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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 Elise Hannum, an assistant editor at The Atlantic who has written about Snoopy as the hero Gen Z needs and the joy of watching awards-show speeches.

Elise listens to Fall Out Boy when she needs to get work done—a habit she hasn’t shaken since college—and unwinds by binging a chaotic Dungeons & Dragons game show and watching 30 Rock episodes.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

When history doesn’t do what we wish it would The final word on a notorious killing The 10 best albums of 2023

The Culture Survey: Elise Hannum

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The upcoming Broadway season has so many musicals that I am looking forward to, but the one I am most curious about is Lempicka, which is about the artist Tamara de Lempicka. Do I know anything about her beyond that? Nope! The production has released a few songs so far—I especially like “Woman Is”—and I listened to Eden Espinosa (who is starring as Lempicka) sing “Once Upon a Time” from Brooklyn a million times when I was younger, so I’ll be in the audience. [Related: How Broadway conquered the world]

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: The first blockbuster that popped into my head reading this question was The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I was a big fan of the book series and the movies (I once lined up outside the Mall of America in the early hours of the morning to try to see the cast, but I didn’t even get into the building). I’ve rewatched Catching Fire a few times since it first came out, and it’s just so good, both as a movie and as an adaptation.

I haven’t watched a ton of art movies (yet), but I do have a soft spot for cult classics such as But I’m a Cheerleader, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Clue. [Related: What the Hunger Games movies always understood]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’m currently watching 30 Rock all the way through for the first time, and I can see why it was so popular. I was a big fan of Parks and Recreation, so I figured I’d like it, but I did not anticipate the sheer amount of jokes the writers packed into each 21-minute episode.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I added a bunch of titles from NPR’s “Books We Love” package to my to-read list on Libby recently, and the first one I read was Empty Theatre, by Jac Jemc. It’s a fictionalized version of the lives of cousins King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elisabeth “Sisi'” of Austria. As the title suggests, the book has a lot to do with them living in excess but still yearning for what they can’t have: to love like they want to, to live like they want to. The last chapters made me gasp out loud on my couch.

Because I read a lot of nonfiction books for work, I don’t reach for them that often in my free time. Still, I remembered reading in The Atlantic about Annie Ernaux’s Look at the Lights, My Love, and I ended up really enjoying it. I may have spent too much time aimlessly wandering around Target with my friends as a teenager, so a book devoted to observations in the grocery store felt right up my alley. [Related: The year I tore through Annie Ernaux’s books]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: The first time I listened to “Adam’s Ribs,” by Jensen McRae, I spent the rest of the day playing it on a loop. For a change in pace, I’ll put on “Hot to Go!” by Chappell Roan—or practically any of the uptempo songs from her album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. There is something so satisfying about yowling out the lyric “Who can blame a girl? / Call me hot, not pretty!”

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: I haven’t completely shaken my middle-school penchant for emo and pop-punk music. I listened to Fall Out Boy when I wrote essays in college, and that’s translated over to my professional life. Folie à Deux is probably my favorite album of theirs. When they reprise a bunch of lines from their old songs on “What a Catch, Donnie”? So fun!

I was a big fan of MTV’s Teen Wolf around the same time. I had Dylan O’Brien as my phone background in a very perfunctory, pre-coming-out-as-a-lesbian sort of way. I’m not saying the show is the worst, but I tried to rewatch it during lockdown for fun and couldn’t get all the way through. It certainly wasn’t worth my dramatic liveblogs on Tumblr!

Something I recently revisited: I often revisit the soundtrack of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 once I feel even a little chill in the air. The musical is based on a small section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, so the Russian-winter vibes work this time of year. The score is gorgeous and sweeping and is sung pretty much all the way through, so I can pause and restart it throughout the day.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I do spend a lot of time scrolling through TikTok. Lately, I’ve been trying to watch any French-language videos that pop on my “For You” page, just to feel like I’m keeping myself fluent. I also play a fair amount of Candy Crush (I’m on level 5767), and I race my dad to finish the New York Times crossword. [Related: What in the world is happening on TikTok Live?]

