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 colleague Olga Khazan shared a radical proposition: What if we stopped firing our friends? The friendship breakup has become a feature of modern life: Online, advice abounds on “how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us,” Olga noted. But what if another solution exists? Instead of firing your friends, psychologists told her, it helps to expand your circle, allowing more people to provide you with different types of support or camaraderie: “Rather than resting on one pillar, healthy friendship is better imagined as crowd-surfing—many hands hol

See Full Page