Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 267

The Ground Offensive in Ramadi

Iraqi government forces and local fighters on Wednesday entered the second day of a ground offensive against Islamic State militants in the city of Ramadi.

Troops attempted to move further into the center of the city, which fell to the Islamic State this spring, toward the terrorist group’s main government complex, the BBC reported Wednesday.

Backed by U.S. airstrikes, ground forces on Tuesday stormed Ramadi, the largest city in the Anbar province. The offensive began Monday night on the edges of the city, and by midday Tuesday, troops had reached its center, according to news reports from journalists on the ground.

The troops, which numbered up to 10,000 men, included Iraqi government troops and U.S.-trained counterterrorism forces, according to The Wall Street Journal, and Sunni tribal fighters, according to The New York Times. Officials estimate that only several hundred Islamic State militants remain in Ramadi, down from about 600 to 1,000 fighters.

A local network on Wednesday quoted an Iraqi army general as saying that government troops hoped to restore control over Ramadi in a matter of days, according to Reuters. But a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State told CNN Wednesday that troops still have a long way to go until the city can be liberated from the group’s control.

Ramadi’s capture in May drew criticism from some in the U.S. of the Iraqi government’s ability to fight the militant group. The Obama administration has deployed several hundred military advisers and special-operations forces to Iraq to aid in the mission.

Ramadi is a mostly Sunni city west of Baghdad and south of Mosul, which the Islamic State captured in June 2014. The civilian population is estimated to be between 4,000 and 10,000, according to The Guardian. On Sunday, Iraqi military planes dropped leaflets over Ramadi on Sunday that warned residents to leave the city within 72 hours.

President Obama said last week that the Islamic State has lost 40 percent of the territory it once controlled in Iraq this year.

Earlier this month, Iraqi forces retook Tamim, a large neighborhood on the southwestern outskirts of Ramadi. In November, Kurdish and Yadizi forces pushed militants out of Sinjar, which had been under Islamic State control since August 2014.

2015: The Year in Nostalgia

This year in pop culture, nostalgia reigned. It seemed like every film was a reboot, and older artists making new music prompted collective reminiscing.

The nostalgia pervaded generations. Nickelodeon brought back its stable of 90s shows, reminding Millennials of laughs past, and the new Star Wars film allowed intergalactic veterans re-entry into a galaxy far, far away.

Netflix deftly capitalized on all the remembering, introducing a new season of Wet Hot American Summer, and promising new Gilmore Girls and a Fuller House in 2016. Music too had its moment of reflection in the biopic Straight Outta Compton and the reemergence of Missy Elliott.

From TV, to film, to song, 2015 was a year to look back and relive:

The Cosmopolitan Genius of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’

Welcome to The 12 Days of Christmas Songs: an attempt to uncover the forgotten history of some of the most memorable festive tunes. From December 14 through 25, we’ll be tackling one secular song and one holy song each day.

“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is rightly considered one of the “Great Four” Anglican hymns, but that label seems too provincial. In fact, the hymn seems like an examplar of European modernity: cosmopolitan, ecumenical, rooted in the printed word, and, finally, a tremendous commercial success.

Start with the words, written by Charles Wesley—a man ordained in the Church of England and one of its greatest hymnodists, yet also a leader of the splinter denomination of Methodism. Even the greats make a mistake now and then: Wesley’s original opening line for this hymn was the leaden “Hark! how all the welkin rings, Glory to the King of kings.” (“Welkin,” for the record, means the firmament or heaven.)

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Then take the music, written by Felix Mendelssohn—one of the greatest Christian composers of the 19th century, yet also the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, one of the greatest Jewish philosophers. Even better, the tune was originally written as part of a cantata honoring Johannes Gutenberg, the father of the printed word. Only later was it combined with Wesley’s words. That’s also when the opening lines were repurposed as a refrain to end each verse. The refrain is the hook that makes the song—an arrangement that neither Wesley nor Mendelssohn ever envisioned.

Now the tune is heard around the world for weeks before December 25, an avatar of the globalized, secularized, commercialized celebration of Christmas. But for my money the only proper way is with the majestic treble descant written by Sir David Willcocks, the great choirmaster who died this year. Performing it any other way is like getting a Christmas tree but leaving it untrimmed.

A Cultural History of Rock-Paper-Scissors

It was 1995, in the early days of the web, when the brothers Doug and Graham Walker decided they wanted to start a website. They hadn’t settled on a topic, but the two were fond of playing rock-paper-scissors in their garage, their matches filled with aggrandizing trash-talk. So, as a joke, they decided to devote their new website to the game. They came up with convoluted rules and regulations, a fabricated history, and cheekily named strategies about how to win. They dubbed it the World Rock Paper Scissors Society, not realizing their pet project would turn into what Doug calls “a unique viral experiment.”

Over the next 10 years, their site exploded. At its peak in the mid-aughts, the World Rock Paper Scissors Society was holding championships complete with black-and-white-shirted referees. They had corporate sponsorships from Microsoft and Yahoo! and a pot of $10,000 for the winner. The 2007 championships were televised on ESPN and Fox Sports, and Rolling Stone called the championship “a high-stakes Star Trek convention.” Last month, players took to a pub in London to battle it out for the title of U.K. Rock Paper Scissors Champion, and an international championship has been scheduled for spring of 2016. The way rock-paper-scissors achieved such visibility is perhaps a testament to how anything, no matter how silly, can earn a fandom. But it’s also proof of how a simple game resonates with people around the world, thanks to its nostalgic quality, easy gameplay, and history of transcending cultural barriers.

Rock-paper-scissors didn’t arrive in the U.S. until the 20th century, but it’s one of the oldest games used for making decisions in human existence, even if its history is muddled with legends and exaggerations put forth by Internet historians and Redditors (for example, the reason why the game is sometimes called “Rochambeau” is fiercely debated).

The earliest known references to finger-flashing games are a tomb-wall painting at the Beni Hasan burial site in Middle Egypt (dated to around 2000 B.C.E.) and centuries later on a scroll from Japan. Versions of rock-paper-scissors can be found in cultures around the world, but outside of North America it remains most ubiquitous in Asia. In Japan, the game is called jan-ken or jankenpon, and uses the same rock-paper-scissors finger positions, though a variation features a tiger, a village chief, and the village chief’s mother (who beats the chief). In Indonesia, the game is earwig-man-elephant, where the earwig overcomes the elephant by crawling up his trunk and eating his brain.

But whatever the interpretation, the game is pervasive, combining everyday utility with basic human psychology. People tend to think that it’s a random (and thus fair) way of making trivial decisions, but the game’s simple structure still allows for an element of strategy, making it an unlikely but fitting subject for a worldwide competition. While your best chance of winning would be to choose your moves completely at random, humans are naturally terrible at behaving randomly. Well-trained players who think of the game as a psychologically driven battle can use this fact and other influencers to increase their chances of winning.

“Who doesn’t want to be the world champion at something, no matter how insignificant?”

Ironically, children are actually the most difficult to play against because they’re the most random in their choices, while adults who who are inclined to overthink their moves tend to be more predictable, Simmons says. More skilled players use gambits, which are pre-decided sets of three throws that help reduce the chance that you give away your next move. The Great Eight Gambits, the most common strategies employed, have names like “Bureaucrat” (for three papers used in a row) and “Fistful o’ Dollars” (for rock, paper, paper). “It’s about choice and the power of suggestion,” Simmons says. “The game itself almost disappears and it becomes this rarified force of will between two competitors when they both know what they’re doing.”

The Walker brothers’ website was partially inspired by the game’s psychological and game-theoretical underpinnings—which have now spawned legitimate research studies and many Internet articles proclaiming to teach you How to Always Win at Rock-Paper-Scissors. In a time when the Internet was first beginning to give people’s secret passions a platform, the brothers managed to hit a nerve and inspire a subculture. By the time the brothers threw their first “world championship” at a pub in Toronto in 2002, there was a line of people two blocks long in the middle of a snowstorm, determined to try their luck in the formal elimination contest or the seedy “street competition.”

“RPS is written off as a kids’ game ... but when you delve into it it’s one of the purest forms of competition that two minds can have with each other,” says the professional rock-paper-scissors player Jason Simmons (he goes by the stage name

'All I Want for Christmas Is You': A Historical Dialectic

Welcome to The 12 Days of Christmas Songs: an attempt to uncover the forgotten history of some of the most memorable festive tunes. From December 14 through 25, we’ll be tackling one secular song and one holy song each day.

