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Easy methods to describe this yr … Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Sure, and: The Katie Miller Podcast.
In the event you’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 yr, she was an adviser to the Division of Authorities Effectivity, an excellent effort that didn’t in truth lower your expenses however definitely did destroy a whole lot of items and companies! 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 by 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: “In the event you may host a cocktail party with three individuals, useless or alive, who’s on the desk, and what are you consuming?” Up to now, the friends, and their different solutions, have supplied what I feel is the right encapsulation of this very unusual yr. Neglect your prime 10 motion pictures and prime 11 information tales—“The High 10 Dream Dinners Hosted by Friends 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 prone to go nicely. Let’s start.
10. Kellyanne Conway, media commentator and President Donald Trump’s former adviser
Friends: Jesus, her grandmother
That is Jesus’s first cameo at one in every of these dinners! It is not going to be his final. Kellyanne Conway has lots to ask him, and he or she anticipates that he would even have lots to ask her. (Talking of individuals attempting to go on to the Roman-Catholic supply, we obtained a brand new Chicago-style pope this yr! Notice that he’s not invited to this dinner.) That is the primary episode to introduce what is going to turn into a persistent downside: the controversy over whether or not Jesus counts as a dinner visitor who’s useless or alive. Theologically this can be a wealthy query, I really feel! I’m Episcopalian, although.
9. Kash Patel, FBI director/influencer
Friends: your entire Miracle on Ice males’s hockey crew from 1980
“Who’re you?” I image the lads’s hockey crew asking. “I’m Kash Patel, kids’s-book creator and director of the FBI,” Kash Patel responds, by way of a mouthful of chicken-parm hero sandwich (his meal of alternative). “Not too long ago I’ve been within the information as a result of the FBI retains detaining the unsuitable individuals 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 rapidly after this level.
8. Cheryl Hines, actor and spouse of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Friends: Her grandmother Ruth, Carol Burnett, and Maya Angelou
I’m arriving on the concept 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 feel 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 techniques), the place it had been hunted virtually to extinction. It’s uncommon to have a measles conservationist on this type of place, however that’s the Trump administration for you: attempting issues which have by no means been tried earlier than. What if the conspiracy theorists have been contained in the FBI as an alternative of outdoor it? What if we didn’t have an East Wing?
7. Adena Friedman, Nasdaq president and CEO
Friends: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the astronaut Sally Journey
I’m getting frightened concerning the inventory market! It stored going up this yr, largely as a result of we maintain spending extra on AI in hopes that this certainly-not-bubble will elevate all boats and ultimately lead to income. The architects of AI even obtained to be Time journal’s Individual(s) of the 12 months. 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 could be consuming a Thanksgiving dinner. She stated these may be very totally different conversations, however I can really see this meal going nicely! So long as they don’t talk about the inventory market—having led the nation by way of the Nice Melancholy, FDR may convey up some questions that might kill the temper.
6. J. D. Vance, vp
Friends: 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 feel it’s doubtless that Trump doesn’t know who Abraham Lincoln is or what he did, and the opportunity of a cocktail party the place Trump is compelled 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 dissatisfied to listen to that Lincoln spent a lot time combating in opposition to the Confederacy. I don’t know what Isaac Newton would do; possibly drop an apple.
Together with Trump on this dinner when that seat may go to actually any human being dwelling or useless is the type of pandering we now have come to count on from the vp, whose different 2025 highlights embody complaining to Europe concerning the “enemy inside,” being one of many final to see Pope Francis alive, and suggesting that he hopes his Hindu spouse will awaken to Jesus at some point.
5. Jillian Michaels, health influencer
Friends: Maya Angelou (once more!), Albert Einstein, and Ozzy Osbourne
This one will get factors subtracted for the menu, which is: French fries, purple 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 want, so, who is aware of! “What’s The Largest Loser’s coach doing on this podcast?” you ask. This yr, 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 notice that solely lower than 2 p.c of white People owned slaves? You notice that slavery is 1000’s of years outdated?” she stated on a CNN panel. “I’m stunned that you simply’re attempting 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
Friends: 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 yr: passing the One Large Lovely Invoice Act and as few different payments as doable, shutting the federal government down, and blocking after which reluctantly permitting the discharge of the Epstein recordsdata. An formidable transient for anybody! And that’s not all that he has to fret about: In the midst of this interview, he agreed that his mind (and, maybe, the brains of all males?) was like a waffle.
3. Pete Hegseth, protection secretary
Friends: 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 struggle engulfing his nation.) Figuring out Vladimir Putin, he could 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
Friends: William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin
Elon Musk imagines that his friends would take pleasure in an epic 12-course meal of most likely not cheeseburgers, however possibly little, tiny cheeseburgers, which by no means style pretty much as good as the large ones, but when somebody actually tried, they could possibly 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 deaths, offering him with a brand new first line in his obituary, and forcing Tesla homeowners to purchase slightly disclaimer bumper sticker for his or her automotive.
I’ve put this dinner fairly excessive on the record as a result of I feel that if Nikola Tesla had the entire Musk scenario correctly defined to him, fisticuffs would virtually definitely ensue. The concept of Tesla and Musk combating one another over tiny cheeseburgers whereas William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on … to me, this is a perfect celebration.
1. Katie Miller, podcast host extraordinaire
Friends: 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 friends be? Maybe Stephen Miller, who, allegedly, “solely eats mayonnaise.” (“With french fries, or, like, interval?” J. D. Vance requested throughout his episode. “Interval,” Miller stated, 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 stick with it 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 resort, you may discover a touring group that appears, a minimum of at first look, slightly unwieldy: younger children, their mother and father, and their grandparents, all vacationing collectively no matter age or mobility limits.
A scene like this is able to have been uncommon just a few a long time in the past, based on Susan Rugh, a historical past professor at Brigham Younger College who wrote concerning the historical past of household journey in her ebook Are We There But?: The Golden Age of American Household Holidays. The traditional Twentieth-century household trip was sometimes a nuclear one, comprising a mother, a dad, and their younger children. Grandparents and different kinfolk seldom got here alongside. However increasingly more, analysis exhibits, households have a tendency to convey a number of generations with them. This, in flip, has modified individuals’s most well-liked journey locations, and even the very function of journey: Multigenerational teams are more likely to take easy, relaxed seashore holidays than to embark on logistics-heavy metropolis visits or highway journeys.
Tradition Break
Learn. In 2023, Ilana Masad really useful six books to learn throughout a annoying household vacation.
Discover. Many grocery-store self-checkout strains at the moment are longer than the staffed ones. Valerie Trapp explores the one line that People (weirdly) select to attend in.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this text.
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