During the years-long height of the British superstar Robbie Williams’s fame, I’d often wonder why he struggled to cross over to true global recognition. Williams, for those who are unfamiliar, started out as a member of the wildly beloved English boy band Take That in the early 1990s. After leaving the group in 1995, right when its success was cresting, Williams transformed himself from potential pop-culture footnote into icon. A slew of blockbuster albums made him a household name across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia—but not in the United States, where his early-2000s attempts to gain traction made little progress. Perhaps the country had too many of its own idols—or perhaps, as the new musical biopic Better Man argues, Williams was too gleefully self-deprecating to sincerely make the sales pitch.

The director Michael Gracey adheres to the biopic genre’s basic contours. Better Man follows Williams’s hardscrabble youth, his rise to fame, and the ups and downs that came with notoriety, all punctuated by interpretations of some of his most famous tracks. This synopsis suggests that the film is a programmatic, musician-approved project, almost as if it’s designed to be an entry point for a new generation of fans. Except, get this: Williams is represented as a CGI chimpanzee. Like, a walking, talking, human-size chimp, portrayed and voiced by a combination of a motion-capture actor (Jonnie Davies), a musician (Adam Tucker), and Williams himself.

Why is he a primate? Better Man doesn’t ever explain—though in its trailer, Williams mentions feeling “less evolved” than everyone else—and none of the characters ever remarks on it. Instead, the meaning of the conceit is left in the hands of the audience. This decision is a baffling swerve for a celebrity biopic, one that will probably keep it from becoming an out-and-out sensation. But Better Man deserves to be treated as more than a strange curio: Despite the seemingly run-of-the-mill premise and the contrivance of the protagonist, it properly delves into its subject’s erratic persona, using the musical segments to advance the story instead of as mandatory breaks in the action. The result is one of the most thoughtfully constructed movies about a musician I’ve seen in years.

[Read: Bob Dylan broke rules. A Complete Unknown follows them.]

A core part of Williams’s appeal has always been his cheekiness, as the Brits would put it. Yes, he’s a handsome fella who sings catchy hits. But even though his stock-in-trade is sincere love ballads and toe-tapping anthems about having fun, Williams exudes the sense that he’s never taking any of the glitz around him too seriously. His narration throughout Better Man poses a possible reason for his devil-may-care attitude: It’s a cover for what he refers to as the clinical depression that has dogged him over the course of his career, especially at its peak. What better way to underline that than by removing his image from the film entirely?

The appealing presentation of chimp-Williams is helped by the fact that Gracey started his career as a visual-effects artist—he knows his way around computer-generated characters. His prior directorial effort was The Greatest Showman, a more conventional movie musical that tried to package the complex and problematic life of P. T. Barnum as a family-friendly inspirational tale. It made little sense, but it became something of a box-office phenomenon on the backs of Hugh Jackman’s bravado and Gracey’s steady hand behind the camera.

Better Man has not only similarly earwormy tunes but also a far richer subject than Barnum. Williams is a showman too, but he’s a rawer, more relatable one; he’s always worn his personal deficiencies on his sleeve, even on the biggest stage. Gracey’s attentive care with Williams’s discography is especially striking. Williams’s career could easily have been shot as a straightforward jukebox musical, running down the track listing of his greatest-hits CDs while sprinkling in some run-of-the-mill backstory material. Instead, Gracey rearranges the chronology, finding numbers that thematically match the events of his protagonist’s life. Williams performs the power ballad “Feel,” the lead single from his fifth solo album, to illustrate his tough childhood. The director re-creates the singer’s famed 2001 live rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” for Better Man’s grand finale; instead of just plucking another of the singer’s own numbers, he chooses to evoke one of Williams’s biggest inspirations.

[Read: The missing piece of the Bob Marley biopic]

The film’s most jaw-dropping set piece is also perhaps its most timeline-flouting. After covering his difficult adolescence in the downtrodden industrial town of Stoke-on-Trent, Better Man turns to Williams’s early years in the music industry. Gracey captures the explosion of Take That’s crossover appeal—they climbed the ladder from small gay clubs to national arenas—in a scene where the band performs “Rock DJ,” Williams’s solo chart-topper from 2000. It unfolds as an unbroken, CGI-assisted camera move, with Williams and his bandmates—who, in real life, had nothing to do with the song—dancing through the streets of Central London, surrounded by a growing throng of fans. An artificial long take can sometimes come across as gimmicky, but it works tremendously well here, thanks in part to the creative choreography. Movie-musical directors must make certain decisions when mounting their big numbers: Should they throw everything into a wide shot, capturing the scale of the dance routines but making the world around them feel static? Or is it better to cut into the action constantly, highlighting the individual players but losing that sense of magnitude? The one-shot technique helpfully circumvents those questions.

