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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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Editor’s Note: Read Ben Okri’s new short story “The Third Law of Magic.”

“The Third Law of Magic” is a new story by Ben Okri. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Okri and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your short story “The Third Law of Magic,” an artist sells snowballs at a market. We get a clear view into his motivations for the show, which take on a philosophical weight as they accrue. When do you choose to focus on your character’s thoughts instead of their actions?

Ben Okri: Part of the story’s tension is precisely in the contrast between the character’s exteriority and interiority. You think you see one kind of person, but when his inner world is expressed, that limited perception explodes.

Interiority is most powerful when it moves with the dynamics of the story. This is another way of saying that perhaps, in a story like this, there are three levels of stories going on. One is the overt story, the quest for a new art form to express that which is almost impossible to express. The second is the story of the journey through the city and the way the city reveals the potential of the quest. The third level of narration is internal.

There is a story going on inside all the time that’s different from the story going on outside. I am fascinated by that. The inner story drives the outer, and the outer story fuels the inner. But all the stories are part of the overarching one in a symphonic way.

Hu: The story evokes a piece of performance art by David Hammons known as Bliz-aard Ball Sale, an event that has since faded but lives on in stories. How does your reimagining play into Hammons’s original mythmaking?

Okri: One aspect of David Hammons’s genius is the generation of mythic fractals. His art encompasses aesthetics, race, politics, magic, dislocation, and identity, among others, but even more so it creates rumors, gossip, tales, and exaggerations in the minds of his audience.

An artist’s work does not always tend towards myth; a work can be great and yet not generate much mythology. But Hammons specializes in the secret art of mythmaking. Isn’t generating myth a higher kind of aesthetics? Bliz-aard Ball Sale is the audacious act of making art out of ephemerality, disappearance, rumor, and the posthumous existence of that which was not widely experienced when it existed. It is the gift of Houdini.

I am fascinated by the way life distills into myth. For me, writing is an act of resurrection and magic. It too brings back to life that which few people noticed. It too raises from the dead. Its greatest realm is not the world but the vast kingdom of the human mind. But this story is not a reenactment of Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale, but a dream woven around it, the way Charlie Parker might take a theme and wander off into his own world, giving us two gifts in one: the fragrance of the original, and a spare, enchanted reverie.

Hu: The pure, unadulterated wonder of the young boy when he sees the snowballs is one of my favorite parts of the story. You describe it in such vivid detail. Do we tend to complicate innocence, or is it inherently complex?

Okri: I am glad that moment moves you. It was important to the story that it was the boy who grasped, without thought, without undue complexity or critical analysis, the wonder of the work. That is exactly what art at its purest is meant to do, to stop our breathing and our thinking. It ought to cut through all the emotional baggage, all the neurosis, all the overthinking and reach right into the spirit to awaken us to something that transcends what can be expressed in words.

Innocence is much more complex than it seems. It is why brilliant people can do things which are the fruits of tremendous thought but which, when experienced, appear to have the incomparable genius of childhood itself. It was once said that all great things are, at heart, simple. There are two kinds of innocence: innocence of spirit and the innocence of wisdom. I am not sure which of the two is more complex.

Hu: In putting a price on snow and scouring the city’s waste, the artist exposes contradictions in capitalism and consumer culture. These contradictions hint at larger questions about how value is ascribed in society. Is there an alternative means for us to derive and create value?

Okri: There has to be an alternative way for us to derive and create value. If not, we as a species are irredeemably doomed. If value can only come from the ever-escalating arms race of competing demands, if it can only come from money, then this exposes its fundamental contradictions. Value ought to be related to being and consciousness. In real terms, the sight of one’s child in a moment of unique happiness ought to be greater in value than a fur coat. The joy one feels in the presence of the one we love ought to be greater in value than a new car.

This is not to say that the car and the coat are without value. But then what value can one place on that which we pay so little attention to, which we forget to celebrate—the sheer invisibility of one’s good health or one’s sanity or the safety and well-being of one’s family? Civilization has to move towards the higher value of consciousness, of being. Otherwise we are in grave danger of commodifying the priceless while conferring unnatural value on the worthless.

The time will come when we will value peace more than gold, when we will value the happiness of the many over the ecstasy of the few. Our society will only ever be as great as what we value. We have to reevaluate before it is too late, before we start unknowingly worshipping death.

Hu: How does “The Third Law of Magic” fit into your work more broadly?

Okri: It continues my interest in what constitutes reality. This has always characterized my work. I have always felt that if we have a proper grasp of what reality is, we will better know what to do with this tremendous gift of life, this infinite energy compressed into a mortal frame. I think all literature at its best tries to do that.

Reality is all we have to work with, but we don’t really know what it is. The truth about reality is that its subdividable aspects can yield results which can be faithfully replicated while we remain completely in the dark about its other aspects or the whole itself. This is odd, for it gives us the illusion of control, when in fact what we have is merely the control of contingent conditions. Therefore, much of our confidence is provisional. One can be wrong and yet some things we do seem to work. One can be right and yet some things that we do appear not to work. Often it is a matter of perspective, of time, of truths concealed from us.

This paradox of reality is at the core of a novel of mine called Astonishing the Gods. In The Freedom Artist, reality can be manufactured for a people to such a degree that it invades their own realities. In The Last Gift of the Master Artists, the realities of a whole people are about to be altered by the white wind, but the dreams of the master artists continue to endure. This short story places the law of magic within the realm of the real, and hints that the ultimate magic is reality itself, the most unknowable magic of them all.

Hu: What distortion of reality have you been most intrigued by recently?

Okri: The most outrageous distortion of reality that I have witnessed recently is where an event that took place before the world’s gaze has, slowly—with suggestions, with counter-theories, with insinuations of secret forces at work—been made to look as if it wasn’t the very thing the world actually witnessed. It took the dogged collation of recorded facts, eyewitness statements under oath, and visual evidence to slowly reestablish to the world what it originally witnessed.

This is a very strange thing to experience in one’s lifetime—where powerful forces can make you doubt what you experienced. It makes one feel that if they can do that, they can do anything. It all comes down to manipulating reality and how reality is then perceived. We need to advance the art of decoding reality and interpreting what power does to reality, if we are to protect our freedoms and our future.

Hu: You work in a range of media, and your writing takes many shapes. What projects are you working on?

