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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 Kevin Townsend, a senior producer on our podcast team. He currently works on the Radio Atlantic podcast and has helped produce Holy Week—about the week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and the Peabody-winning Floodlines, which explores the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Kevin enjoys reading Philip Levine’s poems and visiting the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., where he can sit with Mark Rothko’s large-scale works. He’s also a Canadian-punk-music fan—Metz is one of his favorite bands—and a self-proclaimed Star Trek nerd who’s excited to binge the final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Amanda Knox: “What if Jens Söring actually did it?” How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter The blindness of elites

The Culture Survey: Kevin Townsend

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: In college, I developed a steady rotation of quiet songs that didn’t distract me while I was studying. Artists such as Tycho and Washed Out were some of my favorites.

Recently, I’ve been into Floating Points, the moniker for Samuel Shepherd, a British electronic-music producer. I could recommend his Late Night Tales album or Elaenia, but the one that stands out most to me is his collaborative album, Promises, featuring the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a gorgeous, layered work that’s best listened to all the way through—but if you’re pressed for time, “Movement 6” is an exceptional track.

As for a loud song, one of my favorite bands is the Canadian punk trio Metz. I’ve had “A Boat to Drown In” on heavy rotation for the past year. It doesn’t have the thrumming precision of their earlier singles such as “Headache” and “Wet Blanket,” but the song is a knockout every time. Metz just released a new record, Up on Gravity Hill, that I’m excited to get lost in.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, showcased some of the abstract painter’s lesser-known works. The show closed recently, but the museum’s permanent collection features a good number of his works, including some of his famous color-field paintings. The National Gallery is also home to many pieces from the collection of the now-closed Corcoran Gallery of Art, and they’re worth a visit—especially the Hudson River School paintings, which must be seen in person in all of their maximalist glory.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: A few months ago, on my honeymoon, I reread No Country for Old Men. It’s far from a romantic beach read, but few writers are as tersely gripping as Cormac McCarthy. The Coen brothers’ film adaptation is fantastic, but the novel—published in 2005, two years into the Iraq War—encompasses a wider story about generations of men at war. It’s worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie.

I also brought with me a book I’d long meant to read: Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. Part science history, part memoir, the book is mostly a biography of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and a taxonomist who catalogued thousands of species of fish. It’s a unique and remarkable read that I can’t recommend highly enough. Fundamentally, it’s about our need for order—in our personal world, and in the natural world around us.

Miller’s book reminds me of a recent Radio Atlantic episode that I produced, in which Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses her new book, The Light Eaters, about the underappreciated biological creativity of plants. Miller and Schlanger both examine and challenge the hierarchies we apply to the natural world—and why humanity can be better off questioning those ideas.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My favorite poet is Philip Levine. His work is spare and direct, alive with love for the unsung corners of America and the people who inhabit them. Levine lived in Detroit during the Depression and spent more than three decades teaching in Fresno. Having grown up in Pittsburgh and moved to California as a teenager, I connected easily with the world he saw.

“What Work Is” and “The Simple Truth” are two of his poems that I often return to, especially for the final lines, which feel like gut punches. [Related: An interview with Philip Levine (From 1999)]

Speaking of final-line gut punches, the poem (and line) that I think of most frequently is by another favorite poet of mine: the recently departed Louise Glück. “Nostos,” from her 1996 book, Meadowlands, touches on how essential yet fragile our memories are, and there’s a haunting sweetness to its last line: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: It’s May, so, honestly: the NHL playoffs. (And it’s been a great year for hockey.) But when it comes to actual television, I’m excited to binge the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

It’s bittersweet that the series is ending. Sonequa Martin-Green gives an Emmy-worthy lead performance, but for all of the show’s greatness, it can lean a bit too much into space opera, with the galaxy at stake every season and a character on the verge of tears every episode. Trek is usually at its best when it’s trying to be TV, not cinema. (And that’s including the films—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan succeeded by essentially serving up a movie-length episode.) [Related: A critic’s case against cinema]