Gracey makes an effort to innovate in several other ways, navigating around the musical genre’s visual conventions and limitations. A later scene, for example, renders the anthemic “Let Me Entertain You” as a dreamlike battle between Williams and his mouthiest chimp-demons. High points like these helped keep Better Man in my good graces even as the second half dips into excessively maudlin territory, as Williams wrestles with the strictures of fame. Still, some viewers might find the audacity of a hero that’s a CGI chimp impossible to overcome—especially those who know little about the real person (including what he actually looks like). Early box-office returns seem to indicate U.S. theatergoers’ disinterest, if not outright bafflement. But Williams has always thrived on the audience’s sympathy as much as their admiration, and Better Man finds a wonderfully goofy way to represent that with its charming, if unevolved, simian star.

How the Ivy League Broke America

The meritocracy isn’t working, David Brooks argued in the December 2024 issue. We need something new.

It is a very Ivy League thing to try to take credit for breaking America. I share David Brooks’s criticisms of a system that ranks and sorts based on test results. But standardized testing had taken hold in the United States long before James Conant’s presidency at Harvard. The danger of blaming the Ivy League for today’s overreliance on blunt ranking-and-sorting instruments is that we may be tempted to wait for the Ivy League to fix it. Instead, let’s agree that we also need leaders who flourished in local community colleges, regional universities, apprenticeships. The talent is out there—I saw it every day as a high-school teacher. But our current system sends the message that if you do not score well on standardized multiple-choice tests delivered in English, you are not capable.

Erin Crisp
Knoxville, Tenn.

Most of the elite schools David Brooks criticizes already evaluate “the whole person.” Cognitive metrics are only a small part of getting in. These institutions have invested heavily in evaluating applicants’ noncognitive skills, and arguably, the result is worse.

Families seeking to secure a spot at a top college must strategically position their child as a well-rounded applicant. They choose extracurricular activities and write admissions essays that demonstrate empathy, curiosity, the ability to overcome hardship—all things that Brooks wishes these institutions would evaluate. This approach has further advantaged families with the financial means to afford educational consultants, private coaching, and enrichment activities. We do need an alternative to the meritocratic system. Unfortunately, Brooks’s solution has already been swallowed by the meritocratic machine.

Pete Marshall
St. Louis Park, Minn.

Why is the central force controlling our economy and society today Ivy League admissions offices and not, say, the demands of global capitalism, the transition to a services-based economy, or the increasing value of symbolic thinking in those contexts? The world has changed in ways that reward a certain kind of intelligence. That may be good or bad, but it’s not primarily the fault of a small number of elite schools—it’s true in every developed economy.

Andrew Bartholomew
New York, N.Y.

It’s not utopian to imagine an American public-school system and society that recognize the skills and contributions of both the mechanic and the debater. They do it in Europe: Set into the bronze plaques on London’s Tower Bridge are the names of a plater, a rivet boy, a cook. In America, such a prestigious public placement on an iconic structure would honor only big corporate donors.

The people who pursue vocational education ought to be treated as a core constituency in arguments about the meritocracy, not as afterthoughts.

Sheela Clary
West Stockbridge, Mass.

David Brooks is right that America is broken, but he points his finger at the wrong culprit. Universities aren’t wrong to evaluate academic merit and select the students who will most benefit from the education they offer. The societal problem is an economic system that gives almost all of the benefits of growth to the already wealthy and not the working class. The economic elites are the real predators savaging the American dream—not the cultural elites.

Stuart J. Kaufman
Bear, Del.

Much of what David Brooks described resonated with me. I attended community college on a full Pell Grant; both of my parents were blue-collar workers. I loved school and I loved learning, but my parents could never afford to pay for extracurricular activities, Advanced Placement exams—I never even took the SAT. I always felt that there was an elite class of learning that I would never access.

And in many ways, I was right. I was rejected from hundreds of jobs, only to find out later that the successful candidate was from an elite school. This instilled in me what Brooks calls the sixth “deadly sin” of the meritocracy—“contempt for the entire system.” I now teach as an adjunct, and my students are generally much more well-off than I ever was. I fear my anger has made me less inclined to understand the very real stresses they face.

