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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 Honor Jones, a senior editor who has written about divorce, motherhood, and John le Carré. She has also published short stories in this magazine, including “Skin a Rabbit,” which was excerpted from her novel, Sleep.
Honor recommends punctuating a workday with art and croissants, reading anything by Lauren Groff, and assigning vibes-based ratings to pictures of horses.
— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Because this is Mother’s Day weekend I’m answering this one first. One of my kids discovered the Netflix movie Nimona, and I don’t think enough people know how great this movie is. It’s got a spunky heroine, two knights in love, and smart things to say about how authoritarians exploit fear. And for my 6-year-old: fight scenes with a rhinoceros.
An author I will read anything by: There are many, but one is Lauren Groff. While on a hike with two Atlantic colleagues this spring, I made them listen to me recount in detail the entire plot of “Between the Shadow and the Soul”—one of the stories in Groff’s new collection, Brawler. I feel bad because now they can never come to the story fresh, and because I went on for a really long time and they were trapped on a nature trail and couldn’t escape. So I’ll be briefer here: Groff commands the passage of time brilliantly, your understanding of the characters’ relationship changes right up until the very end, and the story is so sad. Groff has also written one of my favorite openings in all of recent literature, for her novel Matrix: “She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.” I mean.
The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The paperback of my novel, Sleep, is coming out next week. I just got a copy so I’m newly appreciative of the paperback as an object. It’s so small and bendy; it fits so nicely in the hand! I want to say you should get it for your mom for Mother’s Day, but maybe not: The mother-daughter relationship in the book is … complicated, and the story follows a woman trying to parent her kids differently from the way she was raised. Better just get it for yourself.
The really big cultural event I’m looking forward to is the talent show at my kids’ school. Readers may not know how rare it is for a first-grader to achieve the distinction of being selected for this night. My daughter—very talented—is the silent partner in a magic show, who lost her voice in a tragic accident but gained the ability to read minds. Watching her on stage, I’m definitely going to lose mine.
A piece of visual art that I cherish: Lately, when I have a free day, I like to go to the Met to work. I normally get really tired in museums. After an hour and a half my legs hurt, and I’m dying to drink some water. But I feel like an idiot going all the way uptown and leaving so quickly when there’s so much more I should be looking at. Going to the museum to edit or write is the perfect solution. You can walk through a few galleries on the way to the café; spend $28 on a croissant and coffee; work until you start to get dumb; look at art again; spend another $28; look some more; work some more; look some more; go home. I always like to stop by “Leda and the Swan,” a sculpture by Jacques Sarazin (Gallery 548, near the croissants). It makes me think of Yeats’s poem about the same myth: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / above the staggering girl.” The swan is Zeus, and the “white rush” of his assault is terrifying. But this statue makes me smile because the swan is tucked up under Leda’s arm. It looks really snuggly, and it’s even smaller, I think, than an ordinary swan would be. If anyone has been mastered here, it’s not Leda.
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Rooster, Steve Carell’s new campus-comedy show on HBO. It’s mostly gentle jokes in a cozy setting, and I’m good with that. Carell plays Greg Russo, the author of a popular detective series who never went to college but agrees to teach a course to be closer to his daughter, an academic who’s been screwed over by her very hot husband, a Russian-studies professor. With the exception of Russo, who says some useful things about writing, none of the professors seems to teach much, let alone do any research—they’re mostly concerned about whether students think they’re cool. And the show is way too interested in making jokes about cancel culture. But if you secretly want to be a heartbroken professor with a hapless but lovable dad, this series is for you.
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Old pictures in Google Photos. I’m bad at organizing my photos, and I never access the app on purpose. It’s just something that pops up in the top right corner of my screen, labeled “memories” or “together” or “pet friends”—some image from 10 years ago I don’t remember having seen before, but that I have to look at immediately and for a long time, and then screenshot and send to some best friends, feeling bittersweet about time passing and my children growing up and how shockingly bloated my face got when I was pregnant. Much more satisfying than Instagram!
A good recommendation I recently received: Chang-rae Lee has a new novel coming out this summer called A Tender Age. It’s about guilt and innocence and a boy turning 11, and I’m really eager to read it. That’s why, when Lee recommended The Names, by Don Delillo, in an interview, I picked that up in the meantime. I’m working on a novel right now, and I want to steal so much from this book, but above all Delillo’s belief in language and his suspicion of it—how it can mean everything and nothing. Also, the courage it takes to try to describe America, in fiction or journalism.
An online creator I’m a fan of: Serra Naiman has lots of funny videos on Instagram, but I like it best when she rates horses. That’s the whole bit: photos of grazing/rearing/prancing horses, with detailed descriptions of their personalities. She gives each one a rating “so you know where they stand.” The rating is always 10 out of 10. One horse “is angry at all of her children for individual reasons”; “this horse wants people to know that he does not have an addictive personality, so he will be starting a podcast series where he tries every single drug known to man—he will not make it through”; “this horse is running full speed directly into the sea. Ten out of 10.” I showed these videos to my friends and our kids over spring break, and for a while we came up with our own versions: “This horse knows her bikini is making her children uncomfortable but won’t give in and wear a one-piece instead. Ten out of 10.”
The Week Ahead
- Is God Is, a drama thriller that follows twin sisters hunting down their abusive father in their quest for revenge (in theaters Friday)
- The Punisher: One Last Kill, a Marvel special in which Frank Castle (played by Jon Bernthal) tries to leave his violent past behind, until one last fight pulls him back in (out Tuesday on Disney+)
- American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, a memoir by Isaac Fitzgerald about his yearlong journey retracing the footsteps of Johnny Appleseed (out Tuesday)
Essay
The Rise of Emotional Surveillance
By Ellen Cushing
The good news, for me at least, is that the computer thinks I have a nice personality. According to an app called MorphCast, I was, in a recent meeting with my boss, generally “amused,” “determined,” and “interested,” though—sue me—occasionally “impatient.” MorphCast, you see, purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI. It found that my affect was “positive” and “active,” as opposed to negative and/or passive. My attention was reasonably high. Also, the AI informed me that I wear glasses—revelatory!
The bad news is that software now purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI, and it is coming to watch you.
More in Culture
- Music’s next “disco sucks” moment is near.
- The attention-span panic
- The Savannah Bananas bring back a Negro Leagues team.
- The secret of Elizabeth Strout’s appeal
- How Everest has changed since Into Thin Air
- Yet another wasted Met Gala
Catch Up on The Atlantic
- Kash Patel’s personalized bourbon stash
- Democrats could use a cold shower before the midterms, Mark Leibovich argues.
- The venture-capital populist
Photo Album
Take a look at some photos of the efforts to rescue Timmy, a humpback whale off the coast of Germany, over recent months.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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