A Self-Aware Teen Soap

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s very special guest is Isabel Fattal, the senior editor of the newsletters team. When she isn’t working with Tom Nichols and Lora Kelley on The Daily, she writes The Atlantic’s Wonder Reader newsletter.

Isabel’s watch-list recommendations include the film noirs and screwball comedies of the 1940s and ’50s, and the teen-drama series The O.C., which helped launch Seth Cohen as a new type of heartthrob. During her downtime, she enjoys listening to Van Morrison throwbacks, the singer-songwriter Miya Folick’s soulful melodies, and the lively commentary of the Every Single Album podcast.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The Culture Survey: Isabel Fattal

The upcoming arts event I’m most looking forward to: The final installment of Griff’s three-part album, Vertigo. The English singer-songwriter is making some of the smartest pop music out there right now, pairing confident vocals and clean production with a singular lyrical style. “19th Hour” and “Pillow in My Arms” are excellent tracks to dance to. For something slower, spend time with “Earl Grey Tea”—in the song’s bridge, Griff manages to sound assured yet broken at the same time.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love: I recently stumbled upon a blank Word document titled “OC Narrative Theory,” which I’d started as a teenager when I wanted to write a dissertation on the cultural impact of the teen drama The O.C. (I was really cool in high school.) I’ll spare you the details, but I will recommend this self-aware, heartwarming show. Seth Cohen, played by Adam Brody, helped create a new archetype of the heartthrob: He was neurotic, curly-haired, nerdy, Jewish, and undeniably charming. And in a rare feat for teen shows, the parents had well-developed and realistic—well, most of the time—storylines. Add in the fantastic indie artists that the show catapulted to fame, and you get something much richer than your typical frothy teen show.

My favorite blockbuster and my favorite art film: I’m going to take this opportunity to argue that the popular film noirs and screwball comedies of the 1940s and ’50s are just as much fun as today’s splashy blockbusters. Many of my fellow Millennials think of black-and-white movies as inherently stuffy or dense, but lots of them are salacious, hilarious, and easy to watch. If you’re a skeptic, start with Double Indemnity, a crackling crime thriller in which an insurance salesman and a scheming wife plot a murder. Then, if you want to shift to Old Hollywood and theater drama, try Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve.

An art film that enraptured me is Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. I normally focus on dialogue in movies, but this one doesn’t have much to offer in that regard: It’s a quiet story, told mostly through the landscapes of the Texas panhandle. I watched it during the early pandemic and loved it; the panoramic shots seemed to fill some need for vastness and open space that I had at the time.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: The slow and soulful “Thingamajig,” by the classically trained vocalist turned singer-songwriter Miya Folick, is—according to her—meant to be an apology. The song resonates with me most as a self-directed apology—and a plea to have faith in yourself. “Only you know what to do,” the song’s closing line goes. On a weeknight in 2019, I went to hear Folick play at Songbyrd, a small D.C. venue. I stood alone at the side door with my heavy work backpack in tow, jamming out to her dancier songs. When she started to play “Thingamajig,” the crowd went silent.

For a loud song, Van Morrison’s “Wavelength” is nearly six minutes of pure fun. I grew up listening to a lot of Morrison with my mother, and she played me “Wavelength” for the first time when we were driving from New York to D.C. a few years back. I fully lost track of my navigational duties as the song layered over itself again and again.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Last month, my mother and I went to Poland and Western Ukraine to see where my grandparents lived before the Holocaust, and where so many of our relatives were killed. While I was there, I thought a lot about the decision of memory: whom we choose to remember, whom we choose to forget, and how history is created as a result.

After Eastern Europe, we went to visit family and friends in Israel, and saw a remarkable exhibit at the Israel Museum called “The Dawn of Darkness: Elegy in Contemporary Art.” The show, which opened in March, uses art from the museum’s existing collections to comment on the trauma of the October 7 Hamas attacks, and on loss more broadly. One of the installments, by the Berlin-based Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, features black text on a white wall, in a style that evokes a memorial site. The text lays out different categories of loss: “Those I would like to know”; “Those I do not know”; “Those I will never know”; “Those I have forgotten but will remember.” The exhibit was another reminder that memory is messy, and that it’s active—it doesn’t just happen to people or societies, but must be fought for and cultivated.

The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: We’re talking about an entertainment product about entertainment products: The Ringer’s Every Single Album podcast, in which Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard chronicle “Pop Girl Spring” (now entering summer). The two discuss new albums from Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, and others, and put them in the context of current trends in music consumption, social media, and modern celebrity. Most important, their enthusiasm about the music they love is completely infectious. (Bonus points to Princiotti for sharing my obsession with Taylor Swift’s “The Black Dog.”) [Related: The “Espresso” theory of gender relations]

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I was recently introduced to High Maintenance, the web series turned HBO comedy about a bike-riding weed dealer in Brooklyn. Each episode focuses on a different customer—there are wealthy older couples, yuppie activists, construction workers, even a fictional This American Life staffer (and also a cameo from the real Ira Glass). Through this structure, the show serves as both a tender love letter to New York City and a sharp skewering of every part of urban life. The last five minutes of the episode “Fagin” had me on the floor. [Related:High Maintenance is TV’s most compassionate cult comedy.]

Something I recently revisited: I reread Virginia Woolf’sTo the Lighthouseevery few years. The prose is a revelation each time, and Lily’s sputtering growthas a painter has helped me through the ebbs and flows of trying to live a creative life. [Related: Searching for Virginia Woolf on the Isle of Skye]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Caitlin Flanagan’s 2017 feature “Death at a Penn State Fraternity” will never leave me. She tells a terrifying tale with masterful restraint and pacing that builds brick by brick until the reader is completely shaken.

Forgive me for cheating and recommending one more article: Sarah Zhang’s surprisingly hopeful story about the people who, through DNA testing, stumbled upon incest in their own families. Zhang delves into the pain of these discoveries, but she also finds that community can form out of the most horrible and unexpected events.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I go back to W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” when I need a little jolt of perspective:

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