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.
“When I decided to attend seminary … I told people it was to ‘find myself,’” Benjamin Perry wrote earlier this year. “That frame suggests that I yearned to forge a new identity and discover my future. But in fact, I went because I yearned for a more honest emotional life—and that type of life, I would later realize, is watered by tears.”
Perry had spent years unable to cry, and he sensed that he had lost something important. He embarked on an attempt to weep daily—and when he learned to cry again, he found what was missing:
When I was younger, I thought about tears as a consequence: the emotional sum of previous experiences, evidence of the past cascading down our cheeks. Now, however, I think about tears as a doorway: an invitation to be fully human and to connect with others, in all the complexity that entails.
Today’s newsletter spends some time with our tears—not purely as consequences or inconveniences, but as a core human experience.
On Crying
What I Lost When I Stopped Crying
By Benjamin Perry
When my tears disappeared, so did any possibility of an honest emotional life.
The Not-So-Secret Key to Emotional Balance
By Arthur C. Brooks
Crying can help you keep your feelings in check. It’s also inextricably bound up in spirituality.
Why We Cry on Planes
By Elijah Wolfson
Alone among strangers with little to do, a moment of calm amid the stress of travel
Still Curious?
- An ode to crying babies: “Crying baby, I hear you. I’ve got no choice but to hear you. You’re 10 rows ahead of me in Economy, raging like Lear on the heath,” James Parker writes.
- Lean in to crying at work: It’s time to bring back the noble art of public weeping, Olga Khazan argued in 2014.
Other Diversions
- AI’s spicy-mayo problem
- When canola was a new word
- No, you shouldn’t “date ’em ’til you hate ’em.”
P.S.
I’ll leave you with a few more lines from James Parker’s ode to crying babies. If the little ones in your life need a pep talk, I recommend the following:
“Keep it up, little tyrant. You’ve got a lot of power, and no power at all. You’re a tiny fist shaken at the heavens. Soon you’ll be talking, and language will betray you. You’ll say vague, helpless things and make bad jokes. But right now your protest is very direct, very effective.”
— Isabel