Being a friend of DeSoto, I want to give another Trek-related recommendation: The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek podcasts, which go episode by episode through the wider Trek Industrial Complex. The humor, analysis, and clever audio production elevate the shows above the quality of your typical rewatch podcast. I came to The Greatest Generation as an audio-production and comedy nerd, and it turned me into a Trek nerd as well. So be warned.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Hunt for Red October. Somehow, it gets better with every watch. “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”

The Week Ahead

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, an action sci-fi movie about a young ape who must face a tyrannical new ape leader (in theaters Friday) Dark Matter, a mystery series, based on the best-selling novel, about a man who is pulled into an alternate reality and must save his family from himself (premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+) First Love, a collection of essays by Lilly Dancyger that portray women’s friendships as their great loves (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of Elena Dudum.

I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine Exists

By Elena Dudum

My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.”

His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him …

Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.”

Read the full article.

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Say you’re sorry. For generations, parents have leaned on the phrase during sibling tiffs and playground scuffles. But it has lately become controversial, particularly among a certain subset of Millennial parents—those for whom the hallmark of good parenting is the reverence they show for their kids’ feelings. Under this model, gone are the days of scolding a child for melting down, sending them to a time-out, or ignoring them until they settle. (Joining them for “time-ins” to help them process their emotions? That’s okay.) The guiding principle seems to be to take children’s current or future feelings into consideration at every parental decision point—even when they are the ones who have hurt the feelings of someone else.

At first blush, making a child express remorse would seem an obvious violation of the feelings-informed approach. And indeed, both Big Little Feelings, the tremendously popular Instagram account and parenting course, and Dr. Becky, the internet-appointed headmistress of the school of Millennial parenting, have condemned the practice. Telling your children to apologize, the argument goes, is useless, unnecessary, even harmful. Useless because it will produce an empty apology. Unnecessary because there are other, better ways to teach children to make amends. Harmful because—well, accusations of harm run the gamut: It will train children to lie or to apologize only as a formality to escape punishment; make them “less kind and thoughtful”; alienate them from their feelings; or shame them into never apologizing again.

These points aren’t necessarily wrong. But as is often the case in modern parenting debates, the stakes are lower and the reality is more nuanced than many influencers would have you believe. Instructing a kid to say sorry is sometimes useless, at least in the moment; it could be unnecessary, depending on the child’s temperament; and it might be harmful, depending on how you go about it. But when you account for the emotional complexity stirred up by conflict, you can find as many feelings-informed reasons to insist on an apology as not.

Take the classic anecdote that’s used to illustrate the downsides of “forced apologies”: A child snatches a toy from a friend or pushes him over. A parent barks at him to “say you’re sorry,” which he does, but in a half-hearted manner. He then carries on with his play, having learned nothing and leaving the victim feeling no better for it.

Broadly, those opposed to forced apologies would argue that for an apology to have any value, it must be rooted in genuine remorse. They would say that young kids lack the cognitive capacity to empathize with someone they’ve hurt, and that simply telling them to apologize won’t help them develop empathy. (“You’re not actually teaching your kid to feel sorry,” as Deena Margolin, a child therapist and co-founder of Big Little Feelings, has put it.) Instead, if parents take the time to cultivate empathy through reflection and good example, genuine apologies will naturally flower.

When it comes to toy-snatching or shoving, that could mean modeling an apology on the child’s behalf, engaging your child in a private conversation about what went down, suggesting (not insisting!) that the child find some way to help the harmed party feel better, or some combination of the three. “The goal is to help them recognize that their actions have consequences for others,” Karina Schumann, an associate professor of social psychology at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in conflict resolution, told me. “In the same way that their actions caused harm, they can also take an active role in repairing that harm by making amends.” These tactics will be more effective if parents themselves, after their own misdeeds, routinely demonstrate what a good apology looks like: one that names the harm and how it affected the other person, and offers a promise to change future behavior. If children “have observed others in their life apologize readily and empathically for their offenses,” Schumann said, “they will learn in time.”