Okri: My next book is a suite of stories, essays, and poems around the theme of climate change called Tiger Work. It gathers all my writings on the subject. Both strength and beauty of spirit are required to draw attention to the specter hanging over us, one that we live with as if it weren’t there. We carry on each day as we did the day before, but each day we bring nearer the conditions we fear. A radical act of mass consciousness is needed to awaken us to the tremendous responsibilities of the moment.

My novel, Dangerous Love, was published yesterday. In September, Other Press will also be publishing a play of mine set in ancient Egypt called Changing Destiny. I am additionally working on a book of essays, a new play, and a short novel about resisting tyranny, texts that I hope to thread with the wonder of being here on Earth.

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.

Like astrology signs and the Enneagram, the psychological framework of attachment theory has become a popular blueprint for understanding the self. But as my colleague Faith Hill wrote last weekend in The Atlantic, the four attachment “types” aren’t as cut-and-dried as they may seem. In fact, the whole theory is widely misunderstood.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

A new turn in the fight over masks An old romantic custom we should bring back Ibram X. Kendi on the book that exposed anti-Black racism in the classroom

Anxiously Attached

In the 1950s, the psychologist John Bowlby coined the term attachment to refer to the bond formed between an infant and its caregiver. He argued that this formative connection would go on to shape how an infant related to and bonded with other people for the rest of its life. His theory eventually led to the establishment of three different attachment “styles”: securely attached (describing people who are generally open and trusting); anxiously attached (describing people who “long for closeness but are paranoid that others will hurt them, and are thus preoccupied with validation,” as Faith puts it in her story); avoidantly attached (describing those who, “driven by the same fear of abandonment, keep others at arm’s length”); and disorganized, an honorary fourth type which combines anxious and avoidant traits and is a more recent addition to the taxonomy.

Attachment theory was once the provenance of psychology 101 lectures and perhaps also the psychotherapist’s couch. But today, the framework’s tidy behavioral-identity labels make it a natural candidate for online virality. Attachment theory has crossed the threshold into Gen Z memedom: In a Vox article published earlier this week, the writer Allie Volpe cited an attachment-theory TikTok that’s been viewed nearly 6 million times. That 37-second clip depicts a woman’s descent through a cascade of imagined worst-case scenarios after she wakes up to find that her boyfriend hasn’t texted good morning—“what dating someone with an anxious attachment style can look like,” the text above her head reads. If the video’s more than 3,600 viewer comments are any indication, the sketch strikes a chord.

This new popularity has brought with it a serious misconception about the framework: Many people seem to believe “that one’s style is set in stone during childhood, determined by connections with early caregivers, and doomed to play out in every relationship thereafter,” Faith writes. But the reality is much more complex.

In 2021, The New York Times attributed attachment theory’s renewed spotlight to the 2010 self-help book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love. (Anecdotally, I can vouch for this book as the catalyst for at least one of my fellow elder-Millennial friends’ recent, enthusiastic preoccupation with the three main types.) But even the book’s authors are inclined to position attachment as more of a fluid tendency than a hard-set trait—as Faith explains, a “working model” that you’re constantly updating:

Amir Levine, a neuroscientist, Columbia University psychiatrist, and co-author of Attached, told me you can think of an attachment orientation as a working model of the world: a set of beliefs that are constantly put to the test. Those beliefs stem largely from the interactions you’ve already had—but your subsequent interactions keep shaping your expectations, which means that your working model can keep evolving.

In an excerpt, published in The Atlantic, from her 2022 book, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends, the psychologist Marisa G. Franco elaborated on how our attachment styles can change based on each new relationship that comes into our lives:

We develop our attachment styles based in part on our early relationships with our caregivers … But attachment isn’t all our parents’ fault. Although early experiences with caregivers establish expectations about how we’ll be treated, these expectations likely evolve in other relationships. And they shape those relationships in turn.

None of this is to say that our formative relationships don’t stay with us. Some negative experiences, unfortunately, may stick with us forever. But as Faith points out, they aren’t determinative of our ability to form new connections. She writes, “You’ll likely meet people you can count on, and hopefully you’ll start to believe that you can count on yourself too.”

Related:

Attachment style isn’t destiny. The trait that “super friends” have in common

Today’s News

Three Michigan State University students were killed and five were injured in a shooting last night at two locations on campus. The gunman had no known affiliation with the university and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California announced that she will retire at the end of her current term. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, announced her Republican presidential campaign.

Evening Read

Ben Denzer

Math Is Magic

By Camonghne Felix

In second grade, I stopped being able to do math. One night I went to do my long-division homework and I couldn’t figure it out. My mom demanded that I sit with my math teacher because my sudden inability made no sense. Two weeks later, I was sent home with a disciplinary note for turning in only empty or incorrect homework and was accused of not paying attention in class.

Up until then I had been a “good” student, a “smart” girl. I remember the secret bliss I felt when I knew before my peers how to count fractions without the help of manipulatives, and how to subtract negatives. This can be only partially explained by the teaching I got in school. My mom, who was then studying computer science and psychology in her master’s program, was determined to instill a love of learning in my life. Over the course of a year, she built me a computer out of parts and installed all kinds of educational games on it. When I arrived home every day, I attended my mother’s academy, where I spent most of my afternoons watching the sun fall on the walls of my bedroom as I finger-punched my way through the programs.

Read the full article.

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Photograph by Matthew Monteith

Read. These six books will change how you look at art.

Watch. The Valentine’s Day episode of Abbott Elementary (available to stream on Hulu), one of our critics’ favorite TV shows for a short attention span.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

While preparing to write today’s Daily edition, I came across an incredible find in the Atlantic archive: a 14,600-word feature, from the February 1990 issue of the magazine, on the origins and evolution of attachment theory. The article includes interviews with then-83-year-old Bowlby and his contemporary, the American Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth (who is widely credited with developing the three primary attachment styles), both long since deceased. It’s an exemplar of old-fashioned (in a good way) long-form magazine journalism, and a fascinating snapshot of human inquiry and understanding.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

In second grade, I stopped being able to do math. One night I went to do my long-division homework and I couldn’t figure it out. My mom demanded that I sit with my math teacher because my sudden inability made no sense. Two weeks later, I was sent home with a disciplinary note for turning in only empty or incorrect homework and was accused of not paying attention in class.

