Knicks vs. Spurs odds, predictions: NBA Christmas Day best bets, picks

Police are investigating a Christmas shooting at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix that left three people wounded by gunfire

Host the New Year’s Eve party of the century with the help of these festive 2025 decorations.

Airport operations are back to normal at Phoenix's Sky Harbor after a Christmas family dispute that resulted in a shooting and stabbing, police said.

Cam Heyward is blunt after the Steelers' third straight loss.

Guest contributor Ofri Bibas Levy pens an open letter to President-elect Trump pleading for help securing the release of her brother, sister-in-law, and two young nephews who were taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

All non-playoff bowl games present a wide range of unknowns, and the Rate Bowl truly reflects the mystery.

We are going by the time-honored tradition of school breaks and handing out report cards.

Take your friends and family on an adventure to check out these eight holiday train rides and festive model train shows that are sure spread some magic this holiday season.

Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes revealed he kept a pretty important promise to his wife as the team attained the No. 1 seed in the playoffs.

Even as a probe was starting of the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines airliner in Kazakhstan, speculation was mounting about why the plane went down.

The proud mom captured her children matching their pajamas with her sister Lynda on Christmas Day as they celebrated in the snowy ski town Wednesday.

Lee Jung-jae re-enters the game and plays with a new set of contestants in the much-anticipated second season of Hwang Dong-hyuk global hit.

The full-floor, five-bedroom residence atop the Olympia Dumbo tower features, among many perks, 552 square feet of outdoor space.

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Musician Sean Ono Lennon weighed in on criticism directed at billionaire Musk, prompting heated exchanges with social media users.

The listless loss to the Chiefs on Christmas was the Steelers' third straight, and they no longer have the inside track in the race for the AFC North.

The Nizhny Novgorod Oblast will pay one million rubles (about $10,000) per child.

Last month, a source told Page Six that the Princess of Pop "never gave up hope" on reconciling with her and Kevin Federline's 18-year-old son.

"Ukraine was brutally attacked on Christmas Day," said Keith Kellogg, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Ukraine and Russia envoy.

A taxi driver lost control and drove into a crowd outside Macy's in New York City on Christmas Day, injuring six people, including a 9-year-old boy and his mother. Authorities believe the driver suffered a medical emergency. All victims are expected to survive.

Northwest Naturals' Feline Turkey Recipe Raw Frozen Pet Food has been recalled after a cat in Oregon died from bird flu. The product, sold in 12 U.S. states and Canada, has not been linked to any human cases of bird flu.

Michael Jordan's iconic Highland Park estate, Legend Point, was sold for $9.5 million after over a decade on the market.

Wendy Williams went off on her caretakers for leaving her "precious" scooter unattended.

"Sopranos" star Edie Falco revealed she was really upset with Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid in the playoffs last year and wanted to "go after him."

Rod Taylor, the Australian movie star who appeared opposite John Wayne, Tippi Hedren, Doris Day, Jane Fonda and Elizabeth Taylor, died in 2015. He was 84.

Kurt the CyberGuy walks through steps he recommends immediately taking after getting new electronics — like phones or TVs — as gifts this holiday season.

Over-washing, under-washing, hand-washing — experts address the most common issues with caring for your knits.

There were many separations in 2024, from Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck to Billy Ray Cyrus and Firerose. Check out the headline-making celebrity breakups of 2024.

Ye has spent the past decade bending his career arc in a seemingly impossible direction: toward cultural irrelevance.

Assistant manager Sam told Newsweek it's a "digital world," but he had to speak "sternly" to the teens about their mistake.

