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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 reveals what’s keeping them entertained.
Today’s special guest is Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost, who is also the director of the film-and-media-studies program at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s recently written about how the first year of AI college ended in ruin, and whether Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are jocks or nerds.
Ian is currently struggling to get into a new video game his friends love, learning how to tattoo (sort of) with the help of a reality-TV show, and relishing the complexity of the kids’ show Bluey.
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Culture Survey: Ian Bogost
The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: I run in video-game-design circles, and the biggest recent release in games is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. This title has two features that really light gamers up: First, it’s a new Zelda game by Nintendo, and that franchise is 37 years old and hugely popular, which makes a lot of people very happy. Second, the new game is absolutely massive, and the player can do all manner of things in it, including constructing elixirs from raw ingredients and fabricating machinery and vehicles.
Unfortunately, the only tears shed in my kingdom are those of boredom. I used to love Zelda, but I just can’t get into these games anymore. For one part, it’s because there’s so much lore to keep track of—the creators have done fantasy-narrative somersaults to keep justifying new titles. But for another part, the in-game creativity that so many players seem to love leaves me cold. I find it remarkable when people make huge carnival-wheel vehicles to traverse seemingly impassible geology or dog-petting machines to attempt to endear themselves to the in-game pooches. But hell if I want to do this myself.
I think it’s because my work demands creative production. I have to be—I get to be!—creative in my job(s). But that means I absolutely do not want to be creative for my leisure. [Related: Coming of age with The Legend of Zelda]
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Television used to be different from cinema. It was more ambient, taken in along with breakfast or while vacuuming, pursued as a ritual activity more than a narrative one. I miss that. When we get exhausted by high-quality scripted shows, my wife and I turn to a season of Ink Master, a tattooing-competition show.
This show has been around on various networks since 2012, but I’d never watched it until a couple of years ago. All 14 seasons stream on Paramount Plus. I love reality television, and anyone who claims not to is lying or deluded. But I find special affinity with the shows about creative practice. I don’t want to craft things in video games, but I love watching people perform a craft, especially one I’m not familiar with or adept in.
Lots of shows in this genre are popping up these days. The Great British Baking Show is great but has become a little too wholesome, to the point of being cloying; The Great Pottery Throw Down is a touch too emotionally overwrought for its decidedly mid subject, ceramics; Blown Away, a glassblowing show, is a bit too fine-arts cosmic for dumb television; Forged in Fire (bladesmithing—everything has a reality-competition show) is overly edgelord-creeptastic for me. Ink Master strikes a good balance.
The big problem with these shows is that they never really explain anything. They’ll introduce you to terms of art, but not to technique or style. I guess the producers feel that that would be boring for most viewers—better to court drama between competitors instead. No need for that, though; it’s why we have Selling Sunset. [Related: The Great British Baking Show’s technical challenges are a scourge.]
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: The quiet song is hard, and I think I know why: Today, people do a lot of ambient listening—headphones while working or studying, whole-house audio in the evenings, on a portable speaker on the deck or by the pool. Brian Eno had to coin the term ambient music because the concept of listening to enhance an environmental situation wasn’t codified, despite precedents. Now, thanks to streaming-music services and their playlists, it’s super easy to find enhancements to any mood or vibe. But that also means that individual songs become de-emphasized, for better and worse. My pick for a quiet song is really a pick for a quiet playlist: The Synthwave—Night Drive playlist on Spotify. Put this on in the car next time you need to run to Target or CVS after dark, and it will turn your errand into a moody 1980s vaporwave antihero affair.
The loud song is easier: It’s definitely Metallica, probably “Battery” but maybe “Master of Puppets.” Metallica has enjoyed a bit of a pop-culture revival in recent years, with notable features in shows such as Stranger Things and Billions. But those mainstream resurrections make it easy to forget just how fringe heavy-metal music was in its heyday. If you listened to Metallica or Megadeth or Queensrÿche in the 1980s or early ’90s, you were socially ostracized for it. This was not a polite or accepted thing to do. Glam metal (like Poison) and hard rock (like Guns N’ Roses) somewhat tamed that sentiment, but they did so at a cost—a lost edge. I can’t believe I’m calling Guns N’ Roses more palatable, but isn’t that the truth? It’s revisionist to pretend that heavy metal was just a normal, mainstream thing. I guess it’s good that it became so, but it’s also a little sad to forget the forces that pushed people to enjoy it at the time. [Related: Five lessons in creativity from Metallica]
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: It’s definitely Bluey, an animated series from Australia about a family of anthropomorphized heeler dogs and their dog friends. The titular Bluey is a blue-heeler girl, and the show follows her antics along with those of her younger sister, Bingo (red heeler), and their parents, Bandit and Chilli.
The show is both charming and problematic, and maybe that’s what makes it such a draw. Bandit can exemplify the best kind of fatherhood, but he can also be kind of an asshole (like when he doesn’t tell Bingo he’s leaving the country for six weeks? And leaving tomorrow?). Bluey is creative but also a bit of a hellion who gets her way even when she doesn’t deserve it, and Bingo is existentially bereft and tragically misunderstood by her parents and sister. It’s refreshing to see such layers of honesty and complexity in a show for very young children, who lead lives far knottier and more layered than adults give them credit for.
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: A fragment by the seventh-century-B.C.E. Greek lyric poet Archilochus. Here it is:
εἰμὶ δ’ ἐγὼ θεράπων μὲν Ἐνυαλίοιο ἄνακτος
καὶ Μουσέων ἐρατὸν δῶρον ἐπιστάμενος.
And thank you for giving me a reason to exercise my comparative-literature doctorate by offering this brand-new, translated-just-for–The Atlantic rendition:
I am war’s wingman
And art’s willing puppet.
Here’s a more typical, literal take:
I am a servant of lord Ares,
and of the Muses, familiar with their lovely gift.
That’s all that history preserved of this poem. We don’t know if there was more of it. That’s why classicists call it a fragment.
Some of them have read these lines as striking in their paradox, others as utterly normal—war and poetry were complements for the ancients. Whatever the case, these two lines are burned into my brain for some reason. I think in part because Archilochus was easy and fun to read in Greek, unlike the Homeric epics from a century or so before our man Archie here. But also because here’s this dude from almost 2,700 years ago who feels so contemporary: the mercenary with a soft side, scribbling lines like these about reality and expectation, and others about getting drunk enough to fight, because how else would you find the will to bother? Very relatable. People just aren’t so different now than they ever were, or ever will be.
The Week Ahead
Essay
Dave Grohl’s Monument to Mortality
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Twenty-nine years ago, Dave Grohl, then the drummer for Nirvana, lost his singer, the band’s brilliant and vexed leader, Kurt Cobain. Last year, Grohl, now the leader of Foo Fighters, lost his drummer, the dazzling Taylor Hawkins. And then, a few months later, Grohl’s mother, Virginia, died. She was, among other things, the ne plus ultra of rock moms, a teacher by profession whose support for her charismatic, punk-loving, unscholarly (her gentle word) son was unfaltering and absolute.
One blow, then another. It was all a bit much. Grohl is an unreasonably buoyant person, but it was hard to imagine how he would pull himself out of a trough dug by such concentrated loss.
