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 our Science editor Sarah Laskow. Sarah recently investigated whether salsa is gazpacho—and whether gazpacho is salsa. She’s also explored how America’s lost crops rewrite the history of farming.

Sarah is enjoying the sincerity in The Golden Bachelor, despite its cringiest moments; regretting her Shins phase as a New Jersey teen; and thinking about the incredible quantity of oranges consumed in a wonderful children’s book.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Books that changed how our writers and editors think Why America doesn’t build Are pet cloners happy with their choice?

The Culture Survey: Sarah Laskow

The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: Killers of the Flower Moon. I think if you say the words “Martin Scorsese is adapting a David Grann book,” a certain sphere of people will accept point-blank that they have to experience that.

The best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: On the plane to a friend’s wedding in Greece, I decided that as a mom leaving her kids behind to spend time in Athens, I might as well reread Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which begins on a plane with a mom leaving her kids behind to spend time in Athens. I’m not divorced and did not meet a Greek shipping heir on the plane, but I did end up later having drinks with someone who told a story about their complicated relationship with a Greek shipping heir, which I swear Cusk could have written. I wondered if that was why I loved this book even more than the first time I read it. But really I was just so swept away by the way the book works: The narrator is constantly listening to other people tell her stories about their lives, sometimes invited, sometimes less so, which means the novel is both a collection of vignettes with many narrators and a portrait of the narrator, who’s defined as much by what she doesn’t say as by what she does. It’s truly incredible that Cusk wrote this book in three weeks (although three weeks without children does sound like a luxury of time).

On that same trip, I also read Rick Steves’s Pocket Athens, and specifically the chapter that guides you through the National Archaeological Museum. It is a peerless work of a very specific genre of nonfiction. It does exactly the job it needs to, illuminating the story of Greek sculpture for the casual tourist who has no background in the subject. (A friend recommended the guide-museum combo, which made me wonder the same thing about Rick Steves that I wonder about bird-watching: Is it getting more popular, or am I just getting old?) The highlight of the museum, for me, was the Mask of Agamemnon—I’ve seen so many images of it over the course of my life, but the real thing was so shiny and beautifully made; seeing it among the other burial objects with which it was discovered made me imagine the excitement of an archaeological dig where piece after piece of gold emerged from the ground after being buried for thousands of years. [Related: Rachel Cusk won’t stay still.]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: On the theme of ancient treasures, I’m obsessed with The Golden Bachelor. I haven’t been a particular fan of the series—in fact, I identify with the subset of semi-clueless contestants on this season who need to be reminded what the roses and date cards mean. The show can’t quite escape itself: It’s still about a group of extremely groomed women fighting over a man. But I find this particular iteration compelling as a portrait of Boomers and how they imagine the later stages of life. The bachelor in question, Gerry, comes across as both disarmingly genuine and gratingly of his time. I cringed when he ordered food without really stopping to ask what his date might want. That old-fashioned tinge, though, is part of why I’m watching. Like the best reality TV, the show has just enough sincerity to make me root for at least some of these very cheesy people.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: Whitney Houston’s Whitney has always been one of the best albums to listen to, and belt along to, even if, like me, you are a terrible singer. On the other end of the spectrum is the Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow, which just had its 20th anniversary—and which I listened to on repeat at one point in my life. Something about the band’s wordy music spoke to my suburban–New Jersey teenage dissatisfactions, although I always felt a little betrayed that the Shins’ fame was so closely tied to Garden State, a bad film. (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is a much more true portrait of Jersey vibes.) But now I mostly find these songs whiny and can’t stand to listen to any for more than 20 seconds.

