do the same work at a fraction of the cost. In one infamous case, tech workers at Disney were forced to train their replacements, H-1B visa holders who were subcontracted by an Indian firm, before being laid off.However, Musk is correct in the sense that most careful experimental studies on the program find that, overall, it has neutral or positive effects on the employment prospects and wages of native-born workers. Companies that receive H-1B visas tend to grow faster than companies that don’t—likely because many of them really are hiring foreign workers whose skills they need—and thus often end up employing more native workers overall. Employers receiving H-1B visas also tend to develop new products and technologies at higher rates, which helps create new jobs.Despite their sharply different takes on the merits of the H-1B program, Musk and Sanders endorse the same set of reforms to it: a combination of raising the salary floor for H-1B visa holders and raising the cost to companies for maintaining an H-1B visa, which together would make it more expensive for a company to hire foreign workers over domestic ones.But the fact that Musk and Sanders agree on solutions means very little about the prospects for reform, because the real conflict here is within the parties, not between them. This is especially true on the right, where the fight is over how the second Trump administration should approach skilled immigration. Trump was elected by a coalition that included Silicon Valley technologists, who tend to believe in immigration for skilled workers, and hard-core nativists, who believe that all immigration, at least from most non-European countries, is bad. Both sides will hold considerable power in the incoming administration; the tech right is represented most prominently by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy while the nativist right is represented by Stephen Miller, a longtime opponent of even skilled immigration. Miller shaped much of immigration policy during Trump’s first term, including multiple efforts to limit the H-1B program, and has been tapped for an even larger role in his second.[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]It’s impossible to know which faction will ultimately triumph in the second Trump administration. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has pointed out, although Trump has rhetorically endorsed Musk’s position on H-1Bs, he tends to defer to Miller on the substance of immigration policy. The current, mostly online spat over H-1B visas is likely a preview of a larger coming showdown between Miller and Musk. (Complicating matters further, Trump recently appointed Miller’s wife to staff the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Musk and Ramaswamy.)The left is engaged in a factional fight of its own. The Democratic Party’s approach to immigration is widely understood to have hurt its standing with working-class voters, including many Latinos. But a new politics of immigration has yet to emerge to take its place. Sanders’s criticism of the H-1B program suggests one direction the party could take: a return to old-school economic populism that portrays certain forms of immigration as a scheme perpetuated by corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of the American worker. Sanders embraced this position during his 2016 presidential campaign, at one point calling open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal” that would “make everybody in America poorer.”Back then, Sanders’s immigration skepticism was met by widespread criticism from the left. Not this time. In fact, some of Sanders’s fellow Democrats have levied their own criticisms of the H-1B program. But the Sanders approach suffers from a glaring flaw: A large body of research shows that even low-skill immigration does not make native-born American workers worse off; high-skilled immigration almost certainly makes them better off. Claiming otherwise might be an effective way for Democratic politicians to win over immigration-skeptical voters. But in the long run, they might find out that false narratives about immigrants, once unleashed, are hard to control.

Two new studies suggest once again the importance of getting a good night's sleep for good health over a lifetime, as scientists pursue new understandings of restorative deep sleep.

ESPN's coverage of the Cotton Bowl included the airing of a prayer on the field before the game after a week of controversy for not airing the national anthem.

Anthony Liguori Jr. is known to the faithful as "Deacon Elvis" at Corpus Christi Church in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ.

The devastating California wildfires moved into a fifth consecutive day on Saturday, with the number of people officially confirmed dead climbing to 11, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner said Friday.

A new book details comedian Josh Gad's rise to stardom.

Problems with fire hydrants raise questions about how prepared L.A. was for this week's wildfires.

When President-elect Donald Trump takes office in nine days, it will be as the first president with a felony conviction on his record. A Manhattan judge formally sentenced him on Friday for falsifying business records. He could have received up to four years in prison, but the judge imposed an unconditional discharge, without jail time, fines or other penalties.

Greenland's leader Múte Egede said he was prepared to enter into negotiations with President-elect Trump on Friday about the future of the mineral-rich arctic territory

The charismatic figure known as Coach Mac died Friday night “after a courageous journey with dementia,” according to a family statement. His family announced in 2016 that he had been diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer's.

He successfully appealed the sandwich firing in 2019, and briefly returned to the force before being fired again.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are being called by host of the podcast "Barely Filtered," Aurora Culpo, to resign amid raging California wildfires.

As New Orleans seeks to recover from the deadly, Islamic State-inspired truck attack, law enforcement and community leaders are confronting an existential question as old as the city's famed entertainment district: Can Bourbon Street be protected in a ...

