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 2004, Steven Spielberg made an entire movie about the terror of getting stuck for months in an airport,” my colleague Ian Bogost wrote in a recent article, “but I might be happy never to leave the new LaGuardia.”

I had the same feeling flying out from the newly rebuilt LaGuardia Airport in New York City this past Thanksgiving. “I could spend the day here,” I texted my family as I browsed the expensive candy options at one shop in my terminal. That’s an odd feeling to have about a place that, as Bogost notes, has long been defined by how placeless it feels. “Like hotels, conference centers, and shopping malls, they could be distinguished precisely by their indistinctness,” he writes.

The new LaGuardia is trying to reinvent the airport as a place that actually feels like a place. But for now, most airports across the world will continue to be defined by their lack of distinctness. In part because of that fact, airports are good places to watch humans being human: worrying, rushing, dawdling, arguing, eating. Then we get on the plane, and we take a breath—we watch movies, we dream, and we sometimes even cry.

Today’s stories explore who we are when we travel, and what we really want from the experience of getting somewhere.

On Flying

Peter Garritano for The Atlantic

America Built an Actually Good Airport

LaGuardia is reborn, and it has a message for the nation.

By Ian Bogost

Ariel Skelley / Getty

There are Two Types of Airport People

By Amanda Mull

Some travelers love being late.

DreamWorks Pictures; The Atlantic

The Guilt-Free Pleasure of Airplane Movies

By Lenika Cruz

Amid the endless tiny indignities of air travel, only one true retreat remains.

Still Curious?

The dilemma of babies on airplanes: Hamstrung by the need to ensure their kids don’t inconvenience anyone else, parents can’t do much parenting at all. The opening of “the world’s most useless airport”: Images of a new airport in the tiny and isolated British island of Saint Helena (From 2017)

Other Diversions

Junk food is bad for you. Is it bad for raccoons? The secret ingredient that could save fake meat Raiders of the lost web (From 2015)

P.S.

My colleague Amanda Mull’s airport story inspired weeks of passionate debate from both early- and late-arriving travelers back in 2019—so much so that we rounded up a collection of reader replies.

One reader sounded like they might not even need a rebuilt LaGuardia: “Airports are fun … Why hang around that extra hour in the hotel or at home when you can sit in an airport, nursing a beer and watching the planes go by?”

— Isabel

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.

At the end of each issue of The Atlantic is a short ode by my colleague James Parker. He has praised many of life’s realities, most of them completely ordinary: naps, barbeque potato chips, chewing gum, cold showers.

One of my favorites, the ode to low expectations, seems to describe the thinking behind Parker’s entire ode project. “Gratification? Satisfaction? Having your needs met? Fool’s gold,” Parker writes. “If you can get a buzz of animal cheer from the rubbishy sandwich you’re eating, the daft movie you’re watching, the highly difficult person you’re talking to, you’re in business.”

Appreciate what’s in front of you, Parker is saying. That’s a hard thing for humans to do, in our era of social-media comparisons and heightened expectations. What we expect of our romantic partners, for example, has risen dramatically in the past hundred or so years. As a social psychologist told my colleague Olga Khazan in 2017, we now expect a partner not only to love and support us, but also to help us grow and contribute to our self-actualization. That’s a lot to expect from one person.

High expectations aren’t always a bad thing. But if you’re finding yourself flooded with disappointment more often than you’d like—say, if your partner put effort into a Valentine’s Day gift or plan, but didn’t do exactly what you’d hoped for—you might consider the case for lowering your expectations and turning to gratitude instead. Look up at your loved ones. Look down at your coffee or your tea or your “rubbishy sandwich.” And say: This is enough.

On Expectations

Tim Lahan

An Ode to Low Expectations

By James Parker

You’ll be happier if you grade reality on a curve.

Jason Reed / Reuters

We Expect Too Much From Our Romantic Partners

By Olga Khazan

How marriage has changed in recent years, and why that’s made staying married harder (From 2017)

Getty; The Atlantic

Perfectionism Can Become a Vicious Cycle in Families

By Gail Cornwall

When parents have “other-oriented perfectionism,” kids suffer.

Still Curious?

The most effective way to thank your significant other:  Gratitude can be a significant predictor of relationship quality.

Gratitude without God: In 2014, the writer Emma Green asked: If giving thanks isn’t inherently religious, where does it come from?

Other Diversions

AI search is a disaster. Buttons are bougie now. Welcome, please remove your shoes. (From 2017)

P.S.

