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.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her final collection of essays. In 2021, the poet Leila Chatti took up Oliver’s words, reflecting on the challenge of them: “All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world / begging to be noticed.”

For those of us working to slow down, to smell the roses, to look one another in the eyes rather than in the iMessage bubbles, Oliver is a perfect guide. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, “It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs.”

The world makes its demands, and distraction has both personal costs and societal ones. My colleague Megan Garber has smartly noted how an overload of information and a fracturing of attention makes people, and Americans in particular, less equipped to meet the challenges of the moment. “Today’s news moves as a maelstrom [of] information at once trifling and historic, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, funny, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing, fleeting, loud—so much of it, at so many scales,” she wrote in 2021.

A lack of attention is dangerous. But we might also spend time thinking about the beauty of its presence, what attention gives back to those who pay it. I’ll leave you with a few more of Oliver’s words: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

On Attention

“Attention Is the Beginning of Devotion”

By Franklin Foer

The late poet Mary Oliver warned against looking without noticing. In an age of distraction, her work is more urgent than ever.

The Great Fracturing of American Attention

By Megan Garber

Why resisting distraction is one of the foundational challenges of this moment

Mister Rogers and the Art of Paying Attention

By Adelia Moore

The beloved children’s-show host knew what was at the heart of human relationships.

Still Curious?

“Moccasin Flowers”: Oliver celebrates the beautiful fervor of life in the face of oblivion with characteristically simple and poignant verse. The fight for attention: We may live in an endlessly distracted world, but where we focus our gaze still matters.

Other Diversions

The fight over animal names has reached a new extreme. Eating fast is bad for you—right? AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets.

P.S.

If you’re interested in reading another poet whose work focuses on attention to the details of our lives and how we share those details with others, pick up something by Maggie Smith. I recommend her poem “First Fall.”

— 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.

For decades now, America’s college graduations have been defined by ritual. We fill the day with pomp and circumstance, with gowns, with special terms such as procession and regalia, with the recitation of many, many names. As my colleague Caitlin Flanagan wrote in 2020:

We want the day to be distinct, unmistakable, and linked to countless ceremonies of the past. No matter how many graduations I attend—and no matter how much of a hassle it is to get a parking space and catch the shuttle bus and find a seat—when the line of graduates finally appears and begins that last, long walk as college students, I feel like I might cry.

I can relate; I’ve even been known to well up during graduation scenes in TV shows or movies. These events are usually emotional for those watching their loved ones reach a milestone, but they can also be poignant for observers because of what they represent: simply, the end of a formative time of life and the start of a murky future.

With graduation season upon us, I revisited a collection of commencement addresses The Atlantic commissioned in 2020 for students who weren’t able to attend their own graduations. What stands out to me in these essays by various writers and thinkers—and bear with me through a little commencement-address corniness here—is the certainty of uncertainty. Although the class of 2020 was facing new levels of the unknown, the experience itself has always been with us. As the former Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker noted, after asking 19 smart people for their graduation advice, all we can do is try to change our relationship with the unknown, using it as a tool to navigate what lies ahead.

On Graduation

You Thought You Were Free, but History Found You

By Caitlin Flanagan

The commencement speech you’ll never hear (From 2020)

I didn’t Have Any Graduation Wisdom. So I Asked 19 Smart People Instead.

By Joe Pinsker

What a novelist, a therapist, a Buddhist teacher, and others had to say to the class of 2020

The Only Career Advice You’ll Ever Need

By Arthur C. Brooks

The contentment of being true to yourself comes through doing good work, and doing it with love.

Still Curious?

Why do schools read everyone’s name at graduation? Members of the audience care about their loved one’s brief moment of glory—and no one else’s. (From 2019) The college that gives graduates the wrong diploma: Smith College’s unusual ceremony is more than just a silly tradition. (From 2019)

Other Diversions

American food will never look natural again. Something weird is going on with Melatonin. Did the first Americans arrive by land or by sea? (From 2021)

P.S.

The 2023 graduation season brings with it another milestone: the end of the first semester of college in a world with generative artificial-intelligence tools such as ChatGPT. Our contributing writer Ian Bogost wrote a fascinating and sobering essay last week about the unfolding mess for students and professors.

— 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.

For the past several years, my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez has brought Atlantic readers home with her. This home, which she calls “Old Brooklyn,” is more than just a place. It’s also a complex culture, and even a distinct dialect, she explained in 2021: “The base is American English, but turns of phrase and the lexicon itself are peppered with a hodgepodge of Yiddish, Italian, Caribbean, Spanish, Hip-Hop, and disgraceful feral-street-urchin slang not fit for a literary publication such as The Atlantic. At least not until now.”

