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 Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

American voters have never been more polarized—except, perhaps, when it comes to the shared belief that shooting a puppy is wrong. Has Kristi Noem’s admission of such an act doomed her political future?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

David Frum: “The plot to wreck the Democratic convention” America lost the plot with TikTok. Touch screens are ruining cars. Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?

The Shot Read ’Round the World

Say this for Kristi Noem: She has an eye for literary detail.

The South Dakota governor is one week out from the publication of her new book, No Going Back (more on that title later). On Friday, The Guardian reported on one of the anecdotes Noem shares with her readers. In the book, the governor recalls the day she realized that her puppy, Cricket, had crossed the line from poorly behaved menace to, well, a problem that needed solving. Noem led Cricket to a gravel pit. Then she pulled the trigger. “It was not a pleasant job,” the governor writes. “But it had to be done.”

It’s the phrase gravel pit that stands out most—imagery fit for a Cormac McCarthy novel. Typically, campaign books don’t scream “literature.” They’re more or less marketing tools meant to showcase a politician’s character and leadership skills. Noem likely believed that recounting this saga (in addition to a story about killing a goat) would serve as a testament to her courage and her rural bona fides, endearing her to millions of potential voters. Instead, Noem publishing these sentences may one day be remembered as the gravest mistake of her career.

The backlash has been swift. Beyond Democrats and liberals seizing on the moment, even some Republicans and conservatives have offered condemnations. “Omg - now my blood is boiling,” the right-leaning social media influencer Catturd told his 2.4 million followers on X. “Remember, I’m a country boy who lives on a ranch. There’s a huge difference between putting an old horse down who is suffering, than shooting a 18 month dog for being untrainable.” In reality, Cricket appears to have been 14 months old. According to The Guardian, the puppy had attacked other animals, and Noem maintains she decided to put the dog down because it showed “aggressive behavior toward people by biting them.”

With some scandals, members of the American public have notoriously short memories, or at least they may be more inclined to forgive. But certain images never leave the collective psyche—especially when they involve dogs. This fundamental truth transcends politics. Michael Vick was one of the most dazzling NFL quarterbacks of the past quarter century, but you probably remember him first and foremost as the dog-fighting guy. The act of shooting a dog, as Noem did, is, for some, impossible to stomach. (Though once a dog has attacked a human, that calculus changes for others.) Canine execution was once the dark joke of the January 1973 death-themed issue of National Lampoon, the cover of which featured a man holding a revolver against a floppy ear along with the warning “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” (The pup in question, Mr. Cheeseface, looks bewildered.)

What is it about dogs, in particular, that tugs at our core? In a recent essay for The Atlantic, Tommy Tomlinson, the author of the new book Dogland, offered his own unique admission: “By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog. If I could bring one back, I’d pick her 100 times out of 100. So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?” Many dogs, even the bad ones, are seen as unimpeachable. Elected officials, not so much.

Noem is (was?) considered to be among former president Donald Trump’s top prospects for a 2024 running mate. Now she’ll have to fight to escape being branded the woman who once killed her own puppy. Many people seem to want her to express some form of contrition. On Friday, Noem posted a screenshot of the Guardian article, writing, “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.” Then she plugged her book. “If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back.’”

Yesterday, with the online fervor still raging, Noem released a second statement, standing by the idea that shooting the puppy, rather than, say, putting it up for adoption, was the “right” thing to do. “I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book—No Going Back,” her statement read. “The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned … Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never passed on my responsibilities to anyone else to handle. Even if it’s hard and painful. I followed the law and was being a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor. As I explained in the book, it wasn’t easy. But often the easy way isn’t the right way.”

No Going Back’s subtitle—The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward—is the exact sort of phrase you expect to read in a studied politician’s carefully curated treatise. Many of these books are often quite rote, devices meant to serve as the starting point of a national campaign. A lot of them, but not all of them, are bland by design. Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father is perhaps the most notable exception to the rule, but there are others. Jason Kander, once seen as an heir to Obama’s Democratic Party, published a memoir in 2018 about his time serving in Afghanistan and working in state politics that largely fit the political-book mold, right down to the title: Outside the Wire: Ten Lessons I’ve Learned in Everyday Courage. But four years later, he returned with a second memoir, Invisible Storm, showcasing edges of his life that he had sanded down in his first outing. The result was an honest and radically candid look at the depths of his PTSD.

Typically, but not always, political books are produced with the help of a ghostwriter. Noem’s publisher did not respond to my request for comment as to whether Noem used one.

