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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 senior editor Julie Beck. Julie oversees our family section and created The Friendship Files, a special series that explores—you guessed it—stories about navigating friendship. She’s also the writer behind one of my personal favorite Atlantic stories from the past year, on the rites and traditions of “childlore” (featuring such time-honored rituals as drawing the “cool S” and typing “BOOBS” on a calculator). These days, Julie is enjoying the quirky Canadian comedy series Letterkenny and getting swole with the help of the writer and weight-lifting influencer Casey Johnston. She also remains unapologetically smitten with the “bleeding-heart howl” of the 2000s emo legend Dashboard Confessional.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

America fails the civilization test. Too many Americans are missing out on the best kitchen gadget. The end of recommendation letters The Culture Survey: Julie Beck

Something I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: My favorite band in high school was Dashboard Confessional, which was a cool thing to like until I got to college and learned that emo was embarrassing and we were supposed to be into irony and indie sleaze now. Luckily, I’ve held on to my love for Chris Carrabba and his bleeding-heart howl for 20 years; now we’re apparently in an emo revival, and the band is touring again. [Related: Dashboard Confessional, or when it was cool to have feelings]

I was also a big Twilight fan as a teen, and although I will always have some nostalgia for it, I can no longer defend the series’ central romance. I was recently reminiscing with my best friends from high school about how the book swept our entire friend group, and how strange and sad it was that not a single one of us questioned sparkle-vampire Edward Cullen’s behavior at the time. He climbs through Bella’s window to watch her sleep, and he even disables her truck apart to prevent her from visiting a friend. Readers are supposed to understand that this is because he just loves her so much and wants to protect her, and indeed, we all thought it was the most romantic thing ever. Meanwhile, the other corner of the love triangle—a werewolf named Jacob, who treats Bella like she has human agency, has fun with her, and doesn’t stop her from taking risks—is just a temporary distraction before Bella ultimately recommits to her stalker boyfriend and his controlling family. As I’ve grown up, I’ve found that the path to emotional maturity requires switching allegiances from Team Edward to Team Jacob. (As long as you ignore the whole maybe-falling-in-love-with-a-baby thing.) [Related: At its core, the Twilight saga is a story about ____.]

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Casey Johnston wrote the “Ask a Swole Woman” column at various publications for many years and now writes a newsletter called She’s A Beast, which I highly recommend to folks of any gender who are interested in getting into weight lifting. Even if you’ve never touched a weight before, her beginner’s program, “Liftoff: Couch to Barbell” is really welcoming. She’s also a much-needed voice of reason, regularly calling bullshit where she sees it when it comes to the weight-loss industry (see: “The Yassification of Ozempic”).

Lifting weights has turned working out from a penance that I resent into something more like a science experiment—what can my body do if I invest in it? Can I pick up my own body weight? (I can.) Can I get my suitcase into the overhead bin without help? (You betcha.) Can I get rid of my constant shoulder pain from being a professional computer gremlin? (Sort of—but you still need an ergonomic desk setup, kids!) Can I quiet the voices telling me the only reason to move my body is to make it smaller? (Yes—not all the time, but more than I ever dreamed was possible.) Thanks to weight lifting, I’ve found a new and honestly revelatory relationship to exercise and to my body in my 30s—and Johnston’s writing was my gateway.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “Sleepwalker” by Julie Byrne is a gentle masterpiece, as is the rest of her album Not Even Happiness. But if what you’re looking for is happiness, then listen to “Set It Free” by Now, Now. It sounds like a perfect summer day (and also kind of like Tom Petty gone emo).

A good recommendation I recently received: My dear friend Nathalie convinced me to start watching Letterkenny. It’s a Canadian comedy about a fictional town in rural Ontario, where cliques of farmers, burnouts, hockey players, and Native residents of a nearby reservation clash over petty small-town dramas—but also help and support one another when it counts. What’s most fun about the show is its dialogue: The characters delight in wordplay, and they draw on a sprawling glossary of Canadian slang and in-jokes for long scenes of linguistic silliness. I find myself quoting the show all the time. See: “Pitter patter,” which means “Let’s go!” [Related: The dirtbag is back.]

