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.
It’s humbling to realize that other people may live the majority of their life at entirely different hours than you do. If you’re a morning person, you’re sleeping through the joys, crises, snacks, arguments, and laughs of many night owls—and vice versa.
In 24 days during the fall of 1946, a German novelist known as Hans Fallada produced a rare, and now especially timely, literary touchstone: a humane depiction of muted resistance. Every Man Dies Alone was based on a Gestapo file detailing the case of a Berlin couple who had run an illicit two-year postcard-writing campaign aimed at rebutting Hitler’s propaganda. The novel was published in 1947—part of a postwar effort to start de-Nazifying German literature.
After three years of doing essentially nothing to address the rise of generative AI, colleges are now scrambling to do too much. Over the summer, Ohio State University, where I teach, announced a new initiative promising to “embed AI education into the core of every undergraduate curriculum, equipping students with the ability to not only use AI tools, but to understand, question and innovate with them—no matter their major.
Heather Haddon joins Emily Peck to discuss the current challenges and trends she’s reported on in the fast food industry.
Lawmakers want to close a so-called hemp loophole. They might blow up a massive industry in the process.
After US Airways left Pittsburgh high and dry, yinzers finally built an airport on their own terms—and it’s incredible.
Larry Summers’ appalling emails to Jeffrey Epstein aren’t the only reason not to like the guy.
Charities that help people pay for care say demand is way up. That’s before scheduled Medicaid and Obamacare cuts take effect.
The president said an extension of subsidies that help people pay for health insurance “may be necessary” to buy time for a broader overhaul.
The second round of Inflation Reduction Act negotiation prices, which includes 15 brand-name drugs, will kick into effect in 2027.
GOP lawmakers knew subsidies were expiring and premiums would spike, but no clear, conservative alternative emerged.
The HHS secretary said in an interview he ordered the CDC’s website to acknowledge gaps in studies on vaccines and autism.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
A celebrity contracts HIV, the world finally pays attention to AIDS, and Jim Mitulski preaches to a community tired of people dying from it.
When a lesbian minister is physically assaulted, the church is galvanized. When it happens again, the city is galvanized.
A gay minister seeks healing with his family and his queer kin, even as he knows he’ll soon die from AIDS.
Democrats running on cost-of-living anxieties outperformed Republicans in Tuesday’s elections by greater-than-expected margins. The president chalked it up to partisan lies.
A recent poll found a majority of Americans feel they’re spending more on groceries than they did a year ago.
The Republican nominee has promised tax cuts and economic growth, but the numbers are fuzzy.
Trump’s strength with Republicans on the economy could prove to be a boon for the GOP.
Marquetta Shields-Peltier was just a toddler when her father, Leonard Peltier, was jailed in 1976. During our recent trip to Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, we spoke to Marquetta about the campaign to free her father and what it meant to see him released in February.
In September, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman sat down with longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier for his first extended television and radio broadcast interview since his release to home confinement in February. Before his commutation by former President Joe Biden, the 81-year-old Peltier spent nearly 50 years behind bars. Peltier has always maintained his innocence for the 1975 killing of two FBI officers.
Protests have erupted in North Carolina after federal agents arrested 370 people in immigration raids. On Monday, Bishop William Barber and other religious leaders gathered in Charlotte to demand an end to ICE raids. “What you have is a conglomerate of policy violence, and it’s deadly,” says Barber, who is organizing protests against ICE and Medicaid cuts across the country.
Zohran Mamdani will be taking office as mayor of New York in just five weeks. His transition team continues to make announcements about the new administration, recently unveiling a 400-person advisory group, broken up into 17 committees. Democracy Now! speaks with the incoming first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, on how Mamdani plans to implement his progressive vision.
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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” Higgins is an early internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat’s global community.
The comedian Tim Robinson seems to love playing obsessive weirdos. His Emmy-winning sketch series I Think You Should Leave is packed with them: a dating-show contestant who can’t stop using a zip line; an office drone attempting to beat a nonsensical computer game; a rideshare driver who has taped-up window decals and wants—no, needs—people to call him “the driving crooner.
As Zohran Mamdani prepares to become New York’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor on January 1, we look at the historic rise of the democratic socialist who shocked the political establishment. We spend the hour hearing Mamdani in his own words and look at the grassroots coalition that helped him pull off what’s been described as “one of the great political upsets in modern American history.
“Ozempic is about to be old news,” my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote in 2023, just before an even more powerful obesity drug, tirzepatide, then best known as Mounjaro, was approved. Well, two years later, Mounjaro is becoming old news, too. A whole slew of next-generation obesity drugs are on the horizon, some already advanced enough in clinical trials to be looking as good as—if not better than—those already on the market.
Because of time’s arrow, my daughter, who was once a toddler, is now a preteen. A new question thus arises: When should I let her get a smartphone? This problem isn’t new to me. I have two older kids, now in their 20s. Back in the day, I bought each of them an iPod Touch—essentially, a smartphone without the phone—when they were about her age, and then the full device at around the start of high school. But online life was different then.