But he did. And he did so by writing his way out.
More in Culture
Catch up on The Atlantic
Photo Album
An Eid al-Adha festival in India, protests in France, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
'Ink Master' judges Ami James, Ryan Ashley, Joel Madden, and Nikko Hurtado during Season 14
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.
My colleague Alan Taylor has published thousands of photo essays in his time at The Atlantic. I spoke with him about the art of telling a visual story and which photos have stuck with him over the years.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Since joining The Atlantic in 2011, my colleague Alan Taylor has published more than 2,700 photo articles. Multiply that by an average of 24 images per story, and you’ll get closer to approximating the amount of photos he’s looked at in his time here.
When he was working as a web developer in the ’90s, Alan first became fascinated by the images he saw on news agencies’ wires. At The Atlantic, he pores over those resources to publish photo essays about what’s going on in the world. But he also follows his curiosity wherever it takes him, curating collections of wacky, fun, and beautiful things worth seeing: the geometric carvings of salt mines, the world’s tallest statues, life viewed under a microscope. I talked with Alan about what he’s learned from more than a decade of creating photo essays.
Isabel Fattal: Looking back on the tens of thousands of images you’ve worked with, can you think of a few that stand out?
Alan Taylor: I was looking through some of my archives, and it’s often the ones with a really personal touch, something very human. For example, this famous image of Barack Obama.
You don’t really need a caption for that. Being a human and seeing that image in front of you, you know what’s happening. And as soon as you move beyond the recognition of the feeling, you think about what this says in American history and society. You’ve got this little boy reaching up and touching the hair. His hair is just like mine. He’s just like me. I could be this. And I’ve just said far more than needs to be said about it. It’s just there.
There’s another one, from when the pandemic was near its height. This is a doctor in full protective gear, embracing a patient. At that stage of the crisis, people were moving out of a state of panic and trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and toward the sense that, Oh, wow, we should have some compassion for the caregivers too. This is deeply troubling and serious.
Isabel: Are there kinds of news events where you find images to be the most effective way to tell the story?
Alan: Typically broad-scale disasters, such as hurricanes and floods and fires. When they first hit, you can do a whole lot more with a handful of photographs than you can with a few paragraphs. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, and Donald Trump flew there to survey the damage, I really wanted to emphasize, This is what Puerto Rico looked like when Trump went to visit. So I put together a story. If you can sense there’s a question out there that you have that other people probably have, you can put it out there.
And then there are the stories that are about the images themselves. In 2013, North Korea issued photographs of a military drill they were doing, and it had some hovercrafts coming in to land on a beach. And I just saw it as I was going through the news feed, as I always do. And I noticed, Oh, wow, this looks weird. Wait a minute. This is Photoshop. This image has four or five hovercraft, but really, there’s probably only two there and one or more is cloned a couple different times. So I did this little exposé on it. I’m sitting up here in my home office in the attic in the suburbs and going, Oh my God, I’ve seen something that nobody else in the world has noticed here.
Isabel: The power of looking closely.
So where do you get your ideas for some of your more random and fun photo essays, such as salt mines or the pope versus the wind?
Alan: You’re missing probably the silliest one I’ve ever done, which is just cows. It’s pictures of cows, and it’s titled “Cows.” I love that. I put out a tweet promoting it, and the first response was, Is everybody okay over there?
“Pope vs. the Wind” was fun because I thought, I see these pictures all the time. Photographers are assigned to travel with the pope and go to these different places, and there’s only so many different photographs you can get of a scene. And when he’s wearing the skullcap (zucchetto) and a small cape, the wind is having a great time with those. I realized, Wait, there’s a body of images out there of this phenomenon. I can do something fun with this.
The main reason that I spend all day, every day, looking at all these photographs is that they can accidentally clump together and help me come up with story ideas. It’s always fun when you can find some sort of an underlying theme over years and years.
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The Trump AI Deepfakes Had an Unintended Side Effect
By Megan Garber
The former president is fighting with the police. He’s yelling. He’s running. He’s resisting. Finally, he falls, that familiar sweep of hair the only thing rigid against the swirl of bodies that surround him.
When I first saw the images, I did a double take: The event they seem to depict—the arrest of Donald Trump—has been a matter of feverish anticipation this week, as a grand jury decides whether to indict the former president for hush-money payments allegedly made on his behalf to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. (Trump, that canny calibrator of public expectation, himself contributed to the fever.) Had the indictment finally come down, I wondered, and had the arrest ensued? Had Trump’s Teflon coating—so many alleged misdeeds, so few consequences—finally worn away? Pics or it didn’t happen, people say, and, well, here were the pics.
Read. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, a transportive collection of every short story by the late author (most of which were set in small-town Mississippi), or another of eight books that will take you somewhere new.
Watch. Catch up on Succession in anticipation of the fourth and final season of the acclaimed series, which premieres on HBO Sunday.
Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.
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.
Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.
Today’s special guest is staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany, whose work focuses on technology and internet culture. She also co-writes the newsletter Famous People with her friend Lizzie Plaugic. Kaitlyn most recently wrote about how Andrew Tate is haunting YouTube; meanwhile, the latest edition of Famous People recounted a night on a Jeopardy-themed bar crawl.
Kaitlyn’s favorite blockbuster movie, based solely on vibes, is Raiders of the Lost Ark. She finds the Tom Ripley crime-novel series from Patricia Highsmith endlessly fascinating, and she thinks Kenny Chesney has a perfect voice, despite judgment from her peers.
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Culture Survey: Kaitlyn Tiffany
The arts/culture/entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: I have to say it … all of my friends are talking about On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, and Gallivanting, forthcoming from Atlantic Editions and Zando on April 4! It’s a selection of email newsletters that my friend Lizzie Plaugic and I have written over the past five years. The newsletter is called Famous People, and the idea is that we don’t know anybody who is a “celebrity” but we do know people who are stunning and impressive and hilarious and charming to us, and we think it’s fun and funny to write about them as if it’s all the same thing.
There’s sort of a running bit in the newsletter where I’m the sappy one and Lizzie is the one with the drier and clearer eyes. It’s me talking now, so I’ll say: The reason I love writing this newsletter is because I never have to fake the excitement. Honestly, I always expected to get most of what I wanted out of life—an apartment in New York City, a job at a magazine, a little money for haircuts and wine—but I never, ever dreamed I would have a friend like Liz. I’m genuinely shocked. Every exclamation point is sincere! [Related: A private-ish party for the 100th edition of Famous People]
The upcoming arts/culture/entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: In June, I’m taking a nine-hour train ride to Pittsburgh to see Taylor Swift with my sisters. I took three days off of work so that I’d have plenty of time to go up and come back down. I can’t wait. We’re all going to dress as different “eras” in honor of the Eras Tour. (I’m doing Reputation because I used to be a little goth.) I’m obsessed with Taylor’s self-mythologizing—an elaborate, national celebration of your own “eras” at age 33? Wonderful idea. [Related: Taylor Swift misses the old Taylor Swift too.]
