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.

If you weren’t already feeling enough pressure to pick out the perfect holiday gifts, this article from Anna Goldfarb will do the trick: Gifts, both the great ones and the disappointing ones, say a lot more about the buyer than about the receiver. Gifts represent our feelings about other people but also the ways we see ourselves. No wonder choosing a gift can feel exhausting.

Yet the psychological complexity of gift giving can actually make it less stressful, Goldfarb argued last year: “Gift giving is a nuanced psychological transaction in which the givers also bring their own desires to the table,” and realizing that gift-giving is never a purely selfless act can help both givers and receivers lower their expectations, easing some of the anxiety, she notes. (Another way to ease the stress: Stop using gift as a verb. “‘Gifting’ is the ‘moist’ of the action-word world,” my colleague Megan Garber wrote back in 2014, and she is still correct.)

Below is a nontraditional gift guide, full of advice not for choosing the perfect gift but for protecting your sanity and joy during the process.

On Gift-Giving

Gift-Giving Is About the Buyer, Not the Receiver

By Anna Goldfarb

Many of us want to feel like we’re benevolent, yet we pay substantial attention to how the process of giving will make us feel about ourselves.

Why You’re Bad at Giving Gifts

By Derek Thompson

Ironically, we’re awful gift-givers precisely because we spend too much time trying to be considerate. (From 2014)

What Happens When You Buy From Gift Guides

By Amanda Mull

Every website wants to pick out your mom’s next cashmere sweater.

Still Curious?

An alternative to overspending on presents: Gift giving is a beloved—and expensive—tradition. But some people have found a way to partake without the cost. “I’m not sure why my sister stopped giving gifts to my children”: A reader writes in to our Dear Therapist column.

Other Diversions

A sort-of-common, very strange cat trick Autumn colors and autumn chill Why most of America is terrible at eating biscuits (From 2018)

P.S.

I’ll leave you with some words of wisdom from our happiness columnist to help you handle being given a bad gift.

— 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.

Those of us who live in cities are inclined to avoid some of nature’s less-than-appealing creatures. “My aversion to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches is somewhat justifiable, given their cultural associations with dirtiness and disease,” Hannah Seo writes in a recent article. “But such disgust is part of a larger estrangement between humanity and the natural world.”

“As nature grows unfamiliar, separate, and strange to us, we are more easily repelled by it,” Seo explains. “These feelings can lead people to avoid nature further, in what some experts have called ‘the vicious cycle of biophobia.’ This cycle has some parallels with another cycle of modern life, Seo writes: “Psychologists know that lonely individuals tend to think more negatively of others and see them as less trustworthy, which encourages even more isolation.”

Spending time in the natural world can’t solve all of our problems, but it may well help us feel closer to our surroundings—and to our own happiness.

On Nature

America Is Getting Lonelier and More Indoorsy. That’s Not a Coincidence.

By Hannah Seo

Our relationship to nature and our relationships with one another are deeply intertwined.

How We Learned to Be Lonely

By Arthur Brooks

In the early days of the pandemic, many of us got used to solitude. It’s a habit we need to break.

A Growing Fear of Nature Could Hasten Its Destruction

By Emily Harwitz

Some scientists worry that modern life is making children more afraid of nature. What are the consequences for the planet?

Still Curious?

Nature therapy is a privilege: Science is learning more about the health benefits of going outside—at a time when access to wild spaces is ever more unequal. (From 2017) Trees are time machines: Arborists are planting trees today that must survive decades of global warming. The health, comfort, and happiness of city dwellers hang in the balance. (From 2020)

Other Diversions

Sphere and loathing in Las Vegas Why did we all have the same childhood? A must-see comedy about miserable people looking for love

P.S.

If you’re spending some time with the last glimpses of foliage this weekend, I recommend Henry David Thoreau’s ode in The Atlantic to “autumnal tints.”

— 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 2016, my colleague Olga Khazan saw a cultural difference playing out on the faces of those around her. “Here’s something that has always puzzled me, growing up in the U.S. as a child of Russian parents,” she wrote. “Whenever I or my friends were having our photos taken, we were told to say ‘cheese’ and smile. But if my parents also happened to be in the photo, they were stone-faced. So were my Russian relatives, in their vacation photos. My parents’ high-school graduation pictures show them frolicking about in bellbottoms with their young classmates, looking absolutely crestfallen.”

Were her Russian relatives simply less happy than her American friends? Not necessarily, it turns out: Research suggests that some societies view casual smiling as a sign of warmth or respect, but others are more inclined to see it as a sign of trickery.

Olga’s reporting on smiling has stuck with me since I first read it—because it’s fascinating, but also because understanding the human face is becoming more and more important in our AI era, when much of our technology purports to recognize, and even improve upon, our faces and their expressions. Today’s newsletter brings you stories about the human face and the emotions it can reveal.

On Faces

Why Americans Smile So Much

How immigration and cultural values affect what people do with their faces

Artificial Intelligence Is Misreading Human Emotion

There is no good evidence that facial expressions reveal a person’s feelings. But big tech companies want you to believe otherwise.

The Introverted Face

People put serious weight on judgments of character based on facial structure alone. (From 2014)

Still Curious?

The iPhone selfie camera is too good: “Is this really my face?” People are pretty bad at reading faces: why humans are quick to judge expressions—and often get them wrong (from 2016)

Other Diversions

Sleep more and be happier. What if psychedelics’ hallucinations are just a side effect? Eight books that explain how the world works

P.S.

Naomi Sharp’s 2016 piece found that computers may have a leg up on humans when it comes to recognizing facial expressions:​​ In one study, “when people watched silent videos of the same person experiencing pain and faking pain, they couldn’t tell which was which. A computer was correct 85 percent of the time,” Sharp wrote.

— 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 you’re suffering from a cold, the situation might seem perfectly clear—your nose is stuffed. But the truth about what’s happening to you is a little more complicated. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is connected to the armpits.

In a new article, our Science writer Sarah Zhang explains what’s really going on in your body when you’re congested. There’s something oddly empowering in understanding how colds work, even if the knowledge won’t cure you. Today’s newsletter will help you get to know the inner workings of your body when it’s not at its best.

On Colds

Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong

By Sarah Zhang

Start with this: You really have two noses.

Why Has a Useless Cold Medication Been Allowed on Shelves for Years?

By Sarah Zhang

Studies prove that popular decongestants just don’t work.

No One Wants Your Cold

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

How to know if you’re too sick to hang

Still Curious?

An adorable way to study how kids get each other sick: Behold, the ferret day care. The glory of feeling fine: People seem cursed to take being well for granted. Can we change?

Other Diversions

Three paths toward the meaning of life The new meaning of tattoos Whatever happened to carpal tunnel syndrome?

P.S.

I’ll leave you with a beautiful essay by my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig from last spring, about the power we lose and the understanding we gain after a season of illness. “There is a profound helplessness to falling ill, even in cases of ultimately mild and transient illness,” she writes. “If the pandemic ought to have given us anything, it should have been a more universal empathy toward the condition of illness, of being susceptible to getting sick.”

— Isabel