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Culture has a way of defining a year for even the under-rock dwellers among us: A good movie, TV show, book, or album can shape our conversations, our experiences, and even the way we think. Today’s newsletter rounds up some of the culture writing that guided our readers through a year of controversial awards shows, deepfakes, and—it must be said—Che Diaz.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Our 10 favorite books of 2023 Selling art to the rich, famous, and inebriated The 10 best films of 2023

Your Culture Cheat Sheet

Barbie Is Everything. Ken Is Everything Else.

By Megan Garber

The biggest blockbuster of the year was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and in this essay, Garber goes beneath the film’s shiny surface to explore its questions about personhood and political power.

What Made Taylor Swift’s Concert Unbelievable

By Spencer Kornhaber

A ticket to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour was a precious commodity in 2023, and, as Kornhaber reported from the tour’s kickoff, in Arizona, Swift’s performance justifies the hype.

Beyoncé Tickets Are the New Status Symbol

By Shamira Ibrahim

Purchasing tickets for Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour was a cultural experience unto itself, Shamira Ibrahim writes.

Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology

By Ross Andersen

Andersen spoke with Nolan about the similarities between Nikola Tesla and Robert Oppenheimer, the techno-optimism of Interstellar, how Inception anticipated the social-media age, and why the director hasn’t yet made a film about artificial intelligence.

The Death of the Sex Scene

By Sophie Gilbert

Depictions of love in film and TV have become strangely loveless. Gilbert asks: What do we lose when we don’t see intimacy on-screen?

The Unexpected Power of Second-Chance Romance

By Hannah Giorgis

This year, TV turned the cameras in a new direction, Giorgis writes, as shows such as And Just Like That and The Golden Bachelor explored what it means to date after 50.

The Fury of Chris Rock

By David Sims

In his latest special, the comedian opened up about the Oscars slap heard ’round the world. The result, Sims writes, was 10 minutes of raw anger.

The Succession Plot Point That Explained the Whole Series

By Nina Li Coomes

In Shiv, what is often a clichéd storyline became both poignant and tragic in the HBO show’s finale, Nina Li Coomes writes.

The Week Ahead

The second part of The Crown’s final season (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Wonka, adapted from Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, stars Timothée Chalamet and Hugh Grant (in theaters Friday). In How to Draw a Novel (on sale Tuesday), Martín Solares studies the craft of literary fiction through a series of essays.

Essay

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty.

America Isn’t Ready for the Two-Household Child

By Stephanie H. Murray

For most of American history, when parents separated, their kids almost always ended up living with just one of them. But recent studies have confirmed a new era: Joint physical custody, in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time, has become dramatically more common in the U.S.

The trend was first documented in Wisconsin, where court data revealed that the percentage of divorces leading to equal joint custody—in which time with each parent is split 50–50—rose from just 2 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2010 … Regardless of whether it’s the right outcome for a given separation, though, joint custody is a growing reality—one that our systems for accounting for and supporting families aren’t built to accommodate. Americans may be ready for the two-household child, but American public policy isn’t.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Who’s afraid of women’s pleasure? The stunted emotional lives of May December Norman Lear’s many American families Let them cook. A soulless holiday-shopping strategy A spiritual manifesto for the dispossessed The George Santos number that brought SNL to life Poem: “My Ancestors Ride Wit Me”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

If Trump Wins: A project that considers what Donald Trump might do if reelected The sanctions against Russia are starting to work. The hybrid-car dilemma

Photo Album

A Rohingya woman walks to the beach after the local community temporarily allowed a boat of refugees to land for water and food, in Ulee Madon, Indonesia. (Amanda Jufrian / AFP / Getty)

An annular solar eclipse over North America, Israel’s war against Hamas, the felling of a famous tree in England, and more in our editor’s selection of the year in photos.

P.S.

When you’ve finished your journey through this year in culture, consider booking one for further back: This retrospective from 2019 runs through the good, the bad, and the ugly of the 2010s zeitgeist, and it may be the only place to see Elena Ferrante and the poop emoji discussed in adjacent paragraphs.

— Nicole

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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