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For a few years in the 2010s, America seemed to be falling out of love with soda. But some blend of price-conscious shopping, kooky social-media trends (milk and coke, anyone?), and perhaps a streak of fatalistic behavior on the part of Americans has made the beverage newly relevant.

Soda consumption declined consistently over the decade leading up to 2015, in part because of backlash from a health-conscious public and a series of soda-tax battles; some soda drinking was also displaced by the likes of energy drinks, coffee, and bottled water. However, in 2017, the CDC announced that rates of sugary-beverage consumption had plateaued—at a rate far above the government-recommended limit. Now soda sales are ticking back up modestly: Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper both saw soda-case sales rise in the past year, and total sales volumes for soft drinks have risen, according to the investment-bank advisory firm Evercore ISI; last year, Coca-Cola was among the fastest-growing brands for women, Morning Consult found. Soda is having a cultural moment too: Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” was a, if not the, song of the summer. And the U.S. president-elect is famously a fan of Diet Coke, reportedly drinking a dozen a day during his first term.

Compared with 20 years ago, Americans are drinking far fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, particularly soda—but compared with a decade ago, they are drinking almost as much, Dariush Mozaffarian, a physician and a nutrition expert at Tufts, told me. Researchers have suggested that there are links between drinking large amounts of sugary drinks and a range of negative health outcomes, but the people most open to changing their soda habits may have already changed them, Mozaffarian noted. In order for cultural norms around soda to shift, drinking it needs to become uncool, he argued. That’s not an impossible goal, but it can be achieved only through a combination of sustained policy efforts, strong messaging from public-health officials, and perhaps even a bit of help from celebrities.

Public-health messaging alone can’t get people to change their behavior. Soda brands have been “a part of our cultural life for decades,” my colleague Nicholas Florko, who covers health policy, told me. “And so there is going to be some reluctance if you tell people” to ease up on “this thing that your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, have been drinking forever.” Part of the draw of soda is that it’s generally quite cheap. To undercut that appeal, activists and politicians have pushed to implement taxes on sugary drinks; in many cases, they have received major pushback from industry and business groups. Researchers have found that, in places where sugary-drink taxes managed to pass, they do help: One study last year found that sales of sugary drinks went down by a third in American cities with soda taxes, and there’s no evidence that people traveled beyond the area looking for cheaper drinks. But these taxes require political will—and pushing for people’s groceries to cost more is not always an appealing prospect for politicians, Nicholas pointed out, especially in our current moment, when Americans are still recovering from the effects of high inflation.

Soda taxes are controversial, but a soda tax isn’t just about cost: Part of the reason such policies work, says Justin White, a health-policy expert at Boston University, is that they can make sugary drinks seem less socially acceptable. “Policies affect the norms, and norms feed back into people’s choices,” he told me. Now new soda norms are emerging, including a crop of sodas that claim to be gut-healthy (although, Mozaffarian said, more research needs to be done to confirm such claims).

Soda feels like an intrinsic part of American life. But generations of canny advertising and celebrity endorsements, Mozaffarian noted, are responsible for embedding soda in so many parts of America—think of its placement in ballparks and other social spaces—and in the day-to-day rhythms of offices and schools. Curbing soda consumption would require a similarly intentional shift.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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During the early days of COVID, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city I grew up in, back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat sprawl of suburban conformity I’d run away from at 18. The Valley had always felt oppressively normal to me; it made me, as a weirdo, self-conscious. And now I was there again, this time missing the serendipitous weirdness of a New York City subway car, in which I could be subsumed. Trying to relax, I would drive around just to drive around, the palm trees and sun exactly where they always were, the strip malls endless. But one morning, I turned the radio dial, and on came the lizardy voice of David Lynch. And he was doing the weather report.

