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.

Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic staffer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Damon Beres, an Atlantic senior editor who oversees our Technology section. Damon also recently wrote about the high-stakes bluster of Elon Musk for this newsletter, and covered BuzzFeed’s pivot to AI-generated personality quizzes in January. In today’s edition, he endorses the underappreciated comedic brilliance of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in a certain 2000s rom-com, as well as a wise picture book about a sloth, and he makes a case for quiet-loud music.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Jerry Springer explained it all. John Mulaney's Baby J takes apart a likable comedian. I don’t want to smell you get high.

The Culture Survey: Damon Beres

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: Along Came Polly, the 2004 rom-com with Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston—and, much more important, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Everyone knows he was one of the great actors of his era, but if you haven’t seen him slip and fall on the hardwood floor at the start of this movie, well, you don’t really know anything at all. It’s pure comedic brilliance.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: My 1-year-old is obsessed with books. He wakes up in the morning pointing to his bookshelf and repeating “Books, books, books,” like an incantation. He pronounces it like the end of “Malibu,” or like he’s trying to scare someone on Halloween. Boo-ks, boo-ks, boo-ks.

One of his favorites is “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly,” said the Sloth, by Eric Carle, the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Sloth is all about owning who you are and navigating the perceptions of others. In the book, the sloth lives an existence that is truly its own. The other animals of the rainforest judge it. A rude jaguar comes up and asks why it’s so lazy. And on its own time, to no one in particular—the jaguar’s not even on the page anymore—the sloth eventually offers:

It is true that I am slow, quiet and boring. I am lackadaisical, I dawdle and I dillydally. I am also unflappable, languid, stoic, impassive, sluggish, lethargic, placid, calm, mellow, laid-back and, well, slothful! I am relaxed and tranquil, and I like to live in peace. But I am not lazy … That’s just how I am. I like to do things slowly, slowly, slowly.

It’s a beautiful message. Take your time. Be yourself. Don’t take any nonsense from cats.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: I’ll never forget Ian Bogost’s 2022 article “The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now.” When it published, I was working at a start-up that operated to some extent in the “web3” space, which I had mixed feelings about. Ian’s story put everything into perspective. It is, to this day, the smartest, most clear-headed and creative essay on the issues with that particular technological paradigm that I’ve come across—an outstanding piece of analytical writing. About one year later, I work here and get to call Ian a colleague. Happy ending.    

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: If I really need to let my brain go soft and get the drool flowing, I’ll boot up Holedown, a simple game that involves aiming balls at numbered barriers that halt your progress through a tunnel. Sometimes you can ricochet off of the barriers just right to maximize your score. It’s satisfying and low-stakes, but just short of mindless—an ideal game, in other words.

An actor I would watch in anything: I very happily watched Ethan Hawke wander the aisles of a Blockbuster Video while he recited the famous “To be, or not to be” monologue in the 2000 film adaptation of Hamlet. I’m one of his ride-or-dies. I can’t wait to see him in the new Pedro Almodóvar short film Strange Way of Life. It looks divine.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Allow me a slight cheat. It’s “Rid of Me,” by PJ Harvey. It is the best quiet rock song. It is the best loud rock song. The balance is everything. Half of this track is like twisting the handle on the world’s heaviest jack-in-the-box, and the other half is the fireball that pops out.

I love music that plays with this dichotomy. The Japanese band Boris—definitely not for everyone—opens their album Pink with a song called “Farewell.” It has a gauzy, dreamlike lead-in that explodes into something much bigger and more cantankerous. Most of the tracks that follow are profoundly loud, complex metal music.

A gentler version of this is happening in popular music too. Mitski can pulverize you with “Your Best American Girl” or “A Pearl,” but she’s also tender and vibey. If anything, I’ve found her almost subdued the couple of times I’ve seen her on tour, but it’s also been clarifying to see how clearly she impacts the audience, which is younger and cooler than I am. People are crying and singing along. A similar thing seems to be happening with boygenius: Its music is quiet-loud.

Rather than allowing volume to be a stand-in for emotional communication—the “quiet” stuff is sad or wistful; the “loud” stuff is angry—listeners can find something valuable in a kind of commingling. It reminds me of the name of a Daniel Clowes comic, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron: The soft and hard can go together. It’s the mood. [Related: “Rock and roll ain’t what it used to be.”]

