Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration for attorney general but many of Donald Trump’s other nominees continue to draw controversy. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss Trump’s other equally improbable Cabinet choices, and what could come next for these nominees.

With the announcement of Gaetz’s withdrawal, much attention has now turned to Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who, like Gaetz, also faces allegations of sexual assault. “The senators to watch on this nomination are going to be not just the national-security hawks but female Republican senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who are always the wild cards, but also someone like Senator Joni Ernst,” Andrew Desiderio said last night. Although Ernst has been complimentary thus far about Hegseth’s nomination, Desiderio explained, she has also been open about her support for women in combat roles, something that Hegseth has spoken out against.

As for longtime Republican lawmakers, questions still remain over how their reactions to Trump’s Cabinet picks will play out in the confirmation process. Are we going to see Mitch McConnell “lead an insurgent faction now that he’s not going to be the Senate leader?” Goldberg asked panelists last night.

“There might be a story of what he does behind closed doors compared to what you see publicly,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs said. No longer serving as the leader of his party, “he now does not need to worry about managing the factions of the Senate” and, given his past criticism of Trump, McConnell “now has the leeway to be more outspoken.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Ashley Parker, a senior national political correspondent for The Washington Post.

Watch the full episode here.

Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind.

When I was teaching indoor cycling every week, an unexpected benefit of the gig was free ice cream. One of the class regulars had an ice-cream machine at home and sometimes brought samples for me to try, in flavors such as pumpkin and pistachio. I think he did this not only because he was a nice person but also because in class, I was the nicest version of myself: warm, welcoming, and encouraging to the point of profound corniness, despite my usual caustic tendencies.

I noticed this friendliness in others too. Two people who met in my class started dating. Strangers who became friends there went out for post-workout coffees. Two of the other class regulars invited me to go skiing with them. Many of the good friends I have at age 35 are people I met in exercise classes I attended regularly. These experiences have convinced me that group fitness classes are the best place to make friends as an adult—an idea supported by research that suggests that the glow of exercise’s feel-good chemicals has interpersonal benefits.

Once, countless friendships were born in what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places”: physical spaces that aren’t a home or a workplace, don’t charge (much) for entry, and exist in large part to foster conversation. Over the past several decades, though—and especially as a result of the pandemic—third places such as bars and cafés have begun playing a much smaller role in social life, depriving American adults of opportunities for chance encounters that can lead to friendships. Perhaps that’s partly why Americans rank improving their relationships among their top New Year’s resolutions.

Group fitness classes don’t exactly fit the definition of a third place: They cost money, and the primary activities within them are sweating, grunting, and skipping a few reps when the instructor isn’t looking. But they fulfill many conditions that social-psychology research has repeatedly shown to help forge meaningful connections between strangers: proximity (being in the same place), ritual (at the same time, over and over), accumulation (for many hours), and shared experiences or interests (because you do and like the same things).

[From the December 2019 issue: I joined a stationary-biker gang]

Sussing out shared interests can be horribly awkward when you meet someone new at work or even at a party. Group fitness classes make it a little easier, Stephanie Roth Goldberg, an athlete psychotherapist in New York, told me. “Automatically, when you walk into a fitness class, you likely are sharing the idea that ‘We like to exercise,’ or ‘We like to do this particular kind of exercise,’” she said. “It breaks the ice differently than standing in a bar or at someone’s house.” Of course, breaking the ice still requires someone to say something, which, if you’re sweaty and huffing, is frankly terrifying. Whether I’m an instructor or a classmate, one simple tactic has never failed me: I simply walk up to someone after class and say, “Hey, good job!”

Proximity, ritual, and accumulation all require a certain amount of time, which can be hard to come by in a country that requires and rewards long hours at work. But you’re already making time for exercise class, and it provides those conditions; benefitting from them mostly requires acknowledging that you’ve already set yourself up for friendship. Danielle Friedman, a journalist and the author of Let’s Get Physical, told me that breaking through what she calls the “social code of anonymity” is key to making friends. “If you’ve been going to the same class for a while and start seeing the same people, don’t pretend like you’ve never interacted before,” she said.

That kind of friendliness requires adopting the clichéd feel-goodery inherent in many group fitness classes. In my spin classes, I’d cringe whenever I caught myself doling out motivational platitudes—mostly “We’re all in this together!” because I needed the reminder too, as I tried to talk and spin at the same time. Inevitably, though, someone would “Woo!” in response and reenergize the whole room. I’d load up my playlists with high-tempo remixes of early-aughts Top 40 hits and catch people singing along. One of my favorite instructors in a class I attended regularly instituted “Fun Friday,” when we’d warm up by doing silly little relay races or grade-school-style games; my blood ran cold the first time she told us to partner up for this cheesefest, but I had a blast. Everyone did.

In a world that prizes ironic detachment, embracing such earnest silliness can feel deeply uncomfortable. But—and you might as well get used to hearing this kind of phrase now, if you’re going to start attending classes—you just have to push through. “When you’re sweating, feeling a little out of control of your physical self, whooping and yelling, there’s a vulnerability,” Friedman said. “If you buy in, then you’ve shared something. There aren’t that many contexts as adults where you have that opportunity to be vulnerable together.”

[Read: Why making friends in midlife is so hard]

A room full of grown adults flailing, shouting, and running miles without ever going anywhere is a fundamentally ridiculous prospect. Ridiculous things, however, play a crucial role in connecting with others: They make us laugh. Studies show that laughing with others facilitates social connection by helping us feel that we have more in common. The “happy hormones” released during exercise—endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin—are also associated with bonding. In particular, exercising in sync with others promotes close relationships.

Even if you don’t find your next best friend at Zumba, getting into a fitness habit of some kind might help you meet people and make friends in other spaces. “The more that people can step out of their comfort zone in one setting, the less intimidating it is to do in other settings,” Goldberg said. Perhaps you’ll even become the version of yourself who inspires people to bring you homemade ice cream. Win-win.

Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan, two of the nation’s prominent scholars and commentators on matters of democracy, freedom, and the American idea, are joining The Atlantic as contributing writers, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Both writers join The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they served as opinion columnists.

“The Atlantic is deeply committed to covering the crisis of democracy in all its manifestations, and having Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan join our already excellent team represents a real boon for our readers,” Goldberg said.

Allen, who serves as the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, is a political philosopher and scholar of public policy. She is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and director of the Democratic Knowledge Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has published numerous books on justice and citizenship, including 2023’s Justice by Means of Democracy, as well as Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality and the acclaimed memoir Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. Allen has contributed several articles to The Atlantic, the most recent about the history of a forgotten Black Founding Father.

Kagan is a senior fellow in the foreign-policy program at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He has written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and best-selling books, most recently Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again. He is also the author of The Ghost at the Feast: America and Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941; The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World; and Of Paradise and Power. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the policy-planning staff, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com