As she chronicles Old Brooklyn in her newsletter and Atlantic articles, Xochitl articulates the damage of gentrification as she describes, with a deep love, the neighborhoods she grew up in—and exactly what gets lost as a place changes. She also introduces us to the relics of a different time, such as Iris the bra lady, who can fit you better at her mom-and-pop shop than an Instagram ad ever could. And she shares the enduring, raucous joy of New York in the summertime: “motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music.”

Xochitl was named a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary this past week. As I’ve revisited her work, I’ve thought a lot about the visceral wonders of life in cities and their neighborhoods. Today’s reading list highlights some of those wonders, how residents experience them, and how it feels when they get taken away.

On City Life

Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?

By Xochitl Gonzalez

The sound of gentrification is silence.

New York’s Rats Have Already Won

By Xochitl Gonzalez

I thought having a rat czar would be an easy win for the city. I was wrong.

Why Every City Feels the Same Now

By Darran Anderson

Glass-and-steel monoliths replaced local architecture. It’s not too late to go back. (From 2020)

Still Curious?

The gentrification of cleaning products: Xochitl explains the cultural legacy of Windex—and why she refuses to give up old-school cleaning products. The joys of being a regular: Yes, New York is an exciting place, but it’s routine that weaves you into the city, Xochitl argues.

Other Diversions

One of evolution’s biggest moments was re-created in a year. The wedding trend couples love and guests hate Mindfulness hurts. That’s why it works. (From 2022)

P.S.

Xochitl is a fantastic guide to Old Brooklyn, but if you’d like to continue your education, check out this list she compiled of 15 films “to help you better understand what I mean when I talk about Brooklyn.”

— 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 a 1996 book, the philosopher Herbert Fingarette argued that fearing one’s own death was irrational. When you die, “there is nothing,” he wrote. Why should we fear death if we won’t even be around to experience it?

But then the philosopher got closer to the onset of his own “nothing.” In 2020, The Atlantic filmed a short documentary with the 97-year-old Fingarette. As our former film curator Emily Buder wrote, “Death began to frighten him, and he couldn’t think himself out of it.”

Is it worth it to try to think ourselves out of death? This question, of course, is so complicated that centuries of philosophy, psychology, and plain old human experience have not been able to answer it. What we do know is that thinking about one’s own death can have life-altering effects, both positive and negative. The idea of death can open up a person to more intimacy, or it can lead to emotional paralysis. In a 2015 article, my colleague Julie Beck offered some guidance for navigating these possibilities. “Maybe the key, then, is being deliberate,” she writes. “Not letting thoughts of death sneak up on you, but actively engaging with them, even if it’s hard.”

Julie ends her article with a quote from E. M. Forster: “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.” “I don’t know if there’s really any salvation, but if we accept death, maybe we can just live,” she writes. Today’s reading list explores the idea of death—how to begin to accept it, and how to use it to feel more alive.

On Death, in Life

What Good Is Thinking About Death?

By Julie Beck

We’re all going to die, and we all know it. This can be both a burden and a blessing. (From 2015)

How to Die

By Jordan Michael Smith

As a psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom has helped others grapple with their mortality. Now he is preparing for his own end. (From 2017)

What It’s Like to Learn You’re Going to Die

By Jennie Dear

Palliative-care doctors explain the “existential slap” that many people face at the end. (From 2017)

Still Curious?

Why I hope to die at 75: In 2014, the doctor Ezekiel J. Emanuel argued that society and families—and you—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly. What people actually say before they die: Insights into the little-studied realm of last words (from 2019)

Other Diversions

Beware the Ozempic burp. No one in movies knows how to swallow a pill. The Goopification of AI

P.S.

I’ll leave you with one charming moment from Julie’s feature. She notes that the coping mechanisms of adults and young children can look quite similar, citing the story of 5-year-old Richard from a 2015 book by two psychologists on the role of death in life:

“He swam up and down in his bath [and] he played with the possibility of never dying: ‘I don’t want to be dead, ever; I don’t want to die.’ … After his mother told 5-year-old Richard that he wouldn’t die for a long time, the little boy smiled and said, ‘That’s all right. I’ve been worried, and now I can get happy.’ Then he said he would like to dream about ‘going shopping and buying things.’”

— Isabel