My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I asked my colleague David Sims for help with this one because I’m not totally clear on what a “blockbuster” or an “art movie” is. He said there’s no technical definition of blockbuster, and “it is a vibe thing.” Well, going on pure vibes, my favorite blockbuster has to be Raiders of the Lost Ark. My cousins used to cover my eyes when the guy’s face melts off at the end. When you’re 8 years old and you figure out that the dates were poisoned, that Marion wasn’t really dead, and that the bad guys are not only weird-looking but modeled off of actual Nazis, it’s like—cinema! You watch the girl in Harrison Ford’s archaeology class bat her eyes at him and you become a grown-up. You never forget the first time you see a man chopped up to death by a propeller.
David said that my actual favorite film—Shattered Glass, starring Hayden Christensen as the famed New Republic fabulist Stephen Glass, and featuring Peter Sarsgaard as a hot magazine editor in dad jeans—did not count as an art movie, despite the perfection of the jeans. (“Are you mad at me?”) But my second favorite film, Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy and featuring Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy (lol!), does. I just love the way she says “It had to be a silly little Communist.” I try to do it sometimes at parties (it doesn’t read). Also, of course, the movie is brilliant about how people spin narratives out of nonsensical events, and it is very beautiful. But I don’t have the words for that! You’ll have to ask David. [Related: 20 biopics that are actually worth watching]
Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I’ve been on a Patricia Highsmith kick ever since reading a thing about her in The New Yorker in January and texting it to my group chats:
“‘One simply cannot concern oneself eight or even five hours a day with nonsense-taken-seriously and not be corrupted by it,’ she writes. ‘The corruption lies in the very habits of thought.’ Another kind of life taunts her: ‘What a genius I should be with leisure!’”
Until recently, I didn’t know that there were four other Highsmith books about the all-time terrifying villain Tom Ripley, aside from the famous The Talented Mr. Ripley. I’m learning a lot about myself while reading them—I should be more offended by the murders, I think, but it’s hard not to be curious about all of the foods that Ripley’s French housekeeper makes for him and the trips he gets to take. (Would you get involved in an art-forgery scheme? It seems high-risk, medium-reward.)
The best nonfiction book I read recently was one I picked up on a lunch break at the Alabaster Bookshop near Union Square. They have a great selection of old books about New York. The WPA Guide to New York City, written by employees of the Federal Writers’ Project and published in the 1930s, is a chunky travel guide packed with semi-reported local gossip and plenty of facts and figures for posterity. There’s so much amazing stuff in this book. There are maps, drawings, blueprints, photos, a list of nightclubs. In a mini guide to the subways and els, it’s noted that the fare is 5 cents and “not likely to be increased in the immediate or distant future. The New Yorker is extremely sensitive on this point.”
An author I will read anything by: Helen DeWitt is a genius and I’ll probably throw a house party when her long-delayed novel Your Name Here is finally published “in late 2023 or 2024.” I’m too scared to summarize her. [Related: The anguished comedy of Helen DeWitt]
A musical artist who means a lot to me: I think Kenny Chesney has a perfect voice … I tweet about him all the time and never get any engagement. There are so few takers for the “beach cowboy” aesthetic in my current circle, and it actually hurts my feelings.
A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: Once, after a bad breakup, I flew to Santa Fe by myself and nearly died in a blizzard in a rented Dodge Caravan. The next day, I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and saw a whole bunch of stuff, including Thigh Bone on Black Stripe (1931). Again, I don’t really have the words, but at the time I was really in a rare emotional state and I only remember that I thought it was extreme that anybody be allowed to wander in off of the street and look at something like that at 10 in the morning. I have a version of it tattooed on my bicep.
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Chelsey Minnis’s Baby, I Don’t Care, from 2018, is a collection of film-noir-inspired poems. I’m not a great reader of poetry, but many of the quintets have stuck in my head for the past five years.
For example:
“Let me tell you how I know things.
I just think about them very hard.
And then I get ideas.
And maybe they’re the right ideas and maybe they’re the wrong ideas.
Now, can’t you try that?”
Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Bhumi Tharoor, Amanda Mull, Megan Garber, Helen Lewis, Jane Yong Kim, Clint Smith, John Hendrickson, Gal Beckerman, Kate Lindsay, Xochitl Gonzalez, Spencer Kornhaber, Jenisha Watts, David French, Shirley Li, David Sims, Lenika Cruz, Jordan Calhoun, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert.
The Week Ahead
Essay
I Actually Went to the Lighthouse
By Patricia Lockwood
To the Lighthouse, from the first word of its title, is a novel that moves. Here it comes striding across the lawn, with its hair in long, curving crimps and a deerstalker hat on its head, with a bag in one hand and a child trailing from the other. It is coming to find you, its face lights up, there is something in this world for you to do.
I had met Virginia Woolf before I ever opened her books. I knew what she looked like and what had happened to her; I knew that her books took place inside the human mind and that I had my whole life to enter them. My premonitory sense of what her novels were about—Mrs. Dalloway is about some lady, The Waves is about … waves, To the Lighthouse is about going to a lighthouse—turned out to be basically accurate. Yet I put off To the Lighthouse for a long time, in order to live in delicious anticipation of it. There is a pleasure to be had in putting off the classics; as soon as you open Bleak House, you foreclose all other possibilities of what it could be, and there sits Mr. Krook in his unchanging grease spot, always to look the same, never to raise a hand differently. As long as it remains unread, the story can be anything—free, immortal, drowsing between white sheets. Yet if you are a reader, this pleasure can be drawn out for only so long.
More in Culture
Catch Up on The Atlantic
Photo Album
Check out some images from Holi festivals this past week.
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.
In a 2021 Atlantic article that I’ve now read many times, the writer Deborah Copaken reflects on her time spent with another writer, Nora Ephron. A random phone call (“Hi, Deb, this is Nora Ephron.” “Yeah, right. And I’m Joan of Arc.”) led to a decade-long friendship between Copaken and Ephron—or, as Copaken calls her, “this daughterless woman who has all but adopted me and several other women.”
Copaken’s article, excerpted from her memoir Ladyparts, catalogs her own midlife challenges as well as Ephron’s death, in 2012. The article helps those of us who have long loved Ephron get to know her better, but what resonates with me most are the three lessons Copaken has gathered from the rom-com auteur about navigating middle age. Ephron, Copaken wrote, “teaches me, by example, how to navigate the postreproductive half of my life.” Here’s how:
I’d venture to suggest that those rules apply at most ages. But today’s reading list focuses on that era of life we call the “middle”—what makes it special, and how to find a singular sort of happiness within it.
Three Rules for Middle-Age Happiness
By Deborah Copaken
Gather friends and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, and cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.
The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are
By Jennifer Senior
There are good reasons you always feel 20 percent younger than your actual age.
By James Parker
Your body begins to betray you. You have neither the vitality of youth nor the license of old age. But being over the hill has its pleasures.
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
I’ll leave you with some words from James Parker’s ode to middle age:
“You’re more free. The stuff that used to obsess you, those grinding circular thoughts—they’ve worn themselves out. You know yourself, quite well by now. Life has introduced you to your shadow; you’ve met your dark double, and with a bit of luck the two of you have made your accommodations. You know your friends. You love your friends, and you tell them.”
— Isabel
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.
