The National Portrait Gallery and Getty have raised £25m to jointly acquire Portrait of Mai (Omai).

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In footage from Moscow released this week, the detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich looked defiant. “He knows he hasn’t done anything wrong,” Jason Rezaian, a journalist who was arrested in Iran in 2014, told me. Gershkovich must also know that his detention is part of a bigger story.

First, here are four new articles from The Atlantic:

The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion. California isn’t special. Long COVID is being erased—again. The Fox News lawsuit was never going to save America. A Look of Defiance

This week we caught the first glimpse of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich since he was arrested three weeks ago on charges of espionage. The brief clip was surreal: an American journalist standing inside a glass cage in a Moscow courtroom. Local Russian reporters shouted words of support; security guards rebuked them. But the thing that stood out most to me was the expression on Gershkovich’s face—not quite a smile, but a smirk.

Gershkovich’s arrest has provoked global outrage, and for good reason. He’s the first foreign journalist to be charged with espionage in Russia since the Cold War. The White House has called the charges against him “ridiculous” and demanded his release. The Journal has similarly denied the accusation of spying, and described his arrest as “a vicious affront to a free press.” There is no existing evidence that Gershkovich was a spy, and many experts believe his detention is meant to intimidate the foreign correspondents who remain in the country. (Gershkovich pleaded not guilty; he was denied bail, and he’ll remain in the Lefortovo Prison pending trial.)

As a journalist who covers the nexus of politics and the media, I’ve written about many of the issues raised by Gershkovich’s case: Russian information warfare, press freedom, authoritarian crackdowns on journalism. But after I watched those moments in the Moscow courtroom, the smirk is what stayed with me. What is Gershkovich going through right now? What is he thinking?

To try and understand, I called Jason Rezaian. As a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, Rezaian was arrested in Iran in 2014 on bogus spying charges. He was held captive for 544 days in Tehran, where he endured a sham trial not entirely unlike the one Gershkovich is likely to face.

Rezaian told me that the first weeks of imprisonment at the hands of an autocratic regime are disorienting. “You’re asking, Why am I here? What’s going on? This is all a big mistake.” Pretty soon, his initial hopes that the whole ordeal would get straightened out gave way to fear. Although the precise conditions of Gershkovich’s imprisonment are unknown, experts and former inmates at Lefortovo Prison believe he spent the first weeks of captivity in solitary confinement (as did Rezaian). “The experience of solitary confinement is pretty universal,” Rezaian told me. “It’s designed to break you down to a small, scared, malleable animal.” During Rezaian’s imprisonment, he said, he was routinely told by his captors that he would likely face execution.

That’s why Rezaian told me he, too, was impressed by Gershkovich’s smirk. “The thing that stuck out to me was the defiance,” Rezaian said. “He knows he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Gershkovich must also know that his detention is part of a broader story. Vladimir Putin’s regime has been cracking down on independent Russian news outlets for years, and has gotten only more aggressive since its invasion of Ukraine. Some Russian-language outlets have been forced to relocate to other countries; others have shut down. That means that much of the credible reporting on Russia has come from foreign outlets. Now that could change. “This is a dramatic escalation,” Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me. “They have all but snuffed out Russian journalism. Foreign correspondents have somewhat been able to operate—this essentially sends a message that if they continue to do so, they potentially face jail.”

Russia isn’t the only country that’s becoming more hostile to journalists. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stepped up censorship of coverage critical of his government, and thrown scores of reporters in jail. In India, one of the last remaining news channels known for independent reporting was recently acquired by a billionaire ally of the country’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 363 reporters were in prison around the world as of December 2022—more than at any point in the past 30 years.

Ginsberg attributes this grim statistic to the “decline of democracy and democratic norms worldwide.” Governments’ use of the court system against reporters, she said, is “a way of muddying the waters, equating journalism with criminal activity in the eyes of the public.”

Here in the U.S., we reporters have it pretty good by comparison. The First Amendment remains the envy of the world, and with rare exceptions, we are able to do our jobs safely without threat of imprisonment or violence. I’ll admit that I sometimes cringe when I see my fellow American political reporters self-righteously grandstand on cable news about the hardships we face, as though we’re persecuted heroes deserving of public sympathy and reverence. In truth, we’re just people doing our jobs—and not always perfectly.

But even in America, we’re not immune to rising anti-press sentiment. The former president—and current front-runner for the Republican nomination—has dubbed the news media “the enemy of the people,” and campaigned on making it easier to sue journalists. His supporters frequently target individual reporters for online harassment. And as I reported in a cover story for The Atlantic in 2021, local newspapers across the country are being systematically gutted by a hedge fund founded by a wealthy donor to that same former president.

