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.

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 Maya Chung, an associate editor on the Books team and a frequent contributor to our Books Briefing newsletter. Lately, Maya has been enjoying the style and ambience of the French novelist Maylis de Kerangal, is still thinking about a recent exhibition of work by the surrealist 20th-century artist Meret Oppenheim, and is enjoying post-hype-cycle prestige TV, which includes the fourth and final season of Succession.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

A star reporter’s break with reality The instant pot failed because it was a good product. The fake poor bride

The Culture Survey: Maya Chung

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I really hope to see the Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet in New York’s Central Park this summer. The early pandemic made me realize how much I’d taken for granted living in a city with such incredible theater, so I’ve been cherishing the experience of seeing live theater this past year. And there’s nothing like Shakespeare in the Park—whatever the play, it’s a totally enchanting experience. This year it’s a contemporary Hamlet directed by the celebrated Kenny Leon, who also did this season’s Tony-winning revival of Topdog/Underdog on Broadway. Setting Shakespeare in the modern day can sometimes be gimmicky, but when it’s done right, it captures the magic of his work, and how enduring it remains. [Related: All of Shakespeare’s plays are about race.]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I don’t love watching shows when they’re at the height of their popularity, because when there’s a ton of chatter, I have a hard time figuring out what my actual, original thoughts are (and if I have any!). So I just finally started watching the fourth season of Succession. Avoiding spoilers while working on the Culture desk here has been nearly impossible, and some of the big bombshells did slip through. But I’m still savoring all of the delicious drama and insult-hurling. [Related: The Succession plot that explained the whole series]

I’m even more behind on The Handmaid’s Tale, which I also just started watching a couple weekends ago. The show came out in 2017, which wasn’t that long ago, but it has been really fascinating to watch it with a little bit of distance, especially given the political climate in which it premiered. Also, the performances are spectacular, and it’s visually gorgeous. [Related: The visceral, woman-centric horror of The Handmaid’s Tale]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I read Maylis de Kerangal’s short novella Eastbound earlier this year, which is about a young Russian conscript who, once aboard the Trans-Siberian rail, decides to desert and meets a French woman who helps him. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I then read de Kerangal’s book The Heart, a similarly tense novel about the events and characters involved in a heart transplant—including the young man who dies in an accident, the woman who receives his heart, and the doctors and bureaucrats who make the transplant possible. In recent years I’ve sought out books for style and ambience rather than plot, perhaps because of my fickle attention span or perhaps after reading one too many plodding books. But de Kerangal reminded me how transportive it is when an author successfully creates that itching desire to know what happens next—without forgoing an ounce of style.

As for nonfiction, I’ve loved Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, a book of fragmentary “notes”—which include memoir, theory, photos, and poetic musings—about Black life in America. I’ve been reading the book in blips and spurts over the past couple of months, which in some ways has felt like the best way to read it, because it’s meant I’ve been carrying Sharpe’s intelligent, lyrical voice around with me.

An author I will read anything by: For a long time I didn’t have an answer to this, but as a books editor, you get asked this, or a version of this question, a lot. Though my answer will likely change, right now, it’s Rachel Cusk and Rachel Ingalls. Two very different writers, both completely enrapturing and honest and intricate. [Related: Rachel Cusk won’t stay still.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I loved seeing Meret Oppenheim’s work at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year. I was previously uninitiated in her work but came away from the show entranced by her bleakness and her whimsy. My favorite part came near the end, where, across opposite walls on large sheets of paper, Oppenheim had made a blueprint for a retrospective of her work in Bern. For this, she drew tiny reproductions of her works so that the curators could see what order they should be displayed in. It made me strangely sad to see the artist’s career captured two-dimensionally, in such miniature. But that’s probably the wrong way to look at it; it’s likely that Oppenheim was proudly looking back at her life’s work, taking control of how exactly it should be consumed.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Even the title of Nicole Holofcener’s new movie, You Hurt My Feelings, made me snort—I love a literal title. (When I encountered the similarly prosaic book title Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in this lovely profile of his son, the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy.) In the movie, a woman falls apart when she overhears her husband admitting that he doesn’t like her new book. I’m an editor, not a writer, so I was able to laugh heartily at this premise. But I could imagine that for my writer colleagues, this one might hit a little too close to home. [Related: You Hurt My Feelings is a hilarious anxiety spiral.]

