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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 Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic’s projects editor. Ellen has written about how Slack upended the workplace and why Amazon Prime Day is dystopian. She’s currently looking forward to the return of The Amazing Race, angling to beat level 5,593 of Candy Crush, and crying at many things, including a “very effective TV ad for rheumatoid-arthritis medicine.”

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The longest relationships of our lives In praise of Bluey, the most grown-up television show for children The man who transformed American theater

The Culture Survey: Ellen Cushing

The upcoming arts/culture/entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: My household is devoted to The Amazing Race, which follows teams of two as they travel from country to country, stopping to complete challenges along the way. You know cozy mysteries? TAR is basically a cozy reality show, in that no one is outwardly unwell and the highest-stakes drama tends to revolve around, like, reading a map correctly. The new season (its 35th!) premieres September 27.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: The main kid in my life is too busy licking electrical sockets and trying to climb into the toilet to share his cultural picks with me, but he did indirectly introduce me to ER, which I consumed in nibbles and gulps while on parental leave this winter. Weird choice, in retrospect, given that this show employs ill and/or grievously injured children basically the way football employs footballs, but it’s also a spectacularly well-acted and -paced ensemble drama. It pioneered much of the style and tone of modern TV, and has aged almost shockingly well.

The best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I keep recommending Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir to people; its protagonist, a narcissistic, reckless, morally compromised woman in late middle age, feels unlike anyone I’ve met in literature.

And Life on Delay, by my colleague and friend John Hendrickson, is a remarkable memoir about stuttering, family, patience, connection, and all of the other things that make a person who they are. I think about it all the time. [Related: Why I dread saying my own name]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love:

Quiet: “Self Control,” by Frank Ocean

Loud: “Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay),” by Sky Ferreira

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: The best place in The Atlantic’s New York office is the archives room, which houses more than 100 years’ worth of magazines in these fantastic bound volumes with pages like tissue paper and spines that crack when you open them. I am lucky to get to spend lots of time in there, poking around for stories to resurface for our readers—such as, most recently, this extremely funny on-the-ground account of the 1896 Olympic Games.

An author I will read anything by: Nell Zink is a genius, and I’ll do whatever it takes to live inside her brain, even just for a little while. I hope she starts a cult someday.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I’ve been playing Candy Crush Saga since Barack Obama’s first term, and I expect to continue playing it until my thumbs fall off. It’s the ideal phone game—colorful, simple, hard (but not too hard) to master. It looks like a slot machine and feels like gently kneading all of your dopamine receptors at once. I actually beat it in 2017, but those rascals keep adding new levels, so I am currently on No. 5,593.

The last debate I had about culture: What texture is Jabba the Hutt—Jell-O? Human? Hamburger? Snake? Please email me your theories.

The last thing that made me cry: Everything makes me cry! (This is because I’m a very compassionate person.) Most recently: watching some people I love sing “Landslide” at karaoke. Before that: our September cover story. Before that: a very effective TV ad for rheumatoid-arthritis medicine. Before that: the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which is about the photographer and former addict Nan Goldin’s activist campaign against members of the Sackler family, who profited massively from the opioid crisis, and the institutions that accept their wealth.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: The sex scene in Oppenheimer.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I am a generally sloppy and frustrated baker, but every time I try, I find myself repeating—as a sort of incantation—the vivid, compact, flawless opening lines from “i am not done yet,” by Lucille Clifton: “as possible as yeast / as imminent as bread.” It’s a poem about becoming, about the endless act of inching closer to who we are meant to be. It says, We are never finished. It says, Maybe today is the day you wait long enough for your dough to rise.

The Week Ahead

Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous With American History, from the author Yunte Huang, recounts and reclaims the Chinese American actress’s story (on sale Tuesday). Star Wars: Ahsoka stars Rosario Dawson as a former Jedi knight trying to stop the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn (premieres on Disney+ this Wednesday). Golda, a film featuring Helen Mirren, focuses on the Israeli prime minister during the tense days of the Yom Kippur War (in theaters Friday).

Essay

Craig Blankenhorn / Max

An Absurdly Unrelatable Show Has a Relatable Moment

By Sophie Gilbert

And Just Like That, like no other show in our admittedly depleted television universe right now, is simultaneously a riot, a rout, and an utterly chaotic melange of small-scale storytelling and high—but-literally-am-I-high—fashion. Every episode contains at least three scenes to which there is nothing to say but “What?!?” Five weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a humor piece that imagined ludicrously banal storylines the show could tackle next; since then, two have basically happened. Last week, Miranda and Charlotte went to Chipotle, where they were confused by the fast-casual chain’s ordering system. Carrie might have a cat now? Che, a comedian who used to have a hit podcast and a sizable-enough following to get them a sitcom pilot and a Cameo presence, is doing overtime at a vet’s office again, because apparently the only two financial brackets in this world are Hudson Yards–rich and shift work.

Sex and the City was a thrilling show for its relatability, in a fun-house-mirror kind of way; And Just Like That exists in such a remote socioeconomic universe that watching it can feel like gawping at an exotic species in a nature documentary … which is why this week’s episode, inelegantly titled “The Last Supper Part One: Appetizer,” was the best of the season so far.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

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Catch Up On The Atlantic

How America got mean Trump discovers that some things are actually illegal. The sriracha shortage is a very bad sign.

Photo Album

Chloé Moglia, of the artistic company Rhizome, performing “Horizon” during the final day of Le Castrum Festival (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty)

A sheep auction in Scotland; new eruptions of Mount Etna, in Italy; and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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