It's an uncertain time in the electric vehicle market, but Hyundai Motors is preparing to release a highly anticipated new electric SUV. The company's global CEO opened up about the new vehicle and what 2025 might mean for the EV market.

Moscow's counterattack has left Ukrainian forces outstretched and demoralized, killing and wounding thousands and retaking more than 40% of the 380 square miles of Kursk Ukraine had seized.

Knicks fan Joseph DeSimone popped the question to his girlfriend Erica Vann on the Kiss Cam as the team took on the Oklahoma City Thunder on Jan. 3.

Sitting at a desk all day takes a toll on your body, so get in your exercise with the right equipment.

The "Friends" star appeared on a 2023 celebrity version of the show, where he even received a coveted Paul Hollywood handshake.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.In The Atlantic’s latest cover story, my colleague Derek Thompson explores how Americans turned anti-social. Many young people are actively choosing the solitary life, spending time at home in front of screens instead of out with other people, he explains. In a conversation with my colleague Lora Kelley, he noted that this sort of isolation is the result of choices that add up: “The anti-social century is about accretion,” he said. “It’s about many small decisions that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, leading to a massive national trend of steadily rising overall aloneness.”Those choices might seem minor, but they matter: To call a friend, or scroll on Instagram? To go to church, the weekly soccer game, or book club—or sleep in and scroll again? Today’s newsletter rounds up stories on the activities that bring us together, and the ones that keep us apart.On Hanging OutThe Anti-Social CenturyBy Derek ThompsonAmericans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.Read the article.Americans Need to Party MoreBy Ellen CushingWe’re not doing it as much as we used to. You can be the change we need.Read the article.The Friendship ParadoxBy Olga KhazanWe all want more time with our friends, but we’re spending more time alone.Read the article.Still Curious? The death of the dining room: “The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans,” M. Nolan Gray wrote last year. How America got mean: People no longer grow up learning how to be decent to one another, David Brooks argued in 2023. Other Diversions Watch—and rewatch—this 215-minute film. The agony of texting with men What to read when the odds are against you P.S. Courtesy of Mark Bernstein I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Mark Bernstein, 75, from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, sent this photo of “a storm over Blackfish Creek, Cape Cod.”I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.— Isabel

The Supreme Court decided, by a scant 5–4 margin, that President Donald Trump would have to (virtually) sit through a sentencing hearing.

Columnist David Marcus says Californnia's leaders are using the Biden-Harris playbook of simply refusing to answer questions amid the wildfires. But not being accountable comes with a price, he says.

The late actor appeared in a Season 8 episode of the ABC sitcom.

“The flames of Gaza will not stop there, they will find us all if we don’t stop them…None of us are spared in the eye of the empire,” Fatima Mousa Mohammed eerily wrote on X this week.

Los Angeles officials launched an investigation after evacuation alerts were sent to the wrong people as wildfires ravage the region. The company that provides the technology says it's added safeguards to prevent it from happening again.

After fighting to save his family home, 30-year-old Orly Israel had to flee the advancing Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. He shared his harrowing escape online, and the video has garnered more than 8 million views. His home burned, but he was recently able to find hope amid the ashes.

TikTok may go dark in days with the U.S. ban on the popular video-based social media platform looming. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court appeared likely to uphold a federal law to shut down the platform unless its Chinse parent company agrees to sell the app.

Genasys, the company behind Los Angeles' emergency alert technology, said it has "not been able to replicate" an error that sent inaccurate information to millions.

Bass slashed $17.6 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year -- which critics blasted as "a bad call."

Clergy and congregants vow to persevere in the face of the loss.

What it means to go from smog to smoke

Sam Moore, who influenced musicians including Michael Jackson, Al Green and Bruce Springsteen, was inducted with Dave Prater into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.

A parade of foreign leaders are furiously angling to try and receive a coveted invite to President-elect Trump's inauguration later this month.

Uber is slashing driver wages on trips between New Jersey and the Big Apple at the same time it’s passing off a new $1.50 surcharge on these same jobs to customers, The Post learned.

“I decided to pick up trash and treat it like a fun scavenger hunt,” said Andrey Kagan, who now has an online following for his weekly outings.

The 100-year-old Riviera Golf Club, where the world's best golfers will compete for gold, is only five miles from the Palisades fire and within a designated evacuation zone.

A Virginia Department of Health report shows Henrico Doctors’ Hospital, where a nurse charged with child abuse worked, delayed reporting injuries in 2023.

Bureaucratic inertia, politicization of intelligence and the inability to forecast high-tech threats will likely result in another terror attack inside the homeland.

Stay up to date on the latest AI technology advancements and learn about the challenges and opportunities AI presents now and for the future.