All of which is to say, now is not a good time for civic-minded Americans to look away from genuine authoritarian assaults on the press. When I talked to Rezaian and Ginsberg, I asked them both what ordinary people could do to support Gershkovich. Rezaian said the thing he craved most in captivity was outside contact: “Whatever connection you have to the free world, it’s like oxygen.” To that end, friends of Gershkovich have set up an email address to which you can send supportive notes; they’ll translate the notes into Russian—ensuring that they pass through the prison’s screening system—and send them to his cell. The email is freegershkovich@gmail.com.

Ginsberg, meanwhile, stressed the importance of keeping the international spotlight on Gershkovich’s case by posting on social media or calling congressional representatives. “This isn’t just about Evan,” she told me. “It’s about our ability to understand what’s going on in Russia and all over the world.”

Related:

Russia escalates its war on reporters. A secretive hedge fund is gutting newsrooms. Today’s News The Supreme Court extended a temporary stay on a lower-court ruling, upholding the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which will preserve access to the drug through at least the end of the workweek. Two teenage boys were charged with murder in connection with the shooting at a 16th-birthday party in Alabama that injured 32 and left four dead over the weekend. Facebook parent company Meta began a new round of layoffs; the cuts are reportedly focused on workers in technical roles, including members of the user-experience and messaging teams. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: Collecting food scraps in your kitchen can invite insect invaders—but there are plenty of ways to outsmart them, Katherine J. Wu writes.

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Evening Read Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

Nutrition Research Forgot About Dads

By Virginia Sole-Smith

When his 18-year-old daughter Francine first started losing weight, in the fall of 2018, Kenneth initially thought it was a good thing. Francine had always been artistic but never particularly athletic, which puzzled her father. Kenneth, now 47, is a runner with dozens of half-marathons and even one ultramarathon under his belt.

When Francine started to express an interest in exercising and joining Kenneth’s wife, Tracy, for workouts, Kenneth and Tracy thought it was a positive sign. When Francine announced that she was vegan, they rolled with it.

Then Francine’s hair started to fall out.

Read the full article.

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Read. A new book argues that the microscopic agents behind our deadliest infectious diseases are the real protagonists of human history.

Watch. Abbott Elementary, whose second-season finale airs tonight (pay extra close attention to its dryly funny janitor, Mr. Johnson).

Play our daily crossword.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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.

The $1.6 billion Fox News defamation trial is about to begin. More than Rupert Murdoch’s pocketbook is at stake—practically the entire media industry is watching with schadenfreude, and maybe even a little dread.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Supreme Court is likely to reject the independent state legislature theory Nutrition science’s most preposterous result: Could ice cream possibly be good for you? The not-so-secret key to emotional balance A Look Down the Fox Hole

The word of the week is malice. Did Fox News act with “actual malice” in broadcasting a litany of lies about Dominion Voting Systems’ machines in the days and weeks after the 2020 presidential election? On Monday, a jury in Wilmington, Delaware, will hear opening arguments in the landmark case.

Very few defamation suits go to trial. The evidence against Fox is overwhelming. Some of the network’s biggest names, including Tucker Carlson, had their private text messages surface in the discovery process. “The software shit is absurd,” Carlson wrote to his producer. Even Murdoch, in his deposition, personally cast doubt on former President Donald Trump’s claims about a “stolen election.” He also acknowledged that several of his hosts “endorsed” the Dominion conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, the Fox brass kept allowing lunacy about Dominion to transpire on its airwaves. (No, Dominion does not have secret ties to the family of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, for instance.) Last year, Dominion CEO John Poulos told 60 Minutes that he and his employees have faced threats and harassment as a result of the lies.

The unfortunate reality is that news organizations get stories wrong all the time. The sheer thought of landing their work on the Corrections page can keep journalists up at night. David Simon captured this perpetual anxiety during Season 5 of The Wire, in an episode fittingly titled “Unconfirmed Reports.” In a particularly memorable scene, Gus Haynes, the grizzled city editor of The Baltimore Sun, springs out of bed and calls the paper’s night desk, asking a fellow editor to make sure he didn’t accidentally transpose two details in the course of futzing with a story. (He didn’t.) Such a mistake would have been just that, a mistake—which is qualitatively different from acting with malice, or with heightened disregard for the truth, the burden of proof in a defamation suit like Dominion’s.

