Good morning.

The U.S. Coast Guard boarded an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, power has been restored to most of San Francisco after a widespread outage yesterday and Bowen Yang left “S.N.L.”

We’ll have more news below, but first we want to examine how rising beef prices have stressed restaurant owners this holiday season. Today, Julie Creswell, a business reporter, explains the dilemma.

High steaks

Americans eat a lot of beef — nearly 59 pounds per person this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That equals to about 118 eight-ounce filet mignons for everyone in the United States.

And they eat a lot of it in December. The holiday season is a hot time for steakhouses, as companies book back rooms for lavish parties and families treat themselves to nice bottles of wine.

This year, though, it’s been tricky.

Beef prices are near record levels. And steakhouses — from the wood-paneled clubs of Manhattan to chain outposts along highways — are trying to cover their costs and still keep their customers.

In early November, Tommy Hall, who oversees five fine-dining steakhouses in the Southeast, told me that beef prices had climbed to a level that put his Halls Chophouse restaurants in a “code red.” So he raised the price of an eight-ounce filet mignon to $61 from $57. A rib-eye was bumped to $85 from $82.

The back story

The problem is a classic imbalance between supply and demand. While Americans still crave and eat a lot of beef, the nation’s cattle inventory is at its lowest level since the 1950s.

Herds began to shrink in recent years partly as a result of widespread drought, which reduced grazing land and forced ranchers to buy more feed. Closures of meatpacking plants have also depressed cattle prices, since there are fewer processors purchasing cattle.

The prices of beef products, from ground beef to roasts to prime cuts of steak, have been on the rise since the Covid pandemic. But they’ve really shot higher in the last couple of years. In September 2023, a pound of ground beef averaged $5.11 across the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, it is nearly 24 percent higher — more than $6.30 per pound. A U.S.D.A. Choice boneless sirloin has risen 22 percent in that same time.

The effect on your bill

The result of all of this is that diners will be paying more for their steak when they eat out. But how much more depends on the type of restaurant.

Many fine-dining steakhouses, which typically sell the highest grade of prime steak to higher-income diners, say they are seeing little pushback as they price an eight-ounce filet mignon above $60. That’s a trend at high-end restaurants of all types, my colleague Julia Moskin reports: Chefs say affluent patrons are flocking to the fanciest, and priciest, items on their menus.

But midpriced restaurants, which typically sell choice grades of steak and cater to a less-wealthy clientele, face a bigger challenge: How to raise prices to cover increased beef expenses while not chasing away customers?

Outback Steakhouse began raising prices a couple of years ago, and some analysts say it may have pushed too hard. Traffic has nose-dived. And the stock of its parent company, Bloomin’ Brands, has plummeted more than 40 percent in the past year.

But Texas Roadhouse has tried to keep price increases small and, as a result, customers continue to flood in. On a Friday night in mid-November, I visited a Texas Roadhouse in North Plainfield, N.J. The parking lot was jammed, and about 30 people stood in the lobby waiting for tables.

As I nibbled on soft, pillowy rolls, slathered with the restaurant’s special honey-cinnamon butter, and dug into an eight-ounce Dallas filet ($28.99 with two sides), staff members rolled out a saddle into the middle of the restaurant. A woman gamely got on as the staff broke into a raucous birthday chant, with patrons clapping along.

With a final “Yeehaw!” we all returned to our steaks.

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Yes. The question of whether marijuana should be legal requires substantive research on the drug, which Trump’s decision allows. “We cannot manage what we don’t measure,” Aaron Carroll writes for Times Opinion.

No. Trump’s decision flies in the face of the Make America Healthy Again movement, as many Americans will interpret it as permission to light up. “The MAHA movement is right that ultraprocessed foods are a problem, but pot may be worse than fried Oreos,” The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes.

Elizabeth Austin is always the one to host for the holidays. Breaking that mold means either asking for help or stopping entirely, she writes.

Nicholas Kristof discusses Jesus’ message with a scholar.

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Blue Christmas: Do you find holiday songs sort of depressing? Melissa Kirsch argues that most of the season’s songs are a little sad — and that’s part of why we love them.

Anti-cartel offensive: Omar García Harfuch wants to defeat Mexico’s powerful criminal groups. Many before him have failed.

Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about the takeaways from the Epstein files.

A creative force: The costume designer Theodor Pistek worked on more than 100 films, including “Amadeus,” for which he won an Oscar. He was also a noted driver, and painter, of racecars. He died at 93.

“The Testament of Ann Lee,” a movie starring Amanda Seyfried, comes out Christmas Day. Seyfried plays the founder of the Shakers, a religious movement and one of the longest-running utopian experiments in American history.

It’s a film about longing for another, better world. The director, Mona Fastvold, frames that pursuit as a road that runs through hell. The film explores how readily sanity can slip into insanity, order into chaos and idyll into war. It does so with a cast wearing bonnets and singing their spiritual longing into existence, beating their chests in unison. (Yes, it’s a musical.)

The Times ranked the film among its best movies of 2025. In the “Believing” newsletter, Lauren Jackson speaks to Seyfried and Fastvold about their own spirituality — and why they decided to make a this movie now. Read more here.

Sign up for the Believing newsletter. A weekly newsletter about how people live religion and spirituality now, with Lauren Jackson. Get it in your inbox

N.F.L.: The Chicago Bears defeated the Green Bay Packers in overtime, while the Philadelphia Eagles won the N.F.C. East with a victory over the Washington Commanders.

College basketball: Texas Tech pulled off a huge comeback at Madison Square Garden, breaking Duke’s undefeated streak.

This week’s subject for The Interview is the Palestinian writer, lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, who has been documenting what it means to live under Israeli occupation for decades. At the end of another brutal year of strife and suffering, I thought it might be useful to speak with a writer who has a firsthand sense of the ways in which the past need not portend the future — and the ways in which it should.

Given that politics based in raw power are so ascendant now, what is the role of a justice-driven writer?

The first thing is to document, make the situation clear and avoid mystification. Colonization works by mystifying, by making people lose a sense of who they are and how they got to the point that they got to. The people who are younger than me never knew the land as it was before, never knew what the hills looked like before the settlements were built all over them, never knew the roads before they were distorted and full of checkpoints. So one of the objects of my writing has been to describe the landscape as it was before. Then also, they might not be aware of how we got into the legal situation that we are in now. It’s important to remove the mystery and explain that it was a slow process, which was deliberate.

When you talk about the process, you’re specifically referring to the building of settlements in the West Bank?

That’s a big part of it. Other parts are how the present generation of Palestinians have never met an Israeli who is not a settler or a soldier. There were times when Israelis came over to Ramallah and to other places in the West Bank and Gaza, and went to restaurants and had businesses with Palestinians. There was interaction on many levels. Now none of this is possible because of the apartheid wall, and because of the checkpoints. Many Palestinians have never been to Jerusalem from Ramallah, which is 15 kilometers away, and never met a normal Israeli civilian. So they have a distorted picture of what Israelis are. And likewise, the Israelis of the Palestinians.

Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube.

Read this week’s magazine.

Warm up your entire body if your hands and feet are cold. It’s the best way to protect against freezing toes and fingers.

Master the treadmill with these four workouts.

Use A.I. tools to redesign your living room.

The recipes in Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes this week are perfect for a busy time of year when you need fortification at the end of the day — especially, she writes, if you live in a place where there’s already snow on the ground. This shortcut beef biryani from Kay Chun transforms the dish from an hourlong engagement into something you can make quickly.