The Show That Makes Being Awkward Feel Good
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 Serena Dai, a senior editor who has written about the easiest way to keep your friends, the art of the restaurateur, and the endless hunt to make meaning of marriage.
Serena was surprised by how much she enjoyed The Rehearsal, the comedian Nathan Fielder's latest pseudo-reality series. She's also an avid romance-novel reader, a newly minted Jonas Brothers fan, and a longtime admirer of Kathryn Hahn's work.
The Culture Survey: Serena Dai
The television show I'm most enjoying right now: I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I could not bear to watch Nathan for You, a beloved show where the comedian Nathan Fielder suggests outlandish plans to help small businesses. Every person I trusted assured me that Fielder was a genius, and I got the sense that I must lack some sort of sophistication for not enjoying it. The entrepreneurs he was trying to 'help' with suggestions such as poop-flavored frozen yogurt were real people; I felt too badly for them to find the show entertaining. So I was surprised to discover that I loved his new series, The Rehearsal —and now, a few episodes into the second season, I finally understand the 'genius' moniker that my buddies have bequeathed him.
Similar to Nathan for You, the show pairs Fielder's monotonous tone with outrageous conceits, but this time, the premise is staging 'rehearsals' to help people prepare for difficult moments. Though he's still cringey (and still allegedly misleading real people), he also poses questions about how comedy can effect real-life change, and reveals some insights about his own role in the entertainment industry's worst impulses. His critiques feel organic instead of forced, something that is not easy. By the second episode of the new season, I found myself not only in awe of the lengths he would go for a bit but also laughing out loud at the results. [ Related: Nathan Fielder is his own worst enemy. ]
The upcoming entertainment event I'm most looking forward to: The return of Lena Dunham's work to our TV screens, with her upcoming Netflix show, Too Much. I recently rewatched the first season of Girls, and seeing it in my 30s (long after the heated discourse about Millennials and nepo babies that surrounded the show's debut), I had a deeper appreciation for Dunham's talent for writing sharply drawn characters—ones who, even when they're infuriating, you can't help but love. When she hits, she hits! The new show, which debuts on July 10, stars one of my favorite internet personalities, the comedian Megan Stalter. She has an intensity in her facial expressions that makes me laugh before she even says a word, and I am eager to see how Dunham works with her talents. [ Related: Eight perfect episodes of TV ]
An actor I would watch in anything: Kathryn Hahn. She's funny and moving in so much that she does, but I really fell for her in I Love Dick, an adaptation of the Chris Kraus novel where she excels at playing a woman who wants and wants and wants.
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: This year, I finally did something that I've been thinking about for years: I started pulling up the Kindle app to read a book when I had the instinct to refresh my Instagram feed. I read an essay a long time ago recommending it as a way both to read more books and to make phone time feel less terrible, but I hadn't done it. For years, I still felt that any extended time I spent on my phone meant something bad about me, and frankly, I was also just easily distracted. But I decided I didn't need to read Proust, only stay off social media; as a result, I have probably tripled my intake of romance novels, which are breezy yet still require an attention span longer than 30 seconds. I recently dipped my toe into historical romance and have been loving the Ravenels series, by Lisa Kleypas, which you may also enjoy if you're a fan of Bridgerton. I do still spend plenty of time on Instagram trying to remind myself to not pay too much attention to parenting or fitness influencers, but I promise it's less. Much, much less.
An author I will read anything by: Jasmine Guillory. I love romance, I love love, and I love her characters.
An online creator whom I'm a fan of: I've been finding small ways to incorporate more Mandarin into my life because I'm trying to speak it more to my toddler, and a friend recommended following her Chinese teacher, Neruda Ling, on Instagram. He blends internet humor with Mandarin lessons, which is exactly what I need after a lifetime of associating the language with textbooks and long Sunday mornings in suburban community-college classrooms. Crucially, he also explains curse words and gay slang, something my immigrant mother would never have done in depth.
