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 the London-based staff writer Helen Lewis. In addition to her extensive Atlantic coverage of U.K. politics and the British monarchy, Helen wrote about a recent art-world controversy in November and, last month, coined a whole new label for a strange internet trend. She’s currently engrossed in a new royal period drama on Netflix, will read anything by the late novelist Hilary Mantel, and calls the TikToker Mamadou Ndiaye a “David Attenborough for Gen Z.”

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

The death of the smart shopper What’s the smallest amount of therapy that’s still effective? Short story: “The Third Law of Magic” The Culture Survey: Helen Lewis

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The Empress, on Netflix, which is a German-language period drama that tells the story of Elisabeth, or “Sisi,” the 19th-century empress of Austria. Beautiful, divisive, suffocated by the demands of royal life—very much the Habsburg Meghan Markle. (Until I visited Schönbrunn Palace and the museum dedicated to her in Vienna last summer, I had no idea there was a full-blown Sisi industry.)

Elisabeth lived in a time when the Habsburg Empire was being dragged into modernity; a key plotline of The Empress is whether the emperor can raise the funds to build a railway across its lands, which stretched into the current borders of Italy and Hungary. She was herself an oddly modern figure, running away from court to self-actualize in Corfu. She almost certainly had an eating disorder and she had gymnastics rings installed in her room at the Hofburg palace so she could do calisthenics. She also refused to have any portraits painted of her after the age of 42, a practice I intend to follow.

The Empress is more fun to watch than The Crown, because I know the history less well and therefore have no idea what the “right” answer is to the dilemmas the characters face. Should the Habsburgs go to war or try to stay neutral? I don’t know—but then, neither did they. [Related: Black lamb and grey falcon: part I (published in 1941)]

An actor I would watch in anything: Gary Oldman. In Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, he plays a low-level spymaster called Jackson Lamb who oversees a group of no-hopers from a horrible office in a particularly charmless part of London. His performance is exquisite—if that’s the right word to use of a character whose main attributes are dandruff and farting. [Related: Darkest Hour is a thunderous Churchill biopic.]

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: Phaedra at the National Theatre, written and directed by the Australian playwright Simon Stone. Along with Robert Icke, another exceptional writer-director, Stone works regularly at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, which is led by Ivo van Hove—the megastar European director behind the successful Broadway version of A View From the Bridge and the West Side Story revival. If you ever visit Amsterdam, go to ITA! On Thursdays, the shows are performed with English subtitles, and the ensemble is the most talented company of actors I’ve ever seen. Someone once described them to me as being like thoroughbred racehorses.

"[The last gallery show I loved was] the recent Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery, London." Above: Raphael's 'Woman With a Veil.' (Uffizi)

The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: I have to say, I approached Prince Harry’s Spare with low expectations—I thought it would be the written version of Netflix’s saccharine Harry & Meghan documentary. Wow, was I wrong: As I wrote in my Atlantic review, “where else would you find charging elephants, hallucinations about talking trash cans, Afghan War stories, royal fistfights, and a prince’s frostbitten penis in a single narrative?” [Related: The cringeworthy end of Harry & Meghan on Netflix]

An author I will read anything by: Terry Pratchett. Hilary Mantel. Janet Malcolm. All left behind solid back catalogs that I am parceling out to make last longer. [Related: Hilary Mantel’s art was infused with her pain.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: The recent Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery, London. His Madonnas are famous, but the highlights for me were Woman With a Veil, which is usually displayed at the Pitti Palace, in Florence, and the portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which is currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. The colors were astonishing, particularly because these paintings are more than 500 years old.

In Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks—an anti-self-help book about rejecting bad productivity advice and embracing the moment—he talks about an exercise where you have to look at a painting for three hours straight (bathroom breaks are permitted). That sounds like my idea of torture, but Raphael’s Woman With a Veil might make it bearable. [Related: Oliver Burkeman’s time-management advice is depressing but liberating.]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: I’m fascinated by “transient mental illnesses”—medical conditions that arise in specific historical and cultural contexts, like St. Vitus Dance, fugues, hysteria, or dissociative identity disorder. So I frequently revisit an Atlantic piece from 2000 called “A New Way to Be Mad,” which looks at people who want to have their limbs amputated, and the debate among surgeons over whether to grant their wish.

