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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.

More in Culture

Cling to your disgust.

When a celebrity offers a “harsh reality check”

The nicest swamp on the internet

“Dear James”: My husband is a mess.

Coaching is the new “asking your friends for help.”

A thriller that’s most fun when it’s boring

Conan O’Brien understood the assignment.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Mitch McConnell and the president he calls “despicable”

Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet

Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post

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.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Somewhere, Richard Nixon is raging with envy. Nixon was twice left for politically dead, after the 1960 presidential election and then the 1962 California governor’s race, but Watergate proved too much for even him to overcome. (Not that he didn’t try, as Elizabeth Drew reported in The Atlantic in 2014.)

Andrew Cuomo, inheritor of Nixon’s resting scowl face, may have found a way to do what the 37th president couldn’t: come back from an apparently career-ending scandal. Over the weekend, the Democrat launched a campaign for mayor of New York, and polling right now shows him with a wide lead, thanks to the corruption allegations plaguing the incumbent and newly minted Donald Trump ally Eric Adams.

The idea that Cuomo is the man to clean things up, however, is ridiculous. He was forced to step down as governor of New York in 2021 after revelations that his administration covered up mishandling of COVID and multiple allegations of sexual harassment. (Cuomo has denied wrongdoing but did admit to instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation.”) Cuomo’s candidacy is an indictment of New York City politics: A city so eager to tell the rest of us how great it is should be able to produce a better class of mayoral contender (a point made pithily by The Onion with this parody headline: “De Blasio: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy to Find a Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’”).

The nascent comeback is also a sign of the weird amnesia some Americans seem to have developed about the past few years. After his resignation, Cuomo followed his brother, Chris, into the media, launching a podcast where he assailed cancel culture. The implication was that he was a victim; his reemergence as a candidate suggests that the podcast successfully spread that idea, but Cuomo is a victim of nothing except his own bad behavior.

In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuomo’s clear, consistent briefings made him a media star, and they provided a counter to then-President Trump’s erratic statements. As it turned out, though, New York wasn’t especially effective at fighting the virus, and Cuomo’s administration went to great lengths to cover up the number of deaths in nursing homes.

Then, in August 2021, the state attorney general’s office released an investigation finding that “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of both federal and state laws.” The probe found 11 credible accusers who brought allegations against Cuomo.. He denied wrongdoing, though he admitted to making at least some of the alleged statements. “I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” he said.

It is true, and irrelevant, that Cuomo was not ultimately charged with any crimes. The facts in either of these scandals still ought to disqualify him from holding public office, and his resurrection represents a failure of the Democratic Party.

“Parties help to make political choices legible for voters, and, even more importantly, they organize politicians in pursuit of collective policy goals,” Jacob M. Grumbach, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who studies state-level politics, wrote to me in an email. The system is working if “the goals of the group come before the ambitions of individual politicians,” Grumbach said. The Democratic Party knows there are potential candidates who would be better than Cuomo for the party as a whole, but it’s “unable to coordinate to stop Cuomo from using his political capital to enter and likely win the NYC mayoral elections,” he said.

Instead, Democrats seem to be either acquiescing or openly backing him. Representative Ritchie Torres, a young moderate who has become prominent for criticizing the party’s progressive wing, endorsed Cuomo—in an exclusive given to the conservative New York Post, no less—as someone who would battle extremists on the left and right. Torres refused to “relitigate” Cuomo’s resignation, telling the Post: “America loves a comeback, New York loves a comeback.” Okay, but doesn’t it matter who’s doing the comeback, and what they’re coming back from? Cuomo is likely benefiting from a broader societal backlash to cancel culture and “wokeness.” But if, in order to curb the far left, Democrats like Torres are willing to embrace an alleged sex pest who tried to cover up seniors’ deaths, is it worth it?