To be honest, I'm not sure if I remember any of the phrases he's taught, and even if I did, I doubt that I would have the guts to deploy them in casual conversation. Mostly, these videos remind me that the language doesn't have to feel inherently stiff like it did when I was growing up, and that Mandarin can, in fact, be a source of joy.
A good recommendation I recently received: I can't believe I'm saying this, but have you heard the latest Jonas Brothers single? It's called ' Love Me to Heaven,' and my husband stopped everything in our apartment one busy Saturday to make me listen to it. If you, like me, had kind of written them off as Disney Channel heartthrobs or tabloid fodder or reality-show jokesters, you too might be delighted to hear this pop-rock bop. I want to drive a convertible to the beach with the roof down and blast this song the whole way there.
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Week Ahead
Karate Kid: Legends, an action movie starring Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio (in theaters Friday)
Season 3 of And Just Like That, a sequel to Sex and the City (premieres Thursday on Max)
Never Flinch, a crime novel by Stephen King about a killer and a dangerous stalker (out Tuesday)
Essay
The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk's Deadly Attack
In November of 2021, Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school when he first noticed a hawk using a pedestrian crosswalk.
The bird—a young Cooper's hawk, to be exact—wasn't using the crosswalk, in the sense of treading on the painted white stripes to reach the other side of the road in West Orange, New Jersey. But it was using the crosswalk—more specifically, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk—to ambush prey.
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New York Times
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More Money Was Supposed to Help Poor Kids. So Why Didn't It?
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Yahoo
2 days ago
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Grief Counseling With Kermit
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Jim Henson's Creature Shop has sat, for the past 16 years, on the fourth floor of an office building in Long Island City, New York, behind a metal door that looks like any other. When I opened it one gray morning after the holidays, I was greeted by a plastic Christmas tree hung with fake fish skeletons and desiccated banana peels, Oscar leering nearby from his can, and a brown, fuzzy blob sitting on a table. At first I thought it might be a complete Muppet, until I saw, a few yards beyond, a matching brown, fuzzy, headless body. As the archivist Karen Falk began to lead me on a tour of the workshop—drawers of googly eyes, noses, and 'special facial hair'; filing cabinets for 'fur' and 'slippery sleezy'; a stack of banker's boxes, one marked 'Grover,' another 'Boober'—I looked back, briefly, to catch the bulbous nose and round eyes of Junior Gorg from Fraggle Rock staring at me, or perhaps at his own body, waiting to be reunited. 'There are only three Snuffleupagi in the world,' Falk told me, gesturing toward a puppet near the entrance that she said was kind of an extra, deployed when Snuffleupagus needs a family member on set next to him. I reached out to give Snuffy's relation a little pet—his soft brown fur, curly and dense like a poodle's, was overlain with orange feathers—and scribbled a note: 'remarkably lifelike.' For a what? I later asked myself. For a giant woolly mammoth cum anteater puppet? But the space made it easy to slip across the human-Muppet divide and into Henson's world, where the realness of the puppets is sacrosanct. When I asked to take a picture of the decapitated Junior Gorg, just for my notes, Falk looked at me as if I'd asked to check under Miss Piggy's dress. 'We don't allow photos of things like that, Muppets without heads,' she tutted, and ushered me to another part of the workshop, where a handful of archival boxes had been set aside for me. After a great loss, some people find themselves communing with nature, at the seaside or deep in a forest. Others turn to spirituality, toward a temple or church. Me? I'd come to grieve with the Muppets. My father, Marshall, amassed many accolades over the course of his career—a gold record for playing bluegrass banjo on the Deliverance soundtrack; an Oscar for co-writing the script of Annie Hall; a Tony nomination for Best Book for the musical Jersey Boys, which won Best Musical in 2006 (and an Olivier Award, too)—but way cooler to me, as