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Rock and roll is full of legends who should retire. But some bands know how to get back onstage without making fools of themselves—or of their fans.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

A very, very expensive emoji Future-proofing your town sounds great, until you try it. The neighbors who destroyed their lives

Hello, Cleveland

Sometimes I write something that needs a wee bit of qualification. (Translation: I am going to rationalize breaking one of my own rules.) Last year, I applauded rock artists who choose to age gracefully, mostly by exiting the stage. I deplored the acts who were trying to recapture their younger days while cynically vacuuming their fans’ pockets.

In that discussion, I quoted the critic John Strausbaugh, whose 2001 book, Rock Til You Drop, is full of liquid-nitrogen zingers so precise and stinging  that I wish I’d written them. Strausbaugh rightly says that rock and roll should be music by the young, for the young, and he rails against the sham of what he calls “colostomy rock”—older people mugging their way through songs about sex and drugs and rebellion:

Rock simply should not be played by fifty-five-year-old men with triple chins wearing bad wighats. Its prime audience should not be middle-aged, balding, jelly-bellied dads who’ve brought along their wives and kids … Rock‘n’roll is not family entertainment.

That’s damn right, John, and I couldn’t agree more.

So what, exactly, was I doing earlier this month on a quaint little street in a seaside town in Rhode Island, getting patted down by security for a show by the Tubes, a band known for their decadent stage shows and whose biggest hits were from the 1970s and ’80s? I last saw the Tubes about 40 years ago, when the band was playing the Boston college circuit. What the hell was I doing here? More to the point, what the hell were they doing here?

If you’re not familiar with the Tubes, perhaps I can give you a sense of their, ah, aesthetic from some of their songs, including odes to loving relationships such as “Don’t Touch Me There” and “Mondo Bondage,” as well as their ever-popular investigation of youthful anxieties, “White Punks on Dope.” In the ’80s, their two biggest hits were “Talk to Ya Later,” about exasperation with a one-night stand who won’t leave the next day, and “She’s a Beauty,” a giant hit on the charts and on MTV in 1983, whose lyrics basically describe the rules for what were once called rap booths, cubicles in urban red-light districts that were the pre-internet equivalent of cam sites. (“You can say / Anything you like / But you can’t touch the merchandise.”)

This is the kind of music that made Soviet commissars think the West was doomed to fall.

But it’s also the kind of music that seems pretty strange when performed by men of a certain age. I mean, who wants to see a shirtless old coot come out onstage in leather pants and a bondage mask?

Well, as it turns out, I do. And so did my wife, who is not only my age but also saw the Tubes years ago and jumped at the chance to see them again.

The Tubes have the one quality that so many older bands lack: self-awareness. When the lead singer, Fee Waybill, took the stage at the Greenwich Odeum that night, he chuckled and noted that this was a return engagement, and that everyone was a year older now. “Which means,” he added, “I’m, like, fuckin’ 100 now.” (He’s actually 73; the original band members Roger Steen and Prairie Prince are 74 and 73, respectively.)

The rest of the evening was not a reenactment of the old days, but a kind of happy postcard from the early ’80s. This knowing but joyful wink makes all the difference when walking the fine line, as the rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap put it, “between clever and stupid.” The band gets it, and so does the audience: We’re all older now, and we’re not kidding anyone, but we can still sing along with songs that would likely shock our children.

The right venue is the key to enjoying this kind of music without feeling like an idiot. The Greenwich Odeum is a small theater in a town of roughly 13,000 people that seats just under 500—hardly the kind of arena that bands like the Tubes once filled. I wondered how we all came to be singing along to “Sushi Girl”—don’t ask—in a former vaudeville theater built in 1926, so I called the Odeum a few weeks after the show and chatted with Rachel Kinnevy-Fitzpatrick, who handles artist relations, and the general manager, Amanda Ronchi.

The Odeum, they told me, had fallen into disuse, but it reemerged in 2013 with the help of patrons and sponsors; it is now a music and comedy spot. But it’s hardly a dusty old dive: Its roster includes Amy Grant, Al Di Meola, an ABBA tribute band, and Al Stewart and his terrific young colleagues, the Empty Pockets, whom I’ve seen twice there. The house is also holding a Celtic Christmas celebration and hosting Lez Zeppelin, an all-female Zep tribute band (although not at the same time).

When bands are young and hungry, they play the big rooms and go where the bus takes them. When they get a bit older, they don’t want to be shoved onstage and forced to yell, “Hello, Cleveland!” (Likewise, many of their fans are too old to put up with sitting in the nosebleed seats at some decaying local civic arena.) The Odeum tries to create a more intimate environment for the artists, and it seems to work: I was surprised to be standing in the lobby—which has the comforting ambience of an old movie theater—when Waybill and Steen came out after the show, sat at a table, and signed autographs and chitchatted with fans, including me.

A smaller venue such as the Odeum (supported by both ticket sales and patrons and sponsors) also means that the band, and the fans, can forget about trying to re-create their days of fist-pumping arena glory. None of us, onstage or off, seemed up for that kind of creepy nostalgia. As Rachel said about the venue’s older acts, no one has to live in the past; the Odeum thinks it’s “okay to stay present.”

Speaking of age, I noted that the crowd at the nearly sold-out show was almost entirely over 40, an observation confirmed by the theater’s management. The show was not an intergenerational moment with the kids and grandkids, where the creaky Boomers introduced the youngs to their prehistoric rock idols. (That’s what Rolling Stones concerts are for.) Perhaps it sounds odd to call a rock concert a safe space, but I felt more comfortable shouting lyrics such as “Spent my cash on every high I could find” in a crowd of people close to my own age than I might have while getting the stink eye from someone’s appalled teenager.

Back in the day, the Tubes put on a dazzling show, with special effects, scantily clad dancing girls, and multiple costume changes. All of that is over. Now only Waybill changes clothes, and the only sultry lady onstage is dressed as a nurse—cue the Viagra jokes from the audience—instead of a kick-line dancer. (She’s also not a groupie or hired extra; she’s Waybill’s wife, Elizabeth.)

Some things, even in the middle of a rock concert, make more sense when you’re older. After Waybill transformed into one of his onstage alter egos, the dissolute glam rocker Quay Lewd—drug humor from the ’70s, kids—he looked over at the character’s trademark 18-inch-heel boots lying onstage nearby. Apparently, he’d worn them at a show in Philadelphia the night before, and they’d hurt like hell; there was even some concern about whether he’d be in shape for the show in Rhode Island. So this night, he just looked at them and shook his head: Nah.

The crowd laughed. We get it.

Tonight, stay present, and celebrate with the music that moves you. Happy New Year. See you in 2024.

Related:

Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser. Was classic rock a sound, or a tribe?

Essay

Illustration by Dena Springer

The Bizarre Tragedy of Children’s Movies

By Kelly Conaboy

A few weeks ago, I came across a GIF from the 1994 film The Lion King that made me weep. It shows the lion cub Simba moments after he discovers the lifeless body of his father, Mufasa; he nuzzles under Mufasa’s limp arm and then lies down beside him. I was immediately distraught at that scene, and my memories of the ones that follow: Simba pawing at his dead father’s face, Simba pleading with him to “get up.”

That scene lives in my thoughts with a few similar ones: the baby elephant Dumbo cradled in his abused mom’s trunk as she’s trapped behind bars; Ellie, the beloved wife in Up, grieving a miscarriage and eventually passing away within the first five minutes of the film; Bambi, the young deer, wandering around the snowy forest looking for his mother, who has just been shot dead. When they pop up in my mind, I’m always left with the same thought: Why are so many kids’ movies so sad, and how does that sadness affect the kids they’re intended to entertain?

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Dusty Deen for The Atlantic

Read. Check out one of The Atlantic’s 10 favorite books of 2023.

Listen. Don’t buy that new sweater until you’ve heard what Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull has to say about the cratering quality of knitwear on this episode of Radio Atlantic.

Photo Album

A child plays with bubbles from a street performer at the Old Port in Marseille, France (Peter Cziborra / Reuters).

Families and friends at play, expressions of love and compassion, volunteers at work, and more in our editor’s selection of hopeful images from 2023.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Early in 2023, my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce chatted with the writer Oliver Burkeman about New Year’s resolutions. Burkeman is an expert on productivity, but he’s arguably also an expert on getting real about the time human beings have on Earth. Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is approximately the length of an average American’s life span). In it, he writes: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”

With this in mind, Caroline asked Burkeman: “Do you think New Year’s resolutions are worth making, considering we’re all going to die, as your book posits so bluntly?”

Burkeman has hope for the concept of the resolution. “Confronting how short our lives are, and how limited our time is, is actually a sort of precondition for doing meaningful things, including making personal changes,” he told Caroline. But how we go about making these changes matter, he noted; there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do so. In today’s reading list, our writers walk you through the history of the New Year’s resolution, how brands take advantage of it, and how to use it for your own growth.

On Resolutions

Making a New Year’s Resolution? Don’t Go to War With Yourself.

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

“The difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute.”

