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 the staff writer and author Mark Leibovich. Mark has recently written about the long-shot presidential candidate who has the White House worried, and how Moneyball broke baseball.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Streaming has reached its sad, predictable fate. Hip-hop’s fiercest critic A knockout technique for achieving more happiness

The Culture Survey: Mark Leibovich

Mark wrote a little introductory note for our newsletter readers, so I’ll attach that here before we get to his culture-survey responses:

Okay, I will admit to just rereading a bunch of these recent culture surveys and marveling at how well-read, well-watched, and well-listened some of my Atlantic colleagues are. Intimidating! They set such a high and considered bar. Now allow me to lower it.

In comparison, my tastes are a hodgepodge of high-low delights that I pick up from random films, TV shows, or social-media feeds, which then lead me down various other rabbit holes. In other words, my tastes tend to be a meandering mess, depending on my moods, whereabouts, chemical intakes, endorphin bursts, and general exposures (or maybe I just flatter myself, and some algo-god is reading this from a Menlo Park lair, laughing like hell).

Here’s an example from an hour ago: I was driving my daughter to school, hopped up on espressos and flipping around on SiriusXM. Thankfully, Franny (my daughter) shares my quickness to punch the presets, my need for better options at all times, and my jumpy attention span (shorter version: ADHD). I happened to land on the ’80s-on-8 station and somehow found myself hooked on a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac” by Natalie Cole (!). Who knew that existed? I didn’t until this morning, and wouldn’t you know it, the song stuck to my predilection lobes like bubble gum. Then, for some reason, the DJ—the former MTV VJ Mark Goodman—felt the need to come on and trash Natalie’s effort. Totally bogus, dude. And wrong.

This also reminded me that I once had tea with Nat King Cole’s widow, Maria, sometime in the ’90s, at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, where she happened to be living. Lovely woman, since departed. I have a cool story about Mrs. Cole too, which I started to tell Franny, but she was by then deep into her phone.

Anyway …

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I’m writing this on the first weekend of the NFL season. There’s a reason most of the top-rated television shows every single year are NFL games. America’s most successful sports league is such a juggernaut, and I’m definitely part of the problem. Why problem? Because, among other things, football is morally precarious, causes incalculable damage to its players’ bodies and brains, and is run and owned by some of the worst people in the world, nearly all of them billionaires.

Even so, I will definitely tune in to a bunch of games this weekend, with generous bowls of Trader Joe’s kettle corn and reheated leftover pad thai on my lap. Which is a great segue into …

A favorite story I’ve read recently in The Atlantic: One of the teams that kicked off the season Thursday night, the young and promising Detroit Lions, is the subject of a great romp by the long-suffering, lionhearted Tim Alberta. The story is packed with poignancy, hitting many levels and themes: futility and resilience, legacies and character, fathers and sons. Also, faith rewarded: Lions 21–Chiefs 20. [Related: The thrill of defeat]

I’m going to cheat and suggest another article from The Atlantic, even though I read an early version and it is not yet online: next month’s cover story, by my desk-neighbor and pal Jenisha Watts. I have truly never read a story like this in my life, ever, and can’t even begin to describe the wonder of its triumph, or the triumph that is Jenisha, whom I am so proud to know.

The television show that I’m most enjoying right now: Daisy Jones and the Six (on Amazon Prime Video). A total joy. L.A. in the ’70s, road trips, and “you regret me, and I regret you” (that’s a lyric). Speaking of which …

Best work of nonfiction I’ve read recently: The Daisy Jones title cut is “Dancing Barefoot,” by Patti Smith, which led me to Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, which I purchased at my favorite local independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, because screw Amazon, even though it gave us Daisy Jones. (Like football, it’s complicated. Or maybe not.)

Aside: Riley Keough, if you or your reps are reading this, I want to interview you.  MLeibovich@TheAtlantic.com.

An author I will read anything by: Christopher Buckley. The maestro’s been on my mind lately because I just finished Make Russia Great Again, an utterly hilarious Trump-era novel. And yes, there actually is a “Trump-era novel” genre (another pearl being The Captain and the Glory, by Dave Eggers).

I’ll also mention that Buckley once reviewed one of my books, and it was pretty much the highlight of my life—and damn right I’m linking to it.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Worst Person in the World and Licorice Pizza. These were two of the few movies I’ve seen in theaters since (or during) the pandemic, both of which I rewatched on a long flight this summer. Each got into my bones, in their own wanderlusting, generationally particular way. The Norwegian film Worst Person is better than anything the Oslo Chamber of Commerce could ever have spawned (salmonlike!). It also led me to Todd Rundgren’s glorious song “Healing,” which has been feeding my heart ever since.

As for Licorice (again, L.A. in the ’70s), the film blissfully reacquainted me with a long-lost friend of a song, “Let Me Roll It,” by Paul McCartney and Wings. We’ve kept in touch since via Spotify, usually while I’m on my stationary bike, which I try to ride every day in an attempt to mitigate the various erosions of being in my 50s. Speaking of aging and life cycles and the transience of it all … [Related: Licorice Pizza is a tragicomic tale of 1970s Hollywood.]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. The title is also the last line of the poem, and is now the last entry in this scavenging of serendipity. May the golden wisdom of these words stay, eternally.