Ah, Mariah Carey, that great philosopher of the human heart. Fools have foretold the end of her Christmas-music reign. But according to Billboard’s “Holiday 100” list, 21 years after she set loose her hit, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” she’s still exactly where she belongs: at the top. Since 1994, the song has sold more than 14 million copies and made a reported $50 million in royalties. And besides making her some sweet seasonal cash, Carey’s masterpiece is an incredible feat of philosophical subterfuge. Christmas is a time of material and affection-based excess, yet the song is narrowly focused on just one thing: getting to be with a specific person, e.g., you. It rejects the idea of love in general in favor of love in particular, simultaneously defying and defining pop-music conventions. With infinitely more economy of expression and undoubtedly catchier lyrics, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is a sort of Hegelian dialectic of Christmastime desire, taking the conflicting notions of abundance and specificity and packaging them neatly into an earworm for the generations.

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A version of this question has long been of interest in the canon; writerly men are forever theorizing about love. Google “particularity of desire” and you’ll get hits from Lacan, Freud, Hegel, C.S. Lewis, and some stuff on Catholic natural law. Granted, twisting the exegesis of complicated 19th- and 20th-century thinkers in the service of tongue-in-cheek essays about popular culture is one of the most joyful uses of the public Internet and an expensive liberal-arts education. But why rely on Lacan when you can have Carey?

Herewith, an annotated version of the selected text, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” an attempt to unpick its profound and resonant commentary on the nature of desire in our time.

1. I don’t want a lot for Christmas

There is just one thing I need

The author carefully sets out her premises. There exists an entity, “I,” representing conscious selfhood. This entity exists in relation to material space (“a lot”) and seasonal time (“for Christmas”). The entity expresses this relationality through the vocabulary of desire, or “want,” and though its desires could theoretically be expansive, they are not. Here, we have the author’s thesis: Desire, rather than general, is specific; instead of many things, it is “just one thing.”

Heretofore, let the subject be known as “I/Carey”; the object, “You.”

2. I don’t care about the presents

Underneath the Christmas tree

Yet how could we understand the author’s examination of Christmas as anything but an implicit critique of capitalism? Carey deftly communicates via symbols: “presents” and “Christmas tree” clearly indicate the author’s hostility toward the ever-present signifiers of capital’s all-consuming power.

3. I just want you for my own

An artful cut-away from a full deconstruction of the nature of power. I/Carey posits its/her ability to possess “You”; though this might seem at first to be an alarming and unabashed endorsement of human ownership over another (presumably) human entity, it alludes to the mysterious object of desire. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is not, it seems, an exploration of anodyne egalitarianism; narratives of dominance and power-holding feed the connection between I/Carey and “You.”

NB: Evidence suggests “You” could plausibly be puppies. The author leaves this tantalizingly ambiguous.

4. More than you could ever know

This line suggests skepticism of the realization of knowledge; the tangible limits of apprehension (e.g., “more”); and, again, the assertive narrative dominance of subject over object.

5. Make my wish come true

All I want for Christmas is you

Here, though, the implicit narratives of power are upended: The author appeals to “You” as the agent of wish-granting, simultaneously reiterating the singularity of her desire.

There is a darker context to this narrative. The apocryphal story of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is that it was written in 15 minutes in 1994, while Carey was married to Tommy Mottola, her manager. It was reportedly an unhappy and abusive union, lasting only four years. Mottola lurks, implicit/explicit, sinister Santa, monitoring as Carey expresses her desire.

6. Yeah

Uh huh. And you thought this was just a cheery love song.

7. I don’t want … Christmas tree

(See above.)

8. I don’t need to hang my stocking

There upon the fireplace

Santa Clause won’t make me happy

With a toy on Christmas Day

Despite the undeniable creepy/darkness of lurker Santa, the author begins to cultivate a sense of child-like wonder through her choice of language, e.g., “stocking,” “toy.” For a famous exploration of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” in which the youthful quality of desire is fully on display, cf. the undeniably excellent classic holiday film, Love Actually.

10. I just want … You, baby.

(See above.)

11. Oh, I won’t ask for much this Christmas

I won’t even wish for snow

And I’m just gonna keep on waiting

Underneath the mistletoe

I won’t make a list and send it

To the North Pole for Saint Nick

The author explores the dialectic between desire and not-desire. Articulating desire by refusing to ask for its object. Standing in the absence of desire fulfilled under mistletoe, the tool of desire fulfillment. Affirming the agency of I/Carey in obtaining/possessing “You,” despite past pleas to Santa, aka “Saint Nick.”

13. I won’t even stay awake to

Hear those magic reindeer click

A daring allusion to the disenchantment of the world in modernity. Cf. Weber, “All I Want for Christmas Is You and the Spirit of Capitalism.”

The intellect yearns for Netflix and chill.

14. Cause I just want you here tonight

Holding on to me so tight

What more can I do?

Baby, all I want for Christmas is you

The impatience of desire grows. The intellect yearns for Netflix and chill.

15. You, baby.

Minor grammatical confusion; in her phrasing choices, the author appears to introduce ambiguity. Thus far, there have been no suggestions that “You” is a literal baby, and since the author is clearly not about that Freud, we can safely conclude that “baby” is merely an alternative label for the object.

16. Oh all the lights are shining

So brightly everywhere

And the sound of children’s

laughter fills the air

And everyone is singing

I hear those sleigh bells ringing

Santa won’t you bring me the one I really need?

Won’t you please bring my baby to me?

Possibly a thinly veiled reference to a 1993 sensory-deprivation experiment undertaken in the pursuit of greater intellectual/emotional/spiritual/physical understanding of “You.” NB: Similar techniques would later be used in pursuit of Nick Cannon.

18. I don’t want a lot for Christmas

This is all I’m asking for

I just want to see my baby

Standing right outside my door

An acknowledgement of the physical body’s role in desire, thus far largely unarticulated. “You” cannot merely be a sweet, sweet fantasy; although I/Carey may operate as though in a dream-state, she is not, in fact, asleep.

20. Oh … you

(See above.)

21. All I want for Christmas is you, baby … baby

In conclusion, the author presents her clearest articulation of the nature of desire. The ever-quest for “You” is not general, but particular. It is a search not for someone, or anyone, or everyone, but for “You,” a singular object of love and affection, both frustrating and exhilarating in its specificity. If the author weren’t a shiksa, she’d be singing about her beshert.

“You” is everything. “You” is enough.

Spoiler: Santa Claus and the Invention of Childhood

Every year, a significant portion of adults in the U.S., and a significant number of them around the world, get together and, spurred by some combination of love and whimsy and magical thinking, engage in a massive lie. Santa Claus, a.k.a. St. Nick, a.k.a. the bearded old man who embodies childhood: He is a spoiler in every sense of the word. He showers children with gifts, yes, but he’s also a wide-scale deception that puts the paternalism in “paternalistic lie.” He’s one of those phenomena, like reality TV and Donald Trump, that brazenly blur the line between fact and fiction. (Slavoj Žižek described him as a ritual in the guise of a myth—a mass self-deception that implicates everyone who participates in it.) And Santa does all that, of course—he being what he is—because people let him.

Related Story

When Kids Stop Believing in Santa

Future generations, learning about the annual fealty so many people pay to an obese, elfin home-invader, may well look upon all the attendant stockings and stories and shake their heads in confusion. “Why did they do that?” they might wonder. And, seriously: Why? Why do so many engage, cheerfully, in this annual, widespread deception? Why do they make so many exceptions—when it comes their attitudes about materialism, when it comes to their attitudes about truth itself—for Santa? Is it to preserve a sense of childhood as a sacred space? Is it because, even in an age obsessed with spoilers and fact-checking, an age of Facebook and Snopes and Siri and Google, this particular non-fact is somehow acceptable? Is that why kids who know the truth, either because their families don’t participate in the ritual or because they’ve aged out of it, keep the secret for everyone else? Is it why institutions from the U.S. Postal Service to NORAD to the White House to your local mall to pretty much every pop cultural product of the past century have enthusiastically lied to your children?

I have so many questions. They come down, however, to just one: Why? Why do people Santa?

* * *

First, the Santa myth itself. There are, best I can tell, three general assumptions that have survived today to explain the origins of Santa as a Christmas icon. One is that his imagery is based on St. Nicholas, the fourth-century Bishop of Myra. Another is that he was introduced, as a commercial figure, in ads for the Coca-Cola company in the early 20th century. Another is that he’s a tale as old as time—that the current manifestations of Santa are iterations of a figure who’s been part of Western culture for as long as that culture has involved rooftops and reindeer and Christmas trees.