“A few years ago, my wife, Angie, and I made a pact,” Jason Heller writes in The Atlantic. “Every Sunday, we swore to each other, we will abstain from work. And we kept our promise: On the second day of each weekend, we start our morning and end our night by bingeing TV in bed. In the middle of the day, we binge TV on the couch, taking breaks exclusively to nap or read.” The anxiety of looming to-do lists sometimes creeps in, but “we fight to stay still,” he writes.
We fight to stay still. That phrasing stuck with me: stillness as something to fight for. Despite the fact that a day of rest is a core tenet of several ancient religions, as Heller notes, setting it all aside has become so uncommon in American society that we need to actively work to do it. “Taking a consistent day off is an immense privilege,” Heller acknowledges. “And yet, even when you can take it, there are plenty of ways to avoid actually doing so.”
When we do manage to grab leisure time, our world can open up. “Taking a break gives Angie and me the opportunity to really see each other again,” Heller writes. Today’s reading list is all about do-nothing time—why we need it, how much of it we need, and the possibilities it creates.
On Doing Nothing
How My Wife and I Took Back Our Sundays
By Jason Heller
We have an agreement: One day a week, we do absolutely nothing. In a society obsessed with productivity, this is harder than it should be—but it’s worth it.
By Arthur C. Brooks
Absolute idleness is both harder and more rewarding than it seems.
How Much Leisure Time Do the Happiest People Have?
By Joe Pinsker
Too little, and people tend to get stressed. Too much, and people tend to feel idle.
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
Jason Heller’s article was predated by a case for the do-nothing day in The Atlantic in 1952:
“Just how one tells when a ‘do-nothing’ day arrives, I have never been able to make out,” Dr. Wyman Richardson wrote. “There is some combination involving weather elements and human physiology which, when it occurs, makes it clear to all that such a day is at hand.”
Richardson’s ideal do-nothing day on Cape Cod involved sipping coffee and looking out the window, followed by “the day’s major activity”—a long walk down the hill to the boathouse.
— Isabel
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.
Housing shortages color all aspects of American life, my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote over the weekend, including bagels, music, and education. The solution seems simple: Build more homes. But that’s much easier said than done, especially when Americans disagree about the basic facts of the crisis.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
“Nowhere Is Immune”
“In my mind, bagel shops open at 6 a.m.,” my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote over the weekend. “That’s how it works. You should be able to feel caffeinated and carb-loaded at 6:03 a.m. every day of the year, including Christmas.” But in San Francisco, where Annie lives, it’s tough to find a bagel place that opens before 8:30 a.m. She blames the housing shortage.
Annie’s theory might sound a little far-fetched, but she goes on to explain the evidence to back it up: San Francisco is not building nearly enough homes to keep up with the jobs it has added in the past decade, and rents are higher in the city than pretty much anywhere else in the United States. This means that many families navigating child-care costs can’t afford to live in San Francisco; the city has the smallest share of children of any major American city. That’s all to say: San Francisco is not full of people “who might be up at 5:51 a.m. on a Sunday morning, ready to hit the bagel store.”
And this kind of cause-and-effect goes far beyond bagel stores, and far beyond San Francisco, Annie writes:
Housing costs are perverting just about every facet of American life, everywhere. What we eat, when we eat it, what music we listen to, what sports we play, how many friends we have, how often we see our extended families, where we go on vacation, how many children we bear, what kind of companies we found: All of it has gotten warped by the high cost of housing. Nowhere is immune, because big cities export their housing shortages to small cities, suburbs, and rural areas too.
A trio of analysts recently coined a term for this: a “housing theory of everything.” “You now hear it everywhere, at least if you’re the kind of person who goes to a lot of public-policy conferences or hangs out on econ Twitter,” Annie writes. The theory has caught on, she argues, because it’s true: “Housing costs really do affect everything.”
She explains:
[Housing costs are] shaping art by preventing young painters, musicians, and poets from congregating in cities … They’re shaping higher education, turning elite urban colleges into real-estate conglomerates and barring low-income students from attending. They are preventing new businesses from getting off the ground and are killing mom-and-pops. They’re making people lonely and reactionary and sick and angry.
So what do we do? The solution is simple on its face: “Build more homes in our most desirable places—granting more money, opportunity, entrepreneurial spark, health, togetherness, and tasty breakfast options to all of us,” as Annie puts it. But this fix isn’t easy to achieve, in part because many people struggle to even recognize that a housing shortage exists—even when the evidence is right in front of them.
My colleague Jerusalem Demsas reported on this problem a few months ago: “Before I get to the veritable library of studies, our personal experiences compel us to recognize that housing scarcity is all around us,” she wrote, in an essay aptly titled “Housing Breaks People’s Brains.”
Even the rich are struggling to find homes, a sign of how wide-ranging the shortage is. As Jerusalem noted, video clips have gone viral showing “hundreds of yuppies lining up to tour a single Manhattan apartment.” But many people don’t necessarily connect these real-estate woes with the reality of housing scarcity.
People also doubt the effects of building more housing: A study published last year noted that 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe that if a lot of new housing were built, rents and home prices would rise, when in actuality, the evidence—and economic theory—suggests that prices would fall.
In her article, Jerusalem offers a few theories for what’s behind these forms of denialism, but the consequences are clear: These types of thinking “push against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes,” she wrote. “After all, if there is no shortage or if building new homes doesn’t reduce rents, then no one has to tackle NIMBYism, no one has to work to bring down housing-construction costs, and no one needs to build millions of new homes in America’s cities and suburbs. In fact, this magical thinking goes, we can fix our housing crisis without changing much of anything at all.”
The first step toward solving the housing crisis might be aligning Americans around a shared reality—and as we’ve seen time and again, that’s not easy to do.
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Evening Read
The Cure for Hiccups Exists
By Uri Bram
Hiccups are a weirdly distressing physical experience. In their normal version, they are benign and, given enough time and patience on the part of the sufferer, end by themselves. Yet there is something oddly unbearable about that brief eternity when you’ve just hiccuped and are waiting, powerlessly, for the next one to strike.
The search for a cure has, naturally enough in the age of the internet, resulted in a multitude of Reddit threads. Many claim a 100 percent, never-fails guarantee: putting a cold knife on the back of your tongue, saying pineapple, closing your eyes and gently pressing on your eyeballs, drinking water while holding down an ear. Specifically, your left ear.
Spoiler: None of these is a 100 percent, never-fails, guaranteed cure. As common and discomforting as experiencing hiccups is, remarkably little medical research has been done into the phenomenon—and even less into how to end a bout.
More from The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. “There You Are,” a poem by Victoria Adukwei Bulley.
There you are
this cold day
boiling the water on the stove,
pouring the herbs into the pot,
hawthorn, rose;
Watch. Emily, a new film about the “most vexing” of the literary Brontë sisters.
P.S.
In a recently published article adapted from his new book, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, Jake Bittle writes about how climate change is affecting housing dynamics: Rising sea levels are turning coastal homes across the U.S. into sticks of dynamite, passed on to less and less wealthy owners with each sale—and at some point, they’re going to explode. Bittle’s work is another reminder that housing is inextricable from every other issue that touches American life, and life on our planet.