The Week Ahead

Season 2 of The Bear (all episodes streaming on Hulu on Thursday) I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Lorrie Moore’s strange new novel, full of death but also the author’s trademark humor (on sale Tuesday) Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new film that shows the director at his best, according to our critic (in theaters everywhere Friday)

More in Culture

Long live the delightfully dumb comedy. Paul McCartney: I saw you standing there. Killer Mike’s critique of wokeness Asteroid City is Wes Anderson at his best. What to read when you’re feeling ambitious What’s so funny about dying?

Catch up on The Atlantic

Jack Smith’s backup option Why Trump might just roll to the presidential nomination The pregnancy risk that doctor’s won’t mention

Photo Album

Stunning Cephalopod: Aquatic Life Finalist. The iridescent symmetry of this blanket octopus plays a key role in the cephalopod’s success as a predator. Four species of blanket octopuses roam tropical and subtropical seas—including the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Mediterranean—searching for fish and crustaceans to eat.

Scroll through winners of the 2023 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition.

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.

Yesterday, news outlets reported the existence of a recording in which Donald Trump discusses his possession of classified documents. The recording could prove legally damaging, but its existence also reveals something important about how the former president operates.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

America’s approach to addiction has gone off the rails. Don’t avoid romance. Online ads are about to get even worse.

Image Above Law

Yesterday evening, CNN and The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors have a 2021 recording of Donald Trump discussing a military document he held on to after leaving the White House. According to multiple sources, Trump indicates in the recording that he is aware that the document in his possession is classified.

The content of this recording could play an important role in Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s handling of secret records in Mar-a-Lago. A strong prosecution would need to prove that Trump was aware that what he was doing was illegal, and the 2021 tape could offer that evidence. (Neither CNN nor the Times heard the recording, but multiple sources described the audio to reporters.)

But, as my colleague David Graham noted today, the apparent recording plays another role in our understanding of Trump too: “The circumstances of the recording,” he writes, reveal “the way he seems to understand bad press as a graver threat than criminal prosecution.”

David walks us through the circumstances behind the tape: The recording was reportedly made during a meeting Trump held with two writers who were working with Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, on Meadows’s autobiography. At the meeting, Trump was apparently upset about a recent New Yorker report claiming that, in the final days of his administration, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had tried to prevent Trump from ordering a strike on Iran. Trump reportedly referenced a classified document that he suggested could undermine that claim. Meanwhile, Margo Martin, a Trump aide, was reportedly recording the meeting because Trump was worried about being misrepresented or misquoted.

In other words, David writes, “Trump’s fear of damaging press—whether in the Milley reports or the Meadows book—was so much greater than his fear of criminal accountability that he ended up making an incriminating recording that could be a key piece of his own prosecution.”

Trump has long viewed tapes as a protective currency, my colleague Sophie Gilbert noted in 2018—“a talisman against future malfeasance.” But he’s been burned before, when allies or employees use his own techniques against him. Two notable examples: the attorney Michael Cohen, and the former presidential aide Omarosa Manigault Newman.

This time, Trump could get burned by his own recording tactics—but David argues that he has some cards left to play: “Over and over, he’s managed to wriggle out of potential legal jams with bluster, brazenness, and the occasional large check.” That strategy worked even when Trump was president; by rallying political support, Trump was able to escape serious consequences from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, as well as conviction in both impeachments. He will try these tricks again, David reminds us:

No matter how damning the evidence that Smith is able to assemble, Trump is seeking to bully the Justice Department out of charging him. If that doesn’t work, he hopes to be reelected to the presidency in November 2024, which would allow him to shut down any investigation or prosecution against him, or to pardon himself. It might yet work.