It’s the Most Inadequate Time of the Year

By Amanda Mull

New Year’s resolutions are the perfect opportunity for consumer brands to remind you about all the ways you could be better.

New Year’s Resolutions That Will Actually Lead to Happiness

By Arthur C. Brooks

Set goals to improve your well-being—not your wallet or your waistline.

Still Curious?

The best time-management advice is depressing but liberating: You can make time for things that matter, or you can make time for more email. Make a to-don’t list: When you’re feeling stuck, focusing on the things you hate can help.

Other Diversions

81 things that blew our minds in 2023 How to be happy growing older Taylor Swift at Harvard

P.S.

Here’s one resolution you can make tomorrow: Don’t go out on New Year’s Eve. It’s not worth it, my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2018.

— Isabel

Take a close look at Donald Trump—the lavishness of his homes, the buildings emblazoned with his name and adorned with gold accoutrements, his insistent ego, even the degree of obeisance he evokes among his followers—and, despite the fervent support he receives from many evangelical Christians, it’s hard to avoid concluding that there’s something a little pagan about the man. Or consider Elon Musk. With his drive to conquer space to expand the human empire, his flirtation with anti-Semitic tropes, his 10 children with three different women, Musk embodies the wealth worship and ideological imperialism of ego that are more than a little pagan too.

Most ancient pagan belief systems were built around ritual and magic, coercive practices intended to achieve a beneficial result. They centered the self. The revolutionary contribution of monotheism was its insistence that the principal concern of God is, instead, how people treat one another.

Although paganism is one of those catchall words applied to widely disparate views, the worship of natural forces generally takes two forms: the deification of nature, and the deification of force. In the modern world, each ideological wing has claimed a piece of paganism as its own. On the left, there are the world-worshippers, who elevate nature to the summit of sanctity. On the right, you see the worship of force in the forms of wealth, political power, and tribal solidarity. In other words, the paganism of the left is a kind of pantheism, and the paganism of the right is a kind of idolatry. Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.  

[Tim Alberta: My father, is faith, and Donald Trump]

The two may be tied together. We used to believe that human beings stood at the summit of creation. A lot has since conspired to make us feel less important: an appreciation of the vastness of the cosmos, the reality that we are motivated by evolutionary pressures we barely understand, psychology’s proof of the murkiness inside our own psyche, even the failures of Promethean technology. (Yes, we have smartphones, but we also have a climate crisis; it’s slender comfort that the bad news is now instantaneously available.) As we slide down the slope of significance, we may undertake to prove how potent we are.

Shortly before the Second World War, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee described communism and fascism each as a form of idolatry that “worships the creature instead of worshipping the creator.” If we don’t have a God to simultaneously assure us of our centrality and our smallness, we will exaggerate both. Rabbi Simcha Bunim, a Hasidic master of the 18th and 19th centuries, used to advise his disciples to carry two pieces of paper, one in each pocket. In one pocket was the phrase “For me the world was created.” In the other, “I am but dust and ashes.” In the balance between the two lies the genuine status of the human being.

* * *

The current worship of wealth is a pagan excrescence. I am spending this year at Harvard, and it is not easy to find an undergraduate who isn’t interested in “finance.” The poets want to go into finance. The history students are studying investment. For a long time in the United States, the accumulation of capital was teleological: Wealth was a means of improving society, of creating something greater than oneself. The current ideology of wealth is solipsistic: I should become wealthy because I should become wealthy. Gone is the New Testament admonition that it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. On campus, a lot of students are now threading that needle.

Wealth is a cover for, or a means to, the ultimate object of worship in a pagan society, which is power. “Life simply is the will to power,” the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in the manner of a billionaire tech bro. That’s probably truer to Google’s corporate ethos than “Don’t be evil.” The reshaping of politics as a pure contest unconstrained by truth or mutuality, a feature of our political landscape, is both Nietzschean and pagan. The use and abuse of Nietzsche’s work by the Nazis was only to be expected.

Nietzsche criticized Judaism and Christianity for what he saw as their valorization of weakness, which he despised. The Greeks taught that the rich and powerful and beautiful were favored by the gods. Then along came Judaism, and after it, Christianity, arguing that widows and orphans and the poor were beloved of God. This was Judaism’s “spiritual revenge,” Nietzsche argued, which spread through the world on Christian wings. The Nazis, in championing blond, blue-eyed Aryan Übermenschen—a term they took from Nietzsche—were reinvigorating a pagan ideal.

[Arthur Brooks: Three paths toward the meaning of life]

This worship of the body—of beauty, which is another form of power—is a pagan inheritance. The monotheistic faiths did not disdain beauty, but it was not an ideal they extolled. Not only do biblical heroes rarely merit a physical description, but even traditionally heroic attributes are portrayed as worthless if they lack a spiritual foundation. In the Bible, if someone is physically imposing, that usually signals trouble. Samson is a boor who redeems himself at the last minute. Saul stands a head above the crowd, but is an utter failure as king. The English critic Matthew Arnold famously said that the Greeks believed in the holiness of beauty, and the Hebrews believed in the beauty of holiness.

The veneration of physical beauty, the Instagramization of culture, is pagan to its roots. The overwhelming cascade of drugs, surgeries, and procedures intended to enhance one’s physical appearance—all precursors to “designer babies”—is a tribute to the externalization of our values. Movements of hypermasculinity, championed figures such as the now-indicted Andrew Tate, flow from the elevation of the human body to idolatrous status.

It is not enough to look good for a while; we have to look good forever. Attempts by some billionaires to become immortal, and the conceit that we should never die, are born of a conviction that we can transcend our finitude, that we can become as gods. Other billionaires make forays into space, or dream of conquering other worlds. Although this is sold as utilitarian—we are using up the resources of the planet on which we are planted—this is not a public-works project, but a Promethean one.

The virtue that falls furthest in the pagan pantheon of traits is humility. In the ancient Greek epics, humility is not even reckoned a virtue. Edward Gibbon, in his monumental history of the Roman empire, assigned Christianity a large role in its fall: “The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.”

Wealth, power, beauty, and lust for domination made Rome into Rome, in Gibbon’s account. Humility, sexual restraint, patience, and tolerance sapped the brio of a once-great empire, and it fell to the barbarians, unbridled by the strictures of monotheistic faith. What we might call the religious virtues, according to Gibbon and his ideological successors, made defending society impossible.

You can see the same worship of power over heroic endurance and restraint today on the political right. “I like people who aren’t captured,” Trump infamously said about John McCain. Consider how Trump reframes heroism, making it not about bravery, but about success. And the idolatrous slant is also visible in the symbology of the far right. January 6 made Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman,” with his bare chest and Norse headdress, instantly notorious. Norse and Viking mythology have played a large role in the far right, just as they did for the Nazis. The Norse were people of conquest, rape, and pillage, at least in the popular imagination. That the right, which has long marched under the banner of Christian values, is beginning to embrace pagan symbols ought to be deeply troubling.

[James Surowiecki: Why Americans can’t accept the good economic news]

But modern paganism is hardly confined to the political right. The left-wing movement to demote the status of human beings displays a complementary form of paganism. In The Case Against Human Superiority, the Harvard philosopher Christine M. Korsgaard argues that because no standard is common to humans and animals, we cannot sustain a moral hierarchy. In other words, because wildebeests don’t read Kant, we cannot hold them to the categorical imperative. Korsgaard doubts whether one can say that the death of a human being is really worse than the death of, say, an aardvark. Such arguments go back to Peter Singer, whose Animal Liberation was a landmark in the field. Interviewed almost 50 years after the book was published, Singer told The Guardian, “Just as we accept that race or sex isn’t a reason for a person counting more, I don’t think the species of a being is a reason for counting more than another being.”

For those who believe that the pagan outlook has no consequences, Singer illustrated the radical difference between believing that human beings are created in the image of God and believing that they are animals like other animals. In the same interview, after saying that a child on a respirator should perhaps be allowed to die, Singer said, “And I think, even in cases where the child doesn’t need a respirator, parents should be able to consult doctors to reach a considered judgment, including that the child’s life is not one that is going to be a benefit for the child or for their family, and that therefore it is better to end the child’s life.” After all, we shoot horses to put them out of their suffering. If we are all animals, why morally elevate an infant over a horse?

* * *

The monotheistic faiths are not without their own failings. Their critics note the manifold cruelties that have been perpetrated in their name. No one who looks at the history of any faith can have illusions about the ability of believers to prosecute the most horrendous atrocities. As a Jew, I am not likely to overlook the cruelties of religious people to one another throughout the centuries.

The question, however, is not whether beliefs can lead us astray, as they all can, but what sorts of beliefs are most likely to lend themselves to respect for human life and flourishing. Should we see human beings as virtual supermen, free to flout any convention, to pursue power at any cost, to accumulate wealth without regard for consequence or its use? Are gold toilets and private rocket ships our final statement of significance? Or is it a system of belief that considers human beings all synapse and no soul, an outgrowth of the animal world and in no way able to rise above the evolutionary mosaic of which everything from the salmon to sage is a piece?

