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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 Vann R. Newkirk II, a senior editor and the host of the podcasts Floodlines and Holy Week.

Vann is spending time with Sampha’s new album, about the starts and stops of healing; marveling at the storytelling in The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois; and sneaking off to build his son’s Legos while he’s asleep.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Do you have free will? Xochitl Gonzalez: “Me and my bosom” Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla unearths a delicate truth.

The Culture Survey: Vann R. Newkirk II

A musical artist who means a lot to me: I have to give a shout-out to Sampha, whose new album, Lahai, has been playing nonstop around here. I’m a major Sampha fan, and his previous album, Process, was a meditation on grief, prompted by his mother’s death. That album was important to me in processing my own mother’s death, in 2020. His new joint is about the starts and stops of healing after that kind of rupture, and is tethered to the experience of becoming a father. Towing around a 6-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, I find this album just as affecting and personal.

An actor I would watch in anything: If Brian Tyree Henry is in it, I’m there. Also, Jesse Plemons.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: It’s been two years since I first read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, and although I have piles and piles of unread books waiting for me, I decided to revisit the book this summer. I found it just as wonderful as the first time I read it. As a Black southerner myself, I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that’s so true to my own family experiences and so full of intricately written characters. Jeffers’s depiction of the Black southern family experience would itself be worth the price of the book, but she also connects that story to the saga of Indigenous, Black, and white forebears and their own trials and dramas. I’ll probably reread the book again sometime soon.

On the nonfiction front, I just finished Chad L. Williams’s The Wounded World, which explores W. E. B. Du Bois’s ill-fated attempt to write a history of Black troops in World War I, and how that conflict radically changed him and his thinking. I enjoyed it purely on a prose level, but the meticulous historical work also helps the reader understand, through Du Bois, how the making of the modern world changed the global discourse around race and class in society. [Related: Writing in the ruins]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: For a quiet song, I absolutely adore the version of “Stardust” on John Coltrane’s 1963 album of the same name. It’s a glass of cognac and fuzzy slippers. There’s texture in Coltrane’s sax. You just feel sophisticated listening to it.

The first song that comes to mind when I even think of “loud songs” is “Infinity Guitars,” by Sleigh Bells. Obviously, Sleigh Bells is a noise band, so this is kind of their thing, but “Infinity Guitars” is where it all comes together for me. The drums are infectious.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: The ongoing Afrofuturism exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in D.C., is amazing. It’s got such a wide lens on the makings of Afrofuturism, and it’s visually stunning.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: If you are reading this and somehow haven’t read my colleague Jenisha Watts’s “Jenisha From Kentucky,” our October cover story, please do that immediately. I was privileged to be able to talk with Jenisha often as she decided to start writing her own story, and that experience has been one of the great honors of my life. Jenisha is a marvel of a writer and an editor and a colleague, and she marshaled everything into a masterpiece that I think every single person should read.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Working.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: I should say “reintroduced” here, but my 6-year-old son, Benjamin, is really into Legos, and he’s helped me rekindle my love for them. There’s nothing better than settling in and working on a set with him—or sneaking off when he’s asleep to work on it myself.

The Week Ahead

The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, a zany lockdown tale about how the present affects the way we understand our past (on sale Tuesday) David Fincher’s The Killer, a darkly funny look at a cold-blooded murderer’s tedious daily routine (in theaters Friday) The fourth season of For All Mankind, which imagines an alternate history in which the space race never ended (premieres on Apple TV+ Friday)

Essay

Courtesy of BIGHIT MUSIC

Jungkook of BTS Is Chasing His Pop-Star Dream

By Lenika Cruz

When my video call with Jungkook begins, he has the look of someone roused too early from a good sleep. On camera, the youngest member of the South Korean pop group BTS is wearing a black zip-up, hood pulled over his head in a way that suggests he’d enjoy a nap—a little surprising, given his reputation among fans as an indefatigable “energizer bunny.” We’re less than two weeks away from the release of his first solo album, Golden, and his days are packed with dance practices, rehearsals, video shoots, interviews with overseas press. The exhausting demands of promotion aren’t new to him—he’s been with BTS for more than a decade, racking up best-selling albums, Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s, sold-out stadium concerts, and world records. But this is Jungkook’s first time releasing a full record on his own, and it happens to all be in English.

