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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 our supervisory senior associate editor Rachel Gutman-Wei, who works on our Science, Technology, and Health team. Rachel has reported on how handwriting lost its personality and made the case for eating raw batter. She also once ate an apple that had been sitting in the Atlantic offices for more than 400 days during the pandemic. (Those of us who know Rachel are a tad worried about her dietary choices.)

Rachel is currently forgoing social media in favor of the New York Times Games app, defending a high-fantasy series her friends are divided about, and regretting her decision to see the stage adaptation of Moulin Rouge.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Self-checkout is a failed experiment. A worthy heir to David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon MAGA Bluey is stressing people out.

The Culture Survey: Rachel Gutman-Wei

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I loved the audiobook of Blake Crouch’s Recursion, a sci-fi novel in which a mysterious plague called “false memory syndrome” sweeps the globe. For one thing, it’s technically impressive: Crouch deftly handles overlapping, interdependent timelines and the intricate system of rules he sets up for the book’s universe. I also found it personally meaningful: I have a history of bad nightmares, and characters’ experiences with FMS, in which tragedies they vividly remember aren’t real to anyone else, made me feel deeply understood.

I don’t read many nonfiction books (I tend to think too hard about how I would’ve edited them), but this spring, I devoured Sabrina Imbler’s memoir, How Far the Light Reaches. Imbler gracefully weaves together stories from wildlife and their own life, and allows discomfort and beauty to inhabit the same page. More than one chapter made me stop reading to reconsider how I see both the natural world and the human one. [Related: The “mother of the year” who starved for 53 months]

A good recommendation I recently received: My colleague Marina Koren recommended Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican Gothic to me years ago, but I only got around to the audiobook this summer, and I loved it. The story, set in 1950s Mexico, follows a young socialite as she visits her cousin, who has married into a cold and reclusive English family that is most definitely hiding something. It’s delightfully, mysteriously creepy—spooky season is a great time to read it.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Earlier this year, I learned that some music I thought was quiet could be very, very loud. I managed to snag tickets to the Atlantis, a new venue in D.C. that holds fewer than 500 people, for a concert by the Head and the Heart. I’ve described their music to uninitiated friends as “chill” and “gentle,” but when the six-piece band crowded into that tiny space, the effect was overwhelming. I especially enjoyed screaming along during “Down in the Valley,” a song I used to think was a bittersweet lamentation for the parts of yourself you can’t change. Now I see it as a celebration of those parts.

I love just about any song I can belt along to, but my current obsession is Muna’s “I Know a Place.” It’s about finding somewhere you know you belong, and people who are there for you even when you’re hurting. I swear my soul left my body when I saw the song performed live. (If you were standing next to me at the Anthem that night, I most certainly stomped on your feet by accident while jumping three feet in the air, and I am very sorry.)

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I’m currently abstaining from social media, so the No. 1 way I’ve been turning my brain off is through the New York Times Games app. My mom, my sister, and I all wake up with Connections and Wordle and send one another our scores. I work on the medium and hard Sudokus in my downtime and play Spelling Bee with my husband over dinner. The games add a little quiet ritual to my day, and they feel unlike social-media time-wasting in two important ways: First, I’m very aware that I’m doing something meaningless. And second, you only get one of each puzzle a day, so there’s no risk of infinite scroll. [Related: The unspoken language of crosswords]

The last debate I had about culture: Last year, my friends got me into A Court of Thorns and Roses, a high-fantasy series by Sarah J. Maas that was all over BookTok. (I am not on TikTok, but my understanding is that ACOTAR, as we fans call it, is still quite prominent there.) I was recently on a hike with another friend, who said that she got midway through the second book before giving up in exasperation. She felt betrayed, because she’d been told that the books were literary (nope), feminist (hardly), wildly sexy (eh) vehicles of ingenious world-building (your mileage may vary). I grant my friend, who is a discerning reader, all of these points. But I would fight a Blood Duel to defend ACOTAR’s honor as an unfailingly entertaining set of page-turners, and I can’t wait for Maas to finish the next installment.

Something I recently revisited: My sister is a fierce fan of Moulin Rouge, the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film, so when I saw that the national tour of the stage adaptation was coming to D.C. this fall, I bought us tickets. By midway through the first act, when, instead of the movie’s melancholy-yet-defiant rendition of Randy Crawford’s “One Day I’ll Fly Away,” Satine sings Katy Perry’s “Firework,” we both realized that we’d made a terrible mistake. Things only went downhill from there; we lost it when, at the show’s emotional climax, Christian began singing Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” My sister came over later that week to watch the original, and we both felt much better.

The last thing that made me cry: Moulin Rouge the movie.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Moulin Rouge the musical.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Tara Skurtu’s “Morning Love Poem” wrings my heart out like a sponge. Here are the opening stanzas:

Dreamt last night I fed you, unknowingly,

something you were allergic to.

And you were gone, like that.

You don’t have even a single allergy,

but still. The dream cracked.

The Week Ahead

Let Us Descend, a new novel by Jesmyn Ward, follows an enslaved woman who opens herself up to the spirit world (on sale Tuesday). [Plus: Read a short story adapted from it in The Atlantic.] Fingernails, a sci-fi romance film in which a woman explores whether you can love two people at the same time (limited theatrical release begins Friday) The limited-series drama Fellow Travelers follows two men who fall in love during the height of McCarthyism (premieres Friday on Showtime).

Essay

Melinda Sue Gordon / Apple TV+

A Slow, Staggering American Conspiracy

By David Sims

When the World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) gets off the train in Osage County, Oklahoma, he is walking into the turn-of-the-century boomtown of Fairfax, a bustling throng of activity that has sprung up out of nowhere following the discovery of oil. Wandering salesmen press leaflets into his hand and promise he can get rich quick; luxurious automobiles buzz around, the atmosphere pulsing with a feeling of runaway success. But as Burkhart is driven by an Osage man named Henry out to the countryside through fields of pumping derricks, he asks whose land he’s on. “My land,” Henry says gruffly.

As it thrusts the viewer into this epic tableau, a world of sudden and overwhelming wealth at the start of the 20th century, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is suffused with the dreadful sense of storm clouds gathering on every horizon. Adapted from David Grann’s best-selling book, the film explores the history of the Osage Nation as it reaped the rewards of oil residing underneath its land and immediately found itself in the crosshairs of an overwhelming force: pioneering American exceptionalism, which Scorsese demands that the viewer recognize as brutal white supremacy.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

You can learn to be photogenic. Taylor Swift did what Hollywood studios could not. Pete Davidson might be the comedic hero we need now. No, really. Only Wes Anderson could have adapted Roald Dahl this way. Jesmyn Ward: “She Who Remembers” Why children are everywhere in Louise Glück’s poetry A poet reckons with her past. Nine books that push against the status quo An elegy for a late, great American composer Beware the language that erases reality. Poem: “Explaining Pain”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

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Photo Album

Tourists take a boat ride through Pingshan Grand Canyon, in Hefeng County, China.(Ruan Wenjun / VCG / Getty)

A cranberry harvest in Massachusetts, a new science-fiction museum in China, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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