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Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani says foreign forces still needed in training capacity to combat ISIL (ISIS).

By 2013, the zombie apocalypse genre had been done to death. "The Walking Dead" had concluded its third season, "World War Z" was expected to be a summer blockbuster and "Resident Evil" was still perhaps the best-known zombie-starring video game. Where else could the undead go from there?

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.

Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Gal Beckerman, our senior books editor and the author, most recently, of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas. Gal recently wrote about a 1933 novel that depicts the arrival of fascism in Germany, and the combative 50-year relationship between the biographer Robert Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb. He is enjoying Wednesday with his daughters but shielding them from the sight of M3GAN, and, on Rumaan Alam’s recommendation, he finally gave in to the French writer Patrick Modiano.

But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

You don’t know how bad the pizza box is. How it feels to lose a utopia The meaning of Dry January The Culture Survey: Gal Beckerman

What my friends are talking about most right now: We’re talking about how terrified all of our children are of M3GAN! I took my kids to see a movie the other day, and the trailer came on—and I knew, as soon as I saw that creepy face and that creepy body dancing, where this was all headed. I leapt over the seats to cover their eyes before she invaded their nightmares. Too late. [Related: M3GAN’s killer-robot doll is just what 2023 needs.]

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I recently moved back to New York City after a few years in the cultural wasteland of Los Angeles (yes, I said it). And I’ve got a long list of theater I’m dying to experience—in particular, some revivals of shows I’ve never seen performed, such as August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, and Funny Girl. And as long as we’re talking about anticipated cultural happenings, I’m very much looking forward to visiting the Alex Katz retrospective at the Guggenheim. [Related: The unconscious rebellion of August Wilson]

An actor I would watch in anything: Michelle Williams. She blew me away in The Fablemans. I’d always loved her work in Kelly Reichardt’s films, but this role demanded such a careful and difficult balance: a mother who loves her family fiercely but is not willing to sacrifice her own personal happiness. [Related: The Fabelmans is Steven Spielberg’s most honest movie yet.]

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I grew up in the 1980s, and nothing will ever match for me the blockbuster thrill of the Indiana Jones movies. Just hearing the John Williams score reminds me of being 8 years old and completely rapt. As for my favorite art film, the most recent one that comes to mind is Paweł Pawlikowski’s gorgeous, moving 2018 movie, Cold War. [Related: Cold War meditates on exile, nationalism, and love.]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: This might be unfair, because both of these books were ones I read as galleys and aren’t coming out for a few months (and yes, this is what we in the books biz call “galley bragging”).

The novel is Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, which is a fictional biography by the widow of an elusive artist whose career has been defined by shape-shifting (think a mashup of David Bowie and Cindy Sherman). The whole story also takes place in an alternate United States that has been divided into three separate territories, with the entire South existing as a fascist theocracy. If it sounds weird, it is. But in the best way.

In a very different register is my nonfiction pick, Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds, which explores Rosen’s relationship with his childhood friend whose brilliance was interrupted by his schizophrenia. After years of amassing achievements, including graduating from Yale Law School, this friend ends up killing his pregnant fian​cée. It’s a beautifully written meditation on society’s inability to cope with the problem of mental illness. [Related: Catherine Lacey on Gwendoline Riley’s haunted heroines]

“I wouldn’t say haute couture is exactly my thing... but I was totally dazzled by [the designer Thierry Mugler’s] creations.” (Angela Weiss / AFP / Getty)

An author I will read anything by: I’ll limit myself to two European writers whom I love. One is Emmanuel Carrère, the French author, who writes these strange genre-bending autofictional books—if you’re new to him, I’d start with Lives Other Than My Own. And the other is the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, whose Go, Went, Gone is among my favorite books of all time. [Related: You can read any of these short novels in a weekend.]

A song I’ll always dance to: “Hava Nagila”

The last museum show that I loved: I took my daughters to see the Brooklyn Museum’s Thierry Mugler retrospective. I wouldn’t say haute couture is exactly my thing, and I’m often skeptical of museum shows that lean on spectacle to pull in the masses (as much as I understand this impulse). But I was totally dazzled by Mugler’s creations—just the array of materials, from rubber tires to chrome; the crazy extravagance of it. I loved the operatic ambition, and most important, my daughters’ mouths were agape almost the whole time.