The Week Ahead

A Haunting in Venice, Kenneth Branagh’s supernatural mystery film (in select theaters Friday) The Vaster Wilds, a new novel by Lauren Groff (out Tuesday) How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel by Julius Taranto (out Tuesday)

Essay

Bob Berg / Getty

The Album That Made Me a Music Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

Smash Mouth has long been, as its guitarist, Greg Camp, once said, “a band that you can make fun of.” The pop-rock group’s signature hit, 1999’s “All Star,” combines the sounds of DJ scratches, glockenspiel, and a white dude rapping that he “ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.” Fashionwise, the band tended to dress for a funky night at the bowling alley. And over nearly three decades, Smash Mouth has remained famous partly because of the flatulent cartoon ogre Shrek.

But the affection Smash Mouth commands is serious—the result of music so simultaneously pleasing and odd that it could rewire a young listener’s brain. In fact, the sad news of the death of original front man Steve Harwell at age 56 has me wondering if the band’s 1999 album, Astro Lounge, is the reason I’m a music critic. Most people can point to songs that hit them in early adolescence, when their ears were impressionable but their interest in other people’s judgment was still, blessedly, undeveloped. Smash Mouth’s second album, the one with “All Star,” came out when I was 11. Every goofy organ melody is still engraved in my mind, and today, the album holds up as an ingeniously crafted pleasure capsule.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

“Some have yoga. I have Montaigne.” Fiction on trial Okay, the 1980s Lakers were great—what else? How men muscled women out of surfing A constantly rebooting children’s franchise that’s actually good A rom-com franchise that needs to end The problem Olivia Rodrigo can’t solve

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Elon Musk’s latest target hits back. The China model is dead. Can Poland roll back authoritarian populism?

Photo Album

This picture, taken on September 2, 2023, shows a player scoring a try during Water Rugby Lausanne by jumping into Lake Geneva from a floating rugby field. The match was part of a three-day tournament organized by LUC Rugby that gathered more than 240 players in Lausanne, Switzerland. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty)

The World Tango Championship in Argentina, a scene from the 80th Venice Film Festival, a cricket game in Afghanistan, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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.

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

The China model is dead. A knockout technique for achieving more happiness Why would anyone become a politician?

Challenging Power, Again

The year was 1998. Bill Clinton was in office. Titanic had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The Backstreet Boys were ascendant. And Microsoft was in court, teeing off against the Justice Department over claims that it was a monopoly. That landmark case, which ultimately resulted in a settlement, was the last time the government took a major tech company to trial for antitrust issues.

That will change next week, when the U.S. et al v. Google trial begins in Washington, D.C. The Justice Department (joined by a group of states) has sued Google, claiming that the search giant illegally protected its market position by striking exclusive deals—in particular, one with Apple starting 18 years ago that set Google as the default search engine on iPhones and other devices. This isn’t the department’s only lawsuit against the company, but it is the first to go to trial, and regardless of the outcome, this case signals that the government is serious about investigating the influence that a few companies have consolidated. And it could put pressure on tech firms to proceed more carefully.

The moment is ripe for a Big Tech trial: As tech companies have become more and more powerful, public scrutiny has increased. No longer is antitrust zeal considered merely a left-wing cause; Republicans and Democrats alike are now interested in bringing Big Tech down a notch. The Justice Department’s lawsuit was filed in October 2020, when Donald Trump was still in office; Merrick Garland’s team has since taken over the case. We are also in a time of market concentration. Huge companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Google have amassed immense sway over the past 20 years. (By some measures, Google commands about 90 percent of the domestic search market.) Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer, said in a statement, “This is a backwards-looking case at a time of unprecedented innovation,” adding that “people don’t use Google because they have to—they use it because they want to.” The company has said that its default agreements are not exclusive. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft’s antitrust woes in the 1990s are worth looking back on, both for their similarities to the impending Google trial and for how the internet has changed in the decades since. The Microsoft trial was a dramatic one. Videos of Bill Gates being deposed by David Boies (who would later represent clients including Theranos) reportedly caused a judge to burst into laughter in the courtroom. Not long after the court ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly, in 2000, the company appealed, and the decision was partially overturned. Among the many concerns of the appeals court were reports that the same judge had been bad-mouthing Microsoft to journalists.

An antitrust lawyer named Gary Reback, who pushed the government to take action against Microsoft, became famous in Silicon Valley in the years leading up to the case. He appeared on the cover of Wired in 1997 with the tagline “This Lawyer Is Bill Gates’s Worst Nightmare.” When I called Reback yesterday, he told me that back in the 1990s, Microsoft’s “monopoly was more far reaching and profound than any one single monopolist today.” (Reback has been involved with litigation against Google in recent years.)