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

The Week Ahead

Chain Gang All Stars, the new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in which convicted murderers fight to the death, on television, for the chance to win their freedom (on sale Tuesday) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, a “cheerful goodbye” to the Marvel franchise that shows what the superhero genre has been missing (in theaters nationwide Friday) The coronation of King Charles, which, according to the Royal Family’s official website, promises to “reflect the monarch’s role today and look towards the future, while being rooted in longstanding traditions and pageantry” (live coverage begins Saturday at 5 a.m. ET on ABC, CNN, NBC, SkyNews’ YouTube channel, and elsewhere)

Essay

Illustration by Diego Cadena Bejarano

The Painstaking Journey to a David Grann Book

By John Hendrickson

First, some swashbuckling. The journalist David Grann embarks on a multi-leg journey from New York to Florida to Santiago, an annoying combination of planes and customs and cars and ferries en route to Chiloé Island, a little strip off the coast of Chile. There, he meets the boat captain who has agreed to steer him hundreds of miles farther south, to Wager Island, a place where nobody lives.

Storms have rolled in. To Grann’s surprise, the captain’s vessel is much smaller than it appeared in the photos. The tiny crew needs to chop wood to keep it heated; they retrieve drinking water from nearby glaciers. Out at sea, the boat’s top-heaviness reveals itself. No combination of Dramamine and anti-nausea wristbands and behind-the-ear patches can save an uninitiated stomach against these waves near the bottom of the Earth.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

What to read when you need to start over The song that captures the evolution of Willie Nelson When you crave some comforting strangeness Kenan Orhan on exile and memory Short story: “The Renovation” A splashy drama about the diplomacy of marriage Why women never stop coming of age How Harry Belafonte transformed American music Tucker Carlson’s final moments on Fox were as dangerous as they were absurd. The most telling moments from the E. Jean Carroll–Donald Trump depositions

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Kyrsten Sinema theory of American politics Long-haulers are trying to define themselves. AI is a waste of time.

Photo Album

Club members hold oars for a symbolic burial at sea in Currumbin, Australia, on April 25, 2023. (Chris Hyde / Getty)

An observation of Anzac Day in Australia (pictured), classic-car racing in England, and more of our editor’s selected photos of the week

It has been 70 years since the world last witnessed the crowning of a new British monarch. On Tuesday, May 2, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, will join our U.K.-based staff writers Sophie Gilbert and Helen Lewis to talk about the new era of the monarchy and its role both within the United Kingdom and on the international stage. Register for the event here.

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.

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 Atlantic senior associate editor Faith Hill. A wearer of many hats, Faith edits stories for our Family section, commissions and edits our original poetry submissions, and, as a writer, frequently chronicles eye-opening trends in relationships and human behavior. She recently wrote about the awkward in-between-ship of early-stage romantic entanglement, the widespread misinterpretation of attachment theory, and second-chance couples. In our survey, Faith discusses her “sick” childhood obsession with the singer Avril Lavigne, how she recently loved (and wept at) the movie Aftersun, and her coming to terms with, in rewatching the TV series Girls, the startling possibility that she just might be a Marnie.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Nutrition science’s most preposterous result: Could ice cream possibly be good for you? The not-so-secret key to emotional balance Welcome to wedding sprawl. The Culture Survey: Faith Hill

The last thing that made me cry: I saw Aftersun in a theater with friends whom I love and trust, but part of me still wishes I’d seen it alone; when the movie ended and the lights came on, they revealed that I was fully weeping. The train ride home with one of those friends was pretty quiet, save for the occasional “Whoa,” “That was intense,” or, as we looked briefly at each other’s overwhelmed, vacant stare, “Yeah.” I couldn’t read reviews for more than a week afterward—I felt so fragile about it. [Related: When a father is just out of reach]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’ve been dutifully watching the new season of Love Is Blind, though I’m not sure enjoying is quite the right word for my experience. The contestants make me either angry or sad; none of the couples seem like they’ll last or even like they really like each other. Every time I watch it, I end up texting someone, “I’m depressed.” And yet, when new episodes drop, I immediately binge them and complain about waiting for the next ones. Is that just what it means to love a TV show in our modern age? [Related: Why America loves Love Is Blind;

