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On your Sunday, explore stories about the one book everyone should read, what McKinsey did to the middle class, and more.
Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage
Fewer young people are getting into relationships.
By Faith Hill
The One Book Everyone Should Read
The Atlantic’s staffers on the books they share—again and again
By The Atlantic Culture Desk
Why South Park Did an About-Face on Mocking Trump
The show’s creators once said they had nothing more to say about the president. What changed their minds?
By Paula Mejía
A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths
If you can recognize their signature move, then forewarned is forearmed.
By Arthur C. Brooks
10 “Scary” Movies for People Who Don’t Like Horror
You can handle these, we promise. (From 2022)
By David Sims
How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class
Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities. (From 2020)
By Daniel Markovits
Homes Still Aren’t Designed for a Body Like Mine
Why is it so hard for disabled people to find safe, accessible places to live?
By Jessica Slice
The Week Ahead
- Greetings From Your Hometown, a new album by the Jonas Brothers (out Friday)
- People Like Us, by the National Book Award winner Jason Mott, a novel about two Black writers trying to live a world filled with gun violence (out Tuesday)
- Ted Bundy: Dialogue With the Devil, a new Ted Bundy docuseries that features newly uncovered interviews and recordings (out Thursday on Hulu)
Essay
Memoir of a Mailman
By Tyler Austin Harper
“Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. “An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.” What to call Grant’s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.
More in Culture
- Comfort TV is overrated.
- How Justin Bieber finally gave us the song of the summer
- All end-of-the-world menace, all the time
- Hulk Hogan stayed in character to the end.
- Eight books for dabblers
Catch Up on The Atlantic
- How NASA engineered its own decline
- Quinta Jurecic: The FBI’s leaders “have no idea what they’re doing.”
- Why Trump broke with Bibi over the Gaza famine
Photo Album
Included in The Atlantic’s photos of the week are images of a freestyle-motocross trick, a robot-boxing match in Shanghai, a performing-dog show in Canada, and more.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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