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.

Early in 2023, my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce chatted with the writer Oliver Burkeman about New Year’s resolutions. Burkeman is an expert on productivity, but he’s arguably also an expert on getting real about the time human beings have on Earth. Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is approximately the length of an average American’s life span). In it, he writes: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”

With this in mind, Caroline asked Burkeman: “Do you think New Year’s resolutions are worth making, considering we’re all going to die, as your book posits so bluntly?”

Burkeman has hope for the concept of the resolution. “Confronting how short our lives are, and how limited our time is, is actually a sort of precondition for doing meaningful things, including making personal changes,” he told Caroline. But how we go about making these changes matter, he noted; there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do so. In today’s reading list, our writers walk you through the history of the New Year’s resolution, how brands take advantage of it, and how to use it for your own growth.

On Resolutions

Making a New Year’s Resolution? Don’t Go to War With Yourself.

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

“The difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute.”

It’s the Most Inadequate Time of the Year

By Amanda Mull

New Year’s resolutions are the perfect opportunity for consumer brands to remind you about all the ways you could be better.

New Year’s Resolutions That Will Actually Lead to Happiness

By Arthur C. Brooks

Set goals to improve your well-being—not your wallet or your waistline.

Still Curious?

The best time-management advice is depressing but liberating: You can make time for things that matter, or you can make time for more email. Make a to-don’t list: When you’re feeling stuck, focusing on the things you hate can help.

Other Diversions

81 things that blew our minds in 2023 How to be happy growing older Taylor Swift at Harvard

P.S.

Here’s one resolution you can make tomorrow: Don’t go out on New Year’s Eve. It’s not worth it, my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2018.

— 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.

The question “What is a Christmas movie?” might seem straightforward. But there’s one film that has scrambled the logic of the holiday movie for years now—at least for those who probably spend too much time online. “Because of the dreaded incentives of social media, we force debate upon ourselves all the time, even at the most wonderful time of the year,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in 2021. “According to Google Trends, search traffic for the phrase Is Die Hard a Christmas movie jumps every November and December.”

Today’s newsletter doesn’t purport to solve that particular debate, but it will explore the many meanings of the holiday movie, from its inherent cheesiness to its ability to move people in rare ways.

On Holiday Movies

The Cheesy Endurance of the Made-for-TV Holiday Movie

By Megan Garber

The Hallmark Christmas flick has become a genre in itself—one that insists, against all odds, on the inevitability of the happy ending.

Is [REDACTED] a Christmas Movie?

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

No one realizes that their own take on Die Hard as a Christmas movie helps sustain a powerful curse on the internet—not even the guy who started it all by accident.

The Most Unsettling ‘Christmas Carol’

By Tom Nichols

Why my father and I loved George C. Scott

Still Curious?

The mournful heart of It’s a Wonderful Life: The holiday classic is a timely exploration of what happens when all that you’ve relied on fades away, Megan Garber wrote in 2021. Twenty movie families to spend your holidays with: Excellent cinema for every mood, whether you’re feeling homesick, ruminative, or perfectly content (from 2020)

Other Diversions

Read this before you buy that sweater. The great cousin decline Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore.

P.S.

If you’re in the mood for a sharp critique of a piece of Christmas entertainment, check out my colleague Caitlin Flanagan’s essay “Don’t Subject Your Kids to Rudolph.”

— 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 my colleague Amanda Mull “ventured into the belly of the holiday-returns beast,” she learned that somewhere in the midst of a complex system of transporters, warehousers, and resellers, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.

“Michael,” Amanda explains, “is one of dozens of material handlers—the official job title—at the Inmar Intelligence returns-processing center in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania … Material handlers are charged with determining a return’s ultimate fate—whether it goes back to the retailer to be sold anew, gets destroyed, or something in between.”

Today’s newsletter explores the possible fates of your holiday-reason returns. Their future doesn’t look too bright.

On Returns

This Is What Happens to All the Stuff You Don’t Want

By Amanda Mull

I ventured into the belly of the holiday-returns beast.

The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants

By Amanda Mull

What happens to the stuff you order online after you send it back?

‘We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things’

By Alana Semuels

How online shopping and cheap prices are turning Americans into hoarders

Still Curious?