This morning, I called the journalist Maximillian Potter, who collaborated with Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado on his political memoir, The Opposite of Woe, and served as an editorial consultant on the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s memoir, The Power of One. (Potter is also the co-author of an Atlantic investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by the Hollywood mogul Bryan Singer.) He was careful to note that the Guardian report may not include the chapter’s full context; still, Noem has not refuted any of the details. What stood out most to Potter was how Noem, according to the report, writes that she “hated that dog.” “I’ve never heard anyone refer to a pet or an animal with hate. As a collaborator, that’s the word I would have discussed,” Potter told me. “I think part of a ghost or a collaborator’s job on projects like this is to not discourage the author from sharing their truth; it’s to be a thought partner and help them think through what it is they’re really trying to say.”

Potter also brought up an old political idiom, often attributed to Robert F. Kennedy (senior), later popularized by Chris Matthews: “Hang a lantern on your problem.” Maybe that’s what is really going on here. In the book, Noem reportedly notes that a construction crew watched her kill both the puppy and the goat. Perhaps, as her national profile grows, and as potential vetting for Trump’s VP gets under way, Noem sought to get in front of any potentially damaging story that might emerge through opposition research. (Her chief of communications did not respond to my request for an interview.)

Noem is midway through her second term as governor, and she’s ineligible for a third. No Going Back was supposed to be a prelude to her next chapter. Trump even blurbed it: “This book, it’s a winner.” But if he doesn’t pick Noem for VP, her new book’s title may have prophesied the end of her political story.

Related:

The governor who wants to be Trump’s next apprentice Pets really can be like human family.

Today’s News

A federal appellate court ruled that state-run health-care plans cannot exclude gender-affirming surgeries. Columbia University began suspending students who stayed in the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus grounds past the deadline issued by the university. A series of severe tornadoes hit parts of the South and the Midwest over the weekend, killing at least four people in Oklahoma.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: One simple key to joy doesn’t exist, Isabel Fattal writes. There are some subtler truths about American happiness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection

The Godfather of American Comedy

By Adrienne LaFrance

Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost … This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks. Riding shotgun was his best friend and classmate from Beverly Hills High School, Rob Reiner.

Brooks had inherited the car from one of his older brothers, and he’d made it his own by removing the handle of the stick shift and replacing it with a smooth brass doorknob. After several failed attempts to find the Pacific Coast Highway, which would take them home, Brooks and Reiner came upon a long fence surrounding a field where a single cow was grazing. Albert “stopped the car and he leaned out the window and he said, ‘Excuse me, sir! Sir?’ and the cow just looked up,” Reiner told me. “And he said, ‘How do you get back to the PCH?’ And the cow just did a little flick of his head, like he was flicking a fly away, and went back to eating.” Without missing a beat, Albert called out, “Thank you!” and confidently zoomed away. “I said, ‘Albert, you just took directions from a cow!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but he lives around here. He knows the area.’ ”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Dear Therapist: I flipped out at my brother, and I regret it. Sphere is the mind-killer. Even Bill Barr should prefer Joe Biden. The siren call of an Israeli invasion of Lebanon What Putin’s No. 2 believes about the West A prominent free-speech group is fighting for its life.

Culture Break

Photograph by Siqi Li for The Atlantic

Correspond. Andrea Valdez probes the enduring necessity (and importance) of stamps—a nearly 200-year-old technology.

Watch. Blue Lights (out now on BritBox) is the perfect nail-biter show for late-night bingeing, Walt Hunter writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The passage of the Ukrainian aid package by the House this past weekend is an extraordinary sign of political courage. But in the party of Donald Trump, this win for democracy may soon seem like a mirage.

(For further reading on Mike Johnson’s speakership and what the weekend’s victory could mean for him, I recommend Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile, “The Accidental Speaker,” published today in The Atlantic.)

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The politics of pessimism What Donald Trump fears most Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing

A Political Mirage

The mirages known as fata morgana, named for the character Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend, are extraordinary sights. When atmospheric conditions are just right, rays of light bend, transforming boats, islands, mountains, and coastlines before the viewer’s eyes. Despite their beauty, though, these mirages soon fade away—which brings me to this weekend’s remarkable scene in the House.

On Saturday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson faced down the threats from his party’s Trumpist isolationist wing and delivered a resounding bipartisan victory for the forces of democracy. The $61 billion Ukrainian aid package passed with more than 300 votes—the final total was 311–112—including 101 GOP votes and the support of every Democrat in the House. The bill, which is expected to be approved quickly by the Senate and signed by President Joe Biden, will provide the embattled Ukrainians with crucial support at what seems a decisive moment in the war against Vladimir Putin and his army of invaders.

