Seven Reads for a Summer Weekend

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On your Sunday, explore stories about the one book everyone should read, what McKinsey did to the middle class, and more.

Fewer young people are getting into relationships.

The Atlantic’s staffers on the books they share—again and again

The show’s creators once said they had nothing more to say about the president. What changed their minds?

If you can recognize their signature move, then forewarned is forearmed.

You can handle these, we promise. (From 2022)

Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities. (From 2020)

Why is it so hard for disabled people to find safe, accessible places to live?

1. Greetings From Your Hometown, a new album by the Jonas Brothers (out Friday)
2. People Like Us, by the National Book Award–winner Jason Mott, a novel about two Black writers trying to live in a world filled with gun violence (out Tuesday)
3. Ted Bundy: Dialogue With the Devil, a new Ted Bundy docuseries that features newly uncovered interviews and recordings (out Thursday on Hulu)

“Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. “An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.” What to call Grant’s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.

• Comfort TV is overrated.
• How Justin Bieber finally gave us the song of the summer
• All end-of-the-world menace, all the time
• Hulk Hogan stayed in character to the end.
• Eight books for dabblers

• How NASA engineered its own decline
• Quinta Jurecic: The FBI’s leaders “have no idea what they’re doing.”
• Why Trump broke with Bibi over the Gaza famine