Lynch, the bizarro-baroque filmmaker who died this week, at 78, will be remembered for being a cinematic giant, for Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive as well as the warped TV soap opera Twin Peaks and its avant-garde sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return. But what I want to recall is a much smaller gift he bestowed on me and other Angelenos when he started airing weather reports every day on the local public-radio station KCRW in May 2020, just as life under the coronavirus was becoming a long-term slog.

These dispatches were quick flashes of absurdity, many of them lasting just a bit more than a minute. The Lynchean joke of it all was, of course, that in La-La Land, the weather is pretty much always the same.

He would start off with the date and day of the week and read off the weather (in Fahrenheit and Celsius), almost invariably saying that it was “sunny” and “very still right now.” And then he would ponder for a moment: “Today, I was thinking about …” What followed was a nugget from the man’s mind, almost always the title of a song, actually something you could imagine him thinking about as he brewed a pot of black coffee that morning—Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You,” or “Moon River,” or the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Sometimes he would just narrate his plans for the day, but in surreal splendor: “Day two of weekend projects, and the fun work train is rolling. I’m going to get to the dining car and get a hot coffee, maybe a cookie, maybe some popcorn. Today I’m going to be working with oil paint, tempera paint, mold-making rubber, resin, and … varnish.”

But the pièce de résistance was the last 10 seconds of each broadcast, when Lynch described what the sky would look like that afternoon: “We might have some clouds visiting until lunchtime. After that should be pure blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way,” or “It looks like these clouds will evaporate by mid-morning, and after that we’re going to be having those beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way.”

“All along the way” became a kind of catchphrase. It always made me think of The Wizard of Oz, which was a Lynch touchstone—both the glossy campiness of Glinda and the sickly green skin of the Wicked Witch. And that was it: “Everyone, have a great day!”

(His other catchphrase was “If yoouu can believe it, it’s a Friday once again!” Especially during the early pandemic, this felt like a lifeline to normal times, with a strong undernote of irony.)

[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]

I heard these dispatches on the radio every morning on my aimless drives, but I later learned that Lynch posted videos of the reports, and in these he appears in a black shirt buttoned to the top, his shock of white hair standing straight up, and—always, always—big dark sunglasses. Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch his first major-studio directorial gig (The Elephant Man, which Brooks produced), famously once called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” It also seems true to say that if Mars had a weatherman, this is exactly what he would look and sound like. (Perhaps: “A blazing red sun outside, folks, but we’ll be down to –153 tonight.”)

David Lynch’s final weather report.

These daily moments of zen opened something up in me, and made the Valley seem a little less ordinary. After all, Lynch was manifesting in these reports the duality that was a hallmark of his aesthetic, a kind of excessive, pathological normalcy. It’s in his reference to many 1950s songs, his clothing and hair, the very idea of a jolly weatherman providing a tether to sunny, physical reality. And yet, the creepy, creaky edge, the excitement with which he pronounced “very still” every single day, pointed to something dreamier and much darker. It made me attuned to the freeway underpasses, brightly lit and menacing, to the sadness of the blinking neon signs on liquor stores, to the Valley’s surrounding hills, which grow shadowy and hulking at night. Listening to Lynch on the radio suddenly made me feel like I was inhabiting a noir of some sort, as if Raymond Chandler were narrating the events of my very boring and predictable COVID day of bleaching vegetables and washing masks.

There was a charm to Lynch’s weather reports. He genuinely seemed to enjoy embodying this role for a few minutes a day. And it came through. My editor told me that his then-7-year-old son thought of Lynch as his “favorite weatherman,” and it’s funny to think of a new generation encountering the director as a grandfatherly figure wishing them a good day as they opened up their laptops for remote school. Wait until they see Dennis Hopper sucking on gas in Blue Velvet.

The weather reports stopped in late 2022, just as the world attempted to return to its own version of normal—and around the time I moved back to New York. But I like to think of Lynch having grabbed that brief period to fulfill his own fantasy of messing with us all a little bit, and also providing something that he wasn’t always known for but should be: a kind of innocent joy. I know that I’m wishing him blue skies all along the way.