Isabel Fattal

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
In a 1927 Atlantic article, the Episcopal priest Bernard Iddings Bell leveled quite the original insult at college students: They were becoming “mental and ethical jellyfish.” These students were drifters and conformists, Bell complained; they lacked standards and had no real understanding of truth, beauty, or goodness.

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There’s a moment, toward the end of a parent’s trip to drop their child off at college, when it feels like the world is changing. Many describe the joy and loss that mingle in those five minutes walking back to the car.

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Since I moved to New York a couple of months ago, I’ve been paying more attention than usual to people enjoying food in public.

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As anyone who has dated in the modern age will tell you, there comes a point when the endless swiping and small talk starts to feel like a demoralizing chore. So “some people simply … stop,” my colleague Faith Hill wrote this week.

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This past week, an article by my colleague Olga Khazan introduced me to a group of people called the “tightwads”: people who have trouble spending their money. Research has found that “tightwads do not scrimp because they lack money,” Olga reports.

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My colleague Gisela Salim-Peyer put it bluntly last weekend: “Many women love sports, but I am not one of them. I don’t want to play any sports, and I certainly don’t want to watch.” I’m personally quite aligned with Gisela here, but this year, I’m finding myself invested in the Olympics.

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Many of us have been told that perfectionism is unhealthy. We know we’re supposed to simply “do the best we can” and “go easy on ourselves.” But for the most perfectionist-inclined among us, that’s much easier said than done.

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Do dogs understand what’s funny? In the November 1910 issue of The Atlantic, the nature writer John Burroughs turned to this question as he tried to understand how animal minds really work.

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A few years ago, my colleague Olga Khazan conducted an experiment—“sample size: 1”—to see whether she could change her personality. “I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either,” she wrote.

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Walking on the beach on the Fourth of July, I witnessed America the Sunburned. Reddened beachgoers strolled with ice cream or hot dogs; it would have been a lovely sight if not for the secondhand pain I was feeling.

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“Today we live in a society structured to promote early bloomers,” David Brooks wrote in The Atlantic this week. “Many of our most prominent models of success made it big while young—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan.

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In 2023, Chris Heath noted in an Atlantic article that Tom Hanks is a curious person. “Hanks is at his most animated when the words coming out of his mouth are something along the lines of ‘I just learned recently why there’s so many covered bridges in America.

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Back in 2017, Kelly Conaboy had it out for the neck pillow: “This half-ovate, toilet-seat cover-esque object reigns as King of Travel Accessories, while failing miserably at its intended sole use,” she wrote.

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In pop culture, questions of inheritance take on dramatic, often nasty proportions. Watching Succession, you’d be forgiven for thinking that in all wealthy families, the specter of death elicits insults, infighting, and betrayal.

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In 2018, Deborah Copaken listed “30 simple shared truths” she learned at her 30th Harvard reunion. Among them:
“No one’s life turned out exactly as anticipated, not even for the most ardent planner.

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“During most of my early adulthood, philosophy had little appeal to me,” Elissa Strauss wrote in 2022. “As long as I treated people mostly kindly, what did it matter what I thought about right and wrong, or the nature of knowledge or the universe?”
“Until, of course, I had my first child.

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.
Forget “Got milk?”—the new question du jour is “What is milk?” The ubiquity of plant-based alternatives has challenged ideas about what the word means and what it encompasses.

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My colleague Derek Thompson has written about Americans’ social isolation and anxiety. But this week, he writes, “I thought I’d turn things around for a change.

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Israel’s response to Iran’s attack this past weekend signals an “astonishing win,” my colleague Graeme Wood wrote yesterday. With help from several allies, Israel managed to fend off what could have been a mass-casualty event (though one 7-year-old girl sustained life-threatening injuries).

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I’ve long fought the battle in defense of milk chocolate. My colleague Yasmin Tayag understands this position—her favorite chocolate treat is the Cadbury Creme Egg—but in a recent article, she acknowledges that genuinely “good chocolate …. should taste richly of cocoa.

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Gary Shteyngart spent seven nights (or, as he calls them, seven “agonizing” nights) on the Icon of the Seas, the biggest cruise ship that’s ever sailed. In our May 2024 issue, he writes about what he found there.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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“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.

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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.