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

How do you get the albatross off your neck? You know, your albatross. Your own dank collar of bird carcass, bespoke feathery deadweight of shame/rage/neurosis/solipsism/the past/whatever, the price of being you as it feels on a bad day … How do you let it drop?

In Taylor Swift’s “The Albatross”—a bonus track on her new double album, The Tortured Poets Department—the albatross is a person. A woman, to be precise. “She’s the albatross / She is here to destroy you.” Which could be a trope from some slab of 1970s misogynist boogie, Bad Company or Nazareth howling about a faithless woman and her evil ways, etc., etc., but—because this is Taylor Swift—it isn’t.

Let me quickly locate myself in the Taylorverse. I’m a “Bad Blood”/“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” guy. I like the bangers, the big tunes. Midnights was not my cup of tea: overdetermined as to lyrics (too many words), underpowered as to melodies (not enough tunes). For me, it was as if she’d taken the DNA of a maundering, heavy-breathing, medium-Swift song like Reputation’s “Dress” and unraveled it over a whole album, abetted by the soupy skills of Jack Antonoff. But what do I know? Midnights was one of the biggest albums of all time. And now, less than two years later: The Tortured Poets Department. And: “The Albatross.”

[Read: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues]

Sonically, musically, we’re in Folklore territory with this song: the strings; the wending, woodwindy vocal line; the tender electronica; the muted mood; the pewter wash of tastefulness. Chamber music, if the chamber in question has been decorated by Bed Bath & Beyond. Is there a tune? I mean, kind of. Not one you’re going to be bellowing in a toneless rapture at the wheel of your car, but it’s there.

Lyrically, however, things are more lively. There’s this woman, the albatross: a bad habit, a bad relationship, a self-ensnaring situation, a bundle of familiar negatives (“Devils that you know / Raise worse hell than a stranger”). People have warned you about this person. She’s bad news! And Swift, ever-alert to the opprobrium of the herd, cannot help identifying with her. The voice shifts to the first person: “Locked me up in towers / But I’d visit in your dreams.” Reputation-style vibes of slander and persecution are felt: “Wise men once read fake news / And they believed it / Jackals raised their hackles …” As always, the Swifties are speculating: Who’s this song for? Who is it about? Joe Alwyn? Travis Kelce—and the warnings he got when he started dating Swift? Is she his own stubborn albatross?

By the end of the song, the singer herself has assumed the form of the albatross, and is flapping in to perform a “rescue.” “The devil that you know / Looks now more like an angel.” Embrace your shadow? Embrace your albatross? Embrace your partner with your own long-feathered and doom-laden albatross wings?

This is not how it usually goes with albatrosses.

[Read: Travis Kelce is another puzzle for Taylor Swift fans to crack]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the source, the fons et origo, of the albatross metaphor. In the Rime, a sailor shoots an albatross, and brings a curse upon his ship. Why does he shoot the albatross? No reason, or none given in the poem. Maybe it’s the old existentialist acte gratuit, more than a century early: Maybe he does it because the sun is in his eyes, like Meursault in Camus’s L’Étranger. He shoots it, anyway, prangs it with his crossbow, and the wind drops, and the ship slides into a hell-sea, and the dead bird, as punishment and emblem of shame, is hung around his neck.

Back, then, to our question: How do you get rid of the albatross?

Coleridge, fortunately for us, was very clear on this: You bless the water snakes. It’s all in Part IV of the Rime. The ship is becalmed, the sea is rancid, the crew are dead, and the Mariner—albatross slung Björk-ishly around his neck—is sitting on the deck in a state of nightmare. Meaning, purpose, a following wind: all gone. Perished with his shipmates. Now he’s in a scummy realm, a realm of mere biological outlasting. “And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I …”

But. However. And yet. With nothing else to do, with no phone to look at, he watches the slimy things as they writhe and flare in the water, super-white in the moonlight, darker and more luxuriously hued when in the shadow cast by the ship itself. And something happens. His heart opens. Or perhaps it breaks. He is mutely, selflessly stirred and awakened. With his core, from his core, he spontaneously exalts what is before him: He blesses the water snakes.

