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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 staff writer John Hendrickson, who has just published a new book, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter, which you can read an excerpt of here. John has written for The Atlantic about, among other topics, President Joe Biden’s stutter and, most recently, I Didn’t See You There, an experimental documentary about living with a disability that he calls “kinetic and compelling.” John will read anything by Richard Price, bought tickets for all five of The Walkmen’s upcoming NYC reunion shows, and has probably watched The Fugitive 50 times.

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

What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life How Noma made fine dining far worse Stop trying to ask “smart questions.”

The Culture Survey: John Hendrickson

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I spent nearly a decade waiting and praying for The Walkmen to maybe someday reunite, doubting that it would ever happen. To me, they are the unsung heroes of the turn-of-the-millennium New York rock renaissance (think: The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Interpol—all the Meet Me in the Bathroom bands). Recently, when The Walkmen announced a five-night run in Manhattan in April, I impulsively bought tickets for all five shows. I will be screaming every word to every song.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: After cycling through The Office, The Larry Sanders Show, Parks and Recreation, a slew of Ken Burns documentaries, and several seasons of Alone, my wife and I have started watching NewsRadio at night before we fall asleep. Again: Unsung! Every line Phil Hartman delivers is masterful. Stephen Root, of Barry and Office Space fame, does deadpan humor like no one else. And it’s a bit surreal to watch Joe Rogan in one of his early roles, playing a meathead named Joe.

An actor I would watch in anything: Bill Hader

My favorite blockbuster: The Fugitive is as close as you can get to a perfect—for lack of a better phrase—popcorn movie. Brisk pacing! Snappy dialogue! A few huge action sequences counterbalanced with grisled guys in frumpy suits working the phones! I’ve probably seen it 50 times. [Related: Hollywood doesn’t make movies like The Fugitive anymore.]

Best novel I’ve recently read: I’m currently reading Laura Zigman’s Small World, about two middle-aged sisters who move in together, bringing decades of family baggage into the house. I don’t want to give too much of it away, but I’m in awe of Zigman’s ability to weave biting humor and tenderness so closely together.

An author I will read anything by: Richard Price [Related: Two good old-fashioned young novelists]

A song I’ll always dance to: Le Tigre, “Deceptacon.” Hit play and try to keep your body still. It’s impossible!

“When the Walkmen announced a five-night run in Manhattan in April, I impulsively bought tickets for all five shows,” John says. Above: The band performing in Washington, D.C., in 2013 (Leigh Vogel / Getty for Thread)

My go-to karaoke song: Patti Smith, “Because the Night.” I’m a horrible singer, but singing is salvation for me. I like to belt this one out on a Friday or Saturday night at Montero’s, an old fisherman’s dive bar near the East River in Brooklyn. I usually throw in a kick when the pre-chorus starts. I write about this a little bit in my book, Life on Delay, but singing relies on a different part of the brain than we use for speaking, and I never stutter when I sing. It’s freeing. Scores of current or former stutterers have turned to music at some point in their lives: Elvis Presley, Kendrick Lamar, Carly Simon, Ed Sheeran, Bill Withers, Noel Gallagher—to name just a few.

My favorite sad song: Charles Bradley’s cover of Black Sabbath’s “Changes” absolutely slays me. It transcends what you think of as recorded music—it’s as if Bradley’s soul is imprinted on the track. The full backstory about Bradley and his mother around the time of the recording makes it all the more poignant.

My favorite angry song: Thee Oh Sees, “I Come From The Mountain.” Whenever I’m stressed or anxious, I crank this as loud as I possibly can and head-bang at my desk. Colson Whitehead told 60 Minutes that they’re on his writing playlist!

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Annie Lowrey’s deeply vivid, personal account of her experience with pregnancy was the most memorable piece of journalism I read last year, full stop. It’ll stay with me forever.

A good recommendation I recently received: David Sims recently recommended to me the Apple series For All Mankind, sort of like Mad Men crossed with Apollo 13. [Related: How the space fantasy became banal]

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Watch this clip from “The PriceMaster.” It’s one minute of your life. Trust me.

