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 do living things sleep? “Ask researchers this question, and listen as, like clockwork, a sense of awe and frustration creeps into their voices,” Veronique Greenwood wrote in 2018.“In a way, it’s startling how universal sleep is,” she continued.
Oscar nominations will be announced next week. I called our culture writer Shirley Li for her tips on the movies and the buzz you should know about.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The George Santos saga isn’t (just) funny.
A defeated New Mexico GOP candidate allegedly hired others to shoot at the homes of Democratic officials, in a case that is intensifying concerns about political violence in America.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The longest study on human happiness found the key to a good life.
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.Recent breakthroughs in generative AI, such as the image generator DALL-E and the large language model ChatGPT, are “potentially akin to the release of the iPhone in 2007, or to the invention of the desktop computer,” Derek Thompson told me in December.
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 writing this newsletter about how hard it is to remember things, I decided to test myself. I wasn’t sure how much of the recent culture I’d consumed would jolt back into my brain; if it turned out I was a memory savant, I figured I should mention that here.
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 writing this newsletter about how hard it is to remember things, I decided to test myself. I wasn’t sure how much of the recent culture I’d consumed would jolt back into my brain; if it turned out I was a memory savant, I figured I should mention that here.
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.Shortly after our writer Katherine J. Wu, “a born-and-bred Californian,” moved to Boston, she was met with an epic snowstorm—one so bad that the city ran out of places to dump the snow piles. As you can imagine, she wasn’t thrilled.
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.Rebecca Rashid produces an Atlantic podcast called How to Build a Happy Life. The series, hosted by Arthur C. Brooks, joins scientific data with snapshots of human experience to help listeners find the path to a more fulfilling existence.
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 year, the state of Alabama botched three consecutive executions by lethal injection: One man died after three hours of apparent torture, while two others lived. “The state’s incompetence,” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last month, is “a civil-rights crisis.
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 year, the state of Alabama botched three consecutive executions by lethal injection: One man died after three hours of apparent torture, while two others lived. “The state’s incompetence,” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last month, is “a civil-rights crisis.
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.Like most other humans I know, I’m still trying to remember how to act normal when socializing.
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.My colleague Faith Hill focuses much of her writing on what people actually need and want in day-to-day life, and why those needs aren’t as universal as we might assume.
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.OpenAI’s impressive new artificial-intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, has intensified the debate over what the rise of AI-generated writing and art means for work, culture, education, and more.
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 don’t like to shop, but I do like to buy,” Frances Taylor wrote in The Atlantic in 1931. In an essay called “Who Wants My Money?,” Taylor laments how inconvenient the process of shopping is.
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.Fifty years ago this week, NASA launched the Apollo 17 mission. When that crew returned, President Richard Nixon said “this may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the moon”—and he was right.
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 are billions of planets in our galaxy, and billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Those numbers are impossible to picture, but NASA’s newest space telescope is helping us see the universe’s depths in unprecedented detail.
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 August of last year, the Afghan journalist Bushra Seddique, now a 23-year-old editorial fellow at The Atlantic, fled Kabul, smuggling her laptop past the Taliban and leaving members of her family behind. I called Bushra, now living in the Washington D.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.For human beings, a meal is never just a meal, and a snack is never just a snack. As the writer and scientist Louise O.
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.Franklin Foer, a staff writer who is contributing to The Atlantic’s new World Cup pop-up newsletter, The Great Game, has been a soccer fan since he was a kid in the 1980s. I talked with Frank about the disturbing aspects of this year’s Cup and what keeps him coming back to the sport.
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.For our December cover story, our staff writer Clint Smith—who has written a book about historical sites and memorials of slavery in America—spent time in Germany, visiting sites of Holocaust memory and studying the debates around them.
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.Ever feel like the person you’re talking to is just waiting for you to finish so they can start speaking? It turns out every human does that. And it’s a good thing—not necessarily a sign of a bad listener, but a complex communication skill that bonds humans across the world.
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 Supreme Court may soon rule against race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities. I called the Atlantic staff writer Adam Harris to talk about how this week’s news fits into the broader story of higher education 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.In December of 1908, the writer and Presbyterian minister Frank Crane published an article in The Atlantic called “Ghosts.” In it, he explains that as you grow up, the good ghosts die young, and the bad ones live on.
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.Since Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, “an industry of rationalization and justification has thrived,” David French wrote last week.
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.Late on Saturday, Ye (formerly Kanye West) tweeted to his 31 million followers that he planned to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.
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 teachers, nurses, and child-care workers who haven’t already left their jobs because of low pay and stress are hitting their limit.
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.Pop-culture franchises such as Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones—which grew this year to include Amazon’s The Rings of Power and HBO’s House of the Dragon, respectively—have recently begun diversifying their casts.
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.Today our staff writer Amanda Mull answers my questions about her recent article exploring gray floors, house flipping, and how America fell under HGTV’s spell.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
King Charles should get ready to abdicate.