a kid, was the fact that for a brief stint, long before I was born, he'd been part of Henson's crew. For much of my life, I knew little about the specifics. I do remember one time being feverish and crying for a Kermit doll after a doctor's appointment, even though, despite Dad's involvement in the show, I can't remember ever watching any Muppets, or even Sesame Street, at home. The local toy store was all sold out, so Dad called in a favor, and we headed to the old Muppet offices on the Upper East Side to pick one up. While we were waiting, I watched, slack-jawed, as puppet makers working on a new creation pulled googly eyes out of thin drawers, one after another, a fever dream come to life and branded in my memory like a surrealist madeleine. After that, the Muppets all but receded from my life. [Read: The secret life of grief] That changed after my father got sick last year, when my daily life became not just a logistical mire—managing therapy appointments, speaking with doctors—but also one of constant dread: about which Dad I'd find when I walked into his room each day, his personality somehow refracted, as if I were looking at it through a prism; about whether a middle-of-the-night phone call might signify an Earth-tilting inflection point; about how devastating it was going to be to navigate the world without the beloved father I'd always looked up to. At the end of each day, like any well-adjusted individual faced with looming, profound change, I chose to run screaming as far away from reality as I could, which is how I ended up in the arms of the 1970s Muppets. I had no grand plan. I simply gravitated toward their fluffiness and goofiness as an antidote to grief. I sensed—rightly, it turned out—that they'd help keep me afloat. Dad and Henson first connected through Al Gottesman, Henson's longtime lawyer. Their mutual affinity makes total sense to me, even a generation later. They were born three years apart and grew up delighting in Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. They shared an off-kilter sense of humor and a reverence for the silly. Although I can't remember ever seeing Dad with a puppet on his hand, when I was growing up he would put on elaborate bedtime shows for my sister and me, starring our menagerie of stuffed animals. Using a pair of needle-nose pliers from his tool case—a bulky, black-leather valise full of primary-colored screwdrivers I liked to play with, a relic from his days attending Brooklyn Technical High School to appease his practical immigrant father—he made pince-nez out of a paper clip for my plush dachshund, Ollirina, a feisty Southern grande dame who propelled herself around by farting (my contribution); he then had her perform miraculous acts of levitation. Dad's tried-and-true finale: shooting my Ping-Pong-ball-sized plush hedgehog through a toilet-paper-roll cannon as I drumrolled on my lap. Looking back on this now that I'm a parent of three young children, I marvel that he could summon this level of creativity after dinnertime. For a few months in the mid-'70s, Dad helped Henson write a failed Broadway Muppets revue, and what would become the pilot of The Muppet Show, called 'Sex and Violence With the Muppets'—Henson's attempt to establish the Muppets as not just for kids. Dad is listed as head writer on the script, in which Nigel, Sam the Eagle, and a few other Muppets put together a 'Seven Deadly Sins' pageant to determine which sin is the most deadly. Although the final show evolved from the pilot—Kermit replaced Nigel as the emcee; a human guest star was added—you can see from the script that its style was already developed, as was its tone: equal parts outlandish and sophisticated, countercultural, never talking down to the audience. Sloth arrives, of course, during the closing credits, too late to participate. One stage direction reads, simply, 'Chaos in progress.' The script established the framework with which Henson would go on to parody a vaudeville show from all angles—the divas (Piggy), the technical malfunctions (Crazy Harry, blowing up sets left and right), the well-meaning guy trying to hold the whole ball of crazy together (Kermit). My father's contributions are impossible to disentangle from the general Muppetness of the script—collaborations work, he always told me, because they are collaborative—save for one: Despite being Brooklyn born and bred, with not a Nordic bone in his body, he is, by many accounts, the source of the Swedish Chef's accent and nonsense lexicon, the one typified by 'Hurdy, gurdy, gurdy, bork bork bork!' The character had originated