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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg. Yair writes about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion, and is the author of our Deep Shtetl newsletter. He’s recently shed light on the collapse of social trust in Israel, offered a road map for building better social-media platforms, testified in Congress about anti-Semitism, and chatted with the actor Ben Platt about the role Judaism plays in the performer’s work on Broadway. Yair is currently making his way through a unique anthology of science-fiction short stories, rooting for the Yankees despite the great pain it causes, and reminiscing about a magical piece of tech that no longer exists.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

“I saw the movie ‘they’ don’t want you to see.” Barbie is everything. Ken is everything else. The song that first captured Sinéad O’Connor’s power

The Culture Survey: Yair Rosenberg

A cultural product that I loved as a teenager: In high school, one of my prized possessions was a portable DVD player. This was exactly what it sounds like: a flip-top device with a screen that could play movies off discs. Having one meant that I could watch The Lord of the Rings on cross-country school trips, or disappear into my room to binge a TV show from Netflix (back when they used to send you DVDs). It took a lot to persuade my parents to help me get the thing, and I used to take it everywhere. Today, the portable player is a museum item, long replaced by massively more capable smartphones that play higher-quality video. But no amount of processing power or pixel resolution can replace the magic of being the one weird kid on the bus who could watch a movie on demand.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: One of my favorite TV shows is an eccentric ’90s sci-fi saga called Babylon 5. What makes the show unique is that its creator, J. Michael Straczynski, planned out its entire five-year storyline in advance. He basically wrote an entire novel and then dramatized it for the screen. As I’ve written for The Atlantic, most serialized TV shows today disappoint me. Their plots tend to fail to pay off, because writers are making things up as they go. Lost is a classic example of this, but there are many others. Babylon 5 is the opposite, constantly foreshadowing events—sometimes entire seasons in advance—and leading its characters along believable journeys of growth, discovery, and tragedy. I’ve been revisiting the show because it’s delightful, but also because Straczynski is set to release a new installment of the story next month, in the form of an original animated movie.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I’m one of those people who not only watched the extended edition of each Lord of the Rings film—on the aforementioned portable DVD player—but also watched them multiple times with all of the cast and crew commentaries. This is how I know important things, such as how production was momentarily disrupted when the set designers attempted to create a path of floating apples for the characters to follow in the flooded fortress of Isengard, only for the apples to refuse to float. Eventually, they realized they’d been fooled by perfectly designed prop fruits made of wax.

I’m a big hit at parties.

As for art films, this may be a cheat, but I’ll go with Footnote. It’s a foreign-language movie, so by definition not a blockbuster, but it did win Best Picture at Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars, and it got an actual Oscar nod for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012. As I put it elsewhere, “It’s safe to say that director Joseph Cedar’s Footnote is the only Oscar-nominated dramatic comedy about Talmud scholars you will ever watch. It’s also an exceptional film about fathers and sons, generational conflict, and the passions inspired by Jewish texts through the ages.” It doesn’t hurt that the movie is based on a real-life scholarly dynasty whose members include my own relatives. [Related: How to learn about Jews from Jews, rather than the people who hate them]

An actor I would watch in anything: Peter Sarsgaard. He has incredible charisma and range, whether he’s playing a dogged magazine editor who uncovers fabulism by one of his star reporters in Shattered Glass—the best movie ever made about modern journalism—or embodying a predatory but magnetic con artist in An Education, ensnaring an impressionable college student (played by the great Carey Mulligan) and her family.

Best work of fiction I’ve recently read: I’ve been working my way through a new anthology of science-fiction short stories called Jewish Futures. It comes out next month, but I backed the project on Kickstarter, so I got an advance copy. I can’t wait for other people to be able to read it—and not just because my sister contributed to it. As in all anthologies, different stories will speak to different readers, but my favorites so far are the hilarious “Frummer House,” by Leah Cypess, about what happens when a smart home starts imposing religious observance on its inhabitants; “The Ascent,” a haunting tale by Abraham Josephine Riesman and S. I. Rosenbaum about the eternal restoration and destruction of Jerusalem; and, of course, “Moon Melody,” by my sister S. M. Rosenberg, which is a cross between midrash and a superhero-origin story.

The last culture or entertainment event that made me cry: The New York Yankees offense, or rather, lack thereof.

