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When it comes to tariffs for Canada and Mexico, America is ending the week pretty much as it started. Over the course of just a few days, Donald Trump—following up on a November promise—announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least). But the residue of this week’s blink-and-you-missed-it trade war will stick.

The consensus among economists is that the now-paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico would have caused significant, perhaps even immediate, cost hikes and inflation for Americans. Tariffs on Mexico could have raised produce prices within days, because about a third of America’s fresh fruits and vegetables are imported from Mexico, Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at Yale’s Budget Lab, told me in an email. But “uncertainty about tariffs poses a strong risk of fueling inflation, even if tariffs don’t end up going into effect,” he argued. Tedeschi noted that “one of the cornerstone findings of economics over the past 50 years is the importance of expectations” when it comes to inflation. Consumers, nervous about inflation, may change their behavior—shifting their spending, trying to find higher-paying jobs, or asking for more raises—which can ultimately push up prices in what Tedeschi calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The drama of recent days may also make foreign companies balk at the idea of entering the American market. During Trump’s first term, domestic industrial production decreased after tariffs were imposed. Although Felix Tintelnot, an economics professor at Duke, was not as confident as Tedeschi is about the possibility of unimposed tariffs driving inflation, he suggested that the threats could have ripple effects on American business: “Uncertainty by itself is discouraging to investments that incur big onetime costs,” he told me. In sectors such as the auto industry, whose continental supply chains rely on border crossing, companies might avoid new domestic projects until all threats of a trade war are gone (which, given the persistence of Trump’s threats, may be never). That lack of investment could affect quality and availability, translating to higher costs down the line for American buyers. Some carmakers and manufacturers are already rethinking their operations, just in case.

And the 10 percent tariffs on China (although far smaller than the 60 percent Trump threatened during his campaign) are not nothing, either. These will hit an estimated $450 billion of imports—for context, last year, the United States imported about $4 trillion in foreign goods—and China has already hit back with new tariffs of its own. Yale’s Budget Lab found that the current China tariffs will raise overall average prices by 0.1 to 0.2 percent. Tariffs, Tedeschi added, are regressive, meaning they hurt lower-earning households more than high-income ones.

Even the most attentive companies and shoppers might have trouble anticipating how Trump will handle future tariffs. Last month, he threatened and then dropped a tariff on Colombia; this week, he hinted at a similar threat against the European Union. There is a case to be made that Trump was never serious about tariffs at all—they were merely a way for him to appear tough on trade and flex his power on the international stage. And although many of the concessions that Mexico and Canada offered were either symbolic or had been in the works before the tariff threats, Trump managed to appear like the winner to some of his supporters.

Still, the longest-lasting damage of the week in trade wars may be the solidification of America’s reputation as a fickle ally. As my colleague David Frum wrote on Wednesday, the whole episode leaves the world with the lesson that “countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump.”

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Today’s News

A federal judge said he would issue a temporary restraining order that would pause parts of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the USAID workforce and withdraw employees from their overseas posts. Donald Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba at the White House, where they discussed reducing the U.S.’s trade deficit with Japan. A plane carrying 10 people went missing in western Alaska while en route from Unalakleet to Nome.

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The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka examines a new, unbearably honest kind of writing. Atlantic Intelligence: For a time, it took immense wealth—not to mention energy—to train powerful new AI models, Damon Beres writes. “That may no longer be the case.”

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Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Wikimedia Commons.

The Rise of the Selfish Plutocrats

By Brian Klaas

The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

Read the full article.

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Discover. David Lynch’s work was often described as “mysterious” or “surreal”—but the emotions it provoked were just as fundamental, K. Austin Collins writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

“The thing about dinner,” Rachel Sugar wrote recently, “is that you have to deal with it every single night.” Despite the world’s many technological advancements, figuring out how to provide a household with a tasty, healthy meal day after day can feel impossible. “As it stands, dinner is a game of trade-offs,” Sugar writes: “You can labor over beautiful and wholesome meals, but it is so much work. You can heat up a Trader Joe’s frozen burrito or grab McDonald’s … but you don’t have to be a health fanatic to aspire to a more balanced diet. You could get takeout, but it’s notoriously expensive and frequently soggy, more a novelty than a regular occurrence.”

