What Rereading a Book Can Reveal
Culture and entertainment musts from Rose Horowitch
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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 Rose Horowitch, an assistant editor who has written about the enrollment nightmare colleges are facing, the myth of the Gen Z gender divide, and why too many people own dogs.
Rose recently reread Anna Karenina and had “more of the intended takeaway” than she did the first time. She loves winding down with a good animal-rescue video, and she still can’t quite believe she got to see Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey.
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Culture Survey: Rose Horowitch
The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The Morgan Library’s exhibit of Beatrix Potter’s drawings and letters. I’ve complained to friends about feeling disconnected from nature since moving to New York, and I hope that early drafts of The Tale of Peter Rabbit will cure me. (I’d also take any opportunity to visit the Morgan Library and marvel at the rows of well-worn books and the majesty of the ceilings.)
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Does anyone else watch cooking shows for pure entertainment? I usually get bored before I can finish a TV show in full (Gen Z attention spans and all that), so I like to throw something on that I don’t need to watch consecutively. Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home, with Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, is my favorite of the genre. It’s a cooking show, yes, but it’s so much more. It was filmed near the end of Child’s life, and Pépin somehow managed to always lift the heavy copper pots yet let Julia take the lead with recipes. Their friendship is endlessly comforting.
Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I’m midway through The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride. I highly recommend it based on what I’ve read so far. For best nonfiction, I’m going to choose two, but I promise they’re connected: The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, two of Joan Didion’s later books. At age 23, I’ve never been married and never had a child, let alone lost one. But these books articulate a kind of disorientation that I don’t know how to put into words—one that I’m convinced every human being experiences. [Related: Lost histories of coexistence]
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: “Hunter,” by Jess Williamson. I learned about this song from a Jack Antonoff interview. I blindly trust his taste in music, and I’m glad I do. Medium-quiet: “Instant Crush,” by Daft Punk. You have to listen to this song nine times in a row to love it, but afterward, it will be firmly installed among your favorites. Loud-ish: “Ship of Fools,” by World Party. A great song to have in your headphones as you walk outside. I challenge anyone to not scream-sing the chorus.
A musical artist who means a lot to me: Bruce Springsteen. My mom is an avid Springsteen fan, so this pick is partly about his musical prowess, partly about my own nostalgia. “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” seemed to always be humming in our car stereo when I was growing up. This past summer, I saw him in concert. I mostly remember my sister’s frenzied dancing and the oppressive heat in the nosebleed seats of MetLife Stadium. But I saw Bruce Springsteen! In New Jersey!
A piece of visual art that I cherish: Gustav Klimt’s Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (though what a clunky title). Greenery crawls up the side of the small house, and the open windows reveal colorful bouquets. One of the great joys of living in New York City is how its museums transport you to another place and time. The Klimt exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York brought me to the Austrian countryside (did I mention I miss nature?). It’s best paired with a slice of cake from the café downstairs.
A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love: I had a borderline obsession with the Strokes. I listened to all of their albums, then their unreleased songs. Then I watched their performances on late-night shows and on grainy film from small sets in New York, and then I watched their concert documentary (which I could find only on YouTube). We’ve all aged some since then, but they’re still releasing albums, and I’m still listening.
Something I recently revisited: A former teacher once told me that we reread books not to uncover something new in them but to see how we’ve changed. I recently reread Anna Karenina, firmly my favorite book. The first time I read it, I idolized Anna (embarrassing confession: I dressed like her at my high-school prom). The second time, I think I had more of the intended takeaway. [Related: When people—and characters—surprise you]
A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: Earlier this year, I picked up Strangers to Ourselves, the journalist Rachel Aviv’s book. It’s about mental illness, but it’s more about the stories we tell ourselves and how they exert control over our psyche. She focuses each chapter on an individual, and bookends the work with her own story and that of a young woman she met in treatment. Aviv is a marvel of a writer, and her careful focus on people reveals more than an abstract, analytical story ever could. [Related: The diagnosis trap]
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: This will surprise no one who knows me, but I spend much of my time watching animal-rescue videos. It’s a varied genre, one that includes efforts to hoist elephants out of mud piles and unsnare sea turtles from fishing nets. I particularly enjoy watching dogs recover from illness and find a forever home. My favorite rescuer personality is Niall Harbison, who helps sick and injured strays in Thailand. His videos are the greatest thing X’s “For You” tab has ever shown me.
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Rabbit Hill, a novel by Robert Lawson, has the Pixar quirk of being marketed toward children but clearly meant for adults. It’s about woodland creatures but also about family and generosity—an irresistible combination.
A good recommendation I recently received: My boyfriend put me onto Your Queen Is a Reptile, an experimental jazz album by Sons of Kemet. It’s so different from what I usually listen to; it’s frenetic, and each note is unexpected. It’s wholly mesmerizing.
The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Last year, I went to the Refik Anadol exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. I’m not usually a big fan of modern art (this probably says more about me than about modern art), but Anadol’s work was beautiful and overwhelming. He trained a machine-learning model on the museum’s digitized collection and then displayed the result on a wall of LEDs. The machine generated crests of color that I can best describe as some undulating fourth state of matter.
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Spring and Fall,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, will never fail to make me cry. The Goldengrove description. The meditation on aging. The last two lines! This poem entered my life just as I needed it. I like to think it ushered me into adulthood, and I keep it open in a tab on my computer for emergency reads.
The Week Ahead
- The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, an action film directed by Guy Ritchie about a team of highly skilled World War II soldiers who use unconventional methods to fight the Nazis (in theaters Friday)
- The Sympathizer, a thrilling and satirical miniseries about a double agent for the Viet Cong who flees to the United States and moves into a refugee community (premieres today on Max)
- New Cold Wars, a book written by David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks, about America’s unstable modern-day rivalry with China and Russia (out Tuesday)
Essay
The 67-Hour Rule
By Derek Thompson
One of the hard-and-fast laws of economics is that people in rich countries work less than their peers in poorer countries. The rule holds across nations …
But something strange happens when we shift our attention from individual workers to households. In the 1880s, when men worked long days and women were mostly cut off from the workforce, the typical American married couple averaged just over 68 hours of weekly paid labor. In 1965, as men’s workdays contracted and women poured into the workforce, the typical American married couple averaged 67 hours of weekly paid labor—just one hour less. In the early 2000s, the typical American married couple averaged, you guessed it, almost exactly 67 hours of weekly paid labor. In 2020? Still 67 hours.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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