— Isabel
Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will join The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Thursday, February 23—one year after Russia invaded Ukraine—to discuss the war’s latest developments and implications for U.S. foreign policy. Register for the virtual event here.
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.
At the end of each issue of The Atlantic is a short ode by my colleague James Parker. He has praised many of life’s realities, most of them completely ordinary: naps, barbecue potato chips, chewing gum, cold showers.
One of my favorites, the ode to low expectations, seems to describe the thinking behind Parker’s entire ode project. “Gratification? Satisfaction? Having your needs met? Fool’s gold,” Parker writes. “If you can get a buzz of animal cheer from the rubbishy sandwich you’re eating, the daft movie you’re watching, the highly difficult person you’re talking to, you’re in business.”
Appreciate what’s in front of you, Parker is saying. That’s a hard thing for humans to do, in our era of social-media comparisons and heightened expectations. What we expect of our romantic partners, for example, has risen dramatically in the past hundred or so years. As a social psychologist told my colleague Olga Khazan in 2017, we now expect a partner not only to love and support us, but also to help us grow and contribute to our self-actualization. That’s a lot to expect from one person.
High expectations aren’t always a bad thing. But if you’re finding yourself flooded with disappointment more often than you’d like—say, if your partner put effort into a Valentine’s Day gift or plan, but didn’t do exactly what you’d hoped for—you might consider the case for lowering your expectations and turning to gratitude instead. Look up at your loved ones. Look down at your coffee or your tea or your “rubbishy sandwich.” And say: This is enough.
On Expectations
By James Parker
You’ll be happier if you grade reality on a curve.
We Expect Too Much From Our Romantic Partners
By Olga Khazan
How marriage has changed in recent years, and why that’s made staying married harder (From 2017)
Perfectionism Can Become a Vicious Cycle in Families
By Gail Cornwall
When parents have “other-oriented perfectionism,” kids suffer.
Still Curious?
The most effective way to thank your significant other: Gratitude can be a significant predictor of relationship quality.
Gratitude without God: In 2014, the writer Emma Green asked: If giving thanks isn’t inherently religious, where does it come from?
Other Diversions
P.S.
If you’re really struggling to activate your gratitude muscles, our happiness columnist, Arthur C. Brooks, suggests contemplating your death. This does not sound fun. But Brooks has evidence to back up the suggestion: “Researchers found in 2011 that when people vividly imagined their demise, their sense of gratitude increased by 11 percent, on average,” he wrote in 2021. “As a happiness researcher, I rarely see single interventions with this kind of effect.”
— Isabel
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.
When I was in college, an acquaintance who had graduated a few years prior came back to visit for the weekend. As we walked around campus on Saturday night, he flung his hands into the cold Connecticut air and exclaimed, “You guys are so lucky; you live a minute away from all your friends. You’ll never have this again.”
At the time, I thought it was kind of sad—a grown man pining for my life of university housing and late library nights. But his words have stuck with me in the years since. “In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit,” my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2015. The older you get, the more effort it takes to maintain connections, because you don’t have as many built-in opportunities to see your friends every day.
The writer Jennifer Senior noted last year that the fact of our choosing friendships makes them both fragile and special: “You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value,” she wrote. But that’s also what makes friendships harder to hold on to as our lives evolve.
It’s hard but not impossible. Senior notes that when it comes to friendship, “we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together.” So we have to create them: weekly phone calls, friendship anniversaries, road trips, “whatever it takes.”
“Friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age,” Senior writes. “It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow with time.” It’s something worth choosing, over and over again.
On Friendship
It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart
By Jennifer Senior
The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them.
The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship
By Julie Beck
I’ve spent more than three years interviewing friends for “The Friendship Files.” Here’s what I’ve learned.
Why Making Friends in Midlife Is So Hard
By Katharine Smyth
I thought I was done dating. But after moving across the country, I had to start again—this time, in search of platonic love.
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
In one of my favorite editions of Julie’s Friendship Files, she spoke with three women who tried an interesting experiment to deal with “the friendship desert of modern adulthood”: They entered into “arranged friendships,” bringing together a group of strangers who committed to be friends through it all.
— Isabel
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.
The left has long believed that Democratic states are the future, whereas Republican states are the past. But migration data show that red and blue might be starting to switch places.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
State of Disunion
“Democratic-leaning states represent the future and Republican ones the last gasps of a dying empire.” That’s been the theory long espoused by many on the left, my colleague Jerusalem Demsas wrote this week. But geographic trends suggest a possible reversal of this state of the union: Florida and Texas were last year’s top states for inbound domestic migration, with New York and California in the rear. And some red states may be better hubs for employment right now too: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggest that there are now more nonfarming jobs in Florida than in New York.
Jerusalem took a close look at Florida and New York, which together are a paradigm of a broader national trend of migration from blue states to red states. She found that the cost of housing is likely the single greatest factor behind the shift. “The top 10 metro areas for unaffordability are a sort of who’s who of Democratic cities: Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim tops the list, with New York–Newark–Jersey City rolling into the sixth spot as the first non-California metro,” she writes. The rise of remote work in the pandemic has also meant that one of New York’s main superpowers—“its gravitational pull on workers,” as Jerusalem puts it—has been weakened.
So what does this mean for blue states and their superstar cities? They’re far from dying, of course: “New York City isn’t some dystopian wasteland where no one can see their future,” Jerusalem reminds us. But evidence of a growing exodus does mean cities that have long been sitting comfortably need to put in some work to retain their residents—by, for example, improving basic amenities such as public transit.
And there are some selling points that more affordable red states might never be able to offer. “A healthy city attracts wealthy, middle-, and working-class people; it pulls newcomers into its orbit while leaving room for natives,” Jerusalem writes. “I don’t have a lot of faith that the Republican regimes now attracting Americans will be invested in this type of inclusive growth.” As Jerusalem notes, “We’ve seen these states become hostile to LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, voting rights, racial equality, and more.” This is true in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation is forcing professors to change how they teach.
In short, the lack of affordable housing in blue-state cities means that some Americans have to “choose between liberal values and financial security,” Jerusalem argues. And that choice is made more stark by the fact that red and blue America can feel, to some, like two entirely different countries.
My colleague Ronald Brownstein has written about what he calls “the great divergence” between red and blue states. This widening divide is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America, he argues, with the GOP in particular hoping to impose its politics on the entire country. He wrote last year:
What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support.
These new migration trends won’t do much to end the ongoing duel between red and blue America. “Although some predict that liberals moving to red states could moderate our nation’s politics, that seems unlikely given states’ tendency to preempt local policy,” Jerusalem told me. And that happens in both red states (on issues such as gun laws) and blue states (where state governments may hold localities accountable for housing failures), she explained.
For now, it looks like the divide between red and blue states will persist. But as long as cheaper housing and good jobs coexist in red states, blue-staters will keep on coming.
Related:
Today’s News
Dispatches
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Evening Read
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. “The Third Law of Magic,” a new short story by Ben Okri.
Or A Giant Win, a football memoir that offers a human counterbalance to the heroics and chest-thumping of the Super Bowl.
Listen. This Is Why, the new album from the band Paramore.
P.S.
