Miss Manners: Hugging is hard because I am so tall

USC struggled to put UCLA away early Saturday, but the Trojans celebrated roaring back to life in the fourth quarter of a rivalry win.

US President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas. | Brandon Bell/Getty Images Two. Trillion. Dollars. That’s how much Elon Musk, co-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, has said he can cut out of the annual federal budget. Musk and his partner Vivek Ramaswamy have suggested that they can achieve this through “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” by cracking down on spending “unauthorized” by Congress, and “large-scale audits” of federal contracts. Their target wouldn’t be entitlement programs “like Medicare and Medicaid,” they say, but “waste, fraud, and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end.” If you could actually cut this much, it would wipe out the US’s $1.9 trillion deficit and put the country into surplus for the first time since the 2001 fiscal year. But let’s be clear: There is no way in hell Musk and Ramaswamy are going to be able to identify $2 trillion in annual spending to cut, and they certainly will not get anywhere near that number without congressional action. To see why, consult this simple chart of projected federal spending in fiscal year 2025, which began on October 1: !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

Sports betting writer Dylan Svoboda joins The Post’s NFL Bettor’s Guide for his first season. 

Dan Campbell’s 2023 Lions have Restored the Roar, beginning with its first playoff win in 32 years last season, and the Roar has never been louder in 2024. 

Frank Rubio’s experience – leave Earth in one vehicle, return much later in another – gives him an intimate understanding of the ordeal of two other NASA astronauts.

