The Week Magazine December 19, 2025

In the summer blockbuster F1, the racing-team owner, played by Javier Bardem, must choose between letting a friend face near-certain death on the track or selling out everything he believes in and cherishes. It’s not unlike the lose-lose feeling shared by many cinephiles, TV lovers, and news junkies as they see Warner Bros. Discovery—home to the Warner Bros. studio, HBO, and CNN—getting tugged on like a chew toy by two insatiable media pitbulls (see Best Columns: Business, p.34). On one side is Netflix, which has dominated the streaming wars so successfully that its $83 billion bid amounts to loose change for the tech firm. It’s not clear why Netflix wants Warner, other than to keep eyeballs off YouTube and populate future theme parks with characters from iconic properties like DC…

What happened Congressional Democrats this week pushed for the Trump administration to declassify footage of a Sept. 2 attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in the Caribbean—including a follow-up strike that killed two survivors—as President Trump sharply escalated his pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The administration has so far released footage of only the initial strike, which killed nine of the boat’s 11 occupants. But members of the House and Senate’s armed services and intelligence committees were last week shown the complete video, in which two men can been seen clinging to the smoking wreckage. Republicans and Democrats drew starkly different conclusions about the follow-up strike that killed them, which many legal experts call a war crime. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said before the second missile hit,…

■ Jon Alan Hale celebrated his 15,000th spin on the Cars ride at Disneyland last week. The TV technician sought a joy ride after undergoing gastric bypass and knee replacement surgeries in 2010 and 2011 and fell in love with Cars. Hale says he’s visited the Anaheim, Calif., theme park more than 1,100 times, and he takes the ride an average of 13 times each visit. He tracks his races in a notebook and says he’s still not sick of it. Hale even knows all the ride technicians. “Everybody recognizes me, they’re rooting for me.” ■ “Dog days” have a whole new meaning after a record number of golden retrievers gathered in a park in Buenos Aires last week. Over 2,300 pooches and their owners traveled from across Argentina to…

What happened President Trump this week kicked off his new speaking tour, intended to ease Americans’ worries about rising prices, by mocking the concept of affordability and insisting the economy is doing better than ever. Speaking at a rally held at a Pennsylvania casino and resort, Trump blamed President Joe Biden for leaving him “the highest prices ever” and boasted that he’s bringing them down “rapidly.” Democrats “always have a hoax” and “the new word is ‘affordability,’” he said, later adding that he shouldn’t use the word “hoax, because I agree the prices were too high.” Trump frequently veered off script, including to rail against Somali immigrants, who he said came from a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country, and to claim that he has ended eight wars and that Biden gave…

What happened The Supreme Court this week signaled that it was prepared to scrap a 90-year precedent and let President Trump fire the heads of independent federal agencies, a decision that would shift even more power from Congress to the presidency. In March, Trump fired Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. That violated the 1935 Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which holds that a president can only fire an agency chief for cause, and Slaughter sued. But during oral arguments this week, the court’s conservatives assailed the 1935 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts saying it had been winnowed by subsequent rulings into a “dried husk.” The court’s three liberals strongly disagreed. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that overturning Humphrey’s would “destroy…

“A seismic shift in the nation’s approach to public health occurred last week,” said Leana S. Wen in The Washington Post, and American children will suffer for it. Since 1991, the Centers for Disease Control has recommended all babies be immunized at birth against hepatitis B, a virus that attacks the liver. About 90% of infected babies develop the chronic version of the disease, which often culminates in fatal liver cancer. Under the CDC’s “universal birth dose” policy, mercifully, pediatric cases of hepatitis B have fallen from 18,000 in 1991 to only 20 a year now. But the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—packed with anti-vax allies of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—voted 8-3 last week to undo this miracle of public health. If acting agency…