Up until then I had been a “good” student, a “smart” girl. I remember the secret bliss I felt when I knew before my peers how to count fractions without the help of manipulatives, and how to subtract negatives. This can be only partially explained by the teaching I got in school. My mom, who was then studying computer science and psychology in her master’s program, was determined to instill a love of learning in my life. Over the course of a year, she built me a computer out of parts and installed all kinds of educational games on it. When I arrived home every day, I attended my mother’s academy, where I spent most of my afternoons watching the sun fall on the walls of my bedroom as I finger-punched my way through the programs.

I loved Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and You Can Be a Woman Engineer, but Math Blaster was my favorite. I remember the illustration of the game as vividly as any beloved book: an astronaut, tethered to a spaceship, floating their way through the starry landscape of space with simple mathematical expressions on their chest, and on each planet, a foreign landscape with different levels of math problems to solve. That image in my head of the astronaut working diligently in the vast expanse of space, the stars an infinite backdrop to a mathematical cosmos, is exactly how I see math in my head now—fantastical, endless, and enchanting. But I had to lose that relationship with math to be able to find math again.

My mom would later connect the dots between the rapid deterioration of my learning abilities and another, correlative timeline. After getting in trouble one day for saying something so inappropriate in class that it boggled even me, I went home and told my mom what my older cousin had been doing to me while she was at work and my grandma wasn’t home. Immediately, the evidence began to click: the inexplicable spotting in my underwear, the change in my emotional regularity, my 68 score on a math test I’d have more than passed two summers before.

Learning of the violent trauma I’d been experiencing caused a radical 180 in both our lives. Lawyers, doctors, judges—I watched my mom attempt to be strong every day as she worked to manage the worst crisis she could ever have imagined happening to her. Math classes were getting harder as my brain attempted to process the initial trauma and what followed the trauma’s reveal. I went to school, and most mornings, the board seemed too far away. Greater-than and less-than symbols were like commas to me, nearly indistinguishable in function and in form. I was tested for vision impairments twice that month, though the eye doctor recorded 20/20 vision. Division amplified the inadequacy I felt. I would come home, blank, my mom imploring me to think: “You must have remembered something, Camonghne.” But I didn’t remember anything.

Some part of my brain stopped working the way it was supposed to once the assaults started happening. But I was the only one who could see the size of the injury and just how it was affecting me physically. I was tired, uninspired, easily triggered, and quick to fire, always ready to fight. I knew I needed extra help, maybe to go to school somewhere else where they’d rehabilitate me. I spent countless school nights researching boarding schools for troubled kids. But when my mom asked me if she should tell my teachers the full story about what was going on, I refused. I didn’t want eight hours of sympathy; I just wanted to be able to get through my math homework. She told them anyway. It was worthless, as their incapacity to understand how living in my head felt at that time only highlighted the significance of my needs.

Years later, while researching bipolar disorder and executive-function disorders, I found one scientific explanation for all of my mathematical confusion. In 2018, psychologists published a study on the association between adverse childhood experiences and traumatic brain injury in adulthood. Both can affect developmental skills, mood, regulation, the ability to process and synthesize new information. Both affect some of the same parts of the brain. I began to think of the experience of childhood trauma, especially related to abandonment, neglect, and sexual abuse, as similar to a concussion. Imagine a child’s ability to cope with that, particularly when the injury remains invisible to the people she spends eight hours a day with.

Doctors and scientists have only just begun to develop a more complete understanding of how trauma works and how it affects individuals psychologically throughout their lifetime. But what we’re starting to understand confirms much of what people who’ve struggled with trauma and PTSD have long been trying to articulate: Emotional trauma is an injury. Trauma hits you, and your brain absorbs the shock.

In high school, my inability to point where the wound was earned me the label of underperformer, troublemaker, someone who didn’t want to learn. I wished I could project myself onto the whiteboard and, with a bright-red cursor, point to the front lobe of my brain, and then to my heart, to show the teachers how badly it all ached. But that hungry and inquisitive child who devoured mathematical challenges was so afraid that those labels were true that she decided it was less disappointing to just give up—on math, on school, on life.

High school continued to go on despite the fact that I felt incapable of going on with it. I spent more time locked up in mental-health facilities than I did in classes. I shuttled from one high school to the next, kicked out, failed out, behind. I knew that I wanted to go to college; I knew that I wanted to study literature and language. I couldn’t focus in most classes, but I hid novels in my textbooks and wrote fan fiction in the evenings, losing myself in imaginary lands and complex world building, skills that would later revolutionize what I thought I was capable of. By junior year, when my transcript indicated a 1.4 GPA (NYC schools evaluate on a 0.0–4.0 scale), the high-school counselor responsible for helping me get into college told me it was too late, that I would have had to have at least gotten an A in one of my math classes to be anywhere near qualified for admission to any of the schools I was interested in. I was confronted with a series of closed doors as I watched my adolescence spiral out of my control.  

I was eventually transferred to an alternative high school (also known as a last-chance school), where a Cornell-educated and Bronx-raised scientist who’d returned home to teach saw something in me and promised she wouldn’t let me fall through the cracks. She spent every lunch period tutoring me, showing me how to calculate momentum, teaching me that nutrition started with an understanding of how the body quantifies energy, offering me tangible, material ways to understand math. Another math teacher across the hall attempted to teach me calculus. I still couldn’t do the arithmetic I’d need to be able to grasp it at its most complex form, but there was something about calculus as a study in continuous change that made sense to me.

Noticing my curiosity, my lunchtime tutor gave me a copy of Einstein’s Dreams, a novel that reintroduced me to the magical qualities of mathematics, reminding me of the sense of wonder that the illustrations in Math Blaster had made me feel as a kid. It turned numbers back into metaphors and images and poetry instead of scores on the exams I’d failed. I graduated high school a year later than I should have, but with an A in calculus. For the first time since I was 9 years old, I no longer felt inadequate in the face of something my body knew it had once loved.

But it would be almost a decade before math and I would begin to have a conversation about what had happened to us, and why it had left me behind.

After graduating from high school, I managed to build a career, to become a writer and poet and to put the trauma of my childhood in a corner of my mind where it couldn’t disturb me. But years later, after a destabilizing breakup and a subsequent suicide attempt forced me back into psychiatric treatment, I decided that someone had to be in charge of figuring out where this wound was, and what the hell was still wrong with me. In almost no time, I was diagnosed with severe ADHD, and then later with bipolar 2 disorder.