Microsoft’s power was indeed massive, and could have grown further. “Imagine a world in which Microsoft had been allowed to monopolize the browser business,” the law professor and former Biden adviser Tim Wu and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote in 2018. “Holding a triple monopoly (operating system, major applications and the browser), Microsoft would have controlled the future of the web.” And to some, regulation of the company portended a larger change: Milton Friedman predicted, in 1999, “From now on the computer industry, which has been very fortunate in that it has been relatively free of government intrusion, will experience a continuous increase in government regulation.”

Friedman’s prediction didn’t exactly come true in recent decades—but it still could. However the Google trial plays out, it could well lead these companies toward more caution, as the 1998 trial seemed to do for Microsoft. Lee Hepner, the legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties project, an anti-monopoly nonprofit, told me that the Google trial will be key for understanding whether antitrust laws are equipped to handle monopoly power in today’s environment. (The Justice Department, states, and the Federal Trade Commission have brought a spate of other antitrust cases against Big Tech firms in recent years, and FTC Commissioner Lina Khan is a known critic of tech consolidation.)

No single firm now controls the future of the web. The Microsoft case, perhaps ironically, paved the way for today’s tech giants to flourish: Instead of one Microsoft, we have several companies that each dominate their respective slices of the market. But after years of relative dormancy on antitrust issues, the government’s recent cases may mean the end of these companies’ freewheeling heyday.

Related:

The invisible tech behemoth The Silicon Valley myth is over.

Today’s News

Donald Trump notified the judge overseeing the Fulton County, Georgia, election-interference case that he may try to move the case to federal court. Hurricane Lee is expected to grow stronger as it approaches the eastern Caribbean, and it could become a major storm by early tomorrow morning. The Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro was convicted of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress.

Evening Read

Illustration by Robert Beatty

America Is Telling Itself a Lie About Roadkill

By Ben Goldfarb

The great irony of roadkill is this: Its most conspicuous victims tend to be those least in need of saving. Simple probability dictates that you’re more likely to collide with a common animal—​a squirrel, a raccoon, a white-​tailed deer—​than a scarce one. The roadside dead tend to be culled from the ranks of the urban, the resilient, the ubiquitous.

But roadkill is also a culprit in our planet’s current mass die-​off. Every year American cars hit more than 1 million large animals, such as deer, elk, and moose, and as many as 340 million birds; across the continent, roadkill may claim the lives of billions of pollinating insects. The ranks of the victims include many endangered species: One 2008 congressional report found that traffic existentially threatens at least 21 critters in the U.S., including the Houston toad and the Hawaiian goose. If the last-ever California tiger salamander shuffles off this mortal coil, the odds are decent that it will happen on rain-​slick blacktop one damp spring night.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Read. George Eliot’s novels offer a subversive, many-layered vision of marriage.

Watch. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, currently in theaters, highlights the unlikely endurance of the wisecracking reptiles.

Play our daily crossword.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

Democracy is under attack around the world; in the United States, the summer brought good news and bad news. The institutions of democracy are still functioning, but not for long if enough Americans continue to support authoritarianism.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tim Alberta: The thrill of defeat The metaphor that explains why America needs to prosecute Trump There’s a word for blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. What were the Russians doing in Chornobyl?

Layered Repression

Almost two years ago, I engaged in a thought experiment about what the failure of democracy in the United States might look like. I wrote it for an Atlantic subscriber newsletter I had back then, and I hope you’ll forgive me for revisiting it, but after a summer in which American democracy has been walking a tightrope over the authoritarian chasm, it’s worth looking back to see how we’ve done since early 2022.

The most important point, and the one that I think bears repeating, is that the failure of democracy in America will not look like a scene from a movie, where some fascist in a black tunic ascends the steps of the Capitol on Inauguration Day and proclaims the end of freedom:

The collapse of democracy in the United States will look more like an unspooling or an unwinding rather than some dramatic installation of Gilead or Oceania. My guess—and again, this is just my stab at speculative dystopianism—is that it will be a federal breakdown that returns us to the late 1950s in all of the worst ways.

We’re already seeing this unwinding in slow motion. Donald Trump and many on the American right (including the national Republican Party) have made clear their plans to subvert America’s democratic institutions. They made continuous efforts to undermine the will of the voters at the state level, most notably in Georgia, after the 2020 presidential election, and then they tried to overrule the results at the national level by setting a mob on Congress on January 6, 2021. If Trump returns to the Oval Office, he and his underlings will set up a system designed to set up a series of cascading democratic failures from Washington to every locality they can reach.

They intend to pack courts with judges who are loyal to Trump instead of to the Constitution. They want to destroy an independent federal civil service by making all major civil servants political appointees, which would allow the right to stuff every national agency with cronies at will. They want to neuter independent law-enforcement institutions such as the FBI, even if that means disbanding them. They will likely try to pare down the senior military ranks until the only remaining admirals and generals are men and women sworn not to the defense of the United States but to the defense of Donald Trump, even if that means employing military force against the American public.

