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America’s Death Trap

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 04 › americas-death-trap › 673851

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Compared with its wealthy peer nations, the United States is failing the most basic test of a civilization: keeping its denizens alive. As my colleague Derek Thompson wrote last week, U.S. life spans are shorter on average than in much of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. I called Derek to discuss why the nation’s life-expectancy rate is falling behind, and what can be done about it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The most telling moments from the Trump-Carroll depositions Joe Biden’s not popular. That might not matter in 2024. I ruined two birthday parties and learned the limits of psychology. The Mortality Tax

Kelli María Korducki: In your latest article, you repeat a turn of phrase that you used in a previous story, calling the U.S. a “rich death trap.” The rich part is pretty self-explanatory, but unpack the rest of it.

Derek Thompson: The appropriate context is that, over the past 30 years or so, U.S. life spans have increased a little bit, but way behind the pace of similarly rich countries like Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. This is a pretty shocking development because throughout economic history, people living in richer countries have generally lived longer. And yet in the U.S.—which is the richest country in the world—we're not getting the long lives that we would expect. So you could say that there is a mortality tax on being an American as opposed to being French or Japanese, for example.

Kelli: When does this mortality tax emerge in the data?

Derek: You start to see it in the 1980s, but it really picks up in the 1990s. That’s where we really start to see this life-expectancy divergence.

Kelli: What might have happened in the 1980s and ’90s to stagnate life-expectancy increases here in the States but not abroad?

Derek: You could look at guns. Clearly, we have more gun deaths here than in other countries. And you can look at car deaths, which we also have more of than in similarly rich countries. But gun deaths per capita and car deaths per capita haven’t clearly increased a lot in the past 30 years. So that leaves things like drug overdoses, obesity, and health inequalities. But the truth is that health-care access has actually probably gotten more equal in the past 30 years; we passed Obamacare, which has extended Medicaid and all sorts of health care to low-income individuals. My bet, then, is that the growing gap between American longevity and that of other rich countries, at least in the past 30 years, is being driven by our poor health, specifically, more drug addiction, more drug-overdose deaths, and a higher risk of obesity.

Kelli: And despite Obamacare and broadly expanded health-care access, there’s also still a pretty significant health-care gap in the U.S.

Derek: That’s absolutely the case, and health outcomes are much more unequal in the U.S. than in countries with universal health care, where you tend to see that life spans in poor areas and rich areas are pretty similar; in the U.S. they’re much more different. Where you’re born in the U.S., and how much income your parents have, is much more determinative of how long you’ll live.

Kelli: What would it take to make America less of a death trap?

Derek: It’s a really big question. I would say that this conversation needs to be about all of these things that are driving our mortality: thinking more about ways to reduce obesity in America and talking more about the importance of exercise for metabolic health. And we have to reduce synthetic opioid overdoses (primarily fentanyl), which kill more than 70,000 people in the U.S. every year.

This is sort of an aside, but there are almost two separate opioid crises happening in the country right now. One is the opioid-prescription-addiction crisis with the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma at its center, and then there’s the fentanyl crisis. Nearly 17,000 people a year are dying of opioid-prescription addiction—that is, from the abuse of opioids that were prescribed by a doctor—and about 70,000 people died of fentanyl overdoses in 2021. So the fentanyl crisis is four times deadlier than the opioid crisis that we’re used to talking about, but it doesn’t really occupy that much attention from lawmakers. I think we could use some really hard thinking about how to bend the curve of fentanyl abuse.

Kelli: What about the other American death drivers you mention in your article? Cars, guns?

Derek: So far, it seems that a little bit more working from home is probably good for reducing car use and related deaths. More housing in downtown areas that would reduce the need for driving commutes would probably also be good. And when it comes to guns, I can think of some pretty clear policy ideas for reducing gun deaths but, man, I’m not particularly optimistic about their ability to be passed at the federal level.