Love Is Blind was the ultimate reality-TV paradox. (From 2020)]

Something I loved as a teenager and still love: As a kid, I had a sick obsession with the pop-punk singer Avril Lavigne. I say “sick” because of the sheer extent of it; I mean, I wore neckties to school to mimic her style. I somehow managed to write all of my assignments about her. My teachers had to mention it at parent-teacher conferences. Everyone told me—probably out of genuine concern for my mental health—that it was just a phase I’d grow out of. In some ways, I did—but also, have you listened to “Fall to Pieces” lately? Genius. When I love, I love hard. [Related: What Avril Lavigne has always understood about growing up]

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: Like many people, I’ve been rewatching HBO’s Girls. I was always a Marnie defender: She’s terrible, obviously, but the show’s characters all are! Why does everyone hate her the most? My old theory was that viewers were especially irked by the character most similar to them, and there are a lot of Marnies in the world. But I didn’t believe I was one of them; I’m not at all type A, nor am I one of those people who always look clean. I felt I had room to empathize with her.

My revisit of the series has me wondering, though, if I’d perhaps gotten the rule backwards; maybe everyone feels for the character most similar to them, and I’ve been a Marnie all along—competitive, insecure, weirdly attracted to Ray, desperate to build a life that seems successful just to prove my own worth. I recently watched the episode where Ray, upon request, tells Marnie everything that’s wrong with her. “When you’re excluded from things,” he says at one point in his long list, “you’re outrageously offended and hold on to this grudge.” Do we not all do that?

[Related: The wistful, sharp return of Girls (from 2017);

Girls: Still flawless at being itself (from 2016)]

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: I know this answer is the least cool imaginable, but—I’m sorry—I really do love Vincent van Gogh. You can somehow feel in every work, even the still lives and the landscapes, the pulse of his anguish, his searching, his intensity. It’s like the paint is alive and writhing in turmoil. And he was a beautiful writer too; his letters to his brother, Theo, chart his despair, his moments of joy, his constant questioning of how to live a good life. “In the springtime a bird in a cage knows very well that there’s something he’d be good for,” he wrote in one, explaining that he was at once ambitious, hopeful, and profoundly lost. “He feels very clearly that there’s something to be done but he can’t do it.” Maybe van Gogh was a Marnie too.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: As someone who’s deeply afraid of my friends getting married and abandoning me forever, I felt validated and fired up reading “What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse.” I mention it to people all the time, pointing wildly to the paragraph about single people being more connected to those around them, my voice rising in pitch until the nearest glass shatters. No one has committed—yet—to platonically raising children with me. But by the time my friends hit 35, I expect they’ll come crawling.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Tiana Clark is an excellent poet, and I still think often of her poem “I Stare at a Cormorant.” The whole first stanza is one long sentence in which she breathlessly hops from watching a cormorant stretched in the sun to memories of lifting up her hands in church as a kid, wanting but failing to feel overcome. She balances perfectly between hope and longing, capturing the ways we do experience transcendent moments—just briefly, before they slip through our fingers.  

I’m still stumbling

through this life hoping for anyone or

something to save me. I’m still thinking

about the cormorant who disappeared

when I was writing this poem. I was just

looking down and finishing a line

and then I looked back up—gone.

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Derek Thompson, Tom Nichols, Amy Weiss-Meyer, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Bhumi Tharoor, Amanda Mull, Megan Garber, 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 Barry, the darkly comedic saga of a listless hit man (played by Bill Hader), returns to HBO for its fourth and final season (premieres tonight at 10 p.m. EDT on HBO and HBO Max). The Wager, the New Yorker staff writer David Grann’s latest book, unspools a true story of shipwreck, treachery, and empire (on sale Tuesday). Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant—yes, that’s the movie’s title—stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a U.S.-military sergeant who forges a bond with his local interpreter, played by Dar Salim, during his last tour in Afghanistan (in theaters Friday). Essay (Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Sources: Samir Hussein / WireImage / Getty; Alfred Ellis and Walery / Getty.)

