All posts tagged: Today’s newsletter

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 …

What really happens when you’re sick

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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. When you’re suffering from a cold, the situation might seem perfectly clear—your nose is stuffed. But the truth about what’s happening to you is a little more complicated. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is connected to the armpits. In a new article, our Science writer Sarah Zhang explains what’s really going on in your body when you’re congested. There’s something oddly empowering in understanding how colds work, even if the knowledge won’t cure you. Today’s newsletter will help you get to know the inner workings of your body when it’s not at its best. On Colds Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong By Sarah Zhang Start with this: You really have two noses. Why Has a Useless Cold Medication Been Allowed on Shelves for …

The Pleasures of Amateur Photography

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Revisiting an ode to the camera from the Atlantic archives Charles Platiau / Reuters October 21, 2023, 8 AM ET 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. “I wonder whether the non-photographer can grasp the peculiar quality of the pleasure of being an amateur photographer,” Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of the publishing house Simon & Schuster, wrote in The Atlantic in 1942. Simon credits the camera itself with much of the joy of amateur photography: Imagine, then, you unhappy non-photographers, a glorious piece of mechanism … that has within itself the ability to capture for posterity a baby’s smile, a setter at point, the kindly wrinkles of a grandfather … It can magnify a hundredfold the pollen on the rose petal. It can re-create the glistening of the snow and of the trees on a frosty February morning. No, it cannot tell you the time, …

Supermarkets are more than stores

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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. “I don’t remember my first visit to Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but I do remember my first trip to Fairway,” Bianca Bosker wrote in 2020 of the grocery store in New York City. She continued: My grandmother, who had been forced to flee her home in what was then Yugoslavia during World War II, had spent nearly two decades as a stateless person … Fairway, to her, was a place of surreal abundance. She could roll her black-metal grocery cart down the hill and roll it back up stuffed with old- and new-country fare: an Entenmann’s Danish ring, Kraš Napolitanke, Thomas’ English Muffins, Hungarian salami, panettone, hot dogs, ajvar, cornflakes. And the deals! She’d sit me down at the kitchen table and, beaming, haul out new brands of wafer cookies to marvel at how little …

Low stakes, high drama – The Atlantic

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Some of our writers’ most entertaining—and controversial—opinions on everyday matters Daniel Zender September 30, 2023, 10:33 AM ET 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. Saturn is the best planet. Hard seltzer is an abomination. Milk chocolate is better than dark. The “fun fact” should die. My colleagues at The Atlantic are skilled in the art of making a bold, well-researched argument. Those arguments are often about matters of societal importance, but they can also be about the less serious topics that make up our everyday lives. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce noted in 2017, the magazine has used “the case for” (or “the case against”) as a framing more than 200 times in its history, for arguments both serious and silly. (This neat interactive from 2017 allows you to browse the full collection up to that point.) For today’s newsletter, I asked my colleagues …

When kitchen appliances feel stuck in time

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A reading list on our relationship with our gadgets Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. September 23, 2023, 8 AM ET 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 microwave is a baffling contradiction: a universal, time-saving appliance that also seems trapped in time,” Jacob Sweet wrote this week. The appliance isn’t very user-friendly—consider the “Popcorn” setting that some microwave-popcorn instructions explicitly say not to use, as Sweet notes—yet it seems to never change. “You can now easily find plenty of sleek and technologically advanced dynamic precision cookers, stand mixers, and coffee machines, among many other appliances,” Sweet writes. “But somehow, the microwave, a device used in nearly every American home, has responded with a resigned shrug.” Today’s newsletter explores our appliances: those that feel stuck in time, those that time has been unkind to, and those that never need to change at all. On Appliances …

How siblings shape who we are

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For many of us, these relationships are the longest of our life. Yannick Schuette / Connected Archives September 16, 2023, 8 AM ET 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. For those of us who have siblings, these relationships will likely be the longest of our life. That fact is a basic statistical one, but it’s also an emotional one. These are human beings who will see us at many more stages of growth than most others will: the awkward braces years, the sullen teenage years, and whatever happens after that. Because of this, sibling relationships can be intense. As Ben Healy noted in 2018, “When a sibling relationship is bad … it can be really bad—as in messing-up-your-life bad. Tense sibling relationships make people more likely to use substances and to be depressed and anxious in adolescence.” And when siblings become adults and are no …

Why Persuading People to Give Up Meat Is So Hard

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Scientists have made impressive breakthroughs in lab-grown meat, but consumption of the real thing is more popular than ever. Getty September 9, 2023, 8 AM ET 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. For many years, choosing to give up meat meant choosing to stop experiencing its taste. Vegan and vegetarian food had many merits, but tasting like meat was not one of them. In the past half decade, though, some new meat substitutes have come impressively close to the original. When plant-based meat companies and independent testers conducted blindfolded tastings in recent years, my colleague Annie Lowrey reported, they found that many tasters couldn’t tell the difference. Even some chefs have gotten confused. But despite science’s breakthroughs in developing juicy, delicious meat substitutes, persuading Americans to go vegetarian or vegan still isn’t easy; even many people who claim to believe in the ethical value of …

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

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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 …