Future generations, learning about the annual fealty we pay to an obese, elfin home-invader, may look upon our stockings and our stories and shake their heads in confusion.

Those are all, like Santa himself, simultaneously true and not-true. The figure we know today is certainly an extension—you might even say a camp version—of St. Nicholas, but he is also influenced by similar, loosely Christmasy figures across Western cultures: Sinterklaas (Dutch), Père Noël (French), Santa Lucia and Jultomten (Swedish), Babushka (Russian), Christkind and Knecht Ruprecht (German), Befana (Italian), and the Roman god Saturn. Visually, however, the main precursors to the fur-wearing, rosy-cheeked figure we know today, in the U.S. and now in many other countries, are images that were produced long before Coke came along—paintings created by the 19th century cartoonist Thomas Nast. Published in Harper’s Weekly between 1863 and 1886, the images, as the professor Russell Belk puts it, “showed Santa as obese, Caucasian, white-bearded, jolly, dressed in rich furs, and as the bearer of abundant gifts of toys.”

One of Thomas Nast’s “portraits” of Santa, published in Harper’s Weekly in 1881

Santa had previously appeared in Harper’s; a sketch in an 1858 issue, The New York Times notes, depicts him beardless, riding a sleigh that’s pulled by a turkey. Nast’s paintings, however—and similar ones that would follow in the next century, created by Normal Rockwell—drew heavily from the other thing that influenced Santa as we know him today: Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” widely known today as “The Night Before Christmas.” The poem itself had been influenced by the writings of Moore’s friend Washington Irving, and by Charles Dickens; it was published (anonymously, in the Troy, New York Sentinel, in 1823) during a time that found Christmas Day overtaking New Year’s Day as the primary holiday of the season. And during a time that found Americans re-negotiating the meaning of that holiday. Together, the poem and its post-facto illustrations helped, Russell Belk argues, “to secularize the image of Santa Claus by dropping the religious symbols of the European figures—mitre, staff, and bishops’ robes.”

The Santa emerging in the mid-19th century was plump and jolly and kind: a fitting image for the age of relative plenty being brought about by industrialization. He was grandfatherly. He was also, ironically and maybe fittingly, connected to other images of the time: Nast’s drawings of Wall Street’s wealthy. Santa, who with his heft and his rosiness and his rich furs was a visual symbol of economic prosperity, was appropriated not just from Christian tradition, but from Gilded Age acknowledgements of capitalism’s forces, and from Gilded Age anxieties about inequality. Those—via Coke, via Hollywood, via American optimism that can easily veer into American forgetfulness—would soon fade. He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf … and we laughed when we saw him, in spite of ourselves.

* * *

So that’s the image aspect of things: the figure of Santa, an amalgam of the religious and the commercial, of the ancient and the modern, of the magical and the industrial. But what about Santa as a ritual? When did St. Nick become not just a figure, but a mythical-magical gift-giver? When did he make the leap from “beloved icon” to “beloved lie”?

Culture being what it is—occasionally awkward, often chaotic, and above all decidedly not monolithic—it is hard to pinpoint when, exactly, Santa became a full-fledged home invader. What is clear, though, is that his status as a participatory myth is a relatively recent invention: It came about, like the fur-and-reindeer images, in the 19th century. Santa, it seems, arose with industrialization, with the economic plenty that came with it, and with something else prosperity inspired: changing notions about the family and the children’s place within in. Santa, as we know him today, was born during a time that was rethinking and re-imagining and in many ways re-inventing that oldest of things: childhood.

Santa, as we now know him, was born during a time that was rethinking and in many ways re-inventing that oldest of things: childhood.

In his book The Battle for Christmas, the professor Stephen Nissenbaum traces the origins of the Santa lie to a particular decade: the 1820s. He examines the voluminous correspondence of the Sedgwicks, an affluent family whose members were scattered across New York and Massachusetts. In 1823, Moore published “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” By 1827, Nissenbaum notes, Robert Sedgwick and his wife Eliza mentioned in their correspondence that they had hung stockings in their home so that “Santa Claas” could visit their children; by 1829, the stocking-stuffing ritual had extended to the Massachusetts branch of the family. By 1834, a young Sedgwick was writing to her aunt, the writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “I hope ... that Santa Claus has given you at least as many presents as he has me, for he only gave me four.”

Around this time, Santa—in text and in image, reflective of Moore’s “right jolly old elf”—began to spring up in advertising, as well. And not just, in the Coca-Colan model, as a spokesman. In 1841, the first popular image of Santa appeared in a commercial newspaper; that same year, a candy store in Philadelphia used a life-sized model of Santa to entice customers. A paper of the time reported on the stunt, calling the model “so lifelike that no lad who sees it, will ever after accuse ma or pa of being the Kriss-Kringle who filled his stocking.” It added: “That such a person exists will be fixed indelibly on their memories.”

A label, showing Santa Claus on a sleigh with reindeer, created by the U.S. Confection Co. of New York in 1868 (Wikimedia Commons)

That such a person exists. Indeed. And the memory-fixing, from there, happened quickly. (As Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace put it in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, “New Yorkers embraced Moore’s child-centered version of Christmas as if they had been doing it all their lives.”) Santa-centric ads proliferated, and so, with them, did Santa-centric Christmas celebrations. By 1857, a New Bedford whaling wife named Mary Chipman Addison was remarking of a holiday spent aboard her husband’s whaleship with her daughter, Minnie: “Christmas Day reminds us of home and friends. Minnie wished to hang up her stocking as usual, and as I had a tin of candies which her grandpa put up for her, Santa Claus managed to fill it very well.”

One reason the right jolly old elf may have caught on in homes (and ships) as well as ads, Stephen Nissenbaum suggests, is that he offered something that was particularly appealing to parents of the time: gift-giving that could pretend not to be gift-giving. The 19th century, like our own, had deep anxieties about the commercialism creeping into Christmas. “Even more than today, the exchange of Christmas gifts in the 1820s and ‘30s was a ritual gesture,” Nissenbaum notes, “intended to generate the sense that sincere expressions of intimacy were more important than matters of money or business.”And yet—the paradox of Christmas—gifts are generally very much matters of money and business. Santa, the most intimate gift-giver of them all, offered a way for parents to participate in that ritual without expressly participating in it. He allowed parents to indulge their children while outsourcing all the indulgence. He was a figure fit for a time that had concluded, as Little Women goes: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”

Here was a figure—reindeer, fur, elves, ‘Saint’—who seemed to speak to an older time, a simpler time, a more magical and mystical time.

The sociologist Warren Hagstrom argued that Santa is something even more particular, too: a father figure. One who allows fathers to nurture and show affection to their children without compromising their status as disciplinarians. This, too, might help to explain Santa’s quick explosion in popularity. The mid-1800s, Nissenbaum points out, was a time that was re-thinking the notion of childhood as a distinct phase of life. In the U.S., in particular, parents were negotiating between Puritan ideas of child-rearing and more progressive and inclusive ones. Spare the rod and spoil the child was giving way, under the influence of Johann Pestalozzi and Unitarianism and the new middle class and Victorian-inflected notions of the sanctity of the family, to something more permissive: Simply, spoil the child. Santa helped to ease that transition. He converted parental devotion into physical objects—by way of seasonal magic.

And! He converted parental judgment into those objects, too. In 1833, one of the Sedgwicks—Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick of Stockbridge, Massachusetts—published a short story in the gift book The Pearl. It was subtitled “The Christmas Box,” and it featured Santa giving children not gifts, but rather poems that, with sternness but also affection, pointed out their character flaws. It proved hugely popular. Nast’s images of Santa, too, included the old man’s “naughty or nice” list. “Theologically,” Nissenbaum has put it, “Christmas functioned in part as a children’s version of judgment day.” Parents—wanting to discipline, not always wanting to be the disciplinarians—took advantage of that. Santa was a perfect scapegoat.

In that, the commercial images and religious iconography and dramatic character collided: Here was a figure—reindeer, fur, elves, “Saint”—who seemed to speak to an older time, a simpler time, a more magical and mystical time. Here was a figure who seemed to speak of the things Americans who were experiencing the pangs of social upheaval were craving above all: the warmth and reassurance of tradition. That he was essentially a contemporary invention did not much matter; he suggested, in everything he did and claimed to be, nostalgia.