A YouTuber, TikToker, Twitch streamer, or other online creator that I’m a fan of: Mamadou Ndiaye (@mndiaye_97) on TikTok. He is dryly funny about animal behavior: David Attenborough for Gen Z. Also, he has to work around the bizarrely strict TikTok content guidelines, so I’m learning many useful synonyms for killed (e.g., merked, un-alived, past-tensed, turned into a hashtag).

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My highbrow answers to this are “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop; Philip Larkin’s “The Life With a Hole in It”t; and Wendy Cope’s “Rondeau Redoublé.” (I nearly had “She always made a new mistake instead” tattooed on me as a 20-something, but there is nowhere on my body flat enough.) [Related: Coming to terms with loss in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’]

But the honest answer is Clive James’s hymn to schadenfreude, “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” It is absolutely majestic in its pettiness: “What avail him now his awards and prizes, / The praise expended upon his meticulous technique, / His individual new voice?” [Related: A book that honors a complicated figure]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Jane Yong Kim, Clint Smith, 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 Super Bowl LVII, which will feature a halftime show by Rihanna (broadcasts tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET on Fox) Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, an ambitious history of Silicon Valley by the journalist Malcolm Harris (on sale Tuesday) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the latest film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (in theaters nationwide Friday) Essay

Long Live the Octogenarian Sex Album

By Jason Heller

(Jacob Blickenstaff / Redux)

After Smokey Robinson announced his upcoming album, many music listeners were aghast. The Motown legend, at the age of 82, unfurled the most blatantly sexual record title of his career: Gasms. It didn’t help that the album, which will be released in late April, includes songs such as “I Wanna Know Your Body” and, ahem, “I Fit in There.” Predictably, the subsequent volley of Viagra jokes alone could’ve crashed Twitter.

Yet Robinson’s catalog has given him every right to proudly unleash an octogenarian sex record—which, who knows, might now be a genre in the making. It wouldn’t be the first genre Robinson innovated. Not only did he revolutionize popular music as one of the architects of soul with Motown in the 1960s, but he also invented the subgenre known as “quiet storm,” named after his superb 1975 solo album, A Quiet Storm. On it, he crystallized a silky, sophisticated R&B that never tumbled into funky porn. Still, on the album’s No. 1 Billboard R&B hit, “Baby That’s Backatcha,” there’s no misinterpreting Robinson’s celebration of reciprocal lust: “Oh, baby, that’s tit for tat,” he sings. “I’m givin’ you this for that.” Many of Robinson’s peers in the ’70s—Barry White, Al Green, his Motown labelmate Marvin Gaye—rivaled his sultriness. But they all took cues from the maestro, who had long proved his ability to swoop from heartbreak to bravado in the span of a syllable.

Read the full article.

More in Culture What politicians’ libraries tell us Why do fascists love Dante? The films Steven Soderbergh watches on a loop When emo grows up Magic Mike’s Last Dance is as sexy as it is romantic. Catch Up on The Atlantic George Santos, the GOP’s useful liar Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes had to disprove a misconception. Red Zeppelin Photo Album Tourists release sky lanterns during the Pingxi Lantern Festival on February 5, 2023, in Taipei, Taiwan. (Lam Yik Fei / Getty

Check out images of an unusually low tide in Venice, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, a unique dining experience in China, and more in our editor’s photos of the week.

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It’s shunning time in Madison County, Virginia, where the school board recently banished my novel The Handmaid’s Tale from the shelves of the high-school library. I have been rendered “unacceptable.” Governor Glenn Youngkin enabled such censorship last year when he signed legislation allowing parents to veto teaching materials they perceive as sexually explicit.

