All posts tagged: set of stories

Can Anyone Learn to Sing?

Can Anyone Learn to Sing?

Published by skeptic

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. “There is nothing quite so vulnerable as a person caught up in a lyric impulse,” Roy Blount Jr. wrote in our February 1982 issue. What makes the situation even more vulnerable is to be among the group that Blount calls “the singing-impaired.” Some research suggests that it’s easier to improve a singing voice than you might think. But even for those whose prognosis is hopeless, there’s joy to be found in the act of singing. Today’s newsletter explores how the singing voice actually works, and what humans can create when we sing together. On Singing Why the Best Singers Can’t Always Sing Their Own Songs By Marc Hogan Performing pop songs live offers a thrilling reward—if your voice doesn’t betray you, that is. Read the article. What Babies Hear When You Sing to Them By Kathryn Hymes And …

How Relationships Grow, and How They Break

How Relationships Grow, and How They Break

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Reading about others’ experiences can help us navigate the complexities of love and care. David Gregg / Getty February 3, 2024, 8 AM ET 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. “The reason my marriage fell apart seems absurd when I describe it: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink,” Matthew Fray wrote in 2022. “It makes her seem ridiculous and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations. But it wasn’t the dishes, not really—it was what they represented … It was about consideration. About the pervasive sense that she was married to someone who did not respect or appreciate her.” “She knew that something was wrong,” Fray explained. “I insisted that everything was fine. This is how my marriage ended. It could be how yours ends too.” His essay is a heartbreaking but helpful example of the …

Why “adulthood” is impossible to define

Why “adulthood” is impossible to define

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The markers of “growing up” are constantly evolving. Adam Maida / The Atlantic / Getty January 27, 2024, 8 AM ET 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. What does it really mean to “grow up”? As my colleague Julie Beck noted in 2016, markers of adulthood are always evolving, and a set definition is impossible to come by. (When I was a young child, I was convinced that turning 11 would signal adulthood in a significant way—something about the double one felt impossibly mature—but that didn’t really prove to be a helpful framework.) Each possible meaning of “adulthood”—financial independence, living alone, having kids—brings with it an assumption about what should matter, both to an individual and to society. Today’s newsletter explores some of these assumptions, and how the concept of “growing up” has changed. Americans Can’t Decide What It Means to Grow Up By …

What the Act of Crying Can Offer

What the Act of Crying Can Offer

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“I think about tears as a doorway: an invitation to be fully human and to connect with others.” Darren Staples / Reuters December 2, 2023, 8 AM ET 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 I decided to attend seminary … I told people it was to ‘find myself,’” Benjamin Perry wrote earlier this year. “That frame suggests that I yearned to forge a new identity and discover my future. But in fact, I went because I yearned for a more honest emotional life—and that type of life, I would later realize, is watered by tears.” Perry had spent years unable to cry, and he sensed that he had lost something important. He embarked on an attempt to weep daily—and when he learned to cry again, he found what was missing: When I was younger, I thought about tears as a consequence: the emotional …

What We Do With Our Faces

What We Do With Our Faces

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Why do Americans smile so much? Marco Goran Romano November 11, 2023, 10:02 AM ET 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 2016, my colleague Olga Khazan saw a cultural difference playing out on the faces of those around her. “Here’s something that has always puzzled me, growing up in the U.S. as a child of Russian parents,” she wrote. “Whenever I or my friends were having our photos taken, we were told to say ‘cheese’ and smile. But if my parents also happened to be in the photo, they were stone-faced. So were my Russian relatives, in their vacation photos. My parents’ high-school graduation pictures show them frolicking about in bellbottoms with their young classmates, looking absolutely crestfallen.” Were her Russian relatives simply less happy than her American friends? Not necessarily, it turns out: Research suggests that some societies view casual smiling as …

An Atlantic Reading List on Pets

An Atlantic Reading List on Pets

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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. One of the most wonderful by-products of my colleague Amanda Mull joining The Atlantic a few years back was the introduction of Midge into my life. Over the years, Amanda has often treated her Twitter followers and co-workers on Slack to photos of, and stories about, her “cranky, agoraphobic chihuahua,” as she called Midge in a 2021 article. This might sound a bit strange, but as a person who didn’t grow up with pets, I get a surprising amount of comfort from simply seeing snapshots of my colleagues’ and friends’ daily life with pets like Midge—little beings who have just as many quirks, moods, and worries as humans do (if not more). Pets are playing a more and more pivotal role in modern life, particularly for Millennials: As Amanda explained in 2021, “For America’s newest adopters, a dog …

The Psychological Terms We Misuse

The Psychological Terms We Misuse

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Boundaries, gaslight, attachment style, and other jargon that gets misinterpreted online Everett August 5, 2023, 8:35 AM ET 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. Boundaries. Gaslight. Attachment style. If you spend any time online these days, you’re likely familiar with a whole slew of jargon that, in another era, you might have only discovered in a niche book or in a therapist’s office. These sorts of terms can offer clarifying frameworks for life’s challenges, but as they float around in the ether of our conversations, they’re also prone to misinterpretation. Take the concept of boundaries. In a recent article, my colleague Olga Khazan wrote that the term has joined the annals of “misused psychology jargon”: “When you want someone to do something, throwing in the word boundary can lend the request a patina of therapeutic legitimacy.” As a Washington, D.C-based therapist told her, “I …