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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 Boris Kachka, a senior editor who has written about why copyright-expiration dates are an occasion worth celebrating, what the internet age is taking away from writers, and the emergence of an unbearably honest kind of writing.

Boris is a new fan of The Amazing Race and a longtime reader of Thomas Pynchon. He enjoys watching Severance as it grows “ever stranger” and recently attended his second Pulp reunion concert, where he “wore a Pulp T-shirt … without a trace of shame.”

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

How COVID pushed a generation of young people to the right

Want to change your personality? Have a baby.

The secret that colleges should stop keeping

The Culture Survey: Boris Kachka

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: It might be basic to name Severance, but the show does push some specific buttons for me. I’ve been annoyed to see it compared to Lost, a series that eventually betrayed its viewers’ trust. The Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof’s next series, The Leftovers, is a better comparison: a show built on a wild premise that accrued layers and changed registers as it developed, though it always stayed tightly focused on a cast you came to care deeply about. Severance has grown ever stranger, but I have the feeling that, like The Leftovers, it will eventually stick a landing that makes some sense of its fallen world, even as it lets some mysteries be. [Related: What are the puzzles of Severance about?]

An author I will read anything by: It sounds pretentious to pick Thomas Pynchon, but hear me out. V. was the first adult novel I ever read, after I plucked it at random at age 14 from the shelf of a dinky branch library deep in Brooklyn. I didn’t have to understand every symbol and conspiracy theory to fall into its rhythms, which set the template for the beautiful and messy books I consider to be personal favorites. These include, of course, Gravity’s Rainbow and Inherent Vice (how’s that for range?). Shaggy and dead serious and hilarious, capacious and erudite and juvenile, countercultural without being dippy or hokey: What more could you ask for in a book? You can keep your tight structures and perfect endings.

The best novel I’ve recently read: Okay, sometimes I love a tight structure and a perfect ending. One book I read in the past year impressed me for precisely those qualities. Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite takes place during the viewing of a play and displays many of the unities of drama, as well as cutting dialogue and a devastating, punchy coda.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: My son is 11, and we’ve been guiding him (or letting him guide us) toward popular entertainment for adults. This means scouring websites for “clean Seinfeld episodes” and, for me, finally catching up with The Amazing Race. Travel, tension, strategy, situations that are grown-up but not “mature”—all of this makes the ur–reality show perfect family entertainment. (We also binged Only Murders in the Building; I forgot how prodigious and inventive the cursing was, but my son needs to learn this too.)

It’s hardly original to say that what makes the race so amazing, between split-second shots of UNESCO sites, is what it reveals about relationships in extremis. Yes, reality shows are edited to amplify conflict and impose simplistic narratives. But the time constraints of The Amazing Race force all tension to the surface, revealing human impulses at their best and worst. It’s hard to imagine a situation that would compel couples to talk to each other that way in front of a camera. I’m not sure I would survive it, physically or emotionally. [Related: Eight perfect episodes of TV]

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: The hype over Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary was out of control, but it did unearth some gems that missed me the first time. The one that made me snort: Fred Armisen getting his punk band back together to play his daughter’s wedding. [Related: Saturday Night Live played the wrong greatest-hits reel.]

The last thing that made me cry: I imagine that most of us walk around with shadows of our better selves. Mine, I think, goes to concerts once a week instead of three or four times a year. In September, my wife and I saw Pulp’s reunion show at Kings Theatre. It was our first time at the Brooklyn venue, the first show we saw after moving back to New York from L.A., and our second Pulp reunion show (since Radio City in 2012, the year we got married). I wore a Pulp T-shirt to the concert without a trace of shame. Although Jarvis Cocker, the slithery, 61-year-old front man, no longer climbs the rafters, his arm-and-shoulder choreography is almost as dynamic as his dancing once was. Pulp’s sui generis blend of disco, darkness, tenderness, and painfully clever lyricism is often lumped in with Britpop, but Oasis is imitative child’s play by comparison. Jarvis will live forever.

The event I’m most looking forward to: Keeping to our thrice-annual concert schedule, we’re seeing the Magnetic Fields in April, at the Tarrytown Music Hall. We won’t even have to leave the suburbs. We are living the Gen X dream.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: There are many of these, and quite a few that fit both categories (I am very much a loud-quiet-loud guy; LCD Soundsystem was invented for me). Among the quiet standouts is Yo La Tengo’s lovely “You Can Have It All,” a live performance of which blew me away last year. The loud song my family listens to all the time right now is the first thing Alexa plays when we request Afrobeat: Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy.” Sometimes the algorithm is alright.

The Week Ahead

Last Breath, a thriller film based on a real story about deep-sea divers’ treacherous mission to rescue a crewmate (in theaters Friday)

The Talent, a novel by Daniel D’Addario about about a group of actresses who face a reckoning during awards season (out Tuesday)

Vicious, a horror film starring Dakota Fanning (in theaters Friday)

Essay

Illustration by Kimberly Elliott

Want to Change Your Personality? Have a Baby.

By Olga Khazan

I had read some scientific research suggesting that you can change your personality by behaving like the kind of person you wish you were. Several studies show that people who want to be, say, less isolated or less anxious can make a habit of socializing, meditating, or journaling. Eventually these habits will come naturally, knitting together to form new traits.

I knew that becoming a parent had the potential to change me in even more profound ways. But I had no idea how.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

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Frozen food’s new wave

When Robert Frost was bad

The new, unsettling truth at the center of Yellowjackets

A divorce memoir with no lessons

Catch Up on The Atlantic

This is what happens when the DOGE guys take over.

The Trump backers who have buyer’s remorse

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A boat sails past large icebergs near the city of Ilulissat, Greenland, on February 19, 2025. (Emilio Morenatti / AP)

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Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories, as litigants rush to settle their cases.

On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and Elon Musk’s company X, filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.

[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]

Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.

The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.

In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court, in some cases for years, have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant. The deal they struck, according to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, will cost Meta $25 million in damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs.

“We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.

These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.

Neither X nor the president’s legal team have publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Horltzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.

[Paul Rosenzweig: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-defendants, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.

Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.

“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”

The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which had been sued by Trump for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanolopolous that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from parent company Disney to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” Paramount Global spokesman Justin Dini told me in a statement.

Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signalled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.

The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict of interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”

The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of parent company Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.

Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company too seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.