The vote was a stinging rebuke to MAGA world and its leader. “Ukraine won,” David Frum wrote in The Atlantic this weekend. “Trump lost.”

We also got a vanishingly rare glimpse of political courage. For months, Johnson dithered over legislation to aid Ukraine, and his delays contributed to the unconscionable loss of Ukrainian lives as Russia rained death on Ukraine’s cities. His conversion was as welcome as it was astonishing. Although his ideological shift has been described as an evolution, it felt more like a road-to-Damascus moment. Having played the role of Neville Chamberlain for months, Johnson suddenly sounded almost Churchillian.

“History judges us for what we do,” he said last week. “This is a critical time right now. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different. But I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.”

Unlike his party’s maximum leader, Johnson paid attention to foreign-policy experts, listened to the pleas of American allies, and believed the intelligence community rather than Putin. “I really do believe the intel,” Johnson said. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Baltics next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.”

Johnson knew that the decision could cause him to lose his speakership. In this era of GOP political cowardice, his stand felt profoundly countercultural.

So did the House’s rare display of bipartisanship. The House Republican leadership (with the notable exception of New York Representative and vice-presidential wannabe Elise Stefanik) worked with Democrats to stand by Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

After years of dominating the public narrative, the GOP’s most extreme performers found themselves isolated and outvoted. Marjorie Taylor Greene had humiliation after humiliation piled on her; her amendments (including one funding “space laser technology” on the southern border) were widely mocked and then overwhelmingly defeated. Even Fox News seemed to turn on her, publishing a scathing op-ed calling her “an idiot” who is “trying to wreck the GOP” with “her bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy.”

The isolationists were left to vent their rage at displays of support for Ukraine, which included waving Ukrainian flags on the House floor. “Such an embarrassing and disgusting show of America LAST politicians!” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted. “You love Ukraine so much, get your ass over there and leave America’s governing to those who love THIS country!”

And yet, for a few hours, congressional Republicans almost looked like a functioning, rational, governing political party, one that saw the United States as a defender of democracy against authoritarian aggression. It was a party that Ronald Reagan would have recognized. But restrain your exuberance, because we most likely witnessed nothing more than a political fata morgana.

This is, after all, still Donald Trump’s party.

In the days before his legislative defeat, Trump tried to soften his message a bit, posting on Truth Social that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. “As everyone agrees,” he wrote, “Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!”

Frum noted in his recent article that Trump’s statement “was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side after his side was about to lose.” (Perhaps the most bizarre spin came from Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham, who went on Fox News to insist that “this would not have passed without Donald Trump.”)

But there should be no doubt what Trump’s election would mean for Russia, Ukraine, or NATO. And we have precious little evidence that the GOP would ever push back against a President Trump, who would side with Putin against our allies and our own intelligence agencies.

The directional arrow of the GOP remains unchanged: A majority of House Republicans voted against aiding Ukraine (the vote among Republican representatives was 101 for and 112 against); a majority of Senate Republicans is likely to vote no as well.

And the backlash on the right is just beginning. On cue, the flying monkeys of the MAGAverse came out quickly against Johnson and the Ukraine package. After the vote, Greene declared that Johnson was not merely “a traitor to our conference” but actually “a traitor to our country,” whose speakership was “over.” She continues to threaten to bring a motion to vacate the chair, which could plunge the GOP back into chaos and dysfunction.

Senator Mike Lee railed against what he called “the warmonger wish list” passed by the House. Denunciations of Johnson’s “treason” and demands for his removal flooded right-wing social media. Donald Trump Jr. fired a barrage of attacks against Johnson and the Ukraine bill, which he’s called a “garbage bill,” while posting his support for Greene’s attempts to derail it.

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, the rumpled consigliere of Republican anarchy, is escalating his attacks on Republicans who voted for the package. “Traitors One and All,” the former White House aide wrote on his Gettr account. Bannon called Johnson a “Sanctimonious Twerp” who had “Sold Out His Country to Curry Favor with the Globalist Elites.”

The Trump ally Charlie Kirk railed: “Not only is the DC GOP collapsing the country by their anti-American actions, they are participating in the end of the constitutional order as we know it.”

In a rational party, these would be voices from the fringe. But Greene, Don Jr., Kirk, and Bannon still represent the id of the GOP, because they have Trump’s ear and remain far closer to the heart of the MAGA base than internationalist Republicans such as Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, and Mike Pence—all of whom have been thrown into Republican exile. In a recent Gallup poll, just 15 percent of Republican voters said they think the United States is not doing enough to help Ukraine, while a strong majority—57 percent—think we are doing too much.