At first, Jungkook felt conflicted about this. “I was thinking, Is it okay for a Korean to not release Korean songs at all?” the 26-year-old singer told me through an interpreter, from his entertainment company’s office in Seoul. BTS achieved global popularity while making music almost entirely in their native language, with the exception of a few English-language hits such as “Dynamite” and “Butter.” At the same time, the whole point of his solo effort was to challenge himself—and exclusively singing in English seemed like one good way to do that.

Read the full article.

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What Matthew Perry knew about comedy Taylor Swift’s Tinder masterpiece Dear Therapist: I cannot support my mother’s marriage. A movie about the singular intensity of endurance athletes The tech that’s radically reimagining the public sphere I didn’t know I could feel so tired. Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher really understands Poe. Six books that will scare you—and make you think Why AI doesn’t get slang Who made the Oxford English Dictionary? The simple truths of Nate Bargatze on SNL Poem: “The Heart”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

What the 2024 election is really about for Trump supporters New York is too expensive to even visit. Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling.

Photo Album

An aerial view of autumn leaves falling from trees that line a road near Frankfurt, Germany (Michael Probst / AP)

A Halloween parade in New York City, a foggy sunrise over the Great Wall of 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.

I’m a night person, and I say: The rest of the world needs to sleep later.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Xochitl Gonzalez: “Me and my bosom” Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling. The theory of Hamas’s catastrophic success

Creatures of the Night

This is the time of year when opponents of changing the clocks go on about why it’s unhealthy to fall out of sync with the sun, about why a practice first instituted more than a century ago is outdated, about how much human productivity is lost while we all run around changing the hands and digits on timepieces. Those are all great arguments, and I agree with them, but that’s not really why I hate letting go of daylight saving time.

I hate it because, as a general rule, I cannot stand Morning People. I do not like to cede even one minute to those chipper and virtuous larks, the co-workers who send you emails marked “5:01 a.m.” and who schedule “breakfast meetings” at dawn so we can all do some work before we get on with … doing more work. They are my natural enemy, and I refuse to entertain their caterwauling about waking up in the dark.

Look, I love daylight. I bathe in the rays of summer. I live for the sharp definition of a sunny autumn morning. I am enchanted by the brilliance of a bright winter vista. But I am a Night Person. An owl. A Nosferatu. I move in the shadows. I am vengeance; I am the night; I am Batman.

Okay, I’m not Batman, but I am one of those people who can stay up late and remain completely alert. When I drove a taxi in graduate school, I did the 5 p.m.–to–5 a.m. shift almost effortlessly. I’d hit the road, take people on their dates, and pick them up after their dates. (Sometimes that part wasn’t so pretty.) I’d drive bartenders home after the bars closed; later, I would ferry the, ah, ladies of the evening to their residences once the city finally slumbered. Then I’d have some coffee from the all-night Dunkin’ with cops and other night-shift folks, get the early fliers to the airport, go home, and take a nap.

When I was a volunteer for a suicide-prevention hotline, I worked the weekend late shift, where you’d better be on your game in the middle of the night. I’d do my best to be a supportive listener—sometimes during scary moments—and then I’d walk out at 4 a.m. feeling fine, ready for breakfast and a nap.

But ask me to get up at 4 a.m.? What is this, Russia?

Actually, that jibe is inaccurate: Russia, for many reasons, is mostly a night-owl culture. Be it under Soviet dictatorship, during the brief years of democracy, or under Vladimir Putin’s neofascism, Russian offices tend to be empty early in the morning. But Americans still venerate the idea that mornings are super productive, and every year, we’re all forced to give back an hour of sunlight in the afternoon so that our overmotivated friends and colleagues don’t have to endure their first latte in the predawn gloom. Instead, the rest of us have to feel the darkness enveloping us in the late afternoon, when we’re trying to get stuff done at work while the morning people nod off behind their desks.

Yes, I know: Kids will have to get up in the dark for school. Here’s one answer: Instead of setting the clocks back, maybe we should stop sending kids to school so ridiculously early, especially teenagers, who have a harder time learning in the early morning. Doctors and educators have been suggesting this for years, but we don’t listen, because we remain convinced that industrious people get up early in the morning and lazy people sleep in.

Take a look, for example, at the schedule that Chevron CEO Mike Wirth claims to observe, as reported by the Financial Times:

3:45 a.m. — Wake up to go to the gym for a 90-minute workout

5:15 a.m. — A cup of coffee and reading half a dozen newspapers

6 a.m. — Shower and head to the office

6 p.m. — Back for dinner with his wife

9 p.m. — Bed and reading

10 p.m. — Asleep

I believe that this is complete hooey. Not only is there no time between the end of his workout and his first cup of coffee, but no one reads six newspapers in 45 minutes. He then gets less than six hours of sleep, gets up, and does it all again. This is the idealized morning-person schedule, and it is madness. (Also, no matter what we do with the clocks, he will wake up in the dark. That’s his problem.)