On Wednesday morning, in Highland Park, Los Angeles, dawn never broke. The morning light that normally streamed into my rental house simply shifted from pitch-black to gradations of orange-brown as smoke from the Eaton Canyon fires billowed over the hills. Outside my window, a woman used the flashlight on her phone while walking her dog. My own dog and I barely made it around the block; the soot-filled air was dry and pungent, and the winds—those relentless winds—smacked us with a combination of dry pine needles, fallen bark, and chunks of ash. Most of my neighbors wore masks as they loaded their cars with shopping bags and suitcases. By the time we got back, all the phones in my house were buzzing with evacuation alerts.We were a full house: three middle-aged adults, a 6-year-old, and a naughty dog (mine). The night before, after losing power in her home in Altadena, my best friend and my goddaughter went to kill time in classic L.A. style: by driving through their local In-N-Out. Power outages from the Santa Anas are not unusual in L.A., and despite the Palisades Fire raging across town, they were trying to act normal—perhaps the only way to psychically survive in a city prone to fires is to push the constant threat of imminent natural disaster out of your mind. In any case, by the time they got their burgers, the street was illuminated by flames, the night sky hot yellow from Eaton Canyon, just a few blocks away. They drove the 15 minutes to my house, where we immediately lost power too. Her husband hunted down every candle he could get his hands on in a drivable radius.[Read: The unfightable fire]In my living room, we texted friends and neighbors, checking on their homes and kids and evacuation plans. Outside, the sound of the wind was terrifying—because of the howling, but also because of the danger it represented, each gust potentially carrying embers this way, taking out homes and businesses and, eventually, in the case of Altadena, most of a community.Altadena is an unincorporated community of about 40,000 residents nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Having spent a lot of time there, I get the appeal—even something as mundane as putting the trash out, at the right time of day, is a chance to experience majestic levels of beauty. When people think of life in the hills around Los Angeles, they tend to think of millionaires and movie stars—and, for sure, there are some splendid homes and a sprinkling of celebrity residents, such as Mandy Moore, there. But Altadena is racially and economically diverse, and middle-class life remains at its center.It was founded by two well-off brothers from Iowa in the late 1880s, and workers with jobs in the nearby city of Pasadena moved there. After a long battle against redlining, Black homeowners began arriving in the 1960s. This made Altadena one of the first integrated middle-class communities in Los Angeles, and residents today are particularly proud of this history. (One of those residents was Wilfred Duncan, the first Black fireman in Pasadena.) In 1960, Altadena was 95 percent white; in 2024, it was 46 percent white, and the bulk of the rest of the population was made up of Black and Hispanic residents.This was partly why, when my best friend and her husband decided to move back to her native California to raise their Black and Latina daughter, they chose Altadena. The other parents they met at their daughter’s school included local business owners, house cleaners, and government employees. They made friends with their neighbors, including an older public-school teacher who’d raised her family across the street. On Tuesday night, her house burned to the ground.In recent years—and particularly since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when the rise in remote work let people live farther from downtown and West Los Angeles—home prices in Altadena have soared. But newcomers haven’t been house flippers or private-equity firms running Airbnbs; they’ve been families looking to set down roots—like my best friend. A remarkable 78 percent of the households are owner-inhabited; it’s not unusual to meet people who’ve lived in Altadena for decades or even residents whose ties to the town go back a generation or two. That’s part of the strong community atmosphere. Neighbors make cookies for neighbors and invite one another over for drinks. Kids trick-or-treat down the streets in unchaperoned groups, and families have post-parties after the Rose Bowl parade.The local economy was also exactly that: local. Minus a few fast-food joints and big chain pharmacies, the neighborhood was as close to mom-and-pop as one can find today. For 25 years, kids from Altadena and Pasadena have studied with Sipoo Shelene Hearring at Two Dragons Martial Arts. Locals who met at the Rancho, Altadena’s premiere dive bar, became so close that they were known to spend holidays together. If you were bored, you could take your family to the Bunny Museum and browse more than 30,000 items of collectible rabbit memorabilia.Every single one of those businesses burned to the ground this week. One local official told NPR that “probably half of our small businesses are gone.” Five of Altadena’s public schools suffered substantial damage, as did a couple of private schools, a senior center, a public golf course, a country club, several houses of worship, and a yet-to-be determined number of homes and apartment complexes. So far, more than 5,000 structures have been reported as lost.