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Dear James,
I’m typically quiet and mind my own business. But in recent weeks, I’ve been having conflicts with people over minor things. Just today, I got yelled at twice. I’m not sure if it’s me or them or a phase of the moon.
Early this morning, I was driving in my neighborhood. Visibility was poor because of the long shadows of winter morning. A man dressed in black crossed the street, and I didn’t see him at first. I did stop on time, but I felt an apology was in order, so I lowered my window and said I was sorry. He came over to the car, already screaming at me, and leaned in to continue screaming in my face.
Then this afternoon, I took my dog to our neighborhood park. I often allow the dog some off-leash time, as many of my neighbors do. This time, my dog took off and ran into the yard of a house bordering the park. The house’s owner, who was outside, ran at the dog, yelling, using some choice words. I put the dog on leash, apologized, and quickly left.
In both these instances, I was in the wrong. But I was surprised at the intensity of the reactions. Am I an asshole? Or is everyone about to blow a fuse? Or are these random occurrences, and I’m reading too much into them?
Dear Reader,
Excellent atmosphere in this letter. “The long shadows of winter morning”—right on. And the whole sense of transgression in the second episode, of instability and triggered boundaries: love it.
You definitely don’t sound like an asshole. Assholes cannot write descriptive prose. (That may not actually be true. Good essay topic, though. “Assholes Cannot Write Descriptive Prose: Discuss.”) Also—and less controversially—an asshole has no concept of being in the wrong. Or he does, but he applies it only to the other guy. You, in contrast, are rather haunted by these incidents, and you worry about your role in them.
The day you describe, with its yellings and its psychic abrasions, is the sort of day that can make an occultist out of you. You start thinking about astrology, tarot, vibes, telepathy, the underworld. I do, anyway. Is some planet somewhere pulling in the wrong direction, like a truculent mule? Is the mass mind devolving? Am I unwittingly putting out some kind of freaky energy, to elicit this response?
I relate deeply, for what it’s worth, to the dilemma of your rogue dog. My dog, Sonny, is a born crosser of lines and violator of spaces, and we have both been scolded, shamed, and exiled many times. On balance, I think it’s been good for me. (For him too, possibly, but Sonny—being a dog—keeps his counsel.)
I’ve thought a lot about your question: Are these random occurrences? And my considered answer is: It doesn’t matter. Maybe you were a little off, tired, out of sorts. You drove distractedly for a second; your dog moved too fast for you. So what? No harm was done, and in both cases you apologized. Screw that shouty guy in the street, and screw that irritable homeowner and enemy of dogs. Leave them to their little rages and fist-shakings. Leave them to their blood pressure. Do not invest them with the mysterious power of augury.
Raising a glass to rebel canines everywhere,
James
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Around the world, authoritarians seem to be regaining their strength and daring. In the United States, a political coalition—one that includes people for whom, as my colleague Adam Serwer has memorably written, “the cruelty is the point”—is returning to power. It’s been a tough year for people who believe in liberal democracy. But during the Christmas season, let me make the case for a little faith in the resilience of goodness and justice—and how we can all learn something from Charles Dickens and one of his best-known works, A Christmas Carol.
You don’t need to be a Christian to find solace in A Christmas Carol,because it’s not really a story about Christianity. It’s a story about one man’s bitterness, his regrets, and his repentance. More broadly, it’s about the joy that everyone can find by deciding to be a better person in a world that sometimes feels cold and overwhelming.
The main character of the story is the legendary Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge, an obnoxious miser who delights in his sneering misanthropy. (Many wonderful actors have played Scrooge in various adaptations, but I especially revereGeorge C. Scott in the 1984 television movie.) Scrooge is a mossy cistern of cold, sour inhumanity. His miserliness isn’t just about hoarding wealth for himself; it’s about the petty vengefulness he takes in denying money to others. When two men come to his office to ask for contributions to alleviate the suffering of the indigent, one of them tells Scrooge that poor people would rather die than go to the workhouses and other nightmarish institutions to which they are consigned. Scrooge responds with calm and undiluted contempt: “If they would rather die,” he says, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
I don’t want to overdraw comparisons to our current politics, but when political leaders are talking about creating mass detention camps in America, and voters—even those who were once undocumented immigrants themselves—approve of such ideas despite the danger to their own family, this kind of Victorian viciousness feels uncomfortably relevant.