Nowhere is this morning culture worshipped more obnoxiously than in Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital. I no longer live there, and I hear that things may be changing. But I was considered something of a reprobate when I worked in Washington (including on the Hill), because I would saunter into the office at, say, 8:15 a.m. instead of beating the traffic by arriving before dawn. “I was here at 6,” a co-worker would say. “I was here at 5,” another would answer, in a daily game of early-bird one-upmanship that sounded like a young-American version of the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch.

I would go to my desk and growl at anyone who came near me before 9:30 a.m., but I was also the guy who was able to whip up a brief or a floor statement in the early evening, when the morning scolds were already glassy-eyed. (The greatest Hill staffers can do all of those things at any hour, but I wasn’t among them.)

I left Washington but then ended up ensnared in the morning culture of the U.S. military. I  learned about the military’s love of mornings the hard way, by teaching at the Naval War College for 25 years, where an 8:30 start time for a seminar was considered “mid-morning.” I fully understand that military operations require getting up and being ready to go at oh dark thirty, but the military venerates morning culture as a kind of iron-man virtue signaling. A culture that says a project manager in the Pentagon should arrive at the office at 4 a.m. to be there before his boss—who will come in at 4:30 a.m. after jogging in the dark—is an unhealthy culture.

So, enough. Leave the clocks alone; better yet, comrades, let us smash the oppressive culture of our lark overlords and reclaim the day.

Or let’s at least just get the time-changers and the early risers to stop bugging us in the morning.

Related:

Rejoice in the end of daylight saving time. The family that always lives on daylight saving time

Today’s News

Hezbollah’s leader gave his first public address since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war as the group continues to maintain a controlled battle along Lebanon’s border with Israel.   A former Trump appointee who violently assaulted police officers on January 6 was sentenced to 70 months in prison. New Delhi’s air-quality index was the worst of any major city today due to an increase in air pollutants.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Neil Postman’s 1985 diatribe, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a book that gave senior editor Gal Beckerman “a new set of glasses.” Up for Debate: The future of the Middle East is a divisive topic. Conor Friedersdorf asks readers how people outside the region should handle differences of opinion about it.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

The great social media–news collapse Photos of the week: Ghost Rider, canoe slalom, balloon museum

Culture Break

Read. Do you have free will? A new book by Robert Sapolsky argues that we’re not in control of or responsible for the decisions we make.

Watch. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (in theaters) is a pitch-perfect dramedy from a master of the form.

Play our daily crossword.

In an eight-week newsletter series, The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you wrap your mind around a new machine age. Sign up for Atlantic Intelligence to receive the first edition starting the week of November 6.Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

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.

A group of voters in Colorado are trying to use the power of the court to keep Donald Trump’s name off the state’s 2024 ballot. Below, I look at this week’s contentious Fourteenth Amendment trial in Denver—and speak with Trump’s co-defendant in the case.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The solar-panel backlash is here. Adam Kinzinger: Kevin McCarthy is the man to blame. Whatever happened to carpal tunnel syndrome? Political analysis needs more witchcraft.

Testing the System

Back when X was called Twitter (back when it was fun), certain tweets had a way of explaining the Trump era better than any news article ever could. This one, from Jesse Farrar, comes to mind:

Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!

*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*

Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

That tweet was sent six days before Trump’s Access Hollywood tape scandal. (He wriggled his way out.) Trump later went on to survive not one but two impeachments. Though he’s currently a defendant in numerous state and federal cases—my colleague David Graham has written an excellent summary of it all—Trump remains the GOP front-runner by more than 40 points. He sometimes seems like a perpetual motion machine, if that machine were designed explicitly for wriggling.

Many people have argued that the only way to defeat Trump is at the ballot box. This week in Colorado, one group is trying to use the power of the court to keep Trump’s name off the state’s 2024 ballot altogether. This is a bench trial, meaning that no jury is present, and everything will come down to one judge’s interpretation of one section of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In August, a pair of legal scholars published a widely discussed paper arguing that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, the former president’s role in the January 6 insurrection made him ineligible to hold public office again. One month later, six voters in Colorado—in conjunction with CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington)—filed a lawsuit against Trump and Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, seeking to block Trump’s name from the state’s 2024 ballot. This is where it gets complicated: CREW is a left-leaning organization working with a mix of Republican and unaffiliated voters to achieve its goal, Griswold is a Democrat but also a co-defendant with the de facto leader of the Republican Party, and Trump’s lead lawyer in this case, Scott Gessler, used to have Griswold’s job. Confused? It gets trickier.