Monotheism, at its best, acknowledges genuine humility about our inability to know what God is and what God wishes, but asserts that although human beings are elevated above the shackles of nature, we are still subordinate to something greater than ourselves.

If we are nothing but animals, the laws of the jungle inevitably apply. If we are all pugilists attacking one another in a scramble to climb to the top of the pole, the laws of the jungle still apply. But if we are all children of the same God, all kin, all convinced that there is a spark of eternity in each person but that none of us is superhuman, then maybe we can return to being human.

Russian opposition leader says he has seen his lawyer after 20 days travelling to penal colony above the Arctic Circle.

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The question “What is a Christmas movie?” might seem straightforward. But there’s one film that has scrambled the logic of the holiday movie for years now—at least for those who probably spend too much time online. “Because of the dreaded incentives of social media, we force debate upon ourselves all the time, even at the most wonderful time of the year,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in 2021. “According to Google Trends, search traffic for the phrase Is Die Hard a Christmas movie jumps every November and December.”

Today’s newsletter doesn’t purport to solve that particular debate, but it will explore the many meanings of the holiday movie, from its inherent cheesiness to its ability to move people in rare ways.

On Holiday Movies

The Cheesy Endurance of the Made-for-TV Holiday Movie

By Megan Garber

The Hallmark Christmas flick has become a genre in itself—one that insists, against all odds, on the inevitability of the happy ending.

Is [REDACTED] a Christmas Movie?

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

No one realizes that their own take on Die Hard as a Christmas movie helps sustain a powerful curse on the internet—not even the guy who started it all by accident.

The Most Unsettling ‘Christmas Carol’

By Tom Nichols

Why my father and I loved George C. Scott

Still Curious?

The mournful heart of It’s a Wonderful Life: The holiday classic is a timely exploration of what happens when all that you’ve relied on fades away, Megan Garber wrote in 2021. Twenty movie families to spend your holidays with: Excellent cinema for every mood, whether you’re feeling homesick, ruminative, or perfectly content (from 2020)

Other Diversions

Read this before you buy that sweater. The great cousin decline Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore.

P.S.

If you’re in the mood for a sharp critique of a piece of Christmas entertainment, check out my colleague Caitlin Flanagan’s essay “Don’t Subject Your Kids to Rudolph.”

— Isabel

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

My fondness for the acknowledgments section of books runs very deep. Sometimes I flip to them first, though I try to hold off on this guilty pleasure. I love the way they can reveal a writer’s true, gushy self beneath the veneer of authorial control and style, reminding us of the human being who struggled to bring these pages into existence. But acknowledgments also do something else: They show us what a collaborative act it is to produce a book, if only because we get to hear about the writer’s mom, long-suffering spouse, and loyal dog. And, occasionally, an author reveals the identity of some other important but unseen people: agents, editors, publicists, book-cover designers, fact-checkers.

In an essay this week on Dan Sinykin’s book about publishing, Big Fiction, Josh Lambert evokes this wider workforce. Sinykin’s book sets out to show how conglomeration among publishing houses has affected the kinds of novels we read. Though Lambert isn’t convinced that Sinykin has achieved that objective, he does applaud the effort at further transparency around how books are actually made, and offers this intriguing suggestion: If movies and TV shows include extensive credits, why shouldn’t books? “Would it really be so difficult to have a credits page that acknowledges the contributions of the folks responsible for layout, marketing, and proofreading?” he asks.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

The perfect antidote to an age of angsty literature Our forests need more fire, not less. Seven books that actually capture what sickness is like Zombie history stalks Ukraine.

The proposal is a modest one. And Lambert isn’t the first to consider it; the idea has been bubbling for years. In 2022, Lisa Lucas, who oversees the Pantheon and Schocken imprints, tweeted out her support for a credits page along the lines of what Lambert suggests: “It’s a damn shame that most people don’t know how many people it takes to make a book!” One author who took up the challenge was Malcolm Harris, whose book Palo Alto we wrote about earlier this year. He asked for a page that would list everyone who’d been involved in the creation of his book, from the legal counsel to the publicity intern. “I think everyone who works on a book should be able to point to their name in it forever, and I’m proud that’ll be the case with this one,” Harris tweeted. Molly McGhee recently did the same for her first book, crediting her agent, marketing team, contracts manager, and writing teachers.

The idea hasn’t exactly taken off, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Authorship is commonly imagined as an act of lone genius, as if a book emerges from the brain of a writer like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. Don’t get me wrong: The process of writing a book is, for the most part, a very solitary one—I’ve written two books, and each one required whole years of sitting in rooms by myself, knowing that it was entirely up to me and my will as to whether a book would come into being. But this is only part of the struggle, and many, many people are involved in getting a book into a reader’s hands.

An editor—especially a brilliant one, as I’ve been lucky to have—pushes against your ideas, hones your writing, demands that you express yourself with the utmost clarity. The publicity-and-marketing team helps frame how the book will be received. The art director designs a cover that will determine what a reader will feel before they even flip to the first page. The best copy editors can give the book the smoothness of a taut bedsheet. Foreign-rights agents make sure that people in other countries can read your words. It would take nothing away from an author to give them all their due—in fact, in an industry with sadly little remuneration, it would only add to these publishing professionals’ feeling of investment in the creative work they’ve helped bring into the world.

The holiday season is a good time to stop and consider all of the unnoticed labor that makes a book possible. These people, along with my favorite writers, have my gratitude for the pleasure they’ve brought me this past year, even if their work doesn’t always get the appreciation it deserves.

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Invisible Forces Behind the Books We Read

What to Read

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

In 1871, when Eliot was writing Middlemarch, Britain had recently undergone some 40 years of social upheaval. The First and Second Reform Acts enfranchised men of lower means and pedigree, broadening the voting public to include more than just the wealthy and noble few. But her mammoth novel takes place in the lead-up to that change, exploring the tensions between rich and poor, rural and urban, old and new. The story follows Dorothea Brooke, a wealthy and pious 19-year-old orphan living with her sister and her uncle, and Tertius Lydgate, a sweetly naive and eager doctor, as each falls in love, marries, and discovers that a lot follows the expected happily-ever-after. Subplots abound, of course, as this is a lengthy and intricate “Study of Provincial Life” (the novel’s subtitle), but the love triangles, political maneuvering, and intricate gossip in the titular English town make for a thrilling read. This is a book about wonderfully and frustratingly messy people. — Ilana Masad

From our list: Six classic books that live up to their reputation

Your Weekend Read Photo illustration by Chantal Jahchan. Sources: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty; Os Tartarouchos / Getty; fotograzia / Getty.

Everyone Should Be Reading Palestinian Poetry

Recently, while reading the cookbook Jerusalem, I was struck by an observation made by its co-authors, an Israeli chef and a Palestinian chef, in the introduction. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write that food “seems to be the only unifying force” in Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Despite their cuisine’s fraught history, the chefs consider the preparation of meals to be a uniquely human act—an unspoken language shared between two people who might otherwise be enemies.

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Consider—just for one terrible, stressful, bleak moment—if our forebearers in Naples had never invented pizza. No perfectly charred Margherita pies, no late-night Domino’s delivery, nothing. To the pizza-deprived, the world’s most beloved food probably wouldn’t sound all that special. What’s so great about the combo of bread, cheese, and sauce, after all? The alchemy among the three creates something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts—but I don’t have to tell you that, thankfully.

In 1949, the writer Ora Dodd had a much tougher challenge. In her story for The Atlantic, simply titled “Pizza,” Dodd sought to introduce Americans to a strange new food taking over Italian neighborhoods:

The waiter moves aside the glasses of red wine, and sets before you a king-sized open pie. It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese, and herbs. This is a pizza, Italian for pie. There is a plural, pizze, but no one ever uses it, for pizza is a sociable dish, always intended to be shared. Two people order a small pizza, about a foot in diameter. A large pizza is twice that size. Don’t imagine an American pie blown up to about two feet, however; a pizza is a nearer relation to a pancake. It is very flat, made of raised bread dough, with the filling spread on top.

Dodd’s story is the closest you’ll ever feel to an alien hearing about pizza for the first time. How does the pizzaiolo stretch the dough? “He places this large flat pancake on his closed fist, like a floppy hat, and twirls it round and round. The elastic dough becomes thinner and thinner. A skilled pizza-maker knows exactly when to stop twirling: when the cake is at its thinnest, just before it breaks through.” What do you put on top of a freshly cooked pie? “Garlic and chopped orégano (wild marjoram) are the seasonings, used as the customer may request.”

At that point, when President Joe Biden was in grade school and The Atlantic was almost a century old, pizza was completely unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of Americans. We began to evolve beyond the days of “orégano (wild marjoram)” only in the 1960s, when pizza became synonymous with takeout and delivery—a cheap, delicious, and customizable food for the masses. One pizza joint in Ypsilanti, Michigan, DomiNick’s, focused on delivering to nearby college students. In 1965, it changed its name to Domino’s, and within 24 years had ballooned into 5,000 locations. Now America’s love affair with the dish has reached such heights (some 3 billion pies are eaten each year) that imagining a time before pizza feels as unnerving as imagining New York without the subway or Paris without the Eiffel Tower. So much of the American diet has followed the same arc: Food we now eat all the time and take for granted probably wasn’t available even a few decades ago.

