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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Thanksgiving means sharing food with friends and loved ones, which also means that many potluck guests will spend the next few days scouring the web for easy and last-minute recipes. To help inspire readers looking for suggestions, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What’s your go-to dish to bring to a potluck?

There is a calculus to potlucks. The dish you bring must be not only tasty but also impressive, affordable, transportable, easy to serve, and not overly time-consuming—not to mention thematically appropriate. Years of doing the math led me to a simple solution: No matter the party, I bring meatballs. Roll them, bake them, and serve with toothpicks—and don’t forget the dips.

The great thing about them is that they are endlessly adaptable. A fancier gathering might call for veal-and-ricotta balls with a spiced tomato sauce; kids might prefer chicken balls with ketchup. And, of course, they can be made vegetarian.

At a previous job, I was asked to contribute to a cookie-themed potluck. Anxiety struck; I’m a deeply mediocre baker. But the math saved me once again. As I set down a plate of beef-and-pork balls next to trays of whoopie pies and chocolate-chip biscotti, my bemused colleagues waited for an explanation. I pulled out a label: “Meat truffles.” By the end of the meal, not a single one was left.

— Yasmin Tayag, staff writer

***

A staple of my family’s Thanksgiving dinners and summer barbecues is a painstaking mid-century masterpiece we call “rainbow Jell-O”: layers of red, orange, yellow, and green gelatin, partitioned by sweetened condensed milk and cut into bite-size cubes. Making the Jell-O is an all-day affair; each level needs to set in the fridge before the next can be built on top (we skip blue, indigo, and violet as a practical matter).

The recipe, scrawled by my grandmother on a now-yellowed piece of paper, comes from the Japanese American side of my family, which traces its roots through Hawaii, where rainbow Jell-O is sold in convenience stores. The origins of the Jell-O are unclear, but if I had to guess, it might be born of the islands’ unique culinary tradition of drawing magic from shelf-stable foods and wartime rations—in the spirit of Spam musubi.

Is making the Jell-O worth clearing an afternoon and a shelf in your fridge? That perhaps depends on your tolerance for wobbly foods. When one of my college roommates was passed the plate of Jell-O squares on his first Thanksgiving visit, he watched them quake from side to side and politely declined.

— Andrew Aoyama, deputy managing editor

***

I’m a self-conscious cook, even in private; I prefer to stick with minimal ingredients for my meals instead of experimenting with my seasonings and, inevitably, my sensitive stomach. My palate is pretty limited, probably as a result of my boring diet—so I also have no idea if anything I eat tastes good to the average person.

That’s why, when I’m invited to a potluck, I designate myself the Prepacked-Snacks Person. But I make it fun by leveraging my experience as an Oreo connoisseur: My potluck contribution is whatever wacky, seasonally appropriate Oreo flavor is on the market right now. It’s both something you know everyone is somewhat familiar with and more exciting than showing up with the basic snacks you get at the bodega. Plus, I would rather have my friends taste and judge my Pumpkin Spice or Coca-Cola Oreos than watch them pretend to like my homemade chili.

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

***

I’m pretty sure I first made caramel rolls for my mom’s birthday when I was in high school, but I started sharing them at a Friendsgiving potluck in college. They are basically cinnamon rolls, but instead of topping the buns with frosting, you drown them in a caramel sauce, creating a dish that is soft, sticky, and supremely sweet. Although you can use an online recipe for the bread portion, I use my grandmother’s recipe for the caramel, which lives on a bright-blue note card in a wooden box at my parents’ house, along with all of the other cooking instructions we inherited after she passed away. I’ve heard that caramel is notoriously hard to make, but I’ve never had an issue with hers, which includes two whopping tablespoons of white corn syrup. Her side of the family—my mom’s side—comes from North Dakota, so I always feel like I’m sharing a dish that’s a little folksy: simple and delicious. Caramel rolls don’t just work as a hefty addition to potlucks and as a dessert for any occasion; the leftovers can be breakfast too!

— Elise Hannum, assistant editor

***

I am a man of vanity who likes to appear impressive in mixed company; I am also a man of convenience who likes to expend as little energy as possible, if possible. In a potluck scenario, the latter instinct takes over—largely because there’s just less time and attention to spend on any one dish.