Bipolar disorder, characterized by periods of depression and mania or hypomania, works kind of like a blowtorch. When an individual is having an episode, it causes stress to the brain, which can affect cognitive skills and executive function. It can be degenerative, meaning that as one gets older, and with each episode, the brain’s ability to do what it needs to do deteriorates.

After my diagnosis, I spent months researching a connection between math and bipolar disorder. I learned about dyscalculia, a kind of math dyslexia, and called the doctor who’d tested me for ADHD. “Do I have this?” I asked him. He told me, “I’d say it’s extremely likely based on the severity of your results.”

Immediately, I let out a sigh I’d been holding for decades. All at once, I felt betrayed, grateful, and relieved. After some months of treatment for my bipolar diagnosis, I couldn’t believe the clarity with which I began to see and feel. As my treatment adjusted (I tried a couple of mood stabilizers before ending up on lithium last year), I felt my ability to compute improve too.

I’m still no mathematician; I probably couldn’t even pass a sophomore-level college course. But I don’t have to be able to solve every equation for math to mean something to me. Math, after all, is infinite; no human can best it. I try to challenge myself to approach mathematics from a place of wonder and admiration instead of anxiety. And as I study basic techniques such as estimation, and continue to refamiliarize myself with division, I feel the slow death of that earlier block that kept these basics away from me. I feel the excitement I felt when I played Math Blaster, or when I first read Einstein’s Dreams. Losing my ability to learn and understand math represented the frailty of the human mind, but my ability to relearn it represents the mind’s innate resiliency.

Recently, I was out at dinner when, over steaming bowls of rice and half-eaten platters of bulgogi, my friend slid the bill across the table, a gesture with only one meaning. “Why me?” I asked her. “You’re the one who went to Johns Hopkins!” She waved me off. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but you do mental math better than I do.” For a moment, I stared down at the check and I swore it was staring back at me.

This scene with my friend has become pretty typical. She hands me the bill and I calculate the tip. And every time feels like the first time. I hover over that bill with the focus of worship, willing my brain to do what the numbers ask of it, nothing less and nothing more. My respect for math is born from a deep desire to understand it. I’m always nervous when it’s my turn to split the bill, but I don’t wish for those nerves to go away. The chance to correct the narrative of the past feels transcendent.

This essay was adapted from the memoir, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation.

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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The left has long believed that Democratic states are the future, whereas Republican states are the past. But migration data show that red and blue might be starting to switch places.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

DEI is an ideological test. The death of the smart shopper The catch-24 of replacing Joe Biden

State of Disunion

“Democratic-leaning states represent the future and Republican ones the last gasps of a dying empire.” That’s been the theory long espoused by many on the left, my colleague Jerusalem Demsas wrote this week. But geographic trends suggest a possible reversal of this state of the union: Florida and Texas were last year’s top states for inbound domestic migration, with New York and California in the rear. And some red states may be better hubs for employment right now too: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggest that there are now more nonfarming jobs in Florida than in New York.

Jerusalem took a close look at Florida and New York, which together are a paradigm of a broader national trend of migration from blue states to red states. She found that the cost of housing is likely the single greatest factor behind the shift. “The top 10 metro areas for unaffordability are a sort of who’s who of Democratic cities: Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim tops the list, with New York–Newark–Jersey City rolling into the sixth spot as the first non-California metro,” she writes. The rise of remote work in the pandemic has also meant that one of New York’s main superpowers—“its gravitational pull on workers,” as Jerusalem puts it—has been weakened.

So what does this mean for blue states and their superstar cities? They’re far from dying, of course: “New York City isn’t some dystopian wasteland where no one can see their future,” Jerusalem reminds us. But evidence of a growing exodus does mean cities that have long been sitting comfortably need to put in some work to retain their residents—by, for example, improving basic amenities such as public transit.

And there are some selling points that more affordable red states might never be able to offer. “A healthy city attracts wealthy, middle-, and working-class people; it pulls newcomers into its orbit while leaving room for natives,” Jerusalem writes. “I don’t have a lot of faith that the Republican regimes now attracting Americans will be invested in this type of inclusive growth.” As Jerusalem notes, “We’ve seen these states become hostile to LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, voting rights, racial equality, and more.” This is true in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation is forcing professors to change how they teach.

In short, the lack of affordable housing in blue-state cities means that some Americans have to “choose between liberal values and financial security,” Jerusalem argues. And that choice is made more stark by the fact that red and blue America can feel, to some, like two entirely different countries.

My colleague Ronald Brownstein has written about what he calls “the great divergence” between red and blue states. This widening divide is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America, he argues, with the GOP in particular hoping to impose its politics on the entire country. He wrote last year:

What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support.

These new migration trends won’t do much to end the ongoing duel between red and blue America. “Although some predict that liberals moving to red states could moderate our nation’s politics, that seems unlikely given states’ tendency to preempt local policy,” Jerusalem told me. And that happens in both red states (on issues such as gun laws) and blue states (where state governments may hold localities accountable for housing failures), she explained.

For now, it looks like the divide between red and blue states will persist. But as long as cheaper housing and good jobs coexist in red states, blue-staters will keep on coming.

Related:

“Most important, we must not upset DeSantis.” America is growing apart, possibly for good.

Today’s News

The Pentagon downed an unidentified high-flying aircraft over Alaska at the order of President Joe Biden, a White House spokesperson confirmed. Russia launched multiple drones and several dozen cruise missiles in a “massive attack” across Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian air force. The FBI reportedly found a classified document at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence, according to a Pence adviser; a Justice Department official confirmed that a search took place.

Dispatches

Books Briefing: What (and whether) our world leaders read provides crucial insight into their minds and priorities, Maya Chung writes.

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Evening Read

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Red Zeppelin Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes had to disprove a misconception. What’s the smallest amount of therapy that’s still effective?

Culture Break

Tom Coughlin hugs Osi Umenyiora after the Giants' victory in Super Bowl XLII in 2008.

Read. “The Third Law of Magic,” a new short story by Ben Okri.

Or A Giant Win, a football memoir that offers a human counterbalance to the heroics and chest-thumping of the Super Bowl.

Listen. This Is Why, the new album from the band Paramore.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Jerusalem does great work dispelling the many housing and homelessness myths that persist among Americans. To dive deeper, start with her piece on why housing breaks people’s brains. “Anyone who’s been in a dumb recurring fight knows that the entire problem could be cleared up if everyone could just agree on exactly what was said or done,” she writes. “But you can’t, so you end up stuck in a cycle of relitigation. Housing-policy discussions are like that.”

