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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 Walt Hunter, a contributing editor who focuses on poetry and fiction. His past stories cover AI’s poor attempts at writing poetry, the intimate work of Louise Glück, and Jorie Graham’s musings on the demise of the world.

Walt recently became a father, and his 15-week-old son, Julian, has already exposed him to a new catalog of media, including the book Spring Is Here and “newborn eats dad’s nose” videos. When Walt isn’t watching kid-friendly YouTube videos, he enjoys reading Ali Smith’s clever and engrossing novels; binge-watching Blue Lights, a police show set in Belfast; and listening to “A Day in the Water,” by Christine and the Queens.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The accidental speaker Why your vet bill is so high The happiness trinity

The Culture Survey: Walt Hunter

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: My favorite show in a long, long time (well, at least since the previous season of Shetland ended) is Blue Lights (out now on BritBox). The show, which is set in Belfast, follows three rookie police officers and their more seasoned partners. It’s a nail-biter with romance and some comic relief. Perfect for binge-watching during the first few weeks of our son’s 3 a.m. meals.

An other online creator that I’m a fan of: For the past 100-plus days since Julian was born, I’ve been exploring the universe of “newborn eats dad’s nose” videos. In doing so, I have broken Instagram and now receive only recommendations of videos of people playing the piano with chickens on their heads or pushing seals around in carts. [Related: The algorithm that makes preschoolers obsessed with YouTube]

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Julian recommends the book Spring Is Here for the ever-surprising calf cameo near the end.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: Ours, by Phillip B. Williams, a novel about a town of freed slaves in 19th-century Missouri. For a nonfiction option, Winters in the World, by Eleanor Parker, is an enchanting book about the seasons and weather of medieval England. Can I include some poetry? Right now I’m reading the work of Ama Codjoe, Divya Victor, and Jenny Xie while also exploring some of the 19-century poets published by The Atlantic—Celia Thaxter, for example, who wrote beautiful descriptive verse about the coasts of New England.

An author I will read anything by: Ali Smith. I started with her quartet of seasonal novels right after Autumn came out, and then went back to her earlier works. She has a reputation for clever wordplay, which is certainly a feature of her style. But she would be hard to categorize as a postmodernist; she’s really just an incredible novelist in the long line of Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, with some Muriel Spark thrown in. Her characters struggle with the inhospitable conditions of the present by insisting on friendship and forgiveness. And there’s a beautiful touch of allegory in her work—characters can have names such as Lux and Art—which I take to be a reminder of the place of stories in our everyday lives. [Related: Ali Smith spins modernity into myth in Winter.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: This isn’t really a museum, but my partner, Lindsay, and I recently visited the Eden Theatre in La Ciotat, France, and watched a few Lumière films (the train pulling into La Ciotat Station is one of the first films, along with the lesser-known Repas de Bébé). I like very small and focused museums and shows: Last summer, the Institut du Monde Arabe, in Paris, had an exhibition on Jean Genet’s suitcases and papers. Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers is one of my favorite novels, and it was neat to see some of his ephemeral scribbles. Another recent favorite was the Judson dance exhibition at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York City a few years back.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I was living in Greenville, South Carolina, in 2017 and went to a random show in a record store around the corner from our house. A band called Friendship, from Philadelphia, played a quiet song called “Skip to the Good Part.” It’s a barroom love song, and the singer wistfully mumbles encouraging lines such as “Our days are full of shit and so few.” The loud song is just a song I play loud, and that’s “A Day in the Water,” by Christine and the Queens. This song is for a cool morning in early summer, or a too-hot afternoon in late summer. It pulls you out of your reality and into a space that feels like pure music. Music for me is either ruefulness or transcendence.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Ann Hulbert’s story on the theme of marriage in George Eliot’s novels. It’s one of the best pieces of literary criticism I’ve read in many years. Ann argues that marriage opens rather than forecloses possibilities for experimentation in Eliot’s fiction. I love the idea that a novel might encourage us to rethink the coordinates of reality and to treat what seems permanent as susceptible to revision and change.

The last thing that made me cry: The film Petite Maman, by Céline Sciamma, a short fable in which a little girl meets her mother as a little girl. It’s a perfect work of art. In my favorite scene, the two kids share headphones and listen to a song called “The Music of the Future,” which then plays in the film as they take a canoe out to a mysterious pyramid. Almost everything I like about art is in this scene.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.”

The Week Ahead

The Idea of You, a romantic-comedy film starring Anne Hathaway as a single mother who starts a whirlwind relationship with a famous singer (premieres on Prime Video on Thursday) The Veil, a spy-thriller miniseries, starring Elisabeth Moss, about two women who are caught in a dangerous web of truth and lies (debuts Tuesday on Hulu) Mean Boys, a collection of essays by Geoffrey Mak about our societal thirst for novelty (out Tuesday)

Essay

Gregory Halpern / Magnum

Why a Dog’s Death Hits So Hard

By Tommy Tomlinson

My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn’t cry.

Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred … We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.

By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog … So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?

Read the full article.