It’s too easy to buy stuff you don’t want: Online shopping is too fast for good decisions. How online shopping makes suckers of us all: Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, Jerry Useem wrote in 2017.

Other Diversions

A big misconception about the world’s greatest infectious killer Madonna dances with death. Wood that is see-through like glass and stronger than plastic

P.S.

If you’re hoping to buy a loved one something they won’t return, Kelly Conaboy has one tip: Don’t use a gift guide.

— 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 January 2021, a time when many of us were returning from halfhearted outdoor hangouts with freezing fingers, my colleague Marina Koren revealed herself as a lover of winter. Well, within reason: “I do not ski. I believe a ‘polar plunge’ is appropriate only when you’re trying to outrun a bear. I was born in Russia, but I moved to warmer climes as a toddler,” Koren writes. “I’m just a kindly winter evangelist, standing in front of your outdoor restaurant table, asking you to put on a hat.”

One of the secrets to embracing winter is deceptively simple, Koren argues: Dress the part. “As the Scandinavians say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes,” she writes. Beyond the proper dress code, much of one’s outlook on winter is psychological—but some of it might also be genetic. Today’s newsletter will walk you through the art and the science of loving winter, and some unorthodox techniques for dealing with the season.

On Winter

The Secret to Loving Winter

By Taylor Kay Phillips

First accept it, then enjoy it.

Why So Many People Hate Winter

By Olga Khazan

Science suggests that there are two types of people who tolerate the cold well. Sadly, I’m neither.

The Boys Who Wear Shorts All Winter

By Ashley Fetters

The kid who refuses to wear pants is a familiar sight to parents, students, and educators—and a mystifying one. What’s so great about being underdressed?

Still Curious?

The Norwegian town where the sun doesn’t rise: In Tromsø, Norway, the “Polar Night” lasts all winter—and rates of seasonal depression are remarkably low. (From 2015) To survive, these animals must lose their camouflage: How can the snowshoe hare and the Arctic fox thrive in a climate-changed world, where there’s less snow to blend in with? (From 2018)

Other Diversions

The 10 best films of 2023 Why are American homes so big? Diamonds aren’t rare. Why are they so in demand?

P.S.

A few years back, Deborah Copaken chronicled the time she spent $925 on a fake Canada Goose coat. Stay vigilant when you’re stocking up on warm gear.

— 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 decided to attend seminary … I told people it was to ‘find myself,’” Benjamin Perry wrote earlier this year. “That frame suggests that I yearned to forge a new identity and discover my future. But in fact, I went because I yearned for a more honest emotional life—and that type of life, I would later realize, is watered by tears.”

Perry had spent years unable to cry, and he sensed that he had lost something important. He embarked on an attempt to weep daily—and when he learned to cry again, he found what was missing:

When I was younger, I thought about tears as a consequence: the emotional sum of previous experiences, evidence of the past cascading down our cheeks. Now, however, I think about tears as a doorway: an invitation to be fully human and to connect with others, in all the complexity that entails.

Today’s newsletter spends some time with our tears—not purely as consequences or inconveniences, but as a core human experience.

On Crying

What I Lost When I Stopped Crying

By Benjamin Perry

When my tears disappeared, so did any possibility of an honest emotional life.

The Not-So-Secret Key to Emotional Balance

By Arthur C. Brooks

Crying can help you keep your feelings in check. It’s also inextricably bound up in spirituality.

Why We Cry on Planes

By Elijah Wolfson

Alone among strangers with little to do, a moment of calm amid the stress of travel

Still Curious?

An ode to crying babies: “Crying baby, I hear you. I’ve got no choice but to hear you. You’re 10 rows ahead of me in Economy, raging like Lear on the heath,” James Parker writes. Lean in to crying at work: It’s time to bring back the noble art of public weeping, Olga Khazan argued in 2014.

Other Diversions

AI’s spicy-mayo problem When canola was a new word No, you shouldn’t “date ’em ’til you hate ’em.”

P.S.

I’ll leave you with a few more lines from James Parker’s ode to crying babies. If the little ones in your life need a pep talk, I recommend the following:

“Keep it up, little tyrant. You’ve got a lot of power, and no power at all. You’re a tiny fist shaken at the heavens. Soon you’ll be talking, and language will betray you. You’ll say vague, helpless things and make bad jokes. But right now your protest is very direct, very effective.”

— Isabel