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

He spent the night making snow. He packed it tightly into balls of different sizes and stored them in the freezer to keep them stable.

For a long time, he had wanted to make something so simple and natural that no one would suspect concerted thinking had gone into it. He wanted the greatest possible concentration of thought along with the greatest possible efficiency in the execution of that thought.

He had come up with many ideas in the past. He would sell dirt. He would be a newspaper vendor, but the newspaper he sold would not exist. He would create one issue of the newspaper, make only 101 copies, and sell them. The stories in the newspaper would be outrageous, improbable, yet perfectly believable. He would insinuate, for example, that human beings were disappearing, and that more aliens existed among us than at any other time in history. The paper’s events would make people doubt their reality or the reality of the society in which they lived. He would have an ad for a great dirt sale, giving the impression that people lined up every other week to buy dirt from different parts of the country. He would have another item about a 55-year-old flea, accompanied by a blown-up photograph, giving it a half-familiar, half-grotesque appearance, evoking both the art of William Blake and the largely credible pictures in National Geographic. But the more he considered such an elaborate scheme, the more he felt that its very elaborateness disqualified it from the true naturalness that authentic conception, raised to the status of art, must have.

He abandoned such baroque imaginings. He wanted something childlike. This made him think about childhood, about what’s missing from it and how the city robs children of wonder. He wanted to be a dealer in wonders. But he wanted the wonders to be so ordinary that their very ordinariness would be inseparable from their power to astonish. He made a long list of the most ordinary things. He had done dirt. But dirt was not in itself wonderful. He had done flotsam, bottles, human hair. He had worked with the topography of body and skin, had imprinted the mythology of his color on paper. He had made his physical existence its own work of art. He had explored basketball and heights, had made art out of the dust of his favorite rough, urban streets. Using the detritus of society, he had explored the limits of the conceptual.

He now wanted something innocent. But the more you looked into that innocence, the more ambiguous and complex it became, until it encompassed everything he had been trying to say for most of his working life. Where was he going to find such a natural and transparent object? The object had to defeat thought while endlessly stimulating it. But the object also had to be at the center of an event that could never be duplicated, that had happened only once—and then vanished—and whose occurrence would be a rumor. He wanted an event that everyone could enter, but that only a few people would experience at the time it happened. So many possibilities to be contained in a single, simple object.

For years now, he had been going to a part of the city where people sold the most unexpected things. He often wandered the market in search of materials that the streets had yielded. He had discovered that the refuse, the mountains of rubbish the city disposed of every day, was his most precious resource. It was more valuable to him than expensive works of art, created with expensive materials and costly assistants.

At the beginning of his wanderings, he was amazed by what people threw away. He had found perfectly functioning computers and television sets, radios and microwaves. He had unearthed paintings and posters from famous exhibitions, brochures from art galleries, papers from law firms, the complete 1922 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and books of every conceivable quality. He had rescued old Ornette Coleman records and an incomplete set of the tales of Chester Himes. He had uncovered maps and diaries and tap-dance shoes; evening dresses and top hats and a new pair of suspenders. He had found these among the garbage, the mess of decomposing vegetables and foul garnishes, the broken eggshells and the drool of yogurt and other mucuslike substances. He had dug out reams of government documentation about plans to restrict immigration, had marveled at the abandoned notes of a private detective and love letters that had been thrown away when that love had irrevocably died.

He had become a specialist in scouring the city’s waste. He had a warehouse on the outskirts where he stored all that he found. On some evenings he went around with a large shopping cart stacked with everything he had collected. People always took him for a regular tramp, or for one of the mentally disturbed who ransacked trash cans and pushed their loaded carts around the city all night.

It was in the course of his wanderings that he had discovered this informal market where folks sold the most outlandish things. On his first visit, he was astonished to find a lean, toothless man selling false teeth. Rows of them were laid out on a makeshift table. He had teeth for children and for women. He had a full row of dog and horse teeth. Next to him, another man sold eyepieces. On a table he displayed monocles and strange wire eyeglasses. He even had glass eyes. Some were large, some small, and almost all of them blue. Not far from him, a man sold oddly shaped mangoes from South America alongside huge, bulbous avocados. Behind him someone sold clothes for giants. Next to him, another sold baby shoes.

He watched them and went among them. He bought a glass eye and had a chat with the man who sold false teeth.

“What’s your name?”

“Joe.”

“How long you been here?”

“Today?”

“No, selling here.”

“Couple of months.”

“Sell well?”

“We do all right.”

“I’m looking to sell stuff.”

“Yeah, what d’you sell?”

“Dirt.”

“Real dirt?”

“Real dirt.”

“Hey, Nathan. Come over. This guy sells dirt.”

Nathan came over. He was the one who sold baby shoes.

“You sell dirt?”

“Yeah. Where do you find your baby shoes?”

“In the bins. Where do you find your dirt?”

“In the streets.”

“Good one. You don’t have to rob no one for dirt, do you?”

“Guess not.”

“Come sell here,” said Joe, the false-teeth man.

“Yeah?”

“Every other Sunday. You just set yourself up and that’s it. You mind your business, we mind ours.”

“That simple, yeah?”

“That simple.”

“Great. I’ll come by.”

“Can’t wait to see your dirt.”

He went there every other Sunday for the next three months. He never sold anything; he just went to hang out with the oddball traders. He wore a coarse coat with an ascot and beat-up shoes. Half tramp, half jazzman. He could be either, depending on who was looking at him. He got used to the rough humor of the traders and they got used to his sly, elusive ways.

“When you going to start selling dirt?” said the false-teeth man.

“When the weather’s right.”

“There’s a blizzard coming. You better start collecting dirt now or you won’t be able to find it. You know how the city gets covered when it snows.”

“Dirt man here’s got to find the right kind of dirt, yeah?” said baby shoes. “That must be hard.”

The traders laughed. He laughed wryly with them.

“Right kind of dirt is the hardest thing in the world to find. Harder than finding gold.”

“How hard can it be to find the right kind of dirt?” asked baby shoes.

“Takes the right kind of eyes. And that ain’t common.”

“It sure ain’t,” said baby shoes, and they all roared again with laughter.

