Six Stories on Love and Family
Spending time with loved ones during the holiday season can prompt some people to reflect on the roles that family and parenting have played in their life. In today’s reading list, our editors have compiled stories on make-or-break marriage lessons, how to raise confident kids, the plight of the eldest daughter, and more.
Your Reading List
Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids
Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.
By Russell Shaw
Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country
Raising kids shouldn’t be this hard.
By Stephanie H. Murray
The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late
The existence of love, trust, respect, and safety in a relationship is often dependent on moments you might write off as petty disagreements.
By Matthew Fray
The Plight of the Eldest Daughter
Women are expected to be nurturers. Firstborns are expected to be exemplars. Being both is exhausting.
By Sarah Sloat
Find the Place You Love. Then Move There.
If where you live isn’t truly your home, and you have the resources to make a change, it could do wonders for your happiness.
By Arthur C. Brooks
A Shift in American Family Values Is Fueling Estrangement
Parents and adult children alike often fail to recognize how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half century.
By Joshua Coleman
The Week Ahead
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Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, an action series starring Jude Law as a Force-user who encounters four lost children trying to get back home (premieres Monday on Disney+)
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Y2K, a comedy-horror film directed by the Saturday Night Live alum Kyle Mooney about machines and technology turning against humans in the year 2000 (in theaters Friday)
- Havoc, a suspenseful novel by Christopher Bollen about an elderly widow whose past resurfaces when she meets a young mother and her son at a hotel (out Tuesday)
Essay
The Fairy Tale We’ve Been Retelling for 125 Years
By Allegra Rosenberg
Oz persists primarily through the books’ many adaptations, which established the series’ enduring iconography. [The author L. Frank] Baum’s world is best remembered as it has appeared on-screen, especially in the 1939 musical film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy: a place bursting with songs such as “Over the Rainbow” and visuals such as the yellow brick road, which have become the franchise’s most memorable features. And with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s 1956 entry into the public domain, allowing for new, noncanonical works, subsequent generations have iterated on these hallmarks to tell Oz stories of their own.
No transformation has been more vital to Oz’s longevity than Wicked.
More in Culture
- Kendrick Lamar makes his point clearer.
- Thanksgiving should be in October.
- “Dear James”: My home is a horror of unfinished tasks.
- Taylor Swift is a perfect example of how publishing is changing.
- The sense that most defines a culture
Catch Up on The Atlantic
- Jonathan Chait: Moderation is not the same thing as surrender.
- Revenge of the COVID contrarians
- Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake
Photo Album
Take a look at the winning entries of the 2024 International Landscape Photographer of the Year competition, including a tornado in Texas, fireflies in a forest, and more.
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