Back to Scrooge: What about the people who don’t want his money, the happy souls who are merely living their life and indulging in the joy of the season? Well, he hates them too. When Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, a good and gentle young man, asks his uncle why he deplores Christmas so much, Scrooge sneers:
“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Scrooge, of course, will soon see the error of his ways. He will realize that despite attaining wealth and privilege, he is angry and unhappy because of a self-loathing that is mostly the result of his own choices. He will eventually beg forgiveness: Every year, I feel tears in my eyes when Scott, as Scrooge in the 1984 film, wipes the snow from an unloved stone in a barren graveyard, sees his own name, and pleads with the spectral Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come for a chance to change.
The real hero of A Christmas Carol,however, is not Scrooge but his long-deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, whose presence in the story is brief but crucial. (He is, after all, mentioned in the famous first line: “Marley was dead: to begin with.”) Marley, in life a pinchpenny recluse like Scrooge, died seven years before the tale begins. When he comes to Scrooge as a frightening apparition on Christmas Eve, he is wrapped in a winding chain attached to now-useless ledgers and cash boxes. He laments to Scrooge that he is forever doomed to wander the Earth among the human beings he so assiduously ignored while making his money.
Scrooge at first resists believing his own eyes, but he finally accepts that he’s talking with a damned soul. For Marley, it is too late, but he hopes to save Scrooge:
“I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”
“You were always a good friend to me,” said Scrooge.
Scrooge, however, doesn’t get it. He is confused by Marley’s damnation, because for him, material success is evidence of a virtuous life. (This is hardly a Victorian conceit: Think of how many people believe this right now.) When Scrooge tries to comfort the ghost, Marley will have none of it:
“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
These last three lines chill me, yet encourage me.
Scrooge’s repentance comes after years of a wasted life and a night of trauma and shame. The rest of us, however, don’t have to wait. Each of us, every day and in our own small way, can resolve right now that mankind is our business,that the common welfare is our business,and that charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence are all our business,no matter what we do to fill our days or put food on our table—and no matter whom we voted for.
Americans can’t control much of what’s about to happen in their national politics. Some of the people about to govern the United States may be determined to be conscientious public servants, but others seem convinced that their fellow citizens are, to use the president-elect’s words, “vermin” and “scum.” These people will bring division to our public life. Responding in kind, or acquiescing, or withdrawing entirely and believing in nothing, will all be powerful temptations. Giving in to anger or despair is easier, of course, but such feelings are empty emotional calories that eventually leave people spiritually starved. We might hope that others will change their mind, but the sustainable path is to control what’s in our own heart.
The graveyard scene in the 1984 production of A Christmas Carol was filmed in the town of Shrewsbury, England. The stone marker that Scott’s Scrooge discovers in the snow was left in place, and for 40 years, it’s been a tourist attraction.
Last month, someone vandalized it, smashing it into pieces.
For all I know, the culprits could have been local kids experiencing their first tangle with beer (and the stone has since been repaired), but I found the news dispiriting: It seemed like a perfect comment on our modern age of cynicism and avarice that someone trashed the place where Scrooge found his redemption. Learning of this vandalism was part of why I decided to write about A Christmas Carol today. As heartening as it is to think of Scrooge’s happy repentance, it reminded me that we are better served by heeding Marley’s words—so that we never find ourselves in the snow, staring at our own grave, and wondering whether we still have time to set things right.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime, announced in a Telegram post that its leader has reached a deal with other rebel leaders in its coalition to dissolve all factions and merge them under the defense ministry.
American Airlines resumed service this morning after a brief outage that grounded all planes.
Residents along California’s coast are under high-surf and flooding threats, a day after a major storm.
My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a theater director in Florida; a contractor in Louisville; a lawyer in Boston; and a gay Republican.
Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode. What’s always impressed me about our big, mixed-up family is not just that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family includes several couples who disagree politically with the people they live with every day: their own spouses. They haven’t voted for the same candidate, much less for the same party, in years.
Watch. The protagonists of Babygirl (in theaters) and Black Doves (streaming on Netflix) are stuck in their “perfect” lives—and find illicit fulfillment outside them, Sophie Gilbert writes.