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Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.“The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus, “and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.” In other words: If it feels good, do it.Aristippus was a student of Socrates who founded a minor school of philosophy called Cyrenaicism. As Cyrenaic thinking evolved, it centered on two ideas. First, objective reality is unknowable, so we should pay attention only to our own subjective experience of that reality. Second, that experience should be as pleasant as possible, meaning that we should maximize immediate pleasure and avoid pain. Aristippus himself focused especially on the first part, pleasure—preferably involving young courtesans and old wine.Cyrenaic hedonism still pops up as a significant cultural influence from time to time, as it did during the hippie era in America. That pleasure-first principle sounds a bit quaint today, given all the talk of a sex recession and young people being less adventurous than they used to be. But another form of Cyrenaicism is currently very strong: the idea that besides seeking pleasure, we should avoid pain.The memetic way that such an idea can spread means that you may have fallen into this philosophy without even realizing it. This column is intended to help you recognize that possibility, and understand why it can be so damaging for your health and well-being—and how you can break free.[Arthur C. Brooks: There are two kinds of happy people]A Cyrenaic belief in hedonistic abandon might sound harmless and even fun until we grasp how pleasure works in the brain. Charles Darwin reasoned that pleasurable sensations, which are primal in the way they involve the brain’s limbic system, evolved to help us survive and pass on our genes. For example, humans crave highly caloric foods and fixate on attractive bodies because our brains are wired to give us a biochemical reward for acting in ways that prevent starvation and help us find mates.Unfortunately, although Mother Nature is good at making us desire what will keep us and our genes alive another day, she does not care at all whether we’re happy. That condition underpins why Mick Jagger sings, “I can’t get no satisfaction … ’cause I try, and I try, and I try.” Or, to put that more scientifically, the gap between wanting and liking is a major neurobiological disconnect. When you think of something that you are programmed to desire, your brain experiences a little spritz of dopamine, which makes you anticipate pleasure—wanting. But if the payoff is what you anticipated, no more dopamine is forthcoming, denying you much liking. In other words, the pleasurable experience has to be better than you expected in order to produce more dopamine. That generally means that you have to keep upping the dose of whatever pleasure you are pursuing, be it booze, candy, gambling, or pornography.Fruitless pleasure seeking thus easily leads to addiction and misery—what we might call the “Cyrenaic paradox.” If all you do is look for gratification, you will no longer find it. As the psychiatrist Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, puts it, “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”The Cyrenaic paradox works in an inverted way when it comes to suffering. Researchers have demonstrated that when people fear their physical pain and strive to minimize it at all costs, by pulling back from daily activities, the pain tends to remain chronic. This is sometimes called the “fear-avoidance model.” Patients who fear physical pain become hypervigilant and make efforts to elude it. This leads to inactivity and disability, and thus greater pain: The cycle continues and worsens. Say, for example, you hurt your back. Fearing the pain, you baby it and load up on analgesics. Through disuse, your back actually becomes weaker, leading to greater, more constant pain. Many studies have shown this pattern.This cycle of avoidance and worsening pain lies at the center of our drug-abuse epidemic. In the U.S., prescriptions for opioid analgesics to treat pain increased 104 percent from 2000 to 2010. This led to an explosion of opioid addiction and overdose deaths. At that point, crackdowns lowered the prescription levels, but overdoses continued to rise as black-market-opioid use grew.Obviously, pain treatment is necessary and appropriate for many people. The problem comes when this is the first line of defense because pain is considered something that must be eliminated, not a normal part of life to be managed. Just as pleasure seeking tends to make pleasure unattainable, a strategy of pain avoidance can make suffering worse.[Read: Pain doesn’t belong on a scale of zero to 10]The treatment of pain and the avoidance of pain are two very different things. To treat pain effectively requires losing your fear of it and your desire to expunge it as a result. Pain is an unavoidable part of life, and the most effective treatment in many cases involves learning to thrive despite some degree of it. If your back hurts, you may well find healthy ways to increase your mobility and lower your physical discomfort, but your treatment might also include learning to live with that discomfort and manage it at an acceptable level.So far we’ve been talking about physical pain, but mental pain works in a similar way. For example, people who experience depression do well to treat their symptoms, but striving to eliminate them typically makes them worse. According to recent research published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, a belief that happiness requires an absence of pain undermines happiness itself. Other scholars have found that mental-pain avoidance is positively correlated with suicide attempts among those who are depressed. Unfortunately, these mistaken views are reinforced by professionals who tell patients with any mental distress that their discomfort is a pathology, convincing them that they are ill and defective.Therapists and clinicians understand that pain is part of life. They advise their patients not to run away from their reality—and certainly not to self-medicate with recreational drugs and alcohol. This better understanding recognizes that only in facing one’s pain can one learn to live fully and treat it successfully. Particularly if you naturally have high levels of negative affect—if, in other words, you tend to have low moods—part of a full and good life might be accepting this fact about yourself.Several therapeutic treatments explicitly incorporate acceptance, and have proved successful. One is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, in which patients learn that avoidance can be one of the causes of discomfort itself. This type of cognitive treatment teaches patients to accept their distress as painful but as neither catastrophic nor impossible to lessen. This is very similar to the Buddhist concept that suffering = resistance × pain, which implies that nonresistance is the beginning of effective treatment to reduce suffering. This therapeutic approach is also effective in the treatment of addiction, because it can help an addicted person accept their condition honestly, which facilitates a fuller understanding of the gravity of the problem and a greater capacity to stop using.Another treatment option that has achieved good results is known as acceptance and commitment therapy. Patients are encouraged to acknowledge and accept their pain, but then to shift their attention toward the positive aspects of their life. This technique relies on reversing our innate tendency to focus on what we don’t like rather than what we do—a phenomenon called “negativity bias.” When mental or physical pain is chronic, this evolutionary bias can make us one-track-minded about it, leading to avoidance behaviors and making things worse. Instead, we can recognize that pain is real, but also learn to focus on what is right in our life. For instance, I might wake up with a lot of pain, but I can shift my focus away from the pain to the facts that I wake up in a home where people love me and that I have a job I value.[From the October 2018 issue: How to live better, according to Nietzsche]In either its positive, pleasure-seeking or negative, pain-avoiding forms, Cyrenaicism is a mistaken model for human happiness. Rather than taking the advice of Aristippus, we would do better to follow that of his fellow Greek philosopher, Epictetus the Stoic. In his second-century ethical manual, Enchiridion, Epictetus wrote: “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”At the start, I called Cyrenaicism a “minor school of philosophy”; Stoicism is better known and far more influential, and justly so. But the larger point is that your philosophy matters—because it will help you exercise control over your life and your happiness. An attitude of acceptance rather than avoidance can empower you to treat your pain appropriately and manage your expectations about what a good life means. That, in turn, will enable you to learn and grow as a person—and truly savor your sweetest experiences.