And with a complicated downy loosening, and maybe a glancing clang from its beak, the albatross—fatal baggage of a bird—falls off into the sea.

Taylor Swift is not the first musician to engage with albatrossness. There’s Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful instrumental “Albatross” from 1968—slow celestial wingbeats, bluesy exhalations over a dazzling sea. There’s Public Image Ltd’s trudging, splintering “Albatross” from 1979, interpersonal, more in the Swift vein: “I know you very well / You are unbearable.” Corrosion of Conformity’s “Albatross” is a kind of sludge-rocking, negatively charged “Free Bird”: “You can call me lazy / You can call me wrong … Albatross, fly on, fly on.”

But for the full Coleridgean thing, the full voyage, nothing beats Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The live version, preferably. This is a straight-up workingman’s adaptation of the poem, 14 minutes of galumphing rock opera, Coleridge’s words doggedly paraphrased by Maiden bassist–vision guy Steve Harris, and it succeeds spectacularly. Especially at the water-snakes moment, which the band orchestrates to perfection: a flicked and rushing pattern on the hi-hat, a trebly-warbly melodic figure on the bass, palm-muted chug-a-chug of one, then two (then three?) guitars, the tension blissfully building until Bruce Dickinson, with soaring all-gobbling theatricality, sings it out. “Then the spell starts to BREAK / The albatross falls from his NECK / Sinks down like LEAD / Into the SEA / Then down in falls comes the” [King Diamond–style infernal androgynous scream] “RAAAAAAIIN!!”

So what are the water snakes? Coleridge’s Rime is not, for me, an allegory, so the water snakes are not representing or symbolizing something. They are something. A coiling and uncoiling beautiful-terrible, playful-awful force that breaks the surface in snaky loops and flashes. Wonderfully indifferent to us, horrifyingly indifferent to us. But mysteriously in relationship with us, because it is in our eyes that these water snakes, these incandescent reptiles, these limbless creatures of the deep, are made holy. We are the ones who can bless them.

And you can’t decide to bless the water snakes, that’s the point. It’s not about gratitude. It’s not about improving your mental health. No squint of effort, no knotting or unknotting of the frontal lobes will get you there. The blessing arises by itself, or it doesn’t arise at all. Total brain bypass: a love so simple and helpless it barely even knows what it’s loving.

[Read: James Parker on the Rick Rubin guide to creativity]

So it becomes a question of orienting oneself to the possibility of this love. How to do it? I’m out of my depth here—which is just as it should be, for here we are in the zone of the mystics and the mega-meditators. We are full fathom five, where your feet don’t touch anything, because there’s nothing to touch. If you’re the Ancient Mariner—or perhaps if you’re addicted to opiates, as Coleridge was—you’ll have to go through it, all of it. You’ll have to be carried to the end of yourself. The blessing of the water snakes happens at the Mariner’s clinical bottoming-out: when he’s utterly isolated, on a suppurating sea, besieged by the forces of death.

The rest of us, maybe we don’t have to go—or be taken—that far. Maybe there are other, less drastic, more everyday opportunities and invitations for us to be broken down and opened up. For our grip on the albatross to be unclenched. For the love to pour through us like Iron Maiden. For the albatross itself to wrap its angelic Taylor Swift wings around your inner Travis Kelce.

One way or another, though, sooner or later, gently or with loud sunderings and burstings, it’s going to happen. Life, thank God—it’ll get you and get you again.

This article has been adapted from James Parker’s upcoming book, Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive.

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.

For the past couple of years, scientists have watched with growing concern as a massive outbreak of avian flu, also known as H5N1 bird flu, has swept through bird populations. Recently in the U.S., a farm worker and some cattle herds have been infected. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covered the virus’s spread in North America, about the risk of human infection and how, for animals, this has already been “a pandemic many times over.”