I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and for Kamala Harris in 2024. It was during this span of eight years that I attended college and then graduate school—I am a living example of the way education influences opinions and beliefs. Yet I empathize with the working-class voters of Texas, my home state, far more than I empathize with the elite voters of New York City.

Katherine A. Chase
Brooklyn, N.Y.

I am 92 years old. I attended a public high school in Cincinnati. When I told my principal I wanted to go to one of the best liberal-arts colleges, he recommended Harvard—he told me that Harvard would take up to seven students from my class. Looking through my records, he noticed that I was Jewish and qualified his statement, saying that Harvard would never take more than three Jews. Harvard accepted seven students from my class, including me, and six of us were Jewish. When I arrived in the fall of 1950, it was obvious that the quota system was gone—Jews made up a significant portion of my class. At a meeting with incoming students, the dean of freshmen proudly told us that our class had the highest average SAT score of any incoming college class in the country. I frequently saw James Conant walking in Harvard Yard, not knowing that he had made it possible for me to be there.

John J. Frank Jr.
Cincinnati, Ohio

David Brooks replies:

I’m grateful for the thoughtful responses. I’d like to highlight one area of disagreement and one area for further exploration. Pete Marshall says that “cognitive metrics are only a small part of getting” accepted to an elite school. I’d say they are the foundational part—the average Harvard freshman has an SAT score of about 1520. You have to meet those metrics before any other qualities are considered. Andrew Bartholomew suggests that the real problem is global capitalism in the Information Age. There’s a lot of truth to that. I do think universities churn out “knowledge workers” because intellectual life has been commodified. Students and workers are caught in the same system that wants us to live lives of total work. But my argument is that our system doesn’t even turn out ideal capitalists: Large numbers of new employees have to leave their firms because companies don’t know what to look for in applicants. They select for the qualities that the meritocracy can quantify—but those aren’t the qualities that matter. Intelligence is overrated, and temperament and desire are underrated.

A Note from the Editor in Chief

More than two decades ago, The Atlantic decided to reduce the number of print issues published each year, dropping from 12 to 10, thus ending the run of what had been previously called The Atlantic Monthly. The rise of the internet made this seem at the time, I’m sure, like an obvious and unavoidable choice. But the history of our magazine is filled with improbabilities, and today, more people subscribe to our print magazine than at any time since its birth, in 1857. Which is why we’ve decided to restore The Atlantic to monthly print publication, beginning with the issue you are currently reading.

The broader trends in the magazine business, and across journalism generally, are not promising. But The Atlantic continues to grow, because (I believe) our editorial team produces the highest-quality journalism, and because readers like you continue to find what we do useful, and even illuminating.

Last year was a very good year for The Atlantic. We crossed the million-subscription threshold; we became profitable again after running in the red for several years; and we won our third consecutive National Magazine Award for General Excellence, something no other magazine has done in this century. But mainly what we’ve tried to do is make important journalism. I hope, by your lights, that we are succeeding, and that you join me in finding the return of a monthly Atlantic a very happy thing.

— Jeffrey Goldberg

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “The Anti-Social Century,” Derek Thompson explores how Americans came to spend so much time alone, and what that solitude means for our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. For the cover, the illustrator Max Guther created a series of figures engaged in solitary activities. Arrayed across an otherwise blank field, Guther’s figures evoke a nation in which people have come to prefer their own company to that of others.

— Liz Hart, Art Director

The Atlantic

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

In 2016, the South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian, the first of her novels to be translated into English. The novel, in which a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat is treated as if she were mad, was read as a parable of the modern condition, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or “A Hunger Artist,” updated for the age of feminism and ecopolitics. In October, with three more of her novels now available in English and at least 20 other languages, the Swedish Academy awarded Han the Nobel Prize, elevating her to the empyrean realm reserved for writers of what is sometimes called world literature.

Internationally famous authors need no pity, but the status comes with vulnerabilities. Having been turned into global ambassadors for their culture, they are often accused of becoming deracinated and defanged. Han has dodged the charge so far. But suspicion fell on the English-language translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith, when the novel was propelled into the spotlight. Smith mistranslated some words, but her harsher detractors accused her of betraying Han’s limpid, understated style, torquing it so as to hold the attention of Western readers.

Works transposed into foreign languages—and cultures—inevitably suffer omissions and distortion. That doesn’t make them less authentic. But if you’re trying to understand what Han is up to, adjudicating the stylistic accuracy of the translation is less important than deepening your knowledge of the work’s context, which, like South Korea itself, is at once decidedly Korean and very cosmopolitan.