Jerusalem does great work dispelling the many housing and homelessness myths that persist among Americans. To dive deeper, start with her piece on why housing breaks people’s brains. “Anyone who’s been in a dumb recurring fight knows that the entire problem could be cleared up if everyone could just agree on exactly what was said or done,” she writes. “But you can’t, so you end up stuck in a cycle of relitigation. Housing-policy discussions are like that.”
— Isabel
Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.
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.
In her 2017 article “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind,” my colleague Julie Beck asks a social psychologist: “What would get someone to change their mind about a false belief that is deeply tied to their identity?”
The answer? “Probably nothing.”
We’re generally okay at admitting we’re wrong about small matters, where the evidence is right in front of us. For example, Julie explains, if you thought it was going to be nice outside but then discover that it’s raining, you’ll grab an umbrella before you walk out the door. But if your false belief is tied to your identity or how you see the world, “then people become logical Simone Bileses, doing all the mental gymnastics it takes to remain convinced that they’re right.”
It doesn’t help that our mind is constantly tricking us. Faulty ways of thinking seem to be hardwired into the human brain, as the writer Ben Yagoda noted in 2018. Wikipedia has a standalone “List of cognitive biases,” whose more than 100 entries include the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”) and the IKEA effect (“the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.”)
A hundred or so biases have been repeatedly shown to exist in the human mind, and, Yagoda writes, they might be impossible to get rid of. Or at least near-impossible: He tried several different methods to see if he could weaken his own biases, and the results were mixed.
In her piece, Julie offers some tips to help us try to lovingly change others’ minds. But we’re probably better off starting with ourselves; we’ve got powerful, self-deluding minds to contend with.
On Deluding Ourselves
The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain
By Ben Yagoda
Science suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it?
This Article Won’t Change Your Mind
By Julie Beck
The facts on why facts alone can’t change beliefs
Changing Your Mind Can Make You Less Anxious
By Arthur C. Brooks
Humans are programmed to think we’re right at all costs. Fighting that instinct will set you free.
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
In December, my colleague Elaine Godfrey expressed an opinion that might have many of you reaching for all the persuasive tools you’ve got: She hates skiing. (And this opinion does seem quite tied to her sense of identity, so chances are she will not be swayed.)
— Isabel
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.
The Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham has been thinking and writing about Memphis’s policing crisis for several months now. This past weekend, he went back to survey the aftermath of released video footage of Tyre Nichols’s fatal beating by police officers. David is at work on a story about where police reform goes from here, and I called him today to talk a bit about what he saw and heard over the weekend, and how Memphis’s policing strategy led to tragedy.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Not Enough
Isabel Fattal: You were in Memphis over the weekend. What did you hear from residents of the city?
David A. Graham: The sense I got from people in Memphis is that they are glad the city moved so quickly to fire these officers, and they’re glad the district attorney moved so quickly to prosecute. But it’s not enough. They want to know more about the incident. It’s unclear why Tyre Nichols was pulled over. They want to see action against the other officer who tased Tyre Nichols and who has been relieved from duty but has not been fired. They want to know who else was involved. We’ve seen the SCORPION [Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods] unit that these officers were members of disbanded, but they want to see the broader organized-crime unit in the department disbanded. And they want this to not happen again. The city is saying the right things, but the trick is avoiding it in the future.
Isabel: You wrote last Friday that “one of the more remarkable things about the video is that it exists.” To what extent is police activity surveilled in Memphis?
David: Often, when we learn about these incidents, it’s because of bystander video. But in this case, as far as we know, no bystanders were involved. People didn’t come out of the houses around there. I went to the scene on Saturday, and it’s a quiet suburban street. But there is something called SkyCop, which is this surveillance system all over Memphis. It’s really eerie: There are these twinkling blue lights 15 or so feet off the ground, and there are surveillance cameras, which I think are hard to miss, whether you’re a civilian or a police officer. And these officers were wearing body cams.
We’ve seen cases where officers have tried to manipulate body cams. But there’s no effort to hide this. In the video, there’s nothing that suggests they thought they made a mistake, either morally or as a matter of police work.
Isabel: During your past reporting in Memphis, you heard from residents in places with high crime that the city is simultaneously under-policed and over-policed. Can you talk a bit about that?
David: When you’ve got a spike in violent crime—as you did in Memphis, and in a lot of other American cities in 2020—one of the solutions that a lot of departments turn to is hot-spot policing, where you put a lot of officers in an area where there’s crime. We know from experience in a lot of cities that hot-spot policing can drive down crime, but the question is how it does that.
One way you can do it is by sweeping a lot of people up—just arresting a lot of people, stopping people on pretext, and seeing what you can get them on. That may stop crime, but it also creates animosity between residents and the police department. It seeks out people for things that have nothing to do with public safety, and because of where a lot of this hot-spot policing is done, it leads to a lot of Black men being arrested.
So in Memphis, this SCORPION unit was created in 2021 to deal with violent crime and the sorts of public-safety issues that residents are complaining about. And what you see them doing instead, in this case, is terrorizing and killing a citizen who at the worst was driving unsafely, from what we know. So I think it’s a clear example of under-policing and over-policing. They’re not doing anything to stop violent crime, but they are abusing citizens.
Isabel: You wrote last week, “The problem with a troubled department like Memphis’s adopting a tool like hot-spot policing is that culture tends to triumph over tactics.” Why was hot-spot policing a mistake for Memphis?
David: If you have a police department that has a history of excessive force, like Memphis’s does, and you institute a new tactic like hot-spot policing but you don’t do anything to change the underlying culture of the department, then you’re going to get abuses in hot-spot policing.
In the aftermath of Nichols’s death, the mayor of Memphis said that an outside review will help determine whether this is a matter of training or a matter of culture. You can’t watch a video like that and think, Well, if only they had been trained better. No police officer is trained to savagely beat someone like that. It’s not that they needed to be told that. It’s that there’s a problem with the culture.
Isabel: How do you think Nichols’s death might affect the national conversation about police reform?
David: Each of these situations does have its own unique factors and local context. But the national horror that we have seen reflects not only just how visceral this video is but also the fact that we are familiar with this.
It’s always hard for me to know when one of these stories will become a national story. I think this one did partly because the video is so visceral, but also because people are primed for this. They’ve seen so many of these cases. And I think every time we have one of them, it’s a reminder that there was a moment after George Floyd’s death when people were unified on this and there were some changes, but there’s still a lot of work to do to make sure that people are experiencing just policing around the country.
Related:
Today’s News
Dispatches
Work in Progress: For the first time in half a century, the rich are buying more free time, Derek Thompson writes.
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Evening Read
The Existential Wonder of Space
By Marina Koren
Of all the moons in the solar system, Saturn’s largest satellite might be the most extraordinary. Titan is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere, and liquid methane rains gently from its sky, tugged downward by a fraction of the gravity we feel on Earth. The methane forms rivers, lakes, and small seas on Titan’s surface. Beneath the frigid ground, composed of ice as hard as rock, is even more liquid, a whole ocean of plain old H2O.