A good culture or entertainment recommendation I recently received: To stop watching the Yankees. I did not listen.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: I love Irish folk music—its sing-along quality, its intergenerational appeal, the way it reflects and perpetuates cultural memory. I will listen to anything recorded by the contemporary quartet The High Kings. All four members of the group are multi-instrumentalists and have incredible, distinctive voices that somehow seamlessly blend into four-part harmony. They’ve been making music since 2008, and their specialty is bringing classic Irish jigs and ballads to new audiences through contemporary arrangements that are nevertheless faithful to the original essence. When I’m not writing, I have a side hobby composing, singing, and recording Jewish music, and my first album was heavily influenced by this approach, taking traditional Sabbath songs and marrying them to modern melodies and instrumentation.

An author I will read anything by: Kazuo Ishiguro, both because his writing is effortlessly elegant and because it rewards deeper consideration of its moral themes. One example: I recently read The Buried Giant, and it gave me an entry into another book, Forgiveness, by Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the lead minister of Harvard University’s Memorial Church, who uses several works of literature—including Ishiguro’s—to challenge traditional notions of forgiveness and offer an alternative approach. [Related: What my favorite anti-Semite taught me about forgiveness]

The last debate I had about culture: Earlier this year, I debated the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro about anti-Semitism in politics and culture in front of nearly 1,000 people in Florida. We tackled everything from Ye to Joe Rogan, and did it while practically setting the world record for most words spoken per minute. (One reason I’m a journalist is that people can read me at their own speed, which is not possible when listening to me live.)

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it” (Ecclesiastes 11:1). Sometimes it can feel futile to write about seemingly implacable social forces and injustices. But I have found that you never know where your words will be heard, and what impact they may ultimately have.

The Week Ahead

Tom Lake, a new novel by Ann Patchett, meditates on the romances parents have before their children are born (on sale Tuesday). The third and final season of Reservation Dogs, a comedy series by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, premieres Wednesday (streaming on Hulu). Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, featuring the voices of Jackie Chan and Seth Rogen (in theaters Wednesday)

Essay

Gueorgui Pinkhassov / Magnum

American Family Life Should Not Be This Volatile

By Elliot Haspel

Parenthood has always involved unpredictability: wake-ups at 2 a.m., calls from school, the dreaded words my stomach hurts. This daily variance frequently stems from a sick or scared child, and is part of the basic dynamic of family life. Yet today’s parents in the U.S. also face rising external disruptions and a degradation of the institutions that are meant to provide stability. The result is that many families are regularly knocked off their feet by problems that are more than inconvenient but less than catastrophic. This breeds parental stress, insecurity, and exhaustion. Americans have entered, in short, an age of tremors.

The nation has been on this course for the past half century. Starting in the 1970s, a series of economic- and social-policy decisions led to what the political scientist Jacob Hacker has termed the “great risk shift” from government and corporations onto households.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

An Oppenheimer expert watches Oppenheimer. Greta Gerwig’s lessons from Barbie Land What kind of villain doesn’t clean up after their dog? Seven books for the lifelong learner When Judaism went à la carte Hollywood’s huge Barbenheimer fumble Can nature lie? Poem: “Claude Glass as Night Song”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Fatigue can shatter a person. Are you plagued by the feeling that everyone used to be nicer? Alabama is defying the Supreme Court on voting rights.

Photo Album

Matthias Appenzeller of Switzerland competes in the men’s high-diving preliminaries at the Fukuoka 2023 World Aquatics Championships. (Adam Pretty / Getty)

The Women’s World Cup in Australia, a performance at the Lollapalooza Paris Festival, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Tributes stream from political leaders to pop stars for singer Sinead O'Connor, who was remembered for her powerful voice and willingness to court controversy.

The Irish singer and activist, best known for the song Nothing Compares 2 U, died in London this week.

There’s a candid moment in Nothing Compares, the 2022 documentary by Kathryn Ferguson about the life and career of Sinéad O’Connor, when the singer says, “It was such a shock for me to become a pop star. It’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream.” O’Connor, who died yesterday at the age of 56, became famous in the late ’80s, when she was barely out of her teens. In 1990, her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” became not only her signature song, but also a chart-topper in numerous countries—a sweep that thrust a shy Irish kid under the hot sun of international scrutiny.