Last year, Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against The New York Times was dismissed because of Palin’s basic failure to prove her case. Palin had sued the paper over an editorial that contained inaccuracies, but Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that Palin hadn’t provided adequate evidence to meet the legal standard required of a public figure suing for libel. The Times did not live up to its high standards, but neither did it act with actual malice.

While it’s tempting to grab some popcorn and root against Fox next week, the fact that the network known for propaganda is furiously (if unsuccessfully) invoking the First Amendment in its own defense complicates things. In our present era of dystopian book banning and library defunding, journalists and citizens alike should be wary of any legal precedent that could potentially narrow existing First Amendment freedoms.

No, Fox does not have a “right” to peddle lies about a technology company from Toronto. But high-profile cases such as this one can have a perilous downstream effect. Future lawyers can cite even part of a ruling to bend a judge or jury toward their side in a contentious case. We should all be hoping for truth and justice to prevail, while simultaneously praying that we don’t keep seeing more First Amendment(ish) cases going to trial in the years to come. The best press is an empowered press, so long as it’s not reckless.

To keep matters interesting: The case may still settle before Monday morning. Fox has already suffered some behind-the-scenes exposure (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) and may want to avoid any additional texts or emails becoming public. Murdoch, Carlson, and other household Fox names could also be forced to testify.

If the trial does last its expected four weeks, I’ll be curious to see the extent to which the people who drew jury duty understand the nuances in question. Eight years ago, Marvin Gaye’s estate successfully sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, claiming that Thicke and Williams’s mega-hit “Blurred Lines” plagiarized Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Each set of song lyrics is different, but they are sonically similar in terms of “groove” or “feel.” In a surprise to music-industry experts, Gaye’s estate won the verdict, but the jury did not find the offense to be “willful.” Those stakes were no doubt lower than the ones in the Dominion case, but the jury will have to parse similar details—namely the difference between an incorrect statement and a malicious lie.

Meanwhile, the next presidential election is just getting rolling, with Trump and Joe Biden poised for a rematch. After a reported “soft ban,” Fox is giving Trump plenty of airtime again. This week, he sat down for an interview with Carlson to discuss his first indictment. Carlson let the former president ramble at length, and even praised his statements as “moderate, sensible, and wise.” Yet, as we learned in the plethora of Dominion evidence, Carlson once texted of Trump, “I hate him passionately.”

Related:

Brian Stelter: I never truly understood Fox News until now. Why Fox News lied to its viewers Today’s News Federal investigators arrested an Air National Guardsman in their inquiry of leaked classified intelligence documents. A federal appeals court ruled late yesterday that the abortion pill mifepristone could remain available, but left restrictions in place that prevent the drug’s access by mail, partly overruling a Texas judge’s decision last week that declared the Food and Drug Administration’s original approval of the drug, in 2000, invalid. Former President Donald Trump was deposed in New York City as part of the $250 million civil lawsuit filed by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, which alleges widespread fraud by Trump and his company. Dispatches Work in Progress: Derek Thompson delves into the rise of public crusaders who are private reactionaries.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Money May Buy Happiness. But Not as Much as You Think.

By Michael Mechanic

For more than half a century, researchers at UCLA have conducted a massive annual survey of incoming college students titled “The American Freshman: National Norms.” One part of the survey asks students to rank 20 life goals on a scale from “not important” to “essential.” Most are lofty aspirations such as becoming a community leader, contributing to scientific progress, creating artistic works, and launching a suc­cessful business. Surveyed in 1969, freshmen entering four-year colleges were most interested in “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” (85 percent considered it “essential” or “very important”); “raising a family” (73 percent); and “helping others who are in difficulty” (69 percent). Ten years later, freshmen opted for “being an authority in my field” (74 percent), followed by “helping others” and “raising a family.”

But something shifted amid the Reagan Revolution, which deregulated Wall Street, revamped the tax code, and set the nation hurtling toward levels of wealth and income inequality unseen since before the Great Depression. By 1989, a new priority had taken over the survey’s top position, and has appeared there on and off ever since: money. Indeed, the No. 1 goal of the Class of 2023, deemed “essential” or “very important” by more than four in five students, was “being very well off financially.”

Read the full article.

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Read. In The Real Work, the writer Adam Gopnik extols the virtues of striving for mastery in place of superficial achievements.

Watch. Showing Up, the new film (now in theaters) by the director Kelly Reichardt, understands what a creative life actually looks like.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

It’s hard not to watch all of this Fox News drama unfold against the backdrop of the final season of Succession without noticing a few parallels. The briefly unified sibling trio of Kendall, Shiv, and Roman are still duking it out in the remaining episodes to be their father’s successor. My extremely idiotic and unfounded prediction is that Cousin Greg will get full control of the company. In the immortal words of Greg, “If it is to be said, so it be, so it is.”