An author I will read anything by: I’ve been slowly working my way through Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s books since I read and loved Mexican Gothic a few years ago. I’m in awe of her creativity and versatility; she writes across a wide range of genres—gothic horror, noir, historical-fantasy romance—and seems to nail every one.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Wish,” by W. S. Merwin:

Please one more

kiss in the kitchen

before we turn the lights off

I have a print of it, in Merwin’s handwriting, framed in my apartment (near the kitchen). In just three lines, it says pretty much everything about what really matters in this too-short life. [Related: The poet of premature endings]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Faith Hill, Derek Thompson, Tom Nichols, Amy Weiss-Meyer, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Bhumi Tharoor, and Amanda Mull.

The Week Ahead Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, a book by the writer Claire Dederer that wrestles with the question of how to enjoy good art by bad people (on sale Tuesday) Iconic America, an eight-part docuseries that explores American history through a close examination of its national symbols (premieres Wednesday on PBS at 9 p.m. ET) Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved 1970 novel (in theaters Friday) Essay Clémentine Schneidermann for The Atlantic

The Most Quietly Radical Writer on Television

By Sophie Gilbert

Until she was 5 years old, Alice Birch lived in a commune in the Malvern Hills, a bucolic area in the west of England known for bluebell woods and wandering poets. It was, she recalls, quite low-key for a commune, “not culty, not wild”—just a 19th-century redbrick country house with orchards and vegetable gardens and adults trying to live out their collectivist ideals. At night, the whole group ate together around a big round table, and Birch would listen quietly as people talked. Though everyone was broadly left-leaning, she remembers a good amount of disagreement; she couldn’t always understand what was being talked about, but she felt the tension, the crackle of ideas sparking as they met in the air.

“That’s theater,” she told me last month, sitting at a table inside London’s National Theatre. Before Birch became a highly prized film and television writer, she was a playwright—“There’s no one better,” the woman in the theater bookstore told me, her eyes glinting, as I picked up some of Birch’s plays—and throughout her work, the dinner table is often where everything kicks off. In the smash TV adaptation of Normal People that she co-wrote with Sally Rooney, a shady alfresco lunch in Italy turns into an eruption of emotional violence. [Blank], a 2019 play that premiered at London’s Donmar Warehouse, features a 45-minute scene called “Dinner Party,” in which a gathering over meze is interrupted by cocaine dealers, wine deliveries, and eventually a child wielding a baseball bat.

Read the full article.

More in Culture Abbott Elementary lets Black kids be kids. Seven books to read as a family Little Richard and the truth about rock and roll’s queer origins Why Ari Aster freaks people out Vermeer’s revelations The trap of celebrity More from The Atlantic California isn’t special. The internet of the 2010s just ended. The myth of the broke Millennial Photo Album The “blue forest” near Halle, Belgium, on April 18, 2023. (Johanna Geron / Reuters)

Behold a carpet of bluebells in Belgium, a robotic inspector in Paris, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

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When HBO recently announced that it would be adapting the Harry Potter series into a television show, devoting at least one season to each book, some critics were skeptical. The original Potter film franchise grossed more than $2 billion. What could a TV version possibly offer audiences that the popular movies hadn’t already?

But I had a different reaction: It’s about time.

Judged as fan service that considerately condensed the celebrated series for the silver screen, the Potter movies were an undeniable success. But as art, they left a lot to be desired—and not because of a lack of creative effort. Rather, the movie medium was never well suited to the seven-year story of the beloved boy wizard. Harry Potter was always meant to be a TV series, and it provides a perfect study in why so many books today make for better television than film.

To begin with, the Potter novels were never going to fit into the run time of feature films. J. K. Rowling’s saga totals more than 3,000 pages, with the later installments growing notoriously long. In their attempt to encompass this material, the movies often feel more like trailers, churning through plot without fully explaining it and nodding to meaningful character moments while never quite letting them breathe. Certain fan favorites from the books, like Peeves the poltergeist, never appear, and some cinematic scenes from the books were left on the cutting-room floor. To take one example: In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the Quidditch World Cup begs to be dramatized as the magical equivalent of the Super Bowl. But because the championship’s aerial antics were not strictly necessary to understand the book’s conclusion, the match itself was cut from the movie. A TV version of Harry Potter would not have to make such a sacrifice.

