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.

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

Scientists tried to break cuddling. Instead, they broke 30 years of research. The weight-loss-drug revolution is a miracle—and a menace. What to read when you’re expecting The Culture Survey: Clint Smith

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’m very late to it, but I’ve been really enjoying Ramy. It’s a thoughtful, funny, and oftentimes incredibly sincere exploration of what coming-of-age as a Muslim American Millennial looks like. [Related: Ramy isn’t a travel show, but it could be]

An actor I would watch in anything: Mahershala Ali. The man is a genius. [Related: Green Book: A flimsy tale elevated by two great performances]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: The best novel I’ve read recently is When We Were Sisters, by Fatimah Asghar. I’ve known Fatimah for years now. We came up together in the slam-poetry scene in our early 20s, but they have always been someone who worked across genres and disciplines. Their debut novel is a gorgeous, lyrical meditation on the relationship among three sisters who lose their parents and are forced to raise one another in a world rife with uncertainty. It’s a beautiful novel that you can read in just a few sittings. [Related: All the brown girls on TV]

The best book of nonfiction I’ve read recently is Life on Delay, by my colleague here at The Atlantic John Hendrickson. I can’t remember the last time I read a book so human. Life on Delay brims with empathy and honesty. It is a book about family, complicated relationships, and how we come to understand who we are in the world. It moved me in ways that I haven’t experienced before. It’s fantastic. [Related: Why I dread saying my own name]

An author I will read anything by: Living today, Jhumpa Lahiri. From the past, Frederick Douglass.

A song I’ll always dance to: “If It Isn’t Love,” by New Edition

My go-to karaoke song: “Candy Rain,” by Soul for Real

My favorite sad song: “Pass You By,” by Boyz II Men

"[My favorite sad song is] 'Pass You By,' by Boyz II Men," says Clint. Above: The group perform at the 62nd annual Grammy Awards on January 26, 2020 (Kevin Winter / Getty)

An album that means a lot to me: Lupe Fiasco’s 2007 album, The Cool, was so formative for me during my college years because it expanded my understanding of the relationship between music and literature. It is an incredible literary document.

A visual artist that I cherish: Growing up, we had prints of the painter Jacob Lawrence’s work on our walls. I’m filled with nostalgia anytime I see his work.

Something I treasured as a teenager: My VHS tape of every goal in the 2002 World Cup. I watched it every night.

Something I recently revisited: Not a reread or a rewatch but a re-eat. I was obsessed with Lunchables when I was a kid. I recently had one for the first time in a long time and, man … it did not taste the same at all. Not sure what was going on with my elementary-school taste buds. [Related: The 30-year reign of Lunchables]

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: I don’t know that it changed my perspective so much as expanded it, but I recently read Nadja Drost’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize– and Michael Kelly Award–winning story “When Can We Really Rest?” about migrants from all over the world crossing the Colombia-Panama border to try and make it to the U.S. It blew me away.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Gotta be Ta-Nehisi’s “The Case for Reparations.”

Something delightful introduced to me by kids in my life: I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, and one of our favorite things to do on weekends is watch nature documentaries when we wake up. Shout out to David Attenborough. [Related: Blue Planet II is the greatest nature series of all time]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with John Hendrickson, 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 Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, a frank portrait of cobalt-mining abuses by the modern-slavery scholar Siddharth Kara (on shelves Tuesday)   Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, a documentary inspired by the work of the Atlantic senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II (begins streaming on Peacock on Thursday) 80 for Brady, a comedy that joins the screen legends Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field with the NFL star Tom Brady (in theaters Friday) Essay (Derek White / Getty)

Sam Smith’s Radical Centrism

By Spencer Kornhaber

Sam Smith’s music defines the word inoffensive—so why does the singer inspire so many arguments? For more than a decade, Smith’s distinctive voice has soaked through the collective consciousness like the syrup in a rum cake. But that success has also triggered annoyance from across the cultural spectrum. As a nonbinary person, Smith has been treated as a punch line by right-wing media. Earlier in their career, they also ticked off the queer commentariat by misstating gay history and tsk-tsking about Grindr. All along, critics have made sport of Smith for formulaic songwriting, mannered vocals, and a tendency to hire church choirs as if they’re available on Taskrabbit to install soul on demand.

Read the full article.

More in Culture The Oscar nominations are in, and a few big trends are out. A courtroom drama with an indecipherable culprit Poker Face has a sting in its tail. The meme that defined a decade Catch Up on The Atlantic The cognitive dissonance of the Monterey Park shooting An Asian American grief The NHL is gutless. Photo Album (Yannick Gouguenheim / Ocean Art)

Dip into the majestic depths of selected snapshots from the 2022 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest, whose winners were announced earlier this month.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

House Republicans are readying their subpoenas.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory. Take detransitioners seriously. Who’s afraid of a portrait of Muhammad?

Probable Probes

After a few (er, 14) initial stumbles, House Republicans have elected a speaker and handed out committee gavels, and are now poised to deliver on the one promise to voters that they have the unchallenged power to keep: pursuing aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden, his administration, and, yes, even his family.

The flurry of inquiries that Republicans, under the auspices of Congress’s oversight power, plan to launch in the coming days and weeks might well overwhelm the Biden administration, not to mention the public. None of the hearings are likely to command the attention of last year’s Democratic-led January 6 committee, but they have the potential to reveal new information about how the federal government has operated over the past two years and to create political headaches for the president as he prepares to run for reelection. The investigations also carry risks for Republicans, who could lose public support if they appear to be tilting too far at conspiracy theories or pursuing overly partisan—and personal—takedowns of Biden and his son Hunter.

