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.

It’s humbling to realize that other people may live the majority of their life at entirely different hours than you do. If you’re a morning person, you’re sleeping through the joys, crises, snacks, arguments, and laughs of many night owls—and vice versa.

Morning people and night people can feel like warring species, and each will jump at the chance to tell you why their way is the better one. But responsibilities and schedules sometimes necessitate changing our habits, and even the most dedicated morning person can find themselves needing to stay up late. For the writer Liz Krieger, moments of connection with her daughters made staying up a little later worth it: “I know I’ll never be someone who comes alive at midnight, but I am learning to stretch the boundaries of my days to let a little of the night in,” she wrote recently. Today’s newsletter explores sleep habits, and what happens when we try to change them.

On Sleep Habits

The Social Cost of Being a Morning Person

By Liz Krieger

Rising early is great for my productivity—and hard on my relationships.

Read the article.

The False Promise of Morning Routines

By Marina Koren

Why everyone’s mornings seem more productive than yours (From 2019)

Read the article.

The Nocturnals

By Faith Hill

While most people are fast asleep, some ultra-introverts are going about their lives, reveling in the quiet and solitude. They challenge a core assumption of psychology: that all humans need social connection. (From 2022)

Read the article.

Still Curious? • The logic of the “9 to 5” is creeping into the rest of the day: How free time gets conscripted into the service of work • The life of a person who wakes up really, really early: “Extreme larks” get up naturally when some people have hardly gone to bed. (From 2019)

Other Diversions • “Grandparenting on eggshells” • The great mystery of drumming • The culture war comes to the kitchen.

PS

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I've seen double rainbows before, but never with a view of both ends,” Lesley Grant, 60, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, writes.

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Isabel