The Strange Comfort of a Rewatch

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 familiar dilemma: You open Netflix, determined to watch something new. Twenty minutes of scrolling later, after having rejected dozens of perfectly fine options, you land on a movie you’ve seen many times before.We do this constantly—rewatch TV shows, replay albums, reread favorite books until entire scenes or lyrics are committed to memory. Part of the reason is comfort. Familiar things require less from us; they deliver the emotional payoff we expect. But repetition is also a way of revisiting earlier versions of ourselves. Old songs, movies, and shows become emotional time capsules, preserving not just the stories but the person we were when we first loved them. “We like repeating pop-culture experiences because they help us remember the past, and the act of remembering the past feels good,” Derek Thompson wrote in 2014.In a pop-culture era of infinite choices, there is something deeply reassuring about a story that ends just the way you expect it to. Trivial as it might be, that kind of familiarity can make us feel understood.On Familiar FavoritesOn Repeat: Why People Watch Movies and Shows Over and OverBy Derek Thompson The glory of old films, memories, and the existential therapy of nostalgia (From 2014) Read the article.What Rereading Childhood Books Teaches Adults About ThemselvesBy Emma Court Whether they delight or disappoint, old books provide touchstones for tracking personal growth. (From 2018) Read the article.15 Books You Won’t Regret RereadingBy Bethanne Patrick Years after these titles were popular, they’re still worth picking up. (From 2022) Read the article.Still Curious? People underestimate how fun it is to do the same thing twice. It’s common to prize novelty in leisure activities, but research suggests that revisiting the familiar can offer unexp