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.
A family vacation can seem like the solution to all of life’s tensions: You’ll spend time together, bond, and experience a new place. But travel isn’t a panacea.

The early aughts were the worst possible kind of golden age. Tans were inescapable—on Britney Spears’s midriff, on the flexing biceps outside of Abercrombie & Fitch stores. The Jersey Shore ethos of “gym, tan, laundry” infamously encapsulated an era in which tanning salons were after-school hangouts, and tanning stencils in the shape of the Playboy bunny were considered stylish. Self-tanning lotions, spray tans, and bronzers proliferated, but people still sought the real thing.

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, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
This week, Congress passed Donald Trump’s request to claw back $9 billion in approved federal spending, including funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting.

In a court document filed earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service quietly revealed a significant break with long-standing practice: Churches will no longer risk their nonprofit status if clergy endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The change stemmed from a lawsuit brought against the agency by evangelical groups that argued that the prior ban on church involvement in political campaigns infringed upon their First Amendment rights.

Can the city of New York sell groceries more cheaply than the private sector? The mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani thinks so. He wants to start five city-owned stores that will be “focused on keeping prices low” rather than making a profit—what he calls a “public option” for groceries. His proposal calls for opening stores on city land so that they can forgo paying rent or property taxes.
Skeptics have focused on economic obstacles to the plan.

As the questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death—questions that Donald Trump once helped whip up—tornadoed into their bajillionth news cycle, the president’s team began to privately debate ways to calm the furor: appoint a special counsel to investigate. Call on the courts to unseal documents related to the case. Have Attorney General Pam Bondi hold a news conference. Hold daily news conferences on the topic, à la Trump’s regular prime-time pandemic appearances.

Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Eons before ChatGPT and AlphaGo, when OpenAI did not exist and Google had not yet purchased DeepMind, there was FAIR: Facebook AI Research. In 2013, Facebook tapped one of the “godfathers” of AI, the legendary computer scientist Yann LeCun, to lead its new division. That year, Zuckerberg personally traveled to one of the world’s most prestigious AI conferences to announce FAIR and recruit top scientists to the lab.

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.
Shortly after becoming president, as Lyndon B. Johnson struggled to pass the Civil Rights Act, some allies warned him that the success wouldn’t be worth the electoral hit he’d take. Johnson was insistent that the point of winning elections was to push the policies he wanted.

When CBS embarked on the project of replacing David Letterman as the host of The Late Show, in 2014, the network spared no expense. It hired Stephen Colbert, who had collected Emmys and acclaim while hosting his Comedy Central talk show, The Colbert Report; gave him total creative control; and fully revamped Manhattan’s Ed Sullivan Theater so Colbert could make the show’s longtime venue his own.

Defending mainstream journalism these days is about as appealing as doing PR for syphilis. Nonetheless, here I am. Back in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited a group of MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what was billed as “Phase 1” of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who died in jail in 2019.