Last May, when it became clear that Ferdinand Marcos Jr. would ascend to the presidency of the Philippines, Maria Ressa, the Nobel laureate (and Atlantic contributing writer) who has become legendary in her fight for freedom of the press and democracy, was despondent. “This is how it ends, I said to myself that evening,” Ressa wrote in her book How to Stand Up to a Dictator. “You can’t have integrity of elections if you don’t have integrity of facts. Facts lost. History lost. Marcos won.”

Marcos’s win represented a decisive victory for authoritarianism in the Philippines. The new president is the son and namesake of the dictator and kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. His victory also represented a direct threat to Ressa. Marcos’s supporters are among those who, like his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, have targeted and harassed both Ressa and Rappler, the Manila-based news organization she co-founded and runs.

This week, however, Ressa is celebrating an unexpected victory of her own. A Philippine court acquitted her, and Rappler, of four charges of tax evasion—charges drummed up in “a brazen abuse of power” that was intended “to stop journalists from doing their jobs,” she told reporters who had gathered outside the courthouse after her acquittal. The charges would have carried a maximum prison sentence of 34 years if she were convicted. “Of course it was emotional,” she said, her voice breaking repeatedly. “Today, facts win. Truth wins. Justice wins.” When I spoke with Ressa shortly after the verdict, she told me she was feeling “triumphant.” Also: very tired.

Her fight is nowhere near over. Before her acquittal, Ressa had 10 criminal charges against her, all brought under the former presidential administration in quick succession, prompted by Rappler’s aggressive coverage of the administration’s corruption during the country’s drug wars. “We kind of live in this uncertainty,” she said, referring to the remaining pending cases, which include another charge of tax evasion and her appeal of a cyberlibel conviction. (That conviction stems from a publishing decision that Rappler made before the cyberlibel law even existed.) But in some ways, she told me, “we’ve been through the worst already. We survived six years of Rodrigo Duterte and we did our job.”

Ressa’s steadfastness and devotion to that story, despite Duterte’s attempts to silence her, helped earn her the Nobel Prize in 2021. Several journalists who have spoken out against government corruption have been murdered in the Philippines, including 23 under the Duterte administration and two since Marcos took office last year. In September, the radio journalist Renato Blanco was fatally stabbed. In October, the broadcast journalist Percival Mabasa was shot dead in what police claim was a hit ordered by the country’s prisons chief.

Now, Ressa says, she wants to focus all her energy on “2024, which is, I believe, the tipping point for democracy globally. As of now, 60 percent of the world is living under autocracy. We’ve rolled back to 1989.” By that, she meant that the level of democracy experienced by the average person around the world has reverted to 1989 levels. The number of liberal democracies was down to 34 in 2021, the lowest it has been since 1995. Closed autocracies are on the rise. Thirty-five states now suffer from major deteriorations in freedom of expression at the hands of governments, compared with only five a decade ago. The situation is particularly bad in the Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, according to a report last year by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden.

For Ressa, today’s democratic backsliding calls to mind September 1972, when the elder Marcos declared martial law, citing a national crisis of communism and crime, and promised to build what he called “the New Society” while retaining for himself virtually unlimited presidential powers. Marcos oversaw the torture, kidnapping, and extrajudicial executions of tens of thousands of citizens. At least 50,000 people—many of them human-rights activists, journalists, labor leaders, and church workers—were arrested and detained from 1972 to 1975 alone, according to Amnesty International.

During this tumultuous time in the Philippines, Ressa was in the third grade. She had just moved from Manila to New Jersey. She was not thinking primarily about martial law. She was trying to figure out what a pajama party was.

It’s a party where everyone wears pajamas, her mother told her. But when she showed up to her friend Sharon’s house dressed for bed, she saw that none of the other girls was in pajamas. “I turned in panic to my mom, who sheepishly admitted she didn’t really know what a ‘pajama party’ was, either,” Ressa wrote in her autobiography. Ressa remembers how her friend shrugged it off and quickly helped her inside the house to change. Her lesson from that day: “When you take a risk, you have to trust that someone will come to your aid; and when it’s your turn, you will help someone else. It’s better to face your fear than to run from it because running won’t make the problem go away. When you face it, you have the chance to conquer it. That was how I began to define courage.”

Few people have had their courage tested the way Ressa has in recent years. For now, she has a to-do list with three very big priorities on it: (1) avoid prison, (2) fix the internet, and (3) save democracy. “If we don’t put any guardrails—significant guardrails—around technology, we’re jumping off the cliff,” she told me. “What’s at stake is the future of journalism and the survival of democracy.”

Ressa co-founded Rappler in 2012, in part because she could see the immense potential of the web—and she was drawn to the idea of harnessing people’s snap emotional reactions for good. People like to think of the web as a marketplace of ideas, but Ressa understood early on that its current architecture makes it first and foremost a marketplace of feelings. So while sites like Facebook built algorithms that invisibly rewarded and prioritized posts that elicited anger, Rappler gave its readers a mood map, crowdsourcing reactions to articles and sharing the findings openly. “If you actually go through the exercise of identifying how you feel, you’re more prone to be rational,” she told me at the time. “If you can identify how you feel, will you be more receptive to the debate that’s in front of you? I hope.”

