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Methods to describe this 12 months … Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Sure, and: The Katie Miller Podcast.
For those who’re questioning who Katie Miller is and why high-level officers maintain happening her podcast: She made a reputation for herself through the first Trump administration by denying that the Division of Homeland Safety was separating households. This 12 months, she was an adviser to the Division of Authorities Effectivityan excellent effort that didn’t in reality get monetary savings however definitely did destroy lots of items and providers! She can also be Stephen Miller’s spouse. Sure, that Stephen Miller—the architect of the administration’s immigration coverage, an train in wanton cruelty that has demanded 3,000 arrests of undocumented immigrants day by day and has taken a wrecking ball to 1000’s of lives.
Since August, Katie has hosted a soft-focus podcast during which she interviews administration-adjacent figures and individuals who I assume should be, by some definition, celebrities? (A big potted plant is there additionally.) On the finish of just about each episode, she poses the query: “For those who might host a cocktail party with three folks, lifeless or alive, who’s on the desk, and what are you consuming?” Thus far, the company, and their diverse solutions, have supplied what I believe is the right encapsulation of this very unusual 12 months. Neglect your prime 10 films and prime 11 information tales—“The High 10 Dream Dinners Hosted by Visitors on The Katie Miller Podcast” is the year-end rating that 2025 deserves.
I’ve taken the freedom of organizing these dinners into an inventory, from most to least more likely to go effectively. Let’s start.
10. Kellyanne Conway, media commentator and President Donald Trump’s former adviser
Visitors: Jesus, her grandmother
That is Jesus’s first cameo at one among these dinners! It is not going to be his final. Kellyanne Conway has lots to ask him, and she or he anticipates that he would even have lots to ask her. (Talking of individuals making an attempt to go on to the Roman-Catholic supply, we bought a brand new Chicago-style pope this 12 months! Notice that he’s not invited to this dinner.) That is the primary episode to introduce what’s going to grow to be a persistent drawback: the talk over whether or not Jesus counts as a dinner visitor who’s lifeless or alive. Theologically this can be a wealthy query, I really feel! I’m Episcopalian, although.
9. Kash Patel, FBI director/influencer
Visitors: the whole Miracle on Ice males’s hockey staff from 1980
“Who’re you?” I image the boys’s hockey staff asking. “I’m Kash Patel, kids’s-book creator and director of the FBI,” Kash Patel responds, by a mouthful of chicken-parm hero sandwich (his meal of alternative). “Lately I’ve been within the information as a result of the FBI retains detaining the improper folks of curiosity in high-profile instances, and I maintain making brokers present safety to my country-singer girlfriend.” I really feel that the dialog would path off shortly after this level.
8. Cheryl Hines, actor and spouse of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Visitors: Her grandmother Ruth, Carol Burnett, and Maya Angelou
I’m arriving on the idea that in case your grandma goes to your imaginary dinner, it ought to simply be all household. I’d like to have my grandma at such an occasion, however I believe if Carol Burnett have been additionally on the dinner, she may clam up.
In case you’re questioning why Cheryl Hines is getting interviewed—her husband is the present well being secretary, who’s diligently working to reintroduce the measles virus to its unique habitat (inside of individuals’s respiratory methods), the place it had been hunted nearly to extinction. It’s uncommon to have a measles conservationist on this kind of place, however that’s the Trump administration for you: making an attempt issues which have by no means been tried earlier than. What if the conspiracy theorists have been contained in the FBI as a substitute of out of doors it? What if we didn’t have an East Wing?
7. Adena Friedman, Nasdaq President and CEO
Visitors: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the astronaut Sally Trip
I’m getting apprehensive concerning the inventory market! It stored going up this 12 months, largely as a result of we maintain spending extra on AI in hopes that this certainly-not-bubble will carry all boats and finally end in income. The architects of AI even bought to be Time journal’s Particular person(s) of the Yr. STOP PUTTING AI INTO ALL OF MY THINGS! I don’t need it there. It’s just like the letter u that British persons are at all times dropping into phrases: It provides nothing and leaves me unsettled.
Friedman’s dinner options three “trailblazers” who can be consuming a Thanksgiving dinner. She mentioned these may be very totally different conversations, however I can really see this meal going effectively! So long as they don’t focus on the inventory market—having led the nation by the Nice Despair, FDR may convey up some questions that would kill the temper.
6. J. D. Vance, vice chairman
Visitors: Isaac Newton, Donald Trump, and Abraham Lincoln (a well-liked decide)
Provided that Trump described Abraham Lincoln as somebody who “did one thing that was a vital factor to do, and particularly at the moment,” I believe it’s seemingly that Trump doesn’t know who Abraham Lincoln is or what he did, and the potential of a cocktail party the place Trump is pressured to disclose this in actual time is intriguing to me. My sense is that he would attempt to convey up that his uncle was a professor at MIT after which praise Lincoln on his top. He may be disillusioned to listen to that Lincoln spent a lot time preventing in opposition to the Confederacy. I don’t know what Isaac Newton would do; perhaps drop an apple.
Together with Trump on this dinner when that seat might go to actually any human being dwelling or lifeless is the sort of pandering we’ve come to anticipate from the vice chairman, whose different 2025 highlights embody complaining to Europe concerning the “enemy inside,” being one of many final to see Pope Francis aliveand suggesting that he hopes his Hindu spouse will awaken to Jesus someday.