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Republicans who want American carnage Columbia has resorted to pedagogy theater.

Not a Five-Alarm Fire

Lora Kelley: How does this bird-flu outbreak compare with previous ones?

Katherine J. Wu: When we’re considering the toll on nonhuman animals, this is the largest, most deadly H5N1 outbreak that has been recorded in North America. It has been unfolding slowly for about two and a half years now, but it’s become a gargantuan wave at this point.

Lora: Wow—how alarmed are you by that?

Katherine: I’m medium concerned—and I have been medium concerned for a couple of years now. It’s difficult to gauge the amount of alarm to feel, because it’s so unprecedented. Still, most H5N1 outbreaks in the past have totally fizzled without much consequence, especially in this part of the world.

I am worried because so many species have been getting sick. A huge number of wild birds have been infected, including species that haven’t been affected in the past. And we’ve seen these massive outbreaks in domesticated chickens, which are packed together in farms.

Avian flu is known to be a bird problem. Beyond that, we’ve been seeing these outbreaks in mammals for a couple of years now, which is more concerning because, of course, we are also mammals. Humans seem to be potentially susceptible to infection, but at the same time, it would take quite a lot for this to become another big human-flu pandemic.

Lora: Should we be concerned about getting sick?

Katherine: People should be vigilant and paying attention to the news. But right now, as you and I are talking, there is still not a huge risk to people. You don’t get a pandemic unless you have a pathogen that spreads very, very easily among people, and there’s no evidence so far that this virus has mutated to that point.

There have been some human cases globally so far, but it’s a very small number. They seem to have been cases where someone was highly exposed to the virus in domesticated animals. People got sick, but they didn’t pass it to someone else.

I’m definitely not saying that person-to-person transmission can’t happen eventually, but there’s a pretty big chasm between someone getting infected and someone being able to efficiently pass the virus on. It is concerning that we continue to see more mammal species affected by H5N1, including species that have a lot of close contact with humans. But this is not a five-alarm fire so far.

Lora: How will people’s lives be affected?

Katherine: The virus has already affected our lives. Egg prices went completely bonkers in 2022 and early 2023, and over the course of this outbreak, more than 90 million domestic poultry have died. It’s not that all of those birds got sick—when this virus breaks out on chicken farms, it’s generally considered good practice to cull the chickens to halt the spread. Still, when you have that many chickens dying, egg prices are going to go up.

We’re probably not on track to see that with cows anytime soon. Even though this virus has now been detected in dairy cows, they aren’t getting wildly sick, and transmission doesn’t seem as efficient. I don’t think we’re going to be in a situation where we’re killing all of our dairy cows and no one can get milk.

Lora: The FDA announced yesterday that genetic evidence of this bird-flu virus had been found in samples of pasteurized milk. Is it still safe to drink milk?

Katherine: So far, the answer is: generally, yes, if it’s been pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process by which milk is treated with heat so that it will kill a whole bunch of pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, and H5N1 is thought to be vulnerable to this. Also, researchers have been working to test cows so they can figure out which ones are sick. Only milk from healthy cows is authorized to enter the general food supply, though the trick will be finding all the cows that are actually infected. For now, the main ways that this virus will affect us will be indirect.

Lora: Is there anything that can be done to curb the spread among wild animals?

Katherine: For the animal world, this has already been a “pandemic” many times over. It has been truly devastating in that respect. So many wild birds, sea lions, seals, and other creatures have died, and it’s difficult to see how people can effectively intervene out in nature. There have been very few cases in which endangered animals have received vaccines because there’s a real possibility that their populations could be 100 percent wiped out by this virus.

For most other animals in the wild, there’s not a lot that can be done, except for people to pay attention to where the virus is spreading. The hope is that most animal populations will be resilient enough to get through this and develop some form of immunity.

Lora: Responses to COVID became very politicized. How might the aftermath of those mitigation measures shape how people respond to this virus, especially if it becomes a greater threat to humans?