“Santa Claus represented an old-fashioned Christmas, a ritual so old that it was, in essence, beyond history,” Nissenbaum notes. People knew, of course, that he was not real. “But in another sense they believed in his reality—his reality as a figure who stood above mere history. In that sense, it was adults who needed to believe in Santa Claus.” Or, as Pestalozzi put it back in the early days of the modern Santa, to parents and children alike: “Let this festival establish you in the holy strength of a childlike mind.”

Today, childhood is both longer and shorter than it used to be. Today, too, mystery is harder to maintain, not just because cynicism is a common cultural attitude, but because so many of us navigate the world with the help of omnipresent machines that will answer, or try their best to answer, whatever question may pop into our minds. We live, essentially, in Santa-challenged times. We live in times that make it harder to lie, to ourselves, and to each other. And yet that might be even more reason—it was adults who needed to believe in Santa Claus—to keep St. Nick alive. Maybe the moment calls for some magic. Today, I asked a question: “Siri, is Santa real?” She replied, “Well, those cookies don’t eat themselves.”

Donald Trump’s Christmas Present to His Fellow Millionaires

Populist resentment and economic fears have helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump in a crowded Republican presidential field. For all of Trump’s populist appeal, however, wealthy Americans stand to benefit the most from the presidential contender’s tax plan, according to an analysis released on Tuesday by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

After crunching the numbers on the plan, unveiled in September, the center concluded that Americans at every income level would receive tax cuts, but that the highest-income households would see the most significant cuts.

The plan also comes with a hefty price tag. Trump’s plan would cut federal revenue by nearly $10 trillion over a decade, the center estimates. Unless Trump makes deep cuts to government spending or decides to raise taxes later on, the analysis concludes that his proposal “would yield persistently large, and likely unsustainable budget deficits.”

The findings present a stark contrast with the way that Trump has described his tax plan.

According to the campaign website, Trump’s plan delivers “needed tax relief for all Americans, especially the working poor and middle class.” The description is quick to add that “this plan does not add to our enormous debt and deficit.”

“Mr. Trump’s plan speaks for itself and many experts including Larry Kudlow have praised the plan since its release in September,” Hope Hicks, a spokesman for Trump said when asked for comment.

Trump could always change his mind about the plan, or alter its details. And his supporters may not care much about a critical analysis by a Washington think-tank. So far, criticism of the real-estate mogul only seems to make his fans like him more.

The report also comes with a disclaimer. Its authors did not get answers from the Trump campaign about some of the details of the tax plan, and so they had to make some assumptions along the way. Still, a tax plan that generates large budget deficits would put Trump out of step with conservative deficit hawks intent on balancing the budget. It also clashes with the idea—fueled largely by Trump’s own claims—that his business experience is what would help him make America great again.

R. Kelly and the Year of Celebrity Semi-Reckonings

The question of what should happen when popular public figures are convincingly accused of private vileness is difficult, and it’s not going away. It’s a question both on an individual level—can I enjoy this person’s music, or movies, or athletic feats, knowing what they might have done?—and a cultural one, about whether to stop rewarding folks who may have gravely hurt others.

Those are both questions of should. But the answer to the question of does—what does happen to these people?—is different. This past year has been full of examples of celebrities’ ugly actions suddenly becoming public—and their careers surviving, except for in the most extreme cases.

On Monday, R. Kelly walked out of an interview with Huffington Post Live after Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani brought up his alleged history of preying on underage girls. Actually, she didn’t quite bring it up: She politely, confidently asked about the fact that sales for his new album The Buffet were lagging, and read tweets from fans who love his music but are creeped out by him personally. He then started to babble, mostly to keep her from asking follow-up questions.

But that filibuster contained an interesting depiction of the dynamics around a figure like Kelly, who’s been making successful R&B for two decades but who’s been repeatedly associated with—though never convicted of—having sex with minors. Kelly’s response, basically, was: I’m still selling out concerts, I still have fans who love me, who are you to tell me that my personal life is interfering with my professional career? “When I step on that stage, which is my office … if I hear what you just said, I will never show up to that venue and any other venue again,” he told Modarressy-Tehrani after she read a skeptical fan tweet to him. “Until then, I’m going to continue to do my R. Kelly.”

The logic isn’t airtight. Obviously there are many people who struggle with reconciling R. Kelly’s music and persona; if they’re in the front row at one of his concerts, they probably aren’t going to air that frustration there. And yet, Kelly is right that he has a core of fans who don’t care about, or don’t know about, or don’t believe, the accusations against him. In a feature for New York earlier this year, David Marchese talked to concert attendees who fell into that category. “If he was found guilty in court, that’s a different thing,” one woman said. “But there’s life and there’s music, and I can separate the two.” Another guy hadn’t heard of any scandal, period.

The accusations against Kelly are very old, with many of them dating back to the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Yet they’ve received renewed attention recently, in part because Kelly’s lyrics have become explicitly filthy for the first time in a while, but mostly because of media coverage gaining traction online. It’s impossible to say whether the poor sales for The Banquet can be blamed on this scrutiny. But the way that his awkward HuffPost interview went viral this week certainly means that a lot of people have just been reminded of the stories about Kelly’s past.

It’s tempting to use the delayed backlash against him to spin a narrative of 2015 being the year when celebrity bad behavior finally faced a reckoning. Bill Cosby is the ultimate example, with the longstanding accusations that he drugged and sexually assaulted women suddenly getting major press attention, resulting in revoked honorifics and new lawsuits and criminal investigations against him. It was a long fall, one that only happened after dozens of women came forward publicly with horrifying details and a judge unsealed a damning deposition from Cosby. 2015 began with a number of Cosby’s friends and former co-stars standing up for him; by now, though, he has almost no public defenders other than his lawyer Monique Pressley, who recently filed a defamation suit on Cosby’s behalf against seven accusers.

Kelly is right that he has a core of fans who don’t care about, or don’t know about, or don’t believe, the accusations against him.

Dr. Dre also caught flack in 2015 for very bad behavior in his past. The release of the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton and his comeback album Compton: A Soundtrack led some women to repeat stories of being abused by him in the ‘90s—stories that he’d never really denied. This time, after the former music journalist Dee Barnes wrote a powerful essay for Gawker about the time he attacked her in a bathroom, Dre publicly apologized to “the women I’ve hurt.” Apple, who employs him, then put out a statement saying they “have every reason to believe that he has changed.”

Cosby aside, the attention given to famous accused abusers’ pasts this year hasn’t clearly affected consumption patterns from the public. Straight Outta Compton ended up as one of the breakout Hollywood successes of the year, and it was just announced that NWA will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Terrance Howard’s run-ins with the law because of domestic-violence accusations haven’t cost him the leading role on the very popular Fox drama Empire. R. Kelly's The Banquet might be tanking, yes, but albums tank for all sorts of reasons; his 2013 release Black Panties, which was also accompanied by media focus on his past, did pretty well. The new album from Chris Brown, a name forever associated with violence against women, is on pace for a respectable debut week of at least 125,000 sales.

Most vivid is the case of the boxer Floyd Mayweather, whose battery of women is well-documented in brutal detail. His domestic-abuse record received a good amount of publicity around the time of his $100 million prize fight against Manny Pacquiao in May, but that didn’t seemed to put a damper on his opulent retirement lifestyle. Ahead of his final fight, as my colleague Megan Garber recounted, a reporter asked what message Mayweather’s success in the boxing world “sends victims of domestic violence.” Mayweather responded much in the R. Kelly mold, by changing the subject and telling people to tune in to the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight. 4.6 million people then paid to do so.

In the now-infamous Huffington Post interview, R. Kelly insisted that he almost never hears negativity towards him from rank-and-file fans. It’ s only from the media, he said: “The people that I’m interviewing with dispute me. And they make up that other people are disputing me.”

After some talking over each other, Modarressy-Tehrani was able to assert that no, in fact, there are real members of the public who are “conflicted” about Kelly.

His response summed the entire issue up: “Can you count ‘em?”

The Long Battle for Ramadi

Iraqi ground forces stormed Ramadi on Tuesday in an attempt to wrest control of the Iraqi city from the Islamic State, which has controlled it for months.

The troops began their offensive Monday night on the edges of the city, and by midday Tuesday had advanced to its center, according to news reports from journalists on the ground.

The offensive was backed by airstrikes from the U.S-led coalition fighting the Islamic State. The troops numbered up to 10,000 men, and included Iraqi government troops and U.S.-trained counterterrorism forces, according to The Wall Street Journal, as well as Sunni tribal fighters, according to The New York Times.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, Colonel Steve Warren, told the Journal that U.S. intelligence estimates that only about 250 to 350 Islamic State fighters remain in Ramadi, down from about 600 to 1,000 fighters. Officials told news organizations that they believe Iraqi troops could clear out Islamic State militants and take control of the city in a matter of hours.

