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Read about the sneaky tactics behind bad customer service, a bizarre PTSD therapy that “seemed too good to be true,” why the dictionary might be obsolete, and more.
Why Can’t Americans Sleep?
Insomnia has become a public-health emergency.
By Jennifer Senior
Is This the End of the Dictionary?
Obsolete (adj.): no longer in use or no longer usefulRead the article.
By Stefan Fatsis
The Teen-Disengagement Crisis
By middle school, many kids’ interest in learning falls off a cliff. The ripple effects could last for years.
By Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop
That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.
Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.”
By Chris Colin
A PTSD Therapy ‘Seemed Too Good to Be True’
What if overcoming trauma can be painless?
By Yasmin Tayag
Trump’s Real Secretary of State
How the president’s friend and golfing partner Steve Witkoff got one of the hardest jobs on the planet
By Isaac Stanley-Becker
Strawberries in Winter
Most Americans do not want civil war. Anyone who is declaring it should stop.
By Adrienne LaFrance
The Week Ahead
- 107 Days, a political memoir by Kamala Harris about her 2024 presidential campaign (out Tuesday)
- One Battle After Another, a comedic action film starring Leonardo DiCaprio about a group of ex-revolutionaries who reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own (out Friday in theaters)
- House of Guinness, a series that follows the aftermath of the brewery patriarch Sir Benjamin Guinness’s death (out Thursday on Netflix)
Essay
Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic
Inside the Very Expensive, Extremely Overwhelming, Engineered Fun of Theme Parks
By Bianca Bosker
In recent years, Americans have drifted away from many of their once-beloved sources of pleasure: drinking, throwing parties, having sex, making friends. Yet they keep coming back to theme parks …
Even so, park operators have had to work hard to engineer fun at a time when people have become more fickle about what qualifies. “When Disneyland opened, it was the most exciting technological thing you could see,” Phil Hettema, who spent more than a decade working on Universal’s parks, told me. “Now there’s nothing I can see anywhere in the world that I can’t see on my iPhone.”
To meet this challenge, rides are bumping against the limits of physics and the human body to deliver experiences that are more death-defying than ever before.
Read the full article.
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Chilean flamingos in Puerto Natales, Chile (Caro Aravena Costa / 2025 Audubon Photography Awards)
Take a look at the winners and honorable mentions from the Audubon Society’s 16th annual competition, featuring amazing images of bird life from around the world.
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