If we can’t celebrate the holiday the way we’re used to, we can double down on celebrating its message of gratitude. So, when I go around our table this year — just me and three of my kids — what will I be thankful for? The list is surely endless, but in a year when so many have lost so much, if I had to choose one thing I’m most grateful for, if I had to cut through the thicket of distractions to isolate my gene of gratitude, I would say I’m most thankful that I’m simply able to sit in a chair and have a meal at a table and look at people I love– and be alive to write about it.

…this is the most important Thanksgiving of our lives because it is, for the first time, an opportunity to celebrate the holiday in the truest sense of how it was intended.

As millions of Americans have now learned, celebrating Thanksgiving does not need to involve stuffing or wishbones or even gathering multiple generations of family around a decorative autumnal centerpiece.

…whether it’s pressure to celebrate or a natural desire to get back to normalcy, nobody is obligated to participate in holiday cheer. It’s always been 100 percent optional, and in 2020 you don’t even need to make up an excuse… our need for joy and celebration cannot erase or replace our sorrow, and our expression of gratitude or happiness doesn’t need to be confined to specific dates.

Liberals and the media are (as per their tedious usual) claiming the president stepped in to aid a corrupt crony. This has it exactly backward. The Flynn pardon was necessary—to correct a corrupt Federal Bureau of Investigation, a rogue special counsel, an unprincipled federal judge, and an embarrassingly complicit media.

Guilty is innocent; lies are truth; traitors are patriots. The question is not whether Mr. Trump has degraded the presidency. The question is how much long-term damage he has done. Will future presidents now feel free to use the pardon power — or the other vast powers of office — with such nakedly crooked motives?

Although there was no evidence that Flynn was either a clandestine agent of Russia (which could have been the proper basis for a counterintelligence investigation), or had committed any penal offense (which could have predicated a proper criminal investigation), FBI Director, James Comey dispatched two agents to interview Flynn at the White House on January 24, 2017 — Flynn’s first full day as national security adviser.

American Jewish leaders committed to nonpartisanship will find themselves confronted with tense political dramas over Israel. In the end, it may be better to acknowledge that the era of bipartisan support is gone rather than keep it on life support.

President-elect Joe Biden will be better for Israel — strengthening bipartisan American support for the Jewish state and pursuing policies abroad far more effective in enhancing Israel’s security and well-being… Trump has damaged the bipartisanship on which the durability of the U.S.-Israel relationship depends.

Netanyahu’s newfound interest in bipartisanship needs more than words. He has done enormous and potentially lasting damage to Israel’s special relationship and bipartisan support inside the Beltway and in the Jewish community. No amount of glad-handing and AIPAC speeches will erase that. What Israel needs – as do the Palestinians – is what America is getting: new leadership, a uniter, not a divider.

Cranberries are indigenous to North America—first eaten by Native Americans and now an indispensable fixture of Thanksgiving dinner and American cuisine more broadly. But if my Ashkenazi mother-in-law’s potted meatballs are to be believed, cranberries also have a Jewish soul. For into the pot, along with the ground beef and onions, she adds a full can of cranberry sauce.

By any standard definition of the category, jellied cranberry sauce would not qualify as “sauce.” A sauce, according to What’s Cooking America, the nation’s “most trusted culinary resource since 1997” (according to itself), is a “liquid or semi-liquid [food] devised to make other foods look, smell, and taste better, and hence be more easily digested and more beneficial…”

Jellied cranberry sauce — that majestic, jiggling store-bought log — does not meet these criteria…

I guess I’m just grasping at drumsticks over my fear of having to prepare my own Thanksgiving dinner this year… About all I know how to do for a homemade Thanksgiving is to open the store-bought cranberry sauce that retains the shape of the can.

This is a debate over “free speech” nearly completely loosed from the realities of the majority of trans people’s lives. That is not remarkable. But as it attempts to pass as a debate over free speech, it has revealed something else, driving it on: the benefits accrued to those who claim to be on its controversial or even censored side. This is not something Shrier started. To claim victimhood while espousing the status quo is routine in our politics…

The effort to censor Shrier’s book reflects the same dictatorial belief. But it will eventually blow up against trans people and other minorities, as it always does. Once you establish that some ideas are simply too harmful to be aired, you clear the way for other people to make the same claim. And one day, they’ll come after you.

I don’t believe that I’ve been harmed by these suppression efforts. I am not entitled to book reviews by any media outlet. I sold plenty of books without Amazon’s “sponsored ads.” Joe Rogan (and Megyn Kelly, who also had me on) have much larger platforms than the outlets that pretended this book doesn’t exist. And while this topic has become a fascination of mine, I am no activist. I will pursue other subjects and write other books.

By buying the products produced in Uiyghur concentration camps, we may be unwittingly involved in one of the worst human rights abuses of the century. Had we been consumers in 1939, many of us would have adamantly boycotted companies we knew to be complicit in the Holocaust.

The dramatic surge in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is very alarming and it becomes clearer and clearer every day that we have a very dark winter ahead of us. At this point, going into a crowded store for holiday deals, even if you wear a mask and take other safety precautions, is very dangerous.

But instead of setting up in front of your laptop to chase Black Friday deals online, consider skipping this retail holiday altogether.

If there was ever a year to boycott Black Friday, it would be the dumpster fire that is 2020.