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A senior GOP representative from Texas vanished from Congress for five months. Kay Granger, who is 81 years old, stepped down as chair of the House Appropriations Committee this past spring, and she announced last year that she would not seek reelection. Sometime in July, she disappeared from Congress entirely and has since missed months’ worth of votes.
Last week, The Dallas Express (whose now-CEO mounted a primary challenge against Granger in 2020) reported that Granger has been residing in an assisted-living facility. Her son soon confirmed that she has lived there for at least several months; yesterday, he reportedly said that the representative’s decline was “very rapid,” and that she’d moved into the facility before she’d begun showing signs of dementia. In a statement to Axios, Granger said, “Since early September, my health challenges have progressed making frequent travel to Washington both difficult and unpredictable.” Yesterday, her staff posted a picture of the representative; it’s unclear how many of her colleagues knew about her condition.
Once again, the moral questions of America’s political gerontocracy reveal themselves. This is an especially sensitive subject, because so many of us have loved ones—parents, grandparents, siblings—who are in cognitive decline. They deserve our consideration, compassion, and honesty. That’s also true for members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidents. But the stakes there are much higher, and in those cases, sometimes compassion means being truthful about when it’s time to move on.
As the Granger story reminds us, having a politician stay in their role even while suffering cognitive decline is damaging to those who rely on them. Constituents and local officials in Texas seemed stunned to learn that their representative had vanished. State Republican Executive Committeeman Rolando Garcia said it was a “sad and humiliating way” for Granger to end her career. “Sad that nobody cared enough to ‘take away the keys’ before she reached this moment,” he wrote on X. Did Granger’s staff and family cover for her? Did they mislead the public? Did they lie to Granger herself? How hard is it to tell powerful figures in politics that it’s time to resign? In 2024, these are familiar questions. Elderly members of Congress and Supreme Court justices alike have resisted calls to retire; Senator Dianne Feinstein and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg both died in office. For much of this year, our politics has been dominated by octogenarians, including Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Grassley (who, at the age of 91, is actually a nonagenarian). But Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection at the age of 80 was the strongest case against the gerontocracy.
Despite growing signs that Biden was in decline, the White House remained firmly in denial—at least until the disastrous presidential debate in June. Last week, The Wall Street Journalreported in detail how Biden’s staff formed a protective phalanx around the frail president, tightly controlling access, scripting interactions with his Cabinet, and scheduling meetings around his “bad” times. (The White House denied that the president’s schedule “had been altered due to his age.”) “Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent,” the Journal reported. “Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.” All the while, the White House pushed back against evidence that Biden—the oldest man ever to serve as president—might be unable to effectively serve for another four years.
America’s politicians have an age problem, and the issue seems especially acute among congressional Democrats. The prevalence of older politicians can arguably make the elected class less relevant to younger voters and make it more difficult for new voices to rise in politics. But at its core, this is an issue of honesty: Didn’t the American people have a right to know that Biden was struggling? Didn’t Texans deserve to know about Granger? And if either of them was being lied to by those supporting them, didn’t they themselves deserve the truth too?
Eventually, Biden did bow out—and one consequence is that the next president of the United States will, like Biden, be 82 years old at the end of his term.
President Biden commuted the sentences of almost all of the prisoners currently on federal death row. Thirty-seven prisoners, all of whom were convicted of murder, will serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The Jordanian foreign minister and the Qatari minister of state arrived in Damascus to meet with Syria’s new leadership.
At a rally yesterday, Donald Trump said that his administration could attempt to regain control of the Panama Canal. The remark prompted a response from Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, who said that “every square meter of the Panama Canal belongs to Panama.”
Dispatches
Work in Progress: California raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers—and employment kept rising, Rogé Karma writes. So why has the law been proclaimed a failure?
Dear Therapist: How Do I Deal With My Hostile Sister?
By Lori Gottlieb
This holiday season, I’ve been navigating some major challenges with my older sister and my boyfriend. The difficulty started last winter, when my boyfriend wanted to buy an investment property in the state where I’m from and my sister currently resides. My sister became very upset with me and my boyfriend for investing in a place where she lives. We received angry phone calls and disparaging text messages from her. We were shocked at her response. I have yet to make up with my sister as she never apologized, but I have been cordial with her when around the rest of our family.
