A Gritty and Genuinely Readable Book
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 Luis Parrales, an assistant editor who has written about what the border-hawk Catholics get wrong and why the papacy is no ordinary succession.
Luis is a new fan of the author Mario Vargas Llosa and a longtime listener of the singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler. His other recommendations include 'Femininomenon,' by Chappell Roan; The Bear; and anything by Conan O'Brien—whom he deems 'the king of American comedy.'
The Culture Survey: Luis Parrales
Best novel I've recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa before his death, in April, besides some high-level lore—his role in the Latin American Boom, his failed presidential bid, the time he socked Gabriel García Márquez in the face. Soon after, I decided enough was enough and picked up his historical novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000. Through the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic until his assassination at the hands of revolutionaries, in 1961, Vargas Llosa explores how the wounds inflicted by a dictatorship remain long after it officially ends. But as gritty and dark as the novel gets—and it gets dark — The Feast of the Goat is one of the most readable books I've ever encountered. That's both because Vargas Llosa's crisp prose makes the 400 or so pages fly by and, more important, because his novel never loses sight of the power of human resilience.
I was a bit more familiar with the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who also passed away earlier this year. Although best known for his 1981 book, After Virtue (if you haven't already, read David Brooks's reflections on how its arguments help explain President Donald Trump's appeal), MacIntyre also wrote Dependent Rational Animals. The book offers one of the most persuasive cases I've read against treating individual autonomy as the highest ideal, as well as a plea to view our limitations—aging, illness—and dependence on one another not as failings but as constitutive elements of human nature. Oh, and MacIntyre dedicates long stretches of his book to the intelligence of dolphins. Which is great.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: 'If I Don't Hear From You Tonight,' by Courtney Barnett. Loud: 'Femininomenon,' by Chappell Roan.
Something I recently rewatched: Before earning box-office cachet with the Dune series, Denis Villeneuve directed Incendies, a modern Sophoclean tragedy set during a civil war in the Middle East. Nearly 15 years after its release, the film remains one of the most sobering portrayals of familial ties on-screen—of how they can at once inflict unspeakable pain and inspire courage and selflessness.
The television show I'm most enjoying right now: The latest season of FX's exquisite The Bear.
The last thing that made me snort with laughter: For my money, Conan O'Brien is the king of American comedy, though part of his greatness is that he's always reveled in playing the fool. He doesn't have the commanding swagger of a Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr, opting instead for a style that my colleague David Sims has described as a 'mix of silly surrealism with an old-timey flair.' I've been keeping up with O'Brien since his Late Night days, when I would get home from school and play the previous night's episode, so watching him get the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor earlier this year felt plenty nostalgic. The full ceremony is on Netflix now, and it's a comedic cornucopia for any Team Coco stans.
The last thing that made me cry: A few weeks before Independence Day, while visiting New York City, I ended up going to mass at Ascension Church, which has a jazz liturgy on Sunday evenings. Most of my favorite church music leans traditional, yet to my surprise, I felt incredibly moved by the unconventional reverence of melodies with echoes of Art Blakey and Miles Davis. One highlight: the jazz mass's version of the hymn 'This Is My Song.' These lines in particular felt providentially relevant for anybody searching for a more warmhearted patriotism:
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Museo Nacional de Historia, in Mexico City.
A musical artist who means a lot to me: The Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler isn't super well known in America—though he did write the first Spanish-language song to win an Oscar for Best Original Song—but he's pretty acclaimed in Latin America and Spain, especially for his lyricism. He can use scientific principles (the law of conservation or the evolution of cells, for example) as metaphors for love, or meditate on weighty political questions (migration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) without coming off as preachy. No musician means more to me than Drexler, whose art teems with the wonder of a wide-eyed humanist.
Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Week Ahead
The Naked Gun, an action-comedy film starring Liam Neeson as a hapless yet determined detective (in theaters Friday)
Season 2 of Twisted Metal, a postapocalyptic action-comedy series with murderous clowns and a deadly demolition tournament (premiering Thursday on Peacock)
Black Genius, an essay collection by Tre Johnson that identifies overlooked examples of genius in the Black community (out Tuesday)
Essay
The Mistake Parents Make With Chores
Each September at the Montessori school I run, the preschoolers engage in an elaborate after-lunch cleanup routine. They bustle through the room with sweepers and tiny dustpans, spreading crumbs all over the floor and making a bigger mess than they started with …
Contrast this with my own house—where, in a half-hearted effort to encourage my children to take responsibility for our home, I've been known to say, 'You live here!' as they ignore the pile of dishes in the sink. After years in Montessori classrooms, I assumed that a culture of taking responsibility would develop spontaneously in my family. And it might have, had I not made some early mistakes.
More in Culture
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Finally, a Democrat who could shine on Joe Rogan's show
Trump's Epstein denials are ever so slightly unconvincing, Jonathan Chait writes.
ChatGPT gave instructions for murder, self-mutilation, and devil worship.
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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Tom Lehrer, wickedly funny musical satirist whose subversive ditties caused outrage and delight
Tom Lehrer, who has died aged 97, wrote and performed such subversive ditties as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and The Masochism Tango, and was a sensation during the satire boom of the 1950s. A lanky figure with cropped hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a sardonic smile, Lehrer had a clear eye for phoniness and folly and a genius for subversive juxtapositions of words and ideas: 'I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,' he wrote in The Masochism Tango, 'But much more for the touch of your whips, dear./ You can raise welts/ Like nobody else/ As we dance to the Masochism Tango.' In other numbers, a trite Irish ballad celebrates a succession of murderous misdoings; a romantic love song is subverted into the lament of a lover who has murdered his girlfriend and cut off her hand as a keepsake: 'The night you died I cut it off/ I really don't know why./ For now each time I kiss it/ I get bloodstains on my tie.' 'You know,' Lehrer concluded after the end of this last piece, 'of all the songs I have ever sung, that is the one I've had the most requests not to'. 'Mr Lehrer's muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste,' observed The New York Times. Lehrer became a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic for his astute parodies of composers ranging from Mozart to Gilbert and Sullivan and from Cole Porter to traditional melodies popular in what Lehrer called 'the folk song scare' of the 1950s. These became the vehicles for send-ups of boy scouts, religion, love, plagiarism and the old college tie, and dealt with such unmentionables as venereal disease, incest, pornography and drug addiction. Not everyone saw the joke. The Herald Tribune critic panned Lehrer's songs as 'more desperate than amusing' and the London Evening Standard dismissed him loftily as 'obvious, jejune, and remarkably unsophisticated'. His songs were banned by school boards in America after protests by Roman Catholic groups about The Vatican Rag ('Two four six eight./ Time to transubstantiate.'). I Wanna Go Back To Dixie was billed simply as 'a typical Dixie song, all about the many delightful features of the South', but the lyrics ('I wanna talk with Southern genn'lmen/ Put my white sheet on again/ I ain't seen a good lynching in years') so enraged students at Carolina University that they burned Lehrer in effigy. On the other hand, Fight Fiercely Harvard, a parody of the glee club songs of the time, was adopted in all seriousness by the Harvard football team and remains its theme song to this day. In all, the Lehrer canon amounted to only about 50 recorded songs and three albums. In the late 1960s, after sell-out tours of the USA and Britain he retired from performing. It was widely rumoured that the muse had deserted him when the horrors of the Vietnam War made it difficult to be funny about serious things – or as Lehrer was quoted as saying (though he later denied it): 'Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.' But he later admitted that he had been planning to retire from the outset of his career, and that the only thing that had persuaded him to defer his departure was 'the chance to visit underdeveloped countries like England'. 'I don't have to do this for a living,' he told his audiences. 'I could be earning £800 a year teaching.' Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in New York on April 9 1928 and grew up in the cramped but intellectually stimulating world of the city's Jewish immigrant community. His father manufactured ties, but it was from his mother that he inherited his musicality and sense of humour. He would recall how, after being pestered by a dance teacher for dropping out of her class, his mother had explained with perfect deadpan that she had just had both legs amputated so she hoped the teacher would forgive her. Visits with his mother to musical theatre ignited a passion that led him as a child to insist on changing his piano teacher from a classical pianist to one who was willing to indulge his desire to play show tunes. He began writing tunes himself when he was seven or eight and was sent on summer camp with a boy called Stephen Sondheim, who became his musical hero. At the same time, Lehrer was showing a precocious talent for mathematics, and at the age of just 15, he went up to read the subject at Harvard. His mathematical and scientific background would occasionally enter his lyrics, as in The Elements and Lobachevsky, a rollicking ditty about scientific plagiarism, based on Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, a Russian mathematician who developed a form of non-Euclidean geometry. In a typical Lehrer in-joke, the plagiarism was not Lobachevsky's but Lehrer's own plagiarism of a Danny Kaye song. Lehrer's first serious efforts at song-writing began in his days as an undergraduate, when he started performing at parties and at Harvard functions. His reputation spread outside the university to the town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he began singing in night clubs and cabarets. After a few years, however, he began to tire of performing the same songs over and over again. Polling his concert audiences, he calculated that he could find 300 customers for a Tom Lehrer record. But the record companies were not interested, so in 1953 he recorded his first album, The Songs of Tom Lehrer, himself. As his songs were banned by American radio stations as too crude, he had to rely on the record to spread his music. After several months of local sales, he began receiving orders from around the country as Harvard students took the album home to share with their friends. After leaving Harvard, Lehrer spent a year singing songs in cabaret and trying to avoid call-up into the armed services, 'but it got too tiring so I let them take me in'. He was given a desk job in Washington and had two 'wonderful years' working with Harvard men and civilian PhDs. When he later wrote the satirical It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier, he admitted it did not represent his attitude to the army at all since he had loved every moment. He left the army just as the concept of a touring popular music concert was emerging. Finding that he was still in demand, Lehrer gave his first concert that year at Hunter College, and spent the next three years touring most of the English-speaking world. In the British satire explosion of the late 1950s, he was adopted as a sort of mascot Yank and even dined with Princess Margaret: 'She thought I was Danny Kaye, whom she fancied,' Lehrer recalled. 'Instead I was me and was dull.' Even at the height of his celebrity, however, Lehrer knew that live entertainment was not his cup of tea. 'I wouldn't want to do this all my life,' he said in 1957. 'It's okay while I'm still an adolescent.' (He was nearly 30 at the time.) His second album, An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer, was recorded in 1959, as a farewell, during a concert at Harvard. 'I figured that if the record was out, who would want to come hear me?' he said. He returned to Harvard, where he had already embarked on a doctorate, but soon decided he would rather teach than research: 'I kept saying to myself that if I ever get this dissertation written, I will never have to do any research again. Then I realised that I must be telling myself something, so I decided enough is enough.' He held teaching appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Wellesley, and also worked for several defence contractors (including the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos). Although he was no longer performing, Lehrer's songwriting career was not yet over. In 1964, NBC began broadcasting an American version of the British satirical show That Was The Week That Was. Lehrer started to send in songs for the show and found they usually used them. In contrast to his earlier black comic parodies, his songs for TW3, including numbers like Pollution and Wernher Von Braun ('Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/ 'That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun'), hit a more acid political note. By 1965, Lehrer had enough new material to fill another record and, to assure himself that audiences would actually enjoy the material, he did a four week stint at the hungry i, a San Francisco club, recording That Was The Year That Was during his last week there. It was his last LP of satirical songs, though he recorded a few educational numbers for the children's television shows Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Generally, though, when people asked him to write a new song about current issues, he likened it to 'asking a resident of Pompeii for some humorous comments about lava'. He even admitted encouraging rumours of his death in the vain hope of cutting down on unwanted requests. Lehrer banked his royalties and moved on, spending half the year at Harvard and the other half at the University of California at Santa Cruz teaching mathematics. 