South Korea plane carrying 175 passengers skids off runway and crashes killing at least 28

Special counsel Jack Smith has withdrawn from his appeal of the classified documents case against Donald Trump's co-defendants and referred the case to state prosecutors.

Some Dungeons & Dragons gamers are frustrated by new rule changes in which character traits have been "divorced from biological identity," in an apparent attempt to be more inclusive.

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.From a young age, I respected the Croc. But somewhere along the way, I got the message that my favorite orange clogs were not chic, and I moved on.Then, something remarkable happened. After years of being periodically trendy, comfy shoes took off during the early pandemic. Crocs started selling like crazy. Last year, Birkenstock went public. And elite designers have started collaborating with mass-market comfort brands, sometimes festooning their joint creations with ribbons or pearls. A series of such collaborations has emerged over the past few years: Miu Miu x New Balance, Cecilie Bahnsen x Asics, Collina Strada x Ugg, Sandy Liang x Salomon, and Simone Rocha x Crocs, to name a few. Multiple pairs of tricked-up Crocs clogs have appeared on runways lately, and Fendi x Red Wing boots graced the runway at Milan Fashion Week. Birkenstock has collaborated with designers including Jil Sander, Proenza Schouler, and Manolo Blahnik. At this point, nearly every canonical American comfort-shoe brand has paired up with a runway designer.Yes, many of these shoes are not conventionally beautiful, and that’s part of the fun. The fashion world has a long-standing fascination with ugliness, Emily Huggard, who teaches a class on fashion collaborations at the Parsons School of Design, told me. Designer brands such as Collina Strada and Simone Rocha, both of which have collaborated with mainstream shoemakers, play with themes of grotesquerie and beauty, she noted. Beyond shoes, fashion designers have recently been returning to the grungy, oversize, jagged silhouettes of the 1990s and early 2000s. After a yearslong reign of sleek, minimalist looks, fashion’s extravagantly ugly era is upon us. Ugliness is, of course, subjective: As the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman noted earlier this year, “One person’s ugly shoe is another person’s footwear treasure.”At least some of high fashion’s interest in working with big comfort-shoe brands is about reaching new audiences. Many of these luxury brands are small—almost certainly not as widely known as mall mainstays such as Crocs and Mephisto. Plus, making a shoe that functions well requires special expertise, which big brands such as Asics and New Balance can provide to smaller, independent collaborators, Thomaï Serdari, a marketing professor at NYU’s business school, told me in an email. From the mainstream brands’ perspective, such collaborations make them seem cool and relevant—and there’s little to lose. As Crocs’ chief marketing officer told The New York Times last year, experimentation isn’t so risky when your shoes are already pretty controversial.People do actually want to buy some of these shoes: The Simone Rocha x Crocs collaboration, for example, sold out swiftly. The pure shock factor likely helps—Is that a Croc covered in pearls? And because they’re so wacky, such shoes generate rapt, if sometimes quizzical, coverage in fashion magazines. Some shoppers buy the shoes as a way to demonstrate a winking insiderness, or to signal that they’re very online (the collaborations are frequently hits on social media). The high price of high-fashion shoe collaborations may also be part of the appeal. As the Substack newsletter Blackbird Spyplane put it in a September edition about four-figure sneakers, at a time when clothes “seem either criminally cheap or nauseatingly expensive,” $1,500 Loro Piana x New Balance sneakers may be “substantially ‘about’ their own hideous pricetags.”Not all of these collaborations are unappealing or even in-your-face—those Loro Piana sneakers are pretty subdued—but the mix of high-low is core to the concept. That balance takes skill to pull off. I am personally unlikely to pay hundreds or thousands for a designer version of the shoes I rocked when I was 12. But there’s something undeniably fun about the whimsy, and at times ugliness, of these creations.Related: Cool people accidentally saved America’s feet. How Nike turned running shoes into fashion Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: The rise of the union right Jimmy Carter was a lucky man. What the left refused to understand about women’s sports 77 facts that blew our minds in 2024 Evening Read Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin* What Not to WearBy Ellen Cushing As long as people have been able to dress in color, we’ve been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow’s worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color. The press created a minor moral panic (“un scandale optique,” a French journal called it), which it then attempted to solve. An 1859 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read American women’s magazine of the antebellum era, promised to help “ill-dressed and gaudy-looking women” by invoking a prominent color theorist, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and his ideas about which colors were most “becoming” on various (presumably white) women. Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but had the platform been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it. Read the full article.Culture Break Laura Letinsky / Gallery Stock Watch. Check out these six acclaimed movies with roughly 90-minute runtimes.Read. “Case Study,” a short story by Weike Wang:“Her father is back in the ER. His second time this month. The first was a short stay.”Play our daily crossword.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

President Biden on Monday signed an executive order closing executive offices of the government for late former President Jimmy Carter's funeral on Jan. 9.