Read. These six books are perfect for reading by the fire while the days grow imperceptibly longer.
Look. This year, The Atlantic’s art department created and commissioned thousands of images to support the magazine’s journalism. Here are some of their favorites.
This morning, the White House announced that President Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row to life without parole. The historic move came shortly after a batch of pardons and commutations for hundreds of people convicted of nonviolent crimes, as well as Biden’s pardon of his own son. In his official statement, Biden emphasized that “I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss.” But he said that his conscience and experience made him “more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
The political wisdom of Biden’s lame-duck pardons and commutation jubilee is unclear. It seems likely to me that Republicans will use the details of death-row prisoners’ crimes to tar Biden and the Democrats as vaguely approving of torture and murder. Biden himself seemed prepared for that eventuality in his statement, and the recriminations have already begun, despite the fact that life without parole is still a severe punishment: Fair enough; these prisoners’ crimes were to a person evil and left scores of families with holes in their lives. Nevertheless, the moral wisdom of Biden’s decision is compelling to me. Biden’s legacy may be tied up in allegations of corruption and the evident cover-up of his waning health, but he has also secured a place in history as a president of certain mercies, all of which speak of the restraint a sovereign owes his people.
Biden’s decision was a direct response to Donald Trump’s 2020 federal execution spree, wherein then–Attorney General Bill Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions after a 17-year hiatus, then oversaw the deaths of 13 prisoners in six months. Activists and advocates have recently focused on persuading the president to prevent another round of executions on Trump’s watch. In emailed remarks, Ruth Friedman, director of the Capital Federal Habeas Project, explained that “numerous groups and individuals representing a wide array of viewpoints have been calling on the President to take this important step,” adding that “there was also a formal clemency application process through the Office of the Pardon Attorney in many cases, and that process includes communications between the DOJ and a range of stakeholders on all sides of the case.” Among those urging Biden to commute these sentences were the American Civil Liberties Union, Equal Justice USA, the Innocence Project, the Catholic Mobilizing Network, and Pope Francis.
Not every person on federal death row received a commutation. Those who did not were: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers of 2013; Robert Bowers, the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooter; and Dylann Roof, the gunman responsible for the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church massacre that left nine dead. Each case was related to terroristic violence and targeted mass murder. Despite Attorney General Merrick Garland imposing a moratorium on federal executions in 2021, lawyers representing the Department of Justice still defended these death sentences in court; in that respect, it was not surprising that Biden would leave them off of his commutation list. Still, their cases may be tied up in court for the duration of Trump’s term, meaning he will likely be unable to execute any of those three in the coming years.
The commutations will, then, effectively end the federal death penalty for a generation. “If you cannot end the death penalty legislatively, this is the way you end it in practice,” Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me. “Death-penalty abolitionists will have to hope that by the time the next set of cases makes it to death row and through the appeals process, that there’s a new Congress and a differently constituted Supreme Court that will take a serious look at the constitutionality and desirability of the death penalty.” Dunham added that Biden’s moral leadership could enable governors in the country weighing their own commutations, such as Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Governor Gavin Newsom of California.
The decision sparked relief and gratitude not only for the men of federal death row, but also for members of the public who had urged Biden to commute. Donnie Oliviero, a police officer from Columbus, Ohio, whose partner had been killed by Daryl Lawrence, one of the men whose sentence was commuted by Biden, said in a statement provided after the fact that “putting to death the person who killed my police partner and best friend would have brought me no peace. The President has done what is right here, and what is consistent with the faith he and I share. Thank you, Mr. President.” Gary Mohr, the former director of the Ohio Department of Corrections, added that he was “so grateful to President Biden for taking this step to ensure no federal correctional professionals will face the harm of participating in executions for the foreseeable future.” For these men, as well as scores of others both on the row and off, Biden has brought about a fraction of peace on Earth, a measure of mercy mild—and a welcome hallelujah.
ESA / Webb, NASA and CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani
Day 24 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: an energetic stellar nursery. This new image from the James Webb Space Telescope features the young star cluster NGC 602, surrounded by the varied clouds of a nebula, near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionized gas suggest the presence of ongoing star-formation processes.
See the full advent calendar here, where a new image will be revealed each day until December 25.