If you’re really struggling to activate your gratitude muscles, our happiness columnist, Arthur C. Brooks, suggests contemplating your death. This does not sound fun. But Brooks has evidence to back up the suggestion: “Researchers found in 2011 that when people vividly imagined their demise, their sense of gratitude increased by 11 percent, on average,” he wrote in 2021. “As a happiness researcher, I rarely see single interventions with this kind of effect.”

— Isabel

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 was in college, an acquaintance who had graduated a few years prior came back to visit for the weekend. As we walked around campus on Saturday night, he flung his hands into the cold Connecticut air and exclaimed, “You guys are so lucky; you live a minute away from all your friends. You’ll never have this again.”

At the time, I thought it was kind of sad—a grown man pining for my life of university housing and late library nights. But his words have stuck with me in the years since. “In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit,” my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2015. The older you get, the more effort it takes to maintain connections, because you don’t have as many built-in opportunities to see your friends every day.

The writer Jennifer Senior noted last year that the fact of our choosing friendships makes them both fragile and special: “You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value,” she wrote. But that’s also what makes friendships harder to hold on to as our lives evolve.

It’s hard but not impossible. Senior notes that when it comes to friendship, “we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together.” So we have to create them: weekly phone calls, friendship anniversaries, road trips, “whatever it takes.”

“Friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age,” Senior writes. “It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow with time.” It’s something worth choosing, over and over again.

On Friendship

Oliver Munday

It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

By Jennifer Senior

The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them.

Wenjia Tang

The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship

By Julie Beck

I’ve spent more than three years interviewing friends for “The Friendship Files.” Here’s what I’ve learned.

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Why Making Friends in Midlife Is So Hard

By Katharine Smyth

I thought I was done dating. But after moving across the country, I had to start again—this time, in search of platonic love.

Still Curious?

How friendship changes at the end of life: In an edition of her Friendship Files series, Julie Beck spoke with two women who have spent time ministering to aging and dying members of their congregation. Want closer friendships? Move away from your friends. Distance isn’t the barrier that some may think.

Other Diversions

A “distinctly human” trait that might actually be universal Palo Alto’s first tech giant was a horse farm. The origins of office speak (From 2014)

P.S.

In one of my favorite editions of Julie’s Friendship Files, she spoke with three women who tried an interesting experiment to deal with “the friendship desert of modern adulthood”: They entered into “arranged friendships,” bringing together a group of strangers who committed to be friends through it all.

— Isabel

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 her 2017 article “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind,” my colleague Julie Beck asks a social psychologist: “What would get someone to change their mind about a false belief that is deeply tied to their identity?”

The answer? “Probably nothing.”

We’re generally okay at admitting we’re wrong about small matters, where the evidence is right in front of us. For example, Julie explains, if you thought it was going to be nice outside but then discover that it’s raining, you’ll grab an umbrella before you walk out the door. But if your false belief is tied to your identity or how you see the world, “then people become logical Simone Bileses, doing all the mental gymnastics it takes to remain convinced that they’re right.”

It doesn’t help that our mind is constantly tricking us. Faulty ways of thinking seem to be hardwired into the human brain, as the writer Ben Yagoda noted in 2018. Wikipedia has a standalone “List of cognitive biases,” whose more than 100 entries include the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”) and the IKEA effect (“the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.”)

A hundred or so biases have been repeatedly shown to exist in the human mind, and, Yagoda writes, they might be impossible to get rid of. Or at least near-impossible: He tried several different methods to see if he could weaken his own biases, and the results were mixed.

In her piece, Julie offers some tips to help us try to lovingly change others’ minds. But we’re probably better off starting with ourselves; we’ve got powerful, self-deluding minds to contend with.

On Deluding Ourselves

Concept by Delcan & Co; photograph by The Voorhes

The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain

By Ben Yagoda

Science suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it?

John Garrison

This Article Won’t Change Your Mind

By Julie Beck

The facts on why facts alone can’t change beliefs

Jan Buchczik

Changing Your Mind Can Make You Less Anxious

By Arthur C. Brooks

Humans are programmed to think we’re right at all costs. Fighting that instinct will set you free.

Still Curious?

You were right, and then you weren’t. Understanding when to abandon beliefs and when to recommit to them can help us ride out this pandemic and prepare for the next one, Olga Khazan wrote last year. Psychedelics open your brain. You might not like what falls in. Reshaping your mind isn’t always a great idea.

Other Diversions

Someday, you might be able to eat your way out of a cold. Play around with our existential space calculator. The vindication of cheese, butter, and full-fat milk (From 2018)

P.S.

In December, my colleague Elaine Godfrey expressed an opinion that might have many of you reaching for all the persuasive tools you’ve got: She hates skiing. (And this opinion does seem quite tied to her sense of identity, so chances are she will not be swayed.)

— Isabel