[Read: Living through death with Harry Potter]

But it’s not just the number of pages in Harry Potter that makes the material more suited to television—it’s what’s in them. One of Rowling’s strengths as a writer, in both her Harry Potter novels and her acclaimed Cormoran Strike detective series, is her ability to tie up her tales in a fashion that causes all prior pieces to fall into place. Whether it’s the origin of the Chamber of Secrets or the true nature of Severus Snape, everything in a given book ultimately adds up. That quality is precisely what makes for a satisfying television drama.

Many serialized TV shows today, by contrast, are making it up as they go along, advancing narrative questions without knowing the answers, and this often leads to audience disillusionment. Perhaps the most notorious example of this is J. J. Abrams’s Lost, whose first season revolved around a mysterious metal hatch found in the ground. At the end of the season, the locked door is finally opened to reveal … a hole in the earth, an apt representation of the plot hole that the show’s writers planned to fill over the summer break. Unsurprisingly, Lost’s finale similarly punted on resolving most of the mysteries previously raised by the series.

This haphazard approach is distressingly common. In 2021, the Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman was asked what he’d learned from producing the first season of Star Trek: Picard, a nearly $100 million show that received mixed reviews from audiences. “Figure out the end earlier,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “If you’re going to do a serialized show, you have the whole story before you start shooting.”

Such creative confusion has less to do with the talent of the writers than the mechanics of the industry. Much of television is written episodically, and unlike novelists, those producing it don’t have the luxury of going back and revising earlier chapters in light of later developments. Networks typically pick up single-episode pilots, not multiyear storylines. This is why many shows with a gripping first season fall apart afterward, as showrunners either fail to follow up their initial idea with something similarly scintillating or begin coasting once they’ve acquired a built-in audience. Moreover, with constant turnover in TV writers’ rooms, maintaining a coherent narrative vision over time can be fiendishly difficult. When the screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski decided to commit to a five-year storyline for his sci-fi show Babylon 5, he had to write 92 of its 110 episodes himself.

Adapting a literary work is one of the best ways to avoid this trap. After all, the novelist has already taken care of the narrative arc, foreshadowing, and other storytelling elements that bedevil episodic TV writers. By basing a television series on books like Rowling’s, showrunners avoid “hatch moments” where viewers realize that the writers have no idea where the show is going. The result is drama that doesn’t disappoint its audience. In other words, television doesn’t just solve Harry Potter’s problem; Harry Potter solves television’s problem.

HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones illustrates the point. Based on the best-selling novels of George R. R. Martin, the show won plaudits for many years—until the writers ran out of books and had to wrap up the story on their own. Deprived of Martin’s careful plotting and broader vision, they floundered, serving up a conclusion that was panned as rushed and inconsistent with what came before.

[Read: How the lessons of Game of Thrones were lost]

Or take another beloved British children’s book series with adult appeal, which offers a more encouraging precedent. In 2003, when the BBC polled the U.K. public about its favorite literary works, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came in fifth, two places behind Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials. In 2007, the first book of that series was adapted for film. The Golden Compass had a lot going for it: a skilled director in Chris Weitz, the production company behind The Lord of the Rings, and lead roles filled by Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. It also flopped so badly that the studio never produced the next two books in the trilogy. Fast-forward to 2019, and His Dark Materials got a second chance—as television. Featuring James McAvoy and Lin-Manuel Miranda among its stars, and backed by the biggest budget in BBC history, it was finally able to tell the popular story on its own terms. This time, the effort was rewarded with three full seasons. The show finished its run to critical and audience acclaim in December.

Harry Potter can do the same. In the past, only movie studios had the budget and talent to do justice to popular works of literature. Many actors turned down TV gigs for higher-profile blockbuster roles. But today, the rise of prestige television and dramatic advances in affordable visual effects have made it possible to combine the production values of the big screen with the expansive storytelling space of the small screen—and it’s that marriage that would provide the real magic of a Potter TV turn.