The Provocation of The Pitt
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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 Josh Tyrangiel, a staff writer who has written about how America isn’t ready for what AI will do to the job market and Anthony Weiner’s comeback attempt in New York.
Josh has too many great cultural recommendations to count, but I’ll give it a go. Some highlights include: The Pitt, Bluey, a two-minute segment in No Country for Old Men, one book about bear maulings, two bands that “sound best when they’re furious,” and three upcoming movies to look out for.
— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The Pitt. Smart, skilled, hardworking people gracefully put up with all manner of tragedy, stupidity, and institutional rot. I’m not a huge fan of ‘Intubate now!’–type dialogue, but the producers are pulling off something really provocative—using brief scenes of competence and compassion to demonstrate that complex systems can actually be stewarded by serious adults. Oh, to live in that kind of world. [Related: The Pitt is a brilliant portrait of American failure.]
The upcoming events I’m most looking forward to: Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is going to be 14 hours long with eight confusing leaps through space and time, and end with Michael Caine in a kitchen in Coventry, but count me in. Steven Soderbergh’s art-forgery movie looks cool, as does Digger, the indecipherable Tom Cruise–Alejandro Iñárritu thing. I’m excited to read Jodi Kantor’s How to Start, Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling, Ben Lerner’s Transcription, and Siri Hustvedt’s memoir Ghost Stories. I’m also ready for anyone other than me and my editor to read AI for Good, the book I wrote, out May 12.
An actor I would watch in anything: Tommy Lee Jones. His two-minute voice-over at the start of No Country for Old Men is one of the best performances of the past 20 years.
A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on something: I write a lot about tech and AI, so I read a lot about tech and AI. And I’m very impressed by the way people such as Kevin Roose and my colleague Charlie Warzel can report on key technological developments and offer effective—and persuasive—storytelling about what they mean for humanity. They constantly have me reexamining the things I thought I was certain about.
A piece of entertainment that recently changed my perspective on journalism: Pablo Torre Finds Out is a podcast that takes investigative sports reporting very seriously—the show has broken more big stories than almost any other sports outlet in the past year. But the way the show reveals its findings—through shots of Pablo’s friends swinging by and unveiling leaked documents in manila folders, or Zapruder-level deconstructions of Bill Belichick videos—is self-mocking and deeply funny. The trick, and what makes the show special, is that the absurdity somehow heightens the very real, very consequential reporting at its core. [Related: Pablo Torre on billionaire sportswashers and YouTube unboxing videos]
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I’m embarrassed that I don’t have anything recent to share, but I’ve reached the age where a Coachella poster is like an eye chart: I’m lucky if I recognize anything below the second line. Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi” (released in his Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 album) is a quiet song that wanders along with no particular place to get to and no change in its dynamics until you get to the end and realize, Dammit, he did it again. For noise, it’s tough to beat “One More Hour,” by Sleater-Kinney, or “Seek & Destroy,” by Metallica, two bands that know how to play loud and clean, with singers who sound best when they’re furious.
Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I was a little nervous about Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, but he’s still got his fastball. Like all novels that try to be about everything—climate apocalypse, history, academic pettiness, buried treasure—it can get a little shaggy in places, but the sentences and the tension are always under control.
My cousin and I share a love of folksy books about bear encounters, and Alaska Bear Tales is the “best” of this extremely narrow and gross nonfiction genre. It’s just a collection of vignettes in which every story ends with either disfigurement (“With practice I know that I will eventually be able to make my prosthetic devices … do many of the things my hands did for me before”) or death. None of it’s fact-checked, and there are no morals or character development. It’s like a sick joke told over and over again that becomes funnier each time—the same punch line from different bears.
An author I will read anything by: Tessa Hadley, Rachel Kushner, Jennifer Egan, Patricia Lockwood, Ben Lerner, John Lanchester, Geoff Dyer. There are a lot of geniuses out there.
