A Novel That Skewers Meritocracy

The Atlantic

a day ago

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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 Isaac Stanley-Becker, a staff writer who has reported on Steve Witkoff's role as President Donald Trump's 'shadow secretary of state,' the early tenure of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and the dire situation at the Federal Aviation Administration.
Isaac has crowned 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' as the greatest song of all time, enjoys rereading old email exchanges with friends, and is transfixed by the ambiguous nature of Mark Rothko's paintings.
The Culture Survey: Isaac Stanley-Becker
A good recommendation I recently received: A German politician recently recommended Michael Young's satirical 1958 novel The Rise of the Meritocracy to me. The book popularized the term meritocracy, but Young, a sociologist who helped develop Britain's postwar welfare state, meant it as a pejorative. His story envisions a dystopian future society stratified by educational achievement rather than social class, concluding with a wave of protests in which a group called the 'populists' rebel against the meritocratic elite.
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Rereading old emails with friends. I've always been drawn to letters (I recommend the published correspondence between the poets Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, with a terrific translation by Christopher Clark), and email is an approximation of that experience. I enjoy returning to the little asides and evasions and expressions of affection.
The television show I'm most enjoying right now: The Bear is a perfect TV show, and I'm savoring the fourth season at the moment. I tell everyone who gets overwhelmed by the chaos of the first season to wait because good things are in store. The show is a tender study of people struggling to do right by themselves and others. It's also a paean to Chicago, my hometown, a city about which Nelson Algren wrote: 'Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.'
Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: A friend recently soothed her baby with a West African lullaby called ' Mami wata,' by Issa Dakuyo.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: 'Slow Show,' by the National, and '40-16 Building,' by Nas.
An online creator whom I'm a fan of: I'm not sure how Melvyn Bragg would feel about the designation of 'online creator,' but I'm a fan of his show on BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, in which he convenes several experts on a given topic and peppers them with questions for about an hour. There's something for everyone: hypnosis, Bauhaus, the Haymarket Affair. One of my favorite episodes is on W. H. Auden —it's fitting for the 2020s, our own ' low dishonest decade.'
The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I recently took a tour through five centuries of the Middle Ages in a single room at the Palazzo Citterio, in Milan. Objects as disparate as northern-Italian mosaics and Gothic marble heads recorded the eclectic interests of Lamberto Vitali, a 20th-century critic and collector who believed that art was able to dissolve geographical and temporal boundaries.
An author I will read anything by: For fiction, Péter Nádas. For nonfiction, Kathryn Schulz. For commentary, I'm a devoted reader of Adam Tooze's Substack and articles in the Financial Times.
A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: I'm very fond of Mark Rothko's paintings, and some of the best are on view in the National Gallery of Art's East Building, including No. 1 (1961). When I'm face-to-face with these hovering blocks of color, I can't tell whether I'm looking at something natural or unnatural, human or inhuman. Rothko's own words lend this ambiguity a sense of high drama. As part of the 'Paintings on Paper' exhibition from about a year ago, the National Gallery displayed his haunting statement: 'You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should LOOK AGAIN. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colors there hides the final cataclysm.'
A musical artist who means a lot to me: Bob Dylan. I think 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' is the greatest song of all time.
A favorite story I've read in The Atlantic: I loved Jennifer Senior's recent story on insomnia. But everything Jennifer writes is completely captivating.
The last thing that made me cry: I cried during I'm Still Here, a film about the military dictatorship in Brazil and the disappearance of the dissident politician Rubens Paiva. What got me, in particular, was the moment when a photographer visited the Paiva family home and told them to look sad for the camera, but they insisted on smiling and laughing. I was overcome by this simple fortitude.
The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I laughed out loud reading my friend Johannes Lichtman's novel Such Good Work, about a recovering addict whose quest for moral purpose takes him to Sweden amid the international refugee crisis. It's a sweet and very insightful bildungsroman that captures the absurdities of life in the first quarter of the 21st century.
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Patience doesn't come easily to me, but I try to listen to the admonition that begins Galway Kinnell's 'Wait':
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Week Ahead
Rehab: An American Scandal, a book by the Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter on true stories about the opioid crisis, and the dark side of the rehab industry (out Tuesday)
Americana, a new movie about a Lakota ghost shirt that sets off violence in a small South Dakota town (in theaters Friday
Love Is Like, a new album by the pop-rock band Maroon 5 (out Friday)
Essay
Captain Ron's Guide to Fearless Flying
I'd experienced 21 years of unmemorable flights before my own fear of flying took hold. In May 2015, I was traveling from my home state of Iowa to New York City for a summer internship. I was already nervous about moving, and then, somewhere above Illinois, the plane hit a patch of turbulence and dropped what felt like a thousand feet. Several people screamed. For the first time in my life, I began to experience what I would later understand to be panic: My face and neck went clammy, and black spots filled my vision. At one point, an overhead bin popped open and a few unbuckled passengers smacked their head on the ceiling. They were all okay, and, physically, so was I. But I had unlocked a new fear.
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Photo Album
This week, NASA marked the 13th anniversary of its Curiosity rover landing on Mars. Curiosity has now traveled more than 22 miles over the course of 4,620 Martian days, making numerous discoveries across this planet.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter