Samuel Fromartz

On a Wednesday afternoon in March, the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, in Denver’s South Park Hill neighborhood, was packed. The local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible was sponsoring a mayoral-candidate forum. Five candidates had been invited to attend. The moderator asked the usual questions about crime and public safety, homelessness and guns. Then came a question comprehensible only to a close observer of Denver politics: “Do you support releasing the city-owned conservation easement on the Park Hill Golf Course to allow the currently proposed redevelopment of this site?”

Four candidates raised their hands, a couple only halfway, as if that sign of reluctance might lessen the coming disapproval. It didn’t. The crowd booed.

Fairy tales do not typically stand up to a lot of scrutiny. One does not hear the story of Sleeping Beauty and think, Well, that all seems logical. These gauzy fables function because they only vaguely resemble reality, a condition that makes them perfect as subjects of Disney cartoons. But that also makes them terrible as subjects of Disney “live-action” remakes, which have been a scourge on pop culture for more than a decade now; beloved children’s classics are blown out to epic proportions for the sake of completely capitalistic nostalgia. The latest to wash up on Hollywood’s shores is The Little Mermaid, which takes the charming 1989 film that began Disney’s animated “renaissance” and turns it into an aquarium of naturalistic fishy horror.

As Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Stewart Rhodes yesterday to 18 years in prison—the longest yet for a defendant involved in the January 6 insurrection—he explained why the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers needed to be behind bars for a long time. “You pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country,” Mehta told Rhodes.

Mehta was right about that. At his sentencing, Rhodes was unrepentant. In a 20-minute speech before the court, he portrayed himself alternately as a character in Kafka’s The Trial; as an “American Solzhenitsyn,” after the Soviet dissident writer who was sent to the gulag; and as a misunderstood advocate for peace. This monologue was standard fare for Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate who likes to align himself with literary heavyweights and historical leaders.

This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.

Roman Roy was ready. He had written his eulogy for his father—a great man, he would say, great despite and because of it all—on hot-pink index cards. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. He had “pre-grieved,” he kept telling people, and so could be trusted to fulfill, one last time, the core duty of the family business: to love in a way that moves markets.

But Roman failed. His grief overcame him; trying to speak, he sobbed. The funeral that had been so carefully scripted suddenly broadcast dead air. Kendall, ad-libbing, stepped in to speak. Then Shiv. Their addresses—honest, calculating, and hewing to the talking points—were valedictories for Logan, and for their show. They also returned Succession, in its penultimate episode, to its original premise. The declining monarch, the children who compete for his crown, the rotating cast of lackeys and fools: Succession is King Lear, retold for the age of the media empire. And Logan’s funeral punctuates the translation. It transports Lear’s famous first scene to a cathedral on the Upper East Side. Kendall and Shiv are Goneril and Regan, complying with their father’s demands for flattery. Roman is Cordelia, the youngest and most devoted, unable to turn love into a show. Their performances will carve their kingdom, and this is both a ludicrous circumstance and a logical one: Family, for them, is an endless act of politics.

For months, the West has fretted over the prospect of paying for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Russia’s war has inflicted an estimated $400 billion in rebuilding costs, a tally that rises every day. Western leaders, already alarmed by inflation and the threat of recession, have understandably blanched over the bill.

But many of them are disregarding a solution that would cover most of Ukraine’s costs and help deter future aggression not only from Russia but from dictatorships around the world. A year ago, Western governments froze some $300 billion in state assets from Russia’s central bank. Now they could seize the funds and give them to Ukraine.

The biggest question is whether this would be legal. As critics have noted, a seizure of this magnitude has never been attempted. Moreover, little precedent exists for the United States to confiscate the assets of a nation with whom (despite the Kremlin’s claims to the contrary) it isn’t at war.

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When you collect statues of Lenin, Harlan Crow told me, “you get to be a bit of a snob.” The first Lenin I had seen that morning was a brass likeness in the entryway to Crow’s Dallas mansion—a house that capitalism built, if ever there was one. Lenin was in his Finland Station pose, but with his head replaced by Mickey Mouse’s. Crow’s office had at least one more Lenin. Now we were outside, pelted by rain in Crow’s Garden of Evil, admiring the fourth in a series of Lenins, an 18-footer harvested from western Ukraine. “There’s so many statues of Lenin,” Crow said, educating me on dictator-statue appreciation the way another rich guy might introduce a friend to the world of fine wine. Having a good story was crucial. “You don’t want a Lenin From Factory 107. You want Politburo.”

When I was a deaf kid growing up in the 1990s, I had two recurring fantasies. One was that more hearing people would learn American Sign Language. The other was that, one day, the whole world would be captioned, just like TV shows and movies. I imagined pulling on sleek sci-fi glasses, and voilà: The tangle of spoken words around me would unravel into beautiful, legible, written English.

The second of my childhood reveries came back to me recently when I sat down in a quiet on-campus atrium at Harvard with Alex and Marilyn Westner, the co-founders of the Boston-area start-up Xander, who had invited me to chat over coffee after seeing me quoted in a newspaper article about their company’s augmented-reality live-captioning glasses. They slid a bulky prototype across the table, and I put the glasses on my face. Immediately, written words scrolled across a translucent digital box above my right eye.

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My baby pictures and videos are the standard compendium of embarrassment. I was photographed waddling in nothing but a diaper, filmed smearing food all over my face instead of eating it. But I’m old enough that the kompromat is safe in the confines of physical photo albums and VHS tapes in my parents’ attic. Even my earliest digital activity—posting emotional MySpace photo captions and homemade music videos—took place in the new and unsophisticated internet of the early 2000s, and has, blissfully, been lost to time. I feel relief whenever I’m reminded of those vanished artifacts, and even more so when I see pictures and videos of children on the internet today, who won’t be so lucky.

Summer is when lovers of books feel freest to read without restraint—lying on a beach, swinging on a porch, or perching on a stoop at the end of a sweaty day. The Atlantic’s writers and editors want to help in this endeavor, and so we’ve selected books to match some warm-weather moods: Maybe you want to transport yourself to another place, or to take a deep dive into one topic. Perhaps you have a yen to feel wonder about the universe or rediscover an old gem. Some readers just want to devour something totally new. Here are 20 books you should grab this season.

Transport Yourself to Another Place

Heat Wave

by Penelope Lively

The pleasure of Heat Wave is its slow, mesmerizing drama. Set in the English countryside over a hot summer, Lively’s slender novel introduces us to Pauline, a divorced editor in her 50s who has opted for an existence “rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions.” Among those satisfactions is the freedom she feels in her summer cottage, unleashed from London, her partner, and her office job. Staying next door—and buzzing at a different frequency—are her daughter, Theresa; her son-in-law, Maurice, a smarmy, up-and-coming writer; and their toddler. With a gimlet eye, Pauline observes Theresa’s unhappiness and Maurice’s shifty egotism, the amalgam of repression and delusion that seems to hold their relationship together; as she fixates on them, she thinks back on her own marriage. Lively’s wry prose captures the mundane clarity of Pauline’s life among the wheat fields and the way that a maternal ache, when left to its own devices, can crescendo. Never has a mother-in-law’s judgment seemed so deliciously understated—and so devastating in its conclusion.  — Jane Yong Kim

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.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her final collection of essays. In 2021, the poet Leila Chatti took up Oliver’s words, reflecting on the challenge of them: “All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world / begging to be noticed.”

For those of us working to slow down, to smell the roses, to look one another in the eyes rather than in the iMessage bubbles, Oliver is a perfect guide. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, “It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs.”