Hence my love of making pulled pork, which maxes out several factors: cheapness of ingredients, ease of preparation, quantity of yielded food, wow factor with friends. The recipe I use is perhaps not the best recipe; it is, however, one of the first recipes I found when I Googled best pulled-pork recipe a few years ago. You can really blow people’s minds by bringing along the appropriate accoutrement—pickles, barbecue sauce, buns—but even by itself, the meat goes with anything.

I first made pulled pork for a Super Bowl party, when I had a sneaking suspicion—informed by my expansive curiosity about flavor combinations, and my history of alcohol consumption—that it would pair well with chips and beer. I will be honest: Despite the ease of “slather in spices and hit the slow-cooker button,” I somehow kind of screwed it up—the cut of meat was too large for the lid to fully cover, and I didn’t let it cook for long enough. But even made poorly, pulled pork is a novel delight—everyone loved it, even as I was mildly ashamed of this inaugural effort. Made well, you’ll be the talk of the party.

— Jeremy Gordon, senior editor

***

This season of life doesn’t seem to afford much time for hobbies, but I do love baking, either solo or with the “help” of my 6-year-old daughter (she is an expert sugar sprinkler). My favorite—and most consistently delicious—thing to bake is challah. I got the recipe, adaptations, and all relevant advice from my sister; it has completely ruined all those dry store-bought versions for any purpose but making French toast.

I learned the art of baking challah during the pandemic, when everyone else was busy with their sourdough starters. Back then, my husband, my daughter, and I had no choice but to eat it all ourselves—fortunately, this recipe freezes well. That was by far not the worst part of COVID, but I prefer to share challah; Jewish food is always best enjoyed in the company of others. I never mastered the traditional braiding of the dough, so I mostly shape it into large, fluffy buns—all the better for tearing apart with your hands. Try topping the challah with everything-bagel seasoning, za’atar, or something more creative. Then bring it to a communal Shabbat or a holiday meal, and enjoy watching your loved ones go back for just one more hunk of soft, warm bread, and then another, and another.

— Janice Wolly, copy chief

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The business-school scandal that just keeps getting bigger Three ways to become a deeper thinker The Atlantic gift guide

The Week Ahead

Moana 2, an animated sequel about a village chief’s wayfinding daughter who must travel into the dangerous waters of Oceania (in theaters Wednesday) The Agency, a thriller series starring Michael Fassbender as a CIA agent who is ordered to leave his undercover life (premieres Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime) This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a collection of short stories by Naomi Wood about motherhood, femininity, and modern love (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Your Armpits Are Trying to Tell You Something

By Yasmin Tayag

The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the color of my blouse. Never again would I twist underneath a hand dryer to dry my damp underarms. It was time to try clinical-strength antiperspirant.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The thin line between biopic and propaganda How Jimmy O. Yang became a main character Cher has a history lesson for us all. The most coveted screenshot in the literary world What the men of the internet are trying to prove “Dear James”: I used to have friends. Then they had kids.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

David Frum: A good country’s bad choice The Trump-Trumpist divide Inside the mind of Pete Hegseth

Photo Album

In a protest demanding action on climate change, members of Indigenous organizations hold large cutouts of world leaders’ heads above the waters of Botafogo Bay. (Tuane Fernandes / Reuters)

Check out these photos of the week, showing a climate-change protest, a mummified saber-toothed kitten in Russia, a virtual taekwondo championship in Singapore, and more.

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.

In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

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 Jen Balderama, a Culture editor who leads the Family section and works on stories about parenting, language, sex, and politics (among other topics).

Jen grew up training as a dancer and watching classic movies with her mom, which instilled in her a love for film and its artistry. Her favorites include Doctor Zhivago, In the Mood for Love, and Pina; she will also watch anything starring Cate Blanchett, an actor whose “ability to inhabit is simply unmatched.”

The Culture Survey: Jen Balderama

My favorite blockbuster film: I’m grateful that when I was quite young, my mom started introducing me to her favorite classic movies—comedies, romances, noirs, epics—which I’m pretty sure had a lasting influence on my taste. So for a blockbuster, I have to go with a nostalgia pick: Doctor Zhivago. The hours we spent watching this movie, multiple times over the years, each viewing an afternoon-long event. (The film, novelty of novelties, had its own intermission!) My mom must have been confident that the more adult elements—the rape, the politics—would go right over my head, but that I could appreciate the movie for its aesthetics. She had a huge crush on Omar Sharif and swooned over the soft-focus close-ups of his watering eyes. I was entranced by the landscapes and costumes and sets—the bordello reds of the Sventitskys’ Christmas party, the icy majesty of the Varykino dacha in winter. But I was also taken by the film’s sheer scope, its complexity, and the fleshly and revolutionary messiness. I’m certain it helped ingrain in me, early, an enduring faith in art and artists as preservers of humanity, especially in dark, chaotic times. [Related: Russia from within: Boris Pasternak’s first novel]

My favorite art movie: May I bend the rules? Because I need to pick two: Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and Wim Wenders’s Pina. One is fiction, the other documentary. Both are propelled by yearning and by music. Both give us otherworldly depictions of bodies in motion. And both delve into the ways people communicate when words go unspoken.

In the Mood for Love might be the dead-sexiest film I’ve ever seen, and no one takes off their clothes. Instead we get Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in a ravishing tango of loaded phone calls and intense gazes, skin illicitly brushing skin, figures sliding past each other in close spaces: electricity.

Pina is Wenders’s ode to the German choreographer Pina Bausch, a collaboration that became an elegy after Bausch died when the film was in preproduction. Reviewing the movie for The New York Times in 2017, the critic Gia Kourlas, whom I admire, took issue with one of Wenders’s choices: In between excerpts of Bausch’s works, her dancers sit for “interviews,” but they don’t speak to camera; recordings of their voices play as they look toward the audience or off into the distance. Kourlas wrote that these moments felt “mannered, self-conscious”; they made her “wince.” But to me, a (highly self-conscious) former dancer, Wenders nailed it—I’ve long felt more comfortable expressing myself through dance than through spoken words. These scenes are a brilliantly meta distillation of that tension: Dancers with something powerful to say remain outwardly silent, their insights played as inner narrative. Struck by grief, mouths closed, they articulate how Bausch gave them the gift of language through movement—and thus offered them the gift of themselves. Not for nothing do I have one of Bausch’s mottos tattooed on my forearm: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”

An actor I would watch in anything: Cate Blanchett. Her ability to inhabit is simply unmatched: She can play woman, man, queen, elf, straight/gay/fluid, hero/antihero/villain. Here I’m sure I’ll scandalize many of our readers by saying out loud that I am not a Bob Dylan person, but I watched Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There precisely because Blanchett was in it—and her roughly 30 minutes as Dylan were all I needed. She elevates everything she appears in, whether it’s deeply serious or silly. I’m particularly captivated by her subtleties, the way she turns a wrist or tilts her head with the grace and precision of a dancer’s épaulement. (Also: She is apparently hilarious.)

An online creator I’m a fan of: Elle Cordova, a musician turned prolific writer of extremely funny, often timely, magnificently nerdy poems, sketches, and songs, performed in a winning low-key deadpan. I was tipped off to her by a friend who sent a link to a video and wrote: “I think I’m falling for this woman.” The vid was part of a series called “Famous authors asking you out”—Cordova parroting Jane Austen, Charles Bukowski, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe (“Should I come rapping at your chamber door, or do you wanna rap at mine?”), Dr. Seuss, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (“And what if we were to talk a pretty yes in the endbegin of riverflow and moon’s own glimpsing heartclass …”). She does literature. She does science. She parodies pretentious podcasters; sings to an avocado; assumes the characters of fonts, planets, ChatGPT, an election ballot. Her brain is a marvel; no way can AI keep up.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Lego Masters Australia. Technically, we found this one together, but I watch Lego Masters because my 10-year-old is a Lego master himself—he makes truly astonishing creations!—and this is the kind of family entertainment I can get behind: Skilled obsessives, working in pairs, turn the basic building blocks of childhood into spectacular works of architecture and engineering, in hopes of winning glory, prize money, and a big ol’ Lego trophy. They can’t churn out the episodes fast enough for us. The U.S. has a version hosted by Will Arnett, which we also watch, but our family finds him a bit … over-the-top. We much prefer the Australian edition, hosted by the comedian Hamish Blake and judged by “Brickman,” a.k.a. Lego Certified Professional Ryan McNaught, both of whom exude genuine delight and affection for the contestants. McNaught has teared up during critiques of builds, whether gobsmacked by their beauty or moved by the tremendous effort put forth by the builders. It’s a show about teamwork, ingenuity, artistry, hilarity, physics, stamina, and grit—with a side helping of male vulnerability. [Related: Solving a museum’s bug problem with Legos]

A poem that I return to: “Joint Custody,” by Ada Limón. My family is living this. Limón, recalling a childhood of being “taken /  back and forth on Sundays,” of shifting between “two different / kitchen tables, two sets of rules,” reassures me that even though this is sometimes “not easy,” my kids will be okay—more than okay—as long as they know they are “loved each place.” That beautiful wisdom guides my every step with them.

Something I recently rewatched: My mom died when my son was 2 and my daughter didn’t yet exist, and each year around this time—my mom’s birthday—I find little ways to celebrate her by sharing with my kids the things she loved. Chocolate was a big one, I Love Lucy another. So on a recent weekend, we snuggled up and watched Lucille Ball stuffing bonbons down the front of her shirt, and laughed and laughed and laughed. And then we raided a box of truffles.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

How the Ivy League broke America The secret to thinking your way out of anxiety How one woman became the scapegoat for America’s reading crisis

The Week Ahead

Gladiator II, an action film starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, the son of Maximus, who becomes a gladiator and seeks to save Rome from tyrannical leaders (in theaters Friday) Dune: Prophecy, a spin-off prequel series about the establishment of the Bene Gesserit (premieres today on HBO and Max) An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a novel by Anna Moschovakis about an unnamed protagonist who attempts to find—and eliminate—her housemate, who was lost after a major earthquake (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Raisa Álava

What the Band Eats

By Reya Hart

I grew up on the road. First on the family bus, traveling from city to city to watch my father, Mickey Hart, play drums with the Grateful Dead and Planet Drum, and then later with the various Grateful Dead offshoots. When I was old enough, I joined the crew, working for Dead & Company, doing whatever I could be trusted to handle … Then, late-night, drinking whiskey from the bottle with the techs, sitting in the emptying parking lot as the semitrucks and their load-out rumble marked the end of our day.

But this summer, for the first time in the band’s history, there would be no buses; there would be no trucks. Instead we stayed in one place, trading the rhythms of a tour for the dull ache of a long, endlessly hot Las Vegas summer.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The exhibit that will change how you see Impressionism SNL isn’t bothering with civility anymore. Abandon the empty nest. Instead, try the open door. Richard Price’s radical, retrograde novel “Dear James”: How can I find more satisfaction in work?

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Why the Gaetz announcement is already destroying the government The sanewashing of RFK Jr. The not-so-woke Generation Z

Photo Album

People feed seagulls in the Yamuna River, engulfed in smog, in New Delhi, India. (Arun Sankar / AFP / Getty)

Check out these photos of the week, showing speed climbing in Saudi Arabia, wildfires in California and New Jersey, a blanket of smog in New Delhi, and more.

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.

The Atlantic is announcing a new staff writer: Jonathan Chait, who will bring his prolific writing and analysis of national politics and policy to the magazine at a pivotal moment. Chait has been a political columnist at New York magazine since 2011. He begins at The Atlantic this week.

“Jon Chait is a journalist of immense gifts who writes in the tradition of Michael Kinsley. He is fearless, indefatigable, funny, acutely analytical, and smartly (which is to say, not axiomatically) contrarian. Our time requires truth tellers like Jon, and The Atlantic’s readers will benefit greatly from his writing,” said editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

Chait has been one of the most influential political columnists of the past three decades, first at The New Republic, where he was a staff writer for 15 years, and most recently with his daily columns for New York magazine. He is the author of Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail and The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America.

Last month, The Atlantic announced that it was adding more print issues in 2025 and expanding the newsroom––hiring a number of writers and editors to grow coverage of defense, national security, and technology, in addition to health, science, and other areas. For the first time in more than two decades, The Atlantic will once again publish monthly, beginning with the January 2025 issue, which will be released in December.

Other editorial hires who have joined The Atlantic recently include the staff writers Kristen V. Brown, Nicholas Florko, Shane Harris, and Shayla Love; Jen Balderama, Serena Dai, and Allegra Frank, all senior editors for Culture; and contributing writers Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan, both formerly of The Washington Post. Katie Gunn is a new director of creative operations overseeing art and design.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

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.

In today’s reading list, our editors have compiled stories about new and promising medical developments, including breakthroughs to treat lupus, a possible birth-control revolution, and a food-allergy fix that’s been hiding in plain sight.