The Islamic State, which controls about one-third of Iraq and parts of Syria, seized Ramadi from Iraqi forces in May. The government in Baghdad has launched several ultimately unsuccessful offensives to retake the city since July. But earlier this month, Iraqi forces retook Tamim, a large neighborhood on the southwestern outskirts of Ramadi, as well as a key Islamic State operations center there.

Reuters reported that Iraqi military planes dropped leaflets over Ramadi on Sunday that warned residents to leave the city within 72 hours, advised them to carry proper identification, and provided safe routes out.

Local forces have made gains against the militant group elsewhere in Iraq in recent months. In October, Iraqi forces and Shiite militias recaptured most of the country’s largest oil refinery in Baiji. In November, Kurdish and Yadizi forces pushed militants out of Sinjar, which had been under Islamic State control since August 2014.

President Obama said last week that the Islamic State has lost 40 percent of the territory it once controlled in Iraq this year. Since June, his administration has deployed several hundred American military advisors and special-operations troops to Iraq to help local forces in their fight against the terrorist organization.

The 50 Best Podcast Episodes of 2015

More than 300,000 podcasts exist in the world as of the close of 2015. They range from products made by someone pressing record in their closet to million-dollar outfits with sterling sound engineering. Objectives span from shining a light on underheard voices to the audio equivalent of a selfie. But when Serial liberated the form, powerhouses like NPR and Gimlet Media began pumping real money into the medium, making space for shows with broad appeal and qualities people could judge empirically. A list of the 50 best podcasts might have been nothing more than a desperate shuffle until now, but no more: At our website The Timbre, we’ve spent numerous hours every week poring through podcasts and making recommendations, which allows us to say confidently that these are the best of the best. The following works are ranked in order for their exemplary craftsmanship, entertainment value, and je ne sais quoi, all available for your binge-listening pleasure.

1. “Belt Buckle” by Mystery Show

Mystery Show proved the most endearing podcast to debut in 2015. The host and producer Starlee Kine plays the part of a sleuth who tackles the befuddling everyday mysteries that dog her guests. On “Belt Buckle,” a friend enlists her to track down the original owner of a belt found lying in an Arizona gutter decades earlier. Finished with metalwork depicting a miniature breakfast feast and emblazoned with the names “Hans Jordi” and “Bob Six,” the belt seemed like the last thing anyone would toss to the side of the road. With her trademark whimsy and earnest curiosity, Kine digs deep into the world of European chefs living in the southwest, hot on the trail of a Swiss cowboy. The episode is unrelenting in its playfulness and joy, but a sense of profundity lies just beneath the surface, bobbing up in the final minutes, when you won’t be sure whether to grin or weep.

2. “New York After Rent” series, highlighting “New York After Rent II” by Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything

In a three-part series, “New York After Rent,” Walker examines a crucial period in New York City’s history: 2008, right after Rent the musical closed and Airbnb began to invade the rental market. While Rent’s title song famously proclaimed, “We’re not gonna pay rent!”, Airbnb led to the commodification of every square inch of the city, making it impossible for many residents to afford to pay rent. Blending fiction, reporting, memoir, and essay, Walker showcases different takes on the changing New York. The pièce de résistance of the series is part two, in which he describes attending an elite Manhattan party in 2008, during the financial collapse, when the city he knows starts to slip from his grasp. The scene unfolds like a fever dream, with a deeply stoned Walker wandering room to room, trying to piece together a reality where advertising and art are interchangeable and artists like him no longer belong. In Walker, the podcasting world has found its Hunter S. Thompson.

3. “The Living Room” by Love + Radio

The winner of Third Coast International Audio Festival Director’s Choice Award, “The Living Room” was arguably one of the most talked about shows of the year. In it, the writer and filmmaker Diane Weipert explains what happened when a couple moved into the apartment across the street and failed to hang curtains. Through the large bay windows in their home, she and her husband had an unimpeded view of their new neighbors, whose daily comings and goings became something of a fascination for Weipert. Channeling a touch of John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” in the narrative as fascination spirals into obsession, Weipert becomes deeply invested in the fate of her neighbors. “The Living Room” finds its heart at the perfect intersection between voyeurism and empathy.

4. “How to Become Batman” by Invisibilia

Studies show that rats perform better in cognitive tests if their handlers project certain abilities onto them. From this, Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel build an argument for fundamentally changing the way we treat blind people. Rather than limit their mobility out of a misguided desire to protect them, they should be encouraged to get outside and engage with the world, to climb and touch and tumble—to find new ways to “see.” And this isn’t just feel-good pseudoscience either. After listening to Batman, the idea of a real superhero no longer seems farcical. Meet Daniel Kish, America’s very own Batman, who’s been blind since he was an infant and has developed a click he uses to bounce sound waves off his surroundings. The episode barrels forward, punch-drunk on the possibility of its own suggestions, until listeners find themselves standing on the roof of a building, seeing the world anew.

5. “Shine on, You Crazy Goldman” by Reply All

Reply All claims to be a show about the Internet, but regular listeners know that’s just a ruse. The show is actually about people. “Shine on, You Crazy Goldman” begins as a straightforward story, with the host P.J. Vogt examining a website called TripSit, a place where people too high on drugs can find a shepherd. From here, the episode dives into recent research about the therapeutic effects of acid and mushrooms. Curiosity becomes too much for Vogt who decides to try microdosing LSD with the producer Phia Bennin. The story would file under “self-indulgent acid trip” if it weren’t so in tune with the underground conversation about the benefits of hallucinogens. The members of the Reply All crew have so much trust in themselves, the message to listeners seems to be: Curiosity certainly won’t kill these cats, nor will fear prevent them from pursuing stories to their end.

6. “Najibullah in America” by Home of the Brave

The consummate pro Scott Carrier may be the indie bad boy of the old-school audio world, but that doesn’t mean his outlet Home of the Brave lacks vulnerability in his work or shine on the finish. Quite the opposite. “In Najibullah in America,” which is set up by the episode that precedes it, “Over There,” Carrier helps a young man named Najibullah move to America and enroll in a college near him in Utah. The two met while Carrier was reporting in Afganistan, and Najibullah became his translator. We not only witness Najibullah’s personal evolution through Carrier’s own, but the story also gives the listener new stakes for pushing past their own limitations. While the episode takes on elements of a fish-out-of-water tale, it merges Carrier’s and Najibullah’s narratives in one of the finest moments in all of 2015’s podcasts: Carrier learning to teach, and Najibullah at last grasping, the lesson of freedom.

7. “Sight Unseen” by Radiolab

Radiolab tackles the natural sciences through stories that tend to have unexpected complications, and listeners follow along as the hosts untangle the knot. “Sight Unseen” begins with a photojournalist in Afghanistan who captures a series of images of a marine as he dies. While the photographs portray the cold reality of war in stunning specificity, one problem remains: Laws strictly forbid Lynsey Addario from publishing photos that feature the soldier’s face without permission from the next of kin. “Sight Unseen” fosters a deep intimacy between Addario and the marine’s family, and all the while, the listener wonders if they’ll agree to sign off. The story pits an individual against the greater good and leaves listeners uncertain of the most dignified way to honor one man’s legacy.

8. “Madam Secretary, What’s Good?” by Another Round

Another Round premiered in March 2015 as a “happy hour with friends you haven’t met yet.” Right from the start, the show proved to be whip smart on gender issues and racial politics, and it didn’t take long for hosts Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu to turn their podcast into a serious cultural affairs show—all without sacrificing its signature frivolity. The ladies didn’t pump the brakes when they landed an interview with Hillary Clinton, asking her if she thought Bill Clinton “fucked [things] up for black people” during his presidency. You’d be hard-pressed to find another show that does a better job balancing scholarship with laugh-out-loud humor.

9. “DUSTWUN” by Serial

Serial faced serious expectations for its season two, which boiled down to whether the show could catch lightning in a bottle twice. It’s too early to say, but if “DUSTWUN” gives any indication, prospects look good for producer Sarah Koenig and her team. The new season centers on Bowe Bergdahl, the sergeant who disappeared one night in Afghanistan, only to resurface as a prisoner of the Taliban. What exactly sent Bergdahl packing is the subject of the season debut, and listeners will be spellbound by the show’s signature narrative style and disquieting details.  