It’s Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People

By Judith Shulevitz

In 1895, the popular satirist and dandy Oscar Wilde was tried and sentenced to a prison term, with hard labor, for “gross indecency,” meaning sexual acts with men. The ordeal effectively ended his career, shortened his life, and made his name synonymous with depravity for at least a generation. The young Katherine Mansfield, struggling with her alarming attraction to women, wrote to a friend in 1909 that thinking about Wilde had led to “fits of madness” like those that drove him to “his ruin and his mental decay.”

More than a century later, Wilde is a canonical figure, the preeminent wit of Victorian literature and the beau ideal of the queer aesthetic—campy, ironic, a gender-boundary provocateur. To most of his contemporaries, Wilde wound up being a monster. To us, he’s an icon. But if he were held to today’s standards of appropriate sexual behavior, homosexual or heterosexual, he’d be a monster again. Wilde didn’t just sleep with men. He slept with “rent boys” (male prostitutes) and teenage boys picked up for brief trysts.

Read the full article.

More in Culture Beau is afraid is your worst nightmare, and it’s wonderful. How Taylor Swift infiltrated dude rock Seven celebrities who published actually great memoirs The real hero of Ted Lasso The film that understands what a creative life really looks like An institution that’s been broken for 200 years A biting satire about the idealistic left The pornography paradox The spiritual emptiness of achievement Catch Up on The Atlantic The narcissists who endanger America The dangerous rise of ‘front-yard politics’ The court is likely to reject the independent state legislature theory. Photo Album (Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP)

An unusually wet winter has led to a “superbloom” of wildflowers in California. Our photo editor rounded up some of the best recent snapshots from the southern portion of the state.

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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.

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 staff writer Derek Thompson, the author of the new Atlantic Editions title On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity; The Atlantic’s Work in Progress newsletter; and the 2018 best seller Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction. Derek is also the founder and host of the news podcast Plain English With Derek Thompson. Derek is devoted to the early-2000s musical stylings of Coldplay, Fall Out Boy, and My Chemical Romance; wonders whether his sports-media consumption is something akin to gossip; and repeatedly finds himself “in slack-jawed awe” of a certain novel by the late Philip Roth.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

We settled for Catan. Phones will never be fun again. The flu may never be the same. The Culture Survey: Derek Thompson

A musical artist who means a lot to me: I have written at least five articles about Coldplay for The Atlantic. The fact that this sin against taste has not resulted in my firing speaks volumes about our magazine’s sincere devotion to a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives. People sometimes ask me, with a hint of concern, “Do you really actually like Coldplay?” I do! Or, more specifically, I like the version of those guys that I associate with my teens and 20s.

An online study based on data from U.S. Spotify users determined that the average music listener stops discovering new music by their early 30s. Because it is apparently a fact of biology that I am too old to start sincerely caring about any new artist, I’m stuck with the taste of my foolish youth, which is an early-2000s affection for weepy British alt-rock. Coldplay got rich and happy and peppy-electronic in their middle age. This makes me glad for them but sad for their music, because I simply refuse to listen to Chris Martin write his 40th dance-synth ode to birds or stars. Gimme the good ole stuff: the spiders and shivers, the clocks and numbers and figures of turn-of-the-century,

sobbing-into-their-Earl-Grey Coldplay.

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: My favorite period of art history, which is also my favorite period of non-art history, is the late-19th and early-20th century. This is the period when just about everything was invented: cars, planes, cornflakes, aspirin, Coca-Cola, hamburgers, sneakers, and what we (well, art historians) think of as abstract art. The father of abstract art is typically considered to be Wassily Kandinsky, whose untitled 1910 work (now labeled First Abstract Watercolor) was for decades known as the first abstract painting. But in 2018, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City put together a truly extraordinary and rightly famous show establishing that an obscure and wondrous Swedish painter named Hilma af Klint was the true pioneer of abstract art. Her big, bright, psychedelic paintings offer a sort of rock-and-roll point of comparison with the soft jazz of Kandinsky’s fuzzier and more muted style. Don’t make me pick between them. They’re both eternal and awesome. [Related: To understand art, think biology. (from 2019)]

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: Every year or so, I reread parts of Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth. If you’ve never read Sabbath’s Theater, hoo boy. I guess I’d say buy it immediately and thank (curse) me later when, 30 pages into this psychic torture chamber, this moral house of horrors, this monstrosity of sesquipedalian human depravation, the question occurs to you: Is Derek … all right?