Two days before the next market day, a thick blanket of snow covered the city, its cars and skyscrapers, its fields and lampposts. At home, he watched the snow coming down. He went for a walk and saw the city under a pall—under a spell—of whiteness. What if snow were black? he thought. Now that would be something. When snow fell, it would be like night raining down. The houses and the trees and the cars and the roads would be covered in blackness. They’d be singing of a black Christmas. They’d make black snowmen. It would create a different mythology. He mused on this as he wandered the city. The sidewalks were under sheets of snow. Winter kept us warm. He watched children in a nearby field throwing snowballs at one another. A fist-size snowball missed its target and whacked him in the chest. The kids were scared by what they’d done and ran off laughing and screaming, imagining that he was after them. He picked up the broken ball of snow and repacked it and took it home with him, still musing. Covering Earth in forgetful snow.

At home he made two phone calls. The people who received the calls were puzzled by his instructions. One was to bring a camera to a certain place at a certain time.

“Do not talk to me like you know me. Just take pictures. Be as inconspicuous as possible. Blend in. Don’t be like a goddamn tabloid photographer. You were just going past and you saw something that caught your eye and you took pictures of it and then you moved on.”

“Is that it?” said the photographer.

“Pretty much.”

“What’s it about?”

“You don’t need to know. Better if you don’t know. Just be there.”

And to the other caller he said:

“You free on that day?”

“Yeah, sure. What’s it about?”

“Just show up. Don’t act like you know me. Buy something. Stick around for a bit. Then move on.”

“Up to your stuff again?”

“Something like that.”

“One day you’re going to get into trouble pulling stunts.”

“If life ain’t trouble, what’s the point of it?”

They laughed and he put the phone down. He sat by the window and watched the snow falling. He tried to make out a single flake as it formed, and then he tried to follow the downward trajectory. The flakes were like cataracts falling over the eye. He watched the forms the snow made of the stationary cars. Some of them looked like giant hats in the street. He thought about snow: It’s all in there. All the contradiction’s in there. Is it one thing or another? Is it the sky’s fault that snow is white? The whiteness of the whale. How much should a snowflake cost? If nature were selling snow, how much would we need to spend to decorate the whole city with it, how much for the bridal garment of the cathedral, how much for the mantle on the Statue of Liberty? If a gram of snow were the same price as a gram of gold, how much would it cost us to deck the city in splendor? Gone are the snows of yesteryear. Everyone has a memory of snow. Most enchanting thing in the world. The priceless marvel that falls without a sound. Stilling the city and making silence audible. Not the snowmen that melt and, before they vanish, turn ugly and lumpish; not the curves of snow on church domes and telegraph wires, but maybe the way the heart jumps with delight when you step out in the dark or in the morning into the soft miracle of its revelation as it changes the visible world into an innocent paradise that children love.

Can’t put a price on it. How do you put a price on that compression of the sky? Then it melts and is gone, an evanescent memory, fragile like beauty, leaving its midway state and returning to one of the primal elements. Too precious for art. Put it in an art gallery or a museum, and it makes no sense. Exposes the fraudulence of making and pricing. A little piece of transcendence and ephemerality, all in a little flake, the pollen of winter. What complexity is contained in it—commerce, class, race, design, spirituality, fragility, tenderness, childhood, nature, surprise, wonder. Neither ice nor water; part air, part dream. Spirit substance. Black kids in the snow. That indefinable happiness in which the history of the brutalization of bodies is dissolved. Snow equalizes the heart. Perhaps the only truly democratic thing in this divided republic. Life, liberty, and the perfection of snow.

He left the window.

“I got my next thing,” he said to his wife, in the bedroom.

“Yeah, what is it?”

“It’s going to happen and no one will see it. Then it will be a rumor. Then there will be these bits of evidence that it took place. Not a single curator, gallery owner, or museum director will be anywhere near it. Only kids and passersby, the poor, the simple, people who don’t look at art and don’t give a fuck what it is. It will be the most democratic show in the country. It will take place under a bridge, near hoboes and dropouts, drug dealers and tramps. No one will know they are looking at it. Because it will be something so simple and ordinary that it will look like everything else, except for a few tiny details. Then it will be over, as if it had never happened.

“Afterwards, 20 times more people than were there will claim to have been there. What is nothing will become something, and it will become more something with the passing of years, as the event itself fades into oblivion and becomes either a myth or nothing. The years will pass and everything will become old, but this thing that may or may not have happened will become more real and at the same time more strange.

“I always wanted to do something that will work with the passing of time itself, and I think I’ve found a way. It’s going to be about everything and nothing. It’s going to be about whatever you want it to be about. And yet no one’s going to be able to lay a finger on it. It’ll be like snowflakes, evanescent; and like dreaming, persistent; and like a stone wall, tangible.”

The wife stuck her head out from the bedroom.

“How you going to do all that?”

But he didn’t reply, because he was watching the dance of snowflakes falling onto the black streets.

Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum

Days later , on a cold Sunday when the snow had stopped falling, people walking past the market under the bridge saw something they had never seen before. They saw the regular sellers of false teeth and baby shoes and clothes for giants. But they also saw a stall where snowballs were laid out on a Moroccan patterned rug of red and orange and blue. The larger ones were at the top, and in a descending scale of size, the smaller ones were lower down. The smallest ones were quite tiny, the size of a wren’s egg, but perfectly white and perfectly round. The snowballs formed their own immaculate pattern against the Moroccan arabesques. At the back of the stall, hovering over the display, was a man in a dark-brown jacket and dark trousers, with a natty ascot and a rimless dark hat. At first glance he looked like a bum. But when you looked at him again, you noticed a certain secret care about his attire. He was talking to the false-teeth trader, and they seemed to be laughing lightly at some joke.

Many people went past and could not entirely compute what they were seeing. Some were not sure that they had seen what they had seen. They doubled back to get another look. Then they scratched their heads. A man with a whiskey bottle came by, saw the display, and stopped.

“You selling these?”

“It’s why I’m here.”

“But I could make these myself,” said the man with the whiskey bottle.

“You think?”

The whiskey man stared at the rows of snowballs and blinked as if he were not seeing right and then staggered away. He paused at the false-teeth stall and bought a pair. Then he went off singing something that resembled a sea shanty.

A moment later another man came along, and when he saw the rows of snowballs, he began to laugh.

“Only in America,” he said, between laughs. “You selling these for real?”

“For real.”

“How much?”

The price of the snowballs rose with their size, he was told. The smallest was 50 cents and the largest was $1.

“A dollar for a snowball?”

“Cheap at the price.”