10. “The Problem We All Live With Parts 1 and 2” by This American Life

Much of what the podcasting world loves about the form comes from the style and former employees of This American Life and Ira Glass. But “The Problem We All Live With” was an ambitious undertaking even for TAL, chronicling segregation and integration in public schools. The show gets help from the New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who succinctly shows how racial integration has solved much of the disparities in public schools in the past—and how geographic segregation unravels this hard work. Of special note is an outlandish PTA meeting with parents spewing a subtle brand of racism. Listeners will feel as though they’re seated in the packed gymnasium as one black student breaks down while trying to muster the courage to simply introduce herself to the angry white crowd.

11. “The Hurricane” by The Heart

The Heart asks its audience to confront the rawness of human vulnerability through controlled, artful narration. “The Hurricane” recounts an intense love between the producer Mitra Kaboli and a visitor she met when New York shut down for Hurricane Sandy, trapping them together. The passion the two shared fizzled almost immediately after her lover went home—the usual excuses about the expense of plane tickets and time were made, and Kaboli was left to wonder how something that fit so well could fail. She puzzles through this loss for listeners, and it’s not just Kaboli doing the retelling, either. She’s enlisted her partner to reexamine the tryst, too, adding to the aching complexity of this missed connection.

12. “Terry Gross to Marc Maron: ‘Life is Harder Than Radio’” by Fresh Air

A public-radio professional meets a casual Friday podcaster in this conversation between Fresh Air’s Terry Gross and Marc Maron of WTF. Gross is famously elusive with a low-key style that opens up her subjects without requiring her to share too much of herself; Maron is brash and irreverent, often turning interviews into something akin to confessionals between friends. Rather than clash, their two styles make for a marvelous 96-minute game of cat-and-mouse with Maron as host playfully pursuing Gross’ private persona, spinning the interview into a discussion about the interview. These two are in top form for this charmed occasion.

13. “695BGK” by Criminal

True crime sells for a reason, but Criminal doesn’t deliver tabloid fodder. The producers Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer carve out their own form of elegant, tightly paced crime documentary, a much-welcomed addition to the podcastsphere. “695BGK” isn’t political, but it reflects a trend in podcasts that adds a gripping new layer to of-the-moment discussion on policing and race. Podcasting also proves a vital outlet for those who would otherwise take to the streets with a megaphone. From the chilling opening line, “Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about police officers shooting unarmed black men,” Judge tells listeners that this isn’t going to be a Sunday ride. While the subject is thorny, the audio work is unassailable.

14. “Welcome to Millennial” by Millennial

Millennial could not be more … millennial—it’s entrepreneurial, digital, indie, and, essentially, a series of selfies. But its producer, Megan Tan, is far from shallow. On the debut episode, Tan introduces herself as a twenty-something fresh out of college, jobless, and uncertain of the next step. That the next step will be to create the very podcast we’re hearing might be obvious, but Tan so thoroughly translates a sense of herself—and is so darn likeable—that listeners will want to follow her story to see how she fares. Serialized podcasts are still relatively rare, especially memoir-style ones like these, and especially ones that are this good. Be warned: You’re going to want to binge season one.

15. “Taylor Negron: Portrait of an Artist as an Answering Machine” by Fugitive Waves

As a portrait of an artist as an answering machine, this episode takes us back to a time when voicemails were the connective fabric of our lives. And in this case, it’s all for the sake of eulogizing Taylor Negron, who died in January, in the form of voicemails hoarded by the comedian, actor, and artist. Fugitive Waves, in collaboration with Negron’s friend Valerie Velardi, selected the most standout—hilarious and personal, calculated and weird, even some that sound like monologues—and then sewed together the ones that best reflected Negron. That such an extensive archive exists is itself a treasure, but the craftsmanship required to whittle the trove into a portrait deserves recognition, too. There’s even a precious posthumous appearance from Negron himself in the end.

16. “An American Life” by Rumble Strip Vermont

In March 1968, a 118-pound barber named Vaughn Hood answered his draft board and reported to boot camp. As a non-ideologue who fretted over violence, Hood didn’t fit the mold of a hard-charging grunt. In “An American Life,” the host Erica Heilman collects Hood’s Vietnam War on tape. The conversation goes beyond the melancholic, coming-of-age, war-as-hell narrative. All the horrors of Vietnam are here, sure, but it’s the dignity of one man and that his voice still trembles at the mention of his service decades later that demands attention.

17. “Why is Mason Reese Crying?” by WireTap

“Why is Mason Reese Crying?” revolves around a former ’70’s child actor, famous for his old man face, who served as the adorable spokesperson for the likes of Dunkin’ Donuts and Raisin Bran. Later he parlayed his acting career into strange appearances on The Mike Douglas Show. On one such booking, Reese collapsed in his chair, hysterical at the mere thought of guest Harry Chapin playing “Cat’s in the Cradle.” In the hands of producer Jonathan Goldstein, the Wes Anderson of podcasting, Reese’s spellbinding breakdown demands nothing less than an exhaustive search into the heart of a man who never grew up.

18. “Episode 7” by The Message

Fiction, despite its long tradition on airwaves, isn’t the norm in today’s podcasting scene. Decent writing and sound engineering are a tall order in the low-budget state of affairs, let alone employing talented voice actors. Enter General Electric to turn it all around, with money to burn in the branded-content arena and a history in audio storytelling (GE created General Electric Theater in the 1950s, starring Ronald Reagan). The Message follows the protagonist Nicky Tomalin as she and a team of scientists decipher and decode a 70-year-old message from outer space that infects people with a deadly illness after they hear it. Listeners won’t understand the seventh episode without starting from the beginning, but it’s the penultimate installment that most demonstrates that imagination and solid writing—art and craft—can come directly from sponsors.

19. “In the Left Pocket, By My Heart” by ARRVLS

“In the Left Pocket, By My Heart” relays the sorrow of a couple who lose their baby. Sure, friends and family offered words of support, but the narrator, the producer Sara Brooke Curtis, guides—and prepares—listeners to see what these conciliatory gestures don’t touch. The couple’s grief needs acknowledgment, it needs to be taken out for a walk, to be asked to dance, play, and thrive. It’s important not just in terms of the vacancy it leaves behind, but in recognizing that their little girl existed. Their baby girl died, yes, but more important to Curtis and her husband is that she lived, too.

20. “I Want My MTV” by Between the Liner Notes

Finding great indie podcasts can be a head-scratching challenge to listeners combing through the thousands of iTunes offerings. Between the Liner Notes is the succulent fruit of that labor. Taking us from the rough-and-tumble, pre-launch MTV into its iconic 1980s heyday, “I Want My MTV” pinpoints decisive moments that led to the birth of Music Television, with the host Matthew Billy interviewing key players from the network’s origin story. MTV once reigned over youth culture with nothing more than four-minute videos, and now, there’s a great documentary-style podcast  to show for it.

21. “A Red Dot” by Love + Radio

The chance to try on another person’s consciousness keeps many on the hunt for the next great podcast, but “A Red Dot” transports listeners into a headspace they have no desire to occupy. Spoilers will take away from Love + Radio’s brilliant craft choices, particularly in its first few minutes, which bait you into venturing down an unpalatable path. The discomfort comes mostly from the fact that it challenges listeners to contemplate controversial realities that nobody wants to consider, from a person nobody wants to acknowledge. The subject matter is heavy, the flourishes of language intriguing, and the questions hard. Suffice it to say, the producers know the listener needs to be bent into an unnatural sympathy in order to give this particular outlier an ear. “A Red Dot” forces its listeners to rise to the occassion, whether they like it or not. It’s one of the most infuriating and masterful pieces to date.

22. “Source Code” by Mystery Show

Pressing play on “Source Code” transforms listeners into laughing fools, incapable of containing themselves. Jake Gyllenhaal himself makes an appearance, both challenging and acquiescing to the host Starlee Kine’s charm—and saying as much won’t spoil the fun. Kine’s quick wit coupled with her basic goal of solving an Internet-agnostic mystery—that of Gyllenhaal’s exact height—takes the listener through a discovery process they’d never seriously consider on their own. Mystery Show validates that age-old atavistic hunch that the Internet does not, in fact, know everything.

