A Baffling Movie Backed by Godfather Money
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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 Andrew Aoyama, a deputy managing editor who has written about a newly discovered letter from the playwright Arthur Miller, a photographer undoing the myth of Appalachia, and how C. J. Rice’s conviction was overturned after an Atlantic cover story explained his innocence.
Andrew is on a quest to catch up on some classic TV shows (Mad Men ranks as his favorite so far). His other cultural recommendations include reading Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country, which reshaped his opinion on American power, and catching a screening of Megalopolis for a baffling but hilarious time with your friends.
The Culture Survey: Andrew Aoyama
A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: I first read Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country not long after returning to the United States from a year studying Arabic in Rabat, Morocco. It was my first experience living abroad, a period of personal growth but also profound personal disorientation. I started the year with only the most rudimentary Arabic and had to grow accustomed to bumbling my way around; once, I walked into a barbershop with the intention of getting a relatively circumspect haircut and walked out with a buzz.
My real faux pas, though, were cultural, not linguistic. My time in Morocco overlapped with the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, the election of Donald Trump, and the first months of his administration. I struggled to explain to my Moroccan friends what was happening; I claimed that most Americans didn’t agree with Trump’s caustic comments about Muslims and immigrants. Most of them, though, didn’t find Trump particularly surprising. Once, over mint tea, I brought up my confusion to my host father. “Perhaps you’re beginning to see America the way the rest of us have for years,” he said. He made a circular motion with his glass, gesturing at the others around the table but also, it seemed, the world.
Notes on a Foreign Country gave me the vocabulary to talk about my bewilderment in Morocco. Hansen’s book, a series of reflections reported from Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, where she’s worked as a magazine journalist for more than a decade, interrogates why Americans are often oblivious to the experience of American power around the world. The people she encounters across the Middle East understand the United States better than she does in some ways. Hansen distills her experiences into a critique of journalism that has shaped how I think about writing and reporting: “We revered our supposedly unique American standards of objectivity, but we couldn’t account for the fact—were not modest enough to know—that an objective American mind is first and foremost still an American mind,” she writes. “We failed to interrogate not only our sources but ourselves.”
A book I’m most looking forward to reading: I absolutely cannot wait to dig into Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, a perfect birthday gift from my roommate. And I’ve been entering the ticket lottery every day for Ayad Akhtar’s latest play, McNeal, about a brilliant writer (played by Robert Downey Jr.) who becomes obsessed with artificial intelligence. [Related: Ayad Akhtar and Robert Downey Jr. confront AI.]
What my friends are talking about most right now: Last weekend, a group of friends and I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and it’s lived rent free in my mind and in our group chat ever since. One of the most baffling movies I’ve ever seen, Coppola’s decades-long, self-financed passion project tells the story of the genius architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) and his quest to build a utopia from the ruins of a decadent near-future New York.
Is Megalopolis “good”? That’s perhaps too facile a question to ask. Might it forever change how you pronounce the word club? Quite possibly. By the two-hour mark, the whole theater had descended into uproarious laughter and spontaneous cheers. I went home disappointed that only directors with Apocalypse Now credibility and Godfather money are well positioned these days to make similarly weird, risky movies; for all its quirks, I probably won’t see another film like Megalopolis for some time. [Related: The Megalopolis that Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make]
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: These past few years, I’ve been on a slow-burning quest to catch up on all the classic TV shows I missed by being in elementary school during the mid-aughts. It’s a self-administered great-books course for prestige TV, if you will, built on the assumption that if reading The Odyssey and Hamlet enriches your understanding of Ulysses, then having watched The Sopranos and Breaking Bad makes Succession even better. My standout favorite thus far has been Mad Men, and I’ve recently gotten hooked on Girls, Lena Dunham’s satire of a group of postcollege friends trying to make it in Brooklyn. Next stop: The Wire.