Related:

America fails the civilization test. America is a rich death trap. Today’s News President Joe Biden formally announced his bid for reelection today. A fourth cease-fire attempt in Sudan has failed, as residents attempt to flee the country. E. Jean Carroll’s rape lawsuit against Donald Trump has gone to trial. Evening Read Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin

The Pandemic’s Surprising Effect on Suicide Rates

By Clancy Martin

In March 2020, my partner, Amie; our 2-year-old son, Ratna; and I, who usually live in Kansas City, Missouri, were visiting Kerala, India, about to be in the throes of the country’s first COVID outbreak. When it became clear that Kerala was going to be locked down, we drove up the coast as fast as we could and boarded a flight to Delhi. From there we set out for the most remote place we knew—a small village in the Himalayan foothills called Bir.

On our way there we were nearly turned around at a series of police checkpoints. To go where? That was never clear. Hotels and Airbnbs were sending foreigners away. On WhatsApp, rumors were spreading about fellow expats being rounded up into camps.

An initially reluctant Airbnb host took us in only a few days before a nationwide lockdown went into effect. “Really I should never have let you stay,” he told me. “But now you can’t leave.”

Read the full article.

The Trump-Biden Rematch Is Inevitable

found Apr '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 04 › trump-biden-2024-rematch › 673837

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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.

Most Americans do not want President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in another head-to-head match for the White House. But barring a dramatic change in circumstances, that’s the contest we’ll see in 2024.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tucker Carlson’s successor will be worse. A refuge from internet algorithms is hiding in plain sight. Dear Therapist: I won’t marry someone with a mountain of debt. Chris Christie doesn’t want to hear the name Trump.

Existential and Inevitable

Polls for the past six months or so have consistently shown that a majority of Americans do not want to see a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And yet, unless health issues sideline one or the other (or unless a newly unemployed Tucker Carlson decides to take his angry-racist-preppie shtick into politics), the Trump-Biden showdown feels inevitable.

But Trump and Biden are likely to be renominated for very different reasons. Obviously, Biden is the incumbent—and, as I have argued, has been a remarkably successful president under difficult circumstances. Whatever the grousing from Democratic faithful, parties do not torpedo their own president: The only sitting chief executive who was elected in his own right and then denied renomination for another term was Franklin Pierce, in 1856. (Four others were denied nomination after becoming president upon the death of the incumbent.)

My colleague Mark Leibovich, however, has suggested that Biden’s age is too big a problem to ignore, and that the Democrats would benefit from a contested primary:

The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision.

I don’t quite agree. Biden, as the expression goes, has lost a step, but I kind of like the new Joe Biden. As a senator and a vice president, Biden was often a great source of Kinsley gaffes, the accidental truth-telling that made him a must-watch on the Sunday shows. Biden as president is different, and not just older. There’s a greater seriousness to him, a somberness, and an obvious weight on his shoulders. To me, that’s a better Biden.

But the president is older. He’s still liable to blurt out a gaffe or scramble his sentences, and it sounds less charming or amusing now than it did a decade ago. And sometimes, his rambles go off into mystifying detours, some of which are untrue. But on the man’s record alone, it’s going to be hard to argue to Democrats and independents that he somehow doesn’t deserve another term. Republicans, for their part, seem to know this, which is why they’ve rarely bothered attacking Biden on policy, resorting to debt-ceiling chicanery and invocations of Hunter Biden rather than more substantive (and legitimate) criticism.

Let’s put it this way: If Ted Kennedy could not take out Jimmy Carter, no one in today’s Democratic Party is going to defeat Joe Biden.

But let’s also admit an uncomfortable truth that the Democrats dare not say out loud: At least some of the concerns about Joe Biden’s age are in reality barely veiled worries about Kamala Harris. Biden’s approval ratings are struggling, but the vice president’s numbers are worse—in fact, among the worst of any modern vice president at this point in an administration. (Mike Pence is a strong competitor in this category.) I think Harris ran a lousy campaign and has been, at best, a lackluster VP. Yes, Joe Biden rambles, but Harris, when off script, often sounds like a compilation of disjointed clichés, delivered with a kind of corporate-trainer earnestness. (Some of this is likely related to her reported staffing problems.) Her few forays into policy have been unimpressive, and even her intensely dedicated online supporters seem to have become a bit quieter.

Personally, I have no doubt that if something happened to President Biden, Vice President Harris—along with an able and well-staffed administration—would be a reasonable steward of the White House for the remainder of Biden’s term. Nevertheless, when health and age are prominent issues (as they were with Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower), voters are going to look more closely at the vice president. Harris no doubt still has dedicated supporters in the party, but that might not be enough to overcome how much of America just doesn’t like her.