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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.Thanksgiving means sharing food with friends and loved ones, which also means that many potluck guests will spend the next few days scouring the web for easy and last-minute recipes. To help inspire readers looking for suggestions, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What’s your go-to dish to bring to a potluck?There is a calculus to potlucks. The dish you bring must be not only tasty but also impressive, affordable, transportable, easy to serve, and not overly time-consuming—not to mention thematically appropriate. Years of doing the math led me to a simple solution: No matter the party, I bring meatballs. Roll them, bake them, and serve with toothpicks—and don’t forget the dips.The great thing about them is that they are endlessly adaptable. A fancier gathering might call for veal-and-ricotta balls with a spiced tomato sauce; kids might prefer chicken balls with ketchup. And, of course, they can be made vegetarian.At a previous job, I was asked to contribute to a cookie-themed potluck. Anxiety struck; I’m a deeply mediocre baker. But the math saved me once again. As I set down a plate of beef-and-pork balls next to trays of whoopie pies and chocolate-chip biscotti, my bemused colleagues waited for an explanation. I pulled out a label: “Meat truffles.” By the end of the meal, not a single one was left.— Yasmin Tayag, staff writer***A staple of my family’s Thanksgiving dinners and summer barbecues is a painstaking mid-century masterpiece we call “rainbow Jell-O”: layers of red, orange, yellow, and green gelatin, partitioned by sweetened condensed milk and cut into bite-size cubes. Making the Jell-O is an all-day affair; each level needs to set in the fridge before the next can be built on top (we skip blue, indigo, and violet as a practical matter).The recipe, scrawled by my grandmother on a now-yellowed piece of paper, comes from the Japanese American side of my family, which traces its roots through Hawaii, where rainbow Jell-O is sold in convenience stores. The origins of the Jell-O are unclear, but if I had to guess, it might be born of the islands’ unique culinary tradition of drawing magic from shelf-stable foods and wartime rations—in the spirit of Spam musubi.Is making the Jell-O worth clearing an afternoon and a shelf in your fridge? That perhaps depends on your tolerance for wobbly foods. When one of my college roommates was passed the plate of Jell-O squares on his first Thanksgiving visit, he watched them quake from side to side and politely declined.— Andrew Aoyama, deputy managing editor***I’m a self-conscious cook, even in private; I prefer to stick with minimal ingredients for my meals instead of experimenting with my seasonings and, inevitably, my sensitive stomach. My palate is pretty limited, probably as a result of my boring diet—so I also have no idea if anything I eat tastes good to the average person.That’s why, when I’m invited to a potluck, I designate myself the Prepacked-Snacks Person. But I make it fun by leveraging my experience as an Oreo connoisseur: My potluck contribution is whatever wacky, seasonally appropriate Oreo flavor is on the market right now. It’s both something you know everyone is somewhat familiar with and more exciting than showing up with the basic snacks you get at the bodega. Plus, I would rather have my friends taste and judge my Pumpkin Spice or Coca-Cola Oreos than watch them pretend to like my homemade chili.— Allegra Frank, senior editor***I’m pretty sure I first made caramel rolls for my mom’s birthday when I was in high school, but I started sharing them at a Friendsgiving potluck in college. They are basically cinnamon rolls, but instead of topping the buns with frosting, you drown them in a caramel sauce, creating a dish that is soft, sticky, and supremely sweet. Although you can use an online recipe for the bread portion, I use my grandmother’s recipe for the caramel, which lives on a bright-blue note card in a wooden box at my parents’ house, along with all of the other cooking instructions we inherited after she passed away. I’ve heard that caramel is notoriously hard to make, but I’ve never had an issue with hers, which includes two whopping tablespoons of white corn syrup. Her side of the family—my mom’s side—comes from North Dakota, so I always feel like I’m sharing a dish that’s a little folksy: simple and delicious. Caramel rolls don’t just work as a hefty addition to potlucks and as a dessert for any occasion; the leftovers can be breakfast too!— Elise Hannum, assistant editor***I am a man of vanity who likes to appear impressive in mixed company; I am also a man of convenience who likes to expend as little energy as possible, if possible. In a potluck scenario, the latter instinct takes over—largely because there’s just less time and attention to spend on any one dish.Hence my love of making pulled pork, which maxes out several factors: cheapness of ingredients, ease of preparation, quantity of yielded food, wow factor with friends. The recipe I use is perhaps not the best recipe; it is, however, one of the first recipes I found when I Googled best pulled-pork recipe a few years ago. You can really blow people’s minds by bringing along the appropriate accoutrement—pickles, barbecue sauce, buns—but even by itself, the meat goes with anything.I first made pulled pork for a Super Bowl party, when I had a sneaking suspicion—informed by my expansive curiosity about flavor combinations, and my history of alcohol consumption—that it would pair well with chips and beer. I will be honest: Despite the ease of “slather in spices and hit the slow-cooker button,” I somehow kind of screwed it up—the cut of meat was too large for the lid to fully cover, and I didn’t let it cook for long enough. But even made poorly, pulled pork is a novel delight—everyone loved it, even as I was mildly ashamed of this inaugural effort. Made well, you’ll be the talk of the party.— Jeremy Gordon, senior editor***This season of life doesn’t seem to afford much time for hobbies, but I do love baking, either solo or with the “help” of my 6-year-old daughter (she is an expert sugar sprinkler). My favorite—and most consistently delicious—thing to bake is challah. I got the recipe, adaptations, and all relevant advice from my sister; it has completely ruined all those dry store-bought versions for any purpose but making French toast.I learned the art of baking challah during the pandemic, when everyone else was busy with their sourdough starters. Back then, my husband, my daughter, and I had no choice but to eat it all ourselves—fortunately, this recipe freezes well. That was by far not the worst part of COVID, but I prefer to share challah; Jewish food is always best enjoyed in the company of others. I never mastered the traditional braiding of the dough, so I mostly shape it into large, fluffy buns—all the better for tearing apart with your hands. Try topping the challah with everything-bagel seasoning, za’atar, or something more creative. Then bring it to a communal Shabbat or a holiday meal, and enjoy watching your loved ones go back for just one more hunk of soft, warm bread, and then another, and another.— Janice Wolly, copy chiefHere are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The business-school scandal that just keeps getting bigger Three ways to become a deeper thinker The Atlantic gift guide The Week Ahead Moana 2, an animated sequel about a village chief’s wayfinding daughter who must travel into the dangerous waters of Oceania (in theaters Wednesday) The Agency, a thriller series starring Michael Fassbender as a CIA agent who is ordered to leave his undercover life (premieres Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime) This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a collection of short stories by Naomi Wood about motherhood, femininity, and modern love (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. Your Armpits Are Trying to Tell You SomethingBy Yasmin Tayag The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the color of my blouse. Never again would I twist underneath a hand dryer to dry my damp underarms. It was time to try clinical-strength antiperspirant. Read the full article.More in Culture The thin line between biopic and propaganda How Jimmy O. Yang became a main character Cher has a history lesson for us all. The most coveted screenshot in the literary world What the men of the internet are trying to prove “Dear James”: I used to have friends. Then they had kids. Catch Up on The Atlantic David Frum: A good country’s bad choice The Trump-Trumpist divide Inside the mind of Pete Hegseth Photo Album In a protest demanding action on climate change, members of Indigenous organizations hold large cutouts of world leaders’ heads above the waters of Botafogo Bay. (Tuane Fernandes / Reuters) Check out these photos of the week, showing a climate-change protest, a mummified saber-toothed kitten in Russia, a virtual taekwondo championship in Singapore, and more.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