The magic solution to dinner does not exist, at least not yet. But freeing ourselves from ideas about what a meal should be can help. If you’re in a pinch, there’s always breakfast for dinner or a PB&J like the one you had yesterday. And some Americans have started to rely on hearty snacks, abandoning the traditional three-meal schedule entirely. Dinner is whatever you want it to be. That fact can feel overwhelming—or it can be freeing.

On Meals

You’ll Never Get Off the Dinner Treadmill

By Rachel Sugar

There’s no such thing as an easy weeknight meal.

Read the article.

The People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

By Joe Pinsker

“Variety doesn’t really matter to me. I would be perfectly happy to eat the same Caesar salad or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day.”

Read the article.

How Snacks Took Over American Life

By Ellen Cushing

The rhythms of our days may never be the same.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

There’s no real reason to eat three meals a day: In 2021, Amanda Mull wrote about weird pandemic eating habits. The 12 most unforgettable descriptions of food in literature: Haruki Murakami’s stir fry, Maurice Sendak’s chicken soup with rice—only the most gifted writers have made meals on the page worth remembering, Adrienne LaFrance wrote in 2022.

Other Diversions

The myth of a loneliness epidemic “David Lynch, my neighbor” “Please don’t make me say my boyfriend’s name”

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.

Our editors compiled a list of seven absorbing reads for your weekend. Spend time with stories about the secretive world of extreme fishing, new approaches to aging, and more.

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The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows

By Stephanie McCrummen

Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state.

America Needs to Radically Rethink What It Means to Be Old

By Jonathan Rauch

As 100-year lifespans become more common, the time has come for a new approach to school, work, and retirement.

Inside the Dangerous, Secretive World of Extreme Fishing

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Why I swim out into rough seas 80 nights a year to hunt for striped bass

Americans Need to Party More

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We’re not doing it as much as we used to. You can be the change we need.

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Is Moderate Drinking Okay?

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“Every drink takes five minutes off your life.” Maybe the thought scares you. Personally, I find comfort in it.

The Agony of Texting With Men

By Matthew Schnipper

Many guys are bad at messaging their friends back—and it might be making them more lonely.

The Week Ahead

Season 2 of The Recruit, an action series about a young CIA lawyer who becomes embroiled in an international conflict (streaming on Netflix on Thursday) Dog Man, an animated film in the Captain Underpants universe about a police officer who is fused with his dog in a lifesaving surgery (in theaters Friday) The Sirens’ Call, a book by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes about how attention became the world’s most endangered resource (out Tuesday)

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Photo Album

Vivek, the son of U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance, attends the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena. (Carlos Barria / Reuters)

Take a look at these photos of the week, featuring the U.S. vice president’s son on Inauguration Day, two Thai actors who registered their marriage after Thailand’s same-sex-marrige law went into effect, and more.

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The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May, a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

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A federal judge temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Trump told the countries attending the World Economic Forum that if they don’t make their products in America, they will face a tariff. The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as the new director of the CIA.

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Evening Read

America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content.

By Spencer Kornhaber

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

Read the full article.

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Read. Will Bahr writes on growing up three doors down from the late director David Lynch. “David drove me to school a handful of times … Though he was more dad than director to us, David did carry a certain air.”

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When David Lynch died last week, it was almost hard to know whom exactly to mourn. He was a Renaissance man: musician, painter, meditation instructor, YouTube personality. Most, of course, mourn him as a filmmaker, the medium in which he left his most indelible mark. But I mourn him as a neighbor.

I grew up down the street from David. Three doors down, to be precise. My parents owned a big blue wooden house in the Hollywood Hills, a stark contrast to David’s pink, brutalist box just up the lane. The neighborhood offered me a relatively normal childhood. There were kids to play with right around the corner. I learned to ride my bike in the street; I trick-or-treated. But I was also raised in a place organized by celebrity: by palatial homes, by immense creative success, by privacy as a hallowed virtue. After two decades in the big blue house, there were still neighbors within eyesight of my bedroom window whom I’d never met.

David wasn’t one of them. Though he ranked among the bigger names on the block, and his hermitry was legendary, he let us in. Our lives overlapped a good bit: His son Riley was in my sister Anna’s elementary-school class (they were good friends), his granddaughter Syd in mine (sworn nemeses, though we grew out of it). We went to David’s for the occasional pool party, where we kids were warned to steer clear of his workshop: the so-called Gray House, where the mad scientist conducted his experiments. He introduced my parents to transcendental meditation, a practice they maintain to this day. We attended his Christmas parties annually; he came to ours a grand total of once (in his defense, we required caroling). I knew David like I knew others in L.A.’s upper crust, as separate from his work—though, granted, I’m unsure how you introduce a child to his résumé in good conscience. To the extent that I knew him, I knew him as a neighbor.

