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Looking for a good vacation this year? You might choose from a number of models. For example, Instagram Adventure, in which you pick an exotic destination, pack as much as you can into every day, take a million pictures, and document everything on social media to advertise that you are as energetic in leisure as you are at work. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Couch Potato, which means that you fritter away the entire two weeks doing very little. Other popular options include Two Endless Weeks in My Childhood Bedroom (for 20-somethings) and A Whole Month’s Pay Shot at Disney Because the Kids Whined All Year (for 30-somethings).

One great vacation model, which harks back to the ancients, is frequently overlooked. The word for “leisure” in Greek is σχολή, or skhole. In Latin, the word is schola—from which we get “school.” In other words, the name for the place where we teach and learn derives from the word for “leisure.” One way to interpret this is that education is a recreational activity (a concept that may strike my hardworking students as counterintuitive). But a better explanation comes from the 20th-century philosopher Josef Pieper, who believed that leisure is the circumstance in which we can learn the most, if we understand and use it properly.

If the conventional vacation models are leaving you cold, Pieper’s insight could provide the holiday you’ve been looking for. This year, consider using your time off as an opportunity to learn something wonderful.

People pursue different objectives in their vacations, but no one I have ever met was seeking lower levels of positive emotion. The point is to be happier than usual, which is why a bad vacation is so frustrating—it feels like a missed opportunity to reset and make some emotional progress.

To get the most contentment from your vacation, it is worthwhile to start with an understanding of basic human emotions. The negative side includes anger, sadness, fear, and disgust, which alert us to threats and stimulate behaviors such as fight or flight to keep us safe. These are obviously not the emotions you are hoping to experience on vacation—though all bets are off if a long car ride with the kids is involved.

[Read: Why must we work so hard before vacation?]

An abundance of basic positive emotions such as joy, surprise, and anticipation are what you seek. But you shouldn’t neglect another positive emotion of special importance: interest—the feeling of curiosity or fascination that captures your attention.

The experience of interest is favored by evolution: It comes from learning new things, which rewarded our ancestors with more food and a greater chance at survival and reproduction. The same tendency for your Pleistocene hominin forebear to feel satisfaction after devising a novel way to catch a small animal persists in us today when we first master riding a bike or succeed in making a presentable soufflé.

The well-being effect from learning is not as straightforward as it is for other activities, such as eating a doughnut. In fact, it involves a bit of sacrifice. As scholars found in 2011, investing in an activity to raise competency can lower your moment-to-moment happiness but can boost well-being measured over a longer time frame of hours and days. This makes perfect sense, of course: You rack your brain learning calculus but then bask in knowing it. In that respect, learning is like exercise: sometimes painful in the moment but rewarding overall.

A key to maximizing satisfaction through learning is intrinsic motivation, or what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who famously wrote about “flow states”) called “autotelic learning”: learning for its own sake. Neuroscientists in 2014 used fMRI technology to show that this type of learning has to do with the brain’s response to curiosity. They demonstrated high levels of activity in the midbrain and a structure known as the nucleus accumbens, which indicated an enhanced release of dopamine, when study participants were highly curious about a subject. In other words, satisfying your curiosity through learning about whatever you’re most interested in will give you a neurochemical payoff.

Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.

But is learning identical to education? You might be tempted to extrapolate from this evidence to predict, for example, that if everybody went to college, we would have a happier society. Not so fast: One 2017 study suggests that whether higher education drives happiness up or down depends on, among other things, where you live. In nations without high levels of education, many of which are considered developing countries, university education is associated with higher happiness. In countries with labor markets saturated with educated individuals, which is characteristic of greater economic development, the effect is reversed—university attendance is associated with lower happiness. One possible explanation is that for the former group, university training offers a path out of poverty, but for the latter group much of this effect has long since been depleted. Alternatively, something about the rich-world college experience may contribute to lower well-being. Suffice to say that the sort of leisure learning the Greeks had in mind is not identical with the modern American college experience.

Taken together, the research points to a clear strategy to build a great vacation: Identify something you are very interested in for its own sake and focus on it intensively. And because the task or skill should be challenging enough to increase competence, the satisfaction goal should be understood in hours and days, not in the moment to moment of learning.

You can choose a range of ways to achieve this outcome, whether cheap and casual or expensive and formal. At one end of the scale, you can simply program your own reading curriculum. Over two weeks, you might set about carefully reading four books on a particular topic. Or you might decide to read the entire Bible or Quran. You might also mix your media: reading a biography of J. S. Bach, for instance, while listening to 50 of his cantatas.

At a more formal level, you might dedicate your vacation to taking a class. Perhaps you want to learn how to cook Punjabi cuisine, or follow one of the many “massive open online classes” (MOOCs, for short) that are available for free, such as—random example—one about exploring the science of happiness. For a more intensive (and expensive) option, you might hire a teacher to give you a head start on playing the guitar or speaking Mandarin, and do that for several hours every day. Or hire a nutrition-and-fitness coach. You will be amazed at how much progress you can make in two weeks.

[Read: ‘Workcations’ aren’t an escape. They’re practice.]

At the most rigorous level, you might go all in and spend your vacation on a guided silent retreat in one spiritual tradition or another. Or perhaps you could make a pilgrimage, walking in contemplation without devices or interruptions, and immersing yourself during rest periods in a wisdom literature that complements the experience.

In a famous passage of The Republic, Plato advises on how to educate children in a way that will bring out their best: “Do not … keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play. That will … better enable you to discern the natural capacities of each.” In other words, kids will learn better if you allow them to enjoy recreation in a constructive way, rather than forcing them to study, which is more likely to stimulate rebellion.