23. “The Facts” by How to Be a Girl

“The Facts” stars a five-year-old transgender girl, whose maturity belies her age, and her mother, who dives headfirst into the subject of gender identity while recording under the name Marlo Mack. At first, Mack resists her child presenting as a girl, but after months of difficult conversations aimed at changing her daughter’s mind, she considers the possibility of acceptance. How to Be a Girl demonstrates how, if you can’t rely on your interpretation of gender—this is a five-year old baring her soul, after all—then you’re left with trusting that the person standing before you knows her own heart. And the child here survives an emotional gut-check that would level most 30-year-olds. “The Facts” distills the essentials of the How to Be a Girl series into a primer of sorts , the perfect starting point for newcomers who want to find someone under the age of six who can give them a master class in personal growth.

24. “Rukmini Callimachi” by Longform Podcast

Longform satisfies writers’ great desire to understand their fellow creators. When it goes beyond its own bubble, though, it has the power to inspire anyone willing to take their time with good journalism. Rukmini Callimachi wrote many of the most important stories about ISIS published in The New York Times this year. Her social media savvy helped her track down sources in an unprecedented way, and, in so doing, alerted the world of the fact that one vapid Western preoccupation—Twitter—had been commandeered for much darker purposes. Breaking down her motivations and know-how, Callimachi offers a humble, fascinating exploration of the modernization of news—and confirmation that hard work and determination still rule the day.

25. “Rebel Yell” by Home of the Brave

No other podcast sounds like Home of the Brave, and “Rebel Yell” is an especially rollicking episode that dares to be funny, dangerous, and immediate. Scott Carrier invades New York with drops of blotter acid and a plan to cover the Republican National Convention. But he never makes it to the main event, because he’s too busying protesting “the enemy” and then smooth-talking his way into a Kid Rock concert brimming with young conservatives. He immerses himself in the open bar, fist-pumps with Republicans, and delivers a gonzo-style belly laugh, all in a taut 13 minutes. By the end, you won’t believe who Carrier is endorsing for president.

26. “Milk Carton Kids” by 99% Invisible

99% Invisible knows how to take a tidbit of the design world and expand it into into a sleek exploration of society at large. For a few years in the 1980s, kids’ morning cereal came with a generous helping of stranger danger as dairies featured information about missing children on the backs of their milk cartons. This was a time when law-enforcement officials waited three days before considering a child officially missing. After 12-year-old Johnny Gosch didn’t return from his morning paper route, his mother lobbied for reform, and Johnny’s was the first face to appear on a milk carton. 99% Invisible—a podcast that bills itself as “a tiny radio show about design”—finds beautiful ways to expand its scope and explore the larger social and historical context behind innovations.

27. “Instaserfs” by Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything

Following up on his success examining Airbnb in “New York After Rent,” Benjamen Walker once again takes aim at the sharing economy in another three-part series, “Instaserfs.” To explore the world of Uber drivers and Task Rabbits, he partners with a 25-year-old San Francisco native, Andrew Callaway (who turns out to be pure radio gold), as Callaway dives into life as an independent contractor. Callaway races around the city, delivering groceries and chauffeuring coked-up venture capitalists, often spending more on gas than he makes in tips. Walker doesn’t offer any pat conclusions about the share worker economy, but after riding along with Callaway for three episodes, listeners will realize this is not the route to milk and honey.

28. “Birthstory” by Radiolab & Israel Story

What’s the most straightforward—and legal—way for a same-sex Israeli couple to father siblings, one child each, outside of the very expensive American channels? Apparently through a couple of companies that coordinate one Ukrainian egg donor and two Indian surrogates who stay the course of their pregnancies in Nepal. “Birthstory” walks listeners through these complexities, both moral and logistical—and then an actual earthquake shakes up Radiolab’s and Israel Story’s reporting, unveiling a vast baby-making network. “Birthstory” is the culmination of a year’s worth of reporting and a welcomed demonstration of how much the listener benefits when show producers don’t try to shoehorn their findings into a tidy narrative just for the sake of a prettier package.

29. “Every Night Ever” by The Memory Palace

The Memory Palace makes its bones digging out small, forgotten moments in history and breathing new life into them. On “Every Night Ever,” the host Nate DiMeo describes a night in 1953 when something strange visited the sleepy town of Austell, Georgia. It’s an interesting enough little story, but it’s the quiet, wistful scoring and careful attention to detail that elevates this account from a textbook footnote to a timeless tale about the human desire to find meaning in our lives.

30. “No Place Like Home” by Criminal

It’s fun to listen to people talk about kiting checks and living double lives, especially when you know that person got busted, but this particular episode of Criminal takes a turn that sits outside the realm of possibility for the listener. Those who haven’t read Neil White’s memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, will find themselves especially seduced in the first moments of the show. White-collar criminals on the East Coast used to be sent to a place that housed a different type of inmate, one that, unlike White and his nonviolent inmates, had no desire to get out. The perspective the listener gets from these disparate populations coexisting, how they influence one another, will make you want to hug your mother, or at the very least, reach out and touch someone.

31. “Soundtracker” by Generation Anthropocene

Think of “The Soundtracker” as an audio version of a lauded nature program. According to the man who made his living recording the world’s sounds, in the wilderness, those who can really listen stay alive—and those who don’t will get eaten. “The Soundtracker” proves how a sense of hearing is as essential as food and water, and that, baby, the Earth is music. Hempton DJs and interprets his vast collection of nature sounds, precious treasures since noise pollution has made reproducing them impossible. His guidance nuances and brings to light the surprising and sad realities in bioacoustics, and how the sun is what turns up the volume.

32. “Today’s the Day” by Reply All

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Reply All’s “Today’s the Day” is that, on paper, it has all the makings of a dud. It features the hosts Alex Goldman and P.J. Vogt recording themselves riding roller coasters and performing karaoke under the simple guise of the idea that sometimes you need to get outside. Yet the effect is inexplicably magical as listeners tag along on a day where the subtext has more to do with friendship than cabin fever. The podcast should come with a “don’t try this at home” warning, as few producers can pull off such a carefully crafted show while maintaining a freewheeling sense of joy. That the episode also features a cameo by a goat living near an abandoned building in Brooklyn is just a bonus.

33. “Greetings From Suicide Bridge” by The Light in the Attic Podcast

For many music enthusiasts, Light in the Attic Records does God’s work, sifting through discount bins and stalking flea markets in search of undiscovered, forgotten, and obscure albums to reissue. One such record is “Songs From Suicide Bridge,” a moody, plaintive folk album quietly released by David Kauffman and Eric Caboor in 1984, and all but ignored for the next 30 years. The writer Sam Sweet tells the story of these two loners, read directly from the liner notes, and interspersed with tracks off their haunting album. Like “Songs From Suicide Bridge,” the podcast doesn’t call attention to itself, maintaining instead a somber, melancholy tone that will break your heart if you let it.

34. “Entanglement” by Invisibilia

The show hosts Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel shatter all the known rules of the universe in the first 10 minutes of “Entanglement,” proving the interconnected nature of the world, down to the atom level. Everything is one thing, according to their indisputable, sometimes inexplicable, findings. For people generally cast aside as paranoid wackadoos for believing that one day people will download others’ thoughts from a cloud, “Entanglement” all but confirms such a future reality. The hosts call in science, stand-up, and even something called mirror-touch synesthesia for evidential support.

35. “The Worst Part About Our Sport” by The Season

On its face, The Season is about the 2015 Columbia University Lions—a notoriously underperforming Ivy League football team with a famously long losing streak. Though the podcast remains true to its promise, following the team and cataloguing the final scores of games over a 10-episode season, its purpose deepens as the show evolves. In “The Worst Part About Our Sport,” the reporter Ilya Marritz probes the ugly side of the game, considering the devastating head injuries and inherent violence endemic to football. Though he owns up to his initial indifference to the sport, Marritz doesn’t take the easy way out here and condemn football; instead, he grapples with its contradictions, even defending the illogical devotion the game inspires, proving to listeners this is a podcast that has loftier ambitions than tidy conclusions.

36. “Unforgiven” by Snap Judgment

There’s a moment in the first 20 minutes of “Unforgiven” that will make your blood run cold. The theme of the episode is forgiveness, and the first act chronicles the correspondence between two women, a widow and the wife of her husband’s killer. Great documentary storytelling has long had a home in the world of podcasting, and Snap Judgment regularly surpasses typical cocktail-party anecdotes with its sweeping narratives. But “Unforgiven” pushes the show to new heights, layering in surprises and drilling down to the hard questions about how far the reaches of grace should extend.

37. “House on the Hill” by HOME: Stories from L.A.

