After losing more than $1 billion of his customers’ money, the disgraced crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried had just one thing to say.“1) What.”That inscrutable message, posted on Twitter last weekend, followed a cataclysmic week for the 30-year-old. FTX, the cryptocurrency-trading site he’d founded and turned into a global behemoth, went insolvent. Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth plummeted from $15 billion to $0 in just one day, and the company filed for bankruptcy.

The television series Fleishman Is in Trouble begins upside down, with the camera soaring over an inverted Manhattan skyline—squat brick buildings in the top half of the frame, hazy blue sky below. It’s an appropriately destabilizing introduction for a show that’s constantly pulling the rug out from underneath us. The series is untrustworthy, in the best kind of way: It withholds and obscures and implies until it doesn’t.

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 story contains major spoilers for Tár.As someone who writes about art and artists for a living, I confess that I find no question more exhausting than “Can we separate the art from the artist?” The only good answer is a frustrating one: “It depends.” So I went into Tár, Todd Field’s acclaimed movie starring Cate Blanchett, with some dread.

In the weeks since Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, the company has laid off nearly half of its workers and offered the remaining employees an ultimatum: Commit to being “extremely hardcore” going forward or leave the company. According to The New York Times, hundreds of employees have opted for the latter.

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 authoritarians at home and abroad have faced some reversals, but Americans should consider the midterm elections as only a respite. Liberal democracy remains in danger in the United States and around the world.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Make no mistake: Ticketmaster deserves the scorn that it is currently receiving from Taylor Swift’s listenership, a population of such size and power that it probably merits a spot in the United Nations. Earlier this week, the company’s just-for-fans presale of tickets to Swift’s 2023 concert tour was ridden with bugs and delays.

On Tuesday, a missile landed in Przewodów, a Polish village near the border with Ukraine. Two people were killed in the blast. Their deaths were a direct consequence of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, though in the fog of war it was not immediately clear which side was to blame. Initial theories held that the missile had been fired by Russia at Ukraine and gone astray, though later U.S.

Our first relationship in life is usually with a parent. This early experience sets the blueprint for how we approach people for the rest of our lives—the traits we value, our tolerance for vulnerability, and the walls we build up.But parent-child dynamics are more complicated than people are willing to admit, especially parents. And when they’re a burden, they’re often one that a child shoulders alone, as the actor Jennette McCurdy did.