And although 2024 is still a year away, one thing is for sure: Trump can consistently rely on political support from the GOP’s base. In an article aptly titled “They Still Love Him,” also published today, David noted that the majority of GOP voters don’t want a better Trump alternative than the candidates on offer. They want Trump himself. They still love him, and they will continue to love him—all the way to 2024, when he gets the chance to shove his legal troubles out of sight.

Related:

Lordy, there are tapes. They still love him.

Today’s News

The debt-ceiling deal passed the House with a vote of 314–117. It will now go to the Senate and, if it passes there, can then be signed into law by President Joe Biden. Russia says it repelled three more cross-border attacks from pro-Ukraine forces while its aerial assaults on Kyiv killed three people. The Senate passed legislation to block President Biden’s debt-relief program. Biden has said he will veto the measure, but the Supreme Court is expected to rule on two cases on the plan this month.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf makes the case for redirecting DEI funds.

Evening Read

Video by The Atlantic. Source: Sobli / RDB / ullstein bild / Getty.

NASA Learns the Ugly Truth About UFOs

By Marina Koren

At a meeting in NASA headquarters yesterday, the public had some blunt questions about UFOs, or, as the government now calls them, “unexplained anomalous phenomena.” A NASA spokesperson summarized them aloud: “What is NASA hiding, and where are you hiding it? How much has been shared publicly? Has NASA ever cut the live NASA TV feed away from something? Has NASA released all UAP evidence it has ever received? What about NASA astronauts—do they have an NDA or clearance that does not allow them to speak about UAP sightings? What are the science overlords hiding?” In short: Are you guys lying to everyone?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Biden White House doesn’t know when to keep quiet. The problem with wealth-based affirmative action

Culture Break

Jeong Park / A24

Read. A new collection of Susan Sontag’s 1970s writing and interviews about feminism, On Women, showcases the writer’s stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the debates of her era.

Watch. You Hurt My Feelings, in theaters, is made by a filmmaker who knows what’s wrong with your relationships.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

For those of you who are fans of The Wire, my colleague Adam Serwer’s 2019 story on the “Stringer Bell rule” offers a useful descriptor for the most important rule of a conspiracy—one that Trump and his inner circle have violated over and over again.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

If the writer-director Nicole Holofcener could predict the future, she’d guess that no matter what happens to the planet, no matter how much human society evolves and devolves, our descendants will still get emotionally distressed over something small, petty, and entirely irrelevant to anyone else. People hurting each other's feelings, she told me over Zoom last week, is “going to happen until the end of the world.”

Injured feelings can easily become personal doomsdays, as her latest film makes clear. In the appropriately titled You Hurt My Feelings, a couple’s marriage fractures when an unexceptional writer named Beth (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her husband, an unexceptional therapist named Don (Tobias Menzies), criticizing her latest novel—which he secretly thought was just so-so when he read her numerous in-progress drafts, but never told her out loud. That withheld opinion is minor to him, but major to her, sending her into an anguish whirlwind that fuels the movie—a witty and barbed story that reveals the inherent absurdity of caring about a loved one’s opinion. “This whole world is falling apart,” an exasperated Don says to Beth after she reveals that she knows what he really thinks. “And this is what’s consuming you?”

Perhaps Don should watch a Holofcener film or two. The writer-director’s original movies, beginning with 1996’s Walking and Talking, have tended to be about conflicts that seem trivial. Her protagonists, usually middle-class women going about their everyday lives, wrestle not with substantial life changes, but with selfish problems. They’re learning to accept that their best friend is getting married, for instance, or overcoming their jealousy of their closest girlfriends’ substantial incomes.

After a decade away from writing and directing her own screenplays—she adapted books, did uncredited work punching up Black Widow, and co-wrote The Last Duel with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—Holofcener returned to writing about the “continuous conundrum” of relationships because, as she put it, they’re all about figuring out “when to speak up and when to shut up.” Yet as insignificant as the central struggle of You Hurt My Feelings may seem, that slightness is the point. Beth and Don’s turmoil changes them, but not by much; the film implies that the pair are bound to repeat their mistakes, a fate that’s true to life. “I like a more subtle story and a smaller arc for characters,” Holofcener explained. “I feel that we change in small increments. Our lives are informed by those small changes, and not the big, loud stuff.”

