A Zany Nightlife Comedy
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Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.
Today’s special guest is Kelli María Korducki, a senior editor on The Atlantic’s newsletters team (and a frequent editor of this Sunday culture newsletter). Kelli has written about the Goopification of AI, America’s adult-ADHD problem, and what happened when tax season came for the crypto bros. Kelli is awaiting the release of a “very Salvadoran American” comedy from the director Julio Torres—her self-proclaimed “diasporic ambassador”—and rediscovering the pure joys of social media (but not TikTok).
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
- Why is everyone watching TV with the subtitles on?
- Moneyball broke baseball.
- The immortal Mel Brooks
The Culture Survey: Kelli María Korducki
The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I can’t wait to see Problemista, Julio Torres’s forthcoming (and very Salvadoran American) comedy from the premier cool-kid production studio A24, co-starring Tilda Swinton and Greta Lee. I can hardly believe I just used “Salvadoran American” and “forthcoming comedy” in the same sentence.
I share Torres’s Salvadoran heritage—my mom and her immediate family immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s and ’90s—and the only Salvadoran character I can remember from any semi-recent pop-culture product is Cher’s maid, Lucy, in Clueless (1995), whose brief appearance ends with her declaration “I’m not a Mexican!”; I remember first seeing that scene and thinking, Right on! In true minority-group-within-a-minority-group fashion, I’ve made peace with the reality that even if an average, non-Salvadoran American has heard of my familial homeland and can place it on a map, there’s still a nonzero chance that their associations with the country will be limited to gangs, civil war, Bitcoin, and pupusas. Which is darkly hilarious in and of itself, I suppose. Anyway, I’m so proud to claim Torres as my diasporic ambassador. I think he’s a genius.
The best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I’ve been using the word fun to describe Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, which might be a puzzling word choice to others who have read it. It’s a fictional biography, an alternate history, and a mishmash of decontextualized (or rather, recontextualized) cultural ephemera that piece together the story of a deceased artist’s secret life. Reading it, though, I cared less about the characters and their motivations than about how the story would come together; Lacey’s exhaustively footnoted meta-narrative appeals to my own journalistic urge to catalog and go down rabbit holes. It seems like it was a blast to write. [Related: This novelist is pushing all the buttons at the same time.]
As for nonfiction, I’m currently enjoying Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September; I just pilfered a review copy from The Atlantic’s New York office (I’ll return it, I swear). It ticks off a lot of my personal, maybe-pretentious boxes: an autobiography of creative life, intellectual mentorship, the coming-together of the right people at the right moment, 1970s New York. I love reading about bygone cultural scenes, kismet frozen in amber. I’m a sucker for nostalgia. [Related: The writer’s most sacred relationship]
Something I recently revisited: Not too long ago, I rewatched Ghost World, the 2001 film adapted from the Daniel Clowes graphic novel. I loved the movie in high school and strongly identified with Enid, its nonconformist teen protagonist—for a time, I even wore my hair in Enid’s bottle-black bob and had similar vintage cat’s-eye glasses frames fitted with my prescription. I remembered the movie for its humor and world-building. Twenty-odd years later, I noticed, for the first time, its poignancy. What younger me saw as an offbeat coming-of-age story was now a parable about misfits aching for connection in a world they can’t help but chafe against. The teenage rule-bucker within me still relates, but the 30-something understands the stakes. [Related: Ghost World endures for its cynicism—and pathos. (From 2017)]
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with social media (very unique, I know). I was a relatively early adopter of Twitter, a very early adopter of Facebook, and a somewhat late Instagram joiner. From the get-go, I’ve vacillated between anxious overuse and total neglect of these three platforms. But lately, I’ve found a groove—I’m remembering that Instagram isn’t just a place for stalking acquaintances and feeling terrible about my comparably boring life; it’s also a legitimately useful tool for sharing what I’m up to and keeping in touch with my geographically scattered friends and family in a reciprocal way. Being an older Millennial does have its perks; we still have a genuinely social web. The youths are missing out!
As for Twitter: The product bugginess that followed Elon Musk’s takeover of the company (and which continues, despite his recent passing of the CEO torch) has, in my opinion, rekindled some of the chaos that made early Twitter so fun. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Musk’s Twitter era has been great for society—you can read more about that bigger picture here—my feed has somehow become more pleasant, albeit in a slightly unhinged way. I see fewer posts that are clearly written for the purpose of maximizing engagement (so lame) and more stream-of-consciousness riffing. There’s more interaction for its own sake, versus pure performance. I’ve been enjoying the platform more lately than I had been for years.
And TikTok? No offense to theater-kid energy, but that’ll be a nope for me. I prefer to keep enjoying the occasional video in the sensible old-person way—through other people’s curation on the platforms I actually use.
The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Last month, I attended a brunch screening of the new 4K restoration of Party Girl, the 1995 cult comedy starring the ’90s’ “queen of the indies” Parker Posey as an aimless lower-Manhattan scenester who gets a job as a library clerk, drinks the proverbial Dewey Decimal Kool-Aid, falls for a Lebanese schoolteacher turned falafel-cart peddler, and decides to turn her life around and become a librarian. I love everything about this movie—the fashion is divine, and its glimpses of New York’s then-gentrifying downtown capture a moment lost in time. Apparently, the film is beloved, by those in the know, for its incredibly accurate portrayal of the library-science field. But ultimately, this is Parker Posey’s star vehicle. Her face has perfect comedic timing. I dare you to watch this scene (or this one) without letting out a snort or two.
Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Emma Sarappo, Adam Harris, Saahil Desai, Yasmin Tayag, Damon Beres, Julie Beck, and Faith Hill.
The Week Ahead
- Reproduction, a new novel by Louisa Hall, examines the surreality and hazard of childbirth through the perspective of a novelist-protagonist attempting to write a book about Mary Shelley (on sale Tuesday).
- The Flash, a DC superhero film that—despite the “mountain of disturbing allegations against its star”—manages to be “breezy and charming,” our critic writes (in theaters Friday)
- Swiping America, an eight-episode “romantic documentary” dating series that follows four New York City singles on blind dates across eight American cities (first two episodes begin streaming Thursday on Max)
Essay
Inside Frank Bascombe’s Head, Again
By Adam Begley
Half a century ago, at the 1974 Adelaide Festival of Arts, in South Australia, John Updike delivered a muscular manifesto: “We must write where we stand,” he said. “An imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.” His call for accurate and specific witness, for a realism dedicated to the here and now, was surely in part an apology for the repeat appearances of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the former high-school-basketball star Updike called his “ticket to the America all around me.” Already the hero of Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971), Harry was destined to star in two more alliterative Rabbit novels, Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), as well as the postmortem novella Rabbit Remembered (2000). Restless and hungry, open to experience and eager to learn, as fallible as the rest of us, and a staunch, often dismayed patriot, Harry is Updike’s everyman.
Culture Break
- How parking ruined everything
- The reality show that’s tackling the toxic workplace
- Movies are best before noon.
- The novelist who truly understood the South
- Six books that feel like puzzles
- “Hell welcomes all.”
- Poem: “A Room of One’s Own”
Catch Up on The Atlantic
Photo Album
Behold a hedge labyrinth in Denmark, a thousand-musician performance in Madrid, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.