Here’s a guide to the probes that are likely to make headlines in the months ahead.

The Southern Border

Multiple House committees are planning hearings on an issue that Republicans made, along with tackling inflation, a centerpiece of their national campaign. They’ve accused Biden of willfully neglecting the influx of migrants across the southern border, and although the attacks frequently devolve into immigrant-bashing, the moral and legal conundrum over how to handle asylum seekers is becoming a bigger political liability for the president. Big-city Democratic mayors such as Eric Adams of New York are complaining that they lack the funds to accommodate the migrants who wind up on their streets. A big question is whether the hearings will stay focused on policy or whether they’ll turn into an impeachment drive against Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland security.

Hunter Biden

The personal and business dealings of the president’s surviving son have been a Republican obsession for years, and now the party has the power to hold hearings on what Representative Elise Stefanik of New York has called “the Biden crime family.” Hunter Biden is already under investigation by federal prosecutors in Delaware, and Republicans are intent on demonstrating both that he traded on access to his famous father overseas and that the president was aware of what his son was doing. The younger Biden may be in real legal jeopardy, but the GOP faces a tricky test in making the broader public care about Hunter Biden and keeping its probe focused on his alleged corruption rather than the more sordid personal activities of a troubled son.

The “Weaponization of the Federal Government”

To secure the House speakership, Kevin McCarthy agreed to conservative demands to create a select subcommittee modeled on a 1970s Senate panel that investigated abuses by the intelligence community. This one is focused on what Republicans call “the weaponization of the federal government,” and it’s likely to zero in on complaints from Donald Trump–aligned conservatives that the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies have unfairly targeted the former president and his supporters. Democrats see a more malicious motive: to undermine and thwart the many ongoing investigations involving Trump and GOP lawmakers, including the special counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Biden’s Own Classified Documents

Republicans had barely claimed their new House majority when news broke that classified documents had been found at a think tank in Washington, D.C., where Biden had kept an office, and Biden’s residence in Delaware—handing them a fresh line of inquiry against the president. GOP leaders quickly launched a congressional investigation, but they will be competing with the Justice Department, which appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to look into the matter.

U.S.-China Relations

Democrats may see the other planned investigations as partisan exercises aimed at tarnishing the president, but not this one. A House vote last week to create a select committee on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party” earned broad bipartisan support, including from all of the top Democratic leaders. The committee is expected to focus on how the U.S. should counter China’s growing economic and military strength, the threat of its possible invasion of Taiwan, and American concerns about its human-rights abuses. Stronger U.S. policy toward China has long been a bipartisan cause in Congress; former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who voted for the bill, is a hawk who angered the Chinese government with her high-profile visit to Taiwan last year. That consensus is likely to add legitimacy to the committee’s work, although some progressives are wary of its potential to generate anti-Asian rhetoric.

Related:

Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy. The impeachment of Joe Biden (from October 2022)

Today’s News

A helicopter with senior Ukrainian officials onboard crashed in a Kyiv suburb, killing more than dozen people, including Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. The cause of the crash is still unknown. Microsoft is planning to lay off about 10,000 employees as part of a broader effort to cut costs. New research shows that areas of Greenland are hotter than they have been at any point in the past 1,000 years.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores whether diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts actually exacerbate intolerance.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tommaso Ottomano

This Is the Band That’s Supposedly Saving Rock and Roll?

By Spencer Kornhaber

Early December, a tchotchke shop in Brooklyn—an employee advises me about which novelty socks to pair with which comical greeting card for a friend. Then her voice, previously curious and chatty, gains a sudden seriousness. She tells me about a concert she went to the night before. The band was Italian, it was saving rock and roll, and it’d play in the city again, that night. I suddenly understood the difference between a salesperson and an evangelist. The woman gave me an order: You must go see Måneskin.

I didn’t go, but I did know who Måneskin was. I first became aware of the group while attending a watch party for the 2021 Eurovision Song Competition. No one at the party could understand why a bar band in burgundy leather, playing what sounded like a Rage Against the Machine song edited for a Chevy ad, ran away with the top prize. Eurovision is known for Abba-style spectacle, silly and bright. Måneskin is all about scowling, and guitars that sound like carburetors. But clearly, the band had sparked passion somewhere—the kind of passion that, it turns out, converts listeners into proselytizers.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Let’s shake on it. When good pain turns into bad pain

Culture Break

A still from Hawa (Amazon Studios)

Read. “The Bug,” a new poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson.

“What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug. To leave it alone / when it already planned on dying.”

Watch. Hawa, streaming on Amazon Prime, accurately captures teen grief.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, James Kirchick’s book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which came out last year. The title, with its focus on a single American city, actually undersells the book’s scope. More than a case study or chronology of a civil-rights movement, Secret City is a fascinating history of the past century of American politics. It reveals, or reminds, the reader of the supporting and often central role that the scandal of homosexuality—as it was too long understood—played in so many of the nation’s pivotal moments, including the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate. I had no idea, for example, that Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were all subject at one time or another to rumors that they were gay. Kirchick documents how gay life evolved from subculture to simply culture in Washington over the course of a few decades, and how the nation’s capital was both behind and ahead of the curve in the slow but profound shift in acceptance of gay men and women in public service.

— Russell

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.