The plaintiffs hope to prove that Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States and is therefore ineligible to pursue the presidency. Although many people accept that the former president incited the mob that stormed the Capitol, Trump himself was not among those who donned face paint and Viking horns and entered the building. Nevertheless, he clearly did not aid in the peaceful transfer of power. Does incitement count as engagement? For his role in January 6, Trump was impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate. Can a presidential candidate be disqualified without a conviction? Also, how does disqualification occur at the state level—does the secretary of state have that power? None of these questions have clear answers.

Opening arguments and witness testimony began yesterday morning. Representative Eric Swalwell of California described the horrible scenes he experienced inside the Capitol on January 6. Eric Hodges, a D.C. police officer, also told a grisly story on behalf of the prosecution. Trump’s defense claims that the case is based almost entirely on the House January 6 committee’s report, calling it “poison” and “a one-sided political document of cherry-picked information.” Gessler derided the lawsuit as “anti-democratic” and, in a twist of irony, “election interference.”

Last night, I spoke with Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, about the case. She searched for the right word to describe her situation of being sued alongside the most famous person alive, and eventually settled on unanticipated. “At the end of the day, we’re listed as defendants, but I am not defending Donald Trump,” she said. “I believe he incited the insurrection. I also believe there are big questions around how Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment works, and that a judge should weigh in.”

The most important job of any secretary of state is to oversee elections. Last cycle, Trump unsuccessfully tried to pressure the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, into overturning his state’s results. Raffensperger refused, and he faced death threats. Within three weeks of the Colorado lawsuit’s filing, Griswold told me that she herself had received 64 death threats, in addition to more than 900 nonlethal threats. Trump’s “words are powerful to a big portion of the public. And he uses his words to try to intimidate and to get out of accountability. I won’t be intimidated,” she said.

Griswold had no problem speaking plainly about the actions of her co-defendant: “One of the things that makes Donald Trump a danger to American democracy is that he thinks he’s above the law. He’s tried to stop cases through alleging presidential immunity. He stormed out of a case in New York. And in Colorado, he’s not even showing up to testify or give a deposition. You’d think with such a big case that is so foundational as to whether or not he can be president or appear on the ballot, he would want to show up and testify. But ultimately, with these cases, he grandstands.”

The trial is expected to last one week. Judge Sarah Wallace is determined to have the matter settled by Thanksgiving. Colorado is a “Super Tuesday” state, so its presidential primary will occur on March 5. Military and overseas ballots must be sent out 45 days before then, meaning that the ballots themselves will be printed in December or very early January. Griswold could not offer an exact ballot-printing deadline, noting that the sheets are prepared at various plants throughout Colorado.

Whatever happens, this case may soon wind up before the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Though a third of the bench was appointed by Trump himself, the Court is not guaranteed to take his side if he loses and appeals. And if Colorado blocks Trump from the ballot, other states, such as Michigan and Minnesota, could follow.

But all of this is a legal solution to a much larger political problem, which is that Trumpism seems destined to endure. Any successful effort to keep Trump’s name off the ballot will only enliven his cult of supporters. The wriggling continues. Ah! Well. Nevertheless: What was once a brilliant joke now seems like the beginning of a dark era.

Related:

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again. The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy

Today’s News

Israel said that it struck a densely populated refugee camp in Gaza in order to kill a senior Hamas commander; hundreds were killed or injured in the attack, according to the medical director of Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital. The Highland Fire has led to evacuation orders across Southern California for about 4,000 residents. The Senate Judiciary Committee will subpoena the wealthy donors Harlan Crow and Robin Arkley as it investigates undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

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The White House is preparing for an AI-dominated future. Why Vladimir Putin is embracing Germany’s far right The people most ignored by the criminal-justice system

Culture Break

Read. Sarah Ogilvie’s new book, The Dictionary People, gives life to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary—one of the world’s greatest crowdsourcing efforts.

Watch. On Friends (streaming on Max), Matthew Perry gave his signature character a quality that is all too rare in sitcoms: vulnerability.

Play our daily crossword.

In an eight-week limited series, The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you wrap your mind around the dawn of a new machine age. Sign up for the Atlantic Intelligence newsletter to receive the first edition next week.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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