[Read: The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires]An unofficial Google Doc tracking the destruction has been going around, and the pace at which it was being populated on Wednesday was terrifying. Each new address correlated to a person you knew or a business that made you love where you lived. On Facebook, a woman was looking for an older man named Willie who lived near a particular intersection. “I don’t know his last name,” she wrote. ”I speak to him on my daily walks. I’d like to make sure he’s alright.” Neighbors were texting one another videos of block after block of devastation.So many people are in the same situation as my friend: evacuated and unsure whether their house will still hold. Ten hours after she and her family arrived at my house, they learned they’d have to flee again, when my neighborhood was evacuated too.I’d always judged people who, faced with a natural disaster, chose to stay in place. But experiencing the situation firsthand, I understood. We were a ragtag group. Who would take us in? But how could we split up? For almost an hour, we stared at one another, paralyzed. Eventually, we heard from a generous friend in Palm Springs who had room for us. Into the cars we went.But others did stay, or have dared to venture back. They hose off the lawns of the absent to keep the floating embers from catching, offer to break into homes at risk and grab personal photos or other belongings, and take pictures of the damage that’s left behind.As we drove past the halo of black smoke over L.A., we saw tractor-trailers turned sideways by the wind. Text messages continued flooding in, announcing home losses and relocation plans. Most hope these moves will be temporary, but, depending on insurance payouts and school closures, they might wind up being permanent. “We hope to see you all again one day,” a father wrote to my friends’ dad group. His family was heading up north to stay with relatives and knew that they might not be able to return. Some kids leaving town with no return date in sight FaceTimed classmates to say goodbye. Still other children don’t yet understand what’s happened to the place they call home.All of Los Angeles, regardless of socioeconomic class, is sharing in one deep, traumatic loss. Schools, cultural institutions, the businesses that make hometowns feel like home—so many have burned. But there’s a secondary sadness hovering over middle-class Altadena, and certainly over anyone on the margins of poverty. Altadena will build itself back. But how? And for whom?[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]On the Altadena Facebook group, residents are attempting to guide one another through FEMA applications and encouraging everyone to file their insurance claims quickly. But in one-on-one conversations, no one is naive. Everyone anticipates pushback from insurance companies, and payments that will be a fraction of what their homes were worth or would cost them to rebuild. Will the teachers whose homes burned down still be able to afford to live there? What about the firemen? Where will all these people go in a region that is already plagued by a shortage of affordable housing?Even if one isn’t familiar with Naomi Klein’s term disaster capitalism, most Americans are, by now, well versed in its hallmarks. A natural disaster occurs, locals are forced to evacuate, and small businesses close. Their returns are delayed sometimes indefinitely by failures to restore infrastructure such as schools and electricity quickly enough. They might be stymied by red tape and bureaucracy. Needing stability for their family, they are forced to build a life elsewhere, to stop “waiting” to go home. In their place, developers and private equity swoop in, reshaping these areas for the rich and ultrarich.This happened after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and Superstorm Sandy in the coastal areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Los Angeles’s economy is already in a precarious state, with a housing crisis and a glut of workers in the TV and film industry. I can easily imagine that, without government intervention and intentional counterplanning, something similar will happen here. Surviving financially in Los Angeles was already challenging; how many families can manage not to just get by, but to completely rebuild their lives?When my best friend moved here, I was immensely depressed to lose her from my life in Brooklyn. But in the subsequent two years, I’ve visited many times, sometimes for weeks-long stints. I’d come to love it here so much, I’d call it Brooklyn West: It had that same neighborly generosity and quirky moxy that had gotten squeezed out of my hometown, one Blank Street Coffee and luxury high-rise at a time. It’s painful to imagine that Altadena could now, in this moment of speculative opportunity, suffer the same fate.Accusations of local-government incompetence are flying around this week, nearly as forceful as the winds. But the local government has work to do now. Federal aid is crucial, but so is getting schools reopened quickly, and expediting the rebuilding of established small businesses. Altadena needs not vultures seeking to maximize profit, but creative developers who can protect and expand the kind of community Altadena was.When they are done with mourning, I know the residents will do their part.*Sources: Library of Congress; Getty; Justin Sullivan / Getty; Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty; Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty; Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty

The Post’s Erich Richter makes his picks and predictions for the NFL's Wild Card Round.

"Yeah, I mean, we need it so much," Gilpin said, more sincerely. "We deserve it, as the viewers, to have one moment of romance and joy in this crazy world."

“She’s weirdly okay. She’s at parties and events and dinners. She’s not sitting at home wearing all black with the lights off or anything,” according to a source.

Across Washington Heights, locals bemoaned that their already-scarce curbside parking spaces have further vanished in recent days, with many now burning hours trying to track down a precious spot.

A company that monitors electrical activity says faults along the Los Angeles power grid soared in the same areas where three of this week’s major wildfires are occurring.