Concerns about Joe Biden’s renomination, however, are trivial compared with the problem facing those Republicans—roughly four in 10—who do not want Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

The GOP as a political institution has functionally ceased to exist at the presidential level. The nomination process is controlled, at this point, by a cult of personality; Trump bitter-enders are now the backbone of the party, and their fanaticism gives Trump a stable plurality of votes that no other candidate can match. To defeat Trump for the nomination, a conventional candidate would not only have to attack Trump hammer and tongs; they would also have to demand that the national Republican Party buck millions of its own base voters. This is even more unlikely than Biden getting primaried by some youthful Democrat, because it would require the Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel and other GOP leaders to replace the tapioca in their spines with something like principle, and declare that the Party of Lincoln will not lend its money and support to a sociopath who has incited violent sedition against the government of the United States.

That’s not going to happen. It is possible, I suppose, that if Trump is facing multiple state and federal indictments by late summer, Republicans will finally throw their support to someone else, perhaps even Ron DeSantis, out of desperation. But for now, the nomination belongs to Donald Trump.

I would be relieved to be wrong about this, but if nothing changes, 2024 will again be a stark and existential choice. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has grumbled that if the election is Biden versus Trump again, he probably won’t vote. The rest of us, however, cannot afford this kind of petty tantrum. The Republican Party has mutated from a political organization into an authoritarian movement. Democracy itself will be on the line for the third time since 2020, and staying home—or taking the dodge of voting for some no-hope third-party candidate—is not a responsible option.

In Remembrance

Courtesy of Michael Kelly’s family

Michael Kelly, who was the editor in chief of The Atlantic from 1999 to 2002, worked at many publications in a career that was tragically cut short 20 years ago this month. He wrote for small newspapers and big ones, for political magazines and general-interest ones. He was a beat reporter and a writer of profiles and feature stories, a war correspondent and a columnist. He led a number of publications—The New Republic, National Journal, The Atlantic. His acclaimed reporting on the Gulf War, in 1991, was eventually turned into the book Martyrs’ Day. Mike was covering the Iraq War for The Atlantic in 2003 when he was killed on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Michael Kelly is remembered the same way by everyone who worked with him. He was disorganized—his desk drawers held manuscripts but also laundry and dishes—and his handwriting was illegible. He was disarmingly funny, raised by journalist parents in a boisterous Irish family. He was passionate about his principles—a collection of his writing, Things Worth Fighting For, was aptly titled. Perhaps counterintuitively, given his own strong convictions, one thing he believed in was the value of publishing diverse points of view: Ideas need vigorous testing. Another was the central importance of character in public life.

Mike’s family—including his wife, Madelyn, and his children, Tamzin and Jack—and many friends and colleagues gathered this past weekend in Washington, D.C., to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. Tamzin and Jack were 6 and 4 when Mike was killed. “One lesson my father taught me,” Tamzin Kelly said in her remarks, “is the importance of standing up for what you believe in. More than that, the importance of believing what you believe in.” Jack Kelly spoke about the experience of encountering his father through the pages of Things Worth Fighting For—discovering the opinions they shared and, more important, the ones they did not:

It’s both useful and comforting to think about our similarities with those we’ve lost. But there’s a flatness to it—it takes a static image of the dead and asks us to find a portion of ourselves in it. Thinking of our differences with those who are gone is at once more difficult and more rewarding: It asks us how we might have co-evolved with them, how we may have changed each other, and how we would have loved each other as humans who—like all humans—argue and disagree.

A year after Mike’s death, Robert Vare, the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, wrote about his colleague and friend in an article for The Atlantic. You can find Vare’s article here.

