Daily Briefing

Nixon, Kissinger and the great war crime of Christmas 1972, the Everglades crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401, Mary McCarthy disappoints her confessional priest when he asks her what kind of impurities she’d committed.

The funniest pandemic video you’ll see this holiday season, Frederick Douglass remembers his encounter with Andrew Johnson at the Lincoln inaugural, the novice who likes to watch women rub clothes on the stones.

On the death of E.O. Wilson, the great biologist and advocate of the Enlightenment. Today marks the 48th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, which Nixon signed into law while on vacation in California.

The criminality of Monday’s existence the week between Christmas and New Year’s, Wesley Morris on Motown’s wonders, Oriana Fallaci on Interviewing Henry Kissinger.

One of the hottest Christmases on record continues, the James Webb Space Telescope gives us something otherworldly to look at, more from Patricia Lockwood’s “Priestdaddy.”

How they saw Christ: Will Durant, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Barton, Thomas Mann, Bertrand Russell, Bill Day, plus a gift from Bach and the Lucerne Chamber Circle.

Midnight Mass with a fabulous musical program at Elizabeth Ann Seton, and a 5 o’clock program for those who can’t hack the midnight thing, plus Darlene Love’s Christmastime for the Jews and Ronald Reagan on carpet-bombing Vietnam in time for Christmas.

Waste Pro garbage pick-up schedules for Christmas and New Year will not change. Jamelle Bouie on “a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States.” Holiday rules on what not to talk about around the dinner table.

Barely three days left to shop around Omicron, on the little-known enslavement of Native Americans, Beethoven’s big concert, and a few words about “a monument of German stupidity.”

The latest uncertainties on the Omicron variant, All Things Christmas Sale at Santa Maria Del Mar, an excerpt from “Like to the Rushing of a Mighty Wind,” by Tracy K. Smith.