If there’s one thing that all Americans — divided they may be — can agree on, it’s that taxes are a pain. Centuries of that philosophy is what’s employed many of the more than 1.65 million accountants and auditors in the U.S. and allowed services like TurboTax and H&R Block to flourish — despite their exhaustively…

Read more...

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.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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.

Yes, the American tax code is complicated. But a web of other forces makes the country’s tax-filing system much trickier than it needs to be.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Clash of the patriarchs Israeli rage reaches new levels. In MAGA world, everything happens for a reason. The parents being scapegoated for America’s gun failures

Difficult and Expensive

Doing taxes isn’t many people’s idea of a good time—especially right now, in the crunch of filing season. (For those of you still in the process, my apologies for reminding you of the impending deadline.) America has a complicated tax code, but that’s not the only reason tax filing online is so stressful: Companies have lobbied hard over the years to keep the experience difficult and expensive.

Americans who have an income below a certain level are entitled to free federal tax filing. But millions of people who should qualify for free filing have ended up paying to file in recent years. In the early 2000s, after the government started talking about providing free tax filing to the public, a group of companies led by TurboTax, with the help of high-powered lobbyists, told the government that they would provide free federal tax filing for a swath of Americans through the IRS’s Free File program. In exchange, the government agreed to back off. The companies kept their end of the deal, partnering with the IRS, and they later turned to creating additional free services on their own websites. (TurboTax and H&R Block remained affiliated with the IRS’s Free File program until a few years ago.)

But free tax filing did not turn into an idyllic public resource. For one, TurboTax marketed as “free” products that ended up involving fees for some users—earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission told TurboTax that it needs to stop claiming that its services are free unless they are free to everyone or exceptions are disclosed. (Intuit has appealed.) And ProPublica reporting in 2019 found that TurboTax deliberately suppressed links to its IRS Free File service in Google searches, in order to divert people to one of their paid products. (A spokesperson for Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, told me that it has helped more than 124 million people file for free over the past decade, and ProPublica reported that TurboTax changed the code on its Free File option page after the publication of the ProPublica report in 2019 so that the option was no longer suppressed from search engines.)

Many tax-filing systems aren’t just expensive; they’re also confusing to use. Some companies have employed design choices to make certain steps of the process feel more laborious. In 2017, Kaveh Waddell wrote for The Atlantic about how TurboTax showed users fake progress bars—illustrations that seemed to show the site checking every detail of a return but that turned out to be generic. Waddell described the fake progress bar as an example of the concept of “benevolent deception”; as a spokesperson for Intuit put it at the time, the animations were used to assure customers “that their returns are accurate and they are getting all the money they deserve.” Still, although an illustrated progress bar might be reassuring, it also highlights the apparent complexity of the process. Look how hard we’re working to file your taxes, the bar seems to say.

Does tax filing need to be this complicated? A new government pilot program is trying to prove that it doesn’t: Earlier this year, the IRS, which is not exactly known for its technological prowess, released a version of its own free online-filing service. As my colleague Saahil Desai reported last month, “That Direct File exists at all is shocking. That it’s pretty good is borderline miraculous.” Right now the service is available in just 12 states and only works for simple federal returns—and it has guaranteed funding for just this year. Still, Saahil writes, “it’s a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans. In turn, it is also an agonizing realization of how far we are from that reality.”

A free and easy way to file returns seems like a real public benefit. But the program’s haters have been loud (already, TurboTax and H&R Block, which make billions of dollars from filers every year, have reportedly spent millions lobbying against it and other matters). Some critics of an IRS-backed filing alternative are skeptical of what they describe as its conflict of interest: If the IRS is the institution that collects money from you, will they have the taxpayers’ interests in mind, or their own? The IRS has said that its goal is simply to apply the tax code; still, private companies’ promise to get users the best refund possible sounds, on its face, more consumer friendly. Skeptics are also focusing on the question of funding: TurboTax pointed me to a recent Government Accountability Office report calling into question how much taxpayer money would be spent on the program—and a spokesperson for Intuit told me in an email that “IRS Direct File is a solution in search of a non-existent problem.”

One day, perhaps, tax filing will be affordable and transparent for all. But if your immediate future involves parsing W-2s and rustling up receipts, I wish you the best of luck.

Related:

The IRS finally has an answer to TurboTax. Why some apps use fake progress bars

Today’s News

When asked about Arizona’s recent abortion-ban ruling, Donald Trump said that the state’s supreme court went too far, but added that the law would likely be reined in by Arizona’s governor and others. He also said that he would not sign a federal abortion ban. Allen Weisselberg, the former CFO of the Trump Organization, was sentenced to five months in a Rikers Island jail for perjury during Trump’s New York civil fraud trial. The six former Mississippi law-enforcement officers who assaulted and tortured two Black men were sentenced in state court to 15 to 45 years in prison, to be served concurrently with the federal sentences they had already received.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The numbers are in, and they show that married couples are working as much as ever, Derek Thompson writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Sober-Curious Movement Has Reached an Impasse

By Haley Weiss

At Hopscotch, Daryl Collins’s bottle shop in Baltimore, he happily sells wine to 18-year-olds. If a customer isn’t sure what variety they like (and who is, at that age?), Collins might even pull a few bottles off the shelves and pop the corks for an impromptu tasting. No Maryland law keeps these teens away from the Tempranillo, because at this shop, none of the drinks contains alcohol …

In theory, these are teen-friendly drinks. But not every bar or shop owner will sell to under-21s … As nonalcoholic adult beverages become more mainstream, they’re forcing a reckoning over what makes a drink “adult” if not the alcohol, and testing whether drinking culture can truly be separated from booze.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“What I’ve heard from Gaza” America is sick of swiping. Are pitchers pitching too hard?

Culture Break

Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty

Play. The adult stuffed-animal revival is here, Valerie Trapp writes. What’s behind the rising popularity of plushies?

Beef. J. Cole dared to insult Kendrick Lamar—and, more surprisingly, he immediately apologized for it, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

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.