Despite the illusion of a rational foreign policy and this past weekend’s flash of courage and independence, Johnson and the rest of the GOP conference are all but guaranteed to rally to support Trump. Even as he stands trial on multiple felony charges, Republicans are lining up to pledge their fealty to the former president whether or not he is convicted; New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and former Attorney General Bill Barr are merely the latest Republicans to bend the knee.

In just a few months, my hometown of Milwaukee will host the GOP’s re-coronation of Trump, affirming once again his absolute grip on the mind and soul of the party. By then, what happened this weekend will seem like a distant mirage.

Related:

Trump deflates. The accidental speaker

Today’s News

Lawyers in Trump’s hush-money trial in New York made their opening statements today. The head of the Israeli military’s intelligence directorate resigned, citing his department’s failure to anticipate Hamas’s attack on October 7. Hundreds of members of the teaching staff at Columbia University held a walkout to protest the administration’s decision last week to call in police officers, who arrested more than 100 students involved in a pro-Palestine demonstration.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Being busy has become a status symbol, Isabel Fattal writes. What do we miss when our focus is on staying productive above all else?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Cavan Images / Alamy

It’s Really Hard to Rebuild a Marsh

By Erica Gies

The water in California’s San Francisco Bay could rise more than two meters by the year 2100. For the region’s tidal marshes and their inhabitants, such as Ridgway’s rail and the endangered salt-marsh harvest mouse, it’s a potential death sentence …

To keep its marshes above water, San Francisco Bay needs more than 545 million tonnes of dirt by 2100. Yet for restorationists looking to rebuild marshes lost to development and fortify those that remain, getting enough sediment is just one hurdle: The next challenge is figuring out a way to deliver it without smothering the very ecosystem they’re trying to protect.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Christopher Pledger / Eyevine / Redux

Admire. “Miniatures imitate life but have no clear practical purpose,” Gisela Salim-Peyer writes. Here’s the case for why tiny art deserves more attention.

Read. “Hinge,” a poem by José A. Rodríguez:

“At the long edge of the screen door keeping most of the flies out. / At the classroom door, smooth and tight fit.”

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Israel’s response to Iran’s attack this past weekend signals an “astonishing win,” my colleague Graeme Wood wrote yesterday. With help from several allies, Israel managed to fend off what could have been a mass-casualty event (though one 7-year-old girl sustained life-threatening injuries). But the attack was also “a gift to the hapless Benjamin Netanyahu,” Graeme argues. I called Graeme in Tel Aviv yesterday to talk about how the prime minister could use this moment as an opportunity to revitalize Gaza negotiations—and why he’s not likely to do so.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Gavin Newsom can’t help himself. Trump’s willing accomplice The RFK Jr. strategy clicks into focus. What the upper-middle-class left doesn’t get about inflation

A Realignment

Isabel Fattal: You wrote yesterday that Israel’s response to Iran’s attack signals an operational and strategic win. How so?

Graeme Wood: For the past two weeks, since it struck Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing multiple officers and senior officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Israel has been on anxious footing waiting to figure out how Iran was going to attack. There was some doubt, I think, in ordinary people’s minds about how Israel would handle whatever Iran was going to do next. What Iran eventually decided to do was to send more than 300 drones and missiles toward Israel. And Israel not only survived that, but by dawn the next day, the country was up and running as if nothing had happened. The ability for Israel to weather the attack was beyond anyone’s expectations—both as a matter of technical ability and also as a kind of moral ability, to have life go on after what Iran promised was going to be a serious challenge.

Isabel: You write that this could be the moment for Netanyahu to tell his more militaristic right flank to stand down.

Graeme: The way that a lot of people naturally understand these types of attacks is as a matter of tit for tat. Of course there are many in Israel who think, We need to respond in kind. That is the view from Netanyahu’s right. But it is not the most productive way that the aftermath of this attack can be used.

Whenever something big like this happens, it’s almost impossible to put oneself into the mindset of 24 hours ago. But 24 hours ago, many of us would have said, Israel’s in a horrible muddle because it has waged an absolutely brutal war in Gaza. It has not succeeded in dislodging Hamas. It has not gotten its hostages back. There is a humanitarian catastrophe. And there is no negotiation that’s anywhere near happening that could redeem Israel from this pickle that it’s partially put itself in.