Katherine: We’re so fresh off the worst days of COVID that if people were asked to buckle down or get a new vaccine, I suspect that a lot of them would be like, Not again. There is still a lot of mitigation fatigue, and many people are sick of thinking about respiratory viruses and taking measures to prevent outbreaks. And, certainly, people have lost a lot of trust in public health over the past four years.

That said, H5N1 is still a flu, and people are familiar with that type of virus. We have a long history of using flu vaccines, and the government has experience making a pandemic vaccine, keeping that stockpile, and getting it out to the public. That gives me hope that at least some people will be amenable to taking the necessary preventative measures, so any potential bird-flu outbreak among humans would not turn into COVID 2.0.

Related:

Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice. Bird flu has never done this before.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan foreign-aid package that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and a measure that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell the social-media app or face an outright ban. The U.S. Supreme Court seems divided over whether a federal law can require hospitals to provide access to emergency abortions and override state-level abortion bans. George Santos, the embattled former New York representative facing multiple charges of fraud, ended his independent bid for a U.S. House seat on Long Island.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Tesla is not the next Ford, Matteo Wong writes. It’s the next Con Ed.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani

Why Did Cars Get So Expensive?

By Annie Lowrey

Inflation, finally, has cooled off. Prices have increased 2.5 percent over the past year, down from increases as high as 7 percent during the early pandemic. Rents are high but stabilizing. The cost of groceries is ticking up, not surging, and some goods, such as eggs, are actually getting cheaper. But American consumers are still stretching to afford one big-ticket item: their cars.

The painful cost of vehicle ownership doesn’t just reflect strong demand driven by low unemployment, pandemic-related supply-chain weirdness, and high interest rates. It reflects how awful cars are for American households and American society as a whole.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Ashok Kumar / Getty.

Listen. Taylor Swift’s music often returns to the same motifs: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love. Her latest album shows how these themes have calcified in her work, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Look. Take a photo tour of several of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

The year was 2006. Popular music was, for women, a pretty desolate landscape. Songs such as “My Humps” and “Buttons” served up shimmering, grinding strip-pop, while dull, minor-key objectification infused “Smack That,” “Money Maker,” and similar tracks. In the video for “London Bridge,” the singer and former child star Fergie gave a lap dance to a silent, immotive King’s Guardsman, barely pausing to lick his uniform. For “Ms. New Booty,” the rapper Bubba Sparxxx staged a mock infomercial for a product offering women “a little more frosting in your cakes … cantaloupes in your jeans,” before proselytizing the message of the era: “Get it ripe, get it right, get it tight.”

Against this backdrop, late in the year, a 16-year-old ingenue arrived who radiated not sex appeal but feeling. Taylor Swift at this point was a country artist, welcomed into a genre that embraced the kind of romantic imagery she played with in her lyrics: small towns, broken hearts, blue jeans, innocence that’s bruised but not shattered. Her self-titled debut record was full of diaristic songs that courted intimacy with her listeners, sharing adolescent dreams and secrets (“In a box beneath my bed / Is a letter that you never read”). But it also introduced motifs that Swift has returned to over and over since then: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love.

Every song on that record except two, in fact, deals with love, but in terms that make it feel more like a subject she’s intent on exploring than a consuming personal affliction. This is a novice storyteller’s idea of emotion, patchworked together out of movie clips and imaginative sincerity. On “Cold as You,” Swift compares an emotionally unavailable love interest to a rainy day: “You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray.” In “Picture to Burn,” furious after a betrayal, she declares, “Watch me strike a match on all my wasted time.” The album is softly romantic but also notably sharp. Listening to these early songs now, I sense the initial construction of a character who’s already constrained by archetype, unsure of who she might actually be outside the apple-pie conventions of a genre.