In The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, Adam Kirsch argues that “globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore.” What makes a novel global is not that its author has become a worldwide brand, but that it originates in a consciousness of living and writing in a world with permeable borders, and a desire to make sense of that experience. By Kirsch’s definition, Han writes global novels. Most of them deal—some more obliquely than others—with South Korea’s bloody past as a pawn in great-power politics and the war against Communism.

Perhaps that sounds didactic; rest assured that her novels foreground richly specific narratives about individual characters. History still seeps in, and all the more so when the details have largely been forgotten or obscured. Memories of horrors that younger South Koreans can no longer name produce uncanny symptoms in their bodies and dreams. Han, who is also a poet, commands an impressive arsenal of literary devices, and in her hands, the national repression of trauma—what Milan Kundera called “organized forgetting”—even affects the weather. The pathetic fallacy hasn’t been put to such good use in fiction since Wuthering Heights.

Weather plays a major role in, and may in fact be the main character of, Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Much of the action takes place during a massive blizzard, and the wind and precipitation and skies all have an eerie salience. The snow, though, is most saturated with meaning. It exhibits both agency and pathos, as if possessed by ghosts. Snow blocks the narrator’s way during an urgent journey. It effaces the features of people and landscapes the way amnesia erases memories, and yet it also awakens recollections, many of them unbearable, in those it falls upon. Snow clings desolately to eyelashes and noses. It even weeps, blowing into eyes and melting into tears.

We Do Not Part opens with a nightmare that torments the narrator, Kyungha, night after night, and always makes her wake up in a panic. She is standing before a plain containing vast numbers of ink-black lopped-off tree trunks. Suddenly the sea rises and starts to flood the plain. She knows, with the certainty of a dream, that the mutilated trees mark graves, and that she must stop the water, right now, from dredging up and desecrating the bones. But how?

Kyungha is a writer who published a book about a massacre that took place in a city referred to as G—. As it happens, Han wrote a novel Human Acts, about a pro-democracy movement led by students and activists in Gwangju in 1980 that was put down with extreme violence. Possibly as many as 2,000 protesters (the exact number is not known), most of them young and all deemed to be Communists, were murdered. The novel describes, among other barbaric acts, how soldiers and police threw bodies carelessly into trucks that carted them off to be hidden or burned. Kyungha’s research into G— has left her in a suicidal fugue. She has lost touch with friends; her husband has abandoned her and seems to have taken their daughter with him. Now she lives alone in a tiny rental apartment just outside Seoul, if endlessly rewriting her will and not eating or sleeping can be called living. She is as helpless in life as she is in the nightmare.

[Read: Han Kang’s transgressive art]

Kyungha comes up with a project that she thinks will exorcize it. She will collaborate with a friend, Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, on an art film. The plan is to re-create the dream, setting up dozens of tree trunks on a large piece of land, and then wait for winter and shoot the snow falling over the trunks, “as white as cloth to drape down from the skies and blanket them all.” Han doesn’t interpret the dream or its remedy for us, but we understand that the trunks and bones are meant to stand in for the unburied dead of G—, and that the snow is to serve as their shroud.

Han’s novels vary in style, but they form an unusually interconnected whole—in an interview, a member of the Nobel Prize committee noted “a continuity as to themes that is quite remarkable”—and the color white is a motif in all of them. It is mostly associated with birth and death. Han’s brief, lyrical novel The White Book, about an older sister of the narrator who died a few hours after she was born, begins with a list of “white things,” each of which then becomes the subject of a short meditation. Included on the list are “shroud” and “snow,” as well as “white bird”; along with the enshrouding snow, white birds play a role in We Do Not Part.

The temptation to read the white things of this novel as metaphors or omens is hard to resist. They do function figuratively. Looking through the window of an airplane at an approaching blizzard, for instance, Kyungha mistakes the swirling snow for “tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” They could be albatrosses hovering over the Ancient Mariner.

But the white things do more than symbolize. Like the snow, white birds participate in the action as full-fledged characters. Inseon, who lives alone on Jeju Island, off the coast of the Korean peninsula, is devoted to a pair of white budgerigars—a kind of parakeet—that are nominally pets, but really companions; they speak in words because that’s what parakeets do, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Kyungha is flying into a storm because Inseon, who has been evacuated to a mainland hospital after a horrible accident, has asked her to travel to her remote mountain home to rescue one of the budgies (the other died earlier). Kyungha is incredulous that she agreed to undertake such a dangerous expedition just to save a bird. As she transfers from the plane to a bus, from which she will transfer to another bus and then walk to Inseon’s house, the wind picks up and the snow falls ever more heavily.