Rather than moderate her voice, she kept screaming. And over the years, her many controversial protests and statements tended to overshadow her breathtaking body of work. When people vow to murder you (as they did when she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live) and Frank Sinatra publicly threatens to assault you (as he did when she refused to have the American national anthem played at a New Jersey concert in 1990), it’s hard to direct attention back to the thing that actually made you famous: your music.

The fact that she became a pop star—and not just any pop star, but one of the most distinct, most outspoken, and most influential of all time—may have been a surprise to her. But it couldn’t have been a surprise to her fans. Few things made that clearer than her first hit, “Mandinka.” The song, which became a Top 20 hit in the United Kingdom, was the standout single and obvious earworm from her superb 1987 debut LP, The Lion and the Cobra. It was an ambitious album, collecting dark accounts of childhood trauma (“Troy”) and layered explorations of lust and consent (“I Want Your (Hands on Me)”). Amid these deeper, more demanding singles, The Lion and the Cobra needed an upbeat invitation. “Mandinka” was it.

Written when she was still a teenager struggling to make her way as an aspiring expat in London, “Mandinka” is a propulsive anthem that straddles pop and the loosely knit genre of alternative rock, which wouldn’t see its full commercial triumph until the ’90s. The lyrics don’t convey a narrative as such, but like so many of O’Connor’s songs, “Mandinka” synthesizes and projects a string of images, recriminations, and mantras. What coalesces in her words is a barrage of beefs with the patriarchy that refuses to sacrifice poetry for purpose. The title comes from Alex Haley’s Roots, which mentions the Gambian ethnic group of Mandinka. “Mandinka” was slightly ahead of its time, but it’s also very much in the same camp as contemporaneous songs such as Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” and Enya’s “Orinoco Flow.” (Unsurprisingly, her fellow Irish artist Enya made a guest appearance on The Lion and the Cobra.)

“Mandinka,” at its core, is a song of defiance. O’Connor threw every bit of texture and range—snarling, chanting, cooing, and, yes, screaming—she could into the song, and the result was a smack in the face of conventionality. Hurt is part of the DNA of “Mandinka,” even as O’Connor exults in her power to withstand it: “I don’t know no shame / I feel no pain / I can’t see the flame,” she sings with venom. Again, defiance. But it’s not a denial or some bluff—instead, it’s an acknowledgement of how she’s proudly used her scar tissue as raw material.

[Read: How “Nothing Compares 2 U” endured]

“Soon I can give you my heart,” O’Connor chants at the end of “Mandinka.” That’s exactly what she did: The lushly romantic “Nothing Compares 2 U” came out three years later, becoming the song that most people immediately think of when they hear O’Connor’s name. But the power of “Nothing Compares 2 U” partly stemmed from the fact that O’Connor had already proved herself capable of far greater force on The Lion and the Cobra, and in “Mandinka” in particular. Her first appearance on U.S. television was on Late Night With David Letterman, and her performance of the single is telling. She wears a spiked denim jacket like punk-rock armor, holding her arms in front of her and twisting back and forth like she’s dodging blows in a boxing ring.

Perhaps the most succinct tribute to the impact of “Mandinka” is a video of Fiona Apple, posted to YouTube in 2017. In it, Apple lies in bed with her laptop while singing and air-punching along to O’Connor’s 1989 Grammy performance. It was a historic one: Nominated that year for Best Female Rock Vocal, O’Connor infamously drew Public Enemy’s bull’s-eye logo on her head to protest the fact that the newly minted Grammy for Best Rap Performance was awarded off camera. (On Twitter yesterday, the group’s Chuck D and Flavor Flav both remembered the protest.)

When the chorus hits, Apple ups the volume and kisses the screen. It’s a gesture of joyous release and empowerment that mirrors the song itself. “I didn’t mean to be strong,” O’Connor says at the start of Ferguson’s documentary. “I wasn’t thinking to myself, I must be strong. I didn’t know I was strong.” All it takes is one listen to “Mandinka,” though, for anyone else to know, feel, and find themselves strengthened by her strength.

The Irish singer was found dead at her London home on Wednesday shortly after 11:00 BST, aged 56.

The gifted Irish performer, who was known for her fierce and expressive voice, has died at 56.

The Irish singer and activist's family have announced the news of her death "with great sadness".

The Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor has died at the age of 56.

Irish singer and activist Sinéad O'Connor has died aged 56.

Thursday's papers lead on the death of Irish singing legend Sinéad O'Connor at the age of 56.