Something I recently revisited: My brother-in-law and nephew recently started reading My Father’s Dragon; my 3-year-old isn’t so interested yet, but when I reread the first few chapters—in which Elmer, the young protagonist, meets a cat, learns about a captive dragon, packs his bag with two dozen pink lollipops, and stows away on a ship—I remembered why I had loved it as a kid. One detail I had forgotten is just how many tangerines Elmer consumes after landing on the island of Tangerina. At one point he puts 31 in his bag, then later eats eight in one go and then three more a few hours after. I can eat a lot of small citrus fruits, but that’s a lot of tangerines.

The Week Ahead

The Gilded Age, a period drama set in New York City during the economic change of the 1880s, comes out with its second season (premieres on HBO today). In The Reformatory, a novel by Tananarive Due, a boy who is sent to a segregated reform school in Jim Crow Florida sees ghosts—and the truth (on sale Tuesday). Priscilla tells the story of the teenage girl whom Elvis Presley fell in love with, and the life they built together (in theaters Friday).

Essay

TCD / Prod.DB / Alamy

The Hero Gen Z Needs

By Elise Hanuum

Snoopy was everywhere when I was growing up, in the early 2000s. On TV, the cartoon beagle appeared as a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and starred in the holiday specials my family watched; in real life, his statues were all over Saint Paul, Minnesota, a hometown I share with the Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. After I left for college, Snoopy largely disappeared from my life. But recently, I’ve started encountering him all over again, on social media.

The TikTok account @snooopyiscool, also known as Snoopy Sister, went viral earlier this year and has more than half a million followers. Other Snoopy videos on the app regularly rack up thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of views. This online resurgence, primarily among young people, has mostly been fueled by short, shareable Peanuts clips set to surprisingly apt contemporary music. In them, Charlie Brown’s intrepid pet beagle tags along on the kids’ adventures—they often face some sort of problem but aren’t always left with an easy solution … It seems that a new generation is finally seeing Snoopy for who he really is.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Britney finally tells her story. It’s dark. Sadness and triumph at a Massachusetts boarding school Pain Hustlers is a goofy celebration of greed. “The whole country has PTSD.” A movie about the perils of being a control freak Is a coincidental similarity enough for real intimacy? When America helped assassinate an African leader SNL didn’t need subtitles. Poem: The mowing that woke my daughter

Catch Up on The Atlantic

“How much blood is your fun worth?” Hurricane Otis was too fast for the forecasters. Franklin Foer: “Tell me how this ends.”

Photo Album

Lucerne Bell of Team USA competes in the women’s 400-meter individual medley swimming event at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile. (Francois-Xavier Marit / AFP / Getty)

Shrimp fishing on a Belgian beach, the WNBA-championship victory parade in Las Vegas, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu 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 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

What Sidney Powell’s deal could mean for the Fulton County case against Trump The annoyance economy How a common stomach bug causes cancer

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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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 our associate editor Kate Cray. Kate edits for our Family section; she’s also reported on what semi-retirees know about work-life balance and made the case against the fun fact.

Kate is watching a therapy-centered reality show that’s more like a documentary, exercising great patience in the lead-up to Olivia Rodrigo’s D.C. concert next summer, and reminiscing on the joy—and secondhand embarrassment—of seeing Bottoms in theaters.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The Kamala Harris problem What Madonna knows Why the most successful marriages are start-ups, not mergers

The Culture Survey: Kate Cray

A good recommendation I recently received: One of my best friends, who is getting her Psy.D., suggested a few months ago that I check out Couples Therapy; I’d been curious about her future profession, and she knows the thrill I get from analyzing strangers’ interpersonal dynamics. I went in expecting reality TV, but what I got was closer to a documentary. The show simply records the psychologist Orna Guralnik’s sessions with clients over the course of their treatment. There are no producer-provoked theatrics, but there don’t need to be. The tension that can arise after decades of marriage (or even just years together) is more than enough.