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Texas Longhorns quarterback Arch Manning shot down rumors he planned on entering the transfer portal once the 2024-25 season was finished.

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Welcome to the Fox News Politics newsletter, with the latest updates on the Trump transition, exclusive interviews and more Fox News politics content.

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Elon Musk (second from left) and Stephen Miller (third from left) arrive with President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers on November 13, 2024, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images A bitter public feud split the MAGA movement over the holidays, as supporters of high-skilled legal immigration like Elon Musk argued vociferously (and sometimes profanely) with the right’s immigration critics over the topic of H-1B visas. Musk, like many tech executives, strongly supports that program, which lets companies bring skilled foreign workers to the US for specific jobs — indeed, Musk said he once had such a visa himself. Critics on the right have long argued that it suppresses wages for American workers, while proponents say it attracts top talent and helps American businesses succeed. “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” Musk posted on X. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” That particular missive was aimed at an X poster with a small following. And yet Musk’s real nemesis on the issue is someone with far more power, influence, and bureaucratic savvy: Stephen Miller. Miller is the hardline anti-immigration ideologue who effectively oversaw immigration policy for the first Trump administration as a senior White House aide. He spent Trump’s first term mastering the workings of the federal bureaucracy and was one of only a few high-level appointees to remain in the boss’s good graces. In Trump’s second term, he’ll have another high-level role, as deputy White House chief of policy. As I wrote in a September profile, Miller is the architect of Trump’s mass deportation agenda — but he’s also pushed hard to restrict legal immigration including H-1B visas specifically, despite his boss’s sometimes contradictory impulses on the issue. In Trump’s first term, Miller was tenacious enough that he eventually got his way: The administration cited the pandemic to “temporarily” suspend all H-1B visas while crafting rules designed to drastically limit the program. So while Musk might be encouraged by the broadly positive comments on H-1B visas Trump made to a reporter on Saturday — the president-elect said he’s “been a believer in H-1B” — the real question is: Can Musk win a policy war with Miller? Why MAGA fans started attacking each other on X over H-1B visas during the holidays The GOP coalition has long been split on high-skilled immigration. The party’s pro-business faction has supported it, arguing it brings in the best talent and helps American companies succeed and compete globally. But the nativist or populist right opposes it as a plot by cosmopolitan elites to avoid paying American workers. Trump has straddled this divide, often praising H1-B visas, while appointees like Miller worked to limit them. (“Big Tech is replacing Americans,” Miller tweeted last year.) The divide took on a new dynamic over the summer, when several wealthy tech figures — such as Musk and David Sacks — endorsed Trump. Appearing on All-In, a podcast hosted by Sacks and other venture capitalists, Trump was pressed to promise to expand high-skilled immigration. “I do promise,” Trump said. He also mused (without being asked) that international students graduating from US colleges should “automatically” get a green card to stay and work. (Afterward, his campaign walked this back, saying that only after “aggressive vetting” would “the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions” be allowed to stay.) After the election, Trump named Musk and former biotech CEO Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will seemingly be some sort of outside advisory body issuing recommendations on how the administration should cut regulations and spending. Trump also named Sacks the “A.I. & Crypto Czar.” The current brouhaha was kicked off by far-right activist and provocateur Laura Loomer last week, after Trump announced that another venture capitalist, Sriram Krishnan, would join the White House to work on AI policy. Loomer called the appointment “deeply disturbing.” She pointed to a November X post in which Krishnan wrote that “anything to remove country caps for green cards / unlock skilled immigration would be huge,” saying this “is not America First policy.” From there, the conflict spiraled: Sacks defended Krishnan, but the attacks from Loomer and her supporters continued, with many taking on an ugly racial or ethnic dynamic (since about 70 percent of recent H-1B recipients have been from India). Loomer denounced “third-world invaders from India,” said “our country was built by white Europeans,” and asked “why are people in India still shitting in the water they bathe and drink from?” Musk got involved, insisting “there is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” calling this “the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” He also issued the aforementioned “FUCK