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Opponents of the Iraq War gathered to disrupt the Republican National Convention in 2004. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in New York City; some put the total as high as 200,000. A minority of the protesters disregarded police lines. More than 1,800 people were arrested.

Yet the convention itself proceeded exactly as planned. President George W. Bush was renominated, and subsequently won reelection. In so doing, he became the only Republican presidential candidate to win a popular-vote majority in the 35 years since the end of the Cold War. In 2014, New York City paid $18 million to settle the legal claims of people who contended that they had been wrongly swept up in the 2004 convention arrests.

Some radical opponents of President Joe Biden hope they will have better success disrupting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this year. They imagine they can do to a political convention what they have done at America’s prestige universities. They are almost certainly deluding themselves.

Biden’s opponents have based their plans on a folk memory of events in 1968. For The Free Press, Olivia Reingold and Eli Lake reported from an activist planning meeting: “‘Have you heard that the Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago?’ [a leader] asks the crowd. ‘Are we going to let ’em come here without a protest? This is Chicago, goddamn it—we’ve got to give them a 1968 kind of welcome.’”

In 1968, a poorly disciplined Chicago police force brutalized protesters and journalists in front of television cameras. The horrifying images symbolized a year of political upheaval that smashed forever the New Deal coalition of pro-segregation, conservative white southerners; unionized workers; northern ethnic-minority voters; and urban liberals. A Republican won the presidency in 1968—and then again in four of the next five elections.

Exactly why the utterly self-defeating tumult of Chicago ’68 excites modern-day radicals is a topic I’ll leave to the psychoanalysts. For now, never mind the why; let’s focus on the how. Is a repeat of the 1968 disruption possible in the context of 2024? Or is the stability of 2004 the more relevant precedent and probable outcome?

From 1968 to today, responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in a directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.

National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.

Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel. Officers were seconded from across Ohio, and from as far away as Texas and California. Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.

[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]

In the end, the convention was mostly orderly and peaceful—despite the presence of civilians taking advantage of Ohio’s open-carry laws to bear rifles around town. A rare moment of public-order drama was recorded on the second-to-last day of the convention, when about 200 officers faced a small group that tried to burn an American flag. One of the protesters inadvertently set his own pants on fire. A police officer was recorded yelling, “You’re on fire, you’re on fire, stupid!” The man pushed away officers as they doused the flames and was arrested for assault.

At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in 2016, police negotiated ways of permitting peaceful protest with demonstrators. At one point, dissident Bernie Sanders supporters tried to breach the convention perimeter. More than 50 were arrested; most were released without charge.

The mostly virtual conventions of the pandemic year 2020 attracted fewer demonstrators. At the one-day Republican convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, police had little difficulty turning back protesters who tried to breach the convention’s perimeter. At the Democratic convention in Milwaukee, demonstrators apparently did not even try to force a breach; instead, they marched up to the security perimeter, made speeches, then marched away again.

The widespread recent pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses have been distinguished by more rule-breaking than the convention protests of the past two cycles. But campuses are special places, lightly policed and weakly governed. Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.

On January 13, 2024, a protest sponsored by American Muslim groups drew thousands to Washington, D.C., culminating in demonstrations at the White House. Only two people were arrested. Many more arrests occurred on January 16, when a group sponsored by the Mennonite Church trespassed inside the Capitol’s Cannon House office building, but that protest involved old-fashioned civil disobedience—lawbreaking that did not threaten injury to anyone, followed by peaceful acceptance of arrest.

Pro-Palestinian groups have blocked bridges in some U.S. cities to stall traffic. But this tactic, too, has depended on tacit permission from the authorities. The 80 pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested for halting traffic on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in November 2023 escaped criminal convictions by each accepting five hours of community service. That leniency was more or less an open invitation to try it again, which they did on the Golden Gate Bridge in April.

In this country and in Europe, some have inflicted criminal violence against Jewish people. Just last week, for example, French media reported on the case of a Jewish woman in France who was allegedly kidnapped, raped, and threatened with murder by a man who told her that he sought to “avenge Palestine.” At a protest in California in November 2023, a pro-Palestinian protester inflicted fatal injuries on a Jewish man. But these crimes have occurred in the absence of police, not—as at a national political convention—in front of thousands of officers.

Where faced with clear rules backed by effective enforcement, pro-Palestinian protests on this side of the Atlantic have generally deferred to lawful authority.

Past practice is, of course, no guarantee of future behavior. A large number of people do seem to want to mess up the Democratic convention. When I spoke with Democratic Party officials involved with convention planning, they seemed acutely aware of the hazards and deeply immersed in countering the risks.

Maybe they will overlook something. Maybe protesters will discover an unsuspected weak point, overwhelm police, wreak viral-video havoc, embarrass President Biden, and thereby help Donald Trump. The better guess is that they will not only fail in that but also be unable to mobilize any large number to attack police lines and risk serious prison time.

In the meantime, however, the talk of convention disruption has achieved one thing: It has at least temporarily diverted the conversation toward the antidemocratic extremists who may assault the Democratic convention that will renominate Biden, and away from the antidemocratic extremists who will take the stage unmolested to address the Republican convention that will renominate Trump.