— John

Kelli María Korducki and Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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.

Thanks to extraordinary demand for the drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, which cause weight loss, pharmaceutical companies are racing to bring even more potent anti-obesity treatments to market. But, as my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote this week in The Atlantic, current challenges around these drugs’ potential for misuse, and barriers to safe access, aren’t likely to subside. I chatted with Yasmin about what might happen next.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

How Wisconsin Republicans got so angry The flu may never be the same. Phones will never be fun again. A Whole New Class

Kelli María Korducki: Ozempic and Wegovy are two brand names for semaglutide, a drug that was first developed to treat patients with type 2 diabetes. When did the weight-loss hype become attached?

Yasmin Tayag: Semaglutide belongs to a drug class that has been around for about 20 years, first as a diabetes drug and then as a weight-loss drug. So its use for obesity isn’t brand new, but it seems to have made the news because of its fairly recent use by celebrities.

Ozempic and Wegovy lead to much more dramatic weight loss than their pharmaceutical predecessor, a drug called liraglutide. Liraglutide, which is sold for weight loss by the name Saxenda, led to weight loss of about 8 to 10 percent of a patient’s original body weight, which is solid. But semaglutide drugs can achieve weight loss of 15 to 20 percent, which is far more noticeable. So that, combined with the fact that semaglutide is injected only once a week as opposed to every day, made it far more appealing and accessible.

Kelli: You write that a drug called Mounjaro is the first of a new, more potent class of drugs that is on track to be approved by the FDA for weight loss this year. What does that enhanced potency mean in practice for the people who take it?

Yasmin: Basically, it means that these new drugs might be more effective for a wider proportion of people who take them. Semaglutide can lead to 15 to 20 percent weight loss in about 30 percent of people who take it, but that means 70 percent have lower levels of weight loss. If a new medication can increase the percentage of patients who see a higher percentage of weight loss, that would be a big deal.

Additionally, a handful of companies are working on making these drugs available as a pill as opposed to an injection, which would make them even more accessible—and, in theory, cheaper.

Kelli: On the subject of accessibility: You note that supply shortages, combined with the high cost of these medications, are leading some patients to turn to compounding pharmacies. What are the problems that arise from this scenario?

Yasmin: Compounding pharmacies are these often-sketchy pharmacies that take the active ingredients of a drug, make their own concoction, and sell it. There’s essentially no quality control in these situations, no doctor supervision in the way these medications then get used. So there’s a huge risk of people getting sick or having bad side effects.

But the greater theme that came out of my conversations with doctors is that, as long as the drugs remain as expensive as they are, there are always going to be people looking for cheaper options. And that’s when people start going to these sketchy pharmacies or to different countries to get these drugs. And unfortunately, it doesn’t look like these drugs are going to get much cheaper anytime soon, because they’re not covered by Medicare or by most insurance companies. And how many people can actually afford to pay more than $900 a month for these drugs? It’s probably not that many people.

Related:

Ozempic is about to be old news. The weight-loss-drug revolution is a miracle—and a menace. Today’s News Vice President Kamala Harris visited Nashville, Tennessee, to meet with Democratic legislators, including two who were ousted from the state’s House of Representatives yesterday over their involvement in gun-control protests at the State Capitol last week. In a statement released by the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas responded to a ProPublica report about his failure to disclose decades of luxury travel paid for by a billionaire Republican donor, saying that he believed he was not required to report these gifts. The Labor Department reported slower job growth in March, suggesting that the Federal Reserve’s measures to curb inflation are beginning to take effect. Dispatches The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo explores how our fears about technology reflect what we value about personhood.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Illustration by Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty

Why the Government Is Good at Helping Banks but Not People

By Jerusalem Demsas

We are really very good at helping banks. Last month, in no time at all, the federal government calmed a crisis that began at just a few institutions but threatened to spread throughout the financial system.

According to CNBC, within four days, banks had borrowed roughly $12 billion from a fund set up to give financial institutions access to favorable loans. Through more traditional borrowing routes, banks were able to acquire more than $300 billion. All this without endless political hemming and hawing from Congress, without the president’s signature, without action by state legislatures or governors, and without need for city councils or mayors to weigh in.

Read the full article.

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Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

How does a science writer chill out when she’s off the clock? These days, in Yasmin’s case, the answer includes listening to Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, the ninth and latest studio album from the singer Lana Del Rey. “It’s lush and sometimes unsettling,” Yasmin tells me. “Her weirdest and most beautiful yet.”

— Kelli

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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