Kyungha’s trip to Jeju Island turns out to be merely a frame narrative for a much more terrifying journey, which is into history: Inseon’s history is bound up with the history of the island, which in turn recapitulates the history of South Korea itself. Over the course of the novel, Inseon tells Kyungha how she pieced together a past that her mother had shielded her from. Han’s ability to drop references to momentous events offhandedly, as if they were part of everyday life, is on full display here. As an angry teenager who develops a passionate hatred for everything about her life, particularly her stooped, seemingly subservient mother, Inseon runs away to Seoul, falls through a snowbank into a pit, and nearly dies. When she wakes up in a hospital several days later, her mother is by her side. She had known that something had happened to Inseon, she tells her daughter, because she’d dreamed that she saw her with snow on her face.

A little later, Inseon explains why her mother would have had that dream: “When she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village.” (Most of Inseon’s stories are in italics, at least in the translation.) Inseon’s mother and her older sister had been away visiting cousins in another village; when they came home, snow had fallen on the corpses heaped on the grounds of the elementary school, covering their faces, and the sisters couldn’t figure out which were the bodies of family members. So the older sister took out her handkerchief and told Inseon’s mother that she’d wipe the faces, and “you get a good look at them.” And that, Inseon says, is how her mother, as a child, learned that when people died, “snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.”

[Read: A novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going]

As Inseon follows clues left by her mother, whom she cared for during the last years of her life, We Do Not Part turns into a mystery and a ghost story. It’s a mystery because what happened on Jeju Island—in reality, not just in this novel—is not well known in South Korea, any more than it was to Inseon: In the run-up to the Korean War, the authorities suppressed an uprising there with shocking brutality, in the name of anti-Communism. Historians still aren’t sure whether the death toll was 30,000 or upwards of 80,000, out of a population of about 300,000—far more deadly than the outcome in Gwangju. For half a century afterward, well into the 1990s, few people talked about the slaughter on Jeju Island or dared to search for the dead and missing, because to do so was a crime punishable by torture and imprisonment. In the novel, Inseon learns that her quiet mother had, over the course of decades and in the face of real danger, been active in the movement to recover the remains, inspired by the disappearance of her brother, whom Inseon had never even heard of.

The novel is also a ghost story because hauntings are involved, both the usual kind and others that are the product of Han’s singular imagination. Once Kyungha makes it to Inseon’s home, the place turns out to be suspended between life and death. Neither Kyungha nor the reader is sure whether she is being visited by the revenants of the house’s previous occupants or has already joined them in the afterlife. Outside the house, the wind howls and the snow falls and, having fallen, muffles all sound, and we grasp that the elements are animated by the restless spirits of the tens of thousands who were never accounted for or given a proper burial.

Beyond that, a very large specter broods, palpable even though it never quite comes into view. You could call it the ghost of global history. The proximate cause of the war crimes chronicled in Han’s novels is South Korea’s succession of authoritarian governments, their soldiers and police; on Jeju Island, these were joined by gangs of right-wing thugs. But some of us in the West may have forgotten who the occupying power was at the time, and those who have not forgotten may never have known the extent to which it propped up those regimes and participated in anti-Communist counterinsurgency campaigns—including on Jeju Island. I knew very little of this history when I began to read Han’s novels, nor was I aware that during the Vietnam War, the same foreign government used more than 300,000 Korean troops, essentially as mercenaries, among them soldiers later accused of committing atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. Some Korean veterans of that war were also involved in suppressing uprisings such as the one in Gwangju. These discoveries came as a shock, because the occupier I’m talking about is, of course, the United States.

With her characteristically light touch, Han alludes to American culpability only in passing. In The Vegetarian, we learn that the protagonist’s abusive father earned a medal for his service in Vietnam, but the significance of that fact is not explained. In Human Acts, a character recounts a story about Korean soldiers burning Vietnamese villagers alive and adds, “Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times.” A line in We Do Not Part informs us that American military planes released propaganda leaflets over Jeju Island promising amnesty to rebels who turned themselves in; they were arrested anyway.

People in one country often fail to realize how implicated they are in the personal histories of people in countries halfway around the world. Han’s novels never make direct accusations, but her very tact makes the implied indictment all the more devastating. She draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame. Better yet, we do so from the edges of the drama, not the center, where so many American movies about interventions in places like Vietnam seem determined to put us. Globalization is responsible for many bad things, but as Han demonstrates, the global novel is not one of them.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Where Han Kang’s Nightmares Come From.”