It being Los Angeles, I mostly knew him in the car. David drove me to school a handful of times, along with Riley and Anna. Though he was more dad than director to us, David did carry a certain air—he was a tallish guy with a weird voice and weird hair and a weird house, and we were certainly quieter when he was on carpool duty. He once commented as much, pulling up to school after we had spent the ride in a cramped, adolescent silence: “You kids are so quiet, I can barely think.” For all his idiosyncrasy behind the camera, David could be disarmingly plain in conversation. Another morning, he quizzed us on the rules of the road with utter sincerity: “So … if I’m putting on my right turn signal … which way do you think I’m turning?” (Anna, in perfect deadpan: “Right.”)

Once, David appeared at my family’s front door after hours, excited to share a new toy: a Scion xB, a truly hideous vehicle of which he was particularly, oddly proud. He whisked me and my parents through the neighborhood, showing off the wheeled toaster oven as though it was a Model T. Every time we hit a dead end—and there were many in our neighborhood—David would throw the thing into reverse and exclaim with delight: “Scion backing up! Scion backing up!”

As the years passed and we children learned to drive ourselves, I saw less of my neighborhood and far, far less of David. Only after leaving his orbit did I get to know his work. I didn’t become a die-hard fan, but certain creations seized my heart with a pitbull’s grip. I’ll never forget my petrifying first viewing of Mulholland Drive, during which, in a truly Lynchian turn, my friend’s little brother sleepwalked into the room and started speaking to me. My dad, also a filmmaker, was thrilled to screen Eraserhead for me one night, cackling through the baby scenes.

And then there was Twin Peaks. During my last few months living at home, my whole family gathered weekly for a profoundly un-family-friendly viewing of the third season revival, dubbed The Return. I was so infuriated after the final episode that I stalked up the hill in the dead of night and urinated on David’s retaining wall. Though I have warmed to it since, at the time I raged that The Return often felt more like a raised middle finger than a story. But part of my reaction may have also been a childish denial of the point David delivered so effectively in that finale, as Dale Cooper knocks on the door of what he’s sure must be the Palmer residence: Try though you might, you can’t go home again.

[Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television]

A few years ago, my parents sold the big blue house. They had their reasons: Without kids to fill it, the space was too big; after 30 years in Los Angeles, they wanted to finally live by the beach. But beneath this was a much more practical motivation. Climate change had become undeniable, and they couldn’t shake visions of our neighborhood in flames.

It was a prescient move. Mulholland Drive—the actual street—abuts the back of David’s property and threads through the hills that bisect Los Angeles. It snakes past the entrance to Runyon Canyon, which recently caught fire about a mile away from my old house and David’s. The blaze was contained relatively quickly, thanks in part to the oasis of the Hollywood Reservoir. David evacuated, though neither his house nor the big blue one burned. Not this time, anyway.

Months before the rest of the city sealed its windows and fought to catch its breath, David was doing the same. Last year, he publicly disclosed his emphysema diagnosis. I had hoped to interview him: I reached out to Riley, asking whether David might be up for a chat on the record, neighbor to neighbor. It wasn’t to be. David’s weakened lungs made even crossing the room exhausting and COVID a grave risk, further isolating him from the outside world. I can’t remember the last time I saw David—it would have been many years ago now—but before my parents sold their place, I would visit home and picture him above me somewhere on that dark hill, shuffling through the Gray House, still tinkering.

I have always struggled with Los Angeles. Every time I go back, I confront a cocktail of familiar feelings: nostalgia, frustration at the city’s bad reputation, a sense that Hollywood’s long-dangled, covetous promise of “making it” is alive and well in me. In a lifelong attempt to make peace with one’s home, who better to turn to than a neighbor? Perhaps more than any other director, David rendered Los Angeles fairly: the glittering sprawl of the flats and the freeways, the canyons’ serpentine darkness. He understood the city’s hellish side. His films may have never depicted the place in flames, exactly, but more than one framed Hollywood as a surreal and monstrous syndicate.

