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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shane Harris, a staff writer who covers intelligence and national-security issues. He has written about the Trump administration’s military purge, what happens to federal agencies when DOGE takes over, and how Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system.

Shane recommends reading Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, a novel that is “freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three.” He also enjoys daily online etymology lessons, studying Old Masters paintings, and listening to the film scores of the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The telepathy trap

America’s cultural revolution

Trump is breaking the fourth wall.

The Culture Survey: Shane Harris

The best novel I’ve recently read: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers. Like its predecessor—the towering, sylvan epic The Overstory—this novel worries about the possibly untenable relationship between humanity and the natural world. The books are thematically and stylistically similar; nearly every paragraph is freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three. But Bewilderment is a quieter and more tangible story that sometimes felt like it could be The Overstory’s prequel. They are perfect companions, so if you’ve read one, read the other. [Related: The novel that asks, “What went wrong with mankind?”]

If you’ve read neither, give yourself the gift! Bewilderment follows a widowed astrobiologist named Theo Byrne, who is desperate to contain the volatile, emotional outbursts of his 9-year-old son. Robin is a prime target for bullies at school because of his affliction, which presents as a neurodivergent constellation and makes him acutely, sometimes painfully, aware of the physical degradation of the Earth and all the nonhumans that inhabit it.

Desperate for some treatment that doesn’t use medication, Theo has Robin try an experimental neurofeedback therapy that allows him to spend time with a version of his dead mother’s consciousness. The ramifications are … not “bewildering,” per se, but profoundly altering. When you finish the book, ask yourself, as I did, whether you would have made the same choice to bring even a modicum of relief for your child.

The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: I don’t love the term revisionist history, but Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey, is a highly readable book that revised my understanding of early Christianity and my thoughts about the Catholic Church. I’ll leave it to historians to debate the quality of Nixey’s scholarship—I’m way out of my depth there, but the book seems impeccably sourced and added to my evolving view on the nature of religion.

Nixey proposes that, contrary to the Catholic Church’s teachings, there was no clear agreement in Christianity’s early centuries about who Jesus was and why he mattered. Her argument is persuasive, and it excites me the way great investigative journalism does. Her book is as much a hunt to unearth old stories as it is an indictment of the Church fathers who buried them.

The last museum show that I loved: I had only a few free hours when I was in Munich last month for the annual Security Conference, so I went to the Alte Pinakothek, which houses one of the world’s most significant collections of Old Masters paintings. I wasn’t prepared for the physical scale and the beauty of this collection—and I saw only a fraction of it. I have never spent much time on this period of art because I’ve never been a huge fan of Christian imagery, which always struck me as redundant. The Alte Pinakothek converted me. There is just so much more to know about that epoch than I understood, and much of the knowledge is in that museum. I could have spent days there.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “If Christopher Calls,” by Foy Vance, and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” by R.E.M.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Tom Read Wilson. I start most mornings with his word or phrase of the day on Instagram. Tom is a devoted lover of spoken language and a keen etymologist. He recently explained the Latin origins of the word risible, and demonstrated how it could be used positively and negatively. He shares colorful figures of speech from Australia, South Africa, and the American South, always in a regionally appropriate accent. (His Texas twang is really good.) On weekends, he will recite a Shakespearean sonnet—he is learning and performing all of them in order.

That’s all great. But I think Tom is at his best when he eschews the high-minded stuff. I first encountered him when the Instagram algorithm served up his straight-faced explanation of a “shit sandwich.” “Now, I don’t mean a sandwich containing fecal matter, nor do I mean a really rubbish panini,” Tom explained. He asked us to imagine a three-paragraph email in which bad news or criticism is sandwiched between more pleasant and easier-to-swallow sentences. Well, we’ve all received one of those! [Related: The two most dismissive words on the internet]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer who is probably best known for his collaboration with the filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. Jóhannsson scored Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival, which is one of my 10 favorite films of all time. (Sicario, by the way, is a movie that bears rewatching in light of the actions that the U.S. government is poised to take against Mexican drug cartels.) I am also captivated by Jóhannsson’s score for his own film, Last and First Men. He died from a drug overdose two years before the release; the composer Yair Elazar Glotman finished the music and collaborated with other superb musicians, including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won an Oscar in 2020 for scoring Joker. [Related: The blockbuster that Hollywood was afraid to make]

I love Jóhannsson’s film scores and often listen to them while I write. But don’t overlook his studio albums. Fordlandia, inspired by a failed utopia that Henry Ford wanted to build in the jungles of Brazil, is so thematically coherent that you could imagine it was written for a movie. Jóhannsson’s work is often dark, brooding, and eerie, but it can be surprisingly melodic, and I love that he treats any object that can make a sound as a musical instrument. He occupies the same place in my imagination as Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor who also died far too young from an overdose. They would surely have given us more masterpieces, but any artist would envy the body of work they left behind.

