My dream is to breathe the Mediterranean air.
My dream is to dance on the dinner table,
is to melt into sound, is a never-ending chase.
Follow the spiral, my dream says, because a place
is also a memory where all the shadows are white.
My dreams look like homesickness, like peeling
oranges on a hot summer day in my grandpa’s
backyard, except in the dream he is still alive
and the ocean is still blue. The moment I know
I am able to fly is when I see the tree, the leaves
swaying, and I jump.

Tony Lyons knows how Republicans can win the midterm elections later this year. All they need to do, as he explained in a memo to GOP leaders in February, is embrace the Make America Healthy Again movement, or at least the popular parts of it, like banning soda from SNAP benefits and ditching artificial food dyes. Divisive anti-vaccine issues, in contrast, must be “addressed carefully and with nuance.

In 2005, a bipartisan commission of lawmakers and security experts concluded that “the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” America’s spies had told President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear-weapons program and that Iraq possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, as well as stockpiles of chemical weapons. These supposed facts became the basis for a U.S.

The oil shocks of the 1970s forced traumatic austerity on Americans. Some gas stations had miles-long lines; fuel was rationed based on whether a car’s license-plate number was even or odd; the White House Christmas tree went unlit; daylight savings was imposed year-round. The fuel crisis that America’s war on Iran has unleashed is far larger—the biggest oil-supply shock in history, an estimated three times the disruption caused by the Arab oil embargo.

Editor’s Note: Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss growing opposition to President Trump’s attacks on Iran and what winning a war with unclear objectives could like.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump delivered his first national address since the war with Iran began more than a month ago. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the president’s remarks, 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.
The more popular something gets, the less appealing it can start to feel. Take The Pitt: Suddenly, everyone’s watching it and everyone’s talking about it. At a certain point, the excitement starts to make you feel like you should be into it—and just like that, you don’t want to watch it anymore.

In 1976, Karen Batchelor was a young mother desperate for mental stimulation. One day, she went to a library in Detroit to explore her family’s history and unexpectedly found an Irish ancestor who had served as a Revolutionary War soldier on the Pennsylvania frontier. Batchelor, who is Black, was even more surprised when a librarian told her that this discovery qualified her for membership in Daughters of the American Revolution.

At first, in the early days and weeks and even years of my dad’s struggle with dementia, he just seemed more deeply himself. Bruce Jay Parker had always been quirky, in ways that generally delighted his friends and acquaintances, and frequently embarrassed his wife and two daughters. Now he was, simply, more so.

The graduates of America’s most elite universities dominate our economy and culture so disproportionately that the statistics can seem like a mathematical glitch. Students at Ivy League schools and the similarly selective University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT together comprise less than half a percent of America’s undergraduate population.