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My dentist is my enemy. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The truth about organic milk Britain is leaving the U.S. gender-medicine debate behind. Trump has transformed the GOP all the way down.

Clean Teeth, Weak Spirit

When you’re a kid, the dentist’s office is a frightening place full of loud noises and sharp instruments. But at least people speak softly to you, and at the end of all the scraping and scrubbing, you get a pat on the back and a little prize from a treasure box.

When you are an adult, there are no prizes. There is only pain.

The dentist’s office is the only place in the modern health-care system where I still expect to be unrelentingly shamed. My normal doctor tolerates me well enough, and the nurse who takes my blood pressure there is always warm and kind. My dermatologist laughs at my jokes. But my dental hygienist? She would never.

Seconds after entering the exam room, the hygienist—let’s call her Deb—is annoyed. She looks at the screen to see what she is dealing with and sighs as if to say, You again. She snaps on her rubber gloves. “All the way up,” Deb says, because I am not yet reclined on the chair. I smile nervously and go horizontal, as instructed, my legs sticking to the vinyl.

It’s important to mention, before we go any further, that I have a decent set of chompers. They are relatively straight, and a color I will call “pleasantly off-white.” I have never had a cavity as an adult; I do not drink soft drinks; I do not regularly eat candy. My breath is … fine, I think. Could I be flossing more? Sure. Should I be brushing more gently? Probably. But I am, at least in my own estimation, a pretty good—if not ideal—dental patient. Deb does not agree.

If I am due for an X-ray, Deb will spend the next few minutes jamming pointy shapes into all corners of my mouth, ignoring when I wince. Surely an X-ray would be a cinch, you might think to yourself. But you would be wrong. Normal body X-rays are straightforward, painless. Dental X-rays are stabby, pinchy. How have we, as a society, not yet found a pain-free way to send electromagnetic waves through jaws? I cannot ask Deb this question, because she is elbow-deep in my mouth, wedging plastic into my gums.

Next, we begin the cleaning process, which is very complex and involves more sighing from Deb. First, she scrapes the plaque off of my teeth with a tool that is ominously called a “scaler” and sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Then she uses her mechanical brush to grind gravelly mint toothpaste across my molars. So far, so good, I tell myself, breathing through it. Then the flossing begins. Deb performs the first vigorous round with regular floss, which breaks at least once. My gums burn and bleed. “Are we flossing regularly?” Deb asks, tilting her head to give me a better view of her judgmental frown. “Yes, but not this hard,” I reply. Then Deb does a second round of flossing with some kind of ice-cold water spout, and I dissociate.

After my soul has returned to my body, Deb offers to do a fluoride treatment for an additional $30 out of pocket. “No, thank you,” I reply politely, spitting blood into the sink. Deb frowns and says, “Next time.”

Now the dentist appears. In real life, I might find this smiling, bespectacled man sweet. But here, in this place, he is my enemy. He studies my X-rays and tells me the good news: no cavities, all clear. I start to feel hopeful; he starts to sell me Invisalign. He tells me how small and dangerously close together my teeth are. “You don’t have any issues now, but without Invisalign, you could have some serious problems down the road,” he says, a grave expression on his face. But I have already fallen for this once, when I purchased an ill-fitting Invisalign night guard for $300. “No, thank you,” I say again. I just want to go home.

“Get a new dentist!” you might advise. I have thought of this, my friend. Shopping for a new health-care provider requires time and motivation that I simply don’t have. But much more important, a new dentist doesn’t seem likely to solve the problem. Because the problem is with dentistry itself. It goes beyond the judgy bedside manner: The whole industry seems too focused on selling products and too eager to overtreat patients with expensive procedures. Plus, many standard dental treatments are “not well substantiated by research,” as Ferris Jabr once wrote in this magazine.

The dentist digs around in my mouth for a while, his cold metal tools clinging and clanging together. After a moment, he clears his throat and asks the very last question I am expecting to hear: “So, do you think Donald Trump could really win?” It is kind of my dentist to remember that I work as a political reporter; I’m sure he’s trying to brighten up this experience for me. But the only thing more unpleasant than trying to talk with your mouth full of sharp metal instruments is trying to talk about the 2024 presidential election with your mouth full of sharp metal instruments. I force a smile, as my mouth hangs open like a snake’s unhinged lower jaw. “Who knows!” I muster.

