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The characters of “Industry” would like to think they’re capable of doing good in this ruthless world. But they can’t—no...
01/01/2025

The characters of “Industry” would like to think they’re capable of doing good in this ruthless world. But they can’t—not really, Zachary Siegel wrote in October:

Old age isn’t always a time of stagnation. For many people, it’s a time of significant personality change—but not necess...
01/01/2025

Old age isn’t always a time of stagnation. For many people, it’s a time of significant personality change—but not necessarily in a good way. Faith Hill on how older people's living conditions can influence who they become. (From 2023)

Just about anyone can take a picture with their smartphone. So why are some parents paying hundreds—if not thousands—of ...
01/01/2025

Just about anyone can take a picture with their smartphone. So why are some parents paying hundreds—if not thousands—of dollars to capture the perfect shot of their family? Erin Sagen reports: https://theatln.tc/l2q3aVXn

“Happiness rises, paradoxically, when you do not get whatever you want, whenever you want it,” Arthur C. Brooks writes. ...
01/01/2025

“Happiness rises, paradoxically, when you do not get whatever you want, whenever you want it,” Arthur C. Brooks writes. “Rather, well-being requires that you discipline your will and defer your gratifications.” https://theatln.tc/if3jutku

Over the years, researchers have explored whether deferred gratification can lead to a more successful—and ultimately more satisfying—life. Newer studies suggest that a capacity to defer gratification can consistently deliver one important increase: in well-being. To what degree this comes down to nature or being conditioned by nurture is unclear, “but what we do know—because neuroscientists have demonstrated it—is that those who postpone their pleasure exhibit different brain activity when facing temptation from those who want to get their jollies right away,” Brooks explains.

Some people may be naturally better at postponing rewards than others, but there’s also evidence to suggest that the skill can be cultivated from an early age. One way to achieve this is to intentionally think about the future. “If you are hankering for a portion of junk-calorie carbohydrates at 4 p.m., have a conversation with a 6 p.m. version of yourself who forwent the snack and is hungry for a good healthy dinner,” Brooks writes. “Or say you are in college and have a big exam tomorrow but have just gotten invited to a party: Have a chat with the unhappy future you who took the exam after partying instead of studying.”

Another way to practice deferred gratification is also, paradoxically, to not think about the future. This, Brooks continues, should take the form of purposeful mindfulness: “the practice of paying attention nonjudgementally to the present moment.” Although this may seem at odds with imagining your future self, that’s not necessarily the case. “Being more conscious when you make decisions will lead you to optimize your choices,” Brooks writes. “Bring the two injunctions together and combine them to best effect: Think clearly about what you’re doing right now, and then think clearly about how you will reflect on your action later.”

Read more of Brooks’s advice: https://theatln.tc/if3jutku

🎨: Jan Buchczik

The “dead week” between Christmas and New Year’s is the best time to catch up on movies you may have missed. “Perfect Da...
01/01/2025

The “dead week” between Christmas and New Year’s is the best time to catch up on movies you may have missed. “Perfect Days” should be at the top of your watch list, John Hendrickson writes in The Atlantic Daily:

“James Mangold’s ‘A Complete Unknown,’ like all the best movies about rock stars ... is a fairy tale,” James Parker writ...
01/01/2025

“James Mangold’s ‘A Complete Unknown,’ like all the best movies about rock stars ... is a fairy tale,” James Parker writes. “It dramatizes, mythicizes, elides, elasticizes, and tosses twinkling magic showbiz confetti over the period between Dylan’s absolutely unheralded arrival in New York in 1961 and his honking, abrasive, ain’t-gonna-work-on-Maggie’s-farm-no-more headlining appearance, four years later, at the Newport Folk Festival, where his new electric sound drove the old folkies berserk and the crowd (at least in Mangold’s movie) bayed for his blood.” https://theatln.tc/oBIju4bm

One of the young Bob Dylan’s foundational fibs “was that he had learned his songcraft while traveling with a carnival,” Parker continues. Carnies “understand instinctively—animalistically, sometimes—that life is theater, that people will believe what they want to, and that all the most essential things happen in the imagination.”
“Was young Bob a carny? He wanted to be,” Parker writes. “His identity was a performance. His writing was sleight of hand. He wowed and bamboozled his own audience. And when, in ‘A Complete Unknown,’ he tries out the carnival story on Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro) … she looks at him and says—thrillingly deadpan—‘You are so completely full of sh*t.’ Which is exactly what you say to a carny.”

