When Saturday Night Live announced that Timothée Chalamet would be hosting on November 11, it looked like an act of optimism. Up until then, the show had dodged the Screen Actors Guild–strike rules against promotion this season by bringing on either hosts with nothing to sell (the alum Pete Davidson) or artists whose work didn’t fall under the contract in question (the musician Bad Bunny and the comedian Nate Bargatze).But Chalamet was different.

This is an edition of 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.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 Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers politics, culture, and religion.

This article was originally published by High Country News.Two Septembers ago, the residents of Grotto, Washington, woke to the Bolt Creek Fire ripping through the mountains above their homes. “This doesn’t happen here,” Patricia Vasquez remembers saying at the time, shocked.

Translated by Barbara MannNow that death creeps all around
and the pecans are bursting their shells,
I hide within Hebrew.
Nothing will befall me in innocent writing.
Nothing will befall me
if I am absorbed into the letters,
if I don’t go outside the line—
shrunk to a small dot
stuffed inside an O
or into the belly of a C,
a semicolon dripping tears
like a captive.

For much of the past century, America believed that college was essential to upward mobility. A four-year degree has long been a symbol of the American dream, seen as a way to ensure that millions of students could be better off than their parents and grandparents. Today, however, that faith is plummeting. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to a new low of 36 percent, down from 57 percent in 2015.

How do you decide who owns a country? At 10:30 this morning in London, a group of black-clad men were gathered about 100 meters from the Cenotaph, Britain’s most famous war memorial. They were chanting. “We want our country back,” went one refrain, followed by “You’re not English, you’re not English, you’re not English anymore.”This group was—as another of their chants put it—“Tommy’s Army.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s announcement that he will not seek reelection in 2024 capped a paradoxical week for Democrats.

Watching something made by Nathan Fielder can be an act of endurance. The creator, host, and star of shows such as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has cultivated a reputation as a merry prankster and a mastermind of hallucinatory television. On-screen, he tends to be deadpan and awkward, making himself the butt of the joke as regularly as he messes with the ordinary people he meets.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.In 2016, my colleague Olga Khazan saw a cultural difference playing out on the faces of those around her. “Here’s something that has always puzzled me, growing up in the U.S. as a child of Russian parents,” she wrote.

There are two observations in Defending My Life, the new documentary about Albert Brooks by his lifelong friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Reiner, that perfectly capture the imprint that Brooks has made, and continues to make, on American culture.The first comes from Conan O’Brien: “Albert broke the sound barrier,” the talk-show host says.