Almost 20 years later, the same metaphors and frustrations are present in Swift’s new record, The Tortured Poets Department, but they’ve calcified into a mode that, in lyrical form at least, feels like it’s suffocating her. Over 31 songs—the last 15 added in the early hours of the morning as a surprise drop—Swift portrays herself as a woman stuck in a spiral of obsessive overthinking, with new cuts seeming to open up old wounds. The pain seems realer now, more lived in, but the imagery she uses to describe it is the same as it was when she was 16. “If all you want is gray for me / Then it’s just white noise, and it’s just my choice,” she sings on “But Daddy I Love Him,” barely animated by chilling fury. Time, again, taunts her; on “So Long, London,” she sighs, “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”

This is the saddest album I’ve heard in a long time. And I’m fascinated by how jarringly it strikes down public perceptions of Swift from the past few years: the golden girl swept into a jubilantly triumphant romance with the football star, the impossibly beloved auteur of women’s emotional lives, the billionaire savior of entire economies, the lyrical subject of study at Harvard. The song that feels the most revelatory is “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” which tears down the curtain to reveal the truth behind it, scored to a frantic, pulsating, almost obscenely jaunty beat. “There in her glittering prime / The lights refract sequin stars off her silhouette every night / I can show you lies,” she sings, numbly. “I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art / You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.”

What are we to do with all this pain? People wanted a boppy summer soundtrack, and they got an exorcism instead—a messy, sprawling litany of musically familiar grievances. The immediate reviews have not been kind, pointing out the clunkiness of certain lyrics and accusing Swift of solipsism bordering on self-obsession or of digging up old grudges better left buried. Critics both amateur and professional have rushed in to excavate which songs seem to be about which real people, turning a creative work into confessional fodder for the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame—a habit that Swift herself has seemed to encourage. (“I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019. “So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy.”)

I can agree with my colleague Spencer Kornhaber, who described much of The Tortured Poets Department as “a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic.” Yet the album is also intriguing to me as an autofictional work that’s chafing at its own layers of lore and artifice. Swift has long constructed her identity out of archetype, cliché, and torn-up fragments of Americana. She’s a people pleaser, a perfectionist, an eldest daughter, a dreamer, a schemer, a wronged woman, a vengeful gorgon, a cat lady, a girl next door. But at 34, she seems to be butting up against the reality that there are no cultural models for what she’s become. Too earnest to be a diva, too workaholic to retreat into reclusion or retirement, she’s stuck being an extraordinarily rich, influential, and powerful woman who still, somehow, feels like she has no real power at all.

* * *

In an Instagram post announcing the release of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift described the record as:

an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time—one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.

Swift is asking us to read the album as a metamorphic bid for catharsis—the idea, espoused by Aristotle (whom Swift name-checks on TTPD), that staging pain and tragedy as artistic spectacles can help purge us of their effects. As someone once inexplicably compelled to write about the worst time of my life, I can empathize. But the finality with which Swift declared matters to be closed for debate is striking. This is what having an arsenal without authority looks like. Swift knows, at the end of the day, that there’s actually very little she can do to influence what people make of her.

[Read: Fans’ expectations of Taylor Swift are chafing against reality]

And yet, the simple existence of the record is an assertion that her version of events will be the one that endures, the one we remember. History, even recent history, has not been kind to women who attempt to reify their side of the story. In ancient Rome, a woman named Gaia Afrania who tried to argue for herself in court was enshrined by the writer Valerius Maximus as a “monster.” For speaking honestly in King Lear, Cordelia is disinherited and then executed by her lying sisters. Nora Ephron was likened to a child abuser in Vanity Fair for lightly fictionalizing her husband’s infidelity while she was pregnant with their second child in Heartburn. And when Rachel Cusk wrote about her divorce in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, one critic branded her “a brittle little dominatrix and a peerless narcissist.”

