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.
America has a love affair with hobbies, my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2022. Part of this is an obsession with what scholars have called “productive” or “serious” leisure, which puts efficiency and progress ahead of less clearly defined accomplishments such as rest and time with loved ones.

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 time last year, I revisited an 1862 Atlantic article in which Henry David Thoreau argued that autumn wasn’t getting enough attention. At the time, I noted that fall didn’t exactly seem to be slipping from public consciousness—a trip to Starbucks makes that clear enough.

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For a new feature article, my colleague Franklin Foer interviewed two dozen participants at the highest levels of governments in both the U.S. and the Middle East to recount how “11 months of earnest, energetic diplomacy” have so far ended in chaos. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the U.S.

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For your weekend reading list, our editors compiled six great stories. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, and settle in.
A Reading List
The People Who Quit Dating
Being single can be hard—but the search for love may be harder.

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.
White lies can pop up pretty regularly in our everyday social lives. I myself am a recovering white liar: In my teens and early 20s, I found it much easier to fib that I wasn’t feeling well or that I had a family obligation rather than tell an acquaintance I was just too busy to see them.

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To say that Donald Trump is reckless with his public comments is about as big an understatement as you could make. But this week, we are watching the real-world effects of that recklessness play out with alarming speed.
Consider the timeline. On Monday, Trump’s running mate, J. D.

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.
Lately, my friends and I have been talking about a euphoric feeling you might call the “post-rescheduling thrill.

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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.

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’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.

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.
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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.
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.

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 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.

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.
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.

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 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.

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.
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.

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.
“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.

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 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.

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.
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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.
“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.

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.
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).

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’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.

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.
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.

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.