It’s a question that has bedeviled all too many of us: how to deal with loved ones who just keep giving us bad gifts. The National Retail Federation estimates that last winter, about $966 billion worth of merchandise was sold over the holiday period — and about $148 billion of that likely returned. A survey from consumer research firm CivicScience showed that 28 percent of people had returned or exchanged a gift last year. According to Statista, the most wanted Christmas gift among US consumers is cold hard cash. The second most popular? Gift cards. The message seems to be: Thanks for the thought, but let me just choose what I want. Over a single year, let alone an entire lifetime, you might amass a pile of stuff you won’t ever use, taking up valuable space in your home. Do you harden your heart and simply give all of it away? Do you attempt to return every unwanted item as soon as you receive it? What about the things that don’t spark joy, per se, but do have some sentimental value? Standard etiquette advises us to remain gracious even in the face of laughably bad gifts, but research in the social psychology of gift-giving suggests we might be granting bad gift-givers too much benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, an ill-fitting gift is ill-fitting on purpose; it’s not mere miscommunication, but negative, even resentful communication. At the heart of solving this perennial problem is taking a good hard look at what motivates us to confer gifts unto others in the first place. How to politely deal with well-meaning – but unwanted – gifts The question of what to do with gifts you won’t use is a popular etiquette question “in a world of more and more consumer goods,” according to Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette expert at the Emily Post Institute. Generally, “gifts should be received in the same spirit of generosity that they’re given in,” Senning says. “If you don’t particularly appreciate the gift itself, the expectation is that you thank [them] for the effort or thought that went into it.” With that in mind, Senning says that it’s not an etiquette cardinal sin to regift something if you know you can’t use it — for example, if you already happen to have the item. But you should avoid regifting anything handmade or personalized. “Beyond that, it’s about being upfront, ethical, honest” with the original gifter, if they ask, and the new recipient, Senning tells Vox. After all, a gift should be freely given with no obligations, and that includes the recipient having some choice in what they decide to do with the gift. (This is also a reminder to include a gift receipt whenever possible.) Even after the etiquette issue is resolved, it can be tricky figuring out which gifts you’ll no longer keep. “It’s usually easier to begin with items that have less sentimental value,” Juliet Landau-Pope, a productivity coach who has written about decluttering your home of unwanted gifts, tells Vox in an email. Larger items that take up a lot of space might be prime candidates for the initial decluttering, whether they’re going to be regifted or donated. If there’s someone in your life who would appreciate a regift, you should ideally let them know that you were given something you can’t use for insert-reason-here but would love to give them. Clothes — a common but often miscalculated gift — jewelry, and household goods can all go to a Goodwill location or a local family shelter. Furniture, appliances, and other household items can also be donated to Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore program. “One of my core beliefs is that everything comes into your life for a reason, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep it forever,” Landau-Pope says. Take the example of greeting and holiday cards, which may be piling up in your drawer or taking over your fridge. Landau-Pope’s policy is to keep handmade cards from her children, while displaying the others for a set period of time, taking a picture of the display, and then recycling them. Why so many of us get bad gifts In the ideal gift exchange scenario, we probably want to grace the people in our lives with gifts that will be met with undeniable enthusiasm. So why is it that we so often end up saddled with bad ones? It might be an expectations mismatch: As Julian Givi, a marketing professor at West Virginia University, explains, “Whenever we’re gift-givers, we really focus on making people happy the moment that they’re opening the gift.” In order words, we prioritize the drama of a