\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Welcome back to The Daily\u2019s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what\u2019s keeping them entertained. Today\u2019s special guest is Isaac Stanley-Becker, a staff writer who has reported on Steve Witkoff\u2019s role as President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cshadow secretary of state,\u201d the early tenure of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and the dire situation at the Federal Aviation Administration.<\/p>\n
Isaac has crowned \u201cSad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands\u201d as the greatest song of all time, enjoys rereading old email exchanges with friends, and is transfixed by the ambiguous nature of Mark Rothko\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n
The Culture Survey: Isaac Stanley-Becker<\/p>\n
A good recommendation I recently received: A German politician recently recommended Michael Young\u2019s satirical 1958 novel The Rise of the Meritocracy to me. The book popularized the term meritocracy, but Young, a sociologist who helped develop Britain\u2019s postwar welfare state, meant it as a pejorative. His story envisions a dystopian future society stratified by educational achievement rather than social class, concluding with a wave of protests in which a group called the \u201cpopulists\u201d rebel against the meritocratic elite.<\/p>\n
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Rereading old emails with friends. I\u2019ve always been drawn to letters (I recommend the published correspondence between the poets Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, with a terrific translation by Christopher Clark), and email is an approximation of that experience. I enjoy returning to the little asides and evasions and expressions of affection.<\/p>\n
The television show I\u2019m most enjoying right now: The Bear is a perfect TV show, and I\u2019m savoring the fourth season at the moment. I tell everyone who gets overwhelmed by the chaos of the first season to wait because good things are in store. The show is a tender study of people struggling to do right by themselves and others. It\u2019s also a paean to Chicago, my hometown, a city about which Nelson Algren wrote: \u201cLike loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.\u201d<\/p>\n
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: A friend recently soothed her baby with a West African lullaby called \u201cMami wata,\u201d by Issa Dakuyo.<\/p>\n
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: \u201cSlow Show,\u201d by the National, and \u201c40-16 Building,\u201d by Nas.<\/p>\n
An online creator whom I\u2019m a fan of: I\u2019m not sure how Melvyn Bragg would feel about the designation of \u201conline creator,\u201d but I\u2019m a fan of his show on BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, in which he convenes several experts on a given topic and peppers them with questions for about an hour. There\u2019s something for everyone: hypnosis, Bauhaus, the Haymarket Affair. One of my favorite episodes is on W. H. Auden\u2014it\u2019s fitting for the 2020s, our own \u201clow dishonest decade.\u201d<\/p>\n
The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I recently took a tour through five centuries of the Middle Ages in a single room at the Palazzo Citterio, in Milan. Objects as disparate as northern-Italian mosaics and Gothic marble heads recorded the eclectic interests of Lamberto Vitali, a 20th-century critic and collector who believed that art was able to dissolve geographical and temporal boundaries.<\/p>\n
An author I will read anything by: For fiction, P\u00e9ter N\u00e1das. For nonfiction, Kathryn Schulz. For commentary, I\u2019m a devoted reader of Adam Tooze\u2019s Substack and articles in the Financial Times.<\/p>\n
A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: I\u2019m very fond of Mark Rothko\u2019s paintings, and some of the best are on view in the National Gallery of Art\u2019s East Building, including No. 1 (1961). When I\u2019m face-to-face with these hovering blocks of color, I can\u2019t tell whether I\u2019m looking at something natural or unnatural, human or inhuman. Rothko\u2019s own words lend this ambiguity a sense of high drama. As part of the \u201cPaintings on Paper\u201d exhibition from about a year ago, the National Gallery displayed his haunting statement: \u201cYou think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should LOOK AGAIN. I\u2019m the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colors there hides the final cataclysm.\u201d<\/p>\n
A musical artist who means a lot to me: Bob Dylan. I think \u201cSad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands\u201d is the greatest song of all time.<\/p>\n
A favorite story I\u2019ve read in The Atlantic: I loved Jennifer Senior\u2019s recent story on insomnia. But everything Jennifer writes is completely captivating.<\/p>\n
The last thing that made me cry: I cried during I\u2019m Still Here, a film about the military dictatorship in Brazil and the disappearance of the dissident politician Rubens Paiva. What got me, in particular, was the moment when a photographer visited the Paiva family home and told them to look sad for the camera, but they insisted on smiling and laughing. I was overcome by this simple fortitude.<\/p>\n
The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I laughed out loud reading my friend Johannes Lichtman\u2019s novel Such Good Work, about a recovering addict whose quest for moral purpose takes him to Sweden amid the international refugee crisis. It\u2019s a sweet and very insightful bildungsroman that captures the absurdities of life in the first quarter of the 21st century.<\/p>\n
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Patience doesn\u2019t come easily to me, but I try to listen to the admonition that begins Galway Kinnell\u2019s \u201cWait\u201d:<\/p>\n
Wait, for now.<\/p>\n
Distrust everything if you have to.<\/p>\n
But trust the hours. Haven\u2019t they<\/p>\n
carried you everywhere, up to now?<\/p>\n
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Week Ahead<\/strong><\/p>\n Rehab: An American Scandal, a book by the Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter on true stories about the opioid crisis, and the dark side of the rehab industry (out Tuesday)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Americana, a new movie about a Lakota ghost shirt that sets off violence in a small South Dakota town (in theaters Friday<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Essay<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani<\/p>\n Captain Ron\u2019s Guide to Fearless Flying<\/p>\n By Elaine Godfrey<\/p>\n I\u2019d experienced 21 years of unmemorable flights before my own fear of flying took hold. In May 2015, I was traveling from my home state of Iowa to New York City for a summer internship. I was already nervous about moving, and then, somewhere above Illinois, the plane hit a patch of turbulence and dropped what felt like a thousand feet. Several people screamed. For the first time in my life, I began to experience what I would later understand to be panic: My face and neck went clammy, and black spots filled my vision. At one point, an overhead bin popped open and a few unbuckled passengers smacked their head on the ceiling. They were all okay, and, physically, so was I. But I had unlocked a new fear.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More in Culture<\/p>\n Catch Up on The Atlantic<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Photo Album<\/p>\n Curiosity used its mast camera to capture this mosaic of Gediz Vallis on November 7, 2022, its 3,646th Martian day. (NASA)<\/p>\n This week, NASA marked the 13th anniversary of its Curiosity rover landing on Mars. Curiosity has now traveled more than 22 miles over the course of 4,620 Martian days, making numerous discoveries across this planet.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/em><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters.<\/em><\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter<\/em><\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what\u2019s keeping them<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[8636,8326],"class_list":{"0":"post-15036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-meritocracy","9":"tag-skewers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n