An online creator that I’m a fan of: I kept seeing clips of the online game-show series Game Changer on TikTok, so I sought out more information and fell down a Dropout rabbit hole. The production company was a CollegeHumor rebrand before becoming a stand-alone venture with a slew of different shows. Dimension 20 successfully put me on to Dungeons & Dragons. But what I really enjoy about Dropout’s shows is how much fun everyone seems to have goofing around, and how I truly never know the direction their shows will take. (The “Escape the Greenroom” episode of Game Changer is an absolutely wild ride.)

The last thing that made me cry: The final episode of Dancing With the Stars. They’ve all come so far!

The Week Ahead

Maestro, a film depicting the dramatic relationship between the conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, the actor Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (comes to Netflix this Wednesday) Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a television show based on the acclaimed Rick Riordan fantasy series (premieres on Disney+ this Wednesday) Memory, starring Jessica Chastain as a social worker who reconnects with a high-school classmate suffering from dementia (in select theaters Friday)

Essay

Illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: "Saturday Night Live" / NBC Universal; Dudzenich / Shutterstock.

SNL’s New Kings of Bizarro Buddy Comedy

By David Sims

The video that ushered Saturday Night Live into the digital era barely made it to television, and when it did, it was largely ignored. It’s a heartfelt conversation between two friends (played by Andy Samberg and Will Forte) about a recent tragic loss; after every emotional beat, each of them takes a bite out of a large head of lettuce. When the video was screened during SNL’s live taping, the studio audience was clearly puzzled, the laughs barely rising above a polite chuckle. “Lettuce,” created in December 2005 by Samberg’s Lonely Island sketch group, could have been the end of SNL’s experimentation with prerecorded digital sketches.

But then, two weeks later, came “Lazy Sunday,” a music video in which Samberg and his SNL co-star Chris Parnell rap about “lame, sensitive stuff,” as Samberg once put it … In 2021, SNL hired Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy, a comedy team who’d met at NYU and called themselves Please Don’t Destroy. The group had developed a big following with short videos for TikTok and Twitter during the COVID lockdowns, but its members could easily have been dismissed as legacy hires by a nearly half-century-old institution: Both Higgins’s and Herlihy’s fathers wrote jokes for SNL. Despite that pedigree, the three have brought something new to the venerable sketch show, which recently returned from a hiatus lengthened by the writers’ strike. They’ve figured out how to tap into the manic, juddering energy of comedy in the smartphone era.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

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Photo Album

Workers build ice structures for the 25th Harbin Ice and Snow World, in China. (AFP / Getty)

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the agency responsible, one would imagine, for housing and urban development. Over the past two decades, America has done far too little urban development—and far too little suburban and rural development as well. The ensuing housing shortage has led to rising rents, a surge in homelessness, a decline in people’s ability to move for a relationship or a job, and much general misery. Yet the response from the federal government has been to do pretty much nothing.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the federal government granted $87 billion to the CDC and other health agencies, and paid pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars to create a vaccine. When the property bubble burst, the Bush and Obama administrations earmarked as much as $100 billion to stem the foreclosure crisis (albeit with horrid results). During the financial crisis, Congress created a $700 billion backstop for failing banks. And to jolt the country out of the COVID recession, Washington disbursed nearly $2 trillion to households and businesses—including putting a temporary moratorium on evictions and providing $46 billion to cash-strapped renters.

What is happening with housing might not seem as dramatic. But that is only because the crisis has been brewing more slowly. Despite the unemployment rate sitting at record lows and household wealth sitting at record highs this year, an also-record number of Americans were experiencing homelessness: 653,104 in just one night this January. And by some measures housing is less affordable now than it has been in half a century. Shaun Donovan, who served as HUD secretary from 2009 to 2014, told me he had “never seen availability problems this bad … Housing has always been a top-three issue in New York and San Francisco. What is changing now is that it is a crisis in red parts of the country, rural parts of the country—in places where it’s never been an issue.”

Yet legislators have not passed a significant bill to get people off the streets and out of shelters. Joe Biden has not signed a law to increase the supply of rental apartments in high-cost regions or to protect families from predatory landlords. Congress has not made more families eligible for housing vouchers, or passed a statute protecting kids from the trauma of eviction, or set a goal for the production of new housing.

For its part, HUD says it is doing what it can. “Housing sets the foundation for everything else in a person’s life,” Marcia Fudge, the HUD secretary, told me in an email. “HUD is doing all in our power to invest in those who have often been left out and left behind.” But the department can only work with the authority and money Congress allots it. As housing costs have risen, as more people have been forced to crowd in with neighbors or camp in their minivans or skip going to the doctor to make rent, neither HUD nor its budget has expanded to meet Americans’ needs. Right now, it subsidizes housing costs for 2 million households, though more than 10 million families spend more than half of their income on shelter.

The country’s lack of a national housing policy is part of the reason we are in a housing crisis, and Washington needs to take a real role in ending it.

In the past few weeks, I asked a number of housing experts why Congress, HUD, and the administration weren’t doing more.

The problem is structural: Washington just isn’t set up to address the housing crisis. The federal government plays a large, but largely indirect, role in the housing market. It operates through incentives, credits, guarantees, and subsidies. Rather than building housing, it makes mortgages cheaper and covers part of market rents. Rather than setting up retirement communities, it provides tax breaks for developers. You could say the country’s real department of housing and urban development is the Treasury Department, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Senate committee responsible for housing is the Banking Committee.

“The biggest footprint is in mortgage markets,” Jenny Schuetz, a housing economist at the Brookings Institution, told me. The Federal Housing Finance Agency—which oversees Fannie and Freddie—“has more practical authority over housing markets than HUD does. And it’s this obscure agency that most people don’t even know exists.” But the Treasury Department, she added, “doesn’t view itself as a housing agency. I don’t think that many people are sitting inside Treasury actively working on housing-access issues.”

It wasn’t always that way. Indeed, Washington played an aggressive role in expanding the country’s housing stock from the 1930s to the 1970s. As part of the New Deal, the government financed the construction of homes for tens of thousands of families. HUD was founded during Lyndon Johnson’s administration and, as part of his Great Society, set out to build or rehabilitate millions of housing units.

But concentrated poverty and social unrest in public housing—and the anti-Black racism it triggered in voters and politicians—led Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, to put a moratorium on new government-financed projects. HUD would instead provide eligible applicants with vouchers to help pay for their housing. This would “in the long run be the most equitable, least expensive approach to achieving our goal of a decent home for all Americans,” he told Congress. A decade later, Ronald Reagan gutted the voucher program, slashing HUD’s budget by 60 percent.

As a result, today’s HUD is not much of a housing agency. And it is definitely not much of an urban-development agency. (“I used to joke that I’d like to put the UD back in HUD,” Donovan told me, pointing to the department’s limited community-development efforts.) It lives in the shadow of Reagan: small, narrowly focused, and somewhat disrespected. Its current secretary, Fudge, not only publicly lobbied for a different Cabinet gig after Joe Biden’s election but did so by arguing she did not want to end up at HUD. “It’s always ‘We want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD,’” she told Politico while seeking the USDA post that ended up going to Tom Vilsack. (“These out-of-date comments do not reflect the Secretary’s strong pride in the HUD workforce and the work that HUD has accomplished during her tenure,” a spokesperson responded.) Preceding her in the job was Ben Carson, who had no housing experience and repeatedly asked for his own budget to be decimated.

Nearly all of HUD’s budget goes to its voucher programs. And unlike SNAP benefits or Medicaid coverage, vouchers are not an entitlement; the majority of qualifying families do not get help. (Ninety-three million Americans are on Medicaid; 41 million use SNAP; just 5 million live in a household receiving a voucher.) Applicants languish on waiting lists for years, even decades. Many eligible people don’t bother signing up, and as many as one in three people offered a voucher does not end up using it. Take-up rates are low because the process is so arduous and because landlords discriminate (illegally, but commonly) against voucher recipients.

“Think of lining up families who qualify for food stamps and only one in four families gets to eat,” Matthew Desmond, a Princeton sociologist and the author of the book Evicted, told me. “That’s exactly how we treat housing policy today. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because, without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

Something else is stopping Washington from addressing the housing crisis: the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. Land-use policy is not the purview of the federal government. It’s the purview of the states. Congress cannot rewrite Los Angeles’s building code. The White House can’t decide to upzone West Hartford, Connecticut. “I used to spend time with my counterparts in other countries and they’d say, Well, we just updated our national building code and national zoning code. We just wrote a national housing strategy,” Donovan told me. “I’d say, Wait, you have a national building code?”

As my colleague Jerusalem Demsas has written, we have delegated our housing policy not just to state and local governments but to every neighborhood’s homeowners association. Residents of a given place have ample opportunities—zoning-board meetings, candidate forums, historical architectural reviews, city-council open mics—to stop development. So they do. And thus mostly wealthy, mostly older people shape policy to their preferences: keeping new families out, maintaining single-family zoning, stopping development, and prioritizing the aesthetics of buyers over the needs of renters.

Local control is going to make it hard to get out of this crisis. “We’ve got 3,000 counties and 40,000 cities and towns,” Schuetz, of the Brookings Institution, told me. “There’s huge variation in not just their political motivations but in their capacity to carry policy out. And there’s no way to implement local reforms in a widespread way, at any kind of scale.”

But Washington can do something—much more than it is doing now. Expand the low-income housing tax credit. Direct even more money to states with high housing costs. Get rid of the law preventing the government from increasing the number of public-housing units. Fix up the units we already have. Make housing vouchers an entitlement, so that every poor family that needs help with rent gets it. Doing all of this would help not just help millions of poor Americans get and stay housed. It would also help boost the supply of affordable apartments and make HUD a strong advocate for all low-income renters. “Maybe I am getting out over my skis here, but I feel like if HUD were an agency funded at the level of need, an agency administering a universal benefit, it would be a different agency,” Desmond told me.

Then it could develop novel policies to address some of the big drivers of today’s housing shortage: building costs and land-use restrictions. The federal government cannot change land-use policies unilaterally. But that doesn’t mean that it is out of policy levers, housing experts told me. It just means that it needs to work somewhat indirectly: providing cash incentives to places that harmonize their building codes, green-lighting dense development near transit hubs, and allowing prefab homes, for instance. The Biden administration is starting to enact these kinds of policies, and pressing Congress to let it do more. In terms of building costs, the federal government can’t do much to lower the price of lumber. But it can allow more skilled immigration for construction workers and tax land to encourage development.

More modest, cheaper policies are at hand as well. For instance, HUD could start advising state and local governments on how to increase their housing supply. “There is a lot of experimentation going on at the local level,” Schuetz told me. “HUD could at the very least be monitoring this stuff, performing research, evaluating what works and what doesn’t.” It could help Tucson learn from Oakland, Iowa from Massachusetts. “This is squarely in HUD’s comfort zone,” Schuetz added, noting that no agency or political entity is doing this work at the moment.

Many of these policies cost money. But the federal government needs to spend more on housing, particularly on multifamily rental housing. The first thing politicians and civil servants in Washington need to do is simply see the housing crisis as the federal government’s responsibility. Universal homeownership was once the explicit goal of the U.S. government; affordable housing for everyone, everywhere, and the end of homelessness should be the policy priority now.

A lot of us know someone who has felt pretty rough with the most recent form of the virus.