For the first couple of years of the coronavirus pandemic, the crisis was marked by a succession of variants that pummeled us one at a time. The original virus rapidly gave way to D614G, before ceding the stage to Alpha, Delta, Omicron, and then Omicron’s many offshoots. But as our next COVID winter looms, it seems that SARS-CoV-2 may be swapping its lead-antagonist approach for an ensemble cast: Several subvariants are now vying for top billing.In the United States, BA.

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.

When the writer-director Charlotte Wells began conceiving of Aftersun, her exquisite debut feature, she didn’t plan to unravel a parent-child dynamic. She simply wanted to observe how any conventional relationship can shift in a new place—so she situated her characters in a resort, outside of their regular routines.

Every October, Joel Best starts getting calls from journalists, and he knows exactly what they want to talk about: candy. Specifically, they want to discuss the stubborn fear that bad actors might tamper with children’s trick-or-treat stashes by lacing candy with razors or fentanyl.

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.At his annual conference with foreign international-affairs experts, Vladimir Putin ranted about cancel culture and gay-pride parades. He’s trying to unite the global right.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Donald Trump supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol. They sought to prevent Congress from certifying his loss in the presidential election, but a few of them had even scarier ideas.

The loud hype that preceded Rihanna’s rather quiet new song offers a lesson in the power of expectations—especially expectations defied. At age 16, in 2005, the Barbados native Robyn Rihanna Fenty signed a record deal and embarked on one of hottest streaks in hitmaking history.

Given all the attention that Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has drawn, one might forget how little it will affect most people. Although Musk fancies the platform “a common digital town square,” Twitter reports just 238 million daily active users in a world of nearly 8 billion. It just so happens, though, that there is a strong overlap among people who report the news, people who use Twitter, and people who are interested in Elon Musk.

When the world is at war, and you’ve endured night after night of fires and bombs going off all around you, how do you make sense of your own survival? For the unnamed narrator of R. P. Lister’s short story “My Grandfather’s Ghost”—published in The Atlantic in 1960—the solution is to transform the experience into a sort of tall tale, playing up the comedic moments over the real fear, long after the danger has passed.