Five Things: Advent Calendars, Billionaires, Nuzzi and RFK Jr., Airport Lounges, Fighting Fascism
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
This Saturday, like many other families in Germany, my family started baking Christmas cookies. And to illustrate what my family has to endure with me, I’d love to share an occasion from the evening. My wife mentioned that she needed our 3rd child to help with some cookies to do the marmalade filling. All I heard in the other room was “marma lu” (Lu is our daughter’s nickname) and immediately I yelled “Mama Loo!” and my wife said to the other daughter: “careful, he’ll start singing again!” - and yes, the tune of Mama Loo was stuck in my ear for the rest of the evening and playing the song over and over in the kitchen while I was cooking didn’t help either.
I know, my brain does interesting things, but singing and dancing to Mama Loo in the kitchen is so much better than thinking about politics right now. Also, the cookies my wife and daughters baked are very yummy.
Here are this Sunday’s Five Things - enjoy!
Advent Calendars Are Totally Out of Control
In 2025, the Advent seems, mostly, to represent an opportunity to pluck miniature diversions out of perforated-cardboard compartments. People with even a tenuous relationship to Jesus Christ are nonetheless spending their Decembers counting down the days until his birthday; they are doing this by opening paper doors, behind which they are finding just about anything a person can possibly buy—tea, designer lipstick, wine, weed, chili crisp, cheese, knives, crystals, smoked summer sausage, toys for children, toys for cats, toys for dogs, toys for sex. They are participating (possibly subconsciously) in an ancient, sacred ritual by unboxing their daily thong. They are counting down to Christmas without compromising their gains, as Jesus would have wanted. They’re celebrating the season the way it was meant to be: with Keurig cups.
Back when I was a kid, we had a candle with numbers from 1 to 24 which we burned down a bit each day. And we had crappy chocolate advent calendars that were so bad my mother offered to buy us chocolate instead. I think my mother also prepared 24 little bags for us as kids, but not every year. Advent calendars have always been a thing in Germany as part of the countdown to Christmas, along with St. Nicholas Day on December 6, where kids put their polished shoes in front of their rooms the night before and then the parents fill them when the kids sleep. The four Advent Sundays are always something special in Germany with coffee and christmas cookies. The Advent calendar business has gone totally mad, with prepacked calendars available everyhwere in all sizes and shapes. My wife started a beautiful tradition for our kids and she shops for and then packs 96 little bags for our kids (sometimes I get to help, but I mostly do something wrong and don’t follow the system the way it is intended…). I love to see our kids enjoying the Advent calendar every single morning.
How billionaires took over American politics
In an era defined by major political divisions and massive wealth accumulation for the richest Americans, billionaires are spending unprecedented amounts on U.S. politics. Dozens have stepped up their political giving in recent years, leading to a record-breaking surge of donations by the ultrarich in 2024. Since 2000, political giving by the wealthiest 100 Americans to federal elections has gone up almost 140 times, well outpacing the growing costs of campaigns, a Washington Post analysis found.
In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections, according to a Post analysis of data from OpenSecrets. By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared. In other words, roughly 1 in every 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people.
Aside from the fact that this piece was published in the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, the article outlines a dramatic development, even though I always felt that American politics was dominated by rich people more than anyone else.
The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined
At the most basic level, the facts are these: In 2024, RFK Jr. reportedly had an affair with Olivia Nuzzi, then a political writer for New York magazine. Nuzzi, who’s 39 years Kennedy’s junior, met Kennedy while profiling him for a New York cover story in 2023. At the time, Nuzzi was engaged to then–Politico writer Ryan Lizza (z‘s recognize z‘s). RFK was, and bafflingly still is, married to the Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines.
New York fired (sorry, “parted ways“ with) Nuzzi after news of the affair became public, and as more details have emerged over the past year, the scope of the scandal has widened to encompass political corruption, journalistic malpractice, lizards, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Malibu, $15,000 worth of Cartier jewelry, shocking press releases, surprise investigations, naked presidential candidates (more than one), Kennedy assassinations (more than one), and also Keith Olbermann for some reason. Let’s join hands—not you, Mr. Health Secretary, you keep your hands to yourself—and go forth to examine a tale that both encapsulates this dystopian moment in our politics and epitomizes the many, many ways America can make you say, “What the fuck, oh no” in 2025. We’ve still got it, baby.
I don’t know how to describe this. In normal times, these people would have no future in politics, but in this administration, everything is possible and anything goes. Appalling. But great writing!
The Airport-Lounge Wars
Airport lounges are about who gets in and who does not. There are lounges with hot dogs on rollers, lounges with pedicurists, and lounges with personal butlers. Ease of admission varies accordingly. Most people at an airport don’t visit a lounge. If they did, it would kind of defeat the purpose. But we’re getting there. Last year, Priority Pass, a membership network of mostly low- and mid-tier lounges, saw a thirty-one-per-cent increase in visits. By 2023, amid the post-pandemic travel boom, John F. Kennedy Airport had increased its lounge space in Terminal 4 alone to some seventy thousand square feet—about the size of Bill Gates’s mansion, Xanadu 2.0. Since then, the terminal has added another Xanadu’s worth. There are more than thirty-five hundred airport lounges in the world. Suvarnabhumi Airport, in Bangkok, has thirty-seven—roughly one for every two gates. Kasane, Botswana, a town of about ten thousand people, has an airport smaller than some lounges; it has an airport lounge. Three of the four lounges in Punta Cana’s airport have outdoor pools.
Before COVID hit, I was flying quite a bit and I really did enjoy airport lounges, but not the crappy ones United offered to frequent flyers without superduper platinum status, which were always super packed with people and booze cost extra. I preferred the SAS lounges with a nice selection of Nordic food and some nice wines. But the best use of a lounge was a few years ago in Munich, when I went running up and down a mountain an hour south of Munich and came into the lounge totally sweaty and dirty, just to take a shower and then have some nice Bavarian food. But now I fly without status and it sucks to hang out somewhere in front of the gate, sipping coffee that costs 5€ or so.
Turns Out Fighting Fascism Helps You Live Longer
Williams is one of a legion of retired people responding to the tears in the country’s social fabric by volunteering in their communities, rather than staying frozen in fear—work that has taken on new urgency under the second Trump administration.
A January study in the journal Social Science & Medicine found that volunteering slows down aging in retirees: the DNA of people who volunteered the equivalent of one to four hours a week showed distinctive biomarkers associated with decelerated epigenetic aging, with the most pronounced effects among retired people.
While I like the side effects of organizing against fascism, I’d much rather have no worries about democracies sliding into fascism at all.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico