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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 Megan Garber, a staff writer who frequently writes about the intersection of pop culture and politics for The Atlantic. Megan wrote our March cover story on the ever-blurrier distinction between reality and entertainment, which is currently on newsstands. She’s also the author of On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics, a collection of Atlantic essays on misinformation and America’s fracturing political culture, one of the three inaugural titles from our new Atlantic Editions book imprint. Megan is a fan of the classicist Emily Wilson’s literary translations and the artistry of Nicolas Cage, and she belly-laughed during the first episode of the “semi-satirical semi-documentary” HBO series The Rehearsal.

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

The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles

Beyoncé tickets are the new status symbol.

Don’t be afraid to commit to the bit.

The Culture Survey: Megan Garber

A favorite story I've read in The Atlantic: One of my all-time favorite Atlantic stories is also one of the earliest: the 1859 essay “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” For a long time, I judged the piece by its headline and assumed, applying Betteridge’s law, that the thing was a narrow-minded broadside against educating women. But you know what they say about the u and me in assume (and so do I, fortunately, since I’ve been allowed to learn the alphabet). I was very wrong!

The essay is in fact an argument in favor of women’s education. (Initially published anonymously, it was later revealed to have been written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the activist and sometime mentor to Emily Dickinson.) The piece is erudite. It is also, somehow, whimsical: It doesn’t make its argument so much as it unfurls it. And the observation that underscores all of its others—that talent is a historical contingency as well as an individual gift—remains insightful despite, and because of, its vintage.  [Related: But seriously, ‘ought women to learn the alphabet?’]

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I love this question, because I can answer both sides of it with one film: Face/Off. John Woo’s masterpiece tells the story of two men whose faces are removed(!) and then swapped(!!)—two men who then … face off(!!!). I mean. In case you are tempted to argue that a movie whose plot revolves entirely around the trading of face skin perhaps does not deserve my devotion, I’d note that (1) Face/Off features everything that a great blockbuster should (transcendent set pieces, unapologetic maximalism, Nic Cage), and (2) it doubles, at alternate moments, as an opera and a symphony and a ballet. Oh, and it co-stars John Travolta at full-throttle camp. Face/Off is action distilled into John Dunne-ian levels of poetic elegance. Only with more explosions.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: George Santos represents the area of Long Island where The Great Gatsby was likely set; the coincidence led me, last week, to revisit F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic. The novel is as narratively sparse as it is semantically opulent—may we all find something to love as deeply as Fitzgerald loved his adverbs—and because of that, I find it to be one of those stories that can accommodate endless readings. Every reacquaintance with Nick and Tom and Daisy and the polite enigma named Gatsby allows for a new interpretation—of the book, and of the country for which many consider it a metaphor. (Another of my favorite Atlantic pieces: Rosa Inocencio Smith’s beautiful and prescient essay about Tom Buchanan’s resemblance to Donald Trump.) [Related: A new way to read Gatsby]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: So many! But because I’ve found myself writing about the banality of mythology lately—about the stories we tell ourselves, as Joan Didion put it, in order to live—I keep finding the lines of Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck” jangling around in my head. Its last ones, in particular:

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

"The first episode of The Rehearsal made me laugh in a way that was as emotionally satisfying as it was physically humiliating," Megan says. Above: A still from the series. (HBO)

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: One of the best things about living in Washington, D.C., is the access it affords to museums that are epic in scope: summative treatments of facts, inspiring collections of art and culture. What I love the most, though, are museums that are wonderfully small: places dedicated to narrow subject areas, operating less as grand statements than as intimate labors of love. I seek them out whenever I’m visiting a new place (RIP, the Burt Reynolds and Friends Museum of Jupiter, Florida). But I discovered one of my favorites by accident: Driving outside of Providence, Rhode Island, with my mother and sister, we saw a sign advertising the Museum of Work & Culture. Its exit was just ahead; obviously, we took it.