We all know that computer mainframes the size of rooms gave way to laptops and iPhones, but that same kind of “disruption” has also infiltrated our meals. Decades before the rise of pizza, spaghetti and meatballs—a dish that did not exist in Italy—became an American favorite. How that happened is one of the “few fundamental questions” that Corby Kummer explored in “Pasta,” an 11,000-word Atlantic cover story from 1986. (Bring back the one-word headlines!) In the early 1900s, new arrivals from Italy had limited access to some of the fruits and vegetables that went into dishes they’d slurped up back home. But they did have meat. So much meat. The meatball, born out of necessity, just made sense. Other American takes on Italian food from that era now sound revolting at best: Mushy pasta cooked in a sauce of canned tomato soup and Worcestershire sauce. One early recipe for baked ziti, Kummer writes, called for “one and a half pounds of meat, one pound of ricotta, a half pound of mozzarella, and two cups of white sauce for one pound of pasta.”

America’s changing tastes are because of immigration, yes, but also because of the grocery store. In the ’70s, the average supermarket stocked approximately 9,000 items. You might have found a few flavors of yogurt, if that. Now when you head to a supermarket, you can find 60,000 options and choose among blueberry, strawberry, and peach kefir. The modern grocery store is a triumph of science and technology. Why are brussels sprouts no longer a metaphor for stinky grossness? Partly because plant breeders figured out how to eliminate a compound that turned them bitter. Hear me out: American life is more delicious now that the Red Delicious apple has given way to the holy Honeycrisp.

Over the next 70 years, the food we eat will continue to change. Silicon Valley is on a quest to perfect the pizza robot, which could cook up a pie inside a truck while it’s on the way to your home. Maybe we will soon be eating more pawpaws, an enigmatic fruit native to the eastern United States and Canada that somehow tastes tropical, like a mix of mango, pineapple, and banana. Once an all-American favorite, the pawpaw disappeared from our diet because it’s hard to grow and ship—but now food scientists are working on a version that might survive a journey to Whole Foods. As my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote last month, the fruit aisle is getting trippy—starting with yellow watermelon, pink pineapples, and white strawberries. In the future, we may eat more chickpeas. And MSG. And yerba mate. And … gluten-free pasta made of durian seeds.

Perhaps, actually, science has gone too far.

We’re in the coldest season. We’re in the shopping season. We’re in the season of hygge. All the cues point to buying yourself a new cozy sweater. Don’t do it, until you hear what Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull has to say about the cratering quality of knitwear. For years I’ve wondered why my sweaters pilled so quickly, or why they suffocated me, or smelled like tires. And then I read Mull’s recent story titled “Your Sweaters Are Garbage.” It turns out that international trade agreements, greedy entrepreneurs, and my own lack of willpower have conspired to erode my satisfaction.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Mull, who writes about why so many consumer goods have declined in quality over the last two decades. As always, Mull illuminates the stories the fashion world works hard to obscure: about the quality of fabrics, the nature of working conditions, and how to subvert a system that wants you to keep buying more. “I have but one human body,” she says. “I can only wear so many sweaters.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: When it started to get pretty cold, I opened up the drawer where I keep all my sweaters. I have so many sweaters in there. And you know what? I hate all of them. Even the ones that are supposed to be ugly.

Because I was looking at my own closet, in my own bedroom, I figured this was my problem—I was just in my own private hell—until I saw the headline: “Your Sweaters Are Garbage.”

It was an article by staff writer Amanda Mull, who is my guru of consumer dilemmas.

Now, Amanda had done her own thorough sweater investigation, which was inspired by Nora Ephron’s great love letter to cold weather and NY city: When Harry Met Sally.

For sweater lovers, this movie holds a special place. And it has to do with one, enduring image in the movie:

[Music]

Amanda Mull: Billy Crystal is in his new, single-guy apartment, squatting in front of one of the big windows in that apartment, and he is wearing, you know, ’80s jeans and a really beautiful, cabled, ivory fisherman sweater.

And the sweater is, like, it’s incredible. It’s really lush. It’s really, like, oversized in the right ways. It is a great, great sweater.

Rosin: Recently, actor Ben Schwartz recreated the photo on his Instagram.

Mull: And he was wearing jeans and in front of a window and, you know—ivory, cabled fisherman sweater. But it was just like the sweater didn’t have the juice.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

A comedian named Ellory Smith retweeted these two sweater pictures side by side, the one of Billy Crystal and the one of Ben Schwartz, writing, “The quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last twenty years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation.” I 100 percent agree.

And the only person I want to have that conversation with is Amanda Mull, because she’ll be able to explain why a sweater is not just a sweater. It’s a window into so many of the problems of our modern consumer culture.

So, here we go.

[Music]

Rosin: Did you yourself go through a prolonged period of sweater disappointment?

Mull: You know, I moved to New York in 2011. I’m from the South. I’m from Atlanta, so I didn’t need any sweater-buying skills for the first 25 years of my life. I had thought about this, like, not a single time because, you know, you put on a hoodie and you keep it moving where I’m from.

But suddenly, I needed to figure out how to buy, like, a whole new cold-weather wardrobe, so I made a lot of mistakes, and I made a lot of sweater mistakes because I figured, you know: Just go to any of the retailers where I’m buying my other stuff and order some sweaters from them, and it’ll be fine.

It was not fine. I got a lot of very itchy, very plasticky sweaters. I got things that pilled up immediately, that just looked terrible, looked really cheap.

I felt like a baked potato wrapped in foil inside of them. I was steaming like a dumpling. I was unhappy. I was itchy. I looked like I was in, like, this weird plastic material. I hated it.

And I did this for years before I realized that it’s the materials. I need to be looking at the fabric labels. I need to be looking at what these sweaters are actually made out of and probably spending some more money and spending some more time looking for better things. But yeah, I screwed up in that way for the better part of a decade, I would say.

Rosin: Okay, so we have sweaters of yore and sweaters now. Can you walk us through how these come into the world differently?

Mull: When you look at Billy Crystal’s sweater, you can make a few assumptions about what’s going on with it. The first thing is it’s almost certainly fully wool.

What kind of wool, it’s impossible for me to say, but there is an almost 100 percent chance that what you’re looking at is a completely natural-fiber sweater.

And it’s also double knit, which is why it looks so much heftier. At the time, sweaters were much more likely to be made of not just natural fibers, but of 100 percent wool.

That is traditionally the material that sweaters have been made out of for, you know, hundreds of years. A sweater like that would almost certainly be made in a wool-producing country.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mull: So it might have been made in the United States. It might have been made in Scotland, New Zealand, Ireland, one of the places in the world where a lot of sheep are raised, a lot of yarn is manufactured, and then sweaters are then made from that yarn. Because it was almost certainly sold in the United States, in the 1980s there were some import controls on what could be brought into the U.S. and sold as far as textiles go, which means it was almost certainly made in a relatively wealthy country, where garment workers are more likely to have significant tenure on the job, real skills training, good wages—things like that.

So it was probably made by someone who has a lot of experience making sweaters.

Rosin: Interesting.

Mull: By someone who has lots and lots of training, lots and lots of particular skills.

Rosin: So the yarn would be wool, and whoever created it would be someone with sweater skills.

Mull: Right. Making this kind of knitwear is a very, very highly skilled task. It wouldn’t just be a person overseeing the machine; it would be a person manipulating the machine to ensure that you get all of that really rich cabling and all of those details. You know, it takes a lot of yarn to make a sweater that robust.

Rosin: I’m kind of sweating listening to you. Like, I want to be falling into nostalgia with you, but what I’m actually thinking is, like, No, no. Like, I feel too hot and sweaty. So that’s the sweaters of yore. Then what happened?

Mull: Well, in 2005, a trade agreement called the Multifiber Arrangement expired. The provisions within that agreement had been sort of, like, being phased out by design over the course of, like, a decade.

But in 2005, it went away. And what that meant was that the United States had fewer import caps on textile products that were being brought in from developing nations, or less-wealthy nations. And that sort of, I mean, it ended the garment industry in the U.S. as we know it, basically, because what became possible was all these manufacturers and retailers to look for manufacturing overseas in far less-wealthy countries—countries that would allow them to, you know, release more pollution into the environment, that would sort of kowtow to their interests in various ways. You know, the United States is not a perfect country by any means, but there are basic protections on worker safety in the environment that make it more expensive to manufacture here.

So, suddenly, brands could move their manufacturing overseas. Retailers could source inventory from factories overseas that were charging far less. All of these financial incentives just changed apparel as we know it.

Rosin: This sounds like a monumental change, and yet the word Multifiber Arrangement is not something that anyone would stop and notice, even though from what you’re saying it’s completely upended our closets and our lives. Why?

Mull: This agreement was written to expire, and then when it expired, a lot changed about clothing in the United States. What it did, essentially, was placate the domestic garment industry with 30 years of protection but then guarantee that when that 30 years was up, you know, it would sort of be open season. So it got the garment industry to sort of sign off on their own eventual death.

Rosin: So 2005 is a critical year. What does the post-2005 period look like?

Mull: 2005 was a watershed moment, but it wasn’t as stark as it might have been if the protection provisions of the agreement hadn’t been designed to be phased out. But in 2005, it’s basically open season. That is the era where you get a lot of fast-fashion retailers really expanding their presence in the United States.

The first H&Ms start opening in the U.S. You get Forever 21 flourishing. You have this sort of moment when there’s this big rush into this new type of industry that can flourish in the United States, and that rush is built on sort of terrible clothing.

Rosin: Well, now you say terrible clothing. Do you mean terribly made clothing? Clothing with terrible fabrics? Because you could get a lot of trendy clothing cheaply.

Mull: When fast fashion comes to the U.S., it brings with it its sort of internal financial logic. What that means is their goal is to sell as much clothing as possible, and they need to create the prices that allow them to do that. And being able to move manufacturing overseas means that they can vastly reduce their labor costs and also use much, much cheaper materials.

Rosin: So we started with sheep and wool. What do we switch to?

Mull: In sweaters, what this means is you’re getting a lot of what is essentially plastic. That will show up on fabric labels as polyester or polyamide or acrylic. That’s what you’ll usually find in sweater weaves.

You also get what is basically rayon. And in sweater knits, you’re starting to see a lot more of viscose, which is a fiber derived from bamboo, but it’s derived in a way that is really, really deleterious to the environment in most circumstances, and that fabric can be manufactured in other countries with poor environmental restrictions on industry.

So you get a lot more of that material and a lot more plastic.

Rosin: You know, it’s funny: It’s not that I didn’t notice fast fashion—of course I have, and have bought many a thing from its demonic jaws—but somehow the sweater existed in a different category.

A sweater is such a significant thing. If I think sweater, I still think of a Billy Crystal, fisherman, thick sweater, even though I have not worn one or owned one in many, many years. That is what a sweater is. You just, we don’t classify sweater as disposable.

Mull: Right. And the basic designs of sweaters that you see have not changed much in the last, you know, 40 years. You still see cable knits. You still see turtlenecks. You still see the sort of fine-gauge knits more likely to be made from an ultra-soft wool, like a cashmere.

So, because they’ve visually changed less over time, I think that people don’t go into buying one expecting it to be disposable, because it’s still something that has the look and feel of a thing that should be able to be worn for 10 years.

Rosin: Right. Right. What you’re describing has been happening in a pretty rapid way for 20 years. Have we really not noticed that our sweaters were rapidly deteriorating for 20 years?

Mull: Well, I think people have noticed it, but the consumer system is sort of inherently individualistic, and people tend to approach problems that they encounter within the consumer system as something that they can sort of, like, MacGyver their way out of—or if they’re just better educated, or if they look harder, or if they find, like, the secret source for the good stuff, that this is a problem that they can solve. We don’t think about consumption and about clothing and about changes in materials as this sort of collective issue, but that’s really what it is.

So I think that because we are not trained to look for the sort of big, hidden system behind why we have the sweater options we have, it is hard for people to do that.

And it’s just hard to get the type of view on the system that you would need in order to understand what’s happening. Like, if you are sort of a sicko like me, you know, you do a lot of reading about this. You read academic stuff. You read books on the history of textiles. But this history is pretty well hidden.

And the fashion industry goes to great lengths to purposefully hide this type of understanding of how its products are created and how that has changed over time, because fashion marketing works best when you are just thinking about your own aesthetic and sensory experience of a garment.

So there’s a real, concerted effort on the part of the industry at large to encourage people not to put real thought into why suddenly the sweaters are, like, a little scratchier now.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that makes so much sense. I would also say that probably we let it happen because there’s some ways that it’s better. Because laundry is easier. I can have a sense that I’m accessing a luxury item for cheaper. So there are ways in which it’s working for people.

Mull: Absolutely. I think that the fashion industry does a great job of sort of paying off consumers for not thinking about this stuff too hard.

It is fun to have, like, a zillion options when you get dressed in the morning or when you are packing for a vacation. Having this type of variety and this type of choice is something that in the past was only available to wealthy people and to celebrities, and getting to sort of star in our everyday life with our own custom wardrobe is fun. Putting on a cute outfit is fun. Buying a new outfit is fun. I love clothing. I totally get why people buy all of this stuff and why it’s just a little bit easier not to look too hard at the man behind the curtain.

There is not a lot of upside to people in looking into exactly where any of this stuff comes from, or why it is ill-fitting, or why the seams split so easily, or why there’s so much of it and there used to not be nearly as much. There’s not really a lot of personal upside to looking into that, except getting depressed.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, Amanda will teach us what to look for if we absolutely need a new sweater. Back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Before we climb out of the hole—because we will climb out of the hole—besides split seams, what are the other collective costs of this system for us, for people around the world?

Mull: The things that the consumer system obscures are largely bad, especially when it comes to fast fashion. Garment workers overseas work in generally terrible conditions. They work for very, very little money. A lot of them have very little control over their day-to-day lives. Some of them live in in dorms that are, you know, owned by their bosses. There’s very little ability to sort of, like, live a happy, independent, secure life if you’re a garment worker in most of the world. It is a really, really dark system underneath the surface in order to create all of this really, really inexpensive stuff.

You know, if a sweater costs $10, that savings is coming from somewhere, and it’s probably coming from the people in the system with the least power and the least ability to stand up for themselves.

Rosin: Right.

Mull: And then you also get a significant environmental impact from all of this. A lot of the countries that host these types of manufacturing outfits have fewer environmental protections.

So there is a ton of pollution that happens and a ton of human-rights abuses that happen on the front end, when things are being manufactured. And then you just end up at the other end of that manufacturing process with a lot of physical waste. In order for fast fashion to work, companies have to manufacture far more than they can reasonably sell to people, so you end up with a lot of excess clothing that gets dumped, usually in poor countries. There are, in particular, real problems with clothing waste being shipped to Ghana and Chile and then just dumped in these sort of vast piles of waste.

And the stuff we’re talking about here is stuff that was never sold. It was never used. It is pure front-to-back waste. That accounts for a lot of the textile waste in the world. But then also, fabric recycling is really, really difficult. And a lot of things ultimately just cannot be recycled, or it’s not cost effective to recycle them. So because buying habits are sort of decoupled from any actual need or want, people buy stuff that then doesn’t get worn or that gets worn once, and then it ends up being donated, and a huge proportion of that ends up just being wasted. It cannot be recycled.

So you’ve got more stuff for the great clothing-waste piles in these poorer countries that are just essentially a dumping ground for us. You’ve got plastics in waterways. You’ve got hazardous chemicals in waterways that are coming out of these garments that are just wasted. There’s a lot of waste and a lot of human suffering that comes out of this.

Rosin: I’m utterly paralyzed. I’m never going to buy anything again.

I don’t know exactly how spiritually to turn this shift, because everything you said was much more serious than the question I’m about to ask you.

But the reality is: It’s cold. Sometimes I might, maybe, still want to buy a sweater for my niece. Maybe. Or I might have a “friend” who wants to one day buy a sweater. (Not me. I’ll never buy anything again.) How do you MacGyver this?

Mull: There are still places out there where you can find 100-percent-wool sweaters made in factories in countries that have real protections for their garment workers, that are made by companies that care about this type of stuff. It’s a tall order to have to do all that research yourself and try to sort through this. It is, in a lot of situations, maybe impossible.

But sweaters, because they are so deeply tied to certain regions of the world and to long-standing garment traditions that are ongoing in those regions—if you look for sweaters that are made in Ireland, Scotland, or New Zealand, a lot of those are going to be made with real wool from sheep that were treated pretty well and by people that are skilled workers.

And those don’t have to be super expensive. A lot of those, you can have something like that for less than $200. And for a garment that you expect to last year after year after year—and to serve not just a fashion purpose, but a functional purpose in your wardrobe—part of this is just a mindset thing. If you let go of the idea that you need or want to have a new wardrobe every season, I think it’s easier to then go: Okay, I am going to buy one $150 fully wool sweater, and I am not going to get sucked in by the email sales and by Instagram ads and by all of these constant prompts that we receive to purchase additional stuff.

Everybody that I talked to for this story said that their favorite place to get really good, quality sweaters is through secondhand shopping. Because they’re secondhand, you can get a good price on them. You can pay the same amount for one of these that you would pay for a brand-new, plastic sweater in a store. And then you’re also not contributing to this larger issue of the constant cycle of new things that are being put into our physical world.

Rosin: I’m gonna put a Post-it note near my bed that says, “plastic sweater,” because I think if I’m ever tempted, that phrase “plastic sweater” will dissuade me from buying anything new.

