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Lizzie: Have I ever been to the Hamptons? No, I don’t think so, although I do have a tendency to forget these things. For example, I have been to Staten Island, although I don’t remember driving over a bridge to get there, but it turns out I must have. It’s not that Kait and I haven’t considered going to the Hamptons; it’s just that we’ve never managed to figure out our plans before every place we could possibly stay at had already been rented by Bravo-show cast members.

I’m talking specifically about the cast of Summer House—the reality show that follows a group of friends who spend their weekdays in NYC and their weekends in Montauk every summer. It premiered on Bravo back in 2017, and since then, the rented mansion has gotten bigger, most of the castmates have quit their non-Bravo jobs, and everyone involved (the cast, me, Kaitlyn) has gotten five years older. Summer House always airs right in the part of the winter when you start to think summer is never coming back, and it's a good reminder that it is.

Kaitlyn: I’m pretty surprised to learn that Lizzie has been on the Verrazzano Bridge without noticing, as the toll is $19. Guess she just throws Jacksons around willy-nilly!

This is related to the main reason we’ve never been to the Hamptons, which is that it’s so expensive. Instead, Lizzie and I have traveled together to these American cities: Ithaca, New York; Canandaigua, New York; Unionville, New York; Kingston, New York; East Setauket, New York, which is on Long Island. Actually, I don’t know that I have any specific interest in going to the Hamptons except as a joke because we love Bravo’s Summer House so much.

We love it so, so much. Though it’s hard to say what there is to love about it. This show features a bunch of New Yorkers who describe themselves as working hard and playing hard, which is annoying, and it stars our two boys, Kyle Cooke and Carl Radke, who originally bonded over their problematic drinking and their boat shoes, but now have a meaningful friendship defined by Kyle’s support of Carl’s (thank God) newfound sobriety and by Carl’s support of Kyle’s whole thing (complaining, being blond, caring too much about summer as a concept, going to bed with his shoes on). Summarized, it doesn’t sound appealing to me at all, but I can literally make myself tear up thinking about the gift of this show … the comfort of familiar screaming voices, the laughably low stakes of everything they’re screaming about, the warmth of the sun. In the dead of winter, Lizzie invited a tight group of equally devoted Summer House fans over for a watch party of the season premiere.

Lizzie: This party involved the kind of prep where you just have to buy things and vacuum if you want. I bought a bunch of snacks: pickle chips, Oreos, Starburst, Cheez-Its, a bland bagged popcorn mixed with Twix—a product of SNAX-Sational LLC (“The Hottest Snacks in America!”), whose use of the Twix logo prompted questions about trademark law. Matt made fried-chicken sliders and deviled eggs. I made sure I could figure out a system for streaming Bravo live. And I had to go out and find Loverboy.

About Loverboy. A natural successor in a long lineage of Bravo-related alcoholic products, like Bethenny’s Skinnygirl margarita, Sonja’s ill-fated Tipsy Girl prosecco, Ramona’s pinot, and Lisa Vanderpump’s rosé, it’s a sparkling hard tea from the brains of Summer House protagonists and now-married couple Kyle and Amanda. It’s pretty good, and almost everyone who tries one takes a sip and then says, “This is pretty good?” in the same surprised voice. It’s pretty good, but it does have a little bit of that fake-sugar flavor. You take the pretty good with the bad when it comes to Bravolebrity alcohols.

Kaitlyn: Lizzie got the White Tea Peach and the classic Lemon Iced Tea, which are both pretty good, so I had one of each. Confusingly, Loverboy also makes canned espresso martinis, which are so disgusting it’s hard to believe they came from the same planet, much less the same creative minds. (We tried them once while playing Summer House Monopoly, a game I created as a craft project due to pandemic brain.) They taste like Splenda soaked in old coffee grounds and acetone. One of the listed ingredients is orange wine? I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent wondering whether Kyle and Amanda know that the canned martinis are horrible. I also wonder this about Lisa Vanderpump and the Vanderpump wine, which is foul, and she’s a very rich woman, so you would assume she’d had some decent wine at some point. Of course, we’ll keep buying all this stuff as another joke.