[Read: The fairy-tale promises of Montessori parenting]

Yet apologies are socially and emotionally tricky. Observing my own children, I’ve found that what stops them from apologizing often isn’t an absence of remorse but the presence of other strong emotions—a lingering frustration over whatever precipitated their actions, embarrassment for having publicly messed up, a vague but overblown fear of what will happen if they do apologize. (This last point is true for adults as well: Schumann pointed me to a study noting that adults anticipate that apologizing will feel more humiliating and stressful than it ends up being.) Sometimes, guilt itself seems to be the obstacle; my children feel bad for what they’ve done and want to disappear into my arms rather than call any more attention to it. In other words, the issue isn’t always that a kid doesn’t feel sorry but that, for a variety of reasons, he doesn’t feel like saying so.

And what of the person who was harmed? Surely their feelings matter. The idea that anything less than a freely volunteered apology is worthless is unsupported by research. Especially among the youngest children, both prompted and spontaneous apologies can help repair kids’ relationships. One study found that only when it’s abundantly clear that a child is apologizing against their will does a prompted apology start to lose its value—and even then, kids younger than 7 thought it was better than nothing.

Younger children’s more ready acceptance of shoddy apologies may have something to do with the very fact that they are emotionally underdeveloped. Theory of mind—the ability to recognize that other people have thoughts and feelings different from one’s own—develops gradually in humans, but it’s a process that starts fairly early. Cara Goodwin, a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder of Parenting Translator, a newsletter that breaks down scientific research on parenting, told me that, from infanthood, children can express concern for others’ emotions; for instance, when babies see another baby in distress, they look around for help. But even after kids develop a grasp on others’ emotions, they still often struggle with making apologies—because the big challenge for them is regulating their own emotions.

[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]

Goodwin agreed that modeling apologies and helping children reflect on their actions are essential. But she thinks there’s a place for prompting, or even insisting on, children’s apologies—for the simple reason that apologizing often doesn’t feel good, at least not right away. Nudging a child through an apology, even one that comes out clouded by other emotions, can teach them to cope with discomfort, help dispel any exaggerated fears, and expose them to some of apologies’ upsides—the relief of being forgiven, or the satisfaction of knowing you’ve done something to right a past wrong. Marjorie Ingall, a co-author of Getting to Sorry: The Art of Apology at Work and at Home, compared apologizing to learning to tie your shoes: You can get only so far watching someone else do it. Trying it yourself is awkward and frustrating at first, but fumble through it enough times and eventually it clicks.

As for concerns about harm, there’s little reason to think that making kids apologize will cause enduring emotional damage, as long as parents take an appropriate approach, Goodwin told me. She drew a distinction between psychological and behavioral control. Attempts to psychologically control kids—guilting, shaming, or otherwise emotionally manipulating them—have been linked to a variety of negative outcomes. So you shouldn’t berate children for their lack of remorse or shame them into expressing it. But there’s nothing wrong with establishing ground rules and then enforcing them by setting a behavioral limit. If you’d like your child to apologize when he knocks over someone’s sand castle, or to find some other way to make amends if you’re stuck on not making him say “I’m sorry,” it’s fine to make him leave the sandbox if he refuses.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that getting your child to apologize will succeed in smoothing over a situation. Perhaps he won’t be forgiven. Perhaps his muffled apology will draw scorn from onlooking peers. There are all manner of ways for conflict resolution to result in emotional bruising—but this is true regardless of your approach.

That brings us to the hard reality of feelings-informed parenting: Children’s emotions are slippery and unpredictable. When you put their feelings in command—especially amid the minefield of childhood conflict—it becomes painfully clear that adults have far less sway than they’d like to believe.

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