This episode is perplexing to me, in part because my book is much less sexually explicit than the Bible, and I doubt the school board has ordered the expulsion of that. Possibly, the real motive lies elsewhere. The conservative Christian group Focus on the Family generated the list of “unacceptable” books that reportedly inspired the school board’s action, and at least one member of the public felt the school board was trying to “limit what kids can read” based on religious views. Could it be that the board acted under the mistaken belief that The Handmaid’s Tale is anti-Christian?

The truth is that the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale is in part biblical: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15). The novel sets an inward faith and core Christian values—which I take to be embodied in the love of neighbor and the forgiveness of sins—against totalitarian control and power-hoarding cloaked in a supposed religiousness that is mostly based on the earlier scriptures in the Bible. The stealing of women for reproductive purposes and the appropriation of their babies appears in Genesis 30, when Rachel and Leah turn their “handmaids” over to Jacob and then claim the children as their own. My novel is also an exploration of the theoretical question “What kind of a totalitarianism might the United States become?” I suggest we’re beginning to see the real-life answer to that query.

[Read: The banned books you haven’t heard about]

Wittingly or otherwise, the Madison County school board has now become part of the centuries-old wrangling over who shall have control of religious texts and authority over what they mean. In its early-modern form, this power struggle goes back to the mid-15th-century appearance of the Gutenberg printing press, which allowed a wider dissemination of printed materials, including Bibles.

The Church had good reason for wanting to limit Bible-reading (in Latin) to the clergy. Limbo and purgatory weren’t in it, nor was the catalog of saints or the notion of marriage as a sacrament, among other key teachings. But John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, and their continental counterparts translated the Bible into vernacular languages and enabled cheap copies of it to be printed. As people learned to read in ever larger numbers, they read the Bible, and the result was a proliferation of different interpretations. Baptists, Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, and Methodists are all the descendants of this biblical big bang. Approximately three centuries of bitter and destructive religious wars followed, as well as massacres, excommunications, widespread heresy trials, witchcraft panics, and burnings at the stake, with the usual nasty human-warfare raping, looting, and pillaging stuff thrown in.

That’s one reason the authors of the United States Constitution framed the First Amendment as they did. It stipulates that Congress shall not make any law that establishes a state religion or prohibits the free exercise of an individual’s own faith. Who wanted the homicidal uproar that had gone on in Europe for so long?

That uproar resulted from the collision between an old establishment and a new communication technology. All such collisions are disruptive, especially at first, when the new technology bears an aura of magic and revelation. Would Adolf Hitler have had the same impact without radio? As for film, it was such a powerful and potentially bad influence on the masses that it inspired Hollywood’s Hays Code. This list of prohibitions was very long, and included depictions of mixed-race marriages and scenes in which a man and a woman were shown in bed together, even if married. (This last produced a boom in twin-bed sales, because viewers got the idea that this was the norm in a marriage.)

The effort to control lurid comic books came next. Donald Duck was one thing; crime and horror were quite another. The latter included much material that was banned under the Hays Code, and teens of my generation read them avidly. On-screen, Singin’ in the Rain; under the bed, Tales From the Crypt. Series such as Crime Does Not Pay were said to encourage juvenile delinquency, not to mention racism. Some of these comics were certainly traumatizing: Will I ever recover from the slimy, toothy monster rising out of the eerie lagoon? Probably not.

Then along came television. Marshall McLuhan, pioneer of media studies, said that John F. Kennedy won his debates against Richard Nixon thanks to TV: Nixon’s 5 o’clock shadow didn’t transmit well. Then there was Elvis the Pelvis and his Ed Sullivan Show appearance, which encouraged widespread rock’n’rolling. I was 16 at the time, and therefore right in the middle of that particular frenzy. Later, the televising of anti-Vietnam protest rallies and riots sparked more of them, giving us the ’60s. And today, it’s the internet and social-media platforms—so disruptive!