Trump and his supporters are not even coy about some of these ideas. The Heritage Foundation—once a powerhouse think tank on the right that has since collapsed into unhinged extremism and admiration for foreign strongmen—has a “Project 2025” posted on its website, with sections that read like extended Facebook comments. I took a look so that you don’t have to, including at a policy-guide chapter on the military authored by former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Heritage and Miller (a seat warmer brought in by Trump at the tail end of his administration) think it’s very important for the next president—I wonder who they could possibly have in mind—to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs” and to reinstate personnel dismissed for disobeying orders to get vaccinated.

Also:

Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.

Why not just write up a loyalty oath to Trump? Little wonder that Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is holding up the promotion of some 300 senior officers; perhaps it’s occurred to him (or others) that sitting on those promotions until 2025 might open the door for Heritage’s unnamed next U.S. president to sweep out the Marxist gender theorists and replace them with “real Americans” who know that their duty is to a man rather than a moldering document in the National Archives.

The rest of Project 2025 is a lot of putative big-think from wannabe conservative intellectuals such as Ken Cuccinelli, Ben Carson, Stephen Moore, and Peter Navarro (who is currently on trial for contempt of Congress). Much of this stuff is nonsense, of course, but it’ll be nonsense right up until the point it isn’t: These are all names that would reappear in a second Trump administration, and this time, they’d move a lot faster in breaking down the federal guardrails around democracy.

This layered state, federal, and local repression is what I worried about back in early 2022:

This is where we really will have “free” and “unfree” Americas, side by side. To drive from Massachusetts to Alabama—especially for women and people of color—will not be crossing the Mason-Dixon line so much as it will be like falling through the Time Tunnel and emerging in a pre-1964 America where civil rights and equal treatment before the government are a matter of the state’s forbearance. If an American citizen’s constitutional rights are violated, there will be no Justice Department that will intervene, no Supreme Court that will overrule. (And arresting seditionists? Good luck with that. I expect that if Trump is reelected, he will pardon everyone involved with January 6.)

Trump, of course, has since made the promise to drop pardons like gentle rain from the sky. America’s democratic immune system, however, is for now still functioning. The courts have done their duty even when elected officials have refused to do theirs. (Imagine how much healthier American democracy would be right now if the Senate had convicted Trump in his second impeachment. Alas.) Trump is now under indictment for 91 alleged crimes, and Jack Smith seems undaunted in his pursuit of justice.

Likewise, the major ringleaders of January 6—all but one, I should say—have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, among other crimes, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Some of these supposed tough guys ended up blubbering and pleading for mercy in a federal courtroom, but to no avail. The would-be Oath Keepers centurion Stewart Rhodes and a leader of the Proud Boys, Ethan Nordean, each got 18 years, a record broken yesterday when a Trump-appointed federal judge sent the ex–Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio inside for 22 years, meaning he will be sitting out the next five presidential elections.

This is the good news, but none of it will matter if Trump returns to the White House.

I shouldn’t end on such a dire note. Trump is the likely nominee, and although I still feel a chill about the threat of authoritarianism, I also can’t shake the feeling that most Americans in most states want no part of this ongoing madness. I still have faith that most people, when faced with the choice, will continue to support the constitutional freedoms of the United States—but only if they understand how endangered those freedoms are.

Related:

The former Proud Boys leader finds out. Is Tennessee a democracy?

Today’s News

A Russian missile strike killed at least 17 people and injured dozens of others in Kostyantynivka, according to Ukrainian officials. A federal judge found Donald Trump liable for making defamatory statements against the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019, carrying over a federal jury’s verdict in a related defamation case earlier this year. Trump has appealed the jury’s verdict. Delta Air Lines announced that it is bringing Tom Brady on board as a strategic adviser.

Evening Read

Photograph by Erik Paul Howard for The Atlantic

Hip-Hop’s Fiercest Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

One sunny day in 1995, the Notorious B.I.G. sat in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes-Benz, smoking joints and talking shit. Of course, Biggie did these things on many days during his short lifetime, but on this particular day, a neighborhood friend named dream hampton was in the back seat with a video camera. Wearing Versace sunglasses and a checked purple shirt, the 23-year-old rapper—whose breakout album, Ready to Die, had come out the year before—held a chunky cellphone to his ear. He was making plans and talking about girls, riffing in his lisped woof of a voice. He laughed and brought a square of rolling paper, full of pot leaves, to his lips.

From behind the camera, hampton asked whether he intended to consume their entire bag of weed. Annoyed at the interruption, Biggie mocked her question. Hampton’s voice turned sharp. “Why are you going at me today?” she asked. “What’s the problem? Do we need to do something before we go on the road? Take this outside?” The video cut to static.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Read. These six books are correctives to isolation.

Watch. D.P., on Netflix, is a compelling K-drama without a drop of romance.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I voted yesterday in Rhode Island, where our district had a special primary election to choose contenders to replace resigning Representative David Cicilline. Rhode Island CD 1 is a heavily Democratic district (it went for Joe Biden in 2020 by 29 points), so the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to prevail in the general election. Yesterday’s Democratic winner was Gabe Amo, a young man who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations. Amo is Black, and if he goes to Washington, he’ll be the first person of color to represent Rhode Island in Congress.