The museum, overseen by the Rhode Island Historical Society and set in a restored textile mill, is compact but teeming with delights. Focusing on the mostly immigrant workers who labored in such factories in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the museum’s exhibits bring a three-dimensional intimacy to their lives. You can sit inside a typical home. You can experience how they spent their leisure time. You can learn about their efforts, some successful and some less so, to organize. The museum is a testament to the people who helped make the region—and the country—what it is. I think of it, too, as a wanderable reminder of the stories and histories that might be found at every exit.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I snort-laugh with horrifying ease, so take this with a grain of salt … but the first episode of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder’s semi-satirical semi-documentary, made me laugh in a way that was as emotionally satisfying as it was physically humiliating. In the series, the comedian offers to help people who are preparing for big moments in their life: Under his guidance, he promises, they will rehearse the future into reassuring predictability. In the first episode, Fielder assists a man who is making a long-delayed confession to a friend; Fielder’s game-it-all-out approach steadily—inevitably—builds in complication and absurdity. His efforts to outwit life’s uncertainty culminate in a punch line that is as silly as it is poignant. I won’t spoil it here, but I’ll admit that it made the belly laughs I’d been emitting throughout the episode lose their last bit of dignity. [Related: You’ve never seen anything quite like The Rehearsal.]

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: Emily Wilson’s forthcoming translation of The Iliad. The classicist’s radically blunt rendering of The Odyssey is already in my personal canon (“Tell me about a complicated man,” goes its first line, rejecting the florid Muse invocations of earlier versions and catapulting Odysseus into relatable modernity). Wilson’s treatment of that other complicated man, Achilles, will be published in September—and I can’t wait to reencounter Homer’s epic, translated by a scholar who keeps finding new urgency in ancient stories. [Related: The Odyssey and the Other]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Helen Lewis, 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 Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, a lively dive into the history of Hollywood’s biggest accolade by the New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman (on sale Tuesday) Cocaine Bear, a movie loosely based on a real-life bear who ate a real-life brick of cocaine, after which chaos predictably ensued (in theaters Friday) The Consultant, a new, darkly comedic eight-episode series starring Christoph Waltz as a very bad boss (premieres Friday on Amazon Prime) Essay (Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty)

Judging Parents Online Is a National Sport

By Stephanie H. Murray

To be a parent on the internet is to be constantly accused of false advertising. We make parenting sound “so freaking horrible,” “messy, tedious, nightmarishly life-destroying,” like it will “change everything, mostly for the worse.” Or is it that we make it look “so easy,” “aesthetically-pleasing” and “effortlessly beautiful,” “miles from what motherhood looks like for many of us”?

People can’t seem to agree on whether it’s our soul-sucking complaints or our phony cheer that dominates the discourse. By some accounts, current discussions about the difficulties of motherhood are a pushback against a time when it was idealized. Others say the “mommy internet” used to be a place where moms could be “raw and authentic”; only recently has it become overrun with “staged, curated photos that don’t show the messier part of life.” Either way, it’s irresponsible. What real-life mother could possibly measure up to a “vision of motherly perfection”? Who would choose to have children in an atmosphere that insists child-rearing is so bleak?

Read the full article.

More in Culture A sensitive movie about a literary oddity Ben Okri on manipulating reality The new Ant-Man and the creaky, cringey Marvel machine A strange, paranoid new crime drama The wholly human art of poetry Who poisoned Pablo Neruda? Catch Up on The Atlantic Ibram X. Kendi: The book that exposed anti-Black racism in the classroom Eagles are falling, bears are going blind. The truth about aliens is still out there. Photo Album Rihanna performs on a suspended stage during last week's Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show. (Sarah Stier / Getty)

Browse snapshots of the world’s oldest dog in Portugal, pre-Carnival festivities in Brazil, and much more in our editor’s photos of the week.

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A few months ago, I nearly ran over one of Uber Eats’s delivery robots with my car. The little guy was trundling along a crosswalk when I made a left turn. As if startled by my presence, it stopped abruptly in the middle of the street, and its “eyes,” two rings of lights, blinked. Even though its position now meant that I couldn’t complete my turn and was stuck blocking oncoming traffic, I instinctively apologized. How could I not? It had a name emblazoned on its side: Harold, if I remember correctly. Sorry, Harry.

