This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
After losing his corporate marketing job during the pandemic, Stephen Starring Grant decided to move back home and become a rural mail-carrier associate in Blacksburg, Virginia.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
“Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long,” Bekah Waalkes wrote this past spring. “As a child, when nice weather came around, I was told to put down my book and go play outside.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
A family vacation can seem like the solution to all of life’s tensions: You’ll spend time together, bond, and experience a new place. But travel isn’t a panacea.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
A family vacation can seem like the solution to all of life’s tensions: You’ll spend time together, bond, and experience a new place. But travel isn’t a panacea.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
It’s become an adage of the modern age to say that the more streaming options there are, the harder it is to decide what to watch.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Japan is the one place in the world that has felt, and personally mourned, the staggering damage of nuclear warfare. The tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have turned the country into a longtime proponent of nuclear disarmament. But that national identity is starting to shift.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Although exercise has clear benefits for both physical and mental health, for many people, “those are side effects of the aesthetic goal,” Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in 2023.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Atlantic writers have never been afraid to make bold claims about beloved foods and beverages. Hard seltzer? Pretty bad, Amanda Mull argued in 2022. Wraps? The worst kind of sandwich, Ellen Cushing argued this week. Others have stood up for oft-maligned cuisine, like milk chocolate and candy corn.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
In some corners of American culture, one rule applies: The less you sleep, the more impressive you are. Tech CEOs and influencers love to tout their morning routines that begin at 5 a.m. or 4 a.m. or 3 a.m. (though at a certain point we really ought to just call them “night routines”).
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Being offended can make a person feel powerless. Someone says (or posts) something hurtful, and the sting comes fast. It doesn’t dissipate just because you tell it to.
But there are some ways to control our experience when we feel insulted.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Before the air conditioner was invented, human beings were at a loss for how to cool themselves.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
College-graduation ceremonies are expressions of joy, but also of relief. As photos are taken, tassels turned, hugs exchanged, the hope is that all of the hard work, and the money, will have been worth it.
But many Americans aren’t convinced that it is.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
“History found you.” In 2020, Caitlin Flanagan told recent college graduates that their dreams were interrupted in much the same way her father’s dreams had once been interrupted. In 1941, he was a new student at Amherst College, “and he thought it was paradise,” Caitlin wrote.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
People in a vegetative state may be far more aware than was once thought, Sarah Zhang reports in a recent feature. “In some extraordinary patients, the line between conscious and unconscious is more permeable than one might expect,” she writes.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Many of us spend our teenage years working tirelessly to avoid becoming our parents. But sooner or later, we discover that we didn’t stray quite as far as we thought.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Older parents are constantly telling those in the early days to cherish it: It goes by in a flash. But that can be very hard advice to follow when you’re in the thick of it, as Stephanie H. Murray wrote in 2022.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Think back to a good time you recently had with a loved one: an hours-long conversation with a friend or a perfect night of watching TV on the couch with family. I’d venture to guess you still feel a little surge of warmth when you recall it.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
“I am a battery that needs to be often recharged,” Randolph S. Bourne wrote in The Atlantic in 1912. His language of “recharging” foretold modern-day conversations about what is now called “self-care.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
American grandparents in earlier generations had many identities, but caregiver was not first among them. Now, “America is in an age of peak grandparenting—particularly grandmothering,” my colleague Faith Hill wrote recently.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Seed oils—think canola, soybean, corn—have long been “maligned by both the crunchy left and the MAHA right,” Rachel Sugar wrote yesterday. Many consider them to be unhealthy, despite no scientific evidence to back up that claim. (Just don’t use a black plastic spatula to spread oil around.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
“We’re going to start being smart, and we’re going to start being very wealthy again,” President Donald Trump announced today as he laid out a plan that risks derailing America’s economy.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Trying to get better at relaxing might sound silly. Isn’t the point of relaxing to not work at all? But as Arthur C. Brooks points out in a recent article, “doing leisure well will generate the sort of growth in our well-being that work cannot provide.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning
E-bikes can add a layer of richness to your life—especially if you name them. “On a chilly morning last October, my 8-year-old daughter and I took our new e-bike, which she had named Toby, on its maiden voyage to school,” Elizabeth Endicott writes.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning
Dating has never been easy.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning
It’s that time of the year, when clocks become the subject of unusually heated debate. As far as hours go, the extra one that daylight saving time provides is a controversial one. At least a few Americans are such die-hard fans of DST that they choose to live on it all year round.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Just as the institution of marriage has evolved, so has the institution of divorce. In a review of Haley Mlotek’s new divorce memoir, the writer Rachel Vorona Cote traces the introduction of “no fault “ divorce—a split without the designation of blame.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
“The quest” is a well-worn literary trope: Characters travel long distances and face obstacles in hopes of finding justice, or revenge, or forgiveness. But when real people go on quests, their goals can be a little more eclectic.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Americans keeping close track of political news may have been toggling their screens today between Senate confirmation hearings: the second day of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.