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.

Thanksgiving can be a time to reconnect with the things we watched, wore, and listened to in the past (especially for those staying in their childhood bedrooms this weekend). Today we asked six Atlantic writers and editors to answer the question: What’s a trend you wish would come back, and one you wish would go away?

Come back: The most glamorous design for a hardcover book is when the front cover has text only—in a very dramatic typeface—and the back cover has a giant photo of the author. This trend had a good 20-year run at least. I’m talking about a gorgeous edition of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1966), the first edition of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the first edition of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). Instantly recognizable E. B. White (1977) and Joan Didion (1979) essay collections. Patty Hearst’s memoir (1982)! Today’s tiny photos and floral designs (or whatever) are too demure.

Go away: You order a glass of wine, in part, so that you can hold a wine glass. And that’s why you’re happy to pay $15 for a glass of wine poured from a $15 bottle—because you’re sitting in a restaurant and holding a wine glass and feeling elegant. Tragically, hip restaurants and trendy wine bars now serve wine in juice glasses (for children) or other stubby, unelegant vessels inspired by “tavern” glassware. And for what reason? Because it seems less pretentious? I can be unpretentious at home!

— Kaitlyn Tiffany, staff writer

***

Come back: My parents disconnected their landline, but the number is seared in my mind alongside the other home numbers of my childhood friends. I recently learned that my internet provider offers a free landline, and my apartment has a number of its own. All I have to do is plug a phone into the jack. It’s an idyllic thought: coming home, putting my cellphone—and all its distractions—away, but not being disconnected. I can still chat aimlessly with my sister while doing chores, or catch up with a long-distance friend. I’m all for bringing back the landline as a way to create a just-large-enough opening for the outside world to reach me.

Go away: The quantification of the body through fitness trackers can be helpful when they show you your activity levels or other health markers, but I’m ready to let go of sleep scores. Seeing a negative score can make you feel more tired (no matter how you slept), or lead to orthosomnia, the obsession with getting “perfect” sleep. I’m also wary of what the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls “value capture,” when we adopt simplified metrics as our goals, often because technology provides them to us. I used to struggle with my sleep, and I addressed it through making more time for rest, managing anxiety, and, paradoxically, paying less attention to whether I was getting an A in sleeping. The last thing I want to see after a fitful night is a number telling me how badly I’ve slept. I promise, I already know.

— Shayla Love, staff writer

***

Come back: It happened to me: I wore transition lenses. It was 2009, and I was living in Washington, D.C., the global capital of un-fashion. I somehow let the optometrist convince me that I could save money if I bought eyeglasses that doubled as sunglasses. As a result, for five minutes after going indoors or out, I saw the world through a fuzzy gray veil. It was an off-putting choice even by D.C. standards. Friends questioned my judgment; second dates were rare. But in retrospect, it expressed something real: both pragmatism and a proud disregard for good taste.

It’s time for us to re-embrace fashion with a practical purpose. Cargo shorts, thank goodness, are back. What can match the joy of striding down the sidewalk, bag-free yet with any item—phone, wallet, tissues, Advil, sunscreen, water bottle, loose fruit, paperback novels—within easy reach? (Plus, an article of clothing so visually heinous now connotes rebellion.) The fanny pack went from trend to joke to respectable garment. And walking is nice, but have you tried gliding gracefully across the cityscape? This is why God invented Heelys.

Go away: Then again, utilitarian fashion has led to some dark places. The first time I saw an Apple Watch, I was skeptical—who’d want to be harassed by text messages 24/7? I was wrong about what my fellow humans wanted, but I stand by the principle. Digital garments are the opposite of their analog analogues: They invade our psychic space in the name of convenience. They provide the illusion of control while in fact controlling the user. There’s a slippery slope from Apple Watches and Meta glasses to AirPods that pipe conversation topics into your ears and beanies that scan your brain waves. Too much pragmatism turns us all into tools.

— Christopher Beam, writing fellow

***

Come back: I want what was known as the “Global Village Coffeehouse” aesthetic of the late 1980s to early 2000s back. The style was in part a reaction to the ascent of the early tech boom and invoked an ambiguous bohemian warmth. Global Village Coffeehouse recalled a global culture that made no sense and referred to no specific place. It was perfect because it was flawed. Its designs—commonly found in second-wave coffee shops—were loopy and bordered on messy, but they had an internal logic: a sort of contained chaos unlike modern Scandinavian minimalism and mid-century modern. Global Village Coffeehouse interiors were inclusive and not intimidating, and they did not photograph particularly well. The point was to not have an experience that could be broadcast later via an image on an app. It was to have the experience and walk away feeling good.

