The Atlantic

Wedding plus-ones are expensive—what if we did away with them? Faith Hill argues that wedding guests might have more fun without them. “Plus-one-free weddings might push us to try something different. Maybe the single guests wouldn’t feel excluded, because the coupled-up ones going solo for the night would be more game to mingle,” Hill writes. “Maybe those guests untethered from their partner would actually cherish an opportunity to meet people on their own—to be known for one night as an individual, not half of a whole … Regardless, everyone would be fine. Or more than fine: Their life, in some way subtle or significant, might expand.” https://lnkd.in/eRi3zs7d

For an entire set of in-demand restaurants, a card isn’t just for paying the bill: It’s something like an entry ticket in its own right, writes Saahil Desai:

In his new book, Cody Delistraty chronicles his almost decade-long journey to heal his grief—only to discover that there is no remedy, Linda Kinstler writes. https://lnkd.in/eG-vttpV After Delistraty lost his mother to cancer, he found himself taking the “path of least resistance” in conversations, partaking in what he calls the “bullshit dance we all do” to deflect and minimize the weight of our losses. “In ‘The Grief Cure,’ his debut work of nonfiction, Delistraty makes an admirable attempt to write his way out of that ‘bullshit dance,’ to directly confront the contours of his own grief,” Kinstler writes. “Yet his writing ends up mired in the same unsatisfying truisms about the universality and incommunicability of death that ostensibly propelled his project in the first place.” His search for grief cures takes him far and wide. He tries an exercise regime, and something called “laughter therapy,” in which he forces himself to laugh until he might cry. He uses audio recordings of his mother to program AI bots that can imitate her personality; he takes mushrooms, he goes on a silent retreat to the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur; he pays $3,295 to attend a “breakup bootcamp” to see if it is possible to break up with his grief the same way one breaks up with a destructive ex. “In sum, Delistraty wears himself—and his reader—out by frenetically searching for ‘cures’ for his grief, cures that, somewhere along the way, he realizes will never come. He seems lost, and his lostness, more than anything else, identifies him as a bereaved person. In the end, rather than finding a remedy for his incurable condition, he seems intent on drawing it out,” Kinstler continues at the link in our bio. Delistraty admits that his search for solutions allowed him to keep his grief close. But, Kinstler argues, “he is so busy giving himself tasks to complete and ‘grief cures’ to try that he at times seems to sidestep the true nature of his experience, treading lightly wherever he considers the profound emotional toll of his loss.” 📸:Sydney Mieko King

In The Atlantic Memo, we catch you up on the best Atlantic stories about work, business, productivity, creativity, and more. This week: the secrets for later-in-life success.

A strange new trend has emerged on social media, leading Caroline Mimbs Nyce to address a big question: "Why on earth does AI present the son of God as such a smoke show?"

Amazon is slowing down, Louise Matsakis writes. https://lnkd.in/es4kEtGX Amazon stole business from booksellers and most other kinds of retail stores by prioritizing speed, building the most expansive and brutally optimized logistics empire the United States has ever seen. “Even at a moment when many people report feeling squeezed financially, most of them still think it’s worth spending $139 a year to ensure that stuff arrives at their doorstep swiftly, sometimes in as little as a few hours,” Matsakis writes. Recently, Amazon has encountered a new threat to its model: low-cost e-commerce platforms, such as Shein and Temu, that send products directly from China with no middleman. The shipping takes longer, but the prices are lower. Amazon now plans “to follow the Shein and Temu playbook and open a new online store for low-cost products shipped directly from China,” Matsakis writes. “Orders will arrive in nine to 11 days—a relative eternity compared with how long most of its customers are used to waiting … When given the choice, Amazon seems to have realized, lots of people will choose stuff that is really cheap over stuff that arrives really quickly.” Amazon and its rival e-commerce platforms offer similar products, sometimes shipped from the same suppliers in China. But the products cost more on Amazon, in part because of Amazon’s speedy delivery. “That speed is possible because Amazon has poured billions into building warehouses and other logistics infrastructure in the United States. Fast shipping is a convenience that comes at a cost,” Matsakis continues. Amazon was used to undercutting retail stores with lower prices; what it didn’t anticipate “is that consumers would eventually be given appealing options that come directly from the source.” “But as this kind of ultracheap shopping takes over, there are downsides beyond just slower shipping times,” Matsakis writes. 🎨: Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

"This routinization of AI that doesn’t simply talk with us, but also acts out in the world, is a crossing of the blood-brain barrier between digital and analog, bits and atoms. That should give us pause." Jonathan Zittrain on the looming bot crisis:

Caffeine banishes lethargy, calms you down, and boosts your cognition. Most important, it makes you happy, @Arthur-c-brooks writes in this week’s “How to Build a Life”: https://lnkd.in/ektZjFp3 #happiness #coffee

For centuries, strict social norms dictated what people could politely talk about. Now we have to figure it out for ourselves. (From 2022)

“Donald Trump’s defenders on the Supreme Court repeat one of the most basic principles of American constitutional government: ‘The president is not above the law.’ They then proceed to obliterate it,” Adam Serwer writes. https://lnkd.in/eGgFMRWh