Well, look, I don’t know what to tell you. We don’t choose our taste; we can only rationalize it. What I would say, mid-rationalization, is that Sabbath’s Theater is a writer at full throttle descending into the Mariana Trench of human nature and writing a symphony. I remember reading Isaac Asimov for the first time when I was 10 and thinking, I didn’t realize writers were allowed to do that! That’s me reading Sabbath’s Theater every year: giggling, gasping, in slack-jawed awe over a book that keeps going way too far—and then just keeps going. [Related: Remembering Philip Roth, a giant of American literature (from 2018)]

The last debate I had about culture: This is more a point of frequent discussion than of contentious debate, but I have become fascinated by my own relationship to the NBA. I don’t watch games during the regular season. I don’t read much about basketball. But I consume hundreds of hours of podcasts about the NBA during the regular season and off-season. I’ve come to realize that my relationship to non-playoff basketball is essentially what one might call “gossip.” So the NBA serves as an auditory reality show, which magically transforms into a visual sport in April. This is not a normal way to consume sports content! And yet, I’ve gathered that it is, for many, a common way to follow the NBA.

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I like big, beautiful, brainy, bombastic blockbusters, and my favorite film directors are Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve. So the answer to this question is pretty easy: I’m on pins and crysknife-needles for Dune: Part Two and Oppenheimer. [Related: The blockbuster that Hollywood was afraid to make (from 2021)]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is my favorite music to write to. Take one of the most beautiful pieces of classical music and have a genius for cinematic grandiosity interpolate it, speed it up, slow it down, make it new. Spectacular way to start a day. As for loud, I like to work out to over-the-top angsty tenors screaming melodies over arpeggiating electric guitars. So we’re talking Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance … you know, the Vivaldis of the 21st century.

[Related: Max Richter’s soundtrack to dystopia (from 2016);

My Chemical Romance wore themselves out, and it was glorious. (from 2013)]

The last thing that made me cry: [This answer contains oblique spoilers.] A few years ago, I watched the end of Arrival alone at home. My wife walked in at the end of the movie to find me on the couch, absolutely bawling. A few weeks later, my wife watched Arrival alone at home, and, incredibly, I happened to walk in the door during the final scene to see her similarly bawling. This might raise some questions about the strange intimacy of our movie-watching habits. From the temporal perspective of the heptapods, we watched Arrival and cried together. [Related: The epic intimacy of Arrival (from 2016)]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Tom Nichols, Amy Weiss-Meyer, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Bhumi Tharoor, Amanda Mull, Megan Garber, 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 Renfield, a modern-day Dracula retelling in which the notorious vampire’s loyal servant (played by Nicholas Hoult) attempts to break free from his self-obsessed boss (Nicolas Cage) (in theaters Friday) 72 Seasons, the first new album from Metallica in almost seven years (on sale and streaming Friday) The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, whose fifth and final season reveals the denouement of its titular comedienne’s path to showbiz success (begins streaming Friday on Amazon Prime) Essay King George VI of Great Britain and Queen Elizabeth talking to a workman in a bomb-damaged area of London on October 18, 1940 (Central Press / Getty)

When the Royals Showed Their Human Side

By Sally Bedell Smith

Claiming that a single royal couple saved the centuries-old British monarchy might be going a bit far. But King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, by an accident of history and through personal qualities that earned the admiration and support of the British public, may have done just that during some of the most challenging times the country had ever seen. George VI had been crowned King just three years before the outbreak of World War II, and his and Elizabeth’s nerves, perseverance, and courage would be severely tested during the conflict—especially when Britain itself became a battlefield. Nowhere is this more obvious than during the Blitz, when the monarchs broke with protocol and mingled directly with the people. Their actions during those days set the pattern for their leadership during the most critical year of the war.

Read the full article.