But what fascinated me yesterday was that we all voted in Rhode Island CD 1 without having much of an idea who was likely to win. For various reasons, including the short run-up to the primary, none of the local media outlets or universities did any polling. Twelve candidates, including several Rhode Island elected officials, ran in the primary. A few looked to be prohibitive favorites early on; one was felled at the last minute by scandal. Another, Aaron Regunberg, seemed to be ubiquitous on the airwaves, with ads touting his endorsement from Bernie Sanders. (Probably not a great idea in Rhode Island; Regunberg came in second but ran more than seven points behind Amo.)

I often say that people should vote as if their one vote will make the difference; for once, I walked into the booth with the thought that my vote could, in fact, be the deciding vote. As a political junkie, I love polls, but it was nice to be able to cast a ballot without knowing whether my preferred candidate was the likely winner or loser.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

Jimmy Buffett, the chiller laureate of Key West, died on Friday at 76. His legacy goes well beyond music: He also parlayed the power of his loyal community into a business empire.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How American democracy fell so far behind How telling people to die became normal A DeSantis speech too dangerous to teach in Florida You already got into Yale. Now prepare to be rejected.

A Distinctly American Figure

If you have never spent a lunch hour in Times Square at the Margaritaville restaurant, or a cocktail hour at the 5 o’Clock Somewhere bar upstairs, allow me to paint a picture: An enormous shiny flip-flop greets you at the door of the restaurant cum bar cum resort tower. A massive replica of the Statue of Liberty holding a margarita glass pokes through the floor of the restaurant. Should you choose to ascend, a long elevator ride delivers you to the top-floor bar, which features turquoise furniture, tequila drinks on offer, and a beautiful view of Manhattan. Some elements of Margaritaville are kitschy, and some are charming. But above all, when you’re there, you don’t forget for one second that you are in a Margaritaville.

Jimmy Buffett, the troubadour and celebrant of a good-times lifestyle, deserves to be remembered for more than just his music (fun though it may be). Buffett also parlayed his name recognition into a business empire that, starting with the first Margaritaville in Key West, Florida, swelled to include resorts, restaurants, food, and merchandise; Buffett became a billionaire later in life. He was beloved by his many fans, known as Parrot Heads, and he leveraged that fan base into a loyal community of customers. Beyond the Parrot Heads, he also reached hungry and thirsty visitors of all stripes: Some 20 million people visit Margaritaville-branded establishments annually.

In recent years, a variety of brands have become obsessed with building community. Tech start-ups in particular have glommed on to it as a marketing buzzword. If people feel connected to a brand, the thinking goes, they will buy more stuff. Buffett was an early master of this art: He was selling goods and services, but he was also offering a sense of belonging. And though it has become de rigueur for celebrities to peddle branded products, be it skin care or tequila, Buffett has been translating pop-culture recognition into product sales for decades.

Buffett was a multi-hyphenate before it was cool. He first became known as a musician, with his beach hit “Margaritaville” in 1977 and, the next year, his cheeky “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He was also an author: Starting in 1989, both his fiction and nonfiction books topped the New York Times best-seller lists (a distinction he shares with an elite smattering of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dr. Seuss). He had a Broadway show. Margaritaville sold frozen shrimp, blenders, margarita mixes, and a lifestyle. The New York Times reported that Margaritaville Enterprises, a corporation with ties to more than 100 restaurants and hotels, brought in $2.2 billion in gross annual revenue last year, largely through licensing and branding deals. Though Margaritaville Resort Times Square recently began Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, Margaritaville Enterprises is reportedly still investing in new properties.

For a man who made his name on visions of relaxation, Buffett got things done. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2018, “Mr. Buffett is still the lone occupant in the Venn diagram of People Who Outearn Bruce Springsteen and People Who Are Mistaken for Men of Leisure.” Though a 23andMe test reportedly confirmed that Jimmy was not related to Warren Buffett, the two men became friends, and the latter offered business advice to the former; Jimmy called him “Uncle Warren.” (The Oracle of Omaha is also an investor in Margaritaville Enterprises through subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway.)

Jimmy Buffett even created literal Margaritaville communities: Last year, Nick Paumgarten wrote a long dispatch in The New Yorker recounting his time visiting Latitude Margaritaville, a “55 and better” active-living community in Florida. Paumgarten notes the sense of belonging that Latitude Margaritaville provides its older residents—even if it comes with a heavy dose of hedonism. “If it’s isolation that ails us—our suburban remove, our reliance on cars, our dwindling circles of friends, our lack of congregation and integration and mutual understanding, of the kind described by Robert Putnam in ‘Bowling Alone,’” Paumgarten writes, “then the solution, especially for those tilting into their lonelier elderly years, would seem to be fellowship, activity, fun. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol.” (As it happened, Paumgarten’s article was published the day before my first visit to the Times Square location next to my then-office; the sweet—and also thoroughly capitalist—context about Buffett’s empire enhanced what was already a novel experience.)