Still, writers keep trying, possibly inspired by Ephron’s assertion, via Heartburn’s narrator, that “if I tell the story, I control the version.” Swift’s mission with her new album seems testimonial; she wants to have certain facts entered into the cultural archive. “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on,” she states on the title track. It’s the weakest song on the whole record, with a jangling, Bruce Hornsby–like piano riff in the background and lyrics that feel half-baked. So why is it here? I would argue, for context: It documents all the particular texture of a betrayal—the grand emotional duplicity and the intensity, the beauty of flashing-neon warning signs. In the following song, “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” there’s the inevitable follow-up: “He saw forever, so he smashed it up.”

Illusion also plays a big role on this record; events blur and coalesce into a fuzzy narrative wherein the clearest emerging thread is Swift’s own pain. Autofiction is a particular example of writing that performs “a push-me, pull-you of cloaking and revelation,” the critic Alex Clark wrote in a 2018 analysis of recent works in the genre. Women writers and writers of color, she argued, are the ones who are most “bedevilled by the expectation—from readers and critics—that their work is based in the reality of their own lives; what follows is a treasure hunt for the ‘real’ in their imagined worlds, and a diminution of its importance.” Since the beginning, Swift has dropped breadcrumbs throughout her albums that have been analyzed fervently by her fans. Never has it felt less like a rewarding practice than it does now, with her lyrics hovering awkwardly between the neatness of legend and what the French writer Marie Darrieussecq described as “the authentic cry of the autobiography.”

Swift seems to think that if she’s not keeping us busy, we’ll get tired of her. But this mentality, too, is a trap. “The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves 20 more times than the male artists,” she explains in Miss Americana, a 2020 documentary about a tumultuous period in her career during which she dealt with backlash for the first time and became more open about her politics. “They have to, or else you’re out of a job … I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” In another scene in that movie, she responds to perceived failure by saying, “This is fine. I just need to make a better record.” The perfectionist’s impulse is to just do more and work harder, to try to annihilate failure with relentlessness. That narrative is a particularly American one too—as familiar as Johnny Appleseed or standing by your man. Swift loves storytelling. So why is it hard to shake the feeling that it’s ruining her?

She seems, on her new album, like a woman stuck in a fairy tale, who escapes one gilded cage for another, and then another, and then another. This possibly accounts for the music feeling so static—it’s the first record she’s made that hasn’t shifted musical modes, the first whose lyrics lack methodical precision. My hope is that this album is catharsis for her: the purging not just of an emotional moment in time but also of a preoccupation with the motifs that are holding her back. On “Mastermind,” my favorite song from 2022’s Midnights, Swift herself observed how limiting romantic tropes are for women, how they have to plot with intention not to be “the pawn in every lover’s game.” The legends and stories that both her music and her persona are built on simply don’t contain enough substance for her anymore. Swift is going to have to write her own way out.

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More than a decade after Tinder introduced the swipe, many Americans are sick of dating apps. As I explored in a recent article for The Atlantic, the cracks are starting to show in what looked to be the foundation of modern dating. Now young people are yearning for a version of dating they may have never experienced—and that may have never truly existed, my colleague Faith Hill wrote recently. I spoke with Faith this week about how dating has evolved, and what people misunderstand about the purpose of dating apps.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Columbine-killers fan club Democrats’ unproven plan to close Biden’s enthusiasm gap Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues.

The Mysteries of the Heart

Lora Kelley: In your article, you wrote that young people are longing for serendipitous connections or meet-cutes. Why is that?

Faith Hill: Many young people dating now have never dated without the apps. But we have all these romantic comedies where people are meeting strangers and falling in love, and young people are still hearing stories, sometimes from their parents, about how couples met. We still have a romantic ideal that does not involve dating apps. It’s easy to idealize spontaneous “meet-cutes” both because they’re so romanticized in our culture and because they’re kind of the opposite of online dating.

Apps are quite practical. You go out and you seek something intentionally. That gives you some agency, but it also takes away the appealing mythical element at the heart of the meet-cute: this idea that your relationship was meant to be.

Lora: How does living in a world of apps affect people’s understanding of what dating is?