Something I recently revisited: Throughout college, I had five Tom Waits albums pretty much on regular rotation, and I recently went back and listened to them again after a long hiatus. Franks Wild Years stood out as the one that captured what Waits does so well: Underneath the raspiness is that smack of nostalgia. I’m a sucker for the crackly sound of a vinyl record and church bells pealing in the distance. He’s timeless.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Twitter, but I just deleted it (again).

Something delightful introduced to me by kids: This is very recent, but my daughters sat me down and made me watch Wednesday, the new Netflix show about the Addams Family character, now a teenager. They were so taken with Wednesday’s sangfroid, her monochrome fashion, and, of course, that dance. “I love dark humor!” my 10-year-old exclaimed.

The last debate I had about culture: Not so much a debate as a quandary: how to understand the wild sales figures for Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare. The book sold more than 1.4 million copies on its first day. With all of its major revelations already pretty well aired, why were so many people interested in buying Spare? Because they actually wanted to read it? [Related: Prince Harry’s book undermines the very idea of monarchy.]

A good recommendation I recently received: The novelist Rumaan Alam has long pushed the French writer Patrick Modiano on me, and I finally gave in and read one of his many slim, twisty, noirish books, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood. It totally grabbed me.

The last thing that made me cry: The last episode of the series Fleishman Is in Trouble, based on Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel and adapted by her, had me completely verklempt for an hour. I don’t want to ruin anything, but there is such an emotional payoff when you’ve seen these characters who have reckoned with feelings of ennui and emptiness finally grasp enough meaning and purpose to go forward. It’s enough to make a middle-aged man cry. [Related: ‘What is Jesse Eisenberg doing here, saying these things I wrote?’]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Kate Lindsay, Xochitl Gonzalez, Spencer Kornhaber, Jenisha Watts, David French, Shirley Li, David Sims, Lenika Cruz, Jordan Calhoun, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert.

The Week Ahead The Last of Us, the HBO adaptation of the popular zombie-apocalypse video game (debuts Sunday) Women Talking, the director Sarah Polley’s new film (in theaters nationwide Friday) Rikers: An Oral History, a book by the journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau (Tuesday) Essay (Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty)

The Writer’s Most Sacred Relationship

By Lauren LeBlanc

Making a living as a writer has always been an elusive pursuit. The competition is fierce. The measures of success are subjective. Even many people at the top of the profession can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney recalls in his evocative new memoir, “told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers.”

In spite of these red flags, countless people set out on this path. One lifeline, if you’re lucky enough to find it, is mentorship. Literary mentors offer the conventional benefits: perspective, direction, connections. But the partnerships that result are less transactional and more messy and serendipitous than those that tend to exist in other industries. While many people might think of such arrangements as altruistic or at least utilitarian, Pinckney’s book, which chronicles his tutelage under Hardwick, shows that artistic mentorships, especially literary ones, are far more fraught. Together, he and Hardwick weathered two intersecting careers, each with fallow periods and moments of success. This can be a challenge for creative, fragile egos—leading to a fair amount of projection, blame, and tension. And yet, the mentorships that endure allow for unpredictability and evolution.

Read the full article.

More in Culture A society that can’t get enough of work The Last of Us makes the apocalypse feel new again A disability film unlike any other Seven books about how homes shape our life Catch Up on The Atlantic Cities really can be both denser and greener. The gas stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics. Suddenly, California has too much water. Photo Album (Matias Delacroix / AP / Getty)

A nighttime parade at the Santiago a Mil arts festival, in Santiago, Chile, on January 10. See the rest of the week’s notable snapshots here.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

Last year, I called America a “rich death trap.” Americans are more likely to die than Europeans or other citizens of similarly rich nations at just about every given age and income level. Guns, drugs, and cars account for much of the difference, but record-high health-care spending hasn’t bought much safety from the ravages of common pathogens. Whereas most of the developed world saw its mortality rates improve in the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, more Americans died of COVID after the introduction of the vaccines than before.

But this week, America finally got some good news in the all-important category of keeping its citizens alive. Since the early 1990s, the U.S. cancer-mortality rate has fallen by one-third, according to a new report from the American Cancer Society.

