Culture and entertainment musts from Christina McCausland
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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 Christina McCausland, a copy editor who works on this newsletter and has previously written about what successful memoirs accomplish.
Christina is an avid listener of Shakira (they both have roots in Barranquilla, Colombia), has endured the wince-worthy moments of The Curse, and spends her downtime swiping through Kinder—that’s Tinder, but for baby names.
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Culture Survey: Christina McCausland
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: One of the (many) ways that my husband and I have found ourselves unprepared for the baby we’re having in June is that we cannot decide on a name. We each downloaded this app called Kinder, where you swipe left or right on potential names. As in its namesake dating app, if we both swipe right, we get a “match.” It’s kind of addictive, and we have a long list of potential names now, but unfortunately, I think we gamified it too much: The list is about 1 percent names we like and 99 percent inside-joke names.
The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: One of my group chats keeps coming back to the question of whether finishing The Curse is “worth it”—“it,” in this case, being the show’s high density of cringe. My vote has been yes: Though I was only able to sit through one emotionally exhausting episode at a time, I think the show is smart and specific and funny at a time when a lot of TV shows are kind of meh. The group chat, however, remains unconvinced. [Related: What on earth is Nathan Fielder up to now?]
The upcoming arts event I’m most looking forward to: When you read this, I’ll be on a flight to Paris, where, in addition to visiting the obvious museums, I’m most excited to see the huge Mark Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I recently read A Minor Detail, a short novel by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, which was translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette. The first half is based on the true story of a Bedouin girl who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by Israeli soldiers in the Negev desert in 1949; the second is the fictional story of a Ramallah woman’s present-day journey to uncover more about those events. Shibli’s prose is spare and impassive, which makes the violence that the novel hinges on all the more haunting.
I also loved Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, her memoir about becoming a mother, which is so honest that she was pilloried as a bad mom when it came out, in 2001. The sentences do that Cuskian thing where they start out normal and then end somewhere devastating, but the book is also surprisingly hilarious. [Related: Rachel Cusk won’t stay still.]
An author I will read anything by: I have been obsessed with the playwright Annie Baker ever since I saw her play Infinite Life in the fall, and I was lucky to catch her first feature film, the Western Mass–core Janet Planet, at New York Film Festival shortly after. Everything she writes is perfectly understated.
The last debate I had about culture: When I saw May December in a theater a few months ago, my experience was partly ruined by what I’ll call “performative laughter”—just people pointedly guffawing throughout a film that, though occasionally funny, is in my opinion not a comedy (despite the viral hot-dog scene). I’ve been whining about this on Letterboxd and to any friend who will listen: I think it’s because these audiences are irony-poisoned, so they can’t sit with the emotionality of melodrama. [Related: The stunted emotional lives of May December]
It reminded me of when I saw a screening of Light Sleeper, a 1992 Paul Schrader film, at a theater in New York in 2022. Not a comedy, and yet—performative laughter throughout. The screening was followed by a Q&A with Schrader himself, who actually called out the audience and said something like, I noticed a lot of nervous laughter. What was that about? The only explanation someone could muster: “Because it’s fucking funny, dude!”
A musical artist who means a lot to me: Half of my family is from Barranquilla, Colombia, which is also Shakira’s hometown. (The city just erected a huge Shakira-shaped statue on a popular boardwalk.) I grew up listening to her music in the States, so I lost my mind when her crossover album, Laundry Service, was released, in 2001. It still, completely irrationally, feels personal when “Whenever, Wherever” comes on.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Big Thief’s “Not” is kind of both: The anthem of negation (nearly every line of the lyrics starts with “It’s not” or “Not” or “Nor”) opens with Adrianne Lenker singing at almost a whisper, and by the end of a three-minute buildup, she’s howling. Perfect song to put on to power walk through an annoyingly long subway transfer.
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Lines from the poem “Peanut Butter,” by Eileen Myles, get stuck in my head all the time. Lately I’m looping: “why shouldn’t / something / I have always / known be the / very best there / is.”
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