Isabel Fattal

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 you behave in a restaurant is how you behave in life.” Ever since I heard that observation from a friend years ago, I’ve wondered why it hasn’t become a more common aphorism. Dining out can be an opportunity to see a person at their hungriest, their showiest, their most human.

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.
Teens exist in the murky space between youth and maturity—and in decades past, when the teen babysitter was a staple of American life, adults seemed to understand that.

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.
In 2017, my Daily colleague Tom Nichols wrote a book titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Three years later, America underwent a crisis that stress-tested citizens’ and political leaders’ faith in experts—with alarming results.

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.
This week, The Atlantic published its list of the 136 most significant American novels of the past century.

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 Columbia historian said he’d discovered evidence of a lost sacred text with scandalous implications about the life of Jesus. Was it a fake? In a new Atlantic feature, the writer Ariel Sabar reports on the bitter ongoing debate—and the largely unexamined early life of the man who found it.

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In our April cover story, my colleague Franklin Foer explores how anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end a period of unprecedented safety and prosperity for American Jews—and the liberal order they helped establish.

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.
Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

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.
“There is nothing quite so vulnerable as a person caught up in a lyric impulse,” Roy Blount Jr. wrote in our February 1982 issue. What makes the situation even more vulnerable is to be among the group that Blount calls “the singing-impaired.

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 favorite descriptions of New York City life comes from a 2022 article by my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez:
New York in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine.

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.
Spend time with nine great recent stories, selected by our editors. Then explore some presidential history from the Atlantic archives.

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.

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.
“Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people,” my colleague Amanda Mull wrote last fall—and I’ll admit that just reading that line makes me feel a little stressed.

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 reason my marriage fell apart seems absurd when I describe it: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink,” Matthew Fray wrote in 2022. “It makes her seem ridiculous and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations.

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.
What does it really mean to “grow up”? As my colleague Julie Beck noted in 2016, markers of adulthood are always evolving, and a set definition is impossible to come by.

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“It’s hard to remember at this point, but before the Hamas slaughter on October 7, Israel was embroiled in the worst civic unrest since its founding,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote earlier this month.

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 1938, the writer Margaret Dana began an Atlantic essay by describing an everyday indignity:
A man went into a large city store not long ago and bought a raincoat.

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 1933, the writer James Norman Hall had a bone to pick with the concise nature of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It defined boredom as “being bored; ennui.

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.Gathering with family can be a chance to observe up close how multiple generations live their lives. One fascinating instance I’ve been thinking about lately: the way people interact with their phones.

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.Early in 2023, my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce chatted with the writer Oliver Burkeman about New Year’s resolutions. Burkeman is an expert on productivity, but he’s arguably also an expert on getting real about the time human beings have on Earth.

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.Early in 2023, my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce chatted with the writer Oliver Burkeman about New Year’s resolutions. Burkeman is an expert on productivity, but he’s arguably also an expert on getting real about the time human beings have on Earth.

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.Early in 2023, my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce chatted with the writer Oliver Burkeman about New Year’s resolutions. Burkeman is an expert on productivity, but he’s arguably also an expert on getting real about the time human beings have on Earth.

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.Nearly three months into the Israel-Hamas war, our writers think through the possible futures that await the region.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
81 things that blew our minds in 2023
Political accountability isn’t dead yet.

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.As we close out the year, it’s official: The Twitter we once knew is long gone. Elon Musk’s reinvention of the platform, from its name down to its core features, has rendered it nearly unrecognizable to users.

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 question “What is a Christmas movie?” might seem straightforward. But there’s one film that has scrambled the logic of the holiday movie for years now—at least for those who probably spend too much time online.

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 my colleague Amanda Mull “ventured into the belly of the holiday-returns beast,” she learned that somewhere in the midst of a complex system of transporters, warehousers, and resellers, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.

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 January 2021, a time when many of us were returning from halfhearted outdoor hangouts with freezing fingers, my colleague Marina Koren revealed herself as a lover of winter. Well, within reason: “I do not ski.

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 I decided to attend seminary … I told people it was to ‘find myself,’” Benjamin Perry wrote earlier this year. “That frame suggests that I yearned to forge a new identity and discover my future.

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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer and the author of our Up for Debate newsletter.

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.Those of us who live in cities are inclined to avoid some of nature’s less-than-appealing creatures. “My aversion to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches is somewhat justifiable, given their cultural associations with dirtiness and disease,” Hannah Seo writes in a recent article.