I want to ask you about a couple of methods that, now that I’m talking to you, I have used but sound wrong. One thing is price, luxury—that does not necessarily, it sounds like, ensure that my sweater is not plastic.

Mull: Right. One of the most difficult things about the consumer system as we experience it now is that price is pretty much entirely decoupled from any sort of expectation you should have about the quality of an item or the item’s material composition.

Rosin: You say that so casually. That’s so crazy. Like, that is so confounding that you said it’s completely decoupled.

Mull: Right. You know, sometimes a really, really expensive thing is going to be really that much better than its less-expensive counterparts, but usually not. I don’t think there’s really any obvious correlation between the two anymore. It’s pretty much certain that if you’re buying a $20, brand-new sweater, what you’re getting is terrible quality. But there’s not any guarantee that if you’ve spent $3,000 on a sweater that it’s going to be markedly better.

Because the logic of fast fashion has infiltrated a lot of parts of the fashion industry, people expect clothing will look old—trend-wise, if not wear-wise, as far as quality goes—in six months.

They expect to move on. So there’s no real incentive for a lot of luxury brands to make their stuff to be substantially better quality than some of the much cheaper options.

Rosin: So you can’t rely on cost. Can you rely on tags? Like, can I just read the tag and see what it’s made of? Or are there euphemisms there that I might not catch?

Mull: The best thing that you can do is to learn what your fabric tags mean when you look on the inside of a garment. Wool means wool. Cotton means cotton. Linen means linen. Polyamide, polyester, acrylic—those all mean plastic. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Right. What about Mongolian wool? Like, I bought a sweater and it said, “100 percent Mongolian wool.” Is that just wool? Sometimes I’m afraid there’s some euphemism that I never heard of and that’s fake, and there are no Mongolian sheep—just in pictures. It doesn’t really exist.

Mull: Well, wool is sort of a catch-all term. It can come from a lot of different animals. So that level of detail is useful because it might tell you a little bit more about the texture of the garment or how it will look over time with wear. Different wools do have different physical properties, so that can be useful on that level. It doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about quality. But wool is always a good starting point to understanding what it is you’re looking at and what it is you can expect from that garment.

And knowing what the less-definitive words mean as well—viscose, rayon, modal—these types of fabrics are generally the bamboo-derived ones and, while technically a natural fiber, there’s a lot that goes into the creation of that that is not necessarily very good for the environment or for the people working on it.

So learning exactly what those terms mean, too, is useful, and you’ll see the same ones over and over again. Once you learn what all of this means, it is knowledge that you can take with you for the rest of your life and be pretty set when trying to make the most basic decisions about whether or not you want to buy something.

If you can get yourself out of that headspace that says that you need more stuff, that you are missing things, it’s a good idea for everybody to just slow down and go: Okay, I have five sweaters in my closet already. I have but one human body. I can only wear so many sweaters. Do I already have something that’s similar to this and that I just haven’t thought about in a while or that I just haven’t tried on with the new pair of pants that I got that might look great with it?

Making yourself aware of what you already own, and if it fits you, and how it feels on you, and how it might go with the things that you have already is good. Being familiar with your own wardrobe is good. And really, just the problematic behavior here—no matter where you’re getting your stuff—is just buying for the sake of buying.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

One of American fiction’s core preoccupations, these days, seems to be the question of what causes unhappiness. Many of our major writers are earnest anatomists of discontent and its social, psychological, and existential causes. This kind of fiction can be very powerful. Reading about loneliness when you’re lonely can provide both diagnosis and solace; encountering a character trapped by student debt or patriarchal expectation can inspire a sense of camaraderie in a reader facing similar frustrations. But more often than not, contemporary novelists handle their subject matter with immersive seriousness and sincerity—and sincerity, after a while, gets tiring. Misery may love company, but sometimes a miserable person wants cheering up too.

If you’re looking to make a little light of sadness, as I have been, the work of Diana Athill might be the perfect place to turn. The legendary writer and editor is one of a loose cadre of 20th-century English and Irish women authors gaining resurgent attention for their brilliantly drawn characters and sharply witty prose; others in this camp include Penelope Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Taylor, and Molly Keane. These novelists are brisk and mordant stylists who treat sorrow and disaffection not as problems to solve or as states to submerge oneself in, but as conditions to be lived with and sometimes laughed at. This unsentimental approach could turn into a stiff-upper-lip denialism, but it instead intensifies the profound currents of emotion running through their work. Reading any of them is like cracking open a sea urchin: spiky outside, soft within.

The queen of the sea urchins is, without doubt, Athill, who died at age 101 in 2019. Athill grew up in shabby rural gentility and, after going to Oxford—unusual, at the time, for a girl of her background—helped launch the publishing house André Deutsch. There she edited writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, and Keane, whose novel Good Behaviour she swiped from her colleague Esther Whitby: “In our firm,” Athill recalled in a 2017 Guardian essay, “the person who first read and loved a book usually became its editor. In this case, however, I said, ‘I’m sorry, Esther, but I am going to pull rank. I am going to edit this novel.’”

A similar decisiveness shines through Athill’s own writing. In her 40s, she began writing short fiction, followed by one novel and several memoirs in which she chronicled her life as an editor and a single woman unafraid of either adventuring in or candidly discussing the realms of sex and love. Don’t Look at Me Like That, the novel, and Instead of a Letter, her first memoir, have recently been reissued in the United States. Both are beautiful examples of Athill’s refusal to romanticize feelings.

In her afterword to Don’t Look at Me Like That, the writer Helen Oyeyemi describes being captivated by the “acidic crackle” of the book’s “novelistic I.” It’s a perfect turn of phrase. Athill writes in a series of miniature explosions: of meanness, of insight, of stark confrontation with loneliness or brutality or grief. She doesn’t shy away from any of this. Both reissued works dump readers into dark emotion with their first sentence. The memoir’s is “My maternal grandmother died of old age, a long and painful process.” The novel’s: “When I was at school I used to think that everyone disliked me, and it wasn’t far from true.” For Athill, death, pain, and being disliked are not subjects to duck—or, for that matter, subjects to mine. They’re natural parts of life, and, in fiction, sources of plot rather than of extended interest. It’s a tack that creates room for spite, surprise, and humor, and lifts her prose brightly from the page.

Don’t Look at Me Like That is especially acerbic. Its heroine, Meg Bailey, looks back with unsparing clarity on an adolescence and young adulthood defined by her cool-blooded view of unhappiness. Meg is breezy about the financial mismanagement that ruins her family’s fortune and affectionate toward the parents she disrespects for their naivete. As a teenager, she is already gimlet-eyed about her role models: She looks up at her friend Roxane’s mother, Mrs. Weaver, whose effortful glamour Meg realizes she’ll “one day, see … as a joke.” The knowledge that her admiration has an expiration date doesn’t seem tragic to her; it lets her more fully enjoy Mrs. Weaver in the moment. Meg is even jaunty about her first great disappointment, when she’s told at art school that she won’t succeed as a painter. After less than a paragraph of mourning for her ambitions, she jumps into professional illustration, at which she succeeds quickly while maintaining a sanguine, win-some-lose-some attitude.

[Read: The book that teaches us to live with our fears]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meg’s apparent comfort with loss comes back to bite her. Much of the novel’s momentum comes from her ill-fated affair with Roxane’s husband, Dick. Meg feels passionately about Dick; her love for him is the one thing she can’t move promptly past, and, as their relationship falls apart, she descends into misery. Still, Meg makes a point of treating her grief spryly. Indeed, dwelling on it strikes her as nearly inhuman. “Why must you face facts when almost all of them are intolerable?” she wonders, recalling the dissolution of the affair. “Apart from the obvious ones like war and the bomb and concentration camps … how could I stay alive if I spent much time facing them? Even the tiny corners of cruelty and hopelessness which stick into my own life: what would have happened to me, during the time I am remembering, if I had faced them?”

The haste with which Meg pushes through the “intolerable facts” of her life has additional repercussions. Meg is congenitally unable to feel sexual pleasure, a condition that she talks about in brief, barbed terms: “I suppose,” she tells the reader, “that I am a freak.” But her lack of introspection about the effects her sexual detachment might have on others winds up causing hurt: Late in the book, Meg forms a bond with Jamil, an architecture student and her housemate. Although he has a girlfriend, Norah, Jamil yearns for Meg; she brushes his desire off, announcing that “in spite of the misfortune of his having fallen in love with me, Jamil and I remained friends.” She can’t see the complexities of having a friend and neighbor who is in love with her. When it blows up in a humiliating way, though, she feels shame and makes no excuses for herself.

Meg’s capacity to admit fault comes from her relationship to loss. She assumes that some badness, in herself and others, is natural. The novel ends with a confrontation between Meg and Norah in which Norah is genuinely, shockingly cruel—far crueler, in fact, than Meg would ever be. Still, in the book’s blazing last sentence, Meg shrugs it off. “There’s something almost enjoyable,” she tells the reader, “in having one person in the world I can truly hate.” Her crisp observation underscores what could be interpreted as the book’s thesis about pain: Just because you have to feel it doesn’t mean you have to wallow.