A musical artist who means a lot to me: I had the privilege of seeing the Lebanese indie-rock band Mashrou’ Leila in concert four times—in Rabat, in Brooklyn, and twice in Cambridge, Massachusetts—before they disbanded in 2022. Their sound is akin to a sort of dark-timbre Vampire Weekend, heavy on strings and brass, with lyrics that are famous for their frank and often controversial engagement with gender and sexuality, religion and racism, violence and political instability. Mashrou’ Leila’s work is a testament to Lebanon’s rich arts scene, and the group’s 2015 album, Ibn El Leil, is a no-skip masterpiece.
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I love to run, and at the urging of my friends, I recently started using the social-media-ified fitness-tracking app Strava. In addition to its various other features, Strava offers a “Global Heatmap” built from user activity, which shows where people tend to congregate for their workouts. Sometimes, though, to waste time, I’ll scroll to a random place on the map and try to derive some cultural or sociological insight from the snaking navy-blue lines left behind by past runners. Some have suggested that the Strava heatmap can reflect segregation and track gentrification; in 2018, a researcher discovered that the map apparently revealed the locations of U.S.-military bases in Syria and Afghanistan and, allegedly, a CIA “black site” in Djibouti. So what if the app is packaging our personal data—and maybe even our national-security secrets—and selling it back to us; sometimes it’s interesting to ponder the best running route in Vladivostok.
A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: In my sophomore year of high school, I gave a presentation in my English class on Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die. My PowerPoint slides have hopefully been lost to history, but my choice of Lana Del Rey as a subject worthy of critical engagement was validated, I think, by her 2019 album, Norman Fucking Rockwell. The rest of my playlists from high school will stay where they belong, on an iPod Nano that has long since lost the ability to hold a charge. [Related: Lana Del Rey says she never had a persona. Really?]
A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Choosing just one favorite seems impossible, so if I’m allowed, I’ll propose two contenders—a new story and an older one. First, my colleague Cullen Murphy’s reporting on Point Nemo, the most isolated place in the world, is an instant classic. And second, in our April issue, we published a recently rediscovered letter from Arthur Miller, which prompted me to look back in the archives to see if we’d published the playwright before. The letter, it turned out, wasn’t Miller’s only byline: In The Atlantic’s October 1978 issue, we ran a short story of his titled “The 1928 Buick.” It’s a fascinating glimpse into life in Midwood, Brooklyn, in the 1930s, not far from where a young Miller settled with his family after the Depression decimated his father’s clothing business and forced them to decamp from Harlem. His short fiction, I learned, is as sharp as his drama.
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
- November cover story: The moment of truth
- Melania really doesn’t care.
- Couples therapy, but for siblings
The Week Ahead
- Smile 2, a horror film about a pop star who is cursed and begins experiencing terrifying events before her world tour (in theaters Friday)
- Rivals, a miniseries starring David Tennant about a long-standing rivalry between two men that spurs a series of antics and relationships (streaming Friday on Hulu and Disney+)
- Beyond the Big Lie, a book by Bill Adair about how politicians—and Republicans in particular—lie, and why they choose to do so (out Tuesday)
Essay
The Woman Who Would Be Steinbeck
By Mark Athitakis
It is likely, but by no means certain, that in May 1938, the writers John Steinbeck and Sanora Babb met in a café near Arvin, California. Both were in town to chronicle the plight of migrants who were flooding the state to escape the decimation of the Dust Bowl … And both were connected to Tom Collins, a staffer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency providing aid to the migrants. To Steinbeck, Collins was a friend and a passkey to the migrant experience. To Babb, he was a mentor and supervisor; she had volunteered to document living conditions in the camps.
What happened next is in some ways clear as day, in others frustratingly fuzzy.
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Catch Up on The Atlantic
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- How Jack Smith outsmarted the Supreme Court
- What going on Call Her Daddy did for Kamala Harris
Photo Album
Take a look at these photos from Tarragona, Spain, where more than 40 teams of “castellers” recently gathered to form the highest and most complex human towers possible.
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