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.In 1980, the film critic Roger Ebert attended a conference filled with discussion about “new home video entertainment centers.” When he left, he was disturbed.

Since the pandemic’s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more mid-year surges like the one that turned Hot Vax Summer on its head. Eventually, or so the hope went, SARS-CoV-2 would adhere to the same calendar that many other airway pathogens stick to, at least in temperate parts of the globe: a heavy winter peak, then a summer on sabbatical.

Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely.

When UPS delivery workers last went on strike, in 1997, the nature of their job was very different. Amazon, then merely an online bookstore, was barely two years out from its very first sale. Buying jeans, or new furniture, or really anything, still required most people to get in their car and head to the local mall.

Updated at 6:48 p.m. ET on July 28, 2023This 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.Beer was once king. Now, with seltzers, canned cocktails, and other tasty beverages on the rise, what will become of brews?First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Barbie is everything. Ken is everything else.

“Actually, we have Starry,” the counter clerk said. It was early spring of this year, and I was ordering a lemon-lime soft drink. I had asked for Sprite but was told that the establishment, a Pepsi shop, had Sierra Mist instead. But wait, it didn’t have that either, because Pepsi had just killed off its 22-year-old lemon-lime brand and replaced it with a new one: Starry. Did I want a Starry? I guessed so.

In this summer of heat domes and record-breaking global temperatures, finding a place to cool off is more important than ever. You can go to a movie or a museum—if you want to buy a ticket. You can head to an air-conditioned bar—if you don’t have kids who also need to escape the heat. Or you can just stay at home and blast your own air conditioner—a rather lonely prospect, if you ask me.

Updated at 8:09 p.m. ET on July 28, 2023Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith secured a superseding indictment in the classified-documents case against Donald Trump and his aide Waltine Nauta in federal court in Florida. The revised indictment adds a new defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, a property manager at Mar-a-Lago, as well as two new obstruction-of-justice counts for attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence.

More than a decade ago, in a prescient essay for Scientific American, the inventor of the World Wide Web denounced what Facebook and other tech giants were doing to his signature invention. “Why should you care?” Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the time. “Because the Web is yours.