with Henson in the '60s. Back then, he'd been German. For reasons lost to Muppetdom, at some point the character moved northwest, to a place with more centralized health care. And he needed an accent to match. I loved listening to Dad parody foreign languages. He liked to throw off telemarketers by answering the phone as a hard-of-hearing woman from some indeterminate Latin American country, or as an eccentric Central European man, characterized by a sibilant, Peter Sellers–as–Strangelove delivery that would typically escalate into a shriek and send the person on the other end skedaddling to their next call. So I was not surprised to learn that, decades earlier, Dad had apparently reduced the Henson puppeteer Frank Oz to tears by mimicking languages during brainstorming sessions. He later made an ersatz-Swedish tape for Henson to listen to on his commute into the city from his home in Bedford. 'He would drive to work trying to make a chicken sandwich in mock Swedish or make a turkey casserole in mock Swedish,' Henson's son Brian told Jim's biographer, remembering having heard my dad's tape. 'It was the most ridiculous thing you had ever seen, and people at traffic lights used to stop and sort of look at him a little crazy.' All of this I learned from books, from interviews with Muppet staffers, and by emailing Falk, the Henson archivist. But the bulk of my embedding in Muppetdom over the past year involved watching The Muppet Show with my husband and three kids on weekend evenings, our world cocooned between the real, live present and a completely nonsensical 1970s. I'd slice up some apples and we'd cackle together as Rita Moreno flung a noodly Muppet man around set in a particularly violent tango; as Zero Mostel, only mildly indignant that a Muppet was eating him during his cold open, helped wash down his own arm with a little water; as Gene Kelly taught Kermit to tap-dance on the piano. [Read: The father-daughter routine that transformed our family life] Given what I'd learned, was it a cosmic sign that my youngest, just 3 years old, started to develop an obsession with the Swedish Chef? He took to running around the apartment, crowing his bastardized version of the Chef's already bastardized Swedish and then, mimicking his new Nordic hero, flinging into the air whatever he had handy. Sometimes it was a stuffed animal; other times it was hard objects, which would necessitate a stern lecture (after my husband and I had taken cover) about the dangers of throwing things up, because they tend to come down, even if the Chef's flapjacks do not. After my son got a Swedish Chef action-figure set that included a small chicken and a handful of cooking tools, he would sit on the ground, brow furrowed in concentration, making the cleaver-wielding chef hop after the chicken—or sometimes, in keeping with Muppet sensibility, vice versa. My daughters became obsessed with 'Pigs in Space,' a recurring Muppet sketch parodying Star Trek and other space operas of the 1960s and '70s. They erupted in cheers whenever the USS Swinetrek flew across the screen, indicating that the sketch was back again. The setup is that three pigs are flying through the cosmos—Captain Link Hogthrob, Dr. Julius Strangepork, and Miss Piggy as first mate—and … nothing really happens. John Cleese shows up as a pirate and tries to make a call from a payphone on the ship, while his parrot, who is in love with him, gripes that Cleese is neglecting her and should take her to dinner with all his doubloons. The ship is invaded by two alien beings, who turn out to be the Swedish Chef and his chicken, and after they leave, the pigs get bored. When the USS Swinetrek nears the end of the universe, where its crew will finally discover the meaning and purpose of life, the dinner bell rings, and the pigs get sidetracked. Miss Piggy is routinely degraded, asked by the boars to do the laundry or make more swill, though the audience understands that she's smarter and tougher than her male co-stars. According to Oz, Miss Piggy's puppeteer, her toughness was hard-won. In multiple interviews, he has spoken about his need to understand the complete biographies of the characters he portrayed, even if viewers don't share that need. In Oz's mind, Miss Piggy was born on a farm, loved her father very much, and was grief-stricken when he died in a tractor accident. As her mother's subsequent suitors turned their attention to Miss Piggy, a single path forward emerged: to leave. She was later forced to do some things she wasn't proud of as she clawed her way to diva-dom, including appearing in a bacon commercial. Does any of that come through the screen as she floats around in outer space? I suppose that, for some viewers, it does—that having a deep understanding of Miss Piggy's character somehow enabled Oz and the other puppeteers to present her simulated world as real enough that the audience would jump into it with her, feetfirst, willingly suspending disbelief. Or maybe that's not why it works. 