— Cullen Murphy, editor at large at The Atlantic

Today’s News

CNN released a statement declaring an end to its relationship with the anchor Don Lemon. Myles Cosgrove, the former Louisville officer who fired the fatal shot that killed Breonna Taylor, has been hired by a police force in a nearby county. Countries are hurrying to extract their citizens from Sudan as violence continues between the military and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn head to Queens for a day at the racetrack.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

The Most Quietly Radical Writer on Television

found Apr '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2023 › 04 › alice-birch-dead-ringers-amazon › 673771

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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. Dead Ringers, a fiendish new series for Amazon that Birch created with the actor Rachel Weisz, brings even more to the table: At one point, the identical-twin obstetricians played by Weisz pitch a new model for women’s health care to some truly awful rich people over razor clams and kombucha. The resulting scene is one of the funniest and most mordant in TV memory.

[Read: The irresistible intimacy of Normal People]

At 36, Birch has the wholesome features of a woman in a Victorian soap ad, the gentle manner of a therapist (her mother and stepfather both work in the field), and the creative intentions of a Molotov cocktail. She’s an iconoclast in the most tender human form. “It’s quite moving, actually, to see someone continuously be so kind and respectful to everyone while writing these completely outrageous, aberrant, dysfunctional characters,” Weisz told me over the phone. Dead Ringers, a reimagining of the 1988 David Cronenberg film that starred Jeremy Irons as the codependent twin doctors, is a pitch-dark, scabrously funny, occasionally grotesque satire of the upper echelons of American health care. The show is so wildly original that viewers might not notice, at first glance, how radical it is. It forces its audience to absorb the brutality of childbirth and the danger tacitly accepted by any person who chooses—or is forced by the state—to carry a child. “Why are you wearing my vagina like a fucking glove?” a woman in labor shouts at a doctor. Babies crown; blood pools in crimson puddles on the floor.

Dead Ringers feels like not much else that’s ever been on television. It’s more like Birch’s plays than anything—funny, sharp, twisted, and often furious, but also fluid with language and imagery in a way that lets you absorb its ideas at both an intellectual and a not-quite-conscious level. The theater director Katie Mitchell, who mentored Birch and has collaborated with her several times, sees her as carrying on the tradition of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Caryl Churchill, and Sarah Kane. “Whether you’re watching her Normal People or Lady Macbeth on television and film, or her Anatomy of a Suicide or Ophelia in theater,” Mitchell told me, “it’s the same distinct signature and voice. There’s no aesthetic or political compromise across the body of the work.” The only difference with film and television, she notes, is the potential size of Birch’s audience, the almost limitless new realm that a woman with forceful ideas and a streaming series can reach.

Eight years ago, while she was still in her late 20s, Birch did something relatively unconventional for a young woman finally starting to break through in a creative industry: She had a child. For many people, it’s one of the most radicalizing experiences they’ll have. When Birch’s son came, “and it feels like he came, I didn’t have him; when he arrived,” she said, “there was so much about all of it that I couldn’t believe we don’t talk about it all the time. All the time. Because it’s violent. It’s exhausting, and painful, and punishing.” No one else she knew had children at the time. The shock of how much her life had changed was compounded by loneliness. She remembers meeting up one morning with a friend who’d come straight from a rave and was still covered in glitter. Neither of them had slept, for quite different reasons; sitting on a bench, they cried together.

Birch’s son was born during a moment in her career that she describes as being “noisier” than usual: A play she’d written called Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, a ferocious consideration of how language keeps women from true liberation, had premiered with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2014 to critical acclaim (one reviewer called it “a cluster bomb of subversion”), and would debut in New York at the Soho Rep two years later. While heavily pregnant, she’d finished writing her first film, an adaptation of a Nikolai Leskov novella titled Lady Macbeth; the movie, which went into production soon after, became the first starring role for a 19-year-old actor named Florence Pugh. After a dismaying experience being cast in a TV pilot, during which her body, face, and image were scrutinized by studio executives, Pugh had been on the verge of quitting acting when she auditioned for Lady Macbeth. But the film, she told The Telegraph last year, made her “fall back in love with cinema.” Her performance as Katherine—a young bride in the 19th century whose confinement at the hands of her severe older husband turns her violent—propelled Pugh’s reputation as a fascinating, unflinching new star, and Birch’s as a writer of female characters who are knotty, dark, carnal, and compelling.