'I teach the application of mathematics to social science,' he explained. 'Actually there aren't any, but I manage to make it stretch out'. Lehrer, it seemed, would have been content to live out the rest of his life in the classroom, but in 1978, the British theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh approached him about creating a musical revue of his songs. As Mackintosh had just produced a well regarded revue of his hero, Stephen Sondheim, Lehrer agreed, and two years later Tomfoolery opened at the Criterion Theatre in London. The success of the show brought Lehrer back into the spotlight just long enough for him to explain why he had stopped performing and writing songs. 'What are laurels for if you can't rest on them?' he asked. Lehrer's songs retained an enthusiastic following in the 21st century – his nuclear holocaust ditty We Will All Go Together When We Go seemed more relevant than ever – and when representatives of the rapper 2 Chainz sought permission to sample his song The Old Dope Peddler in 2012, he replied: 'As sole copyright owner of The Old Dope Peddler, I grant you mother------s permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?' In 2022, uniquely for a recording artist, he announced on his website that he was relinquishing all copyright claims on his work, putting all his songs into the public domain. Tom Lehrer never married and always brushed away questions about his private life, describing himself as 'fundamentally a loner', but with a few good friends. Tom Lehrer, born April 9 1928, died July 26 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
Trump and EU reach trade deal ahead of looming deadline
The trade deal echoes the arrangement Trump reached with Japan. President Donald Trump announced July 27 the United States had reached a trade deal with the European Union, days ahead of a self-imposed Aug. 1 deadline. Trump met with the European Commission's president, Ursula von der Leyen, during his trip to Scotland over the weekend, where the pair discussed terms and came to an agreement. The deal includes a 15% tariff on most European exports to the United States, similar to agreements struck recently between Trump and other major trading partners, including Japan. The levy is higher than the 10% rate sought by Europeans but a reduction from the 30% Trump threatened to impose earlier in July. The agreement also includes $600 billion in EU investments in the U.S., and the purchase of $750 billion worth of U.S. energy. "I think we both wanted to make a deal,' Trump said. "I think it's going to be great for both.' The 15% tariff will be applied 'across the board,' for items including cars, but steel and aluminum will remain at 50%. "We have a trade deal between the two largest economies in the world, and it's a big deal,' von der Leyen said. 'It's a huge deal. It will bring stability. It will bring predictability.' The president has repeatedly criticized the European Union, saying it was "formed to screw the United States" on trade. The U.S. trade deficit with the EU reached $235 billion in 2024, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Heading into the weekend meeting, he called the relationship between the EU and the United States "very unfair" and said he thought officials had a "50/50 chance" of striking a deal. After an agreement was announced, von der Leyen said the deal would "rebalance" relations, despite European leaders long claiming there was not an unfair trade balance. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the agreement averted a trade conflict that threatened a 27.5% tariff on cars. "This agreement has succeeded in averting a trade conflict that would have hit the export-orientated German economy hard,' Merz said. Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called it a 'positive' trade deal. Ireland's Trade Minister Simon Harris said the tariff provides certainty in trade that 'is essential for jobs, growth and investment.' "A deal provides a measure of much needed certainty for Irish, European and American businesses who together represent the most integrated trading relationship in the world,' Harris said. Trump is seeking to reorder the global economy and reduce decades-old U.S. trade deficits. He has so far reeled in agreements with Britain, Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam, although his administration has failed to deliver on a promise of "90 deals in 90 days." The EU deal echoes the deal reached with Japan. Despite the recent deals, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the administration will continue to pursue aggressive tariffs around the world, including potential duties on critical semiconductors in the near future. Contributing: USA TODAY, Reuters
New York Post
2 hours ago
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Progs have abandoned progressivism, Columbia's ‘message of hope' and other commentary
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