'It's just so weird,' my third grader said to me one night, with a snort. 'Like, why are there even pigs in space?' I didn't experience what others warned me I might, after the months of decline that led to Dad's death late last year: picking up the phone to call him and forgetting that there would be no one on the other end, looking up from the sidewalk at the window where he worked for decades, expecting to see the light on and being knocked sideways that it was dark. I never forgot. I never expected the light to be on. But occasionally, I'd find myself dropping from one reality straight through to another, something most likely aided by my living just eight blocks from where I grew up. My neighborhood is saturated with memories spanning my whole life. Passing a street corner, I would suddenly reverse-age four decades and see Dad's belt buckle sliding along my tricycle's handlebars, because I was so hot and sweaty and tired that I simply couldn't pedal one more inch, and he was pulling me around that corner, home. I'd be running the Lower Loop in Central Park, where we used to take our daily afternoon walks, and I'd pass a busker playing the fiddle and have to stop, hands on knees, to catch my breath, remembering the Flatt and Scruggs Dad played through his computer speakers. These temporal shifts through eras were uncontrolled, unexpected, all-encompassing. My scrim between reality and memory, truth and simulation, had become porous, faulty. Like the Swedish Chef, who starts making a turtle soup only to find that the turtle has woken up and is trying to escape, my reality was pitched, slightly, on its axis. The first time one of these temporal shifts through eras, one of these free falls from today back to childhood, happened was a few nights after the burial. My husband, kids, and I gathered, the children freshly showered and damp-haired, and put on the Muppets, as we'd done, at that point, for months. The episode featured Señor Wences, the ventriloquist whose main act involved Johnny, a boy made from Wences's hand, on which he stuck two googly eyes, and on top of which he draped a ridiculous orange wig. His other star performers were a bespectacled chicken named Cecilia (Wences: 'Second name?'; Cecilia: 'Chicken') and Pedro, a surly talking head (literally just a head, not an MSNBC type) who, after a train accident that decapitated the poor puppet, spent his life, disembodied, in a box. The episode's conceit was that Kermit has decided to do something new: a puppet show! 'It's a complete change of pace, folks,' he said to cheers. 'Yes, it's a real first!' Toward the end, Wences held up an egg and asked Cecilia Chicken to identify it. As she replied, softly and directly, 'My son' (rhymes with moan), a memory of childhood weekend breakfasts welled up from deep in my subconscious, collapsing time just as the puppets on-screen were collapsing their simulation. I saw the kitchen table, the oval wooden one my father had waxed by hand until it shone. I felt its slight stickiness beneath my hands. And by the stove was Dad, apron halved and tied around his waist, holding up an egg reverently, sighing, lovingly pronouncing it 'my son!' in Salamancan-inflected English, then cracking it, with a flourish, into a cast-iron skillet. He used to do that with eggs. I'd completely forgotten. For a moment, I stayed there at the kitchen table, giggling. I stayed with the feeling of being closer to my children's age than middle age; closer to those evenings spent cross-legged and damp-haired myself, watching my dad turn stuffed animals into performers; closer still to a moment years before my birth, when, across town at the Henson studios, in a healthy body with long legs kicked up on the desk in front of him, my dad held a bulky tape recorder to his mouth, paused, then started up for the first time in ersatz Swedish, the beginning of a thread that would reach out, decades later, and tether him to me. Article originally published at The Atlantic Solve the daily Crossword
New York Post
2 days ago
- New York Post
Brooding ‘black cat' boyfriends have pushed aside ‘golden retriever' heartthrobs: ‘He's not perfect, but he's real'
Say goodbye to the 'golden retriever' boyfriend — and hello to the 'black cat.' For years, there's been a lot of love for the former — doe-eyed boys who romance their partners with lovey-dovey sentiments and a cheerful energy. Those men possess similar qualities to a golden retriever: sweet, gentle, affectionate, eager to please and even easy to train. Sometimes they also share some physical attributes with the breed: an adorable smile, big brown eyes and golden hair. 4 The golden retriever boyfriend romances partners with sweet sentiments. JordaanExams/ – Now, people are pining after 'black cat boyfriends' — the quiet, mysterious, brooding and complicated guy. Black cats are not ones to make big romantic gestures, but despite their detached exterior, they're emotional underneath and feel things very deeply. Take it from the character everyone is rooting for in Jenny Han's 'The Summer I Turned Pretty.' Conrad Fisher, portrayed by Christopher Brinley, is the brooding older brother who's hard to read, ultimately resulting in his heartbreak. Conrad is Belly's (Lola Tung) first love, but his emotional unavailability led her to date his brother, Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno), the irresponsible frat bro. But fans online are still rooting for Conrad, seeing from the outside that he pulled away due to his big emotions. In Lena Dunham's new show 'Too Much,' Will Sharpe's Felix was an instant heartthrob, an enigmatic character with a ragged denim jacket and messy black hair that Jess (played by 'Hacks' actor Meg Stalter) sees performing at a London dive bar. He doesn't dote over her at all; he simply wins Jess over with his charm before showing any emotion. 4 People are pining after 'black cat boyfriends' — quiet, mysterious, brooding and complicated guys. pablo – 'This shift isn't just about characters being darker or moodier,' PR expert Chad Teixeira told the Daily Mail. 'It reflects a larger generational shift in how people understand relationships, emotional growth, and vulnerability. 'Gen Z, more than previous generations, tend to value emotional realism over idealism,' he added. 'The black cat boyfriend complicates the traditional romantic arc. He's not perfect, but he's real.' The hit Netflix show 'Ginny and Georgia' shows this, too. Ginny (Antonia Gentry) tries to date the sweet, popular boy but doesn't feel any connection. She inevitably falls for her troubled and perplexing bad-boy neighbor, Marcus (Felix Mallard). As the series goes on, Marcus starts to unveil his emotional and sensitive side, which has viewers rooting for the two to end up together. 4 Despite their detached exterior, black cats are emotional underneath and feel things very deeply. graziella – And this kind of boyfriend archetype isn't new to pop culture — think Jess Mariano in 'Gilmore Girls,' Chuck Bass in 'Gossip Girl,' Angel in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' Lucas Scott in 'One Tree Hill,' or even Carmy in Emmy-winning 'The Bear.' People have long been swooning over the black cat beau, and it's their mysterious nature that makes them irresistible. 'There's a desire to get beyond the mystery and see what lies within,' psychotherapist Amy Morin told USA Today. 'We might think they'd be willing to be vulnerable if they were in a trusting, healthy relationship. We want to see the walls come down so we can learn more about how they really feel.' 4 People have long been swooning over the black cat boyfriend, and it's their mysterious nature that makes them irresistible. ajr_images – Having those walls come down is important for young boys and men to understand emotional intelligence, which can ultimately lead to long-lasting and strong relationships as well as mental wellness in general. 'It's breaking the masculine code, stepping out of the man box, and saying, 'Yeah, I'm vulnerable,'' Ronald Levant, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and co-author of 'The Problem with Men: Insights on Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood from a World-Renowned Psychologist,' told the outlet. And while sometimes the so-called 'bad boy' can eventually soften — even Chuck and Blair got married on 'Gossip Girl' — Morin warned that there is a 'danger to romanticizing emotionally unavailable men. 'There may be a desire to fix them or help them so that they can grow closer and become more trusting. But, in reality, they might prefer avoidance,' she explained. 'So, while it sounds intriguing to pursue a mysterious man, he just might not be emotionally available. And it's not your job to draw it out of him or change him.'