In the Newport scenes, the movie really does “some fancy shuffling of events,” Parker writes: No one at the festival shouted “Judas!” at Dylan (that wouldn’t happen until a show the following year in Manchester, England); one biographer has argued that much of the Newport audience would have known what to expect from Dylan, and his keyboardist has said that most of the crowd enjoyed Dylan’s performance.

“But so what? ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a movie, and a movie—or a movie like this, which in one sense is a parable of artistic ruthlessness—needs a climax. And Bob Dylan, more than most rock stars, is a myth,” Parker continues. “He made himself up, he disappeared himself, and in doing so, he became a lens: Rays of otherworldly insight poured through him, and he trained them upon us like somebody frying ants with a magnifying glass.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/oBIju4bm

🎨: Liz Hart. Source: Getty.

As 2025 approaches, it is a good time to set intentions for the new year, Grace Buono and Mariana Labbate write. Let the...
01/01/2025

As 2025 approaches, it is a good time to set intentions for the new year, Grace Buono and Mariana Labbate write. Let these musings by Atlantic writers and other experts be your guide as you reflect on what to carry forward—or leave behind.

The tortillas you might purchase at the grocery store or even your favorite Mexican restaurant are more redolent of card...
01/01/2025

The tortillas you might purchase at the grocery store or even your favorite Mexican restaurant are more redolent of cardboard than corn, Kristen V. Brown writes. Now, a growing group of chefs, restaurants, and companies are trying to change that. https://theatln.tc/LN26GRfB

Making masa, a dough that comes from nixtamalized corn, is time intensive—but around the turn of the 20th century, an enterprising tortilla maker developed a way to dehydrate masa and package it so that tortillas could be made quickly by just adding water. This innovation, known as masa harina, eventually helped spread tortillas, most notably by the company Gruma (brand name: Maseca). “It also made most tortillas taste like nothing,” Brown explains. As Gruma’s products “proliferated, traditional tortilla making declined. My great-grandma was a Texas Mexican, and I have many fond memories of eating her buñuelos and tamales, but can remember virtually nothing about her tortillas.”

For many Americans, tortillas made with commodity corn have long been the only easily available option. But exploding demand for tortillas has encouraged artisanal producers, resulting in a new wave of masa made from single-origin, heirloom corn that restores the sanctity of Mexican culinary stalwarts.

“To taste a tortilla made from heirloom corn is to get a little closer to its ancient roots,” Brown writes. “But that heritage is being marketed, at least right now, mostly to the economically advantaged shoppers.” Masa harina from the company Masienda, for example, “is infinitely more corn-y than Maseca; it’s also $12 for 2.2 pounds, compared with $6 for four pounds of Maseca.” According to a 2023 census report, Hispanic people in the U.S. earn less than almost any other ethnic group. This means that the masa revolution may be pricing out descendants of the people who invented it.

Still, the tortilla has come a long way from “the days of the Spanish conquistadors, who viewed masa as the unhealthy food of an uncivilized people and imported wheat instead,” Brown continues. “Today, Mexican food—and most especially tortillas—are mainstays of the American diet.”

Read more: https://theatln.tc/LN26GRfB

📸: Victor Llorente

In one of our don't-miss stories of 2024, Faith HIll writes about how some people who want a relationship—badly—are deci...
01/01/2025

In one of our don't-miss stories of 2024, Faith HIll writes about how some people who want a relationship—badly—are deciding that the effort of searching for love isn’t worth it:

"Babes" isn’t perfect, but its refreshing candor still feels like an R-rated public service, Hannah Giorgis wrote in May...
12/31/2024

"Babes" isn’t perfect, but its refreshing candor still feels like an R-rated public service, Hannah Giorgis wrote in May.

