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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 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

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

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On Indivisible’s website, the first words you’ll find—in large font and all caps—are “Defeat MAGA. Save democracy.” The progressive organizing group, formed shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 win, sees the stakes of this fall’s presidential election as enormous, even existential. Yet when it deploys more than 2,000 volunteers to canvass neighborhoods in Arizona over the next seven months, the presidential race is the last topic it plans to bring up.

“We’re not going to be knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Joe Biden,” Indivisible’s co-founder Ezra Levin told me. Instead, its volunteers will be trying to turn out voters for just about every other Democrat on the ballot—including the party’s nominees for U.S. Senate and House seats and its candidates for the Republican-controlled state legislature—as well as a referendum that could restore abortion rights in Arizona.

The message isn’t meant as a snub of Biden, whom Indivisible desperately wants to win—it’s an acknowledgment that the president may be too unpopular to spur enough turnout by himself. Groups like Indivisible believe that although many Democrats are unenthusiastic about Biden, they’ll vote for him if they can just be persuaded to go to the polls. “If you get people out for the reproductive-rights amendment,” Levin said, “they’re not going to vote for the guy who overturned Roe.”

[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]

Democrats are betting that they can reverse long-held conventional wisdom on voting behavior. Support is generally thought to flow from the top of the ticket down: State and local candidates “ride the coattails” of the presidential nominee, and parties sink or swim on the strength of their standard-bearers. Not this year, Levin told me. “A large part of the theory of victory is the reverse coattails,” he said.

The strategy is a gamble. Although Democrats have had plenty of down-ballot success in recent years, particularly since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision striking down Roe v. Wade, previous elections offer scant evidence of a reverse-coattails effect. Even today, polls indicate that support for abortion access isn’t translating into support for Biden, who has often run well behind state-level Democratic candidates.

Nevertheless, faith in the reverse-coattails effect is fueling Democratic investments in down-ballot races and referenda. In North Carolina, for example, party officials hope that a favorable matchup in the governor’s race—Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein is facing Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who has referred to homosexuality as “filth” and compared abortion to slavery—could help Biden carry a state that Trump narrowly won twice. Democrats are also trying to break a Republican supermajority in the legislature, where they are contesting nearly all 170 districts. “The bottom of the ticket is absolutely driving engagement and will for all levels of the ballot,” Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.

Meanwhile, in key states across the country, Democrats and their allies are planting ballot initiatives both to protect reproductive rights where they are under threat and to turn out voters in presidential and congressional battlegrounds. They’ve already placed an abortion measure on the ballot in Florida, where the state Supreme Court upheld one of the nation’s most restrictive bans on the procedure, and they plan to in Arizona, whose highest court recently ruled that the state could enforce an abortion ban first enacted during the Civil War. Democrats are also collecting signatures for abortion-rights measures in Montana, home to a marquee Senate race, and in Nevada, a presidential swing state that has a competitive Senate matchup this year.

The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee are endorsing these ballot measures even as they dispute the suggestion that the president will need help from down-ballot races to win. “Just like they did in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024, voters across the country will reject Trump and MAGA Republicans’ extreme plans to drag our country backwards and side with President Biden and Democrats’ unified and positive agenda of protecting our rights and freedoms this November,” Rhyan Lake, a DNC spokesperson, said in a statement.

The theory of the reverse-coattails effect isn’t new, and its history isn’t encouraging for Democrats. An article in Time from September 1956 reported on the launch of “Operation Reverse Coattails” by Adlai Stevenson’s campaign manager to help the Democratic nominee defeat President Dwight Eisenhower’s reelection bid. Two months later, Eisenhower beat Stevenson by 15 points and nearly 400 electoral votes. A 2009 study of national elections over a 50-year period found that popular congressional incumbents offer no electoral benefit to their party’s presidential nominee.

Campaigns and parties have also frequently used ballot measures to try to juice turnout. In 2004, President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign backed amendments banning same-sex marriage that went before voters in 11 states and which Republicans hoped would motivate evangelicals to go to the polls. Bush won the election, and the amendments passed everywhere they were on the ballot, but a study by Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz found that the referenda “had no discernible impact on either voter turnout or support” for Bush.

“It would be unusual,” Abramowitz told me, for a ballot measure to increase the number of people who vote in a presidential election year. “Generally it’s the presidential election that drives turnout.” A quick look at just about any state’s results helps explain why. The number of votes for president, at the top of the ballot, typically exceeds the total for any other race further down; referenda usually appear at the end of a multipage ballot.

But there are reasons to think that dynamic could change this year. Polls show that voters are unexcited about the Biden-Trump rematch, and since 2022, when Roe was overturned, abortion-related ballot measures have produced stronger-than-expected turnout just about everywhere, including during midsummer special elections in red states such as Kansas and Ohio. “If there’s any issue that has the potential to drive turnout above and beyond the presidential turnout, it might be the abortion issue,” Abramowitz said.

[Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio]

Increased turnout alone, however, might not be in the Biden campaign’s best interest. Democrats have been doing well in low-turnout elections decided by politically engaged voters, but the much larger electorate expected to vote in November will likely include millions of infrequent voters, a group that now tends to favor Trump. In a NORC/University of Pennsylvania poll conducted earlier this year, Biden was beating Trump 50–39 among people who had participated in each of the federal elections since 2018. Among people who voted in just one or none, Trump was ahead by double digits.