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Gal Beckerman, 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

Maybe I Do, a romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Luke Bracey, William H. Macy, and Emma Roberts (in theaters Friday) Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, a posthumous book by David Graeber (Tuesday) The docuseries The 1619 Project, an expansion of the book by Nikole Hannah-Jones (first two episodes premiere Thursday on Hulu)

More in Culture

The film that accurately captures teen grief When good pain turns into bad pain This is the band that’s supposedly saving rock and roll? The calamitous lies of adulthood A slick mystery that takes place entirely on screens Skinamarink is a delightful nightmare. The line that Velma crossed

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Supreme Court justices do not seem to be getting along. Despite everything you think you know, America is on the right track. How Joe Biden wins again

Photo Album

A snow leopard against a backdrop of the mountains of Ladakh in northern India (© Sascha Fonseca / Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

Check out some entries in this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest (and vote for your favorite).

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Twelve thousand layoffs at Google. Eleven thousand at Facebook, 10,000 at Microsoft, 18,000 at Amazon, 8,000 at Salesforce, 4,000 at Cisco, 3,000-plus at Twitter.

The American economy has recovered from the sharp downturn caused by the arrival of the coronavirus and is chugging along just fine, at least for the moment. Yet the tech sector—the country’s most dynamic industry—has fallen into a kind of recession characterized by mass layoffs, pervasive hiring freezes, a bear market for tech stocks (their recent rebound notwithstanding), a collapse in initial public offerings, and a sharp drop in venture-capital funding.

For decades, the industry’s potential seemed boundless. So why has tech suffered so much more than its corporate peers have lately? That question has two answers: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s effort to stamp out inflation, and the waning of a pandemic emergency during which many tech companies thrived.

[Derek Thompson: What the tech and media layoffs are really telling us about the economy]

The foremost issue for tech companies is interest rates, which Powell has been hiking sharply for the past year. Short-term borrowing costs were close to scratch for much of the 2010s and fell to scratch again when the pandemic hit, but they began rising precipitously in 2022 as the Federal Reserve has attempted to reduce inflation by slowing down parts of the economy. Pretty much all American businesses across all business sectors are reliant on borrowed cash in one way or another (as are most American consumers). But many tech companies were especially conditioned to very low interest rates: Uber, an enormous and long-established business, for instance, loses money on many rides, and thousands and thousands of start-ups accrue huge losses and rely on their financiers to foot their bills while they grow.

The interest-rate hike has hit the tech sector hard in another way: by helping to crater crypto prices, thus erasing billions of dollars of paper wealth, disciplining any number of venture capitalists, and crashing any number of technology businesses, most spectacularly the Ponzi-like FTX. Indeed, the crypto winter has both directly hurt many technology companies that went all in on bitcoin or ether and indirectly made the financing climate harder for others. There aren’t a lot of bitcoin decamillionaires around to invest this year, and many VCs are deep in the red.

The second major factor is a reversion to the mean after the intense early years of the pandemic. That awful period was in some ways a good one for tech firms. People stopped going to theaters and started watching more movies and shows at home—hurting AMC and aiding Netflix and Hulu. Families stopped shopping as much in person and began buying more things online—depressing town centers and boosting Amazon and Uber Eats, and spurring many businesses to pour money into digital advertising. Companies quit hosting corporate retreats and started facilitating meetings online—depriving hotel chains of money and bolstering Zoom and Microsoft. Schools sent students home—hurting firms that provide services to school districts and leading to a surge in spending on computers, tablets, and virtual-classroom software.

[Derek Thompson: Why everything in tech seems to be collapsing at once]

Flush with new revenue and bolstered by low borrowing costs, tech companies expanded. They added thousands and thousands of new workers: Microsoft, for instance, went from a head count of 163,000 to 221,000, and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, from 45,000 to 72,000. Many firms also expanded their business operations; Meta, for instance, poured billions and billions of dollars into developing a virtual-reality social space (that, I would add, nobody likes and nobody is using).

Consumer spending has since normalized. Sales of smartphones, laptops, kitchen gadgets, and gym equipment have dropped, and Americans are spending a lot more cash in restaurants and movie theaters and on hotels and flights. As a result, many tech companies have seen revenues in parts of their businesses decline, and corporate officers are admitting that they expanded too quickly. “Our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have,” Sundar Pichai, the head of Google’s parent company, told employees last year.

The net result is that tech companies whose prospects once seemed limitless now look a bit more like other old, lumbering corporate giants. There’s some good news for tech firms, though. Many are still wildly profitable. The Fed is likely to stop hiking interest rates soon. Artificial intelligence has started making amazing breakthroughs—ones that regular consumers can finally understand, see, and use. Maybe a tech summer is just around the corner.