Finally, it’s over. My teeth are glimmering, but my spirit is weak. When I leave the room, Deb and the dentist watch me, their eyes downcast, as though they’re reluctant to let my teeth go home with me.

My ego will be sore for a week. So will my mouth. I have a cap on one of my front teeth because of an unfortunate apple incident a few years back. Two weeks ago at the dentist’s, that cap came loose after some overeager flossing and digging. I can feel it right now, wiggling slightly in the front of my mouth, taunting me. I’m trying to ignore it, because the truth is hard to face: The only fix is a return to the dentist.

Related:

The truth about dentistry Why dentistry is separate from medicine

Today’s News

The House passed a modified surveillance bill that reauthorizes a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for two years, two days after some House Republicans voted against an earlier version of the bill. President Joe Biden canceled $7.4 billion in student-loan debt, affecting roughly 277,000 people. The move is separate from his announcement earlier this week about a large-scale plan to forgive some or all student loans for some 30 million people. A driver ran an 18-wheeler truck into a Department of Public Safety office in Brenham, Texas, seriously injuring multiple people. The suspect is in custody, according to police.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The Children’s Bach, by Helen Garner, is an oblique and beautiful book, Gal Beckerman writes. Atlantic Intelligence: AI has drastically improved voice recognition—a technology that researchers have long struggled with, Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote this week.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Alamy

Tupperware Is in Trouble

By Amanda Mull

For the first several decades of my life, most of the meals I ate involved at least one piece of Tupperware. My mom’s pieces were mostly the greens and yellows of a 1970s kitchen, purchased from co-workers or neighbors who circulated catalogs around the office or slipped them into mailboxes in our suburban subdivision. Many of her containers were acquired before my brother and I were born and remained in regular use well after I flew the nest for college in the mid-2000s …

The market for storage containers, on the whole, is thriving … But Tupperware has fallen on hard times. At the end of last month, for a second year in a row, the company warned financial regulators that it would be unable to file its annual report on time and raised doubts about its ability to continue as a business, citing a “challenging financial condition.” Sales are in decline. These should be boom times for Tupperware. What happened?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The homepage on the Black internet A home for kidnappers and their victims The AI revolution is crushing thousands of languages. Iran’s deadly message to journalists abroad The country that tried to control sex

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Savor. The cocoa shortage is making chocolate more expensive—and it might never be the same, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Watch. La Chimera (out now in theaters) is an entrancing fairytale about Italian grave robbers.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

I’ve long fought the battle in defense of milk chocolate. My colleague Yasmin Tayag understands this position—her favorite chocolate treat is the Cadbury Creme Egg—but in a recent article, she acknowledges that genuinely “good chocolate …. should taste richly of cocoa.”

Many of the milky, sugary versions of chocolate are light on actual cocoa, she explains: “M&M’s, Snickers bars, and Hershey’s Kisses aren’t staples of American diets because they are the best—rather, they satisfy our desire for chocolate while costing a fraction of a jet-black bar made from single-origin cocoa.”

Now the ongoing cocoa shortage is driving prices way up, in ways that will affect even low-in-cocoa chocolate varieties. Commercial chocolate makers may start to tweak their recipes to use less cocoa; as Yasmin puts it, “Chocolate as we know it may never be the same.” I don’t tell you this to ruin your weekend. Instead, let the news encourage you to savor your favorites while you can (for me, it’s those extra-milky Dove milk-chocolate pieces).

On Chocolate

Chocolate Might Never Be the Same

By Yasmin Tayag

The cocoa shortage is making chocolate more expensive—maybe forever.

Read the article.

Silicon Valley Is Coming for Your Chocolate

By Larissa Zimberoff

One day, cocoa might come from a petri dish.

Read the article.