big reveal, as opposed to whether the gift is useful and valuable years down the road. Then there are all the other unintentional ways we might give a bad gift. We might overestimate how passionate someone is about a hobby, sports team, or something else they once mentioned offhand. We might miss the mark simply because we don’t know enough about the other person; we wouldn’t guess in a million years that they have a bad childhood association with receiving hand-knit sweaters, for example. Unfortunately, research shows there are more sinister motives for giving subpar gifts than we’d like to think. For one, some people know exactly what a recipient wants — maybe they have a gift registry — but they buy something else anyway because the options presented are boring to them personally, Givi says. Another selfish motivation his research has discovered: People resist choosing gifts (like, say, a nice pair of sunglasses) that are better than the versions they own, likely to avoid feeling envious. Deborah Cohn, a marketing professor at the New York Institute of Technology, has identified five broad patterns for how lousy gifts happen. On the more innocuous side is due to ritual and obligation. “You’re going to be at a party, you have to bring somebody something,” Cohn tells Vox. But you don’t know enough about them or just don’t want to expend the mental effort of figuring out what they’d really want, so you grab something perfunctory. A more aggressive (but all too common) type of bad gift-giving is when the gift is intended to impose a certain identity on the recipient. We’ve all heard stories about parents who only give dolls and dresses to their daughters, and Legos and video games to their sons. It’s not that these givers don’t understand what their individual children’s real preferences are — it’s that they want to foist their own desire upon the recipient. “This actually happened to me,” Cohn says. “Somebody gave me a book about a religion that I don’t ascribe to.” Other typical bad gift-giving habits stem from pure self-centeredness, like picking out headphones for your spouse that you intend to use or wanting bragging rights for presenting the splashiest (read: most expensive) gift at the party. These kinds of gift-giving behaviors aren’t mistakes, and they aren’t innocent, Cohn contends. “It’s selfish,” she says. “It’s thinking more about yourself than the recipient, and people can see right through it.” Right now, Cohn is working on further research on whether there’s a correlation between habitually bad gift-giving and narcissism. How to be a better gift-giver Individual tastes in gifts can vary greatly, but there are some broad strokes of what people tend to appreciate. According to Givi, sentimental gifts — for example, something handmade or connected to a memory that the two of you share — are often underrated by gift-givers. Another finding in Givi’s research was that people tend to appreciate gifts that are given “out of the blue, as opposed to gifts that we receive on our birthday or any other special occasion.” The fact that it’s not being presented out of any social obligation may emphasize that the thought behind a gift really does count. Being a good gift-giver also involves imagining ourselves in another’s shoes. It takes conscious effort. You genuinely need to ask yourself what this particular person would want, not what you or some other abstract of a person would want in the same situation. It probably doesn’t help, then, that there’s still some social awkwardness around being explicit about what you want to be gifted and what you’d hate to receive. Maybe to some people, maintaining a regularly updated gift registry is gauche, but if you’re concerned about your pile of unused gifts gathering dust in the closet, taking the surprise out of gift-giving does seem like the preferable option. (According to Senning, it’s perfectly all right for gifters to ask for some direction on what gifts someone would like.) Cohn recalls the memory of a bad gift she got in childhood: a prank played on her by her father in which every gift box just contained a smaller one, with nothing inside the last. It motivated her to study what gifts mean and how people communicate through them. She told her mother how the prank had made her feel; when Cohn finished her dissertation, her mother gave her another set of nested boxes, this time full of chocolates. “I think that was the best gift I ever got because she wanted to take away my pain. That’s what that gift was meant to do,” she says.