Ressa built Rappler in a far sunnier era of web history, when people were still celebrating the Arab Spring as a success for democracy, and the big social platforms seemed like they had the potential to be forces for good. Today she puts it starkly: “Social media prioritizes the spread of lies over facts,” she told me. “Our information ecosystem, it’s corrupted right now. If your information ecosystem is corrupted, then that leads to the corruption of your institutions. And when you don’t have working institutions, you don’t have checks and balances. We’re electing illiberal leaders democratically, and they’re corrupting the institutions from within. And when the institutions are corrupted, when that happens, you lose your freedom.”

Yet despite horrific targeted harassment, death threats, and attempts by some of the most powerful men in the world to silence her, Ressa has been relentless in her belief that it does not have to be this way. She believes that global democratic decline is a temporary condition; that authoritarianism will be beaten back; that the people and the press can be free; that tyranny will be stopped. She believes all of this because, for one thing, she is basically the Energizer Bunny of Nobel Peace Prize winners, and also because she knows that any other outcome would be intolerable. “Compared to others in hiding, in exile, or in jail, I am lucky,” she wrote in her latest book. “The only defense a journalist has is to shine the light on the truth, to expose the lie—and I can still do that.”

Ressa has watched in real time as government operatives have attacked her and her news organization, attempted to discredit her and destroy her livelihood, and charged her with numerous crimes to frighten her into submission. You can see why Ressa has argued that we ought to treat this technocultural moment not as a beginning but as an ending—as the aftermath of a war. She argues for the creation of NATO-like partnerships and a new Declaration of Human Rights to protect democratic values in the age of the social web. The outcome she is after may not come to pass. The solutions she poses may not be exactly right. But what she is fighting for is most certainly worth the risk.

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 Xochitl Gonzalez, a best-selling novelist and newly minted Atlantic staff writer. You can find Xochitl’s incisive takes on culture, community, and class in her essay from our September 2022 issue, “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” and her Atlantic newsletter, Brooklyn, Everywhere. She’s gaga for Broadway, catching up on last winter’s Yellowjackets craze, and says there’s exactly one Marvel cinematic experience that’s stoked her sense of childlike wonder as an adult.

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

Franklin Foer: The cynic’s dilemma Eight books to comfort you when you’re lonely The married-mom advantage Culture Survey: Xochitl Gonzalez

What my friends are talking about most right now: I wrote about this for my newsletter a bit, but my Latino friends—artists and not—are cautiously optimistic about what feels like a bit of a shift in cultural representation. Not a wave, but an evolution. It was an amazing year for Latino literature, with another one coming up; we’ve seen amazing Latino characters in Wednesday, Wakanda Forever, The Bear. Bad Bunny is one of the biggest stars in the world, but also, you have artists like iLe, Alynda Lee Segarra, Omar Apollo. I could go on and on, but it feels like a moment not just for Latino “presence” in culture, but for that presence to really reflect our diversity as a community. [Related: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever does the near impossible.]

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I just finished a spree of amazing live events, which included seeing Mariah Carey’s Christmas special at Madison Square Garden, the actor Wendell Pierce in the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, and The Collaboration. But I’m really looking forward to seeing Between Riverside and Crazy; I love the actor Liza Colón-Zayas, who stars in it, and I’m loving the moment she’s having right now. I hope it goes on forever. I’m also excited about the Sweeney Todd revival on Broadway. We did it at my high school—ambitious, I know—and that made me a lifelong fan. I’ll see any and every production of it.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I came to Yellowjackets late, and I love it. And who doesn’t love Wednesday?  [Related: The TV show for the age of conspiracism]

An actor I would watch in anything: LaKeith Stanfield, Aubrey Plaza, and I’m buckling up to see whatever Hong Chau does next—she’s captivating. (More than one, I know.)

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: The art movie is easy: Requiem for a Dream. It spoke to a side of Brooklyn that I’d never seen anywhere in art before it came out, and that I’ve never seen again. A fucked-up homage to home.

I remember having a sense of thrill the first time I saw Black Panther in a movie theater that I hadn’t felt since I was a kid—experiencing heroes and charismatic villains in the dark, with strangers, on a massive screen with a pumping sound system. That, to me, was what blockbusters were meant to do: make you feel so connected to the rest of the world and also deeply satisfied with their story and action. [Related: The provocation and power of Black Panther]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I devoured Bunny, by Mona Awad, on a flight recently and can’t stop thinking about it, and I loved High-Risk Homosexual, by Edgar Gomez.

A song I’ll always dance to: “Show Me Love,” by Robin S

A go-to karaoke song: “Copacabana”; I also have a dance that goes with it.