Villains do emerge, but the conceit of the show inherently injects nuance into any one-note portrayal, and many people seem to genuinely grow—this is therapy, after all. Guralnik probes gently at first, then insistently, uncovering the childhood wounds playing out in each pair’s relationship. But the episodes’ most satisfying moments come when her clients arrive at these types of realizations on their own; they identify the ways they’re hurting a partner and commit to doing better.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I never dared to imagine that it could be possible to unite the disparate poles of my humor into one film until I saw Bottoms, which perfectly marries queer feminist comedy and immature scatalogical gags in a masterpiece of cringe. I may have laughed more uproariously at certain moments than others (“Feminism. Who started it? (a) Gloria Steinem, (b) a man, (c) another woman”), but I was vibrating the entire time, even at moments that weren’t traditionally comic. For example, when the opening chords of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” came on after a fight between the two protagonists, the audience erupted. I left the theater high on life, immediately texted my funniest friend to recommend it (her reply: “Bitch I’ve seen it twice!!!”), and listened to Lavigne’s anthem on repeat for a week. I can’t remember the last time I experienced so much secondhand embarrassment, or so much fun. [Related: The raunchy teen comedy gets a queer twist.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I took a dream vacation to Japan this past summer, and one of my favorite stops in Tokyo was the Sumida Hokusai Museum. Its collection unfortunately doesn’t have as many of Hokusai’s original prints as I’d hoped—many of them live in the Freer Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C.—but the curation was still masterful, helping me understand the artist as I hadn’t before. I especially enjoyed perusing the popular sketchbook series he created, which promises to teach readers how to draw. The simpler, more relaxed line illustrations in those books offer a different window into his style than his more formal prints do. Plus, who wouldn’t want Hokusai as their art teacher?

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: My housemate recently scored us tickets to Olivia Rodrigo’s tour. I’ve got a while to wait—she’s not hitting D.C. until next July—but I’m confident my patience will pay off. The serotonin boost from hearing “Good 4 U” live, if she plays it, is sure to sustain me for at least a month. [Related: The problem Olivia Rodrigo can’t solve]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I’ve heard people talking about Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels for years. I don’t know how or why I held out on reading them for so long, but I do know that the delay was my mistake. Other books just aren’t like this. I was subsumed entirely into the protagonist Elena’s mind, the Naples neighborhood she grew up in, and her messy but absorbing relationship with her childhood friend Lila. I know how intoxicating bonds like that can be, and I’ve never seen one captured so well on the page before.

I read a lot of nonfiction in search of excerpts and original pieces for our Family section. That’s how I came across Leah Myers’s Thinning Blood, which seamlessly combines memoir, history, and myth in a fascinating story about her ancestors, herself, and her tribe’s future. I may have started the book for work, but I finished it for pleasure. [Related: Blood-quantum laws are splintering my tribe.]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: It’s hard to compete with our magazine features (“Jenisha From Kentucky,” which a few of my colleagues have already recommended, is one of the best of those, ever), but for people looking for something shorter, Amanda Mull’s observations in “Bama Rush Is a Strange, Sparkly Window Into How America Shops” have stuck with me since I first read the story over the summer. Much like those sorority hopefuls, I too will pair an expensive ring and a cheap polyester dress in one outfit without much thought—a choice that, Mull points out, is a relative historical novelty. I’ve long been fascinated by the sometimes-convoluted ways that consumption choices serve as status signifiers, and Mull’s argument about how the internet is changing that relationship is so sharp.

An author I will read anything by: I received Norwegian Wood as a birthday gift of obligation from a peripheral friend in high school, decided to actually read it when I was rushing to the airport and had nothing else on hand to entertain me, and have been devouring Haruki Murakami ever since. In many books and shows, plot structures are familiar enough that I often end up guessing what will happen next and spoiling it for myself, but with Murakami, I never know what’s coming. Reading him is just so refreshing. A favorite is hard to pick, but Kafka on the Shore stands out. Or, for a slightly less heralded work, I also really enjoyed Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. [Related: Haruki Murakami on where his characters come from]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” may open like a philosophical treatise, but it grows more tender as it unfurls, ultimately arriving at a moment of such reverence that I’m convinced the last line should be recited as a prayer: “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

