Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. President Joe Biden faced a convergence of issues this week—domestic, foreign, and familial.

Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest, begins with a black screen that lingers for at least a full minute. There’s music in the form of a groaning score, as well as a smattering of noises—faint whispers, rustling leaves—that can be heard through the discordant notes. Otherwise, though, nothing appears.

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.

One of the defining characteristics of the second half of 2023 has been the gloominess of American consumers. Even as the economy remained unexpectedly robust—growing at a 5.2 percent clip in the third quarter—and inflation cooled, consumer sentiment as measured by the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index dropped steadily from the summer through the fall, and its rating hit a low of 61.3 in November.But then something surprising happened.

The governor, attorney general, and chief justice of the state supreme court sat atop a wide dais at the front of the Minnesota Senate hearing room on a warm day in June of 2019. One by one, petitioners for clemency—almost always without a lawyer—came to the podium and made their pitch for a pardon, which would erase many effects of their criminal convictions.

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.So much can go wrong at an office holiday party. And yet … see you in the break room at 5:30.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Why Trump won’t win
Biden’s smart strategy for outmaneuvering Bibi
That’s not censorship.

​​​​​​Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat do you think about all-male or all-female social spaces?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Nature writing has always been a little unsatisfying to me, I’ll admit. Unlike our relationships with other humans, which are tinged with friction and love and all the other ingredients of drama, our encounters with the natural world seemed fairly static. Nature exists out there: We walk through it, we enjoy its beauty, we sometimes feel its indiscriminate wrath.

I’m going to miss The Crown. At its best, it has been alternately soothing, nostalgic, and educational, and even at its worst, it has always been well acted and gorgeous.Unfortunately, the second half of the sixth and final season is very much The Crown at its worst.