A similar principle lies behind the best model of vacation. Feeling compelled to relax and have fun is a common and counterproductive mistake. Telling yourself “I will be refreshed and not think about work!” is bound to lead in the wrong direction. Instead, employ a Platonic strategy and turn your leisure into learning. You might just have your best holiday ever.

Republic of Ireland captain Katie McCabe says she is "heartbroken" after Canada recover from a goal down to knock her side out of the World Cup.

Canada fight back from a goal down to beat the Republic of Ireland 2-1 and knock the debutants out of the Women's World Cup in Perth.

Republic of Ireland manager Vera Pauw says her side have shown "they are ready for this level" after a narrow 1-0 defeat by co-hosts Australia on their World Cup debut.

Republic of Ireland manager Vera Pauw says her players "feared for their bodies" as their Women's World Cup warm-up with Colombia was abandoned after 20 minutes,

Republic of Ireland midfielder Lucy Quinn says she won't let this summer's "once in a career" World Cup pass her by.

Today we’re offering a brief history lesson (and a brief themed diversion). But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk Really Broke Twitter This Time The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements What Should the Fourth of July Be?

With the Fourth of July comes all the complexities of collective observance—patriotism, fireworks, picnics, apathy, resistance. The holiday has always been one of dualities. It has also always been political.

After 1776, the day was celebrated throughout the Revolutionary War. “The trend in the early republic would be for July Fourth, and other celebrations modeled on the Fourth, to spread nationalism and, at the same time, to provide venues for divisive political expression,” the historian David Waldstreicher wrote in 2019—the year then-President Trump ordered a military parade, complete with tanks, to observe the day.

After the Civil War, Black Americans in the South transformed the date into a celebration of emancipation, according to the historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, complete with martial displays, dedicated performances, and food and drink. “The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out,” they explained in 2018.

In the decades after the Civil War, the Fourth gradually lost its civic character and was marked in many cases by drunken, raucous affairs, rife with gunfire, injury, illness, and death, our deputy editor Yoni Appelbaum wrote in 2011. The public-health solution in New England? Massive public spectacles—bonfires—in lieu of smaller gatherings. Today, that tradition lives on in the form of public fireworks displays.

Whether you’re waiting for fireworks, working, traveling, or resting at home today, join us for another time-honored tradition: a game of trivia. Below are five clues drawn from The Atlantic’s archives.

“A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other,” this president observed in his first inaugural address, “but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.”

Assessing this film in 1996, Roger Ebert called it “in the tradition of silly summer fun, and on that level I kind of liked it.” Our staff writer Megan Garber wrote that it was, “in the era before cowboy diplomacy and the isolationist impulses that sprang from it, a comically blithe rendering of American exceptionalism.” (Bonus points if you can name the director.)

The first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence contains a crucial typo that has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the document intended, the political theorist and scholar Danielle Allen has argued. This typo comes midway in the famous sentence that begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident ….” Can you complete it?

This country gained independence from the United States on July 4, 1946, after almost half a century of American colonial rule. “In 1776, the United States sought to escape the rule of one empire. On its way out the door, its representatives proclaimed that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. After 1898, the United States acquired an empire of its own. And between that latter outcome and the former words gaped an uncomfortable contradiction,” David Frum wrote in 2021. “That contradiction was no less apparent a century ago than it is today.”

This American author and abolitionist is perhaps best known for writing the anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (a five-stanza poem that The Atlantic paid $5 to publish in February 1862), but she was also a noted pacifist and advocate for women’s rights. Her work for The Atlantic shows “the point of view of a woman before modern feminism—the point of view of someone who wants to pitch in but must do so from the confines of the home,” Spencer Kornhaber wrote. Her poem “The Flag,” for instance, goes:

My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;

And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;

But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:

Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.

Related:

In 1902, Bliss Perry contemplated the beginnings of American imperialism and the waning of patriotic spirit.

James Russell Lowell: An Ode for the Fourth of July, 1876 Bill Ingalls / NASA / Getty Evening Read

Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries.

By Adam Frank

The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.

That’s the takeaway from [the recent] remarkable announcement that scientists have detected a “cosmic background” of ripples in the structure of space and time. If the result bears up as more data are gathered, it’s a discovery that promises to open new windows on everything from the evolution of galaxies to the origin of the universe.

Scientists had been awaiting such a discovery for decades. More than 100 years ago, Einstein introduced his radical general theory of relativity. For Einstein, space and time were a single entity, “space-time,” comprising a flexible fabric that could be stretched and compressed, bent and warped. In general relativity, matter makes space-time bend, and space-time, in turn, guides how unconstrained matter will move. Because space-time is flexible, you can make it wave. Just like snapping a bedsheet, if you move enough matter around fast enough, a wave of distorted space-time will ripple outward into the universe.

Read the full article.

Fan Ho / Blue Lotus Gallery Hong Kong Culture Break

Read. Written on Water, a collection of essays first published in 1944 by the Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang, whose observant essays about day-to-day realities double as a manual for surviving history.

And if you want to pick up something new but only have short stretches of time, Morgan Ome recommends five essay and short-story collections that are easy to read at your own pace.

Watch. Crash Course in Romance, on Netflix, a drama series featuring an all-star cast of Korean actors that aptly depicts the pressures students face in hypercompetitive academic environments.

Play. Our new print crossword puzzle puts a fresh narrative spin on a classic, as our crossword-puzzles editor Caleb Madison explains. The deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes.

P.S.

Three American presidents notably died on Independence Day—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe—and one was born on this day. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who throughout his life wrote frequently for The Atlantic, shares this birthday too. Hawthorne even did a fair bit of reporting: In this 1862 essay, for instance, he traveled from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., to interview civil and military leaders during the Civil War.

— Shan