And turnout, of course, is only half of the equation. In swing states such as Arizona and Nevada, Democrats will need voters who show up to support abortion rights to also cast their ballot for Biden. That’s no sure thing. In Kansas and Ohio, abortion-rights referenda passed easily but didn’t produce a groundswell for Democratic candidates. The same has been true with other policy areas; a majority of voters, for example, have repeatedly voted to increase state minimum wages on the same ballot in which Republican candidates who opposed lifting the wage have won election.

“I'm not sure that it’s going to have more than a marginal effect on the politicians whose issue stances are associated with those ballot initiatives,” John LaBombard, a Democratic consultant who has advised Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Jon Tester of Montana, told me. “There’s just not quite as much intersection on those questions as some of us in D.C. like to think.”

Democrats are trying to prove that analysis wrong. They point out that, unlike in some presidential-election years, their candidates up and down the ballot are running on a unified message on issues such as abortion, which could strengthen the connection that voters make between the policy and the nominees running on it. Indivisible is also hoping that a new strategy built around “relational organizing” will attract votes for both abortion rights and Biden. Rather than sending out volunteers to knock on the doors of people they’ve never met, the group will ask those volunteers to contact members of their own community with whom they already have some ties. The Biden campaign and other Democratic groups also plan on incorporating it into their ground games this fall.

To Indivisible’s Levin, this approach could give Democrats an edge in persuading the most sought-after Americans in this year’s election—those who haven’t decided whether they’re going to vote for Biden or Trump, or if they’re going to vote at all. All they know is they don’t particularly like either candidate, and they’ve tuned them both out. “How do you reach these voters?” Levin asked. You talk to them, he said, answering his own question, and figure out what issues resonate with them and which down-ballot candidates might get them excited to vote. “The folks who should be talking to them about these things are their neighbors,” Levin said, “because they’re going to be the most persuasive messengers.”

The key is to get these people out to vote. Once they’re inside the polling booth, the first name they’ll see is Biden. They might not like him all that much, but Democrats are betting they’ll vote for him all the same.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Cosmically speaking, the alignment of Earth, the sun, and the moon is ordinary. But from our corner of the universe, the occurrence produces something wondrous: a total solar eclipse. On April 8, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow along a narrow strip of the country, from Texas to Maine. Outside this path, the sun will not disappear, and the best and safest way to observe the event is with eclipse glasses. Inside the path, the moon’s shadow will blot out the sun so completely that, for a few minutes, it will be unrecognizable—a luminous ring in the suddenly darkened sky. You can stare right at it. The difference between a partial eclipse and a total one is, well, night and day.

More than 30 million Americans live inside the path of totality, and millions are expected to travel there for the celestial event. Many before them have been caught in the fleeting shadow of the moon. In 1897, The Atlantic published the writer Mabel Loomis Todd’s account of a total solar eclipse that occurred the year before, in Japan. (Todd is best known for transcribing Emily Dickinson’s original works after the poet’s death and, controversially, making changes to the poems before publication.) By that time, heavenly beliefs about eclipses had given way to natural explanations; Todd witnessed the eclipse as part of a scientific expedition. Astronomers had traveled all this way, with all kinds of instruments with which to observe the spectacle, but they initially “could not bear to look at all the fine apparatus and the extensive preparations, with the prospect of cloud,” Todd wrote.

In 2017, 120 years later, I was just as worried as Todd and her companions seemed to be about clouds obscuring the display. As I waited in a state park in Tennessee, the anticipation became uncomfortable; as Todd described it, “The nerve-tension of that Sunday morning was beyond what one would often be able to endure … Something was being waited for, the very air was portentous.”

When the moon slid over the sun, the sky above me turned a surreal deep purple; for Todd, “unearthly night enveloped all things.” The corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, looked to me like a radiant white ring, but no words felt enough. Todd put it better: “a celestial flame beyond description.”

I remember feeling out of time, the world as I knew it on pause—but when the sun came roaring back, those two minutes of totality seemed like two milliseconds. Time felt scrambled for Todd too:

It might have been hours, for time seemed annihilated; and yet when the tiniest possible globule of sunlight, like a drop, a pin-hole, a needle-shaft, reappeared, the fair corona and all the color in sky and cloud flashed from sight, and a natural aspect of stormy twilight filled all the wide spaces of the day. Then the two minutes and a half in memory seemed but a few seconds—like a breath, a tale that is told.

Eclipses are an eternal echo. They remind us that although our little home is changing all the time, the universe marches on. Our understanding of the depths beyond Earth constantly evolves too: In 1863, a writer named M. D. Conway wrote an essay in The Atlantic about the 18th-century astronomer Benjamin Banneker and his talent for creating astronomical calendars. Banneker, a free Black man who lived in a slave state, correctly predicted a solar eclipse in 1789, contradicting the leading astronomers of the time. “To make an almanac was a very different thing then from what it would be now, when there is an abundance of accurate tables and rules,” Conway wrote, referring to the methods available in the 19th century. Today, computers do the work of producing eclipse forecasts, the calculations buoyed by data from spacecraft that have orbited the moon.

Next week, I’ll be in Niagara Falls, hoping, once again, that the clouds part just in time. When it’s over, I’ll try to imagine 2045, the next time the moon’s shadow will fall across a large swath of the United States, changed in unknowable ways. But, in Todd’s timeless words, “the heavens remain, and sun and moon still pursue their steady cycle. In celestial spaces shadows cannot fail to fall, and the solid earth must now and then intercept them.”