Go away: LinkedIn posting is eternally baffling, and it needs to be stopped. In the way that TikTok turned humans into marionettes as it puppeteers them into doing viral dances ad infinitum, LinkedIn has turned people I am fond of into something utterly unrecognizable: people who post about their passion for “finding unique solutions to hurdles in developing brand strategy.” I suspect that the LinkedIn posters I know personally are not actually passionate about these things, because they never come up in real-life conversation. This stuff is not good for the soul. It’s not good for my soul to see people I know turn into this, and it’s not good for your soul to be forced to publicly say that you love things you actually do not.

— Ali Breland, staff writer

***

Come back: Albums, especially those released by the legendary jazz company Blue Note Records, used to feature essays printed on the back of the sleeve. Usually written by music critics or knowledgeable scenesters, the essays could be explanatory, evocative, and at times esoteric; the dispatch accompanying Wayne Shorter’s 1966 release Speak No Evil, for instance, links the tenor saxophonist to Edgar Allen Poe within two sentences. These notes were informative introductions to the tunes, but they also contextualized the musicians’ stylistic influences and artistic development. At a time when recordings have been atomized into algorithmically selected tracks and stan culture encourages the artists’ enshrinement as purveyors of perfection, it is valuable to be reminded that music is a craft produced by fallible, striving souls, in a room with others.

Go away: Until recently, the sky was one of the few precious parts of our world where the internet couldn’t reach us. Now, at the click of some buttons (albeit for a ransom), a dark plane becomes a steampunk arcade of glowing screens.

Bah! Once, humans accomplishing sustained flight was so magical that the appearance of the first hot-air balloons started “balloonomania” across Europe, as well it should have. Now we’re so desensitized to our bodies vaulting between cities that we need TikTok, Netflix, and email to keep our attention aloft. But without Wi-Fi we could chat with strangers, read a good magazine or a bad book, or just stare out the window and enjoy a good old-fashioned Ponder. Let’s go back to a time when nothing on our phones or laptops could possibly feel as magnificent as simply being in the air.

— Evan McMurry, senior editor overseeing audience

***

And staff writer Jennifer Senior kept her replies concise:

Come back: Big hair.

Go away: The internet.

Here are three stories from The Atlantic:

How the Ivy League broke America A guide for the politically homeless A ridiculous, perfect way to make friends

The Atlantic Gift Guide

Photograph by Joanna McClure for The Atlantic. Set design by Abby Walton for The Atlantic.

The Atlantic has chosen 65 gifts for bringing more merriment, adventure, and wonder to the ones you love. Read our gift guide.

Culture Break

Nanna Heitmann / Magnum

Watch. In 2020, our critic compiled a list of 25 feel-good movies you’ll want to watch again and again.

Read. “Ours was a sky real estate so dark, we could track / the Milky Way cartwheeling over our house / could hold the plasmic whiskers of its twilit clouds / accountable for our paradoxes”

Spend time with a poem by Miciah Pendarvis.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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

Just 50 days before his reelection, Donald Trump took the time to hawk a new crypto platform.

If the country does not build out its cryptocurrency ecosystem, “we’re not going to be the biggest, and we have to be the biggest and the best,” Trump said on a livestream on X. “It’s very young and very growing. And if we don’t do it, China’s going to do it.” The livestream was sponsored by World Liberty Financial, which has given Trump the title “chief crypto advocate” and his sons, Barron, Eric, and Donald Jr., that of “Web3 ambassador.”

World Liberty Financial is the brainchild of Zak Folkman (the creator of an advisory firm called Date Hotter Girls LLC) and Chase Herro (an affiliate marketer who previously sold colon cleanses). It is a get-rich-quick scheme, and not one that seems designed to enrich its customers.

It is also an emblem of a financial world that Trump’s election seems set to supercharge, populated by young men who have seen their economic prospects stagnate, their faith in the United States falter, and a champion in a baggy business suit and a red baseball cap emerge. Think of it as the bro-economy: a volatile, speculative, and extremely online casino, in which the house is already winning big.