When I initially read the news in The Wall Street Journal, my assumption was that this achievement in health outcomes was principally due to medical breakthroughs. Since the War on Cancer was declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on cancer research and drug development. We’ve conducted tens of thousands of clinical trials for drugs to treat late-stage cancers in that time. Surely, I thought, these Herculean research efforts are the primary drivers of the reduction in cancer mortality.

As it turns out, however, behavioral changes and screenings seem just as important as treatments, if not more so.

Let’s start with an obvious but crucial point: There is no individual disease called “cancer.” (Relatedly, nothing like a singular “cure for cancer” is likely to materialize anytime soon, if ever.) Rather, what we call cancer is a large group of diseases in which uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells makes people sick and possibly brings about their death. Different cancers have different causes and screening protocols, and as a result, progress can be fast for one cancer and depressingly slow for another.

The decline in cancer mortality for men in the past 30 years is almost entirely for a handful of cancers—lung, prostate, colon, and rectal. Little progress has been made on other lethal cancers.

Consider the diverging histories of two cancers. In 1930, death rates for lung cancer and pancreatic cancer were measured as similarly low among the American-male population. By the 1990s, however, lung cancer mortality had exploded, and that disease became one of the leading causes of death for American men. Since 1990, the rate of lung cancer has declined by more than half. Meanwhile, pancreatic-cancer rates of death rose steadily into the 1970s and have basically plateaued since then.

What explains these different trajectories? In the case of lung cancer, Americans in the 20th century participated en masse in behaviors (especially cigarette smoking) that dramatically increased their risk of contracting the disease. Scientists discovered and announced that risk, then public-health campaigns and policy changes encouraged a large reduction in smoking, which gradually pulled down lung-cancer mortality. In the case of pancreatic cancer, however, the causes are mysterious, and the disease is tragically and notoriously difficult to screen.

Treatments for late-stage lung cancers have improved in the past few decades, according to the American Cancer Society report. But for all the money we’ve spent on treatments, most of the decline in deaths in the past three decades seems to be the result of behavioral changes. Smoking in America declined from a historic high of about 4,500 cigarettes per person per year in 1963—enough for every adult to have more than half a pack a day—to less than 2,000 by the end of the century. It’s fallen further since then.

Another possible factor in declining cancer mortality is better screening, though the question of how much to screen is still contentious. In the early 1990s, doctors started using blood tests that turned up prostate-specific toxins. This period coincided with a decline in prostate cancer. But many positive results from these tests were false alarms, turning up asymptomatic cases that never would have bloomed into serious cancers. As a result, the federal government discouraged these prostate-cancer tests for men in the 2010s. Since then, advanced diagnoses for prostate cancer have surged, and mortality rates have stopped falling—suggesting that the previous testing regime may have been better after all.

This cancer-screening debate could define the next generation of medicine. As I wrote in last year’s “Breakthroughs of the Year,” companies such as Grail now offer blood tests that look for circulating-tumor DNA in order to detect 50 types of cancer. As these kinds of tests become cheaper and more available, they could reduce the mortality of more cancers, just as antigen tests have helped reduce the death rate of prostate cancer. On their face, these advances sound simply miraculous. But deploying them effectively will require a delicate balancing act on the part of regulators. After all, how much information is too much information for patients if many cancer tests detect false alarms? “They sound wonderful, but we don’t have enough information,” Lori Minasian of the National Cancer Institute has said of these tests. “We don’t have definitive data that shows that they will reduce the risk of dying from cancer.”

The Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative should heed the lessons of this latest report. Much of the decline in cancer mortality since the 1990s comes from upstream factors, such as behavioral changes and improved screening, even though the overwhelming majority of cancer research and clinical-trial spending is on late-stage cancer therapies. A cure for cancer might be elusive. But a moonshot for cancer screenings and tests might be the most important front in the future war on cancer.

Office hours are back! Join Derek Thompson and special guests for conversations about the future of work, technology, and culture. The next session will be January 26. Register here and watch a recording anytime on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.

Lawyers for United States President Joe Biden have found five additional pages with classified markings at his home in Wilmington, Delaware

Flu continues to be very prevalent in the US, but the first wave of the season -- which swept through the country weeks earlier than usual -- appears to have peaked.