A recent favorite story in The Atlantic: Robert F. Worth’s “The Fall of the House of Assad.” The whole thing is riveting, but the No, no, no, that can’t be moment is when one of Worth’s sources reveals that, as the war in Gaza began and Iran and Russia suspected that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was leaking information to the Israeli government, Assad was oblivious to the peril of his situation. Because he was spending most of his time playing Candy Crush.
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Nonparents are probably exhausted by people freaking out over how great Bluey is, but the rave reviews still kind of undersell it. Kids can sense when things are made with care by people who care; even as my 8-year-old ages out of her prime Bluey years, she still locks in on each short episode with a rare kind of delight. It’s cliché, but I love the satisfaction she gets from feeling so seen. Also, the show is genuinely funny. [Related: The surprisingly mature lessons of Bluey]
The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Museum experiences are weird because they’re inextricable from the location of the museum, the crowd that day, your memory of the weather. But I was recently in Baltimore, my hometown, to take my dad to a doctor’s visit. On the way back to the train station, I scheduled a quick stop at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which swooped in to stage Amy Sherald: American Sublime in November, when the Smithsonian clutched its pearls at Sherald’s painting of a trans Statue of Liberty. It was a cold, clear day. The gallery hummed with the ideal number and mix of people—reverent Sherald fans, art students in statement glasses, and little kids rushing up to the massive canvases and screaming in delight. It was life-affirming in ways I wish all museum visits could be.
Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: Rewatched: Fleabag Season 2, Episode 6. I remembered it as a perfect 25 minutes of television, and maybe the most satisfying finale of any series; upon rewatching, I can confirm this is true. Reread: I hadn’t attempted Anna Karenina since high school, and it’s so entertaining and gorgeous that I wonder how Tolstoy’s contemporaries motivated themselves to get out of bed. Revisited: the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a very good ocean. Top four. [Related: Eight perfect episodes of TV]
An online creator that I’m a fan of: Jacques Pépin is 90, and every week, he posts a short cooking video from his home kitchen. It’s rarely fancy, but it’s lovely to see someone so good at two hard things—teaching and cooking—doing both with nonchalance. Pépin’s memoir is a sneaky pleasure, too.
The last debate I had about culture: It was about Heated Rivalry. My unpopular opinion and I were basically chased out of the room.
A good recommendation I recently received: Don’t tell people that Heated Rivalry is hockey without the hockey and porn without the porn.
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
- What 100 million volts do to the body and mind
- Friendship, on demand
- Will small businesses get their money back?
The Week Ahead
- Forbidden Fruits, a dark comedy about mall employees in a secret witch cult (out Friday in theaters)
- Who Needs Friends, a memoir by Andrew McCarthy about the friendship crisis faced by American men (out Tuesday)
- Season 5 of For All Mankind, a science-fiction drama series about space exploration (out Friday on Apple TV+)
Essay
The Basic Drive That Humans Might Be Losing
By Anna Louie Sussman
After a newspaper profile of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, otherwise known as Clavicular, went viral last month, many critics focused on how divorced his nihilistic quest for beauty—he’d call it “sexual market value”—was from any pursuit of women, relationships, or even sex. I was especially flummoxed by this sad man because I had just immersed myself in The Intimate Animal, a new book by the evolutionary biologist Justin R. Garcia on intimacy’s starring role in perpetuating our species. From an evolutionary perspective, the handsome, muscle-bound Clavicular is, by his own accounting, a dud: He suspects that the testosterone-replacement therapy he takes to appear more manly has decimated his fertility, and in any case, he considers sex a waste of time, telling the reporter that it “is going to gain me nothing.”
More in Culture
- The horseshoe theory of polyamory
- The forgotten female pilots of World War II
- What we lost when we lost rom-coms
- Girls’ sports are getting more physical.
- The Seinfeld theory of fiction
- What are the Oscars for, if not this?
Catch Up on The Atlantic
- Donald Trump is nothing like Robert Mueller.
- Why does Cory Booker think this time will be different?
- Anne Applebaum: Everyone but Trump understands what he’s done.
Photo Album
Explore recent images of our fine feathered friends at work and at play in the warming Northern Hemisphere.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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