Buffett’s Florida development, Paumgarten wrote, “came off both as an escape from America and as the most quintessentially American setting of all.” And Buffett himself was a distinctly American figure—a canny self-mythologizer who brought people joy and made very good money along the way. I hope you all will embrace your license to chill in his honor. As they might say at Margaritaville: Fins up. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

Related:

Make the collabs stop. Why celebrities partner with cannabis companies

Today’s News

All the defendants in the election-interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, have now pleaded not guilty. Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, after being convicted for seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021, attack. Senator Mitch McConnell released a letter from Congress’s attending physician stating that evaluations ruled out a stroke or seizure, after McConnell visibly froze on camera on two recent occasions.

Evening

Vivian Maier / Howard Greenberg Gallery

The Novel That Helped Me Understand American Culture

By Rafaela Bassili

Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.

With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the baby boom.

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P.S.

Tom here, peeking in after reading Lora’s essay on Jimmy Buffett. Buffett’s last public appearance was just up the way from me here at a venue in Rhode Island, and when I heard he’d died, I was on my way to a nearby beach. I reminisced with my wife a bit as we drove to the shore about how I didn’t appreciate Buffett when I was growing up, mostly because “Margaritaville” was overplayed when I was a teenager. Also, I didn’t really get that whole Gulf and Western sound. My New England (I was raised near the mountains) doesn’t seem like Jimmy Buffett’s natural environment: The beach is far, the water’s cold, and the first snows come soon after the last beach day.

But when I moved to Rhode Island in my 20s, I spent my first summer at the beach and the Newport bars, where Buffett’s music was everywhere. One day, I heard “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” and it clicked. The beach wasn’t really the point. The palm trees and tropical nights and steel drums? Those were just the decor. That day in Newport, I realized that you didn’t need a beach to love Jimmy Buffett, whose music was so kind, so American, and so fun. The next day, I went to the local record store and bought my first Buffet CD. After that, no matter where I lived, I always had a beach and a friend.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

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 Shan Wang, The Atlantic’s programming director. Shan has written about why it’s a mistake to write off Korean-language TV series as sappy melodrama, and offered 19 ways to think about the heat. She’s currently watching a distressing yet compelling K-drama, drowning in snacks from an Asian grocery-delivery service she recently discovered, and begging everyone in her life to stop quoting Zoolander at her.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Retailers bet wrong on America’s feelings about stores. Take a wife … please! What adults forget about friendship

The Culture Survey: Shan Wang

The upcoming entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: It’s a doubleheader for me: Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts and V of BTS’s Layover (both out September 8). Perfect voices, no notes.

The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: Still Barbie. I was personally unmoved, but I’ve learned a lot about how my friends feel about men, motherhood, and Michael Cera through their reactions to the movie—views they previously had trouble articulating in casual conversation. [Related: The surprising key to understanding the Barbie film]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Having watched a lot of 16-episode romance K-dramas lately, I pivoted and have been savoring D.P. (the title stands for “deserter pursuit”; a second season was released on Netflix this summer). In it, a young private, An Jun-ho, is recruited to a special squad that tracks down soldiers who have deserted. Each episode—deviating from K-drama tradition, D.P. has only six per season—is the story of a deserter, their sorrows and circumstances chipping away at Jun-ho’s rigidity about doing the “right” thing within a system that violates people’s humanity at every turn.

The show can be distressing to watch; its main notes are bullying, abuse, and social alienation. But well-timed humor and the relationships between characters keep it from descending into total darkness. At a time when more and more conversations are happening in the open about how troubled young men turn into violent ones, D.P. has its own unsparing view. [Related: The secret to a good K-drama]

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I am required by law to rewatch all three Lord of the Rings movies every few months so that I can brush up on some of the most important dialogue in cinema history, such as “What about second breakfast?” and “What’s this? Crumbs on his jacketses!” The effects remain impressive and the storyline satisfying. What more does one need?

Even though I don’t think I can stomach a second viewing, Park Chan-wook’s slow-burn romance slash murder mystery Decision to Leave is my favorite art movie I’ve seen recently. I do like feeling out the edges of my comfort zone, and Decision to Leave is halfway between sexy and disturbing. [Related: Decision to Leave is this century’s first great erotic thriller.]

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Elena Ferrante (and translator Ann Goldstein) fan club is large, and I’m an active member. Every so often, I revisit parts of My Brilliant Friend, the first in a four-book family epic centered on the coming-together and coming-apart of childhood friends Elena and Lila, who grow up in the poor outskirts of Naples. When I’m feeling uneasy—usually because there’s a family dynamic I haven’t properly excavated or a social norm I feel I’ve breached—the novel is my other therapist. These books are for anyone who’s ever left a place or a person, and for anyone who’s ever shamed themselves into trying to be a different way.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: Colde, “I’m Still Here.” Loud: Sleigh Bells, “A/B Machines.”