The Week Ahead

Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s new spy-thriller film about an intelligence agent whose wife is accused of betraying her country (in theaters Friday)

Season 3 of The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series about five young villagers who are part of an ancient prophecy (out Thursday)

Liquid: A Love Story, a novel by Mariam Rahmani about a Muslim scholar who leaves her career in academia to marry rich instead (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty.

What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain

By Shayla Love

What Ketamine Does to the Human BrainBy Shayla LoveLast month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Read the full article.

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Photo Album

Evgenia Novozhenina / Reuters

Revelers watch a giant wooden installation depicting a mill tower burn during the annual celebration of Maslenitsa at the Nikola-Lenivets art park southwest of Moscow, on March 1, 2025. The cherished Russian folk festival has its origins in an ancient Slavic holiday marking the end of winter and spring’s arrival.

Spend time with photos of the week, including a caretaking humanoid robot in Japan, prayers for Pope Francis in Brazil, a polar-bear-plunge record attempt in the Czech Republic, and more.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Picture a plastic shopping bag that some busy customer picks up in the checkout line of a store—say, the British supermarket Tesco. That shopper piles her groceries into the bag, takes it home to a flat in London, and then recycles it.

Although she’ll think about the bag no further, its journey has just begun. From a recycling bin in London, it is trucked to Harwich, a port town 80 miles northeast, then shipped to Rotterdam, then driven across Germany into Poland, before finally coming to rest in a jumbled pile of trash outside an unmarked warehouse in southern Turkey. It might eventually get recycled, but it just as likely will sit there, baking in the sun, slowly disintegrating over years.

For most plastic bags, this odyssey is invisible. To one particular Tesco bag, however, Bloomberg journalists attached a tiny digital tracker, revealing its months-long, transcontinental journey—“a messy reality,” the reporters wrote, “that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.”

The story of this plastic bag appears early in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a new book by the journalist Alexander Clapp. The book reveals many such journeys, tracking the garbage of rich countries along hidden arteries toward some of the planet’s poorest places. One dark side of consumerism, it turns out, is all of the discarded wrappers and old iPhones piling up or being burned on the other side of the world.

This dumping exacts a devastating environmental toll—leaching toxic contaminants into water, air, and food, and miring whole regions in growing fields of rubbish. It’s also reshaping economies, having birthed an informal disposal industry that now employs millions of people. Towns in Indonesia are buried in millions of pounds of single-use plastics; communities across India and Bangladesh are populated by armies of migrant laborers tasked with dismantling cruise liners and oil tankers by hand. To describe this dystopian reality, Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world.

The focus of Waste Wars may be trash, but the book highlights a literal manifestation of a much broader global dynamic: Rich countries tend to pass their problems on to poorer ones. Consider, for instance, the nuclear refuse that the United States dumped among Pacific island nations during the Cold War, which threatens radioactive disaster even decades later. Consider the refugees consigned by the United States to Latin America, by the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan, or by Australia to the island of Nauru. Consider, of course, the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the rising seas threatening island nations that bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions.

[Read: What America owes the planet]

Waste Wars shows how wealthy, developed countries are, today, not only removing wealth from poorer, developing countries (in the form of materials and labor) but also sending back what the late sociologist R. Scott Frey called “anti-wealth.” In fact, the very places that long supplied rubber, cotton, metal, and other goods to imperial viceroys now serve as dumping grounds for the modern descendants of some of those same powers. This disheartening reality augurs a future in which the prosperity of a few affluent enclaves depends in part on the rest of the globe becoming ever more nasty, brutish, and hot.

Toward the beginning of his book, Clapp describes a counterintuitive consequence of the landmark environmental laws passed in the United States in the 1970s. Statutes such as the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 banned scores of toxic substances, while others, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, made burying hazardous waste in U.S. soil much more expensive. A tricky new problem presented itself: what to do with all of the waste?

