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.The question “What is a Christmas movie?” might seem straightforward. But there’s one film that has scrambled the logic of the holiday movie for years now—at least for those who probably spend too much time online.

Leo Tolstoy’s observation in Anna Karenina is famous to the point of becoming a cliché: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it wouldn’t have become a truism if it didn’t resonate—whether or not you agree with the first part, the second half is inarguably a fact.

The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun.

For a few years of my childhood, Kwanzaa was a big deal. I recall attending three Kwanzaa celebrations hosted by Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Baltimore. My cousin Olivia Moyd Hazell, at the time the church’s director of Christian education, organized them. About 50 church members and friends, many wearing kente cloth, would file into a softly lit basement the weekend after Christmas.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. On Tuesday, Colorado’s Supreme Court disqualified Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot after determining that his actions on January 6, 2021, made him ineligible under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause.

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.Why are “year in review” roundups so pleasing to users?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The real reason for marriage polarization
Harvard has a Veritas problem.
A sex scandal. A conservative power network. And Moms for Liberty.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.The bedrock of the AI revolution is the internet, or more specifically, the ever-expanding bounty of data that the web makes available to train algorithms.

From the standpoint of many on the left, former President Donald Trump did exactly two good things in office. He supported Operation Warp Speed, which facilitated the development and production of the first COVID-19 vaccines. And in 2018, he signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal-justice bill that shortened federal prison terms, gave judges more latitude in sentencing, and provided educational programming to ease prisoners’ eventual return to the outside world.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.My fondness for the acknowledgments section of books runs very deep. Sometimes I flip to them first, though I try to hold off on this guilty pleasure. I love the way they can reveal a writer’s true, gushy self beneath the veneer of authorial control and style, reminding us of the human being who struggled to bring these pages into existence.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.