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Good morning. Before we turn to the Sunday culture edition of this newsletter, here are some of our writers’ most recent stories to help you make sense of the situation in Russia.
- Why didn’t the Wagner coup succeed?
- Prigozhin planned this.
- The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble.
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 staff writer Franklin Foer. Frank is currently at work on a book about the first two years of the Biden presidency; he has recently written for The Atlantic about controversies in the book world and the act of psychoanalyzing American presidents. He’s currently reliving a transcendent music experience he shared with his daughter, wishing he could find a TV show as good as Succession—especially in the art of “sibling razzing”—and watching Bill Nighy any time he graces the screen.
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Culture Survey: Franklin Foer
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: When my oldest daughter was 3, I made a determined effort to teach her how to eat with a fork and knife, culturally speaking. I bought used VHS copies of one of the most improbable shows in the history of network television, Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, in which a dashing Leonard Bernstein sweeps the hair from his face as he attempts to explain classical music to a CBS audience in the 1960s. For nearly two whole minutes, I managed to coerce her to sit on the couch with me in front of the black-and-white broadcast. Then she broke free and changed the channel to The Backyardigans.
I thought about this doomed experiment in parental pedantry recently because my daughter is now 18. A few weeks back, she graduated from high school, and she’s off to college in the fall. Just before the beginning of her second semester of senior year, we vowed (or was I coercing her again?) to watch every movie on the newly released Sight and Sound list of all-time greatest films. We were going to start with Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, the surprise at the top of the rankings. A family member dismissed the project as hopelessly pretentious, and sure enough, this plan didn’t fare any better with my daughter than my attempt to foist Bernstein on her.
But one of the joys of her teenage years has been our cultural convergence. Because she’s an enthusiast for gardening, a couple of months back, we jointly curated a Spotify playlist of songs about plants, which happens to be a ubiquitous musical metaphor.
During her senior year, we started going to concerts together for acts we both liked—to Big Thief and Phoebe Bridgers, to see a group from New Zealand called The Beths. (Expert in a Dying Field is the impeccable title of The Beths’ most recent album.) For Chanukah, she bought us tickets for a brassy Brooklyn group called Rubblebucket. I had barely heard of it. But attending the concert was one of the great musical experiences of my life. The band was exuberant—horns blaring, lead singer pushing her anaerobic capacity with manic dancing—and so were we.
In their book, All Things Shining, the philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that the transformative reading of Western classics—and moments of passionate engagement with culture—can help us rediscover purpose in a secular society, because it can supply a similar sensation of transcendence. (It’s a lovely short read.) They would call the experience of culturally induced sublimation “whooshing up.” At the 9:30 Club, with a band I barely knew, my daughter and I were, in fact, whooshing up. Because I knew that moment of fatherhood was so fleeting, it felt genuinely ecstatic.
The culture or entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: I find it annoying how many conversations return to the inadequacy of television after Succession. They are annoying because they are true. Every suggestion for a replacement is impoverished by comparison.
Like many couples, my wife and I will frequently watch shows on our devices at our own pace. (Yes, it’s a mark of my selfishness—and my inability to pass the marshmallow test—that I annoyingly race ahead.) She’s still making her way through Season 4. I’m rewatching episodes with her just so I can study the poetry of familial teasing. It takes characters uninhibited by superegos and morality to realize the literary heights of the sibling-razzing genre. [Related: The Succession plot point that explained the whole series]
An actor I would watch in anything: Bill Nighy. I would even watch him as a catatonic English civil servant confronting his own mortality. That’s the conceit of Living, which just began streaming on Netflix. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the screenplay, which is an adaptation of a Kurosawa film, which is an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella. The movie is borderline sappy but saved by its Englishness. In moments of catharsis, it pulls back just enough to stay classy, unable to fully express its emotions.
It’s disturbing to see Nighy play a character so old and inhibited, because he’s a balletic actor, usually bursting with charm. I love to watch him walk across the screen. He packs a Russian novel’s worth of character into his gait.
I’m an evangelist for his turn in the Worricker Trilogy, a series of BBC thrillers written by David Hare. The series is about the War on Terror. Nighy is a rogue MI5 agent who seeks to undermine the power-mad Tony Blair–like prime minister, played by Ralph Fiennes. For whatever reason, nobody seems to have ever heard about this miniseries, but it’s sitting there on Apple TV. [Related: The movie that helped Kazuo Ishiguro make sense of the world]
Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: After Martin Amis’s death, I picked up a copy of his “novelized autobiography,” Inside Story, that was lying in the middle of a pile in the bedroom. It’s a book very much about mortality—that of his friends (Christopher Hitchens and Saul Bellow) and his own. Reviewing the book in The Atlantic, my colleague James Parker wrote, “He wants to lance the moment with language, and he wants his language to live forever.” Reading Amis’s own farewell, at the book’s end, it’s impossible to believe that it won’t. [Related: Jennifer Egan: I learned how to be funny from Martin Amis.]
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Searching for rumors about which players Arsenal Football Club might buy this summer.
The arts/culture/entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: I can’t wait to see the postponed Philip Guston exhibit at the National Gallery. The fact that this show was delayed has always struck me as the most ridiculous culture-war skirmish of our time.
The Week Ahead
- California, a Slave State, a new book by Jean Pfaelzer that explores the history of slavery and resistance in the West (on sale Tuesday)
- The Bachelorette’s 20th season, featuring Charity Lawson, a 27-year-old therapist and the fourth Black Bachelorette in the show’s history (premieres on ABC this Monday)
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which features Harrison Ford’s final performance in the role, alongside a performance from Phoebe Waller-Bridge (in theaters Friday)
Essay
The Elegant, Utterly Original Comedy of Alex Edelman
By Adrienne LaFrance
In the long and checkered history of possibly terrible impulse decisions, here’s one for the ages: A few years ago, the comedian Alex Edelman decided on a whim to show up uninvited to a casual meeting of white nationalists at an apartment in New York City, and pose as one of them. Why? He was curious. He wanted to see what it would be like to be on the inside of a gathering that would never have knowingly included him, given that he is Jewish.
More in Culture
- The radical reinvention of The Bear
- The real lesson of The Truman Show
- Pixar’s talking blobs are becoming more and more unsatisfying.
- The Valley girl, like, totally deserved better.
- Nine books that will actually make you laugh
Catch Up on The Atlantic
Photo Album
Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, a mass yoga session in New York City, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.