Anyway, my own preparation for the party was making a bunch of Jell-O cups in summer hues. When I arrived at Lizzie’s, I put my Jell-O cups in her backyard because there was no room in the fridge. She told me to come up with a rhyme so I would remember to go get them before the episode started, so I settled on “When Claire gets here, the time for Jell-O is near.” I did repeat this a few times but then got distracted by talking to Susannah about our attraction to the problematic Real Housewives of New Jersey husband Joe Gorga, who has huge muscles and an “old-school” Italian American mindset, and how if he paid attention to us we would find it interesting, and it might help us work through some of our issues with men. When Claire arrived, it was time for the show!!! (Nobody ate the Jell-O.)

Lizzie: This was a classic episode, I thought. A study in how to kick off a reality show six seasons deep after you “part ways” with your house comedian so she can spend more time guesting on Call Her Daddy. Three new people showed up in her place (Mya, Alex, and Andrea, who is technically new but who had a head start on relationship-building during last year’s Vermont-based sister show, Winter House).

Despite the fact that only three of the 11 current cast members were part of the original Season 1 friend group, Summer House still wants us to believe that all of these people are real friends outside the show. So every season, the new people have to pretend they were invited to the house by someone, and often it feels like no one told them to prep a convincing anecdote ahead of time. When Carl asks new girl Mya how she knows Paige, Mya says something like, “You know, New York…” and then pleads with her eyes for Carl to stop asking questions.

Also on Summer House, the plotlines are kind of recycled from season to season. This episode it was Kyle staying out at Southampton Social Club far past the time when everyone else had gone home, Paige lying in bed gossiping about the others, Carl waking up at 7 a.m. to go for a jog, and Lindsay running through 15 distinct emotions over the course of four scenes.

Kaitlyn: It’s true; the show is a bit repetitive, which is part of its charm. I actively resent change. I hated when new guy Andrea was helping Lindsay unpack her suitcase and said “the bra is my favorite part.” Like, an empty bra? “I’m a boob guy,” he said. Congratulations.

We were treated—as we are every season, thank you—to a montage of Carl through the ages and all his little speeches about how much he’s evolving. (In this one, he referred to himself as “Carl 6.0 Pro Max.”) This year we believe it, though, because he is sober and looking so good. Every person in the house was given an opportunity to say that he is looking so good, and they all took it. (Carl followed me on Instagram about a year ago. I added him to my Close Friends list, but he never watches my Stories. I’m not trying to get his attention … I just wonder what it would feel like if I did!)

When the new cast members were coming in and getting hugged, Claire remarked, “I would be so nervous to enter the summer house.” This made me realize that I would be also. I think I would spend a lot of time fretting over the grocery situation—whom to pay, when to pay them, which stuff in the fridge is for snacks and which stuff is specifically for a dinner someone is planning on cooking later, etc. I would also worry about not getting enough coffee in the morning.

Lizzie: I think I would worry about standing weirdly in front of the cameras, accidentally looking directly into the cameras while talking, and having cameras in my bedroom. Mostly camera-related and not cast-dynamic-related worries, I guess.

Just as Summer House encourages us to imagine ourselves in similar Hamptons house-share situations, it also stimulates the brain by raising questions few can answer. Like, why would Kyle order a hot toddy in July? Are these $100,000 cars they all drive leased, or do they actually own them? Why does Bravo force us to watch so many pharmaceutical commercials when we’re just trying to have a good time? Is that J. Lo and Owen Wilson movie trailer for real?

Kaitlyn: Bravo has also started airing Slack commercials that play the sound of a Slack notification, as if you’re getting a Slack notification while you’re watching TV—what the hell? Luckily, Matt interrupted every commercial break to supply us with more sliders.