The man stared at the pristine rows of snowballs and then at the trader and back at the white rows. He sensed a profound incongruity between the whiteness of the snowballs and the haziness of the trader, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

“You some kind of magician or something?”

“Got to be to stay alive, right?”

The prospective client laughed again. He couldn’t control his laughter. He found the whole setup funny but couldn’t say why. The trader watched him, his back against the wall of the rundown bridge.

“This is just the best jive I ever seen. If I buy one, it gon’ disappear or something?”

“You pay your money, you takes your chances,” the trader said.

The man lingered, unable to leave and unable to commit to a purchase.

“You into some kind of scam here and I just can’t see what it is. You sold any of these already?”

“I done all right,” came the reply.

While he hung around, a woman wheeling her son in a stroller saw the snowballs and stopped. The man sloped off.

“Can I have a snowball, Mommy?” the boy said.

“It depends on if this gentleman is selling them, honey,” she said to the air generally. But she maneuvered the stroller to the front of the stall and looked at the smiling face of the trader.

“That’s a bright boy you got there,” he said, not coming forward, his smile going on ahead.

“They are magic!” the boy said. “I want one. Can I have one, Mommy?”

“Are you selling these snowballs?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Did you make them yourself?”

“I think God did, but I lined them up.”

“So pretty. Never seen snowballs look so pretty before.”

“Can I have one, Mom?”

The trader came forward. He looked at the kid, who was sitting in his buggy like a little emperor. Then he said: “Which one would you like?”

“A small one. That one,” the boy said, pointing to the lower line of snowballs, to the tiny ones like wrens’ eggs. The man reached down and picked out the snowball indicated, as well as a big one from the top, and gave them to the boy, who breathed out a cry of wonder.

At that moment, a camera clicked.

“They’re real, Mom. They’re real snowballs.”

“How much are those?” the mother asked.

“On the house, ma’am, on the house.”

“Oh, you are a gentleman.”

“I’m sure you’ll do the same thing for my kid.”

The woman, looking at the trader, reddened and was momentarily flustered. She wheeled the stroller around and began to walk away. But then she stopped and came back and stood gazing at the snowballs. The camera clicked again.

“They are just the prettiest things, and the rows of them are just so funny. Made my day, sir. You made my day.”

The trader nodded. Joe, seeing the interest around the snow stall, came over.

“Ma’am, can I interest you in a new set of teeth?”

But the transition from snowballs to false teeth was perhaps a little too bold for her, and she took off into the streets, looking back from time to time at the gleaming rows of snowballs on the patterned rug.

Many people stopped, drawn by the mysterious and orderly form of the snowballs at the stall. Some came to banter, some came to test their wits, some came with cracks about capitalism. Another man saw the perfect rows of whiteness and couldn’t stop laughing. He meant to ask a question about how much they cost, but something about the setup seemed so hilarious to him that he just laughed and laughed and came close to choking. The trader had to come around the stall and pat him on the back ’til he calmed down and wiped the tears of laughter from his cracked, life-beaten face. When he laughed, he showed no upper teeth, and false-teeth man sold him a set at a knockdown price. The man was still laughing in the distance and saying something about always reinventing the dream, brother.

Later, another man showed up. It seemed he was a lawyer from upstate and was in the big city for a conference. He had gone on a stroll and his feet had led him here; he took the snowball display very seriously and began haggling for the price of a middle-size ball. He was thinking of bringing it back home to his son, who he was sure would love it. Only he wanted to know if it would keep.

“Put it in a fridge soon as you get back to your hotel. They’re packed pretty tight so they’ll hold for a while, so long as you’re not planning a trip to the Mojave Desert,” said the snow trader.

The lawyer was very excited by this unusual purchase and took out his wallet.

“I knew you guys were pretty wacky in the city, but this is the wackiest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

And all the while, the camera was clicking. No one really noticed the photographer, because he didn’t look the part. He blended in a short distance away and could be taken for a curious tourist, from the Middle East perhaps, someone overawed by the mesmerizing things the great city had to offer those with an eye for its quotidian oddities.

The lawyer went off, chuckling to himself, with his wrapped-up snowball. He didn’t look back to see that the rows of whiteness on the resplendent rug had almost magically replenished themselves, so that they were again a perfect pattern of serial globes. Young women came by in their winter coats and their mufflers and their impeccable gloves. They couldn’t stop giggling at the cuteness of the row of small snowballs. They looked at the trader shyly, and he asked where they were from and engaged them mildly and carefully, tossing at them the occasional mot juste, or a throwaway line with a salty turn of wit, which they didn’t quite catch. They debated among themselves whether the snowballs would make a perfect birthday present for a friend and speculated about his reaction. While they pondered, someone else came by who was surprised to see the seller of snowballs and began to let out a cry of astonishment. The strange, severe look on the trader’s face stopped him in his playfully caustic greeting.

“What’s up, brother?”

“Just go away, or behave like you don’t know me,” whispered the snow seller in a fierce undertone.

“Oh, all right, I get it,” said the newcomer, clearly an acquaintance.

But he didn’t leave, sensing intrigue and a story, sensing that, with his usual good timing and excellent luck, he had stumbled on something, maybe a scoop, maybe just a good old tale to tell the folks. And so he lingered and examined the serial snowball display with the gravity of a connoisseur, dwelling on each detail. He asked the women, who were still debating, if they had a magnifying glass. They said they didn’t and, giggling again, wandered away.

“This ain’t a museum,” the seller of snow said. “Move on, or I’m closing the stall.”

The old friend stood up.

“Okay, keep your stone hair on. I’ll push off, but that’s dinner you owe me.”

“Call you next week.”

“Can’t wait.”

He left, walking in a lopsided way, as if he were conscious of being watched, which he was, by the snowball seller. The old friend made a backward gesture, a half wave, before disappearing round a corner. The snow seller called to Joe.

“You got the time?”

Joe shouted it across.

“You thinking of packing up already?”

“I’ll give it another half hour.”

“Getting too hot for your snowballs?” Joe said, laughing and rubbing his palms together to warm them.

“Sometimes the wrong people show up.”

“Hazards of the trade, my man. The other day my ex-wife turned up. Offered to give her some of these here teeth instead of monthly maintenance. She didn’t want ’em.”

“Can’t say I blame her.”

“Put me right off my stride. Knocked the wind out of me, her turning up like that.”

“Like you say, hazards of the trade.”

“Ain’t that right.”