More in Culture ‘Notice all that disappears.’ An ode to bananas The emotional genius of Ryuichi Sakamoto The Super Mario Bros. Movie gives the people what they want. When the human and the artificial collide Not just the janitor of Abbott Elementary Catch Up on The Atlantic How Wisconsin Republicans got so angry How rural America steals girls’ futures Ozempic is about to be old news. Photo Album Luca Bruno / AP

A Holy Week procession in El Salvador, a field of tulips in Italy, and much more in our editor’s photo selections of the week.

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.

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 will be familiar to readers of The Daily: the Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols. Tom’s incisive current-events analysis and swashbuckling prose are most frequently found in weekday editions of this very newsletter. His writing on Russia, national security, and, of course, American politics also regularly appears elsewhere in our magazine.

Anyone who knows Tom, either personally or through his writing, is likely aware that he’s just a bit of a 1980s film and TV buff. But he’s been known to dip a toe into the 21st century too. These days, he’s engrossed in the fourth and final season of Succession, eagerly anticipating the return of the Star Trek prequel series Strange New Worlds, and treasures a Robert Lowell poem that was first published—as it happens—in The Atlantic.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Something odd is happening with handbags. Why Americans care about work so much There’s exactly one good reason to buy a house. The Culture Survey: Tom Nichols

The upcoming entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: Well, the honest answer is that I’m glued to the final season of Succession because I’m in it. (I have a very small part as a cranky right-wing pundit. I know: “Nice reach, Tom.”) And Succession, of course, is an incredible series.

But I’m very excited to hear that Strange New Worlds, the Star Trek prequel series, is coming back for at least two more seasons. Of course, I’m already familiar with SNW; the debut that has me most fascinated, however, is the upcoming Amazon Prime series Fallout, based on the immensely popular game franchise. (The first Fallout game debuted in 1997, so that tells you how long I’ve been playing it.) The Fallout world is a weird place; if you’ve seen the series Hello Tomorrow!, where the 1950s are reimagined with floating cars and space travel and malfunctioning robot bartenders, it’s something like that.

Except it all takes place after a nuclear war. So I’m hoping they get that right. [Related: The real Succession endgame]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I just discovered A Spy Among Friends, a limited series based on a book about the infamous Kim Philby espionage affair of the early 1960s. It’s beautifully done. I began my career in Soviet and Russian affairs, and so I’m familiar with the details of the Philby spy caper—which is good, because the series assumes a lot of familiarity with the history. But it’s the kind of period drama you can enjoy watching just for the fine details of its production and re-creation of an era. [Related: Washington—the fifth man (from 1988)]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I’m going to be clever here and say that I have always loved a song that is both quiet and loud: “Don’t Want to Wait Anymore” by The Tubes. You’ll have to hear it to get that comment, I think.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: I have a particular attachment to Joe Jackson. Most people will know him only from a few hits back in the ’80s, such as “Steppin’ Out,” but I feel like he’s one of those artists whose work I have been able to appreciate at every stage of my life. I enjoyed his autobiography, A Cure for Gravity, which is a memoir of growing up and falling in love with music, rather than some trashy rock tell-all. There’s a self-awareness and sly humor and even an awkwardness in his songs that can still make me as pensive now as when I first heard them 30 or 40 years ago.

I suppose I’d add Al Stewart here too. His songs about history are both beautiful and nerdy: He’s a perfectionist, and I have to love a guy who once lamented that he accidentally referred to Henry Tudor as Henry Plantagenet. I recently saw him do a small concert where he performed his album Year of the Cat in its entirety, and at my age, I appreciate a rock star who can perform well while aging gracefully. (Mick Jagger: Take a lesson.)

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: “The Oath of the Horatii,” by Jacques-Louis David. Don’t ask me why; I saw it as a teenager in a bookstore in Boston, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. There was something about the stilted drama of the scene, the valiant backstory about the defenders of Rome, that made me stare. (Also, I also am slightly color-blind, so maybe the vivid reds and silver in the painting got through my defective eyeballs.) When I began teaching military officers, my understanding of the painting changed: I came to see it both as a celebration of military loyalty, but also, at least to me, as a warning about the seductive glorification of war. For some 20 years, I kept a print of it on the wall of my office at the Naval War College.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: One of the lousier jobs I had as a teenager was as a janitor at the old Spalding sports-equipment company, which back then was headquartered in my hometown. But one of the perks was that some of the offices I had to clean were air-conditioned, so I’d goof off while working the evening shift by reading the books that the art department had strewn around their desks. That’s where I discovered Cape Light, a book of photographs by Joel Meyerowitz. I fell in love with that book at 18 years old, and I still keep a copy right next to my desk for when I need a soothing mental and visual break. My house is decorated with several large prints from the book.

