Seven Weekend Reads

The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new. (From 2024)

When it comes to lasting romance, passion has nothing on friendship. (From 2021)

Five years ago, the flight vanished into the Indian Ocean. Officials on land know more about why than they dare to say. (From 2019)

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school. (From 2024)

Hans Luther was the principled and respected president of the Reichsbank—but he wouldn’t accede to Hitler’s demands.

Would you raise kids with your best pals?

People with generational wealth control a society that they don’t understand.

1. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a new series that tells the story of Knox’s wrongful conviction for the murder of her roommate (out Wednesday on Hulu)
2. The 15th-anniversary rerelease of Black Swan, a movie about the manipulative relationship between a veteran ballet dancer and her rival (in theaters Thursday)
3. All the Tomorrows After, a novel by Joanne Yi about a teenager wrestling with loss and belonging (out Tuesday)

The shift begins when she leaves her desk at 5 p.m.

She drives home, arriving at 5:45. Five minutes later, she’s starting a load of laundry; at 6 p.m. she changes into workout clothes. By 6:25 she’s on the treadmill for precisely 30 minutes. At 7 o’clock she grabs a grocery delivery from her front porch and unloads it. At 7:15 she makes an electrolyte drink. Shower time is at 7:25. At 8 p.m. she cooks up some salmon and broccoli; at 8:25 she plates her dinner while tidily packing up the leftovers. Not a moment is wasted …

In the past few weeks, I have lived months’ worth of compressed mornings and evenings with 5-to-9 vloggers. They are a self-selecting crew, certainly. But the sheer volume of hours that I consumed allowed me to see, in a big-picture way, how the need to be productive seeps into people’s leisure time—time that ideally would be free of such concerns. These videos reflect a truth that predates and will almost certainly outlive them: When life revolves around work, even leisure becomes labor.