Home: Stories from L.A. launched in 2015 as an anthropological study of the people who created the dreamscapes and mythologies of southern California. In its first installment, “House on the Hill,” Bill Barol drenches his story in the Golden Age of Hollywood as seen through the weird, beautiful, and sometimes macabre orchestra of Herman Stein, a composer of dozens of monster-movie and sci-fi soundtracks. To understand Stein, Barol, a journalist-turned-podcaster, chases ghosts in the cavernous home to which the composer retired after he grew disillusioned with the business. While “House on the Hill” charms you on the surface with Hollywood lore, it’s actually an understated love story about Stein’s tender devotion to his wife Anita.

38. “I Am in Here” by Rumble Strip Vermont

Imagine hearing and understanding words, but being unable to speak any for the first 30 years of your life. Mark Utter, the subject of “I Am in Here,” explains this reality, in no easy terms and not without incredible effort. Utter communicates through supported typing, a slow process that the host Erica Heilman demonstrates in real time, giving listeners a rare taste of just how impressive it is that Utter is not only able to hold onto his thoughts, but also express them. Mostly, the episode offers a vignette into an isolated and othered sect of humanity, one that demands a lended ear. But, listen for the moment when Utter talks about the sheer helplessness and danger inherent to his wordless life, listen for when he and Heilman argue. Both prove that deep thinking need not be verbal, and that words aren’t the only path to love, sorrow, or even self-actualization.

39. “Joe Frank: Downfall” by UnFictional

To understand “Downfall,” you’ll have to put down your devices, stop cleaning the bathroom, and avert your gaze from the world. The legendary Joe Frank made poetry in this episode of UnFictional, through an audio collage that stitched together peculiar soundbites, including an interview with a corrupted mayor and voiceover work from David Cross. It’s hard to pinpoint the takeaway—the listener must do some of the heavy lifting to that end—but it’s not clear if that even matters. Certainly natural disaster intersecting with the limitations of man creates enough engaging satire for listeners to give it one, if not a few, go rounds.

40. “The Accidental Gay Parents” by The Longest Shortest Time

When John got a call from a social worker who informed him that foster care would soon take possession of his sister’s children—unless he intervened—he had no choice but to act. Until then, he and his boyfriend Trystan had lived a carefree 20-something lifestyle. All that was all gone in a flash as they became adopted fathers to two kids from an abusive household. The men stepped admirably into their new roles, even as it meant rupturing the relationship they shared with John’s sister. “The Accidental Gay Parents” is an affecting episode that showcases the transformative power of love and family—in all its forms.

41. “Splash” by Awful Grace

The Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Florida has the unfortunate distinction of serving as one of the country’s most popular places to commit suicide. “Splash” explores the romance and reality of this grim site, examining it through hotline operators, rescue workers, and a man who tracks the yearly suicides—each with a unique understanding of the fragile contract some people make with life. We also hear from Hanns Jones, a jumper who survived, about what it’s like to stare down into that blue water and then step out, into the abyss.

42. “The Last Place: Diary of a Retirement Home” by Radio Diaries

Long before podcast was a word and streaming audio a reality, the team at Radio Diaries was helping people tell their stories by giving them recorders and editing their tape. Decades later, the formula still works. In “The Last Place: Diary of a Retirement Home,” we hear from the residents of The Presbyterian Home in Evanston, Illinois, who describe their frustrations with their failing bodies and their secrets to aging (one woman eats a regimented diet of gin-soaked raisins every day). But for them life isn’t merely reduced to the art of growing old—these are people with opinions and memories and plans.

43. “Burnout” by StartUp

Listening to the frazzled employees of a podcast company hit a wall shouldn’t play this well. StartUp markets itself as a franchise about “what it's really like to get a business off the ground,” but it’s obvious now how its reality-show format worked best when it turned the mics on itself. With unlimited access, “Burnout” wanders the halls of Gimlet Media checking for vitals. Given the testimony by worker bees like Starlee Kine, Alex Goldman, and P.J. Vogt, you might think this is a new season of The Walking Dead. Slogging through endless grunt work, Gimlet Media discovers what happens in a startup after the romance dies.

44. Entire “Charles Manson’s Hollywood” series, highlighting “Charles Manson’s Hollywood Part 3: The Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson, and Manson the Songwriter” by You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This gives listeners an outlet for indulging in the Golden Age of Hollywood. With Karina Longworth at the helm, the “Charles Manson’s Hollywood” series doesn’t feel like scholarship because it’s too gripping, too addictive, and too easy to follow. The series is a slow reveal of Manson’s ego, influence, and crimes, chock-full of details that sharpen the well-known events.  Of particular fascination is part three of the series, which describes Manson’s relationship with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, a man who was easy prey for Manson. The revival of this little-known relationship translates into equal parts nostalgia and terror.

45. “Paul Thomas Anderson” by WTF with Marc Maron

If a championship belt were awarded to best podcast interviewer every year, Maron would have defended his title in 2015 with this showing. As a standup comedian-turned-podcaster, Maron doesn’t just enhance how a guest and host communicate, he creates a new form of human expression, one where he filters his guest through his own neuroses to arrive at what makes a person successful. When the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson kicks open the door to Maron's garage-turned-recording-studio, the host may have finally met his match. Anderson's appearance on WTF places everything that is compelling about Maron's podcast in a box with a floppy bow: conversation as a manic tug-of-war tell-all, and Maron’s compulsive plunge into what drives a person to pursue an artist’s life.

46. “Grace of the Sea” by UnFictional

UnFictional is no stranger to a story that burrows inside you and takes up residence in your head, pushing aside the clutter and white noise. “Grace of the Sea” is all about the memories people hold most dear. It taps into the intoxicating days of youth as seen through the seascaped daydreams of Luis Gutierez Sanchez, a man from small-town Mexico who moved to Cozumel and worked in a drag show under the name Grace of the Sea. Hypnotic and nostalgic, this episode finds its cadence in the rhythm of Caribbean waves off the coast of Mexico.

47. “Terrible Parents” by Black List Table Reads

Into a field crowded with documentary-style reporting enters The Black List Table Reads, a fiction podcast built around real Hollywood screenplays and performed by professional actors. Hosted by Franklin Leonard, the man behind the legendary collection of unproduced screenplays known as the Black List, the show gambles on the idea that these scripts can come to life through solid voice acting. Though not the only show attempting to tell fictionalized stories, it’s one of the most ambitious, with episodes clocking in at feature-film length. “Terrible Parents” is a comedy about two parents who are hell-bent on ensuring their young son’s success, to the point that they fail to notice what nightmares they’ve become. The “movie” paints its scenes so vividly that you’ll quickly forget you’re hearing a table read.

48. “Pete Davidson” by You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes

The comedian Pete Holmes aims for an unconscionable two hours per episode and hopes to “make it weird” by talking about life after death, ayahuasca, astrophysical travel, and the like. By controlling his interviews, in a loose way and with extraordinary playfulness and total lack of judgment, he often creates unguarded conversation that can captivate listeners who don’t buy into New Age ideas. Pair him with someone like Saturday Night Live’s ingenue, Pete Davidson—a straight shooter whose father died working as a firefighter in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11—and You Made it Weird can’t fail. Davidson, 21, is inexplicably mature for his age and demonstrates the value of dark humor. The unsavory throat-clearing up top redeems itself—stick with it for a handsome reward.

49. “Lionel Shriver Reads T.C. Boyle” by The New Yorker’s Fiction

There’s nothing groundbreaking about this podcast’s premise in which authors are invited to read and discuss a short story from The New Yorker’s archive. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t occasionally exceptional. Take this episode, in which Lionel Shriver reads T.C. Boyle’s “Chicxulub,” an unsettling story about a tragic accident involving a teenage girl. It’s a story that sneaks up and offers a gut punch, and while the reading is enough to make this a must-listen, it’s the ensuing conversation between Shriver and the host Deborah Treisman that seals the day. The discussion extends beyond the pages of the story, to grief and empathy and humanity’s shared, collective fate.

50. “Take a Little Ride with Coors Light” by Pitch

The producers at Pitch comb through music in search of a narrative, but they also look underneath and around the industry, scouring the bit players and rainmakers dishing out records and fulfilling rock and roll dreams. In its best installment of 2015, Pitch explores how some hits by songwriters double as jingles for their corporate sponsors. As you hear the host Alex Kapelman tell it in “Take a Little Ride with Coors Light,” product placement sneaks its way onto more albums than you might recognize. Pitch finds a story in a Nashville backroom, where the songwriters in Jason Aldean’s 2012 hit “Take a Little Ride” tweaked the lyrics to include a shoutout to Coors Light, helping the country rocker perform the double duty of topping the pop charts and pleasing his corporate overlords.