Athill’s memoiristic I has a warmer tone than her fictive one, though it’s no less sharp-tongued. Instead of a Letter opens on her grandmother’s deathbed, where Athill, in her mid-40s, sat and wondered that the idea of dying with no heirs did not cause an “icy wind” to blow through her: “I would like to know why. Which is my reason for sitting down to write this.” Questions about aging and legacy can invite sentimentality—think of Pixar’s Up and Coco, kids’ movies on those themes that double as tearjerkers for adults. Athill’s blunt curiosity is refreshingly straightforward in contrast. She is surprised herself, and just wants to know more.

Like her novel, the memoir covers its heroine’s childhood and roughly the first decade of her adulthood, in which she establishes herself as an editor and falls in love. On the latter front, Athill is at once strikingly emotional and strikingly unromantic. In the memoir’s best scene, she has unintentionally gotten pregnant and goes to a counselor to discuss her options. The counselor begins spouting pieties about how badly women suffer after ending pregnancies, which, Athill writes, “clarified my mind in a flash. I knew, now, that I must get on with the job of finding an abortionist.” Walking down the street afterward, she feels confident not only in her decision, but also in her scorn for the counselor—the “old blackmailer,” she calls her—that helped her arrive at it. She would love to have a baby, and feels that she “got pregnant by subconscious intention”; she knows herself, however, to be totally unprepared to raise one, and so she will not.

[Read: The calamity of unwanted motherhood]

Athill’s matter-of-factness about the decision to have an abortion is especially notable considering the question of posterity that she asks herself at the book’s outset. Another memoirist might have turned the counselor scene into a lengthier meditation on her feelings about maternity. Athill pins those feelings down swiftly, then moves on. She doesn’t return to the issue until the book’s final pages, at which point she reaches an answer, then instantly undermines it. “I have written a little, and I have loved,” she begins, and though she finds literature and romance enough in her 40s, she expects that “if I do not die until I am old, those things will have become too remote to count for much. I shall remember that they once seemed worth everything, but quite possibly the fact that by then they will be over will appear to have wiped out their value. It ought to be a frightening thought, but I am still not frightened.”

Athill underestimated herself. She kept writing memoirs—many about love and sex—for decades, and her final memoir, Alive, Alive Oh!, came out in the U.K. when she was 97. But maybe her icy wind did not show up because dying, no matter what she might or might not leave behind, just didn’t scare her. In her work, death, like love, loneliness, or humiliation, is more than natural: It’s too real and too human to fear.

The Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness broods upon what I’d call zombie history. There are other terms for inherited memory of catastrophic events experienced by one’s forebears, such as intergenerational transmission of trauma and postmemory. But the past in this novel rises from the grave and takes possession of the bodies of the living. Memories resurface as tics, gestures, obsessions—the condensations of meaning that Freud called neurotic symptoms. Sometimes these show up in the personally traumatized. Much of the literature about intergenerational trauma focuses on the reappearance of symptoms in the next generation, though they may, indeed commonly do, persist into the third and beyond. Here they seem dormant in the children and resurface in a grandchild.

In Forgottenness (the first novel originally written in Ukrainian to be published by a major U.S. trade house), a young woman mops compulsively, finally driving away her fiancé. She is the narrator, a writer who is never named. The time is the present, which seems to mean about a decade ago; the novel came out in Ukraine in 2016. As a child, she learned how to wash a floor—really wash it—from her maternal grandmother, Sonia, a cleaning woman who is now barely clinging to life. You have to do the floor at least twice, Sonia taught her. Go over it once, and you’ll leave streaks of dirt. Sonia used to grab the mop out of the narrator’s hands when she didn’t apply enough force. “Why are you washing as if you haven’t eaten in three days?” she would demand.

Sonia’s reproach is not the innocent hyperbole of a babushka. Nothing is innocent in zombie history. Sonia is the one who didn’t eat for three days, likely more. Her mother died soon after she was born, and when she was 3 or 4, she tells the narrator, her father left her on the steps of an orphanage and said he’d be right back with some pampushky, garlic rolls. Instead he walked to the gatehouse of a factory and died. It was 1932, the first year of the Holodomor, a horrific famine in which close to 4 million Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin’s monstrous agricultural policies, possibly deliberately. The orphanage took Sonia in but soon could manage to feed the orphans only three beans a day. She ran away and somehow made it home, to a large farmstead that had been turned into a commissary for the Communist Party elite. For lack of anything better to do, she went to the cemetery, lay down on her mother’s gravestone, and screamed for three days. Thereafter she spoke “almost inaudibly, her voice more like the rasp of an old wooden door.” How she survived is unclear. She had “an incredible, innate strength,” the narrator says.

Transmuting raw experience into symbols, and symbols back into raw emotions, is a basic operation of psychic processing. We do it in our dreams. Literature does it for us, as does, of course, religion. Wafers and wine conjure up the real presence of Christ; ritual is how we reconnect with the miraculous. It’s no coincidence that Sonia spent her working life cleaning a music school that had once been a Catholic monastery, lugging around a mop with a giant handle “that looked more like a cross awaiting a crucifixion.” After crucifixions come resurrections, and the narrator is getting ready to perform one. She scrubs the floor, once, then twice, day in and day out, refusing to leave her apartment, until Sonia’s long-repressed terror finally reemerges and takes hold of her. “A fear stronger than I had ever felt gripped and paralyzed me, and my mop fell to the floor with a clunk,” the narrator says.

Resurrection is the great theme of Forgottenness. Maljartschuk never uses the word, but reading between the lines, we understand that the exhuming of memory is meant to be a miracle. So much militates against it. History, for one, which she compares to the soot that coats an old painting. To restore color and detail—life—to the canvas, there must be a scrubbing, an undoing. Or, you might say, a mopping and a nervous breakdown. A mightier enemy of memory is time itself. “Time consumes everything living by the ton, like a gigantic blue whale consumes microscopic plankton, milling and chewing it into a homogenous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance,” the narrator says. “It wasn’t the disappearance that grieved me the most, but the tracelessness of it.”

That whale, monstrous and deadly, swims through the novel like a biblical leviathan. We and all that we are made up of, “billions of minuscule, almost invisible worlds,” the narrator says, begin disappearing into its maw from the moment we’re born. Meanwhile the whale endures “in its own whale-space, absolute and immutable, where the need to think about something or remember anything doesn’t exist.” Maljartschuk doesn’t say this outright either, but we understand that the only memories that have a chance of outlasting oblivion are the ones written down.

Maljartschuk was born in 1983, eight years before the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Ukraine. She is one of her country’s best-known and most prolific writers, the prizewinning author of several short-story collections and one other novel. She has lived in Vienna since 2011, and also writes in German. When Maljartschuk came of age, at the turn of the millennium, Ukrainians were engaged in what Milan Kundera called “the struggle of memory against forgetting,” revisiting the history of violence and terror under Russian czars, Soviet Communists, and German Nazis, and rehabilitating characters who were erased from memory when the history of the Ukrainian nation was suppressed.

Viktor Yushchenko, a democratic reformist and the Ukrainian president from 2005 to 2010, was particularly preoccupied with the Holodomor. He embraced the view that it was an attempted genocide and erected Holodomor monuments throughout the country, incorporated it into curricula, and initiated government-sponsored research. And then, in 2010, the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych defeated Yushchenko in a presidential election that had partly turned on Yushchenko’s uses of history. The public reckoning with the past came to an end.

Two years before Forgottenness was published, the Maidan Revolution drove Yanukovych out of Ukraine; shortly thereafter, Russia invaded the Donbas region, claiming it was Russian. The novel was presumably in process during this fraught period. In her earlier work, Maljartschuk availed herself of satire, absurdism, and fable to depict Ukraine’s mutating reality. One of her favorite tropes is having animals stand in for people and vice versa, blurring the lines between bestiary and human society. In her first novel, A Biography of a Chance Miracle (2012), set during the chaotic, impoverished Ukraine of the 1990s, a town starts paying its residents to round up stray dogs; a young, idealistic protagonist discovers that they’re being sold to restaurants and wages a quixotic campaign to save them: “Dogs of the world, unite! We won’t let ourselves get eaten!”

[Franklin Foer: It’s not ‘The’ Ukraine]

Forgottenness is more rambling than A Biography of a Chance Miracle—memoiristic (maybe) and realistic-ish, with a heavy overlay of metaphor. The tone is distraught rather than wry, at times oppressively so. Human bodies do more of the work of social critique than animal bodies—with the exception of the stupefying bulk of the whale.

The novel weaves together two stories: the narrator’s and that of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, who was a political thinker and influential theorist of Ukrainian statehood at the turn of the 20th century. The narrator comes across an obituary of him when she begins taking old newspapers out of the library as part of her mission to revive the past. Three words are splashed in huge type across the front page of a 1931 issue of the Ukrainian American newspaper Svoboda, “VIACHESLAV LYPYNSKYI DEAD.” Here’s an obviously important man she’s never heard of. She decides to research his story, because it seems somehow bound up in hers.

