The Atlantic

A Do-Nothing Day Makes Life Better

Lounging around can free up time for things beyond your to-do list.
Source: Westend61 / Getty

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.

“A few years ago, my wife, Angie, and I made a pact,” Jason Heller in . “, we swore to each other, . And we kept our promise: On the second day of each weekend, we start our morning and end our night by bingeing TV in bed. In the middle of the day, we binge TV on the couch, taking breaks exclusively to nap or read.” The anxiety of looming to-do lists sometimes creeps in, but “we fight to stay still,” he writes.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic3 min read
They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America
The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ult
The Atlantic11 min read
Something’s Fishy About the ‘Migrant Crisis’
When the mayor of New York, of all places, warned that a recent influx of asylum seekers would destroy his city, something didn’t add up. “I said it last year when we had 15,000, and I’m telling you now at 110,000. The city we knew, we’re about to lo
The Atlantic8 min readAmerican Government
The Return of the John Birch Society
Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment. Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and oppositi

Related Books & Audiobooks