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.

The first chapter of Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 best seller, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, opens on a December evening in 1972, when masked intruders entered the West Belfast home of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widowed mother of 10. As they dragged her away into a van, she told one of her sons to watch his siblings until she returned. And then she never did.

Keefe unspools the circumstances surrounding McConville’s disappearance over the course of his nonfiction doorstopper. Her kidnapping—and eventual murder—was just one crime among many that occurred during what’s known as the Troubles: From the late ’60s to the Good Friday Agreement that brokered peace in 1998, Catholic republicans seeking Irish independence clashed with Protestant factions and British soldiers, leaving thousands dead across Northern Ireland. Based on his own interviews and those conducted for a Boston College oral-history project, Keefe paints a panoramic portrait of the era that reads more like a novel than a history lesson. He studies how a common, radical cause can yield intense bonds—and also lead to profound trauma.

FX’s excellent nine-episode adaptation, now streaming on Hulu, matches the book’s ambition. The show, also called Say Nothing, similarly begins with the kidnapping of McConville (played by Judith Roddy) and subsequently delves into an ensemble of key figures involved in the Troubles. (Keefe served as an executive producer, working closely with the writers and the creator, Joshua Zetumer, to ensure an authentic adaptation.) But whereas the book tells much of the story chronologically, the series often collapses time, primarily shifting between the 1970s and the 2000s. Doing so streamlines the conflict and its aftermath into a study of juxtapositions: between youthful passion and adult disillusionment, collective ideology and individual responsibility, the appeal of secrecy and the power of confession. Sometimes, the series argues, history yields no heroes or villains, just people whose convictions curdle into confusion, and whose wounds never fully heal.

[Read: How conflicts end—and who can end them]

Dolours Price learned that firsthand. As a teenager during the early days of the Troubles, she joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary group that broke away from the original IRA. Its young members, Dolours included, believed in using violent tactics to counter discrimination against Catholics; they were regularly harassed by the British police, prevented from living in some neighborhoods, and denied certain jobs. Like its source material, which uses a photograph of her on its cover, the show is drawn to Dolours and follows her life story the closest, from her childhood to her death, in 2013. Teenage Dolours quickly developed a reputation among her peers as a mouthy, attractive militant who rejected the “woman’s work” of making tea that the Provisional IRA (a.k.a. “Provos”) leaders assigned her. Older Dolours seemed wary of her notoriety, refusing later chances to rejoin the fight. Instead, she became a source for the Belfast Project, Boston College’s oral history of the group’s activities, thereby implicating herself as a participant in some of the Provos’ most brutal crimes, including Jean’s murder.

The show makes clear that despite how much Dolours’s attitude changed over time, she remained the same person at her core. The younger and older versions of Dolours—played respectively by Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake, both magnetic and well cast—overlap throughout the adaptation, an elegant choice that helps hold the sprawling narrative together. The older Dolours’s reflections soundtrack scenes of her younger self at work; the younger Dolours’s eagerness runs counter to her older self’s evident pain. Dolours’s foundational goals take center stage as the story hopscotches across time: Although she was raised to believe in the cause of Irish independence, her biggest motivation was her love for her little sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe). In her youth, she stayed at home and joined the Provos in part because going to university instead would have meant their separation. In old age, she never gave up Marian’s activities as another, more trigger-happy Provo. The focus on Dolours is pivotal to the show’s success: She embodies the struggle to separate your life and identity from the larger conflict, even after it ends.

Dolours is also an effective point of contrast for Jean, allowing the show to explore the different ways these two women moved through the world. An early scene of Dolours’s induction into the IRA, after she’s argued successfully that she can do more than serve her male peers, is spliced together with shots of Jean and her 10 children moving into their own apartment for the first time. Both women are bucking expectations; both seek to protect their families. Yet Jean’s identity as a widowed single mother is, to the IRA, a sign of weakness, a possible reason for her to become an informant for the British; her neighbors also ostracize her for comforting a wounded British soldier who collapsed outside her home. Dolours weaponizes her femininity, flirting with a border-patrol officer to gain entry into Ireland during a mission, and her Provos superiors reward her for adopting the organization’s ruthlessness. Once she’s “promoted” to be the group’s Charon, ferrying the IRA’s perceived enemies to their executions, she must also shepherd some of her own friends to their death—a responsibility that weighs on her conscience. Neither woman can disentangle her quest for independence from the unrest around her.

[Read: Great sex in the time of war]

Say Nothing is not absent of possible antagonists—it treats Gerry Adams (Josh Finan in early scenes, Michael Colgan later on), the alleged former IRA member who later helped negotiate the peace accord in 1998 in part by turning his back on the organization, with both skepticism and sympathy. (A disclaimer at the end of every episode notes his ongoing denials of involvement in the IRA.) But the show is more interested in pointing out that the thoroughly human impulse to belong can also be shortsighted, even naive. The Provos’ extreme views allowed for a deep-seated sense of community, and these idealistic teens and 20-somethings approached their terrorist activities with starry-eyed enthusiasm: Dolours and Marian don costumes to rob a bank, giggling together after they accomplish the heist. The Provos grab beers and gossip about their crushes in between rigging car bombs. Even the older Dolours reflects upon some moments with a wistful nostalgia, underscoring the continued allure of a movement that had seemed so righteous and revolutionary.

The consequences of belonging to such communities endure too. In the pilot, one of Jean’s sons clings to her leg before the masked Provos take her away; later in the episode, Dolours does the same to a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, grasping his leg tightly after he fends off a Protestant man who beats her with a baton at a civil-rights march. Taken together, these shots illustrate how cyclical violence and despair can be: Dolours’s failed attempt at peaceful protest leads to her devotion to the Provos, and that leads only to more pain—for her and others. Say Nothing presents Jean’s and Dolours’s fates as intertwined from the start, even before it reveals Dolours’s role in Jean’s murder—an indication of just how intimate the Troubles really were.

In focusing so much on Dolours and the Provos, Say Nothing doesn’t adapt some of the most intriguing turns in Keefe’s account—the mass prison hunger strike in the 1980s, the Belfast Project’s struggle to preserve the anonymity of its interviewees—and fast-forwards through years of political upheaval. In their stead, the series offers a thoughtfully constructed study of the conflict’s moral complexity. Say Nothing demonstrates that war can easily bring groups of people together. Ending the fighting—reckoning with atrocities, confessing to misdeeds, and assigning blame—is the hard part.