“America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret,” Clapp writes. “It didn’t extend to other countries.” As similar laws were passed across Europe and North America, a thriving, semilegal international waste trade soon sprang up. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, wealthy nations exported such unloved materials as asbestos and DDT to impoverished nations like Benin and Haiti, which were desperate to develop their economies yet rarely possessed facilities capable of properly disposing of toxic materials. These countries faced a choice, Clapp writes: “poison or poverty.” By the end of the ’80s, more waste than development aid, dollar for dollar, was flowing from the global North to the global South.

This dynamic was historically novel, yet it emerged from practices stretching back hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, the filthiest trades (such as tanning) were branded nuisances and forced out of cities and closer to those living at society’s margins. Factories, industrial smelters, and dumps were likewise relegated to places where Black and brown people in the Americas, or the Roma in Europe, or Dalits in India, were legally or economically compelled to live. As the historian Andrew Needham has noted, the 20th-century population boom of southwestern U.S. metropolises, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, relied on coal both mined and burned on Navajo and Hopi land—coal that by the early 1970s was generating five times more electricity than the Hoover Dam. The air-conditioned comfort of the Sun Belt, in other words, depended on the despoliation of Indigenous land.

By the late ’80s, many developing nations had had enough. The leaders of Caribbean and African states united to draft the Basel Convention, a 1989 international agreement effectively outlawing the export of hazardous waste to other countries. Today, 191 nations have ratified the convention. (The United States is one of the only holdouts.) It’s a spectacular accomplishment—a testament to transnational organizing and solidarity—and also, as Waste Wars demonstrates, a hollow one.

The global redistribution of “anti-wealth” did not cease; in fact, Clapp writes, it “exploded” in the 1990s. The rub lay in a provision of the Basel Convention, which stated that an object sent from one country to another for reuse, rather than disposal, wasn’t waste but a thing of value. Quickly, waste brokers learned to refer to their wares with such euphemisms as “recovered byproducts.” Those on the receiving end of the garbage learned to extract whatever value they could from discarded cardboard and busted laptops—and then dump, burn, or dissolve in acid what remained.

To illustrate the profound consequences of the global recycling economy, Clapp traveled to the Ghanaian slum of Agbogbloshie, where (until it was demolished a few years ago) a shadow workforce of migrants lived at the foot of a five-story mound of discarded electronics. On paper, these items weren’t all waste—some of them technically still worked—but most were dying or dead, and the laborers of Agbogbloshie dutifully wielded hammers to strip old televisions and smartphones of precious metals and incinerate the rest. Clapp highlights the particular irony of Agbogbloshie—a slum “clouded with cancerous smoke, encircled by acres of poisonous dirt”—occurring in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to free itself of colonialism. Despite the high hopes of its revolutionary generation, in some places, Ghana still experiences what Clapp calls “a story of foreign domination by other means.” More and more of these electronic-waste disposal sites are popping up around the world.

Yet the biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem. Derived from fossil fuels, plastic is cheap, convenient—and eternal. When, in the late 1980s, the public started to get concerned about plastic detritus, the petrochemical industry began promoting “recycling.” It was, mostly, public relations; plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and it’s hard to make a profit while doing so. But the messaging was effective. Plastic production continued to accelerate.

[Read: The cost of avoiding microplastics]

In the mid-1990s, China emerged as the principal destination for used cups, straws, and the like; the country’s growing manufacturing sector was eager to make use of cheap, recycled raw plastic. As Clapp reports, over the following quarter century, China accepted half the globe’s plastic waste, conveniently disappearing it even as air pollution spiked in its destinations in the country’s southeast. The plastic waste China received was filthy, much of it too dirty to be cleaned, shredded, and turned into new plastic.

The result was not only environmental catastrophe but license for unchecked consumption of cheap plastic goods that can take a few minutes to use but hundreds of years to decay. In the United States, plastic waste increased from 60 pounds per person in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. There is now a ton of discarded plastic for every human on the planet; the oceans contain 21,000 pieces of plastic for each person on Earth.

In 2017, citing pollution concerns, China announced that it would no longer accept the world’s plastic waste. “There was an opportunity here,” Clapp writes, for the world to finally tackle the problem of unsustainable plastic production. Instead, governmental and industrial leaders chose a simpler solution: “redirecting the inevitable pollution blight from China to more desperate countries.” In just two years, the amount of American plastic waste exported to Central America doubled; worldwide exports to Africa quadrupled, and in Thailand they increased twentyfold.

The international waste trade is a “crime,” Clapp concludes, and the refusal to address its root causes is a dereliction bearing “certain similarities to international failures to address the climate crisis.” Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience.

Authorities in Australia’s Queensland have been using boats to rescue people trapped by flooding from Cyclone Alfred.