A beautiful young woman arrived and stood in front of the snowball stall. With a solemn expression, she studied the glistening rows of snowballs. She seemed mesmerized, lost in a faraway musing. The depth of her absorption made her look even more beautiful. She stood there silently for a long time. The camera clicked discreetly. The seller of snowballs did not interrupt the young lady’s musings. With a half smile, he looked away and took his mind off her. Some things are just perfect if you let them be, he thought. Sometimes a moment is the ideal image of life. You couldn’t improve it if you had a thousand years. The camera worked unobtrusively. The seller of snowballs let his eyes wander over the city’s skyline. The rooftops were edged with snow. All of the boundaries were blurred. The snow linked things that seemed separate. It was falling now, flakes in pirouettes, bringing silence. It was time to make the show disappear. Our revels now are ended. The real magic begins when things disappear. It begins with erasure, with absence. The snowfall was obliterating the city, anonymizing its uniqueness. But the true enchantment is when from death things begin to return, long after people knew of their existence. You have to get people to know that something once happened, that it once existed, before you can make them know that it can never happen again, that it is lost in time forever. Lost in time, but resurrected in myth, or rumor, or stories.

“Joe,” he said, “it’s been nice knowing you.”

“You make it sound like a valediction.”

“For a man who sells false teeth, you sure got one hell of a vocabulary.”

The young lady smiled, and asked how much the snowballs cost, just as he began dismantling the show.

This short story appears in the March 2023 print edition.

Poor, poor Mike “Magic Mike” Lane. Channing Tatum’s stripper-god character, bearer of less-than-zero-percent body fat, has satisfied countless women with his gyrating—and yet true romance has been elusive. That sweet, low-key relationship he began with his colleague’s sister in Magic Mike? It’s a failed engagement by the sequel, Magic Mike XXL. That charming photographer he wooed in XXL? Nowhere to be found when the latest film, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, begins. Lost and jaded and struggling to pay the bills, Mike is more alone now than ever before. Maybe, just maybe, Mr. Mike doesn’t know what he really wants.

Good thing Steven Soderbergh does. The director, returning to the franchise after handing the reins to Gregory Jacobs for XXL, tells a downtempo love story between Mike and the impossibly wealthy Maxandra “Max” Mendoza (played by a magnetic Salma Hayek Pinault). A portrait of a mature courtship, Last Dance shifts tonal gears from the buoyant road-trip comedy XXL just as that film swerved away from the first Magic Mike, an incisive study of the Great Recession. Mike and Max’s relationship—in which she whisks him off to London so he can direct an all-male revue at the theater she owns—is the stuff of romance novels, but that’s the point: Last Dance is all wish fulfillment, seductive and surreal.

And it works, in large part because (with apologies to the studly Kings of Tampa) Max makes for Mike’s perfect dance partner. She’s nothing like the women he usually meets, customers he calls “a zombie apocalypse of repressed desire”; she’s sexual, glamorous, and so rich that she can make her every whim come to life. In an early scene, she swans into her theater, a historic building best known for staging classical plays, and installs Mike as its new director, unruffled by the cast and crew’s shock. By making Max as much of a protagonist as Mike is, the film explores what the rest of the franchise never has: a fully realized female character voicing her wants rather than having them presumed by a bunch of half-naked men. The result is perhaps the sexiest entry in the Magic Mike movies. It’s intimate and emotional without losing any of the heat that comes with a sensually lit dry-humping scene.

[Read: The welcome rise of the stripper ensemble film]

Take Mike’s first dance in Last Dance. Max invites Mike inside her Miami home, a glass-walled mansion that’s a calm reprieve from the heavy winds outside. She requests a routine, and as the sky darkens into night, Soderbergh follows their movements with smooth, uninterrupted shots, relishing every sway, lift, and heave of their fully clothed bodies. The lengthy scene is so immersive, with the two of them (and the camera) caught in so many positions, that it took me a minute to realize I’d been holding my breath. The erotic nature of their pas de deux doesn’t just come from the fact that Mike spends much of his time with his face pressed to Max’s crotch; it also comes from how Max, at first stunned by Mike’s choreography, soon becomes just as assertive as him. He may have set the stage by rearranging her furniture, but she ends their encounter by blindfolding him with the sash of her jumpsuit. They’re evenly matched.

In many ways, Max’s journey parallels Mike’s: She likes to be in control but has mastered that only in certain professional forums. At home, she has trouble connecting with her teenage daughter, Zadie (Jemelia George), and she’s divorcing her husband, to whom she owes her wealth. Little by little, the film reveals her vulnerability, showing how she’s just as adrift as her new paramour. The two of them bond over a shared penchant for creative leadership and a love for the spotlight. Max is no femme fatale taking advantage of Mike for fun. She’s no moralizing naysayer questioning his background as a stripper. Instead, she simply wants to be validated and respected in an equal partnership—a challenge for Mike, who’s not certain he knows how to satisfy a woman he’s not performing for. Their intimacy grows more sophisticated as the film progresses. They fight and make up in a language that feels private to them. They share glances across dinner tables, captured in extreme close-ups. They curl up in bed just to watch a video together. These scenes are as enthralling to watch as Mike’s solo dance to “Pony” in his garage workshop.

Not that Last Dance is short on spectacle. If anything, it’s the closest Soderbergh, a director who usually leans heavily on realism, might ever get to making a musical: Besides the film’s opening salvo in Miami, there’s also a marvelous number set on a double-decker bus, and most of the film’s last hour is devoted to showing off the revue Mike directs (which is largely inspired by the live Magic Mike show playing in Las Vegas). Throughout the movie, Soderbergh injects playful moments befitting the subversive nature of that revue, including a brief video clip of cute kittens and a series of cheeky voice-overs from Zadie about the wonder of dance. When the final production kicks off, Soderbergh lets the sound of the audience’s cheers fade away, as if the grandest act is Mike and Max’s shared devotion.

Last Dance isn’t perfect. The script falters when it comes to developing anyone outside of the central couple; Zadie, especially, never feels like a real character, just a collection of ideas about a pampered British teenager. London also seems terribly small, with the action so confined to the theater and Max’s apartment that it makes little sense when hordes of people suddenly come to the revue. But Soderbergh’s direction revels in the pure fantasy of the love story, choreographing a gorgeous tango between two characters who’d felt their lives had fallen out of step. As it turns out, the question was never about what Mike wanted. It was always about who might truly want him.