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 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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Columbia University’s impossible position Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Trumpification of the Supreme Court

Photo Album

A view of the Cuernos del Paine, a cluster of steep granite peaks in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park (Lukasz Nowak1 / Getty)

Take in the splendor of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.

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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 Valerie Trapp, an assistant editor who has written about the adult stuffed-animal revival, a fun way to pick up a new language, and the long tradition of villain comedy.

Valerie is a “self-appointed emissary” for Crazy, Stupid, Love, which she calls “the perfect rom-com.” She loves listening to Bad Bunny’s “unfailing bangers,” will watch anything Issa Rae does, and was left in a brief stupor after reading The Order of Time by the physicist Carlo Rovelli.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Gavin Newsom can’t help himself. Welcome to pricing hell. “Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had”

The Culture Survey: Valerie Trapp

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I’m still riding a wave of postconcert bliss from the Bad Bunny tour, which left me wanting little. But if I could, I’d love to see the Shakira, Maggie Rogers, and Jazmine Sullivan tours, and Steve Carell and William Jackson Harper in the Uncle Vanya production on Broadway.

Something I recently revisited: I’ve been rereading the civil-rights lawyer Valarie Kaur’s memoir See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. It’s an absolutely gorgeous and lucid guide on how to stretch our heart a little past what we think is possible. Kaur defines the act of wonder as looking at the world—trees, stars, people you do and don’t like—and thinking, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” I return to such phrases when I need a way forward.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: The novel The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, entranced me with a voice I’d follow down any train of thought. And the physicist Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time left me walking around in a mild stupor for about 20 minutes, seeing buildings as events instead of as objects. Did I quickly forget all the physics Rovelli tried to teach me? I’d barely grasped it in the first place. But his poetic musings on how humans experience time and mortality have stayed with me. [Related: A new way to think about thinking]

Authors I will read anything by: Jia Tolentino, Maggie Nelson, Andrew Sean Greer, Joy Harjo, Michael Pollan.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Maybe not a blockbuster, but I’ll mention it anyway, because I am its self-appointed emissary: Crazy, Stupid, Love is the perfect rom-com. It’s a Shakespearean comedy of errors with jokes about the Gap and many perfect uses of the word cuckold. Could we ask for more? As for an art film, I love Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers—Penélope Cruz is brilliant in it (and in pretty much everything she does).

An actor I would watch in anything: In college, I was fascinated by Margot Robbie’s “animal work” method-acting process, which involves studying and embodying different animals to shape the physicality of her roles. She prepared for I, Tonya by observing bulldogs and wild horses; for Babylon, she studied octopi and honey badgers! I had a philosophy professor in college who once made us do a similar exercise as homework. I ended up embodying a crow, and by this I mean I made a gigantic fool of myself by squawking in front of passersby. So props to Margot—I’m happy to sit that exercise out and watch her do it instead.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: A quiet song: “Rodeo Clown,” by Dijon. I’ll play the entirety of Dijon’s discography when I feel even a bit moody, and this song is the pinnacle of moodiness. It’s perfect and a little deranged, all soul and catharsis. “You’re missin’ out on some good, good lovin’!” Dijon wails, screeching and theatrical, shortly before an interlude of quiet sobs.

A loud song: “Safaera,” by Bad Bunny, Jowell & Randy, and Ñengo Flow. Bad Bunny makes unfailing bangers that switch up and crescendo, taking you on a complete and adequately tiring perreo journey. “Todo Tiene Su Hora,” by Juan Luis Guerra, also can get me both dancing and crying happy tears of wonder at the magic of the world. [Related: Bad Bunny overthrows the Grammys.]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Beyoncé. She’s ecstatic and lavish in her artistry. I think sometimes about a moment in her documentary Life Is but a Dream in which she emphatically tells a crowd, “I’m gonna give you everything I have. I promise!” I find that kind of exuberant generosity very moving.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Recently, Sarah Zhang’s article about the life-changing effects of a cystic-fibrosis breakthrough and Ross Andersen’s story about our hypothetical contact with whale civilizations left me in absolute awe.

The last entertainment thing that made me cry: I might not be the best gauge for this question, because I cry easily and for most movies—including once during a viewing of Justin Bieber’s 2013 concert film. But recently: the song “2012,” by Saba. It feels like time travel and sounds like nostalgia. It was the sweeping post-chorus, which speaks to simpler days, that got me: “I had everything I needed, everything / ’Cause I had everyone I needed.”

An online creator that I’m a fan of: I’m a devoted reader of Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Polly Substack, which is consistently hilarious, comforting, and sharp.

A good recommendation I recently received: Young Miko’s new album, Att.—it’s a 46-minute-long party. I saved pretty much every track and especially loved “ID” and “Fuck TMZ.”

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I started rewatching Insecure this year while doing my taxes. Dare I say, I almost had a nice time on TurboTax. The show’s pilot remains brilliant. The “Broken Pussy” rap remains hilarious. I will watch anything Issa Rae does. [Related: How Issa Rae built the world of Insecure]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I mutter lines from “The Story Wheel,” by Joy Harjo, like affirmations. Whenever I feel myself slipping into self-deprecation or pride, I recall: “None of us is above the other / In this story of forever. / Though we follow that red road home, / one behind another.”

The Week Ahead

Challengers, a film directed by Luca Guadagnino about a former tennis star turned coach, played by Zendaya, who is enmeshed in a love triangle with two pro players (in theaters Friday) The Jinx: Part Two, the second installment of the infamous true-crime docuseries, in which the real-estate heir Robert Durst seemingly confessed to murder (premieres today on HBO and Max) Funny Story, a book by Emily Henry about a woman whose life is upended when her fiancé leaves her for his childhood best friend (out Tuesday)

Essay

Getty

The Most Hated Sound on Television

By Jacob Stern

Viewers scorned the laugh track—prerecorded and live chortles alike—first for its deceptiveness and then for its condescension. They came to see it as artificial, cheesy, even insulting: You think we need you to tell us when to laugh? Larry Gelbart said he “always thought it cheapened” M*A*S*H. Larry David reportedly didn’t want it on Seinfeld but lost out to studio execs who did. The actor David Niven once called it “the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of.” In 1999, Time judged the laugh track to be “one of the hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century.” And yet, it persisted. Until the early 2000s, nearly every TV comedy relied on one. Friends, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, Drake & Josh—they all had laugh tracks.

Now the laugh track is as close to death as it’s ever been.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Trump trial’s extraordinary opening Finding justice in Palestine Why did U.S. planes defend Israel but not Ukraine?

Photo Album

Theo Dagnaud, a member of a fire crew, scans the horizon during Canada’s recent summer of gigantic forest fires. (Charles-Frederick Ouellet)

Check out the winning entries of this year’s World Press Photo Contest, including images of the aftermath of an earthquake in Turkey, Canada’s scorching wildfire summer, and war in Gaza.

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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.

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.

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

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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