Faith: For one thing, we’re now used to reducing the risk of rejection. Apps let you confirm someone is interested, to some degree, before you meet up—and that also creates a kind of built-in layer of consent, however imperfect.

Dating apps also give people more options. That’s good and bad. We should expect a lot from our partners and not just feel stuck with the only prospect. But it can also create the feeling that there’s always someone better out there.

Lora: To what extent have shifting norms around flirting with strangers reshaped how people meet and date?

Faith: People do still meet out and about. But it’s not an amazing fit for today’s culture. We have this idea of meeting someone in a grocery store while reaching for the same cantaloupe or whatever. But many of us don’t actually want strangers talking to us in the grocery store—that can feel like an intrusion. And I think it’s a good thing that we are more sensitive now to what might feel pushy or creepy. What seemed normal to characters in TV shows such as Sex and the City probably wouldn’t fly today.

Lora: While I was reporting my article on dating apps, a researcher suggested to me that even if all of the apps were to go bankrupt overnight, something similar would pop up in their place, because people have come to really value having this type of dedicated way to meet. What do you make of this?

Faith: People will keep finding a way to meet romantic interests, and companies will try to innovate. Our society has become more structured and less spontaneous in many areas, including dating. Even though many people are getting frustrated with dating apps, they do like having a structured way to meet people who are eligible and looking to date. You can see that with speed dating and the resurgence of matchmakers.

Lora: A lot of the main dating apps are trying to get users to pay for extra features and subscriptions. But even the most expensive dating-app algorithm or service cannot guarantee that you will meet someone you like. Is the root of the problem just that people are people, and it’s hard to pair individuals who will actually like each other?

Faith: It’s hard to predict whether two people will be compatible, partly because that sort of connection comes about as two people interact. How two people feel about each other can unfold from what they happen to talk about in a conversation, whether they hit on something that they have in common or both find funny. We keep trying to find a way to figure love out, but the truth is that it’s difficult, and it takes luck.

Lora: The mysteries of the human heart are great.

Faith: Yes, and that’s true both on and offline. Honestly, apps are a way to meet people, not a way to date people. Once you have met, your relationship becomes its own thing—and it’s not so different from if you had met in a bar.

The enigma of other people isn’t a bad thing, though. People don’t really want love to be a totally solvable science. Meet-cute nostalgia speaks to that. On the one hand, we like the idea of an algorithm that’ll give us someone who is great for us, but on the other hand, we still have this hunger for love being weird and complicated and hard to pin down.

Related:

America is sick of swiping. “Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had”

Today’s News

Israel launched a strike that hit a major air base near nuclear sites in central Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran’s nuclear sites were not damaged. The House voted to advance a foreign-aid package that would send aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and includes legislation that could lead to a nationwide ban of TikTok. A man set himself on fire near the New York City courthouse in which Donald Trump is on trial for criminal charges.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Cookbooks are full of hidden wisdom—and some of them are worth reading cover to cover, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: The generative-AI boom will look very different for non-English speakers, Matteo Wong recently wrote.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Atlantic / Getty

The Problem With Counterfeit People

By Daniel C. Dennett

The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, known for his musings on free will, religion, and evolution, died earlier today. We’re revisiting his 2023 essay on the “immoral act of vandalism” committed by companies that use AI to create fake people.

Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The growing incentive to go nuclear A chess formula is taking over the world.

Culture Break

Getty

Read. These eight cookbooks are best enjoyed like novels, read in their entirety.

Watch. Ripley (out now on Netflix) stars Andrew Scott as a man who masters the art of putting on airs, Hillary Kelly writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

More in Culture

Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues. Eight cookbooks worth reading cover to cover The uncomfortable truth about child abuse in Hollywood The illogical relationship Americans have with animals Something weird is happening with Caesar salads. Short story: “The Vale of Cashmere” Is this the end for Bluey? Prestige TV’s new wave of difficult men Ken will never die.

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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