OPEN THREAD: Have yourself a merry little Christmas Eve.

OPEN THREAD: Life is short, but the years are long.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: 55 years after Apollo 8’s Christmas at the moon, a new Artemis crew readies for launch.

HMM: People With Suicidal Thoughts Show a Chemical Pattern in Their Blood.

BLUE STATE UPDATE: Gavin Newsom’s 10-year plan to end San Francisco homelessness marks 20-year anniversary.

ME ON SUBSTACK: Muddling through, somehow.

BILL ACKMAN: CLAUDINE GAY HAS BEEN ASKED TO RESIGN.

I have heard from a source that is reliable but a step or two removed from the situation that the @Harvard Corporation has asked President Gay to resign and she has refused.

Gay has apparently said that if she is fired, she will sue. Gay has retained her own counsel.

I can’t…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) December 24, 2023

Hoping for a lawsuit with lots of discovery.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Checkout Your Loadout: A pistol malfunction on the range is embarrassing. It’s so much worse in the middle of a gunfight.

AI AND PRODUCTIVITY: The Economic Effects.

COMING SOON!  THE NATION’S 250th ANNIVERSARY!:  Shouldn’t we be getting ready?  The National Association of Scholars promises to prepares us by writing history blurbs about the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence.

My recollection is that there was plenty of planning and pre-game activities in the years leading up to the Bicentennial in 1976.

READER FAVORITE: ThermoPro Lightning 1-Second Instant Read Meat Thermometer. #CommissionEarned

GRABIEN’S TEN MOST MORTIFYING MEDIA MOMENTS OF 2023:  Via Powerline.

MORE ON THE ARGENTINE EARTHQUAKE:  On Minding the Campus.

FLASHBACK: For Bloggers At Risk: Creating A Contingency Plan.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Stay At Home Girlfriends Are Having A Moment.

The typical stay-at-home girlfriend video opens on a young woman in a pristine apartment. At 8 a.m., she makes the bed and cooks pancakes for her boyfriend before he goes to work. After a green juice, it’s time for self care: a private Pilates reformer session and a microcurrent facial. Then, she has lunch with a girlfriend at a local hot spot, goes for a long walk and listens to a podcast before it’s time to get ready for date night.

Clips like this abound on TikTok—smooth, hypnotic videos presenting an idealized vision of a traditional marriage, minus the wedding ring, plus a dose of the current wellness boom. Being a stay-at-home girlfriend (or SAHG for short) is all about supporting your boyfriend with tasks like cooking and housework, plus a rigorous self-care regimen to keep up appearances. The phenomenon reflects a Gen Z move away from mid-2000s “girlboss” hustle culture, and toward aspirations of a softer life.

“My life was very, very slow and peaceful,” said Kendel Kay, 26, who moved from Los Angeles to Puerto Rico to be a stay-at-home girlfriend to her then-boyfriend in 2022. She described an “extensive morning routine filled with skin care” and juice and breakfast prep.

Videos of young SAHGs from Nairobi to Miami show them puttering around modern high-rise apartments, pushing Dyson vacuums and spoiling small dogs. They wear workout sets all day; they talk slowly; they seem unbothered. . . .

Kay, who is newly single and now based in San Diego, spoke positively about her time as a SAHG in Puerto Rico. Before she met her ex-boyfriend, who ran his own company, she earned money modeling and making OnlyFans subscription-based content. When he started supporting her, she said, “I just felt like I didn’t have to experience as much stress, and I was really able to be my best self and do a lot of self-improvement.”

Aliyah Wan, 26, who grew up in Singapore and lives in Los Angeles with her generous boyfriend, said that a lot of women aspire to this lifestyle these days. “With big cities, the cost of living is just so high that having somebody to provide for you makes living a lot easier,” she said.

Judging by the illustrations, it helps to be really, really hot.

SPACE: SpaceX returns vital life science research to Earth.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Loss of sleep increases risk for depression, anxiety.

ARNOLD KLING ON THE PERSISTENCE OF FASHIONABLE WRONGS: “We are in the process of becoming a society where fashion is more powerful than logic.”

IN THE MAIL: From Michael Savage, A Savage Republic: Inside the Plot to Destroy America. #CommissionEarned

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Reminder: Husbands, It’s Time To Start Christmas Shopping.

AS WELL THEY SHOULD: Harvard’s early admits reconsider amid concerns of campus anti-Semitism. “This is the first time and first application season where I’ve seen a student who got into Harvard early that I’ve worked with for almost three and a half, four years now, starting in ninth grade — we’re seeing them say, ‘You know what? I want to apply to other schools because what if I graduate and this stigma and this reputation of Harvard stays the same?’ That’s their true concern.”

YES: It’s time for universities to share the burden of student loan defaults. “By inducing their students to borrow from the government, higher education institutions collect vastly inflated tuition and fees, which they then spend without worrying about whether the loans will ever be repaid. This in turn incentivizes them to push the tuition and fees, and room and board, ever higher — by an average of 169 percent since 1980, according to a Georgetown University study. In short, in the current system the colleges get and spend billions in borrowed money and put all the loan risk on somebody else — including those student borrowers who responsibly pay off their own debt and those who never borrowed in the first place, not to mention taxpayers, whether they attended a college or not.”

I’ve been saying that for years.

ARNOLD KLING: “He seems to be saying that the powers that be in academia now understand what went wrong and will proceed to fix it. I find this remarkably optimistic.”

SUPPOSED TO BE SATIRE:

Parents Take Gen Z Kid Who Doesn’t Have Anxiety Or Depression To Therapist To Find Out What’s Wrong https://t.co/G99bgdukSS pic.twitter.com/XPLBmWwRhT

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 22, 2023

LIGHTNING DEAL: COOFANDY Men’s Oxford Shirt Long Sleeve. #CommissionEarned