An inside look at Sunday’s Giants-Buccaneers matchup at MetLife Stadium:

Nayelly Flores finishes second at City Section Division II final while supported by her boyfriend, who asked her to run on the team this fall.

The Washington Commanders are set to meet the Dallas Cowboys at home Sunday. Here’s everything you need to know for game day.

The biggest surprise through two-thirds of St. John’s trip to The Bahamas has been the Johnnies’ 3-point shooting.

The former host of game shows "Love Connection" and "Wheel of Fortune" has died at the age of 83.

A Latin American restaurant in Brooklyn with a laundry list of revolting health-code violations is at the center of an illegal vending scheme where dozens of migrant women brazenly hawk hot meals on street corners across the Big Apple, The Post has learned.

After Trump’s victory, tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates.

With President-elect Donald Trump vowing to impose tariffs on imports when he takes office, now might be the time to buy new appliances.

The postnatal retreat in Northern Virginia, which offers services inspired by practices in South Korea, is one of only a few to have opened in the United States.

It is possible to enjoy the holidays while maintaining a healthy lifestyle, says Dr. Nicole Saphier. The Fox News medical contributor shares her tips for navigating the season in a nutritious way.

A reader said she used to walk to a Metro bus stop on Sunset Boulevard. Now, after falling on poor sidewalks, she uses ride share or just stays home.

The president-elect should redouble his earlier efforts to emphasize skills over college degrees.

The annual game between Army and Notre Dame used to be a clash of worlds: military and religious. The Fighting Irish now just represent capitalism.

A reader predicts Phillips 66 executives will be just fine if their company is convicted, because 'corporations are definitely not people.'

Eagles coordinator Vic Fangio shut down Sean McVay and the Rams offense in 2018 as the Bears won and gave the Patriots a blueprint to win Super Bowl LIII.

Holiday concert guide

A transgender reader says she has been out for many years and hopes California stands up for her rights. Another cautions that Trump has seized on this issue.

This is the season for California lawmakers to travel across the globe, some to lush beachside resorts with schmoozing lobbyists, at no cost of their own.

Saturday night’s showpiece final between the Orlando Pride and the Washington Spirit capped a record year for attendance, viewership and growth.

Temperatures turn noticeably cooler starting Wednesday.

California is now producing so much solar energy that the state must increasingly ask solar farms to stop producing to prevent overloading the electric grid. In the last 12 months, power that would have fueled 518,000 California homes for a year has been curtailed or thrown away.

Madeleine Lambert, who had her daughter at 14, wanted to prove to people that she was "more than just a statistic."

"A Palestinian state is a must and an absolute prerequisite for normalization with Israel," a Saudi political analyst told Newsweek.

The farmer raising the turkeys for a presidential pardon talked to TIME about why they like bugle music and how he gets them used to cameras.

Dear Abby advises a couple on what to do with their valuables before their time on Earth ends.

A Montgomery County police officer argues that revealing records of investigations into his conduct would be unconstitutional and violate his privacy.

The Post's Dave Blezow returns for Season 31 of the Bettor's Guide to give his Week 12 NFL picks.

The problem that the United Nations’ annual climate conference was meant to solve this year was, in one way, straightforward. To have any hope of meeting their commitments to holding global warming at bay, developing countries need at least $1 trillion a year in outside funding, according to economists’ assessments. Failure to meet those commitments will result in more chaotic climate outcomes globally. Everyone agrees on this.And yet, after two weeks of grueling, demoralizing negotiations, the assembled 198 parties agreed to a deal that was, in the most generous terms, weak. The agreement committed to $300 billion per year, by 2035, in funding for climate action in developing countries—triple the current target, but less than a third of that trillion-plus goal.These negotiations have operated on the presumption that a significant chunk of this money would come from wealthy countries, because where else would it come from? A limited number of places—the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and Europe—have been the source of 92 percent of excess carbon emissions since industrialization. The countries that are bearing the brunt of climate change largely didn’t emit the carbon causing it. And the wealthiest countries failed to make a financial commitment even close to what was needed. “They’re really finding ways to avoid their responsibility,” Nafkote Dabi, the climate-change-policy lead at Oxfam International, told me.Even the climate financing that was agreed to is not just a cash handout. Previous agreements had promised $100 billion annually, a goal that the world claims to have finally managed to hit in 2022. But about 70 percent of that financing came in the form of loans. Much of the money in this agreement will likely be structured as debt, too—and will add to a global debt crisis that the International Monetary Fund estimates has 35 countries in dire financial straits this year. Dabi described debt—both a country’s existing national debt and climate finance taking the form of new debt—as the elephant in the room at COP. Even as developing countries worried about their debt burden growing from funds promised at the conference, they worried that discussing debt forgiveness would derail the already fragile negotiations.But both national debt and new climate debt stand in the way of COP’s stated goals. Towering national debts are stifling countries’ ability to invest in climate resilience: Some 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on servicing the interest payments on their debt than on education or health, let alone climate adaptation. And as climate change fuels hurricanes, droughts, and other disasters, the country must take on more debt to respond. African nations in particular are struggling. Last year, the chief economic adviser for Kenya’s president tweeted, “Salaries or default? Take your pick.” The country’s economy is collapsing under the weight of debt repayments. Kenya is also ricocheting between drought and flooding, and although climate funding might help build irrigation systems for drought-stricken farmers or finance renewable-energy infrastructure, it could also exacerbate the economic crisis if it arrives in the form of debt, adding to a burden that itself makes people that much less resilient to climate change’s challenges.Pakistan is perhaps the clearest example of how debt and climate risk can send a country into a downward spiral. It is one of the countries most loaded with external debt, owing some $100 billion to mostly the Asian Development Bank, IMF and World Bank, and a handful of wealthy countries including China, Japan, and the United States. And disasters worsened by climate change only add to its hardship: In 2022, for instance, flood damage amounted to $30 billion in losses. Pakistan can never repay its debts, and natural disasters will push it to rack up more.Dramatically lessening Pakistan’s debt would offer some recognition that the country is suffering under climate conditions it was not responsible for creating, and to which it will struggle to respond otherwise. Mark Brown, the prime minister of the Cook Islands, has called for countries on the front lines of climate change to have their national debts forgiven, and the president of Nigeria recently wrote that offering climate financing to African countries without restructuring their debts would be like “pedaling harder on a bicycle as its tires go flat.”There is precedent for mass debt forgiveness: In the 1990s and early 2000s, the IMF led the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative to restructure debts. It managed to cut out up to 64 percent of the countries’ debts on average. Kevin Gallagher, the director of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center and an expert on climate finance, told me he’d like to see a new program like it, but one meant to wrangle the many private bondholders that have since entered the debt market. These companies, he says, tend to be reluctant to grant a country debt relief, despite charging extremely high interest rates meant to cover losses in the likely case the country defaults. “They’ve already priced it in,” he told me. Right now, China and other major debt holders are then also wary of offering debt relief, knowing the debtor country will likely use any financial breathing room to pay the private bond market.China, which is the single biggest creditor of any country in the world, is actually a far more progressive lender than private bondholders, experts say. China can be reluctant to restructure countries’ debts when they’re at risk of default, but it also lends at much lower interest rates than private bondholders. And few other creditor countries have been willing to entertain cutting debts as part of a climate-resilience strategy either, according to Jason Braganza, a Kenyan economist and the executive director of the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development. If a major debt-restructuring initiative managed to get China, other creditor countries such as the U.S., private bond markets, and global-development banks to the table, that could alter the fate of the world: Although every one of the poorest indebted countries could default on its loans without having a huge impact on the global financial system, the financial strain of them defaulting—and tumbling into austerity—would drag down the global economy, Gallagher said. “If these countries can’t even afford to pay back their international debts, they certainly can’t invest in climate resilience, mitigation, and development.”Debt forgiveness poses a similar challenge to the climate-finance question that COP failed so miserably to address: Solving either crisis would take collective will, and at COP too few responsible entities were willing. And although COP could agree not to issue new climate finance in the form of debt, a multilateral agreement on debt forgiveness wouldn’t happen at COP, which doesn’t include nonstate actors.Still, last week in Brazil, President Joe Biden called on G20 countries to swiftly provide debt relief to nations that need it, urging a faster debt-restructuring process. Many analysts say wealthy countries have an obvious interest in preventing default in the developing world: The impact of debt distress is not confined to the distressed country’s borders. Indebtedness breeds austerity, and if countries are unable to shield themselves from the effects of climate change and to transition away from fossil fuels, then that crisis deepens into an issue of global security. Emissions go up, as does displacement. If the world could think differently about debt, perhaps the next round of climate talks, scheduled for November 2025 in Brazil, could go differently, too.