The Week Ahead

The American Buffalo, a documentary by Ken Burns, traces the animal’s significance to Indigenous communities, as well as its near-extinction (premieres Monday on PBS). Tremor, a new novel by Teju Cole, focuses on a West African photography professor and the violence in the everyday (on sale Tuesday). Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, based on David Grann’s book about the Osage Indian murders (in theaters Friday)

Essay

The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity

A sallow light rises over the land at the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the most celebrated movies of the 20th century. Stanley Kubrick’s shot pulls in on a band of furry man-apes gathering around a watering hole; no women, no children—or at least none easily discerned. The scene shifts to a young male, who pulls a large bone from a skeleton. He stares at it for a moment before beating the ground, slowly at first, then furiously. He soon runs off and uses it to bludgeon another hominin to death. Prehistoric man has invented the first weapon.

This is the story of what I call “tool triumphalism”: Man invented weapons, claimed dominion over his peers and the rest of the animal kingdom, and all of our achievements flow from there. As a culture, we still tell ourselves that this special cleverness is why we’ve succeeded as a species. And maybe that’s true—but not in the way you might think. Among our ancient ancestors, the most prolific tool creators probably weren’t male. And I propose that the most important early invention people came up with probably wasn’t a weapon, fire, agriculture, the wheel, or even penicillin. Humanity’s greatest innovation was gynecology.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Lizzo was a new kind of diva. Now she’s in a new kind of scandal. The journalist and the fallen billionaire A shocked and frazzled collective mind The least-known rock god Poem: Rauschenberg & Johns

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Israel is walking into a trap. Steve Scalise bows out. The progressives who flunked the Hamas test

Photo Album

Iceland from above, with a bridge extending from left to right while abstract shapes emerge from flowing river water originating from a glacier (José D. Riquelme / The 14th Epson International Pano Awards)

Swimming with whale sharks, feeding time for thousands of ducks, and more in our editor’s selection of winning photos from the 2023 Epson International Pano Awards.

Katherine Hu 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.

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 staff writer Olga Khazan. Olga has recently written about not liking dogs (and joining a rather intense Subreddit of people who share that unpopular opinion), and why married people are happier than the rest of us. She’s also working on a book about personality change.

Olga revisited Speed recently and found it surprisingly believable, would love a lifetime subscription to all of Gary Shteyngart’s writing, and is reflecting with some confusion on her 13-year-old self’s love of Celtic ballads.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Group-chat culture is out of control. These 183,000 books are fueling the biggest fight in publishing and tech. Good luck getting into the club.

The Culture Survey: Olga Khazan

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I actually don’t watch a ton of blockbusters, but in the early pandemic, I got extremely bored, drank half a bottle of wine, and rewatched Speed on a cold night. It honestly holds up! You kind of believe that a Los Angeles city bus could, under the deft guidance of Keanu Reeves, jump an unfinished section of a freeway overpass. If you’re a ’90s kid, the movie is also much better viewed as an intact whole rather than broken up into 20-minute chunks on TNT, with your mom pressing a pillow to your face during the violent parts.

Instead of blockbusters, I almost exclusively watch foreign films, and a favorite of mine is Mustang, a 2015 Turkish movie about five sisters who try to resist their arranged marriages. I was going through this particularly radical-feminist era at the time, and it hit me in a way that few things do, really driving home the awful status of women in much of the world.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I haven’t read many novels lately; I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction, because I’m working on my own nonfiction book. So instead, I have two nonfiction recs, both mind-blowing books about topics I was not initially drawn to. First, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, by Kerry Howley, is ostensibly about the “deep state,” but it is so well-written, vivid, and empathetic that it could honestly have been about anything and I would still have devoured it. Second, The Mercenary, by Jeffrey E. Stern, is ostensibly about a driver in Afghanistan, but again, it’s so beautifully told and riveting that it’s a page-turner even for people who don’t care about foreign policy. I haven’t stayed up reading this late in a long time.