Yet his love for L.A. still shone through. In Mulholland Drive’s most arresting scene, the protagonists find themselves at an otherworldly club in the middle of the night. As haunting music emanates from behind a red curtain, an emcee emerges and announces that all the sounds are prerecorded; the entire show is an illusion. But then an entrancing singer takes the stage, lip-syncing so convincingly that the audience’s disbelief is suspended all over again. It’s a tribute to my hometown as critical and unsparing as only true love can be. The whole city, this vast, thirsty project sprouting from the desert, is contrived—and no less beautiful for it.

Like all neighborhoods, mine used to be a lot wilder. When David and my parents first bought their property, about a decade apart, there were still vacant lots in the canyon, and the streets were a patchwork of homes and chaparral scrub where deer and coyotes roamed free. (One of my parents’ favorite stories from my childhood, for whatever reason, involves me nearly getting trampled by a wild buck tearing through our yard.) Years later, my dad found himself catching up with David at a graduation party for Riley and Anna’s class. One of the neighborhood’s last wild tracts had just sold, a fact Dad was bemoaning.

David was unsentimental. He was far more impressed with the element of human craftsmanship than conservation, marveling that anything, with enough ingenuity, could be sculpted from the sandstone. “Oh, yeah,” he replied with his signature squawk and an unmistakable pride, “it doesn’t matter how steep it is. They’ll figure out a way to build on it.”

David Lynch famously abhorred explaining himself. “Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film,” the director once said of his esoteric debut feature, during a 2007 interview. When asked to elaborate, he replied, smiling: “No, I won’t.” The clip, which tends to make the rounds on the internet every few months, demonstrates—without actually stating—everything that anyone ought to know about the late auteur’s oblique body of work: The viewing experience itself matters much more than where the story is going, let alone what it’s “about.”

Twin Peaks was perhaps Lynch’s most robust example of this general philosophy—and revisiting the series after the director’s death last week reinforces just how effective his approach continues to be. The show, which premiered in 1990 and has since grown a cult audience, embraced many of linear television’s conventions while simultaneously defying them as often as possible. Part murder mystery, part soap opera with an urban-legend flair, Twin Peaks begins with a resident of the titular fictional Washington town discovering the dead body of a local high-school student, Laura Palmer. From there, it deliberately layers on the kitsch while gradually revealing the cosmic nightmare lurking at the small town’s center.

But Twin Peaks’ many aficionados know that this synopsis belies its true genius. Lynch and his co-creator, Mark Frost, drew on the director’s affection for both the eldritch and the ordinary to conceive this singular affair, making great use of Lynch’s ability to balance these two discordant modes. Over the course of his career, it could sometimes seem easy to take his knack for stylistic cacophony for granted—but even now, Twin Peaks’ unknowability feels appealingly distinct.

The show’s arc follows an otherworldly battle between good and evil, ostensibly a familiar setup. But every character involved has a charmingly eccentric quirk—an eye patch, an obsession with drapes, an ever-present log, an affinity for doughnuts and cherry pie. The town sheriff shares a name with a former U.S. president. The local psychiatrist displays his collection of cocktail umbrellas. The FBI agent assigned to the Laura Palmer case, Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan), is as eager to solve the puzzle of her death as he is to learn what kind of lovely trees mark the entrance to the town. (They’re Douglas firs.) These characters contribute to the overall peculiar tone, emphasizing that viewers shouldn’t expect anything to be straightforward or easy to predict.

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

Audiences flocked to the show in its first season, attracted to its central premise. They were captivated by what they assumed were promised answers to the question that became Twin Peaks’ unofficial catchphrase: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” But that reveal came less than halfway into the second season—much earlier than intended, because of network pressure, according to Frost. What should have been a climactic moment instead felt, to many fans, disappointingly abrupt, as if Lynch and Frost had tossed out the truth about the teenager’s murder as an afterthought. The ratings started to decline, and viewers considered whether to keep watching Twin Peaks: Now that the show had wrapped up its biggest subplot, what was the point in watching the rest of its strange, seemingly disjointed storylines unfold over the remainder of the season?