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These last days of the year can feel weird. When I was about 7, Los Angeles public schools shifted to a “year-round” schedule. The effect, for my elementary school, was a shorter summer break (boo), and an extra-long winter break (also, it turned out, boo). That year, my parents enrolled me in “winter camp,” which was like summer camp but less fun. It was an El Niño year, and the constant rain turned the swimming pools into an unwholesome shade of green. I honestly don’t remember what we did with most of our days; probably we made a lot of lanyards and argued with one another. In an effort to mix things up, the camp arranged a whale-watching trip for us (January is gray whale season in Southern California). But as soon as we got out to sea, an enormous storm kicked up, buffeting our boat to such a degree that every camper except for me threw up. Lest you think I was spared: My clothes became so waterlogged in the rain that my pants fell down in front of everyone. We did not see any whales. All of this is to say that winter break can be weird for kids: There are often family visits and holiday celebrations, but it’s also a time when school is out, the weather is bad, and there’s not always much to do. In a lot of places, there’s no longer enough snow for the winter activities of yore — you really cannot build a snowman out of wintry mix. One year, I took my older kid on a desperate trudge to the dollar store in subfreezing temperatures just to get out of the house. Things can get rough. I have no advice for the short, strange days at the end of the year other than to honor them in whatever way you can. We celebrate Christmas in my family, so my kids will be opening presents this week, and then probably strewing pieces of them liberally about the house. My 2-year-old keeps exclaiming, “It’s Halloween!” and then, when corrected, quietly lamenting, “Halloween all done.” I get it — I like Christmas fine, but I kind of prefer Halloween, too. Whether you’re celebrating anything or not, remember that these are the darkest days of the calendar, and whatever happens with the weather or everything else, the days are already getting longer. Maybe get some sleep, if you can. Take your kids out to look at the night sky — Venus is really good this month and is not a drone. If they are reasonably quiet, take them birdwatching. I’ll be skipping Thursday, January 2, but I’ll be back with you on January 9. A big thank you to everyone who’s been reading (and sending in questions, podcast recommendations, and stories about kids hibernating in nests of toys) these last few months, and I’ll see you in the new year! What I’m reading School districts are preparing for potential immigration crackdowns from the Trump administration, by hosting seminars for families on their legal rights and training staff on how to respond if ICE agents show up at school. The 74 has a roundup of charts that defined education in 2024, including data on pandemic learning loss and kids’ smartphone use. Ulta Beauty has started selling mystery balls with toy versions of beauty products inside, possibly as a way of courting the coveted Sephora tween demographic. We are contractually allowed to continue reading our Christmas books until December 31, at which point my husband will sequester them for the next 11 months. My little kid especially enjoys Pick a Pine Tree, a sweet rhyming story about tree decorating, and How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney?, which (spoiler) fails to answer that age-old question. From my inbox I’ve gotten a lot of questions about Australia’s move to ban kids from social media, and in the new year, I’ll be looking into the pros and cons of such bans. As I report on that, I’d love to hear from you: Have the kids in your life experienced any positive effects from social media? We hear so much about the negatives that I’m very curious about the flip side. Get in touch at anna.north@vox.com.

Mikal Bridges spent much of this Knicks season before the holidays — too much, probably — as the “but.” As in, yes, the new-look Knicks are shaping up to be a legit contender with an unreal offense and a defense that’s creeping into the top half of the league, and yes, the Karl-Anthony Towns trade...

President-elect Trump floated Wayne Gretzky as the prime minister of Canada and it appeared his wife was watching as she shared the post on her own social media.

LeBron James and Austin Reaves each put in stellar performances to lift the Lakers to a thrilling victory over Stephen Curry and the Warriors.

No flights were affected.

NY Post readers discuss President Joe Biden commuting 37 of 40 federal death-row inmates’ sentences.

President-elect Trump posted a Christmas message to "Radical Left Lunatics" and the death row inmates who received clemency from President Biden.

After Donald Trump reiterated the idea that the U.S. purchase should Greenland, social media posts suggested Denmark had responded in kind.

A Milwaukee resident said: "Those are kids. You know, I just talked to both of their parents and consoled them on Christmas, and that's the hard part."

"Some of these ‘carry ons’ are monsters, let's be honest," said one user.

Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James had a message for the NFL as it continued to encroach on the NBA's day, which has been Christmas for years.

The "Look What You Made Me Do" singer did not attend the tight end's game against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.