Milk Chocolate Is Better Than Dark, the End

By Megan Garber

Do you enjoy being reminded that the treat (“treat”) you are eating has been extruded from a crushed-up plant?

Read the article.

Still Curious?

How to make hot chocolate: In March 1994, Corby Kummer explained how to make hot chocolate an opulent, adult drink. Americans don’t really like to chew: For texturally exciting gummies, you have to look outside the United States, Sarah Zhang wrote last year.

Other Diversions

Jung’s five pillars of a good life Tupperware is in trouble. Six cult classics you have to read

P.S.

In 1943, the self-proclaimed chocolate addict WIlliam Henry Chamberlin came up with an ill-advised plan for handling the chocolate shortage of the time. “Life without sun or air might be made endurable by some miracle of science,” he wrote. “But not life without chocolate. Should this be denied, I cherish wild dreams of emigrating to Ecuador or Guatemala. There (although I have never raised anything more productive than ideas) I would layout, a personal Victory Garden in which the sole crop would be cocoa beans, which I would chew raw if necessary.”

— Isabel

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Rose Horowitch, an assistant editor who has written about the enrollment nightmare colleges are facing, the myth of the Gen Z gender divide, and why too many people own dogs.

Rose recently reread Anna Karenina and had “more of the intended takeaway” than she did the first time. She loves winding down with a good animal-rescue video, and she still can’t quite believe she got to see Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Our May cover story: “This will finish us.” Matt Gaetz is winning. Clash of the patriarchs

The Culture Survey: Rose Horowitch

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The Morgan Library’s exhibit of Beatrix Potter’s drawings and letters. I’ve complained to friends about feeling disconnected from nature since moving to New York, and I hope that early drafts of The Tale of Peter Rabbit will cure me. (I’d also take any opportunity to visit the Morgan Library and marvel at the rows of well-worn books and the majesty of the ceilings.)

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Does anyone else watch cooking shows for pure entertainment? I usually get bored before I can finish a TV show in full (Gen Z attention spans and all that), so I like to throw something on that I don’t need to watch consecutively. Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home, with Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, is my favorite of the genre. It’s a cooking show, yes, but it’s so much more. It was filmed near the end of Child’s life, and Pépin somehow managed to always lift the heavy copper pots yet let Julia take the lead with recipes. Their friendship is endlessly comforting.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I’m midway through The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride. I highly recommend it based on what I’ve read so far. For best nonfiction, I’m going to choose two, but I promise they’re connected: The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, two of Joan Didion’s later books. At age 23, I’ve never been married and never had a child, let alone lost one. But these books articulate a kind of disorientation that I don’t know how to put into words—one that I’m convinced every human being experiences. [Related: Lost histories of coexistence]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: “Hunter,” by Jess Williamson. I learned about this song from a Jack Antonoff interview. I blindly trust his taste in music, and I’m glad I do. Medium-quiet: “Instant Crush,” by Daft Punk. You have to listen to this song nine times in a row to love it, but afterward, it will be firmly installed among your favorites. Loud-ish: “Ship of Fools,” by World Party. A great song to have in your headphones as you walk outside. I challenge anyone to not scream-sing the chorus.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Bruce Springsteen. My mom is an avid Springsteen fan, so this pick is partly about his musical prowess, partly about my own nostalgia. “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” seemed to always be humming in our car stereo when I was growing up. This past summer, I saw him in concert. I mostly remember my sister’s frenzied dancing and the oppressive heat in the nosebleed seats of MetLife Stadium. But I saw Bruce Springsteen! In New Jersey!

A piece of visual art that I cherish: Gustav Klimt’s Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (though what a clunky title). Greenery crawls up the side of the small house, and the open windows reveal colorful bouquets. One of the great joys of living in New York City is how its museums transport you to another place and time. The Klimt exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York brought me to the Austrian countryside (did I mention I miss nature?). It’s best paired with a slice of cake from the café downstairs.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love: I had a borderline obsession with the Strokes. I listened to all of their albums, then their unreleased songs. Then I watched their performances on late-night shows and on grainy film from small sets in New York, and then I watched their concert documentary (which I could find only on YouTube). We’ve all aged some since then, but they’re still releasing albums, and I’m still listening.