5. Jillian Michaels, health influencer
Visitors: Maya Angelou (once more!), Albert Einstein, and Ozzy Osbourne
This one will get factors subtracted for the menu, which is: French fries, pink wine, peanut butter, sizzling sauce, and ice cream—I’ve to imagine not collectively, however Michaels did say that this was all that they would wish, so, who is aware of! “What’s The Largest Loser’s coach doing on this podcast?” you ask. This 12 months, she got here out swinging in protection of Trump’s directive to the Smithsonian to say nicer issues about America and cease harping on about slavery. “Do you understand that solely lower than 2 p.c of white Individuals owned slaves? You understand that slavery is 1000’s of years outdated?” she mentioned on a CNN panel. “I’m shocked that you simply’re making an attempt to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery,” the CNN host Abby Phillip responded. Have enjoyable at your dinner with Maya Angelou, Jillian.
4. Mike Johnson, speaker of the Home
Visitors: Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington
Mike Johnson calls this dinner “very American-centric,” which raises some questions for me. Did I miss essential info within the Bible about Jesus’s nationality, or, conversely, essential details about the institution of faith within the Structure? Will Jesus convey a translator with him? In Johnson’s episode, he sounds burdened, as he needs to be—he’s had a busy 12 months: passing the One Massive Stunning Invoice Act and as few different payments as potential, shutting the federal government down, and blocking after which reluctantly permitting the discharge of the Epstein recordsdata. An bold temporary for anybody! And that’s not all that he has to fret about: In the middle of this interview, he agreed that his mind (and, maybe, the brains of all males?) was like a waffle.
3. Pete Hegseth, protection secretary
Visitors: Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vladimir Putin
When he hasn’t been ordering the extrajudicial killings of individuals in boats or kicking the press out of the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has spent most of 2025 lecturing individuals who have higher issues to do about how a lot he hates beards. I ponder if he’ll be capable to restrain himself from doing so at this dinner. (Then once more, the Ukrainian president is used to being lectured on his look in lieu of any progress on the conflict engulfing his nation.) Figuring out Vladimir Putin, he might skip the dinner fully, forcing Trump and Hegseth to pursue him down the tarmac to his aircraft, with their steak (well-done) and Thousand Island dressing in hand. (That’s the menu Hegseth picked. “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable,” as Oscar Wilde put it.)
2. Elon Musk, CEO of too many firms to call, former DOGE honcho
Visitors: William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin
Elon Musk imagines that his company would take pleasure in an epic 12-course meal of in all probability not cheeseburgers, however perhaps little, tiny cheeseburgers, which by no means style nearly as good as the massive ones, but when somebody actually tried, they might be made to. (He riffed, if that’s the phrase I need, on this cheeseburger query for what felt like ages.) Having to listen to from Musk and be topic to his whims has been, sadly, a characteristic of 2025. His DOGE efforts are why we don’t have USAID any extra—leading to an estimated lots of of 1000’s of preventable deathsoffering him with a brand new first line in his obituary, and forcing Tesla house owners to purchase a bit of disclaimer bumper sticker for his or her automobile.
I’ve put this dinner fairly excessive on the listing as a result of I believe that if Nikola Tesla had the entire Musk state of affairs correctly defined to him, fisticuffs would nearly definitely ensue. The concept of Tesla and Musk preventing one another over tiny cheeseburgers whereas William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on … to me, this is a perfect social gathering.
1. Katie Miller, podcast host extraordinaire
Visitors: Queen Victoria and ???
So far as I can inform, we by no means hear who’s becoming a member of past the “Grandmother of Europe.” Katie Miller begins to inform Senator Katie Britt about her personal dinner picks and by no means finishes! Tantalizingly incomplete. Who would the opposite company be? Maybe Stephen Miller, who, allegedly, “solely eats mayonnaise.” (“With french fries, or, like, interval?” J. D. Vance requested throughout his episode. “Interval,” Miller mentioned, later elaborating: “It’s no matter.”) The one dinner worse than one the place Elon Musk fights Nikola Tesla whereas William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on is one the place Katie Miller and Queen Victoria attempt to keep it up a dialog whereas Stephen Miller sits silently subsequent to them, consuming mayonnaise.
Associated:
Night Learn
The New Household Trip
By Michael Waters
The subsequent time you’re on the airport or checking right into a lodge, you may discover a touring group that appears, at the least at first look, a bit of unwieldy: younger children, their mother and father, and their grandparents, all vacationing collectively no matter age or mobility limits.
A scene like this may have been uncommon just a few many years in the past, in keeping with Susan Rugh, a historical past professor at Brigham Younger College who wrote concerning the historical past of household journey in her e-book Are We There But?: The Golden Age of American Household Holidays. The basic Twentieth-century household trip was usually a nuclear one, comprising a mother, a dad, and their younger children. Grandparents and different relations seldom got here alongside. However increasingly, analysis exhibits, households have a tendency to convey a number of generations with them. This, in flip, has modified folks’s most popular journey locations, and even the very function of journey: Multigenerational teams are more likely to take easy, relaxed seaside holidays than to embark on logistics-heavy metropolis visits or highway journeys.
Tradition Break
Learn. In 2023, Ilana Masad really helpful six books to learn throughout a anxious household vacation.
Discover. Many grocery-store self-checkout traces are actually longer than the staffed ones. Valerie Trapp explores the one line that Individuals (weirdly) select to attend in.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this text.
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