The answer to that—and what actually made Twin Peaks so compelling, beyond its core mystery—lay in Lynch’s rejection of cut-and-dried solutions. Like all of the director’s most memorable settings, the show’s world abided by something closer to dream logic than any earthly science, obfuscating even the most integral developments. Viewers learned that what happened to Laura was a brutal act of violence, one that lacked an easy explanation; the series instead offered both a mundane and a supernatural reason for her murder. Yet after Agent Cooper named Laura’s killer and illuminated the dark forces converging on the town, viewers unfamiliar with the director’s work may have found it hard to imagine where else the show could go. What followed the presumed conclusion of Laura’s thread were 15 more episodes that tracked the affairs and schemes of everyone else in the town—instead of investigating, more linearly, the remaining secrets surrounding the murder. Mainstream audiences may not have always been ready for the task of keeping up with him, but Lynch’s desire to make these swerves is essential to the continued potency of his art.

[Read: What David Lynch knew about the weather]

Twin Peaks expresses the key duality to Lynch’s work many times over. The director enjoyed having it both ways when it came to narrative comprehension: He would break down some secrets while keeping others, giving his viewers just enough to make sense of what was happening while still leaving room to ponder the deeper meanings. Lynch was a transcendentalist who saw the innate power in the goodness of people, and a surrealist who endeavored to depict both the horror of violence and the electrifying fear of the unfamiliar. In Twin Peaks, he’d play up the Pacific Northwest community’s folksy allure in one instant, then transfix viewers by showing a demonic serial killer inching toward the camera in the next. The director refused to commit to any one truth or mood, allowing for—and encouraging—myriad understandings. He knew that within ambiguity often lay excitement.

After ending on a startlingly inconclusive note in 1991, Twin Peaks returned in 2017 to extend the story for one more season. Yet audiences who’d hoped for a traditional ending were again denied one. Again, Lynch seemed to be imploring them to stop seeking clarity and embrace the moments whose overarching connections are far less obvious. What mattered to him, it appears, was the experience itself: the feelings they evoked, the uncanny images whose significance were difficult to parse yet impossible to forget. David Lynch didn’t want to leave his viewers with an interpretation, but with something more visceral—like the taste of cherry pie and a cup of hot coffee, black as midnight on a moonless night.

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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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The Supreme Court upheld a law that will effectively ban TikTok in the United States if the social-media platform’s Chinese parent company does not sell it by Sunday. The Israeli cabinet voted to approve a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which is expected to take effect Sunday. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem testified in her Senate confirmation hearing for the role of secretary of Homeland Security.

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The Books Briefing: Two novels take different approaches to resurrecting the dead, Maya Chung writes. Atlantic Intelligence: TikTok is set to be banned in the U.S., following a decision by the Supreme Court. But the legacy of its algorithm will live on, Damon Beres writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

‘I Won’t Touch Instagram’

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

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.

David Lynch died yesterday at the age of 78, after a career that made him perhaps the most consequential American art filmmaker in the history of the medium. But his singular voice extended far beyond cinema, into television, music, internet fame, coffee making, furniture design, transcendental meditation, and practically any other creative endeavor you can imagine. He was a brand, though a fiercely independent one: Beginning with his debut movie, Eraserhead, in 1977, Lynch became the rare kind of artist whose last name seemed to describe an entire genre. He established a style that offered an otherworldly reckoning with our way of life, incorporating classic Hollywood storytelling, pulpy romanticism, and abstract surrealism all at once.

Lynch’s canon was so tremendous that each of his many fans and acolytes  likely had different entry points into it. There was the aggressive midnight-screening oddness of Eraserhead in the 1970s; the frightening mix of throwback folksiness and depraved sexuality in Blue Velvet in the 1980s; and the bizarre-but-incredible TV phenomenon that was Twin Peaks in the early 1990s. Others found him through 2001’s Mulholland Drive, a staggering collision of Hollywood dreamscapes, or 2017’s inimitable Twin Peaks: The Return, which exploded the form of “prestige television” that its predecessor had helped plant the seeds for. These are just a few of Lynch’s achievements in a body of work that spanned big-budget and micro-budget, highbrow and low. His output was also defined by his personal celebrity—a folksy, chain-smoking former Eagle Scout who produced art of high complexity while also rhapsodizing about the simple pleasures of eating a donut with a cup of coffee.