[Christopher Beam: The worst of crypto is yet to come]

Its first major market sector: day-trading. I don’t mean old-fashioned, small-dollar equity investing done at the kitchen table. I mean hyper-speculative betting done with borrowed money on mobile apps, as investors shitpost and infinite-scroll. Market-moving rumors come not from corporate conferences, but from sites like YouTube and the Subreddit WallStreetBets (tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”). Users at times coordinate to buy up a certain stock with the explicit goal of screwing over a hedge fund that had bet the stock would go down.

That’s what happened four years ago with GameStop: Redditors helped to push the share price up 8,000 percent. Now so-called meme stocks are resurgent. GameStop spiked this spring. Tesla climbed when Trump won. (Tesla is both a blue-chip stock and a meme stock; Elon Musk, the company’s founder, is one of Trump’s biggest donors and closest advisers, as well as being a storied internet troll and the owner of the social-media platform X.) “This rally seems unsustainable, even if you believe in the long-term growth story for the stock,” David Wagner of Aptus Capital Advisors told Bloomberg. “It makes no sense.”

As noted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, this trading behavior is in part driven by market democratization. A decade ago, the fintech firm Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading, allowing individuals to buy stocks or other financial assets without paying any fees. Today’s apps also allow users to purchase fractions of a stock and do not set minimum balances, ushering in less wealthy investors.

The barriers to entry are low, yet the risks are high. Today’s young day-traders tend to make frequent transactions and gravitate toward exotic trades, when research shows that investors generate the best returns when they make simple investments infrequently. The apps encourage the piling-on of risk through push alerts, promotions, and other gamifications.

The second crucial market sector: sports betting. In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a 1992 law banning commercial sports betting outside of Nevada. That paved the way for more than three dozen states to okay the practice; 30 states also allow residents to make wagers online.

It would be hard to overstate how much this has changed pro sports and the fan experience over the past half decade. Commentators talk about fantasy leagues and prop bets as much as they talk about the game; advertisements for sportsbooks are ubiquitous; millions of spectators keep DraftKings and FanDuel up on their second screen. An estimated two in five American adults engage in sport betting. One in four online bettors has wagered more than $500 in a single day. Americans staked $120 billion last year, double what they did in 2021.

Many die-hard fans love the rise of sports betting: It’s entertaining, engaging, a way to support your favorite players and dunk on your friends. Still, in a survey, 37 percent of online bettors said they “felt bad or ashamed” for losing money. Nearly 40 percent said they bet more than they should; nearly 20 percent said they lied about the extent of their betting, and the same share said they lost cash that was meant for their day-to-day financial obligations. A strong majority supported the federal government “aggressively” regulating the market, “to specifically protect customers from compulsive gambling.”

Third and last is crypto, which boomed into the mainstream a decade ago. Today, roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto. Sites such as Robinhood and Coinbase make purchasing easy. (Buying bitcoin used to take significant know-how and days of waiting.) The most recent bust, in 2022, seems to have done little to deter crypto’s most ardent fans.

There might be more of them soon. For years, Trump was anti-crypto. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he wrote on Twitter five years ago. He added: “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”

Today, he’s not just promoting shady crypto start-ups. He’s promising regulation that would allow banks to offer crypto assets to clients, making the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” Industry-friendly rules would lead to a flood of cash entering the crypto markets, enriching anyone with assets already in their wallets, but also increasing volatility and exposing millions more Americans to scams, frauds, and swindles.

Day-trading, sports betting, and crypto are three floors in one bustling, high-stakes casino. Many folks trade crypto and meme stocks on the same platform, thumbing over to a second app to keep their sports bets going, thumbing over again to post their wins and losses. Apps have made the experience social. They have also made staking money as frictionless as ordering Uber Eats.

[Charles Fain Lehman: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake]

The players in this casino are overwhelmingly young men, roughly 40 percent of whom are into sports betting and crypto. (A smaller minority is actively trading.) No surprise, Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me, when I called to ask about the bro-economy. “Risk skews male, period, for good and for ill,” he said. “There’s this greater willingness, appetite for, vulnerability to, tolerance of risk.” He appreciated how the activities gave guys something to do together and talk about with one another. He also noted how many young men felt shut out of traditional wealth-building strategies, such as homeownership.

Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.

Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.