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.

My colleague Derek Thompson has written about Americans’ social isolation and anxiety. But this week, he writes, “I thought I’d turn things around for a change. What matters most for happiness—marriage, money, or something else entirely?”

Reading about the key to happiness can sometimes feel like a trick: Could it really be as simple as a given expert makes it out to be? As Derek notes, “Clever sociologists will always find new ways of ‘calculating’ that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount.” But his research leads him to what he calls a “subtler truth”—a “happiness trinity” of which “finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs” rising together and falling together.

Today’s newsletter explores some subtler truths about American happiness.

On Happiness

The Happiness Trinity

By Derek Thompson

Why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

Read the article.

Take a Wife … Please!

By Olga Khazan

Why are married people happier than the rest of us?

Read the article.

A Happiness Columnist’s Three Biggest Happiness Rules

By Arthur C. Brooks

A good life isn’t just about getting the details right. Here are some truths that transcend circumstance and time.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Ten practical ways to improve happiness: For when you need advice that goes beyond “Be Danish” What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life: “We neglect our connections with others at our peril,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write.

Other Diversions

Sphere is the mind-killer. We’re all reading wrong. A dentist found a jawbone in a floor tile.

P.S.

Courtesy of Karolina L.

Last week, I asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Karolina L., 26, in Warsaw, wrote: “I always look up at the moon when I’m walking at night. No matter where I am, it makes me feel at home—like I have a friend watching over me.”

I’ll continue to share your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

— 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.

I’ve long fought the battle in defense of milk chocolate. My colleague Yasmin Tayag understands this position—her favorite chocolate treat is the Cadbury Creme Egg—but in a recent article, she acknowledges that genuinely “good chocolate …. should taste richly of cocoa.”

Many of the milky, sugary versions of chocolate are light on actual cocoa, she explains: “M&M’s, Snickers bars, and Hershey’s Kisses aren’t staples of American diets because they are the best—rather, they satisfy our desire for chocolate while costing a fraction of a jet-black bar made from single-origin cocoa.”

Now the ongoing cocoa shortage is driving prices way up, in ways that will affect even low-in-cocoa chocolate varieties. Commercial chocolate makers may start to tweak their recipes to use less cocoa; as Yasmin puts it, “Chocolate as we know it may never be the same.” I don’t tell you this to ruin your weekend. Instead, let the news encourage you to savor your favorites while you can (for me, it’s those extra-milky Dove milk-chocolate pieces).

On Chocolate

Chocolate Might Never Be the Same

By Yasmin Tayag

The cocoa shortage is making chocolate more expensive—maybe forever.

Read the article.

Silicon Valley Is Coming for Your Chocolate

By Larissa Zimberoff

One day, cocoa might come from a petri dish.

Read the article.

Milk Chocolate Is Better Than Dark, the End

By Megan Garber

Do you enjoy being reminded that the treat (“treat”) you are eating has been extruded from a crushed-up plant?

Read the article.

Still Curious?

How to make hot chocolate: In March 1994, Corby Kummer explained how to make hot chocolate an opulent, adult drink. Americans don’t really like to chew: For texturally exciting gummies, you have to look outside the United States, Sarah Zhang wrote last year.

Other Diversions

Jung’s five pillars of a good life Tupperware is in trouble. Six cult classics you have to read

P.S.

In 1943, the self-proclaimed chocolate addict WIlliam Henry Chamberlin came up with an ill-advised plan for handling the chocolate shortage of the time. “Life without sun or air might be made endurable by some miracle of science,” he wrote. “But not life without chocolate. Should this be denied, I cherish wild dreams of emigrating to Ecuador or Guatemala. There (although I have never raised anything more productive than ideas) I would layout, a personal Victory Garden in which the sole crop would be cocoa beans, which I would chew raw if necessary.”

— Isabel