Alexandra Petri, at the Atlantic, has “A 2025 Ranking You Won’t Read Anywhere Else” [gift link]:
How to describe this year … Slop? Rage-baiting? Pantone white? Yes, and: The Katie Miller Podcast…
Since August, Katie has hosted a soft-focus podcast in which she interviews administration-adjacent figures and people who I guess must be, by some definition, celebrities? (A large potted plant is there also.) At the end of almost every episode, she poses the question: “If you could host a dinner party with three people, dead or alive, who’s at the table, and what are you eating?” So far, the guests, and their varied answers, have offered what I think is the perfect encapsulation of this very strange year. Forget your top 10 movies and top 11 news stories — “The Top 10 Dream Dinners Hosted by Guests on The Katie Miller Podcast” is the year-end ranking that 2025 deserves.
I have taken the liberty of organizing these dinners into a list, from most to least likely to go well. Let’s begin.
10. Kellyanne Conway, media commentator and President Donald Trump’s former adviser
Guests: Jesus, her grandmother
This is Jesus’s first cameo at one of these dinners! It will not be his last. Kellyanne Conway has a lot to ask him, and she anticipates that he would also have a lot to ask her. (Speaking of people trying to go directly to the Roman-Catholic source, we got a new Chicago-style pope this year! Note that he is not invited to this dinner.) This is the first episode to introduce what will become a persistent problem: the debate over whether Jesus counts as a dinner guest who’s dead or alive. Theologically this is a rich question, I feel! I am Episcopalian, though…
2. Elon Musk, CEO of too many companies to name, former DOGE honcho
Guests: William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin
Elon Musk imagines that his guests would enjoy an epic 12-course meal of probably not cheeseburgers, but maybe little, tiny cheeseburgers, which never taste as good as the big ones, but if someone really tried, they could be made to. (He riffed, if that is the word I want, on this cheeseburger question for what felt like ages.) Having to hear from Musk and be subject to his whims has been, unfortunately, a feature of 2025. His DOGE efforts are why we don’t have USAID any more — resulting in an estimated hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, providing him with a new first line in his obituary, and forcing Tesla owners to buy a little disclaimer bumper sticker for their car.
I have put this dinner pretty high on the list because I think that if Nikola Tesla had the whole Musk situation properly explained to him, fisticuffs would almost certainly ensue. The idea of Tesla and Musk fighting each other over tiny cheeseburgers while William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on … to me, this is an ideal party…
Shakespeare & Franklin would be making bets, and quips, about the combatants, while mocking the tiny cheeseburgers.
My party choices, within the given parameters: Miss Jane Austen (famously an incisive, catty conversationalist), Octavia Butler (because I missed my one chance to tell her how much her writing meant to me, and also I would love to hear these two women discuss their mutual careers), and either Shirley Chisholm or Bella Abzug (the two who first introduced me to politics as a personal interest, and also both renowned for their skill at facilitating potential difficult conversations). Over a nice beef bourguignon (which should be generally acceptable, or at least easy to push around on the plate if somebody doesn’t care for it), with whatever red wine is recommended as a pairing, and sparkling water (since I don’t drink).