A favorite sad song: “Summer Soft,” by Stevie Wonder

A favorite angry song: “Cell Block Tango” from the original Broadway cast of Chicago

“My friend Marcy Blum put me on to the show Sex Education, and I really enjoyed it.” (Netflix)

An album that means a lot to me: There are many, but I would have to say Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Navigator, because the path of my life feels irrevocably linked to that album; that was what I was listening to when I conceived of the idea for my first book. The journey that the singer-songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra takes you on, lyrically, helped me find a path for the characters I made. So I worship that album a bit, and it never gets old, despite my listening to it so many times. I own it on vinyl, which, these days, is a true sign of love.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “No Existe un Mundo Poshuracán” at the Whitney, which was the first major exhibition of Puerto Rican art in the mainland U.S. since, I believe, a show at the Met in 1974. It focused on art created post–Hurricane Maria and was political and powerful. It was also moving for me to see a prestigious institution give so much space to art engaged in this conversation, and to see Puerto Rican art centered in an American context for a change.

Something I treasured as a teenager: Holy Cow!, the record store that used to be in Park Slope, Brooklyn. They would have mystery bundles of CDs for like $1. Or maybe it was $5. I discovered so much awesome music that way.

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: Alex Brook Lynn’s recent feature in Intelligencer, “I Lost My Brother Twice,” was extremely illuminating for me about how the mental-health crisis we are seeing in the U.S. is part of a trickle-down effect of health-care privatization and the defunding and closing of public hospitals. It connected a lot of dots for me.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: It’s a bit of a tie between Sam Quinones’s meth story from 2021 and, frankly, the revelation that the Where the Crawdads Sing author, Delia Owens, is part of an ongoing investigation for murder that seems to then have been fictionalized in her novel.

The last debate I had about culture: I’ve been debating—both with myself and others—if we can or should separate art from the artist that made it. We are living in a time when, on a nearly daily basis, we find out that a lot of people who have made cool and pertinent art are also terrible or morally reprehensible people. This is true throughout the history of art, but unlike a painting in a museum from days gone by, or even an album or a DVD you might have purchased ages ago, now, in the era of streaming everything, what we listen to and watch is also a form of continued economic support of living artists.

There are a lot of downsides to everything going digital, but one of them, to me, is that it’s added a slightly exhaustive element to being entertained. You aren’t just watching a film by a man accused of pedophilia or listening to a song by someone you’ve discovered is an anti-Semite; you are now actively putting money in their pocket when you do so. What does that mean for us, the consumers of the culture? [Related: Tár has an answer to art’s toughest question.]

A good recommendation I recently received: My friend Marcy Blum put me on to the show Sex Education, and I really enjoyed it. She also made me purchase a lemon squeezer, and, honestly, it has changed my life. [Related: The thoughtful raunch of Sex Education]

The last thing that made me cry: I sobbed for the entire mile-and-a-half walk home after watching The Whale. I’m still not sure if I loved it or if it was an expert act of emotional manipulation, but Brendan Fraser was a marvel and the entire theater just sat in stunned silence when it was over. [Related: You can’t really make a feel-good body-horror movie.]

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I rewatched How to Marry a Millionaire recently and was literally rolling. There is no one like Marilyn Monroe.

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

The Week Ahead Abbott Elementary, one of our critics’ picks for the best shows of 2022 (returning from its Season 2 hiatus on Wednesday) M3GAN, the latest horror flick from Blumhouse Productions and Atomic Monster Productions (Friday) Iggy Pop’s new album, Every Loser (Friday) Essay (Rob Delaney; Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic; Alamy; Getty)

The TV Shows That Helped My Dying Son Communicate

By Rob Delaney

When you have a kid with a severe illness, whatever makes them happy during it becomes immeasurably valuable to you—no matter how small.

I learned this when my 1-year-old son, Henry, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. As part of his treatment, he had to get a tracheostomy—a breathing tube was inserted in the base of his neck and prevented him from talking. After he lost his voice, Henry communicated through Makaton, a language program that uses symbols, signs, and speech to enable communication for people who might otherwise have a tough time being understood. The program is similar to sign language, but it combines hand gestures with spoken words (for those who can speak) and sometimes references to images or objects as well. Many people with Down syndrome find it helpful, as do kids like Henry who can’t speak because of a tracheostomy and nerve damage.

You may have seen Makaton if you’ve ever watched the beloved Mr. Tumble on CBeebies, a BBC channel for little kids. Mr. Tumble is the alter ego of a guy named Justin Fletcher. Because he’s probably the most famous Makaton user in the United Kingdom, he’s helped countless families develop communication skills that foster substantively better and closer relationships. When we found his show, Henry and I didn’t have much longer left together, but Mr. Tumble helped us understand each other in what time we did have.

Read the full article.

More in Culture The dizzying debauchery of Babylon How the lessons of Game of Thrones were lost Will climate change make real animals into fairy tales? The Avatar sequel’s worst character actually does the film a service.

Read the latest culture essay by Jordan Calhoun in Humans Being.

Catch Up on The Atlantic How George Santos defrauded my old congressional district The great big Medicare rip-off Poverty is violent. Photo Album (Emilio Morenatti / AP0

Check out some of the best photos of 2022 through the lens of the photographer Emilio Morenatti.

Kate Lindsay contributed to this newsletter.