An Unconventional Spy Show

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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 Sarah Zhang, a staff writer who has covered the life-changing impact of a major cystic-fibrosis breakthrough, the true prevalence of incest, and why so many kids now need glasses.

Sarah is a converted fan of the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith remake, a show that toys with spy-movie tropes. She enjoys James Turrell’s art installations, which play with light and dark; was recently engrossed by the curse of goiter in Switzerland; and takes breaks by playing High Rise, which she considers the “platonic ideal of phone games.”

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

• Baltimore lost more than a bridge.
• Too few Americans are eating a remarkable fruit.
• The war at Stanford

The Culture Survey: Sarah Zhang

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: My first reaction to Amazon Prime’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith remake was a smug eye roll about how nothing is new. But then I learned that the remake was co-created by Donald Glover, whose Atlanta is refreshingly weird. So is his new “spy” show. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are not particularly good at espionage or seduction or any of that spy-movie stuff, and the show sets up a fascinating game of subverted expectations. The cameos are so fun, as are the guest stars that make you go, Wait, is that supposed to be a cameo? The actor in the opening scene is a dead ringer for a young Angelina Jolie, and after what happens next—I won’t spoil—I knew the show was in deft hands. [Related: How fake spies ruin real intelligence]

The last entertainment thing that made me snort with laughter: The dog scene in the second episode of Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: In James Turrell’s Hind Sight, you sit for 15 minutes in a dark room looking at nothing. Or is it nothing? Afterward, all is revealed in a stunning moment that renewed my appreciation for the miracle of sight. My husband, who says he actually saw nothing, was enraged.

The installation is part of the Turrell exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which also includes a Ganzfeld light room—the concept of which Drake borrowed for his “Hotline Bling” music video—and one of his famous Skyspaces. I hope one day to make it to the Roden Crater, the inactive volcano that Turrell bought almost 50 years ago to turn into his still-unfinished magnum opus.

Something I recently revisited: I recently started playing Balatro, a poker-like card-based video game. I was intrigued to learn, however, that its creator—a single anonymous dude in Canada—says he was inspired not by poker but by Big Two, a Chinese card game he played with his friends. I knew it! I too spent many childhood afternoons playing a variation of Big Two with my friends. And when we weren’t playing that, we were playing Spit, War, Gin Rummy, Egyptian Rat Screw, Zhao Pengyou, Hearts, or Spades, entertaining ourselves for hours with a pack of cards. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for a time when I had a lot of time, but I’m hoping to get a regular card game going in my life again. [Related: The secret to gaming in adulthood]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: High Rise is my platonic ideal of phone games: small, beautiful, and elegant, with few rules but infinite variations. You add buildings to a tiny city block. Small buildings merge into bigger buildings, but you will eventually run out of room—so to keep playing, you must destroy. (I hear Balatro is also coming to mobile soon …)

A piece of visual art that I cherish: Richard Serra, who died last week, made immense rust-colored sculptures that you can go inside and touch. I walked through one of his Torqued Ellipses for the first time a few years ago, and I walked through them again this past summer, after I’d just had a baby—meaning that my body had just grown and shrank and then sprouted a four-wheeled appendage, a.k.a. a stroller. The passages inside his Torqued Ellipses at the Dia Beacon museum are alternately wide and narrow; walking through them this most recent time, I felt overcome by how my relationship to time and space had so radically changed since I became a mother. The baby liked it too. Well, I think she liked being able to touch something in a museum.

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: Jonah Goodman’s story in the London Review of Books about the curse of the goiter in Switzerland blew my mind. I can’t say I’d previously thought much about goiters, which are big lumps that appear in the neck, so I had never considered that the medical condition could be connected to the slow freezing and thawing of ice sheets in Europe 24,000 years ago. Goodman’s article traces how doctors uncovered the connection and their efforts to end the “national evil” in Switzerland, which they did so successfully a century ago that the curse of the goiter is now long forgotten.

The Week Ahead

1. Ripley, a drama-thriller series based on the Talented Mr. Ripley novels, starring Andrew Scott as the titular grifter who is enmeshed in a web of deceit and murder (premieres Thursday on Netflix)
2. Monkey Man, an action film starring Dev Patel as a man bent on revenge against an Indian city’s elites (in theaters Friday)
3. Choice, a novel by Neel Mukherjee that follows the London-based publisher Ayush, who is driven by the question: “How ought one to live?” (out Tuesday)

Essay

Zyn Was 100 Years in the Making

By Jacob Stern

For something that isn’t candy, Zyn nicotine pouches sure look a lot like it. The packaging, a small metal can, looks more than a little like a tin of mints. The pouches come in a wide variety of flavors: citrus, cinnamon, “chill,” “smooth.” And they’re consumed orally, more like jawbreakers or Warheads than cigarettes.

America has found itself in the beginnings of a Zyn panic.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

• The violence of Cowboy Carter
• The real issue with Netflix’s 3 Body Problem
• Godzilla x Kong is one long tease.
• The everyday indignity of dining out
• A clear-eyed look at the early Obama years
• The Rick Rubin guide to creativity
• Photographing Black self-creation in the American South
• The impossible fight to live the life you want
• “Lunch at the Polo Club”
• The patron saint of political violence

Catch Up on The Atlantic

• Americans really don’t like Trump’s health-care plans.
• Sam Bankman-Fried’s dream came true.
• Phil Klay: “U.S. support for Israel’s war has become indefensible.”

Photo Album

Check out these images from The Notion of Family, a series by the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier.

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