The wildest part about Titan—the best part, perhaps—is that something could be living there. NASA is currently working on a mission, called Dragonfly, that would travel to the faraway moon and search for potential signs of alien life, past and present. A helicopter will fly around and study the local chemistry, checking whether conditions may be right for microbes to arise. Hypothetical Titanian life-forms could resemble the earthly varieties we’re familiar with or be something else entirely, feeding on methane compounds the way we rely on oxygen.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Victory City, the latest novel from Salman Rushdie—and “a triumph,” according to the writer Judith Shulevitz.
Listen. Gloria, the radically inoffensive new album by the pop singer Sam Smith.
P.S.
For a more detailed analysis of the Memphis Police Department’s troubled history, David recommends this recent New York Times opinion essay by the Memphis-based journalist Emily Yellin. “One reason I wanted to focus on Memphis when I started writing about it was that it’s really similar to a lot of cities but also has its own distinctive characteristics,” David told me. Yellin’s article helps situate this recent tragedy within the city’s particular history.
— Isabel
Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.
Protesters march during a rally in Memphis, Tennessee, on January 28.
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.
Coffee is one of the great loves of my life, and I’m not alone. The majority of my fellow Americans love coffee too, so much so that they refuse most alternatives—including yerba mate, an energizing option that happens to be South America’s most consumed beverage. “True, yerba mate is bitter and tastes like freshly cut grass,” Lauren Silverman wrote this week. “But coffee tastes like burnt rubber the first time you try it, and Americans can’t get enough.”
Americans’ obsession with coffee is partly due to the way we live. As Silverman notes, sitting down for an hour or two and sharing a beverage—the traditional way to consume yerba mate—is not something Americans are used to.
Coffee, on the other hand, is the perfect drink for America’s on-the-go, work-obsessed culture. In 2020, Michael Pollan wrote that coffee “freed us from the circadian rhythms of our body, helping to stem the natural tides of exhaustion so that we might work longer and later hours. Coffee, he writes, “has helped create exactly the kind of world that coffee needs to thrive: a world driven by consumer capitalism, ringed by global trade, and dominated by a species that can now barely get out of bed without its help.”
It’s a bit disturbing to think of a beloved morning ritual this way. But, of course, we’ll keep on drinking it. Once you get used to that burnt-rubber taste (I prefer to call it “mud-like”), there’s no going back.
On Coffee
The Coffee Alternative Americans Just Can’t Get Behind
By Lauren Silverman
The yerba mate in U.S. grocery stores is nothing like the real brew.
By Amanda Mull
Personal-finance gurus really hate coffee.
By Michael Pollan
The dark history of how coffee took over the world
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
The relationship that coffee and capitalism have shared for centuries might be coming to an end, Pollan noted in his essay: “Coffea arabica is a picky plant, willing to grow only in the narrowest range of conditions,” and climate change will make those conditions much harder to come by.
— Isabel
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.
America has suffered an onslaught of mass shootings in the first weeks of 2023, adding to an ever-growing national community of survivors and grievers.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
After
California Governor Gavin Newsom was at the hospital with victims of the Monterey Park shooting on Monday when he got pulled away to be briefed about two shootings that had just occurred in Half Moon Bay. The U.S. has experienced more mass shootings so far in 2023 than by this point in any year on record. And with a recent Supreme Court ruling opening the door to dismantling many of America’s remaining firearm regulations, gun violence in America may soon get even worse.
Today I’d like to focus on the communities that mass shootings touch—and the communities that form as a result of this singular type of grief.
Yesterday, my colleague Shirley Li wrote about the complex emotions many Asian Americans are wrestling with after the shootings in California.
News of mass shootings, as frequently as they happen in the U.S., has been shown to produce acute stress and anxiety. But for many Asian Americans, this past week’s deadly attacks in California—first in Monterey Park, then in Half Moon Bay—feel profoundly different. The tragedies occurred around the Lunar New Year, during a time meant for celebration. And not only did they happen in areas that have historically been sanctuaries for Asian residents, but the suspects in both cases are themselves Asian.
“I’d always believed ethnic enclaves such as Monterey Park were uniquely protected,” Shirley writes.
As my colleague Katherine Hu points out, “Regardless of an attacker’s motive, the trauma of violence remains.”
Lives have been senselessly lost. And in the same way that past attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have helped form an invisible, pervasive dread, the attacks of the past few days will continue to affect many of us, compounding our fear and raising the risk of future copycat shootings.
And with each act of gun violence, another community grows: the “unfortunate family” of survivors and those grieving. As my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2017:
Many people who have lost loved ones in a mass shooting forge friendships and rely on each other for a kind of support that can only come from someone who’s been through the same thing … “There’s an unspoken understanding that no one else really can give you,” [Caren Teves, whose son was killed in the Aurora, Colorado, shooting] said. “There’s no words that even need to be spoken. It is a very unique situation that we’re in, but all too common. I call us the unfortunate family of gun-violence survivors.”
This “family” is made up of hundreds of people processing their experiences in a range of ways, including by taking political action. When I reported on the Parkland, Florida, school shooting for The Atlantic in 2018, I noted that the student survivors’ quick turn to advocating for tighter gun laws was part of “a long tradition of American mourners who channel their grief into political activism.” (The Parkland shooting survivor X González’s recent essay for The Cut, on what it was like to grieve as a teenager in front of the entire country, and where they find themselves five years later, is worth spending time with.)
Social action can provide some comfort. Jeremy Richman, the father of a Sandy Hook student who was killed in the school shooting there in 2012, told me that after the attack, he and his wife got started right away on what would become the Avielle Foundation, a nonprofit named for his daughter and dedicated to preventing violence. “In a blurry 48 hours we created the mission and the vision of the foundation,” Richman said in 2018. “We knew exactly what we were going to do.” On a personal level, he told me, it “motivated us to get out of bed and move.” But they were also “profoundly committed to preventing others from suffering in the way that we were suffering and continue to [suffer to] this day.”
Activism, of course, does not make grief or trauma bearable, and sometimes it is too much to bear entirely. Richman died by suicide in 2019. The lasting, often misunderstood, trauma and grief that result from a mass shooting continue long after the rest of the world has moved on.
Related:
Today’s News
Evening Read
The Meme That Defined a Decade
By Megan Garber
Memes rarely endure. Most explode and recede at nearly the same moment: the same month or week or day. But the meme best known as “This Is Fine”—the one with the dog sipping from a mug as a fire rages around him—has lasted. It is now 10 years old, and it is somehow more relevant than ever. Memes are typically associated with creative adaptability, the image and text editable into nearly endless iterations. “This Is Fine,” though, is a work of near-endless interpretability: It says so much, so economically. That elasticity has contributed to its persistence. The flame-licked dog, that avatar of learned helplessness, speaks not only to individual people—but also, it turns out, to the country.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Watch. In Poker Face, streaming on Peacock, Natasha Lyonne is extremely fun to watch as a crime-solving waitress on the run.
Listen. Sam Smith’s new album, Gloria, is a reminder that the prominent queer singer thrives at playing to the middle—but that their centrism is still radical.
P.S.
For a nuanced look at America’s gun crisis, I recommend my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro’s 2018 essay “The Bullet in My Arm.” Elaina grew up in a gun-loving town in Alabama, as she puts it, but only began to understand America’s relationships with guns once she herself was shot.