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, a 900-page opus of conservative policy recommendations published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. But he has nominated two of the document’s co-authors to Cabinet-level positions, and many others served in his first administration, which suggests the document may be a window into what the next four years could bring. On Monday, Trump nominated Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to head the agency. He has also appointed Tom Homan, a Heritage Foundation fellow named as a contributor to Project 2025, as his so-called “border czar.” Eighteen of the 40 co-authors and editors of the report served in the first Trump administration. Among them are Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security; Christopher Miller, former acting Defense secretary; and Russell T. Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is reportedly being considered for another top post in the coming administration. During the 2024 campaign, Democrats sought to tie Trump to Project 2025 — a policy agenda they decried as “dangerous” and “shockingly radical” — framing it as a blueprint for his second term that is much more detailed than the GOP’s 28-page platform. The document focuses on proposals to expand presidential power, gut the federal bureaucracy, enact the priorities of the religious right, deregulate, and more. Trump at one point claimed to have “no idea who is behind it” and denied any connection with it when asked about it at the September presidential debate: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.” However, since Trump’s reelection, some of his allies have suggested that the document was always intended to be the playbook for his second term. Trump’s nominations of Carr and Homan seem to support that idea. Neither will require additional Senate confirmation to take on their roles; through them, they will be in a position to advocate for Project 2025’s ideas on communications and immigration, respectively. Here’s what we know about Carr and Homan and the ideas relevant to their posts outlined in Project 2025. Brendan Carr Carr, a pick approved by Trump’s billionaire backer Elon Musk, currently serves as the senior Republican on the FCC and was previously its general counsel. Now, he is set to take the helm, steering the commission toward a hardline stance against Big Tech and what he describes in Project 2025 as its “attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” Among his key proposals in Project 2025 is ending legal immunities for internet platforms hosting user-generated content under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That would require stricter content moderation on the part of these platforms or cutbacks to the degree to which users can contribute content, fundamentally changing the way people interact online. At the same time, he wrote in Project 2025 that he wants to ensure that “Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech.” That echoes some of Trump’s other Cabinet picks who are seeking to crack down on “wokeness” in their respective agencies. Carr also supports efforts to block TikTok in the US, identifying it, along with the Chinese smartphone producer Huawei, as a national security threat. He claims in Project 2025 that TikTok is part of a Chinese “foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans.” However, there are reasons to believe that a TikTok ban would, as Vox previously reported, have “serious consequences for online expression,” which include shutting down what has proved a hub for activism. Carr may have some difficulty enacting his agenda initially, however. The commission will have a 3-2 Democratic majority until next June when Trump will be able to nominate a new member. Homan isn’t named as an author of a particular chapter of Project 2025 but as an overall contributor — and some of his stated hardline views on immigration and the border are reflected in the report. He started out as a Border Patrol agent in the 1980s and worked his way up through the immigration agencies, becoming the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s removal operations arm under former President Barack Obama. There, he presided over the most immigrants ever deported in a single year, exceeding 400,000. Under Trump, Homan served as acting director of ICE but was never confirmed to the position permanently by the Senate. Homan’s new role as “border czar” appears to involve far-reaching responsibilities. Those include overseeing the implementation of Trump’s mass deportations policy — the centerpiece of the former president’s immigration agenda. That means Homan’s responsibilities will likely intersect with many of the numerous immigration priorities outlined in Project 2025. Here is a non-exhaustive list of what’s included: * Expanding the use of a legal authority known as “expedited removal” to quickly deport immigrants who crossed the border without authorization. * Deporting immigrants even in currently protected, sensitive zones like churches. * Ending large-scale parole programs that the Biden administration has relied upon as a deportation shield for individuals from certain countries, including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. * Ending programs like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation. * Creating a new legal authority akin to the Title 42 policy, which was implemented by Trump and maintained by Biden to rapidly expel immigrants arriving on the US southern border on the dubious public health grounds of stopping the spread of Covid-19. Homan has yet to indicate whether he or Trump fully endorses these policies. But unlike Trump, who claims to have never read Project 2025, Homan put his name to the document, and could draw from it in his new role.

Rúben Amorim has said he doesn't feel "the weight" of Manchester United's history as he prepares to start his reign as the club's new head coach.

Amorim arrived in Manchester on Monday after being appointed as Erik ten Hag's successor on a two-and-a-half year contract.

The 39-year-old and his staff are still awaiting their visas before formally starting work. But ahead of his first game in charge -- set to be against Ipswich Town at Portman Road on Nov. 24 -- he has insisted he's calm about the challenge ahead.

"I feel very relaxed," Amorim told United's in-house TV channel MUTV.

"Maybe because it's not game day. When we have a game I'm a different guy. But I really don't feel the weight. I'm really excited and I'm quite relaxed. I think I'm where I'm supposed to be. That's the feeling."

Amorim left Sporting CP to take the job following a successful stint in Portugal which saw him lift two Primeira Liga titles.

Sporting had not won the Portuguese title since 2002 when he won it for the first time in 2021. He's facing a similar task at United, who have gone 11 years without winning the Premier League.

"You can feel the history," said Amorim. "I'm really, really proud to be a Manchester United coach. It's amazing, it's a real honour."