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.
When, exactly, does middle age begin and end? This past summer, my colleague Julie Beck tried to figure it out. Public opinion didn’t exactly offer a consensus: “In one survey, the median response put middle age as lasting from 40 to 60,” Beck writes.
“Nature’s silence is its one remark,” Annie Dillard wrote in a 1981 Atlantic essay. Dillard, who died yesterday at age 81, spent her life listening.
She opens that essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”—which was later adapted into a collection by the same title—with the story of a man named Larry who is trying to get a rock to speak to him. “He keeps it on a shelf,” she writes, protected “by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth.
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.
Learning how to drive is a rare instance in a teenager’s life, Liz Krieger argues in a recent article: “This wobbly uncertainty, this return to a kind of innocence, is the rarest condition in a 16-year-old, and it lasts about as long as a learner’s permit does.
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 few years ago, my colleague Faith Hill reported on what psychologists call the “Michelangelo phenomenon”: the idea that over time, romantic partners mold each other. “Some researchers have found that when that happens, the art tends to look conspicuously like the artist,” she 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.
“Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month,” my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last week. “After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall.
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.
Over the past two decades, Matt Seaton discovered something about himself: He loves building walls.
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.
Earlier this year, my colleague Rose Horowitch reported on a new irony in higher education: Students who have chosen to take film classes can’t sit through the films.
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.
In his 2022 essay on how to want less, Arthur C. Brooks recalls a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson about the dangers of thinking that a new place or shiny thing will fix life’s problems.
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.
For some people, an out-of-office message is a simple one-line email. For others, it’s an opportunity to make a grand statement about the relationship between work and life. In 2018, Marina Koren reported on the emailers who auto-delete all new messages while they’re on vacation.
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.
Recently, Russell Shaw realized that he had texted his kids the same two words—Too loud—133 times since 2020. “The backstory to each, I’m sure, was relatively consistent,” he 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.
When the writer David Epstein had to get stitches in his head and was told to move slowly for a few days, he expected to feel annoyed. But instead, after three days of following doctors’ orders, he found that he felt happy.
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.
As the weather gets nicer, many of us feel the allure of just hanging out. We want to sit outside with friends and have a drink, go on long morning walks and catch up, enjoy the breezy night air.
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.
When kids spend time together, they create their own rituals and traditions, Julie Beck wrote in 2022—“essentially, their own folklore, or, as researchers call it, ‘childlore.
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.
Waiting can be understood as the absence of something: It’s what stands between you and the coffee, the subway ride, the doctor’s appointment. But what if we tried to construe waiting as a gift of time instead? Okay, fine: Waiting for hours at the DMV or the airport may never feel like a gift.
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.
When Andrew McCarthy’s 21-year-old son turned to him and asked, “You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?” McCarthy had to stop and think. He had friends—at least he thought he did—but he saw and heard from them so infrequently that he started to wonder if they still counted as his friends.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
“I think of celebrities as the transient royalty of a democracy,” Thomas Griffith wrote in The Atlantic in 1975. “While reigning, they live like kings, with paid and unpaid courtiers to show them little attentions. But their powers and privileges last only during their flowering period.
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.
How does a person take smart risks? To start, mind the difference between recklessness and bravery, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in 2022. Free soloing a mountain with no climbing experience? Reckless. Confessing your love or going for that job you’ve always dreamed of? Brave.
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.
“In 1989, at Dartmouth College, the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky delivered what must be one of the strangest commencement addresses of all time,” Daniel Smith wrote recently. “Brodsky told the graduates that their lives would soon be claimed by the ‘incurable malaise’ of boredom.
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.
When Michael Pollan traveled to a cave in New Mexico to try to understand consciousness, he learned what good meditation is really made of.
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.
Something about getting older makes it easier to say “No, thank you.” On average, older Americans score higher on well-being than younger adults, and much of this is thanks to developing a clearer sense of what’s worth time and attention. At 61 years old, Arthur C.
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.
The year 2025 was hard for the film industry but good for movies.
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.
“Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode,” the journalist Elizabeth Harris wrote last year.
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 humbling to realize that other people may live the majority of their life at entirely different hours than you do. If you’re a morning person, you’re sleeping through the joys, crises, snacks, arguments, and laughs of many night owls—and vice versa.
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 few years ago, my colleague Olga Khazan shared a radical proposition: What if we stopped firing our friends? The friendship breakup has become a feature of modern life: Online, advice abounds on “how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us,” Olga noted.
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“Keep your voice down.”
“That’s enough of you.”
“Be nice; don’t be threatening.”
“There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
“Quiet, piggy.
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.
The kayaker who went missing—and stayed missing for so long that rescue teams were at a loss. The seemingly perfect man who conned women—and was brought to justice by his own victims.
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.
Some critics of the suburbs argue that they’re not a place at all. “The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term non-places to describe interchangeable, impersonal spaces lacking in history and culture that people pass through quickly and anonymously,” Julie Beck wrote last year.
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.
Why have Americans clung so hard to the dream of a fancy wedding? Hanna Rosin asked Xochitl Gonzalez, our staff writer who used to be a luxury-wedding planner, this question on the Radio Atlantic podcast 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.
Regret, my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2016, is “the emotional price we pay for free will.” If we were just pawns tossed around on the chessboard of life, she explains, there’d be nothing to regret.
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.
One of my highlights of the past year has been receiving your weekly emails with photos that spark a sense of awe in the world around you. In reviewing your submissions, I’ve most enjoyed seeing how the beholder’s mind works.