Not that the big, loud stuff doesn’t ever happen. In one of the more dramatic scenes in You Hurt My Feelings, Beth and her son, Eliot (Owen Teague), get robbed at the weed store Eliot manages. As Eliot struggles to reach the cash register, Beth clambers onto his back, pinning him down to protect him from the burglars. Afterward, they just stand up, hug each other, and brush themselves off. It’s the kind of rare goofy moment that shows how little people might change after a startling ordeal—Beth and Eliot are grateful that they’re okay, rather than profoundly affected. Originally, the scene included a punch line from Beth to drive this idea home: “Now I know I’d take a bullet for my kid.” “I was like, ‘No offense, that’s such a stupid line,’” Holofcener recalled. “Any mother would already know that! So we dropped it.”

[Read: You Hurt My Feelings is a hilarious anxiety spiral]

Holofcener was following a rule for her work that sounds counterintuitive: If a line of dialogue feels like it belongs in a movie, then she takes it out of her movie. The standard has served her well, especially in scenes where characters confront each other. Instead of devolving into histrionics, fights are usually low-key, and her characters express themselves like actual people. They go on tangents. They get distracted. They stall. Beth and Don could have broken up, begun living apart, or screamed at each other for the rest of the film about every other problem they’ve had with each other—all possibilities Holofcener considered, until she realized that the next step for the couple would be … talking. And so they do.

That’s the trick to Holofcener’s work. She sets up situations that seem poised for showdowns, only to yield scenes that feel deliberately uncinematic. In doing so, however, she gets to devote screen time to the nuances of her characters—not necessarily their backstories, but their emotional growth (or lack thereof), arguing that such nearly flat arcs deserve the spotlight too. Her characters contradict themselves in ways they’re unaware of: Beth, so viscerally pained by Don’s dishonesty, has no trouble encouraging a student in her writing class to pursue a poorly conceived story. Even after Beth’s loved ones see her go into a tailspin, they keep telling one another white lies in order to be supportive. Beth’s sister assures her husband that he’s a good actor after he’s fired from a play. Don regularly ends his therapy sessions on a positive note, despite how unsatisfied his patients continue to be in their life.

For some viewers watching Holofcener’s work, the persistent low stakes and lack of life-changing epiphanies might be disorienting. But big revelations simply don’t seem to excite Holofcener as a filmmaker. Unlike some of her more autobiographical films, such as 2001’s Lovely & Amazing, You Hurt My Feelings came from Holofcener wondering how she might react if someone close to her didn't like her work. Most of her stories have become her way of answering such hypothetical questions—“my nightmare, imagined,” as she put it. In 2013’s Enough Said, Holofcener’s first collaboration with Louis-Dreyfus, the protagonist says goodbye to her daughter as she leaves for college; Holofcener, who had not yet sent her children to college at the time, wept as she watched the actors perform. But although she’s tried to process her own fears through her films, she told me, the result is not usually enlightening. “I’ve not found catharsis in my work,” she explained. “I find it really moving when I can create something that comes from my life, but I can’t say it solves my problems. It might inform. Maybe it might, you know, educate me more about myself or how I feel about things.” She paused. “No, I don’t think so.”

When we spoke before the film’s nationwide debut last weekend, Holofcener sounded a little bit like Beth. Though she knows there are people who want to see emotionally modest movies like hers, she still struggles to finance her films, and is skeptical that the people she shares her scripts with—her producers, mostly, rather than a dedicated panel of trusted readers—are telling her their truthful opinion. (“I think they tend to love me too much,” she quipped.) But she’s learned to take the hurt feelings as they come—to keep closing the wounds, knowing they’ll open again. “I just want to keep writing about this,” she said. “It’s too fun to pass up.” Good thing she has endless material to mine.