Since she was very young, Birch had always written plays, without necessarily knowing that that’s what they were. She wrote pantomimes and made her friends perform in them; by herself, she lined up her pens and made them talk to one another. As a teenager, she did a weeklong internship at the Royal Court Theatre in London, historically a hothouse for incendiary British playwrights: John Osborne, Caryl Churchill, Martin McDonagh. Reading unsolicited scripts, she dismissed one by observing that it was too violent and extreme to be staged. “And they gave me a stack of Sarah Kane, Simon Stephens, Beckett, Shakespeare,” she said. “It was such a generous and gentle way of interrogating things.” The point was that transgression and experimentation are necessary to theater, crucial components in the process of making art.

That notion might help explain why so many superlative TV shows now scour theaters to add to their teams (the writers’ room for Dead Ringers included six playwrights, a director, and Weisz), or are themselves adapted from plays (Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, Katori Hall’s P-Valley). Birch’s first TV job, in 2018, was on Season 2 of Succession, where a writers’ room that included the playwrights Lucy Prebble and Susan Soon He Stanton dreamed up scenarios for the cursed Roy family from a noisy office in Brixton, South London. “I sometimes feel fraudulent saying I worked on it because it was quite overwhelming,” Birch told me. Jesse Armstrong, its showrunner, “is very generous and leads it so kindly and carefully. But it’s rigorous.” She was traveling with her son around that time when she read Normal People, Sally Rooney’s literary sensation about the romantic travails of two Irish teenagers, and stayed up far too late one night to finish it. She could see distinctly how it would work as a TV series—how the structure and dialogue and emotion would play out on-screen. The subsequent show, which she ended up co-writing with Rooney after the author sought out a collaborator, scored Birch her first Emmy nomination, and became a sensation itself when it was released by Hulu and the BBC early in the coronavirus pandemic.

The director Sebastián Lelio—who collaborated with Birch on the 2022 film The Wonder—told me that Birch “has an extraordinary capacity to create very complex characters through dialogue … characters who really express themselves, their light and shadows, through the way they talk, the words they use.” That is, he said, “really the quintessential challenge of writing a script.” During the pandemic, when theatrical productions were canceled everywhere, including Birch’s planned National Theatre production of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, she found herself appreciating the task of adaptation, and the “scaffolding” of an existing work. Before adapting a book into a script, she writes the entire thing out longhand, word by word, to get as intimately acquainted with it as she can. And she usually writes at night, when the isolation and the darkness makes her feel like she can get away with more, creatively. “I feel like when she’s writing at night, in the kitchen, it’s almost like she becomes the characters when she writes,” Weisz said. “I think her imagination is a pretty beautiful, profound thing.”

[Read: Stubborn, determined, and dying]

Since having her son, Birch has been deploying that imagination to expand and sometimes upend portrayals of motherhood. In a different era, having a baby might have challenged a woman’s creative ambitions. For Birch, it turbocharged them; she felt as though she needed to write about everything just to process it. After having her son, she wrote Anatomy of a Suicide, a play written in the round, like a canon, that juxtaposes three generations of women from the same family and the ways in which their experiences rebound and echo over one another. Her next project, a film adaptation of Megan Hunter’s novel The End We Start From, stars Jodie Comer as a new mother fleeing London during a devastating flood. And she’s also in the early stages of adapting a thriller she can’t yet name, whose exploration of matrilineal trauma treads dark psychological terrain.

For its part, Dead Ringers also pushes into fresh territory. Its conception, which coincided with the birth of Birch’s daughter, considers childbearing through the lens of body horror. But it’s also immensely interested in female gratification. Weisz and Birch fixated on the Lacanian idea of “jouissance,” or the vital and sexual impulse for pleasure, while writing Elliot Mantle, the older twin, who eats, drinks, snorts, screws, and—most jarringly of all—says exactly everything that she wants to. “It’s a really particular version of pleasure that is primal and physical, and might be misunderstood,” Birch said. For one scene, filmed in a diner, Weisz had to eat cheeseburgers over and over with carnivorous relish, and, as Birch observed, “it really feels a bit radical to watch a woman eat and enjoy it.” Inevitably, being a Birch-written dinner scene, things go sideways. But in the meantime, there’s subversive joy in seeing something so simple in front of our eyes: the desire gratified, the need met. The woman’s hunger fed.

A Stylish Spy Caper

found Apr '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 04 › a-stylish-spy-caper › 673602

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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 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.”

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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