Of course, we have been putting off asking the worst question of all, the one that had us gripping the furniture, slurping Loverboy after Loverboy. The episode ends with Kyle at the club, ignoring Amanda’s first 14 phone calls by accident and the subsequent 13 on purpose. Paige and Ciara jump in bed with Amanda after she has smashed his cologne and face creams on the bathroom floor. Then she reveals to them that she made Kyle sign a legal document stating that if his drinking problem causes her to call off their upcoming wedding, then he has to reimburse her parents for everything they’ve spent on it, a deal that is all the more shocking now that it is clear he feels so little reverence toward it. When Kyle finally returns, he steps on a shard of cologne glass and then storms around in his Calvins, screaming that his fiancée is “as fucking fun as a piece of fucking wood.”

So here’s the question that’s so hard to ask: Why does Kyle do this to us when we root for him, and have done so for all these years?

Lizzie: Amanda doesn’t deserve it, and neither do we. But we’re all locked in now, and it looks like we will be for the foreseeable future. Speaking of the future: In the next Famous People, Kaitlyn and I will be leaving our homes for a ticketed event involving strangers and the New York Harbor. Maybe some change will be good for everyone.

Somewhere, maybe in the attic of his childhood home in San Mateo, California, or perhaps in an alcove of a Florida bunker, I imagine there must be a portrait of Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. that shows him gnarled and gray, his throwing arm wizened, the twinkle in his eye occluded by glaucoma and cataracts. Because what, other than some dark Dorian Gray sorcery, some sinister Faustian bargain, can account for the Methuselahian magic of Tom Brady’s geriatric greatness (Super Bowl MVP last year, for a gobsmacking fifth time, at age 43! Conceivably the regular-season MVP candidate again this year, for what would be the fourth time, at age 44!) as a football player? This can’t all have been avocado ice cream and his fitness guru Alex Guerrero’s “pliability” exercises, can it?

Yesterday, ESPN’s report that Brady would shortly be announcing his retirement sparked confusion and disbelief all over. Brady has been playing so long, and has been so good for so long—years past the typical expiration date for professional athletes—that it’s started to seem he might stick around forever. He had previously said he would play until he was at least 45, or until “I suck”—neither of which, quite manifestly, is true yet. He still has a year remaining on his contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Compounding the confusion was Brady’s own company, TB12, which posted and then deleted a tweet that seemed to acknowledge the retirement news. Then both his father, Tom Brady Sr., and the Buccaneers’ front office put out statements saying that the quarterback hadn’t made a decision yet. Finally, his agent, Don Yee, released his own, bizarre non-denial denial, the seeming implication of which was that Brady had made up his mind but, for whatever reason, wasn’t quite ready to roll out his plans yet. All this threatened to overshadow the NFL playoffs—including this afternoon’s conference championships—an outcome that Brady himself, who cares deeply about his own image and about his football brethren, surely did not intend.

But here he was, still dominating the football landscape even as he was reportedly trying to recede from it. Brady has reached a point where he exists outside of time, or on some metaphysical time scale that he alone controls and where the normal rules of aging, and beginnings and ends, do not apply.

Other athletes have become imprinted in legend because of the unlikely circus-sideshow freakishness of their attainments. Muggsy Bogues, who starred for the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA in the 1980s, was a Thumbelina-ish 5 feet 3 inches in a league where typical heights run a foot and half taller than that. William “the Refrigerator” Perry, of the 1985 NFL-champion Chicago Bears, was better known for his kitchen-appliance-size rotundity and his novelty-act cameos on offense than for his skill as a defensive lineman. Even in the category of athletic longevity there have been comparably ageless outliers: In 2007, Julio Franco suited up for the Atlanta Braves at an absurdly late-middle-age 49, and Jamie Moyer pitched for the Colorado Rockies at the same age, in 2012. Even more absurdly, in 1980, Gordie Howe played professional hockey in the NHL for the Hartford Whalers alongside his adult sons, Mark and Marty, at the age of 52. I am 52 now, and simply getting from the bed to the bathroom in the morning can feel like an Olympian feat of agility and endurance.