"There is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own," Dere...
12/31/2024

"There is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own," Derek Thompson writes in one of our don't-miss stories of 2024:

"A business that builds wealth and renown without paying anything, much less a living wage, to nearly half its workers i...
12/31/2024

"A business that builds wealth and renown without paying anything, much less a living wage, to nearly half its workers is not worth celebrating no matter how exceptional the output," Rob Anderson wrote in 2023.

Though names can be intensely personal, parents’ choices have become subject to public dissection, Stephanie Bai writes ...
12/31/2024

Though names can be intensely personal, parents’ choices have become subject to public dissection, Stephanie Bai writes in the Atlantic Daily:

New York City has adopted a new literacy regimen under which many public elementary schools are, in effect, giving up th...
12/31/2024

New York City has adopted a new literacy regimen under which many public elementary schools are, in effect, giving up the teaching of books, Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in June. The initiative is called, ironically, NYC Reads.

Spend your day with some popular stories from 2024: a disastrous cruise vacation, why Americans stopped hanging out, a m...
12/31/2024

Spend your day with some popular stories from 2024: a disastrous cruise vacation, why Americans stopped hanging out, a medical breakthrough, and more. Find 12 stories you won’t want to miss: https://theatln.tc/XhPmWrMx

Cinema feels under constant threat—as if it must continually justify its existence. This year’s best movies are a hearte...
12/31/2024

Cinema feels under constant threat—as if it must continually justify its existence. This year’s best movies are a heartening sign, David Sims writes. He shares his picks for the 10 best films of 2024:

“I am fully convinced by [the book] ‘A Wilder Shore’ that without F***y, the great body of work created by Robert Louis ...
12/31/2024

“I am fully convinced by [the book] ‘A Wilder Shore’ that without F***y, the great body of work created by Robert Louis Stevenson in his truncated life of 44 years would not exist,” Phyllis Rose writes. https://theatln.tc/UjjurgtD

When F***y met Louis in 1876, he was not yet the author of “Treasure Island, “Kidnapped,” and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” “He was a scrawny, sickly, rotten-toothed, chain-smoking, 25-year-old literary wannabe who had published a few essays and reviews and was financially dependent on his parents,” Rose writes. F***y was 36, 11 years older than Louis. Originally from Indiana, she had married at 17, quickly had a baby, and followed her good-natured but feckless husband to mining camps in the West, where he tried unsuccessfully to strike it rich. Her father gave her a pocket pistol when she left home. She kept it in her bag and learned to shoot a rifle as well. After F***y’s second son died of what doctors said was tuberculosis, F***y and her other children went to live in an artists’ colony in Grez, where she met Stevenson.

Camille Peri’s engrossing ‘A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of F***y and Robert Louis Stevenson’ is weighted toward F***y, “partly because F***y is, in fact, the more colorful of the two Stevensons and partly because of Peri’s underlying feminist project: to do justice to an often-vilified woman,” Rose continues. “Stevenson biographies tend to be anti-F***y, downplaying her role in his writing and blaming her for exaggerating his illness and working him to death. Peri’s is pro-F***y. Her richly researched and vivid double portrait makes a convincing case that F***y pulled off a rare feat, enabling Louis’s genius to mature while releasing his boyish energies.”

Louis and F***y went their separate ways for a time, and when they were reunited in California, he was quite ill with what doctors thought was tuberculosis. F***y trained herself to be Louis’s personal physician; she subscribed to a medical journal and monitored visitors while stocking up on palliative care drugs. “Their life became not so much a search for health as a notably adventurous campaign to hold off death,” Rose continues.

Read more: https://theatln.tc/UjjurgtD

Some of the most powerful people and interests on the planet are aligned against an Indigenous group in the Serengeti. I...
12/31/2024

Some of the most powerful people and interests on the planet are aligned against an Indigenous group in the Serengeti. In one of our don't-miss stories of 2024, Stephanie McCrummen reports on how Gulf princes, wealthy tourists, and conservation groups are displacing the Serengeti’s original conservators:

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