Add streaming services, which permit written works too long and complex to be squashed easily into a 90-minute film to appear as ongoing series. One of these is The Handmaid’s Tale. So, yes, today’s self-appointed moral gatekeepers can exclude my novel from school libraries, thus making it impossible for students who can’t afford to buy it to read it for free—but as for shutting down the story completely, I’m afraid that horse has left the barn. Has anyone told Madison County about BookTok? That’s the part of TikTok where young people recommend books to one another. Added together, hashtags of my name and The Handmaid’s Tale have about 400 million BookTok mentions. Sorry about that.

I did intend my book for adult readers, who would recognize totalitarianism when they saw it. But it’s very hard to control what young people get their hands on, especially if they’re told something is too old for them, or too evil, or too immoral. What was I doing reading Peyton Place on top of the garage roof when I was 16? Incest! Rape! Varicose veins! The incest and the rape weren’t news to me—they were in the Bible—but varicose veins? The Bible says nothing about them, so that was a shocker.

Here, I would point out that attempts to control media content are as likely to come from the so-called left as from the so-called right, each side claiming to act in the name of the public good. Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and Mao’s China went in for a mind-boggling level of censorship, but it was all for “the people,” and who could be against that? Or against the protection of the innocent? Sometimes, these things get started out of a genuine need and concern, but a takeover by some bureaucratic version of the Inquisition is very likely to follow. Most of us are more easily manipulated by our desire to do good, or to be seen to do good, than by the temptation to do evil, at least in public view. Hence “virtue signaling.”

[Read: How to be a good person without annoying everyone]

Freedom of expression is a hot potato—freedom for whom and for what, and who decides? The last English writer before the late 20th century to have totally free rein was Geoffrey Chaucer. Few then could read, and books were hand-lettered and very expensive, so Chaucer could diss the clergy, use four-letter words and religious swearing, and describe salacious and ribald incidents, because his work would have no effect on the body politic. However, by the time of Shakespeare’s theater—an early mass-entertainment medium—a state censor had been installed. That’s why Shakespeare’s characters have to be so inventive with their cursing, and why so many plays are set in the past, and in distant locations such as Venice. This trend continued: The licensing of plays and books in the name of public morality explains much about the 19th-century novel. Sex by implication, but not on the page. Officially, no obscenity, no sedition, no blasphemy. Nothing that would bring a blush to the cheek of an innocent maiden (though there was a great deal of illicit porn).

Which brings us back to Christianity and the supposed bias against it in The Handmaid’s Tale. Christianity is now so broad a term that it means little. Are we talking about Greek Orthodoxy? Antinomianism? Mormonism? Liberation theology? The Salvation Army, dedicated to helping the helpless? Sojourners, a social-fairness movement? A Rocha, an eco-organization that is firmly Christian? (I happen to be a fan of these last two.) Incidentally, Jesus is not particularly pro-family. “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26). That’s a difficulty for any pro-family Christian group, you must admit. (Should these words of Jesus be censored? Just wondering.)

Should parents have a say in what their kids are taught in public schools? Certainly: a democratic vote on the matter. Should young people—high-school juniors and seniors, for starters—also have a say? Why not? In many states, if they’re over 16, they can be married (with parental approval); if of reproductive age, which might be 10, they can give birth, and may be forced to. So why should they, too, not be allowed an opinion?

The outward view of the Madison County school board is that people ages 16 to 18 are too young to explore such questions. I don’t know what its inner motives may be. Possibly, it has a public-spirited aim. It may have noted the falling birth rate and the surveys showing that young people are losing interest in sex. No sex equals no babies, unless everyone resorts to test tubes. Has sex become too readily available? Banal, even? A boring chore? If so, what better way to make it fascinating again than to prohibit all mention of it? Don’t read about sex! Don’t think about sex! See no sex, hear no sex, speak no sex! Suddenly, the kids want to explore! “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant” (Proverbs 9:17). If that’s the school board’s game, well played! Virginia may even get more babies out of it.

How dare I question the school board’s motives? I do dare. After all, it has questioned mine.