Your Reading List

A ‘Crazy’ Idea for Treating Autoimmune Diseases Might Actually Work

Lupus has long been considered incurable—but a series of breakthroughs are fueling hope.

By Sarah Zhang

The Coming Birth-Control Revolution

An abundance of new methods for men could transform women’s contraception too.

By Katherine J. Wu

Why People Itch, and How to Stop It

Scientists are discovering lots of little itch switches.

By Annie Lowrey

A Food-Allergy Fix Hiding in Plain Sight

Why did it take so long to reach patients?

By Sarah Zhang

Bats Could Hold the Secret to Better, Longer Human Life

A team of researchers dreams of anti-aging, disease-tempering drugs—all inspired by bats.

By Katherine J. Wu

A Fix for Antibiotic Resistance Could Be Hiding in the Past

Phage therapy was once used to treat bubonic plague. Now it could help inform a new health crisis.

By Patience Asanga

The Cystic-Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything

The disease once guaranteed an early death—but a new treatment has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now?

By Sarah Zhang

The Week Ahead

Red One, an action film starring Chris Evans and Dwayne Johnson as members of an elite team tasked with saving Santa Claus (in theaters Friday) Season 6 of Cobra Kai, the final season about Johnny Lawrence, who reopens the Cobra Kai dojo, and his rivalry with Daniel LaRusso (part two premieres Friday on Netflix) Set My Heart on Fire, a novel by Izumi Suzuki about a young woman who finds a surprising relationship in the club and bar scene of 1970s Tokyo (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Alamy.

The Invention That Changed School Forever

By Ian Bogost

Some objects are so familiar and so ordinary that it seems impossible to imagine that they did not always exist. Take the school backpack, for example. Its invention can be traced to one man, Murray McCory, who died last month. McCory founded JanSport in 1967 with his future wife (Jan, the company’s namesake). Until JanSport evolved the design, a backpack was a bulky, specialized thing for hiking, used only by smelly people on mountain trailheads or European gap years. By the time I entered school, the backpack was lightweight and universal. What did anyone ever do previously?

They carried their books. Let me repeat that they carried their books.

Read the full article.

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Photo Album

Riders perform during a freestyle motocross show at the EICMA exhibition motorcycle fair in Rho, Italy. (Luca Bruno / AP)

Take a look at these photos of the week, showing a freestyle motocross exhibition in Italy, Election Day in the U.S., a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, and more.

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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.

The thought of Election Day may bring a twinge of anxiety for some people. “A big event should prompt big feelings,” our staff writer Shayla Love recently observed. But waiting for the results also leaves plenty of downtime for many Americans, whose nerves are unlikely to abate until after the race is called. Today, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What should you watch if you’re feeling overwhelmed by election anxiety?

What to Watch

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (streaming on Max)

When thinking of movies that ease my anxiety, election-related or not, this one is a no-brainer. Allow me to introduce you to Marcel, the shell with shoes on, who will likely give you some hope for the future.

In this mockumentary for all ages, Marcel (co-created and voiced by Jenny Slate) faces tough situations with incredible grace—something we could all aim to do right now. He takes care of his grandmother while also looking for the rest of his family and community, who all disappeared one night. But this heartbreaking situation is no match for Marcel’s relentless positivity, corny sense of humor, and cheesy-but-adorable observations (for example, he says that a documentary is “like a movie, but nobody has any lines and nobody even knows what it is while they’re making it”). And when things don’t go his way or he wants to back down, his grandmother steps in to show us where Marcel got his cheerfulness from—and to tell him to be more like Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes.

— Mariana Labbate, assistant audience editor

The Verdict (available to rent on YouTube), Darkest Hour (streaming on Netflix)

I should probably recommend something uplifting and funny and distracting, but whenever I feel down or stressed, I return to two rather heavy movies that inspire me. Both of them are about the determination of one person to do the right thing, even when all seems lost.

Start with The Verdict, a 1982 courtroom drama starring Paul Newman as Frank Galvin, a down-and-out lawyer trying to win a medical-malpractice case against a famous Boston hospital. Once a rising legal star, Frank is now just a day-drinking ambulance chaser. But he rediscovers himself—and his sense of justice—as he fights the hospital and its evil white-shoe law firm.