This kind of selective amnesia about the recent past is not exclusive to New York or to politics—it’s afflicting many areas of American culture. The film director Brett Ratner, who faced multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct in 2017 (which he denied, and for which he wasn’t charged), released a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump that received a reported $40 million licensing fee from Amazon. Jon Gruden, a football coach who was forced to resign for emails that used homophobic language, among other things, has been restored to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Ring of Honor. The late Pete Rose, who in 2022 blithely dismissed the allegation of having had a sexual relationship with a 14- or 15-year-old girl by telling a reporter, “It was 55 years ago, babe,” is in line for a presidential pardon and possible reinstatement in Major League Baseball after he was barred for gambling.

But politics is where voters and institutions seem most ready to ignore the past. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote last week, the whimpering end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia has led many on the center and left to pretend that no scandal existed. “But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing,” Jonathan wrote.

In some Trump-related cases, his administration is trying to force the country to forget what happened. The most maddening of the Trump scandals was his alleged hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The president escaped a trial on the case by winning the election, but the basic facts were not really in dispute: He possessed boxes and boxes of documents, he had no credible claim to them, and he didn’t give them back when asked to by the government. Now the FBI has handed the materials back over to Trump. And as my colleague Quinta Jurecic recently wrote, Trump and his administration are trying (in vain) to pretend that the January 6 insurrection never happened, yanking down government webpages and issuing pardons.

At the peak of social-justice activism in America, critics complained that pulling down statues of Confederates or removing the names of tarnished figures from institutions was tantamount to erasing history. Now, as the movement wanes, a different message is emerging: Some parts of history are apparently fine to erase.

Related:

Portrait of a leader humblebragging (From 2021) January 6 still happened.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post Trump’s cultural revolution The man who would remake Europe Conan O’Brien understood the assignment.

Today’s News

Donald Trump said that 25 percent tariffs will be imposed on Canada and Mexico tomorrow, and that there is “no room left” for last-minute deals. In the first full month of Trump’s presidency, the number of migrants illegally crossing America’s southern border hit a new low not seen in at least 25 years, according to preliminary government data obtained by CBS News. Israel will stop all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza until Hamas accepts the new terms for an extension of the cease-fire agreement, Israeli officials said yesterday.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: With the best intentions, the United Kingdom engineered a housing and energy shortage that broke its economy, Derek Thompson writes. The Wonder Reader: Shan Wang compiled Atlantic articles about why the egg is a miracle.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

lllustration by Katherine Lam

Migrants Prepare to Lose Their American Lives

By Stephanie McCrummen

At a Mexican restaurant, the owner stashed newly laminated private signs under the host stand, ready to slap on the walls of the kitchen and a back dining room where workers could hide if agents arrived without a proper warrant.

Inside a house nearby, a woman named Consuelo went to the living-room window and checked the street for unusual cars, then checked the time as her undocumented husband left for work, calculating when he was supposed to arrive at the suburban country club where he’d worked for 27 years, where he’d earned an “all-star” employee award, and which now felt like enemy territory. She lit the first prayer candle of the day.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

No one wins a trade war. J. D. Vance stopped talking about eggs. Firing the “conscience” of the military What it takes to make Shane Gillis funny

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: NEON; Patrick T. Fallon / Getty; Trae Patton.

Watch. Anora (available to rent online) swept the Oscars, proving that Hollywood’s biggest night can still recognize indie movies, David Sims writes.

Examine. The trend known as “anti-fan art” hinges on irony: The creators’ best works are inspired by the pop culture they disdain, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If I invoke the musical style called Americana, who comes to mind? Jeff Tweedy? Tyler Childers? Jason Isbell? As Giovanni Russonello wrote in 2013, the genre is heavily white and male, in contrast to its influences. I’ve been listening a lot over the past week to “Cry Baby,” a song by Sunny War that features Valerie June. It’s a summit of two young Black women from Tennessee who are making music—and a reminder that there’s no American music, or Americana, without Black music. Sunny War’s Anarchist Gospel was one of my favorite records of 2023, and Armageddon in a Summer Dress, which features “Cry Baby,” is one of my favorites of 2025 so far.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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