[Read: Tom Brady’s tone-deaf perfection]

But what has set Brady’s accomplishments (way) apart is that even as his advancing age has pushed him into circus-freak territory, his greatness has remained undiminished; in fact, his greatness and his circus-freakishness have merged. Franco appeared once on a Hall of Fame ballot and Moyer was an estimable pitcher, but by the end of their careers both were at best marginal players in a sport not nearly as physically destructive as football. Gordie Howe was one of the greatest hockey players ever, but the bulk of that greatness came well before his first retirement from the sport, in 1971; the last time he led the NHL in scoring was in 1963, at age 35. Tom Brady led the NFL in touchdowns and passing yardage this year, at age 44.

Brady’s astounding statistical accomplishments will be much trumpeted whenever an announcement officially comes, but to cite just a few here: He has appeared in twice as many Super Bowls—10—as any other quarterback, and he won seven of them—three more than any other quarterback and one more than any other team has ever won across more than 50 years of NFL history. As my colleague Derek Thompson recently noted, Brady has won more than twice as many playoff games as the next-most-winning quarterback, Joe Montana, and played in 18 more playoff games than any other player not his teammate. He holds just about every significant career passing record in pro football: regular-season passing yards, completions, and touchdowns; most regular-season wins and playoff victories.     

But what’s almost as remarkable as the full body of work Brady has compiled is how much he has achieved at an unprecedentedly advanced age for a football player in the modern era. The average retirement age for an NFL player is 27. Since turning 40 (!), Brady has thrown for almost 23,000 yards and 168 touchdowns, and engineered 10 fourth-quarter comebacks and 13 game-winning drives (a very good career for most quarterbacks).

This season he was not only the oldest current player in the NFL—he was the oldest player by more than four years, an eternity in football time. At the start of this season, he was older than 13 NFL head coaches. He is older than his own offensive coordinator, Byron Leftwich. Many of the quarterbacks who faced off against Brady this year had his poster hanging on the walls of their childhood bedrooms. A growing cohort of NFL players was born after Brady embarked on his pro career, in the spring of 2000. A number of players in the league now are the sons of Brady’s former teammates, taking him into Gordie Howe territory. He has played against Devin Bush Sr. and Devin Bush Jr.; against Ed McCaffrey and his son Christian McCaffrey; against Terrence Metcalf and his son DK Metcalf. In the Super Bowl last year, one of Brady’s teammates, a rookie safety named Antoine Winfield Jr., intercepted a pass for the Buccaneers; in November 2001, that rookie’s father, Antoine Winfield Sr., a cornerback for the Buffalo Bills, intercepted one of Brady’s first passes as a starter for the New England Patriots. Antoine Jr. had then just turned 3.

[Scott Stossel: The end of Brady]

I suppose I should admit that I’ve been hanging around The Atlantic long enough that a number of my own colleagues were born after I first set foot in these precincts, back in 1992. But the position I play does not require me to get sacked by 300-pound linemen or speeding-freight-train linebackers again and again—as Brady has been 543 times. And that’s not including the thousands of times he’s been late-hit, crunched, bent, twisted, pile-driven, or battered without an official sack being registered. (It also doesn’t include the 13 people he himself has tackled, to their great ignominy.) Forget leading the NFL in passing this year—it’s a marvel that he’s still walking upright.

Brady has played so well for so long that he is an era unto himself, outlasting America’s entire 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan. John Madden, who for many years, dating back to the early 1980s, was the voice of the league, and who was the color commentator for Brady’s first Super Bowl (famously, and wrongly, advising that Brady should not attempt the drive at the end of regulation that won the game), died last month; today’s most perceptive color commentator, Tony Romo, followed Brady into the league as a quarterback and preceded him out of it. (The list of star quarterbacks who have come into the league, burned brightly, and then flamed out while Brady has remained incandescent include Romo, Eli Manning, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Andrew Luck, Brady’s own offensive coordinator Leftwich, and most recently Ben Roethlisberger. The list of non-star NFL quarterbacks who have come and gone during Brady’s tenure must number in the scores, if not hundreds.)