Something I recently revisited: A former teacher once told me that we reread books not to uncover something new in them but to see how we’ve changed. I recently reread Anna Karenina, firmly my favorite book. The first time I read it, I idolized Anna (embarrassing confession: I dressed like her at my high-school prom). The second time, I think I had more of the intended takeaway. [Related: When people—and characters—surprise you]

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: Earlier this year, I picked up Strangers to Ourselves, the journalist Rachel Aviv’s book. It’s about mental illness, but it’s more about the stories we tell ourselves and how they exert control over our psyche. She focuses each chapter on an individual, and bookends the work with her own story and that of a young woman she met in treatment. Aviv is a marvel of a writer, and her careful focus on people reveals more than an abstract, analytical story ever could. [Related: The diagnosis trap]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: This will surprise no one who knows me, but I spend much of my time watching animal-rescue videos. It’s a varied genre, one that includes efforts to hoist elephants out of mud piles and unsnare sea turtles from fishing nets. I particularly enjoy watching dogs recover from illness and find a forever home. My favorite rescuer personality is Niall Harbison, who helps sick and injured strays in Thailand. His videos are the greatest thing X’s “For You” tab has ever shown me.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Rabbit Hill, a novel by Robert Lawson, has the Pixar quirk of being marketed toward children but clearly meant for adults. It’s about woodland creatures but also about family and generosity—an irresistible combination.

A good recommendation I recently received: My boyfriend put me onto Your Queen Is a Reptile, an experimental jazz album by Sons of Kemet. It’s so different from what I usually listen to; it’s frenetic, and each note is unexpected. It’s wholly mesmerizing.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Last year, I went to the Refik Anadol exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. I’m not usually a big fan of modern art (this probably says more about me than about modern art), but Anadol’s work was beautiful and overwhelming. He trained a machine-learning model on the museum’s digitized collection and then displayed the result on a wall of LEDs. The machine generated crests of color that I can best describe as some undulating fourth state of matter.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Spring and Fall,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, will never fail to make me cry. The Goldengrove description. The meditation on aging. The last two lines! This poem entered my life just as I needed it. I like to think it ushered me into adulthood, and I keep it open in a tab on my computer for emergency reads.

The Week Ahead

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, an action film directed by Guy Ritchie about a team of highly skilled World War II soldiers who use unconventional methods to fight the Nazis (in theaters Friday) The Sympathizer, a thrilling and satirical miniseries about a double agent for the Viet Cong who flees to the United States and moves into a refugee community (premieres today on Max) New Cold Wars, a book written by David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks, about America’s unstable modern-day rivalry with China and Russia (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Adrian Ace Williams / Hulton Archive / Getty; H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty; Getty.

The 67-Hour Rule

By Derek Thompson

One of the hard-and-fast laws of economics is that people in rich countries work less than their peers in poorer countries. The rule holds across nations …

But something strange happens when we shift our attention from individual workers to households. In the 1880s, when men worked long days and women were mostly cut off from the workforce, the typical American married couple averaged just over 68 hours of weekly paid labor. In 1965, as men’s workdays contracted and women poured into the workforce, the typical American married couple averaged 67 hours of weekly paid labor—just one hour less. In the early 2000s, the typical American married couple averaged, you guessed it, almost exactly 67 hours of weekly paid labor. In 2020? Still 67 hours.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Tupperware is in trouble. Civil War was made in anger. The alluring mystique of Candy Darling The wasteland is waiting for you. America is sick of swiping. Are pitchers pitching too hard? A rom-com you might have written Welcome to kidulthood.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Maine is a warning for America’s PFAS future. Trump has transformed the GOP all the way down. The RFK-curious women of Bucks County

Photo Album

The hands of a mother and an infant gorilla, seen in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Uganda (Michael Stavrakakis / World Nature Photography Awards)

Check out the winning photos from this year’s World Nature Photography Awards, including images of gorilla kinship, the cloud cover above a volcano, and more.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.