What started as a perfectly innocent trip down mid-2000s Nickelodeon memory lane somehow turned into a reminder of why my producers no longer trust me with Google. We revisit Danny Phantom, arguably one of the greatest eras of kids’ TV, and give Ember McLain the respect she deserves as an iconic, name-chanting, power-ballad-fueling villain who absolutely did not need to be searched with SafeSearch turned off. Also in this episode: confused producers, immediate browser-history deletion, and a brief lesson in what not to type into a work computer. And because it’s the end of a very long year, we close things out with The Last Word—finding gratitude, perspective, and maybe even a little peace after everything this year threw at us… including our own poor decision-making.

In the headlines on #TheUpdate this Friday, one of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ’s appointees has resigned over social media posts she made more than a decade ago that featured antisemitic tropes, Mamdani’s office said.

New York City prosecutors asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate a murder conviction in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz.

And in New Hampshire, A frantic search for the suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University ended at a storage facility where authorities discovered the man dead inside and then revealed he also was suspected of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.