As a New Englander—okay, let’s be real, as a Masshole—I revere Brady for the championships he’s brought to the Patriots, for the glory he’s bestowed on the region. But as he’s gotten older, and as I have, my reverence for him has acquired an additional dimension: With intimations of my own mortality getting actuarily louder, Brady’s ability to somehow defy, if not reverse, the normal processes of aging, to rage (gracefully) against the dying of the light, provides the illusion that decay and death can maybe be deferred a little longer. Of course, his agelessness also makes me hate him a little, too, for the same reasons the rest of his seemingly perfect life does; I can only imagine the hatred that, say, New York Jets fans must feel for him.

[Read: The case against Tom Brady]

Brady has never been the strongest quarterback, nor the most athletic, nor, certainly, the fastest. This undoubtedly has helped his longevity; you can’t lose what you’ve never had. What he does have, in addition to great throwing accuracy, is the ability to effectively slow things down on the field, to think faster than things on the field are moving, to “make his read” and “go through his progressions,” as the analysts say, and make the best, most odds-conferring decision again and again. He also has a quick release—the ability to get rid of the ball in a hurry—one that’s amazingly gotten faster as he’s gotten older, a remarkable but necessary feat of self-preservation. Again and again, as the hourglass has run out on games, he has excelled; his ability to manage the clock is unsurpassed. Perhaps this ability has extended beyond the field of play.

Interestingly, as the news of an imminent retirement announcement was reported by ESPN yesterday afternoon, Brady seemed to have lost control of the narrative. This rarely happens. He is always scripting unlikely endings (he led 42 fourth-quarter comebacks, nine of them in the playoffs)—and sometimes impossibly unlikely endings, most famously coming back from 28–3 in the second half of Super Bowl LI to beat the Atlanta Falcons. Last weekend, in the NFC divisional playoff round against the Los Angeles Rams, he was down, 27–3, even further into the game than he had been against the Falcons. Once again he clawed his team back into the game. His greatness was visibly pressing on the Rams’ collective psyche as they blundered again and again, visions of that Super Bowl comeback, and many others, dancing in their head. Astonishingly, he managed to draw the Buccaneers even with 42 seconds left.

But in that instance, events got away from him: Matthew Stafford drove the Rams down the field for a last-second field goal. And then yesterday, the ESPN report seemed to catch Brady and his inner circle by surprise. Maybe he’s not retiring (I’ve gotten this wrong before). Maybe his command of the clock and the narrative remains as firm as ever, and he will play out his contract and lead the Bucs to the Super Bowl again next year.

Whatever the plan turns out to be, I suspect No. 12 is keeping his head about him, even if the original play call has broken down. Because one of the lessons of his career has been that if you can stay in the moment, you can slow time down and make it submit to you—and that even when things appear dark and helpless (28–3, for God’s sake), if you just keep forging ahead and doing your best, things may yet turn out far better than appears possible. There are worse models for our time.

New funding for the Great Barrier Reef will improve water quality but not address its central threat.

The Gilded Age made its debut on HBO on January 24, which is also the writer Edith Wharton’s birthday—a detail that’s hard to ascribe to coincidence. Not only does the drama borrow Wharton’s milieu of 1880s New York City, but the show’s creator is also a self-proclaimed Whartonite. Julian Fellowes—or the Lord Fellowes of West Stafford, as he’s known in his native Britain—has said that The Custom of the Country, Wharton’s strikingly modern 1913 novel about a ruthless social climber, inspired him to start writing. His first major project, the Robert Altman–directed murder mystery Gosford Park, felt like a British homage to the American Wharton and her elegant skewering of social regimes via the ornate filigree of details that sustain them.