"Russia's own troops are not enough" to push Ukraine out of the Russian border region, Kyiv's top commander has said.

It’s not quite Babe Ruth calling his shot, but Brock Nelson will come away from Hockey Fights Cancer Night with quite the story to tell.

Take a quick break with our daily 5x5 grid.

Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for Nov. 24, 2024.

An Idaho woman, 18, was arrested over accusations that she dropped a deceased baby in a Safe Haven Baby Box at a hospital with the placenta still attached.

Empires in decline. Demagogues on the rise. Welcome to this weekend’s two escapist blockbusters!

Ukraine's air force said that at least 73 Russian attack drones entered the country's airspace on Saturday night into Sunday.

Many on social media took inspiration from her post, with one commenting how they'll be copying her message.

The TikTok CEO Shou Chew is trying to find out how Trump will approach the social media platform in his second term.

At the start of the season, Nets coach Jordi Fernandez said he hoped Ben Simmons would be aggressive and put up double-digit shots on a nightly basis.

Most United Nations efforts to deliver aid to the area in November were obstructed, except for a single World Food Program mission, according to OCHA.

Reporting on the 40th anniversary of the popular pizza literacy program sent one writer on a mozzarella-scented memory trail.

Archaeologists working in Central America have discovered a series of fishing-catching canals made by pre-Columbian Mayan predecessors thousands of years ago.

One seismologist has told Newsweek how his team reacted to one of the worst natural disasters in history.