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: Throughout my life, I’ve unfortunately discarded various cultural products out of a desire to be “cool.” An exception: I watched Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animation, My Neighbor Totoro, for the first time when I was 12 and have loved it steadily ever since (it’s my Wi-Fi name). The movie is about bravery in all of its forms, and the friendly woodland spirits that aid the main characters are the cutest things ever created. Something I am ejecting from my life, however, is Zoolander. Please, no one quote it at me ever again.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I’m trying to rein in my shopping to only pre-owned stuff (because, well, this, this, this, and this), but the constraint means I’ve become an absolute Facebook Marketplace and Buy Nothing group monster. Free plastic bucket?! Gimme.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: My name is Cecilia, and I live on Svalbard, an island close to the North Pole. I discovered Cecilia Blomdahl during lockdown, when she showed how cozy life in a tiny cabin just outside Longyearbyen could be despite its months of polar night. Her videos are cheerful, controversy-free (knock on wood) curiosities about the small excitements of life, such as a nice grocery-store vegetable or tidying up a modest home.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: The first time I encountered Bluey, an Australian animated children’s series about an anthropomorphic cattle-dog family, I was with a 3-year-old watching an episode called “Copycat.” Like most episodes in the series, this one is about encountering a difficult subject (death) and then processing big feelings through play. As my colleague David Sims has written, the show “trusts that its young audience will be able to understand stories that are about the foibles and insecurities of parents too.” People without children in their life can still appreciate the same about Bluey. And adults could stand to learn a few things from kids about the foundation of good relationships. [Related: In praise of Bluey, the most grown-up television show for children]

A good recommendation I recently received: A friend introduced me to an Asian and Hispanic grocery-delivery service called Weee! (three e’s), and after resisting online ordering for the past 10 years, I now drown myself weekly in Asian snacks. I’m so excited to be able to buy food from my childhood, such as canned fried dace in black-bean sauce and braised gluten in a box. My Proustian madeleines, except venture-backed and delivered within 48 hours of purchase.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: The chair-pants episode of Jury Duty. I shan’t elaborate. [Related: Jury Duty is terrific TV. It shouldn’t get another season.]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: We published James Baldwin’s short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” in our September 1960 issue. It was later included in his 1965 collection, Going to Meet the Man. I stumbled upon it recently while doing some research in our archives. It’s wonderful down to the final sentence:

“I open the cage and we step inside. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘all the way to the new world.’ I press the button and the cage, holding my son and me, goes up.”

The Week Ahead

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, the third installment of the romantic-comedy franchise written and directed by Nia Vardalos (in theaters Friday) Guts, Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album (out Friday) Holly, a new novel by Stephen King (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Scott Dudelson / Getty / Youtube.

The Real Men South of Richmond

By Spencer Kornhaber

In an era of artificial wonders, authenticity—or at least the illusion of it—is only going to become a more coveted commodity. Perhaps that’s one reason country music has ruled the highest reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 for most of the summer. And no one is selling authenticity like Oliver Anthony, a former factory worker from Virginia who was totally unknown until his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” hit No. 1 two weeks ago. His rise is surprising, but it also fits with a long pattern of audiences cherishing—and power brokers exploiting—figures who seem like the real deal.

Read the full article.

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Jonay Ravelo and his horse Nivaria observe the rising full moon from a mountain in Mogán, in Gran Canaria, Spain, on August 31, 2023.

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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In recent years, a massive selection of new drinks has popped up on the market, including a spate of alcoholic seltzers and a bunch of no-alcohol options. To discuss the state of beverages ahead of the long weekend, I convened a roundtable with our health and technology writers Amanda Mull, Ian Bogost, and Charlie Warzel.

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

Retailers bet wrong on America’s feelings about stores. The other work remote workers get done America needs hunting more than it knows.

Throwing Drinks at the Wall

Lora Kelley: Why are there so many drinks on the market right now?

Amanda Mull: Part of it is the economics of the drinks industry. There’s pretty low overhead relative to a lot of other food categories. One of the biggest costs is shipping, but everything else that goes into making a beverage—the ingredients, one of which is just water; the ability to find a manufacturer; the shelf life—is pretty favorable. So profit margins are better than in other areas of packaged food. It’s a friendly area to get into.

Also, in a lot of consumer categories, trying to switch someone from one product to another is a really expensive and difficult enterprise. But in beverages, you have a lot of people in a very large market who are open to and actively seeking new options.

Ian Bogost: The global nonalcoholic beverage market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. If you can capture a very tiny fraction of this enormous market, it can be extremely lucrative.

Charlie Warzel: I read some Kantar market research that found that the number of “beverage occasions” has remained static, at about 35 a week, but the way that people are consuming their beverages is different, and what they want out of them is different. It seems there is a shift toward emotional experiences with beverages. People aren’t drinking beverages more frequently, necessarily, but how we’re doing it has changed.

I moved away from New York City in 2017. Going into a bodega in 2023 in New York City now, from a beverage standpoint, is a truly mind-blowing experience. It feels like being a kid at a toy store. I have so many different options—this one might soothe me; this one sort of tastes like a root-beer float.