The broad outlines of the narrator’s account of Lypynskyi’s life are factual; Maljartschuk makes up the details and the dialogue. Lypynskyi was an unlikely Ukrainian hero, Ukrainian by choice. He was born in 1882 in the town of Zaturtsi in Volhynia, a region then in the Russian empire (now in western Ukraine) and predominantly populated by Ukrainians (then known as East Slavs). Lypynskyi came from a small elite of wealthy, aristocratic Poles. Maljartschuk imagines how he announced his decision to identify as Ukrainian to his family: at the dinner table, at the age of 19. “Don’t call me Wacław. I’m Viacheslav,” he says.

In another scene, likely fictional, set in his professor’s house near Jagiellonian University, in Kraków, he tells fellow Polish students that he’s “a Ukrainian Pole.” To his family and friends, the statement makes no sense. Hybrid identity hasn’t been conceptualized yet, and anyway, as far as they’re concerned, “Ukrainian” is barely an identity; it denotes an illiterate peasant or a “peasant tongue.” In czarist Russia, the printing of Ukrainian books is illegal. In Kraków, which is Austro-Hungarian, Ukrainian is tolerated but considered ridiculous. Lypynskyi’s professor of Ukrainian has only one outdated high-school grammar book to teach from and must supplement the lessons by reciting poetry and singing folk songs. Antiquated, tradition-bound, “the stateless Ukrainian society increasingly resembled a dust-coated stage set that someone had simply forgotten to strike,” the narrator says.

Undaunted, Lypynskyi makes the rebirth of a Ukrainian nation his lifelong cause. In the novel, Polish friends call him a traitor. For a while, he does little besides study the life and career of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, the leader of the great Cossack revolt against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648 that led to the establishment of a free Ukrainian state that lasted 100 years. Ukrainians now hail Khmelnytskyi as a founding father, their George Washington. Lypynskyi points out to his critics that Khmelnytskyi was the son of a Polish courtier, therefore also a Ukrainian Pole. (I have to add that, all my life, I’ve been aware of a very different Khmelnytskyi: the leader whose uprising unleashed the slaughter of perhaps as many as 20,000 Jews. How much blame he deserves is now in dispute, but he is not absolvable. Maljartschuk doesn’t mention this Khmelnytskyi; to be fair, Ukrainians almost never do.)

Perhaps to show other Poles from Ukrainian areas how to imagine themselves as Ukrainian Poles, Lypynskyi eventually comes up with what the narrator calls his “best political idea,” territorialism: Citizenship should be determined by residence on a common land, regardless of ancestry, language, politics, or creed. This is true. Territorialism was Lypynskyi’s most original contribution to Ukrainian political thought. In a 1925 book not cited in the novel, he explained how his land-based concept of the nation differed from then-prevailing European views that grounded national identity in race. “Such a notion, in our colonial conditions, with periodic migration of peoples on our territory … is a complete absurdity,” Lypynskyi wrote. “There have never been and never will be ‘pure-blooded Ukrainians.’ ” Today what seems notable is how pro-immigrant he is: “Whoever settled in our country … and became part and parcel of the Ukraine is Ukrainian, regardless of tribe or cultural origin, of ‘racial’ or ‘ideological’ genealogy.”

Lypynskyi is to Maljartschuk what Khmelnytskyi was to Lypynskyi: a prophet and warrior for a better Ukraine. For the rest of his life, in the novel and in reality, Lypynskyi fought bitterly against Ukrainian ethno-nationalists. He also opposed Ukrainian socialists, who considered nation-states reactionary and obsolete. By the mid-1920s, he had lost both battles. The Bolsheviks absorbed the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a book by Lypynskyi’s nationalist nemesis won a following among Ukraine’s youth. They “would flail between socialist and nationalist ideologies like between the banks of a swift mountain river onto which few manage to clamber alive,” the narrator says. (The translation, by Zenia Tompkins, can get choppy.)

The portions of the novel devoted to Lypynskyi’s political evolution are straightforward and lively, even inspiring. Lypynskyi is a little pallid, though, compared with the narrator’s grandparents, who tromp through the novel like damaged giants. Bomchyk, the narrator’s paternal grandfather, is a toothless, joyous farmer. The narrator lived with him for a year when she was little, a period she associates with “the happiest times of my life.” Bomchyk weighed 330 pounds when he died. Before he got so fat, he laughed constantly. Now, as an adult, the narrator understands his transmogrification. Bomchyk laughed because he had the gift of being easily amused, but also because he had nothing besides laughter to call his own. He’d handed over whatever the Communists demanded when they established a collective farm in his village; resistance would have meant Siberia or worse. To avoid conscription, he’d played the idiot in front of the recruiters. Friends who melted into the woods to fight the Soviets wanted him to join them, but he pulled a comforter over his head and pretended not to hear them. The friends were shot and their bodies put on display as a warning, and villagers averted their eyes as they went by. Bomchyk’s laughter hid shame and powerlessness, and as life got sadder, he smothered the urge to giggle with food.

Symptoms circulate freely among the narrator and her characters: Zombie history would appear to operate on a principle of mimetic contagion. Right before she tells Bomchyk’s story, she goes through a phase of pathological overeating. This comes in the middle of a longer-lasting phase of agoraphobia, so when she runs out of food, she can’t leave to go shopping. Her parents bring over potato dumplings and cabbage rolls, which she stuffs into her mouth while they watch. “Look, don’t eat so much or you’ll end up like Grandpa Bomchyk,” her father says.

Lypynskyi is more vivid when his psychic crises hijack his body the way the narrator’s problems commandeer hers. He contracts tuberculosis and struggles to breathe, an apt malady for a man squeezed between inimical identities and mass movements that have no room for nuanced thought. His erotic impulses are bizarre. He meets his future wife under extremely unpropitious circumstances: During a lecture he gives on Ukrainian history, he claims that Polish nobles in Ukraine had fought on the side of the Cossacks during the Khmelnytskyi uprising, rather than for Poland, and a blond Polish student, a woman, stands up and screams, “Shame!” He is chased out of the building—and becomes obsessed with the woman, Kazimiera, whom he ultimately persuades to marry him. The marriage, of course, is a disaster; she can barely read Ukrainian, has no interest in Ukrainian independence, and won’t live with him on the family estate in Ukraine. This fixation on a woman who rejects him so thoroughly is a telling pathology. In a part of the world left bloody by ethnic wars, dual identity may pit the soul against itself.

You can’t rethink the past—your past, a nation’s past—without a radical shift in perspective, and sure enough, angles of vision get very strange in the novel. Drafted into the Russian army at the start of World War I, Lypynskyi narrowly escapes a massacre and ends up in a military hospital with a curious neurological condition. “Every person he encountered appeared to him to have only one eye—right in the middle, at the bridge of the nose,” Maljartschuk writes. “The human world had become a world of Cyclopes.” Shortly after the narrator tells that story, she starts standing on her head so that she can see the world upside down. Her head throbs; noise rings in her ears. “World War I has broken out in my chest,” she tells her fiancé, who thinks she’s gone mad.

The real question is: Is madness the sane response to history? Maljartschuk thwarts the urge for an answer. There turn out to be no denouement and few big revelations. One occurs during the narrator’s visit to Lypynskyi’s family estate, now a museum. The great man was buried in a nearby cemetery, but where is no longer known. The Soviets turned the property into a collective farm, and the cemetery was razed and the gravestones used for flooring. Afterward, the narrator waits for a bus that never comes, and she weeps. Too many bones have been bulldozed, too much memory excised. The dead will never be raised. We who walk unaware over their now-unmarked graves will never realize that life in their absence is a lusterless shadow of what it could have been, “just a branch growing green on a withered tree.”

And yet the novel itself pushes back against despair, simply by virtue of existing. Which means that Maljartschuk exists. She could so easily not have been born. What do we owe the ancestors who survived, notwithstanding ignominy and torment? Just that. To survive. Every single one of them had to survive for the line of descent to arrive at us, and now we must too. And maybe record a memory or two. “Through the generations, considerable interest had accrued,” the narrator says. “Little by little, I had to start paying off my debts.”

Maljartschuk’s repayment is a novel, haunted and haunting, that is disorienting and less than perfect but does what it has to do: It’s memorable. I worry, though, that she might not be doing much debt-paying at the moment. Two months after Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, she told the German public-broadcasting company Deutsche Welle that she could no longer imagine writing poetry or fiction. Though she lives in Austria, far from the front, she said she felt “as if Russian tanks were attacking my body, my organs, my heart, my kidneys.” Watching that interview, I thought of the whale. Toward the end of Forgottenness, Maljartschuk has her narrator say, “I can hear how the gigantic blue whale is slapping its tail against the surface of the sea somewhere not too far away. Very soon, it will open its mouth and begin to suck in everything and everyone.” Far be it from me to deny the leviathan its status as the cosmic principle of death and destruction, but, I thought, it might also be Putin’s Russia.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Zombie History Stalks Ukraine.”