An author I will read anything by: Gary Shteyngart. If I could sign up for some sort of Amazon-style lifetime subscription where every time he writes something, it gets automatically downloaded to my devices for a prearranged price, I would absolutely do it. I’ll be honest: I like him in part because he’s a Russian immigrant like me, and something about his prose feels familiar, like it echoes certain rhythms from my childhood. But also, I just think he writes excellent sentences and is extremely funny. [Related: I watched Russian television for five days straight.]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: “Sister,” by TSHA; it’s hard not to snap into a sun salutation with this one going.

Loud: I first started listening to “Cha Cha Cha,” by the Finnish Eurovision contestant Käärijä, as a bit. But as so often happens, it grew on me! The man looked at heavy metal, EDM, and the human centipede, and said, Why choose? When I went to my cousin’s wedding in Finland over the summer, this song came on around midnight, and all of the Finns lost their minds and started screaming, “Cha cha cha!” in their bowties. It was infectious, really.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: I think this counts as my teen years, but in early college, I was obsessed with the band the Postal Service, which was very big at the time. The fact that its hit song was about being young and lonely in D.C., where I was also young and lonely at the time, probably sealed the deal. For a while, I even lived in a gaudy apartment complex! It’s funny, because they were so big, but then they faded out rather quickly. (I was recently talking with someone four years younger than me, and she had never heard of them.) But I’m seeing the Postal Service, and their better-known associated band Death Cab for Cutie, in concert this week. So my fandom still runs deep.

One thing I’ve abandoned: When I was 13 or so, I signed up for one of those CD clubs that gave you 12 CDs for the price of one. One of the 12 CDs I chose was Riverdance, as in the backing musical track to the Irish tap-dancing show. I’m not sure what was going on with me, mentally or emotionally, that I wanted to listen to 70-some minutes of Celtic ballads. I think I was just a weird, sad little kid who thought I could escape my middle school and clog away to Ireland or something. Suffice to say that I’m no longer a Riverdance fan, though I hope they’re all doing well, wherever they are.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Everyone should read “A Sea Story,” by William Langewiesche, before they die—hopefully not at sea.

A good recommendation I recently received: I read Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas, on Ellen Cushing’s recommendation in an earlier iteration of this newsletter, and I loved it!

The Week Ahead

The MANIAC, a fictionalization of the life of John von Neumann by novelist Benjamín Labatut, centers the dark side of scientific genius (on sale Tuesday). The second season of Loki, a series that takes place after Avengers: Endgame (premieres on Disney+ on Thursday) In The Exorcist: Believer, a single father discovers that his daughter and her friend are possessed by demons (in theaters Friday).

Essay

Illustration by Vartika Sharma

The Parents Trying to Pass Down a Language They Hardly Speak

By Kat Chow

My mother used to tell a certain story at family parties when trying to explain why my sisters and I didn’t really speak Cantonese, my parents’ primary language. It’s probably a familiar narrative, especially to kids of immigrants in America. Still, it stung every time I heard it.

When my oldest sister, Steph, was in her suburban-Connecticut kindergarten, she returned home one afternoon embarrassed and upset, and insisted that our parents talk to her only in English. Steph was young and doesn’t remember the specifics, though the scenario is easy to imagine: some kid, probably oblivious but still cruel. Our parents, who came to the United States separately from Guangzhou, China, in the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Hong Kong, spoke mostly the Chinese dialects Cantonese and Taishanese to us, but also possessed fluent English from their education in colonial Hong Kong. They conceded to Steph’s request, my father told me, and we became a primarily English-speaking household. Although my sisters and I could understand and speak some Cantonese (mine was the most limited, because I was the youngest; I was born a few years after Steph’s kindergarten incident), the ability faded as we aged.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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