The first Lynch film I saw in a theater was Mulholland Drive, at the age of 15. A budding cinephile, I was only somewhat aware of the director’s titanic reputation and of the movie’s circuitous journey to the screen. (It was initially intended as a television pilot, a Twin Peaks successor that ABC ultimately rejected.) Mulholland Drive was an artistic thunderbolt like no other for me, and watching it for the first time is still probably the most transformative experience I’ve ever had in a cinema. I can palpably recall my terror during the early sequence at Winkie’s Diner, in which two men discuss a dream one had involving some ineffable monster out back, and the transfixing mystery of Club Silencio, one of Lynch’s many on-screen environments that seemed to have a foot in multiple realities. The film was at certain times a chilling representation of fear, trauma, and death, but at others hauntingly lovely and funny. It opened my eyes to what movies could be, beyond just the entertaining product they usually were.

[Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television]

Mulholland Drive resisted easy explanation, as did all of the director’s stories. But, boiled down, many had a sweet purity to them, involving battles of good and evil and harsh realities endured by pure spirits. The director had a charmed and normal childhood, by all accounts; he was born in Montana but moved all over the country as a kid, living in Washington, North Carolina, Idaho, and Virginia at various points. Still, he would later recall moments that punctured that idyll. “When I was little, my brother and I were outdoors late one night, and we saw a naked woman come walking down the street toward us in a dazed state, crying. I have never forgotten that moment,” he once told Roger Ebert, evoking an image that would serve as Blue Velvet’s centerpiece many years after the fact.

More adult life events inspired his first feature, however. A quiet, eccentric, ink-black comedy about a peculiar young man who works at a factory in an industrial dystopia, Eraserhead is plainly Lynch’s way of processing his life as an early parent in Philadelphia. Its protagonist struggles to raise a mutant creature while also dealing with nattering in-laws and a mundane job. Most theatergoers were likely to find the film off-putting—what with its clanking, abrasive soundtrack, beautifully cloying interludes of simple songs, and unabashedly nonnarrative strangeness. Eraserhead could have died in obscurity, but it became a cult-movie sensation instead, the kind that circulates among artsy gatherings, comic-book shops, and other underground scenes, as much of Lynch’s filmography now does.

The veteran comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks saw the movie and, somehow, it resonated with him. He then hired Lynch—over far more objectively qualified, well-known names—to direct a project that Brooks had been nurturing, The Elephant Man. It was a critical smash that landed several Oscar nominations, and Lynch’s industry ascension seemed set. His follow-up was the sci-fi epic Dune, an adaptation of the blockbuster Frank Herbert novel, for which Lynch claimed he had passed on Return of the Jedi. But it was an artistically compromised box-office failure; the director never made a big-budget film again. He instead found greater success once he’d swerved back to his more personal fascinations: His next film was the alternately astonishing and repellant Blue Velvet, a nasty noir fairytale of gangsters and abuse in a picture-perfect suburban town.

[Read: David Lynch's unfathomable masterpiece]

Lynch took many, many creative risks over the years, but Blue Velvet is the movie that perhaps best melded grim violence and white-picket-fence cheerfulness—a vision that came to characterize him in the public eye. The director continued to dig beneath idealism’s rot for the remainder of his career, and the 1990 premiere of Twin Peaks brought his worldview to a broader swath of viewers. Co-created by the writer Mark Frost, the ABC show was an uncanny soap opera, powered by a murder mystery that briefly captured the country’s imagination. Twin Peaks ran out of ratings steam quickly over the course of its initial, two-season run, but it’s since emerged as Lynch’s quintessential work. The series’ legacy was powered by both its empathy—the stark and sincere emotion the director could deploy so beautifully—and the way it transformed between various media over time. Twin Peaks evolved into a larger, decades-spanning project, encompassing the aggressively tragic and beautiful prequel film, Fire Walk With Me, in 1992, and the confounding, hilarious, and formally defiant sequel show, The Return, which premiered 25 years later.

In his later life, Lynch charged into the digital frontier in his typically singular fashion. He used grainy digital video cameras to shoot the bizarre California epic Inland Empire mostly on his own dime; he uploaded original, offbeat episodic projects and crudely animated cartoons exclusively for subscribers to his website. The director was an excellent marketer of himself, despite his preference for alienating themes and aesthetic choices: His trademark non-sequitur-filled humor and rambling sincerity connected both him and his oeuvre to generation after generation. Lynch, more than many of his peers, could expose audiences to the harshest, most discomforting imagery while also balefully commanding them to “fix their hearts or die.” If the American experience had a cinematic poet, it was him. The news that Lynch had left us was shocking only because it seemed that he’d be here with us forever.

Lynch won acclaim for his strange and dreamlike sequences and was honoured with a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2019.