Happy three days til Christmas! If you were anything like me in high school and early college, you were probably the type of annoying person who snuck your more palatable emo & pop-punk Christmas-themed songs into the mix of corporate-approved winter-time pap during the holiday season so you’d be able to listen to at least a few things to keep you sane during the seemingly endless eight-hour-shift-that-always-ends-up-becoming-twelve-hour-shift days and nights at Starbucks.

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him,

We need to talk about sadism and the assumptions surrounding it. Often I see questions, answers, and get comments from people that think that psychopathy and sadism are linked. One is forever and indelibly connected to the other. However, this is not what has been found in science. In fact, they have found a negative correlation between psychopathy and sadism. Why would that be? It is because sadism requires emotional empathy.

In reflecting on the life of Jimmy Carter as the former president approaches his 100th birthday, God bless him, I came across an extraordinary event that took place on the South Lawn of the White House in June 1978. Carter hosted a jazz concert to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival. The concert was part of Carter’s initiative to honor various American art forms. It is this week’s reason to smile.

Sasha Stone is a pioneering blogger and founder of Awards Daily, as well as a widely-read, provocative Substack, “Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning.” She is on the vanguard of the realignment and re-sorting underway in our politics and culture. Sasha Stone’s lived experience is representative of those Bridget Phetasy calls “the politically homeless.” This refers to the rising plurality of Americans—nearing a majority of voters—who reject the enforced duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans.