A Canceled Comedy Gem

Entertainment musts from Alan Taylor

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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 our photo editor, Alan Taylor, who has published more than 2,000 photo articles during his time at The Atlantic. Alan recently compiled images of humans and animals keeping cool during heat waves, and some photos of the wondrous lives of sharks.

Alan is hoping that another platform picks up the canceled Joe Pera Talks With You, crying at a gut-wrenching episode of The Last of Us, and checking out the vibe of new social-networking platforms such as Bluesky and Threads.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The Culture Survey: Alan Taylor

The best novel I’ve recently read: I was late to discover these, but I had the best time recently tearing through The Murderbot Diaries series, by Martha Wells. The adventures of Murderbot sucked me in, and each of the books was better than the one before.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet song: “Sun Will Set,” by Zoë Keating. This song is so wonderful—somehow both haunting and uplifting. It’s the smell of a warm campfire on a cool autumn night.

Loud song: “Conduit,” by Russian Circles. It’s pure drive, a powerful series of chugging guitar riffs, bass, and drums that I would just love to hear live.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Season 1 is over now, but I’ve really been enjoying Silo on Apple TV+. I read the books a couple of years ago and remember liking them a lot, but I’ve forgotten a lot of the details. The series really retains the overall feel, and the performances are great. Rebecca Ferguson, Common, and Tim Robbins really stand out.

Separately, I hope someone picks up Joe Pera Talks with You, which was canceled after three seasons—it’s uniquely wholesome, inviting, funny, and sometimes moving. [Related: The 25 best television episodes of 2018]

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I’m going to go with my simplest answers here. Favorite blockbuster: Star Wars. It was the original blockbuster. I watched the first film multiple times in the theater when I was 9 years old, and it transported me in a way I never knew was possible.

Favorite art movie: I don’t know if it qualifies as an “art film,” exactly, but my favorite film that is filled with quiet beauty and awe is Never Cry Wolf, from 1983. There are so many great moments, such as the main character, Tyler, playing his bassoon to call the wolves in, or the depth of solitude implied by the fading image of a small plane as it flies away, leaving Tyler standing alone in the middle of a frozen lake in the remote Canadian Arctic wilderness.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: A few years ago, when I thought that the days of hearing new heavy rock music were waning, I discovered the band Pelican and dove into its catalog, feeling the joy of rediscovering a genre. Songs such as “Deny the Absolute” have powered me through so many days in recent years.

The last piece of entertainment that made me cry: I’m a total softie these days, and I get teary-eyed at the drop of a hat. That said, the most recent show that had me struggling to keep from ugly-crying was The Last of Us, specifically the third episode, “Long, Long Time.” I love the video game as well and have played it through several times, but that really has no bearing on the power of that episode, and the incredible story and performances by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett. It gets me choked up even writing about it. [Related: The Last of Us makes the apocalypse feel new again.]

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Our kids started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender a few years ago. My wife and I joined them and were soon wrapped up in the whole series—amazing storytelling, great characters (Uncle Iroh is simply the best).

An online creator who I’m a fan of: “Itchy Boots,” also known as Noraly, rides her motorcycle around the world, traveling solo and skillfully making videos documenting almost everything, including mundane border crossings and soaring panoramic drone shots. She gives a ground-level view of life and landscapes in so many places, offers interesting background information, seeks out local stories and experiences, and has an overall good and cheerful attitude that helps her navigate sometimes-difficult circumstances.

A line of poetry or prose that I return to: The last paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I’ve turned it over in my head many times. The words and phrasing are so evocative; it’s a delight to read to myself, or to read aloud, and such a great exercise of concision, of summing up the impact of the entire novel that preceded it.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” [Related: On the death of Cormac McCarthy]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: There’s this game called Holedown, where you just aim balls to break blocks. It is the most mindless, drop-dead-simple game, and I have spent an embarrassingly large amount of time playing it. Another favorite lately: I’ve been jumping from Twitter to Bluesky to Threads, figuring out the vibe of the new places and finding myself fascinated by the differences between the communities and by how people present themselves on each platform.

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: I used to play the video game Dishonored a lot. I absolutely loved the overall visual aesthetic: the characters, the city streets, the artwork on the walls. There was a painting in a room in one of the levels that I thought was pretty great, and on a whim, I asked my wife, Chris (who was in the midst of an oil-painting phase), if she could replicate it. She did a fantastic job! It hangs in my office now, and I do indeed cherish it.

The Week Ahead

Essay

The Greatest Museum You’ve Never Heard Of

By Cullen Murphy

In the basement of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, in Milan, a conservator named Vito Milo had just applied a small gel strip to the edge of a 500-year-old drawing in order to dissolve the glue that joined it to a larger paper frame. Now, with a scalpel, he worked loose a few millimeters of the drawing. I asked Milo what was in the gel, and after he rattled off a list of ingredients in Italian, I offered a layman’s rough translation: “special sauce.” He smiled and nodded. “Si, special sauce.”

The drawing was a page from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, and I had been invited to witness the painstaking process of its conservation. One morning last winter, I descended to the conservators’ laboratory, which occupies a room just outside the steel-and-glass doorway to the Ambrosiana’s gleaming vault. At the bottom of the stairs, I was stopped by an attendant, who took a coffee cup from my hands and placed it out of harm’s way.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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