The thing I loved as a teen that I hate now? Vintage arena rock. I was driving along the other day and the band Kansas came on the radio, and I thought: Wait—didn’t I used to love this stuff? The days when I would hear Asia or Kansas and turn the volume to 11 are long over for me. (Some things haven’t changed, however: I am infamous on social media for my love of the group Boston, and my disdain—which I have had since childhood—for Led Zeppelin.) [Related: More than an album cover (from 2015)]

The last debate I had about culture: I cannot pinpoint the last debate I had about culture, because so many people think my taste is so awful on so many things that it’s more like an ongoing project than a single debate. [Related: The complex psychology of why people like things (from 2016)]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I’m not literate enough to fully appreciate most poetry, but I was introduced to the work of Robert Lowell in college, and it stuck. Perhaps I feel a connection to him as a New Englander; I reread “For the Union Dead”—published in The Atlantic in 1960, the year of my birth—every year. But the line that kept coming back to me over the years, and now occurs to me more often as I age, is from “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” a very short poem in which Lowell paints a spare, melancholy, almost Edward Hopper–like portrait in words of his father’s last days as a retired naval officer. The old man, restless and in declining health, lived in Beverly Farms, on the North Shore of Massachusetts, an area where I had family and that I have loved since childhood. I have been to the “Maritime Museum in Salem” where his father spent many leisurely hours, and I have ridden the commuter trains to Boston whose tracks shone “like a double-barrelled shotgun through the scarlet late August sumac.”

But it’s the last line that gets to me, because it’s such a simple observation about the penultimate moments before death. I don’t mean to end here on a morbid note, because oddly, this line does not depress me. But I’ve often thought of it because it’s likely how most people die—without speeches or final declarations or drama.

Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.

His vision was still twenty-twenty.

After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,

his last words to Mother were:

“I feel awful.”

[Related: The difficult grandeur of Robert Lowell (from 1975)]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Amy Weiss-Meyer, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Bhumi Tharoor, Amanda Mull, Megan Garber, 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

1. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a two-part documentary series on the former child model and actress (begins streaming Monday on Hulu)

2. A Living Remedy, a meditation on American inequality and the second memoir by the best-selling author and Atlantic contributing writer Nicole Chung (on sale Tuesday)

3. Air, from the director Ben Affleck, traces the blockbuster footwear collaboration between Nike and Michael Jordan that would cement both of their legacies (in theaters Wednesday)

Essay Illustration by Daniel Zender / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

A Tale of Maternal Ambivalence

By Daphne Merkin

Motherhood has always been a subject ripe for mythmaking, whether vilification or idealization. Although fictional accounts, from antiquity until today, have offered us terrible, even treacherous mothers, including Euripides’s Medea and Livia Soprano, depictions of unrealistically all-good mothers, such as Marmee from Little Women, are more common and provide a sense of comfort. Maternal characters on the dark end of the spectrum provoke our unease because their monstrous behavior so clearly threatens society’s standards for mothers. They show that mother love isn’t inevitable, and that veering off from the expected response to a cuddly new infant isn’t inconceivable.

If motherhood brings with it the burden of our projected hopes, new mothers are especially hemmed in by wishful imagery, presumed to be ecstatically bonding with their just-emerged infants as they suckle at milk-filled breasts, everything smelling sweetly of baby powder. The phenomenon of postpartum depression, for instance, a condition that affects 10 to 15 percent of women, has been given short shrift in literature and other genres when not ignored entirely. This is true as well when it comes to the evocation of maternal ambivalence, the less-than-wholehearted response to the birth of a child, which is mostly viewed as a momentary glitch in the smooth transition from pregnancy to childbirth to motherhood instead of being seen as a sign of internal conflict.

Read the full article.

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Tourists pick tea leaves in Fujian province, China; demonstrators convene in Israel, France, and the Texas State Capitol in Austin; and more, in our editor’s photo selections of the week.

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