Ian: The precursors to this situation we’re in are also worth mentioning. The rise of bottled water is, of course, huge—people shifted from thinking of hydration as drinking from a fountain to picking up water as a packaged good. And then there was the Starbucks-ification of coffee. The third thing is, the number of impulse-purchase opportunities has massively increased both in stores and everywhere else, including in places that wouldn’t have sold you a beverage in the past. And the fourth thing is just market segmentation and lifestyle marketing in general. Now you can feel you’re the kind of person who would try Charlie’s calming beverage or root-beer beverage or the CBD drink or whatever it is. You are marking identity with much greater willingness and self-consciousness than just having a brand affiliation.

Lora: Is this much variety good for consumers? For example, who would something like a nonalcoholic White Claw—which is said to be coming next year—be for?

Amanda: We’re in a period of a lot of brands, both established and upstarts, throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. When companies can detect changing habits among people, there is this real rush to figure out what products address those new desires.

Charlie: Throwing stuff at the wall may also be an attempt to capture a weird bit of cultural virality. When Liquid Death was first announced, it was this weird start-up water, but it became a very successful brand. You laugh at it, then you’re buying it. It would be truly unhinged to be walking around at work with a nonalcoholic White Claw. But maybe that will take off among a strange segment of consumers, or get popular on TikTok.

Ian: Brand value, and brand management, used to be much more conservative than it is today. It was unthinkable—even in the 1990s, when there were a lot of new drinks—for a brand with the recognition of White Claw to imagine undermining that by confusing the consumer about their value proposition. Instead, what a beverage company would have done is launch a different brand. For whatever reason, there’s now a willingness to experiment with brand properties. Social media is definitely a part of it.

As for whether this is good for consumers: It’s absolutely bad to have all of these packaged goods and all the plastic. But capitalism says that choice is always good for consumers. On the one hand, you’re like, Maybe there’s too much choice. But then you think about all the parts of the economy where you have almost no choice or no choice at all. If there was only one drink or three drinks, that would be worse.

Lora: To what extent have we reached peak beverage? Will the market keep growing?

Amanda: Generally, in consumer markets, when you see this quick expansion in the players and the products, you eventually do see a shakeout. There is stuff that just won’t work: It won’t be sustainable on a revenue basis; it won’t find a market; it won’t have a viral moment. So I think it will shake out eventually. I don’t know if we’re there yet.

I think there’s probably still room to grow, especially with growing interest in low-alcohol or no-alcohol drinks. And I think there’s probably room left in the athletic-hydration market, which expands out into the hangover market. Over the course of industrialized-beverage history, I don’t know if there’s ever been a period of real contraction. It just keeps growing.

Ian: I don't think there’s peak beverage. The universe expands.

Charlie: Look at the change in habits around drinking alcohol. There are people that are saying, “It’s very clear that alcohol is very bad for you; we should be drinking less.” But for many people, that means adding more things to their arsenal of drinking.

I keep Athletic Brewing IPAs in my fridge, and I also, on occasion, will have a regular IPA. Now I am buying two different things. In my own life, I see how my beverage universe has expanded just because I have a slight change in my own habits and preferences.

Lora: Before we go, what are you all drinking right now?

Amanda: I have a lemon-lime Liquid I.V. in like 35 ounces of water.

Ian: This is just coffee out of our office espresso machine.

Charlie: I don’t have it on me, but this summer, I discovered the Waterloo brand of seltzers, and it’s a revelation. It’s the beverage of the summer.

Ian: A year or two ago, I became a pure LaCroix drinker. I kind of burned through the flavored LaCroix, and now I’m almost exclusively a plain-seltzer drinker. It feels like getting back to basics.

Related:

Drinking water is easy. Just add stuff to it. All soda is lemon-lime soda.

Today’s News

The August jobs report showed steady hiring and increased unemployment in the U.S. Russia has placed its new nuclear-weapons system, the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, on combat duty. Hong Kong and Guangdong canceled flights and evacuated almost 800,000 people to prepare for the arrival of Typhoon Saola.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman asks: Could AI ever write like Stephen King and Margaret Atwood?

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Supreme Court Justices Are Just Like Anyone Else

By Adriane Fugh-Berman

What do some Supreme Court justices and physicians have in common? Both take gifts from those who stand to profit from their decisions, and both mistakenly think they can’t be swayed by those gifts.

Gifts are not only tokens of regard; they are the grease and the glue that help maintain a relationship. That’s not always unhealthy, but it’s important to note that gifts create obligation. The indebtedness of the recipient to the giver is a social norm in all cultures, and a basic principle of human interaction—something the French sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote about in his classic essay The Gift.

This sense of reciprocity is subconscious and powerful, and doesn’t necessarily require a quid pro quo. In other words, a material gift need not be reciprocated as a material gift, but may be reciprocated in other ways, including a more favorable bent toward a company, a group, or a person.

Read the full article.

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Patrick Harbron / Hulu

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Watch. Meryl Streep is giving yet another killer performance in Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building (streaming on Hulu).

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.