A Perfect Show That Doesn’t Make Sense
· The Atlantic
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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Michael Scherer, a staff writer who has covered how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the most powerful man in science and the challenge that rising political violence poses to journalists; he has also done a sit-down interview with Donald Trump about his political comeback.
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Michael’s recommendations include reading any piece of writing from George Will, whom he considers to be the preeminent political columnist; listening to electronic-music sets on SoundCloud; and watching the late climber Dean Potter’s miraculous ascents in The Dark Wizard.
— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: I thought my generation had played out the self-referential wink-wink with shows such as Scrubs and Arrested Development. Then a representative of Gen Z showed me the Netflix live-action show One Piece, a rollicking pirate tale that is pulled from manga, and that is also a ’90s teen sitcom, a high-school theater production, and a fantasy-canon blender. The sets make Disneyland look real, and the acting is the opposite of method. The kids fire muskets and swing katanas in printed T-shirts and plastic jewelry. None of it made sense, until I realized that playing with the expectations of genre remains a great way to celebrate the timelessness of youth. (For a counterpoint, the self-appointed theologian Peter Thiel has other thoughts on One Piece’s insights on the Antichrist.)
A musical artist who means a lot to me: I’ve lately fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic music—the kind that plays in clubs while I’m sleeping, for people on drugs I don’t take. Most interesting DJs post uninterrupted, multi-hour sets on SoundCloud. (If you are curious for a place to start, look up Dekmantel Podcast, episode 267, with Djrum, circa 2020.) There are those who work in beats of black and white, slotting in gray industrial math, and those whose songs experiment with color and shapes. I prefer the latter. This led me to Avalon Emerson, a DJ who has more recently taken a turn toward bedroom pop. Her new album, Written Into Changes, is a Skittles rainbow of emo flavors.
A good recommendation I recently received: Subscribe to County Highway, the bimonthly broadsheet for magazine lovers. The masthead’s motto is perfect: “America’s only newspaper.”
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: “Wasting time” suggests agency, which I lack. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once told me about his own addiction struggle, When you dance with a gorilla, the gorilla decides when you stop. The moment I find myself without intent, the device attacks my brain and spits out the pieces. I keep X and Bluesky for work but deleted Instagram and TikTok for sanity. The rest of my screentime is spent reading the news and doing Wordle with my wife.
The last thing that made me cry: The final scene of Train Dreams, the adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella. “You just go through what you go through,” the Forest Service worker Claire Thompson says early in the film. “In the forest, every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.”
A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: I started Caity Weaver’s May cover story about the best free restaurant bread in America thinking it would be a fun romp, only to find unmistakable proof that the heyday of magazine writing has not passed.
A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: “America’s secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key,” The New York Times declared in 1955. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the 2024 documentary about the State Department’s use of jazz diplomacy in Africa amid CIA assassination plots, sets Nikita Khrushchev’s fist and Allen Dulles’s deceit against the Cold War’s swinging anti-colonial score. Never seen a documentary so ambitious.
An author I will read anything by: I thought conservatives in bow ties were baffling, like dogs in handbags, when I first arrived in Washington. Two decades on, I have come to see George Will, a pioneer of the look, as the finest political columnist of my lifetime, for the scalpel point of his pen and his unwavering commitment to the American project. (At 85, he still churns out articles twice a week.) Even when I disagree, I learn.
Will was recently asked in a Substack interview about H. L. Mencken, the all-time heavyweight champion of the newspaper column who made the medium a devastating literary sport by targeting all manner of clodpoll, mountebank, and booboisie. “I think he’s ruined a lot of promising writers,” Will responded. “Because they try to write like him, in that tone of voice. And the tone of voice was okay for him, but he wasn’t a very attractive person.” Will knows that we still live in Mencken’s “carnival of buncombe,” a political comedy run by unmitigated scoundrels. But may we also retain Will’s understanding of the essential pull toward decency.
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The Dark Wizard, on HBO Max. There are adventure-sports documentaries about athletic achievement, or the world’s wild edges, or the agony of defeat. This one is about someone who viewed “the death consequence” more as a medication than a spiritual pursuit. The late climber Dean Potter, once Yosemite’s king, is not cast as a hero, a heel, a messiah, or a particularly good friend. But like James Salter did in his 1979 novel, Solo Faces, the filmmakers find the human condition laid bare on high granite walls.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Jerry Garcia played “Sugaree” in concert with the Grateful Dead more than 350 times, but never better than on May 19, 1977, at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta—a locked-in band, three epic guitar solos, 16 minutes of bliss. At a higher volume, I still play Pavement’s 1992 edition of its debut single, “Summer Babe (Winter Version)”—perhaps the best drum groove in rock, with an 11-second howl like no other. Every time I sit around, I find I’m shot.
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I got to see Czesław Miłosz read “Esse” back in 1998 or 1999, a poem that starts with a fleeting infatuation on a metro train and ends up comparing love’s desire to the writer’s task: “A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.” But we keep trying.
The Week Ahead
- Spider-Noir, a Marvel series starring Nicolas Cage about an alternative-universe Spider-Man, set in New York City during the Great Depression (out Wednesday on Prime Video)
- The Breadwinner, a comedy movie about a man with three young daughters becoming a stay-at-home dad (in theaters Friday)
- The Land and Its People, an essay collection by the humorist David Sedaris on travel, family, and caregiving (out Tuesday)
Essay
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.The Typo Vibe Shift
By Michael Waters
Toward the beginning of the 2002 film Secretary, a domineering lawyer (played by James Spader) barges into the office of his assistant (Maggie Gyllenhaal) with evidence of a work infraction: a memo she has written that has “three typing errors.” Spader’s character spits out a reprimand. “Do you know what this makes me look like to the people who receive these letters?”
Setting aside that his screed turns out to be foreplay, Spader’s character was channeling a widespread cultural revulsion: Typos were the ultimate shorthand for careless work. A spelling mistake was proof that the writer hadn’t bothered putting much effort into a piece of correspondence, that their instructions or advice shouldn’t be taken seriously—and perhaps that the recipient shouldn’t invest time in reading their note at all.
More than two decades later, as AI-generated writing has flooded workplaces, social media, and dating apps, old hallmarks of sloppiness—typos chief among them—are getting a new gloss.
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Catch Up on The Atlantic
- Why Thomas Massie thought he was different
- What the Pentagon didn’t say about a deadly crash
- A different kind of fading president
Photo Album
Buildings seen from Morro Castle during a blackout in Havana in March (Yamil Lage / AFP / Getty)Cuba—currently under intense economic pressure from the Trump administration—is suffering through prolonged blackouts and fuel shortages that affect nearly every aspect of daily life.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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