Gosford Park may have been a switchblade in the back of the culture Fellowes was raised in, but Downton Abbey—the series that made Fellowes’s name—was the gentlest of pokings at the English aristocracy. It was also pure soap opera gussied up as a big-budget costume drama, with an amnesia plot and malevolent housemaids and concupiscent Turkish diplomats meeting untimely ends in Lady Mary’s boudoir. Downton was never great art, but it had great actors doing essentially pantomime theater. Good defeated evil more reliably on Downton than in any major Hollywood franchise, leading to a series that had high drama but—with a few exceptions—very low stakes.

The Gilded Age, Fellowes’s new series, is something different again. Like Wharton’s work, it documents a time when the rapacious accumulation of American resources and capital by a handful of industrialists was causing a palpable shift in the social order. This is, we might say, timely terrain. But The Gilded Age, stacked with a revolving door of Broadway’s stars, feels not only flat but also myopic. It grabs from Wharton’s themes but somehow entirely elides her fundamental observation: that this culture is so corrupted that the only people who can thrive within it are either mindless or irredeemable.

If Downton cribbed from commedia dell’arte, The Gilded Age feels almost like Disney. It opens with a montage of PBS-familiar shots: sheep grazing in the green fields of Central Park, edifices rising up in stony grandeur, servants scurrying like mice. There’s a striking sense of unreality to it. Despite the size of the budgets involved—which was why the series, originally destined for NBC, was eventually shipped over to HBO—the city feels less like old New York than a Warner Bros. lot. Everything is too pristine. The overreliance on CGI to spruce up the scenery only adds to the uncanny-valley effect, as if we’re looking at dollhouses that have been elaborately constructed for full-size people.

This is not, to be fair to Fellowes, all that far from what’s actually happening in the show. An obscenely rich railroad tycoon, George Russell (played by Morgan Spector), and his wife, the sharp-elbowed striver Bertha (Carrie Coon), are moving into their new home on East 61st Street, a white building so ostentatious, it might make a museum blush. The house seems like a deliberate nod to the widow Mrs. Manson Mingott in The Age of Innocence, who audaciously builds “a large, pale house of cream-colored stone … in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.” At odds with every other brownstone on the street, the Russells’ house (and the Russells themselves) are existentially offensive to their neighbor Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski). We know this because repeatedly saying so is her only discernible characteristic. “We only receive the old people in this house, not the new,” she sniffs to Marian (Louisa Jacobson) in one scene. “You are my niece and you belong to old New York.”

But does Marian belong, really? The scale of The Gilded Age means that handfuls of characters could be the outsiders through which we see the manifold bugs in the social system. There’s Marian, who wouldn’t be out of place in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence; she has the manners of May Welland, with occasional iconoclastic flashes of Ellen Olenska. Bertha, whose desire to get onto New York’s A-list is matched only by her inability to muzzle herself to do so, seems modeled in her ambitions after one of Wharton’s most ambitious protagonists, Undine Spragg, although she’s much less vacuous. And there’s the charming, career-minded Peggy (Denée Benton), a young Black woman who becomes Agnes’s secretary and who regularly hints at a tragic rupture in her relationship with her parents.

The first five episodes (of nine) made available for review reveal not much of anything about what the show is trying to do with these women. The opening credits in episodes following the pilot allude to a collision between micro- and macroeconomics—the ways in which money was literally shaping the country and encouraging a new national identity of aspiration. It’s hard to sympathize with the van Rhijns and their ilk, whose only purpose seems to be reveling in a system that’s elevated them and asserting their supposedly native superiority. But I resent the fact that I’m more inclined to sympathize with the Russells purely because Bertha is dryly intelligent and George apparently loves his wife. This is no moment to be on the side of the robber barons. Fellowes’s light touch feels ill-suited to his own material; in one episode, George’s machinations lead to tragedy for a competitor, and yet the whole interlude is brushed off as breezily as if he’d slightly cheated at backgammon.