— Isabel
People pay tribute at a candlelight vigil in front of City Hall in Monterey Park on January 24.
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.
Why do living things sleep? “Ask researchers this question, and listen as, like clockwork, a sense of awe and frustration creeps into their voices,” Veronique Greenwood wrote in 2018.
“In a way, it’s startling how universal sleep is,” she continued. “In the midst of the hurried scramble for survival, across eons of bloodshed and death and flight, uncountable millions of living things have laid themselves down for a nice, long bout of unconsciousness. This hardly seems conducive to living to fight another day … That such a risky habit is so common, and so persistent, suggests that whatever is happening is of the utmost importance.”
In other words, Greenwood writes, “whatever sleep gives to the sleeper is worth tempting death over and over again, for a lifetime.” Whatever sleep gives us is also worth the many hours, and large amounts of money, that humans now spend figuring out how to maximize our slumber. Sixty percent of America’s adults report experiencing sleep problems every night or most nights, Amanda Mull noted in 2019, and a variety of industries have sprung up to help us sleep longer and better.
Sleep is a need, but it’s also a ritual: Where we sleep, when we sleep, and who we sleep next to say a lot about who we are and what we want. Today’s reading list explores sleep as a scientific mystery, a physical need, and the most consistent routine of our daily lives.
On Sleep
Can Medieval Sleeping Habits Fix America’s Insomnia?
By Derek Thompson
“My 3-a.m. awakenings aren’t an unnatural disorder but an ancestral echo.”
Why Everyone Should Sleep Alone
By Malika Rao
On the virtues of splitting up for the night
I Found the Key to the Kingdom of Sleep
By Amanda Mull
It’s my foot.
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
I’ll leave you with one sleep fact from the animal kingdom that only adds to the mystery: Golden hamsters “have been observed waking up from bouts of hibernation—in order to nap,” Greenwood reports. “Whatever they’re getting from sleep, it’s not available to them while they’re hibernating.” But what is it? Scientists still don’t know.
— Isabel
A defeated New Mexico GOP candidate allegedly hired others to shoot at the homes of Democratic officials, in a case that is intensifying concerns about political violence in America.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Negative Polarization
On Monday, police in New Mexico arrested Solomon Peña, a Republican who, after losing a race for state representative last fall, allegedly paid four men to participate in at least two shootings at the homes of Democratic state officials in Albuquerque. Peña has blamed his loss on election fraud, and police believe the attacks were politically motivated.
I called the Atlantic staff writer David Graham, who reported last summer on the killing of a retired judge in Wisconsin, to discuss the political violence that appears to be on the rise in America.
Isabel Fattal: In your article about the assassination of the retired judge, you wrote that, based on the limited research that exists, the U.S. is showing warning signs of a rise in political violence. What are those signs?
David Graham: There are a few. One is we just have a really polarized country, and in particular, we have what political scientists call “negative polarization” or “affective polarization,” where people are driven almost more by their dislike of the other party than they are by any kind of shared value among their own party. And you see attitudes of a kind of dehumanization—seeing the other side as less than human, as a threat to democracy. All of these things encourage folks to take up violence; they make them believe that violence might be justified.
So you have these risk factors. And then we see lots of political violence, even though it’s not always on the level of assassination. The most obvious case is January 6. We have seen some attempted assassinations. We had a shooting at the practice for a congressional baseball game in 2017, in which Republican Representative Steve Scalise and others were injured, and we had the Trump-supporting pipe bomber in 2018. We had a guy who tried to attack an FBI office in Cincinnati and was then killed.
Isabel: What was your reaction to this New Mexico case?
David: It’s interesting to compare it with the Wisconsin case. One thing that’s good about this is no one was killed or seriously injured, which is a major difference. But in other ways, as part of the trend, I think it’s almost a bit more concerning.
The Wisconsin case, from what we know, is somebody who had a personal vendetta against this judge because of a case where the judge ruled against him. People are always going to have that sort of disagreement, and what we don’t want is a situation where political violence is normalized so they think violence is a good way to deal with that.
But in Albuquerque, we have somebody who was specifically complaining about elections being stolen; who described himself as the “MAGA King,” according to postings online; and who seemed to be really motivated by the sorts of things we hear people talking about in regular discourse about “stolen” elections. So you can see how it connects to things we hear every day and then takes on this really dangerous form. In that sense, I think the outcome is less grave—but we need to be more worried.
Isabel: Solomon Peña, the alleged perpetrator in New Mexico, didn’t act alone—he involved other people in the shootings. What does that say more broadly about political violence right now?
David: I think the organization is alarming. On January 6, we could see some coordination among groups, but it’s unclear how coordinated it was. And you wonder, if these people had had their act together more, what might have happened? Could Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi have been harmed?
The same thing applies here. This guy was allegedly able to get some people to go shoot at these folks’ houses for him. It seems, from what we know now, that they’re kind of small-time criminals, so it’s not like this was a mass political movement. But it’s worrying that someone was able to enlist people. You wonder how big it gets when it goes beyond a single actor.
Isabel: What relevance, if any, do you think the recent convictions in the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have to this trend?
David: I think it’s a little ambiguous. It’s obviously important that people who commit crimes like this are caught and prosecuted and punished for it. The discourse around the Whitmer case is weird, because on the one hand, you have folks getting some pretty stiff sentences, and on the other hand, you have a critique—and this is not just on the right, you hear this from folks on the more civil-libertarian left too—saying, Is this a real plot, or is this something the FBI cooked up? Because we’ve seen cases where the FBI takes people who are prone to violence and helps get them going. You have an argument among some people that this plot was really deep-state puppeteering.
So in that case, although you have a deterrent effect, you also may end up with people distrusting the government more and being angrier about things.
Isabel: There’s obviously no easy answer to this, but what can be done to stem this violence?
David: The short answer is it’s really complicated. One thing we do know is that leaders make a difference, and when leaders are condoning or even encouraging violence, that is likely to produce more violence. When leaders say it’s unacceptable, even in the service of their cause, that will tamp it down. That’s not all of the answer, but it’s one simple answer that we do have.
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Evening Read
Nothing Drains You Like Mixed Emotions
By Arthur Brooks
“Ōdī et amō,” the Roman poet Catullus wrote of his lover Lesbia about 2,000 years ago. “I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.”
Maybe you can relate. If you’ve ever had mixed feelings about someone you love, you know the intense discomfort that results. If your feelings were purely positive, of course, the relationship would be bliss. Even purely negative feelings would be better, because the course of action would be clear: Say goodbye. But mixed feelings leave you confused about the right thing to do.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Good for a Girl, Lauren Fleshman’s memoir about life as a runner, asks: When should athletes stop pushing through the pain?
Watch. The Last of Us, a new HBO series (the first episode is now available to stream), makes the apocalypse feel new again.
P.S.
David recently wrote about a very different example of how political polarization plays out: the debate over gas stoves, which, he argues, exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics. But you can also read the article for the simple pleasure of his wordplay. It’s a sharp analysis with many great air-, cooking-, and heat-related puns nestled in it.
— Isabel
The New Mexico State Capitol
FreshRSS