YOURSELF in the face” post and promised to “go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon called Musk a “toddler” who needs a “wellness check” from Child Protective Services and said there should be “zero H-1B visas.” Eventually, Ramaswamy joined the fray in a lengthy X post, arguing that the reason “top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans” is that “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” He condemned the idea of valuing “the jock over the valedictorian” and criticized American cultural products like the TV shows Boy Meets World and Friends — praising instead the 2014 film Whiplash, which portrayed an instructor’s psychological abuse of a jazz drummer aspiring to artistic greatness (directed by Ramaswamy’s Harvard University classmate). As for Miller, he has not weighed in explicitly. But later on the day of Ramaswamy’s post, Miller posted on X, without explanation, excerpts from a 2020 speech when Trump praised the culture and achievements of the American people, calling them “the most adventurous and confident people ever to walk the face of the Earth.” Some on the nativist right, like Bannon, interpreted Miller’s post as a rebuttal to Ramaswamy — and a reminder of who will really hold power in the White House. Miller, who oversaw the White House speechwriting office, may have had a hand in crafting Trump’s words there — just as he will have a major role in crafting immigration policy in 2025 and likely beyond. Can Musk supplant Miller? Now, if you believe what Trump says currently, he’s pro H-1B. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump told the New York Post on Saturday. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he continued. (However, the New York Times reported Trump “appears to have only sparingly used” the H-1B — but that his companies had often used the very different H-2 visas for “jobs like cooks, housekeepers, and waiters.”) But Trump has previously spoken more negatively about the program. “We should end it,” he said in 2016, calling it “very bad for workers.” (“The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: These are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” he said in a campaign statement that March.) And the biggest problem for Musk and his tech allies is that, if they want H-1B expansion, they’d have to go through Miller, a formidable opponent. Trump has sent mixed signals on legal immigration, but Miller has made his agenda clear: He wants much less of it. In 2020, when Trump announced “temporary” suspensions on legal immigration during the pandemic, Miller privately told allies this was just the first step in a broader strategy: “The most important thing is to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor.” And in contrast to ideological allies like Bannon and Miller’s one-time boss Jeff Sessions, who flamed out of government and lost Trump’s favor, Miller has lasted, becoming a seemingly permanent fixture in Trumpworld — being dubbed “the president of immigration.” He exerted such vast policy influence in Trump’s first term in part due to his focus on bureaucratic minutia, in part because he could get other appointees fired, in part because he helped craft Trump’s words in prepared speeches, and in part because he was unshakably loyal to the boss and savvy at making alliances with other top officials. But mostly it was because other staffers believed, with good reason, that he and Trump had a mind meld on immigration — that he was speaking for the boss. So the venture capitalists and tech executives who have more recently joined Trump’s coalition and hope to be rewarded with their preferred H-1B policy changes will face a challenge getting past Miller. Trump may say things, but it’s Miller who turns those things into policy, and who knows how to slow-walk or squelch proposals he dislikes. So long as Miller holds Trump’s favor, and so long as he remains effectively in charge of immigration policy, betting on restrictionism is the only reasonable bet. Finally, there’s yet another twist to this messy saga — shortly before this dispute began last week, Trump announced he’d chosen a new appointee to join Musk and Ramaswamy at DOGE. Her name? Katie Miller — Stephen’s wife. “Congratulations to Stephen and Katie!” Trump posted.

Kim Fuller, the niece of former President Jimmy Carter, reflects on her uncle's life and legacy.

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Images from the eclipse, the Olympics in Paris and the attempted assassination of President-elect Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, stand out among the most impactful captured moments of the year. Jeffrey Henson Scales, a photography editor at The New York Times, joins CBS News with his team's top picks of the year.

Five people have been charged in connection to the death of Liam Payne. The British singer died in October after falling from the balcony of his hotel room in Buenos Aires.

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A DOJ watchdog found that three officials violated policy by releasing details of the investigation to reporters.

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Jones appeared to be putting on his best poker face as the unwanted attention came with his squad getting absolutely crushed by the Eagles on Sunday in Philadelphia.