Wharton is unlikely to have approved of such a half-hearted imitation of her work. No one more subtly rendered the toxicity in mannered society, the ugliness of a world in which status can be entirely divorced from morality. In 1947, the literary critic Diana Trilling wrote of Wharton’s The House of Mirth that it is “one of the most telling indictments of a social system based on the chance distribution of wealth, and therefore of social privilege, that has ever been written.” Wharton’s New York, fully in thrall to money, celebrity, and power, feels almost more feudal than Downton does. But The Gilded Age takes this teeming morass of a historical period and essentially focuses on a single animating question: Will Bertha win the reigning socialite Mrs. Astor’s approval? As social commentary goes, it’s less The Custom of the Country than The Real Housewives of Washington Square.

[From the July/August 2001 issue: Wharton’s sharp eye]

The whole thing feels much too rote and timid for HBO—even if the costumes deliberately evoke modern sensibilities and wouldn’t be out of place on the ladies of And Just Like That, who are trying as resolutely to assert their relevance in a changing world as Agnes is. The mood is too saturnine, the occasional nods to social criticism too stilted. In one scene, Peggy meets an editor at a Black newspaper who feels obliged to remind another journalist, not 20 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that “Lincoln was a Republican.” There are occasional flashes of Downton-esque absurdity: A French chef is a walking wheel of Gallic cheese; a housemaid schemes with a closeted gay man in an alliance ripped right out of the Crawley household. All in all, the show made me long for the opening, opera-set scene of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, where every detail—Newland’s gardenia, Ellen’s proffering of her hand—serves the idea that the characters’ lives are as much a performance as anything being acted out in front of them. In that scene, Wharton’s New York is a panopticon no resident can escape. The fourth episode of The Gilded Age ends at the opera; Marian looks out from her box, but sees only the stage.

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America, shall I compare thee to a can of SPAM? Thou art more decadent, salty and sweet, container of even greater mystery. In this three-part series, some of the meatiest questions the United States faces about how we work for the food we eat play out in the story of special processed American meat. The Experiment embarks on a remarkable journey to the heart of SPAM—from remote Philippine provinces, where American GIs disseminated the American dream through cans of SPAM, to Austin, Minnesota, SPAMtown U.S.A., where SPAM employed generations of meatpackers, and tore the town apart. SPAM inspired aspirations and opened wounds in the American worker’s psyche that we still yearn for and ache from today.

New weekly episodes begin February 3, 2022.

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at theexperiment@theatlantic.com.

A transcript of this episode is presented below:

(The quick rewind of tape.)

Noella Levy: Okay! (Laughter.)

Julia Longoria: You ready?

(Indistinct talking—possibly vocal warm-ups.)

Levy: Okay!

Longoria: All right, so … This is a song about SPAM.

(A wind-down. Then, over the sound of a finger-picked ukulele, a song is sung—a variation on “Home on the Range” that one might call “SPAM on the Range.”)

Levy: (Sung.) In the blue-yellow can

That is cherished by all of the land,

It’s all to eat,

So deliciously sweet

When cooked in a hot frying pan!

How a—

[Stopping.] No, I missed a verse! Wait just a minute. (Longoria laughs.)

(As the ukulele starts back up, a dreamy synthesizer plays alongside it.)

Levy: SPAM, oh, better than ham!

It is loved by all in the land.

We chop and we slice

And combine it with rice

And grind it whenever we can.

(Applause, then laughter. The music ends.)

Levy: So that’s … (Laughter.)

(The sounds of a small audience in an intimate performance space dissipate as the mic is turned off. A low, resonant drone persists, though, playing under Longoria’s narration.)

Longoria: Coming soon on The Experiment is a story of America told through the history of SPAM. You know! The mystery meat in the blue-and-yellow can. From The Atlantic and WNYC Studios: a miniseries, starting February 3.

After a surge starting around New Year’s that brought the prefecture’s daily case count nearly 2,000, new infections have steadily dropped in recent days.

The researchers, who followed more than 200 patients for two to three months after their COVID-19 diagnoses, said the findings might suggest ways to prevent ...