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.

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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 the Atlantic deputy editor Jane Yong Kim, who oversees our Culture, Family, and Books sections. She’s fond of Laura Dern’s dino-dodging fashion in Jurassic Park, the late English environmentalist Roger Deakin’s paean to swimming outdoors, and the “wildly imaginative” video art of Wong Ping.

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

The bathos of Brady I bought a CO2 monitor, and it broke me. Psychedelics open your brain. You might not like what falls in. The Culture Survey

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: The last art shows I remember feeling really impressed by were side-by-side Wong Ping exhibits from 2021, one at the New Museum, and the other at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. A self-taught animator based in Hong Kong, Wong makes wildly imaginative videos: colorful landscapes that use surrealism to convey oddball, engrossing, sometimes disturbing stories about the loneliness and disappointments of modern life. (One video, An Emo Nose, depicts a man who discovers his nose is sensitive to “negative energy”; in an attempt to keep it happy, he dispenses with polarizing activities such as talking politics and focuses on cheerier ones such as eating ice cream and having sex.) The reward of Wong’s work is the juxtaposition of cartoonish early-internet aesthetics with intricate, gripping themes.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I just finished, and loved, Lisa Hsiao Chen’s debut novel, Activities of Daily Living. It’s a striking meditation on time and the things we fill our lives with—the tug-of-war between jobs and passion projects, productivity and curiosity, minutes spent and minutes gained. A woman named Alice is preoccupied, in her off-work hours, with Tehching Hsieh, the brilliant performance artist known for his lengthy “endurance” pieces in the 1980s. Hsieh’s explorations of time were psychologically and physically demanding: In one, he tied himself to another artist for a year with a piece of rope; in another, he punched a time card every hour for a year; in yet another, he spent a year inside a cage. Alice’s research into Hsieh begins seeping into aspects of her daily existence—interactions with her family, her movements through the city. The novel is a beautiful, subtle read; it tenderly builds an argument for seeing our lives more clearly.

On the nonfiction front, I’ve been making my way through Waterlog, a stunning book by the environmentalist Roger Deakin that takes readers on a swimming journey through the lakes, rivers, and tarns of Britain. Deakin, who died in 2006, was a tremendous writer, able to render his adventures with immediacy, clarity, and wit. Following along with him as he goes in search of little-known waterways and old open-air swimming pools is a real delight. [Related: Swimming in the wild will change you.]

“The reward of Wong’s work is the juxtaposition of cartoonish early-internet aesthetics with intricate, gripping themes," says Jane. Above: A photo from the Wong Ping exhibition at New York's Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (Pierre Le Hors)

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I’ll answer this one with movie theaters in mind.

Jurassic Park is one of the first true blockbusters I remember seeing in a theater, and that place of honor colors my relationship with it. The blend of high tension and pure camp—the rampant hubris, the captive goat, the raptors on the hunt (those tapping claws!), Laura Dern’s knotted shirt and khaki shorts—is pitch perfect. And the experience of watching it in a row filled with other terrified kids is an indelible memory.

The art-house version of this memory, for me, is watching Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue. It’s actually a series of one-hour films originally made for Polish television. Each film takes loose inspiration from one of the Ten Commandments, following characters who all live in the same neighborhood in 1980s Warsaw as they deal with the moral messiness of their lives. I first saw The Decalogue in high school, at an indie theater close to home that happened to be playing it, and was transfixed by its moody, understated profundity. Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy is arguably his better-known series, but this earlier group of films about human frailty has always been my favorite. [Related: I just wanted to watch people get eaten by dinosaurs.]

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: I recently reread No Longer Human, a cult novel by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai. It’s just as arresting as I remember it being when I first read it more than 15 years ago. Dazai, who died by suicide in 1948, at 38, wrote discerningly, sometimes scathingly, about disenchantment. His young male protagonist is alienated from society, spending much of his time noticing all of the ways in which the world around him seems fake or strange or stressful. Dazai’s prose style is spare, and his observations about life in 1930s Japan are startlingly acidic. [Related: Of Women: A story]

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: The Visitors, by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, charmed me when I first saw it and has stuck with me since. The concept is deceptively simple: Across nine screens, viewers see footage of the artist and a bunch of his musician friends performing together from different rooms in a big, run-down house in upstate New York. Kjartansson himself plays the guitar from inside a bathtub filled with soapy water; other people, perched on beds or by windows, sing and play cellos, accordions, the piano.

Kjartansson’s 2012 work, which is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, hit a nerve during the pandemic, for obvious reasons. The solitude of the performers is noticeable; the videos draw attention to the visual stillness in each scene. In turn, the collective sound the performers produce—separately but in unison—is a powerful reminder of music’s communal potential and the new ways we’re always learning to be together. It’s an artwork to spend time with in person, one that rewards slowing down and lingering.

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with 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 The 65th Annual Grammy Awards (broadcasts live on CBS tonight) Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop, a sweeping study of human creativity by the Harvard professor Martin Puchner (hits bookstores Tuesday) Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third and final installment of the director Steven Soderbergh’s male-stripper series starring Channing Tatum (in theaters Friday) Essay (Gie Knaeps / Getty)

The Band That Best Captures the Sound of the ’70s

By Kevin Dettmar

No decade is dominated by a single genre of popular music, but the 1970s was arguably more motley than most. What is the sound of the ’70s? Is it … folk rock? (Neil Young’s Harvest turned 50 last year.) Progressive rock? (Prog’s nadir, Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, was released in 1973 and promptly crashed under its own weight.) How about disco? Punk? Post-punk? New wave? Reggae? Rap? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. And what do we do with Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, one of the 10 best-selling albums of the decade? Is bombast a genre?

But if you were to drill down through the decade and pull up a core sample of ’70s pop, it would come up Blondie—and would look, in fact, very much like the band’s eight-disc box set, Against the Odds: 1974–1982, which is nominated for the Best Historical Album Award at this weekend’s Grammys. As the academic and artist Kembrew McLeod has written, Blondie was a mediator between the experimental music and art scene of downtown New York City and the larger pop audience. But more fundamentally, I’d argue, the group was also a conduit and popularizer of a wide variety of new rock and pop sounds.

Read the full article.

More in Culture What is it about Pamela Anderson? Knock at the Cabin and the terror of raising children A new way to read Gatsby Did George Washington burn New York? Elaine Hsieh Chou on the ethics of ‘trauma porn’ Never underestimate Jennifer Coolidge. Catch Up on The Atlantic Tyre Nichols wanted to capture the sunset. Cover story: We’ve lost the plot. ChatGPT is about to dump more work on everyone. Photo Album (Matthias Rietschel / Reuters)

Check out snaps from a figure-skating championship in Finland, a rugby tournament in Afghanistan, the Magh Mela festival in India, and more in our photos of the week.