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.As I watch my friends grow older and enter new phases of life, I’ve noticed a common thread: Year after year, many of us happen upon questions we wish we’d...

Preparing a birth plan requires considering the many things that could go wrong during childbirth—or, in the best-case scenario of everything proceeding as normal, how you might attempt to mitigate earth-shattering pain. In Babes, a new comedy about two best friends navigating pregnancy and the delirium of postpartum life, one woman is determined to...

Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars. With that,...

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.The last rat on Tromelin Island—a small teardrop of scrubby sand in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar—was killed in 2005.Rats had lived on the island for hundreds of rat generations. The rodents likely arrived in the late 1700s, when a French ship—carrying Malagasy people kidnapped for the...

Nearly 20 million people gained health-insurance coverage between 2010 and 2016 under the Affordable Care Act. But about half of insured adults worry about affording their monthly premiums, while roughly the same number worry about affording their deductibles. At least six states don’t include dental coverage in Medicaid, and 10 still refuse to expand...

It is nighttime in Paris. We are more than a year into Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and tonight, her fans are once again trying to figure out what her clothes mean.The star is in a glittering yellow-and-red two-piece set, a possible reference to the colors of the Kansas City Chiefs, the football team Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays on. This is also...