Now there is this kind of realignment of the security paradigm. Could a creative, thoughtful, competent government use that realignment to move forward from what seemed like an intractable position in Gaza? Yes. There are angles that a government could take so that tomorrow is not like yesterday. Part of that includes just acknowledging, where did this success come from? The success came in part because Israel, over the past several years, has created what turns out to be a pretty durable and effective alliance with the governments of Arab states in the region. We’re talking about Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Without those states, the prospects for having only one casualty in Israel from the Iranian attack would have been nil. That means that there’s gratitude to be doled out to those states, and there are compromises that can be made as part of that expression of gratitude.

Isabel: So you think that now there could be an opening for negotiation that didn’t exist before the attacks?

Graeme: Yes, exactly. The reason that opening didn’t exist previously is that Netanyahu has consistently tried to mollify those to his right who have maximalist views of the post-Gaza situation—maximalist views meaning that, at the end of the day, there’s not just no Hamas, but no Palestinian government or security force whatsoever in Gaza, and no Arab security force whatsoever. That’s not a reasonable hope for the future, and it has prevented Netanyahu and his government from considering any reasonable future at all.

Among the things that they could have considered are creative solutions that would have involved these Arab allies who have populations, as well as governments, who are not thrilled by what they’re seeing in Gaza. And in the past 24 hours, Israel’s need for those countries has been demonstrated. It’s a moment where a trusted, courageous leader could step in and perhaps create some kind of change in policy that would allow the Gaza war to, if not conclude, then come closer to its conclusion.

Isabel: What’s Netanyahu’s window to do something like this?

Graeme: If you see what’s being spoken about in Israel, it’s Netanyahu being pressured to retaliate. This is not an incomprehensible command. If there were 300 drones sent toward any country, the population of that country would say, We have to do something material to cause those who sent them to regret having done so. It’s unclear whether Netanyahu is going to take that bait, or do what a great politician has to do sometimes, which is to say to people, You’re not going to get what you want; you’re going to get what you need. And what we need as a country is something other than this. That’s what the situation really calls for, and it’s a call that would probably have to be answered in, I would say, the next week.

Isabel: What else should readers keep in mind as they’re following this story?

Graeme: One thing that I think will be a nagging question for a lot of people is, What did the Iranians want to happen? Even if they didn’t want massive death and destruction, what they did was an unambiguous act of aggression. But another possibility, which is reasonable to consider, is that they didn’t expect most of those drones and missiles to get through. They needed to retaliate, and as soon as they did so they said, Okay, we’re done here. Even before the missiles and drones would’ve reached their targets, they said that. So we have to consider the possibility that this was a half-hearted attack.

Isabel: This attack is also unprecedented in a few ways, isn’t it?

Graeme: They’re attacking from Iranian territory. And if you attack from Iranian territory, you invite retaliation on Iranian territory, which is a huge change from the status quo ante. This really is a before-and-after moment. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander said this publicly, which means it’s probably an official statement of doctrine now: From now on, if Israel attacks Iranian interests, figures, and citizens anywhere, we will retaliate from Iran. If that’s what they’re going to do, that’s a new disposition.

Related:

What will Netanyahu do now? The coalition of the malevolent

Today’s News

Jury selection is under way on the first day of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan; it marks the first time a former president has been on trial for criminal charges. The civil war in Sudan has now reached the end of its first year. More than 14,000 people have been killed, according to some estimates; last month, the UN warned that nearly 5 million people could soon suffer a “catastrophic” level of hunger. The FBI opened a criminal probe into the recent collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The investigation will cover, in part, whether the ship’s crew knew their vessel had “serious system problems” before leaving port, according to The Washington Post.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Savor your favorites while you can—the ongoing cocoa shortage may change the future of chocolate forever, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Philip Shribman, in a college photo from around 1940; behind it, an excerpt from a wartime letter he sent to the sociology professor George F. Theriault Sources: Courtesy of David Shribman; Wieland Teixeira / Getty

The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts

By David M. Shribman

Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthday, was not worldly but understood that he had been thrust into a world conflict that was more than a contest of arms. At stake were the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet young man, taciturn in the old New England way, but he had much to say in this letter, written from the precipice of battle to a brother on the precipice of adulthood …

He acknowledged from the start that “this letter won’t do much good”—a letter that, in the eight decades since it was written, has been read by three generations of my family. In it, Phil Shribman set out the virtues and values of the liberal arts at a time when universities from coast to coast were transitioning into training grounds for America’s armed forces.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Getty

Please laugh. The most hated sound on television is the laugh track, Jacob Stern writes. Now it has all but disappeared.

Watch. The third season of Bluey (out now on Disney+) might be signaling the end for the beloved children’s show, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

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Silicon Valley Is Coming for Your Chocolate

By Larissa Zimberoff

One day, cocoa might come from a petri dish.

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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?

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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