| November 29, 2025 
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Good morning. As the year comes to a close, we want to know your highly specific, idiosyncratic bests of 2025.  | | María Jesús Contreras |
Highlight reelThe weekend after Thanksgiving makes a strong claim for the coziest weekend of the year. It’s getting properly chilly if you live in a place that gets chilly. (And if you don’t, stop taunting the rest of us!) If you’re lucky, you’ve had a couple of days off work and there are a couple more to go. There are still leftovers for every meal if you can stomach them, the stuffing getting ever gluier and strangely more delicious each hour it spends in the fridge. Sales beckon, streaming options abound (I’m eyeing the documentary “Downey Wrote That”). Hopefully the characters assembled are remaining on their best holiday behavior and you can get some serious relaxing in. It’s the time of year when I crave recommendations. Critics will soon be issuing their choices for the best movies, music, books and TV shows from the year, but what I want — what I always want — is people’s favorite things that don’t fall into easy categories. Our lives don’t break down according to genre, our tastes don’t confine themselves to mediums. And while of course we want ideas for what we should watch and read and listen to, we also want recommendations for how to live: how to live better and more fully, with more curiosity and excitement. That’s where our annual Morning tradition comes in. Every year, I invite you to send me your category-agnostic, superspecific, idiosyncratic bests of the past 12 months. What was the best change you made to your routine? What was the best seasoning combo you devised to put on popcorn? What was the most illuminating thing you realized about the nature of existence? The best bit of conversation you overheard? Your best strategy for combating the Sunday scaries? Best new mantra? Best parlor game you made up? You get the picture. Submit your list here, and I’ll include as many of the best of the bests as I can in upcoming newsletters. Be creative! Invent categories no one on earth has ever dreamed of before. Tell us what you loved, what you learned, how you changed. You’re the critic of your own experiences, and we want to know what you discovered. For morePolitics  | | President Trump on Thursday. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times |
Hong Kong Fire More International News Other Big Stories - A five-day rally in the stock market has reversed a recent downturn, pushing the S&P 500 index near a record high.
- A storm bringing heavy snow and sleet could disrupt travel for the Northern Plains, Upper Midwest and Great Lakes through the weekend.
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Film and TV - “Stranger Things” became a hit in part because it skillfully repurposed vintage pop-culture parts. Its approach has come to define the streaming era.
- Dads are having a rough time onscreen this season: In “One Battle After Another,” “Springsteen” and “Ella McCay,” patriarchs are depicted as emotionally stunted — or worse.
- In his latest knockout, “The Secret Agent,” the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho finds laughter amid the terror, our film critic writes.
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Music - John Holiday is his own singer, equal parts baroque and R&B. His performances this season range from Handel’s “Messiah” to a gender-bending role in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”
- Donald Glover, the actor and musician, revealed that he had a stroke last year, which led him to abandon his world tour.
- At 95, David Amram still makes music. Jazz, classical, folk, you name it — for this composer, categories were never confining.
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