After that, watch Darkest Hour, in which Winston Churchill—magnificently portrayed by Gary Oldman—fights to save Western civilization during the terrifying days around the time of the fall of France in 1940. The United Kingdom stands alone as British politicians around Churchill urge him to make a deal with Hitler. Instead, the prime minister rallies the nation to stand and fight.

No matter what happens on Election Day, both movies will remind you that every one of us can make a difference each day if we stay true to our moral compass.

— Tom Nichols, staff writer

Outrageous Fortune (available to rent on YouTube)

Bette Midler and Shelley Long star in this campy 1987 flick, which starts out as a satire of the New York theater scene before escalating into a buddy comedy slash action thriller (with a healthy dose of girl-power revenge).

Some scenes haven’t aged all that well. But the dynamic between the two stars as they careen into truly absurd situations is winning enough to carry the film. To keep track of who is who—and who mustn’t be trusted—you will need to put down your phone and focus (doubly true because some elements of the plot are slightly underbaked). The blend of slapstick antics and pulpy suspense should help take your mind off the race, as will the costume jewelry, shots of 1980s New York, Shakespeare references, and explosions. Through the plot’s various twists and turns, one takeaway is clear: The power of dance should never be underestimated. This movie may not exactly restore anyone’s faith in humanity, but it will definitely help pass the time as you wait for results to roll in.

— Lora Kelley, associate editor

The Hunt for Red October (streaming on Max)

There are three movies I’ll watch at the drop of a hat: Arrival, a genre-bender in which Amy Adams plays a linguist who learns to speak backwards and forward in time; The Devil Wears Prada, as long as we skip through the scenes with Andy’s annoying friends; and the Cold War underwater thriller The Hunt for Red October. I consider all three films a balm in anxious times, but this week, I’m setting sail with Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin.

Maybe because I write about war, I don’t consider a plotline centered on the threat of nuclear Armageddon an unusually nerve-racking experience. This movie transports me. The script is as tight as the hull of a Typhoon-class submarine. James Earl Jones is near perfect as an admiral turned CIA honcho. Baldwin was super hot then. And a bonus: The supporting performances by Scott Glenn, Courtney B. Vance, Sam Neill, and Tim Curry (Tim Curry!) are some of the most memorable of their careers. (Fight me.) If you haven’t seen this movie, treat yourself—if only for the opening minutes, so you can hear Connery, in Edinburgh-tinged Russian, proclaim morning in Murmansk to be “Cold … and hard.”

— Shane Harris, staff writer

How I Met Your Mother (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

The right sitcom can cure just about anything. If you, like me, somehow missed out on watching How I Met Your Mother when it first aired, it’s the perfect show to transport you back to a not-so-distant past when TV still had laugh tracks and politics was … not this. For the uninitiated, the series is exactly what it sounds like, featuring a dorky romantic named Ted as he tells his kids the seemingly interminable story of, well, how he met their mother.

The roughly 20-minute episodes are both goofy and endearing. Although the plot, which follows Ted and his four best friends, centers on the characters’ romantic entanglements, the story is fundamentally about friendship. As Kevin Craft wrote in The Atlantic in the run-up to the series finale, the show’s unstated mantra is “We’re all in this together.” Over the next few days, this is perhaps the most important thing we can remember.

— Lila Shroff, assistant editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Throw out your black plastic spatula. A future without Hezbollah What Orwell didn’t anticipate

The Week Ahead

Heretic, a horror-thriller film starring Hugh Grant, about a man who traps two young missionaries in a deadly game inside his house (in theaters Friday) Season 4 of Outer Banks, a series about a group of teenagers hunting for treasure (part two premieres Thursday on Netflix) You Can’t Please All, a memoir by Tariq Ali about how his years of political activism shaped his life (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Why You Might Need an Adventure

By Arthur C. Brooks

Almost everyone knows the first line of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” Fewer people may remember what comes next—which might just be some of the best advice ever given to chase away a bit of depression:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

Read the full article.

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A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks Trump suggests training guns on Liz Cheney’s face. The Democratic theory of winning with less

Photo Album

A competitor paddles in a giant hollowed-out pumpkin at the yearly pumpkin regatta in Belgium. (Bart Biesemans / Reuters)

Check out these photos of people around the world dressing up in Halloween costumes and celebrating the holiday with contests, parades, and more.

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