Robot technology seems just as sentient in Hello Tomorrow!, AppleTV+’s new dramedy set in a retro-futuristic society. In the first episode, a chipper delivery van greets passersby via a screen showing an animated stork. The cartoon bird recites cutesy messages: “Morning, friend!” “Hello, neighbor!” “Have a bright, smiling day!” But of course, there’s nothing self-aware about the van: By the end of the scene, it has accidentally backed into a woman, crushing her against her garage door. And no, it doesn’t apologize.

Hello Tomorrow! follows Jack Billings (played by Billy Crudup), a traveling salesman hawking time-shares on the moon, who wows new clients with grandiose visions of a better life off Earth. As an allegory for the illusory promise of the American dream, the show is rather inelegant. The characters are thin, the dialogue is painfully on the nose, and the plot—largely about whether there’s really anything on the moon, and whether Jack can keep his customers’ interest—goes in a predictably dark direction for everybody involved.

And yet, I was taken by the show’s mid-century, Epcot-ian aesthetics. Nearly every scene bursts with beep-booping gadgets and Jetsons-y machinery: People commute using jet packs, get served drinks by sassy robot bartenders, and so on. These gizmos look cool, but they do little to actually improve people’s experiences. Instead, they highlight the limits of technological advances: Innovation, the show suggests, can manifest as mere style over substance, marketing rather than mattering. The series’s own stylishness, however, turns out to be its greatest strength.

Consider how almost everything in Hello Tomorrow! levitates. There are levitating cars, levitating briefcases, levitating dog walkers—all of which add little utility. The cars can’t really fly; they just hover at the same height they would if they had wheels. The briefcases still have handles; they might as well be carried. As for the dog-walking, well, having a robot walk a dog frees up pet owners’ schedules, but the show also includes a shot of a family trying to train a robot dog. What’s the point of making both mechanical dogs and dog-walkers available? What are such advanced products for, aside from making a society seem advanced?

Subtly (and perhaps inadvertently), the show’s elaborate production design illustrates the attractiveness of new models, no matter their futility. A machine stocking shelves at a grocery store still requires a human to monitor its work; otherwise, it might overstock, causing goods to come crashing down. A bureaucrat keeps his files impeccably organized with his floating briefcase, but he must shred them by hand once he’s finished with an assignment in order to ensure privacy. Sometimes, what’s state of the art is just a repackaged and renamed version of an existing item. In the fourth episode, Jack marvels at a microwavelike contraption that incorporates “aroma technology,” as if food had never emanated smells. This infatuation with the latest inventions permeates everyone’s thinking on Hello Tomorrow!, so much so that they don’t notice they’re chasing after a gussied-up variant of what they already have. The people enamored with Jack’s pitch are on the extreme end of this obsession: Everything they have is so familiar that they need to leave the planet.

Unlike with other recent sci-fi series that take a more cautionary view of the future, the show’s whimsical aesthetics match its characters’ sunny optimism, making Hello Tomorrow! even more unsettling to watch. They’ve come to see anything new and (allegedly) improved as confirmation that the world they live in is getting better.

Eventually, the look of Hello Tomorrow! starts to come off as oppressive. Jack’s quest gets trickier, characters’ lives get complicated by melodramatic twists, but the series’s bright aesthetics never dim. The supposedly innovative objects surrounding the ensemble do nothing to alleviate their problems. A self-tying tie cannot repair Jack’s relationship with his son. A perfectly seared steak from a top-of-the-line, aroma-technology-assisted machine cannot patch up a marriage. Instead, most of the futuristic items on the show are ornamental at best—much like many updates in our own world. Hello Tomorrow! frustrates with its weak narrative, but the show does, in its visuals, hit on a bleak truth: We’re often doing nothing more than reinventing the wheel—and then calling that a breakthrough.