Cowboy Carter, Connections, and more picks of the week

I have to admit, this winter found me in a bit of a culture slump. There weren’t movies I wanted to see (this always happens!), there was a dearth of new TV (the strikes were certainly a factor here), I didn’t have any concert plans, museums were between big shows. As a culture editor, it was tough. This is the stuff that lights me up — and that’s especially necessary when the days are dark.

Well, dare I say, culture is back! Today we have a new Beyoncé album. We have some post-release coverage up our sleeves, but you can start with our Today, Explained episode about the history of Black country music and Alex Abad-Santos’s piece on how Beyoncé’s 2016 CMAs performance explains Cowboy Carter. If you want to go a little further back into our archives, I really recommend Constance Grady’s celebrity analysis of Queen Bey.

There has been a lot of other new music in the last month (weirdly a lot of it related to Saturn returns?), including from my personal favorites Olivia Rodrigo (the sincerity! the rage!) and Kacey Musgraves. I haven’t watched 3 Body Problem yet, but I am quite enjoying Palm Royale. And I love to look forward to things, so I can’t wait to check out Challengers (yes, that is the sexy tennis movie) and the Whitney Biennial in the coming weeks.

What bits of culture are you into right now? Let us know!

—Julia Rubin, senior editorial director for culture and features

How AI could explode the economy

Dylan Matthews blew my mind with this bit from his intro and then just kept on going: “Imagine everything humans have achieved since the days when we lived in caves: wheels, writing, bronze and iron smelting, pyramids and the Great Wall, ocean-traversing ships, mechanical reaping, railroads, telegraphy, electricity, photography, film, recorded music, laundry machines, television, the internet, cellphones. Now imagine accomplishing 10 times all that — in just a quarter century.”

🎧 Buy a house? In this economy?

Today, Explained is running a great two-part series on multigenerational housing this week. The first episode is available now, and the second will publish in your podcast feeds later today. At a time when buying a home seems totally out of reach, I’m super interested in imagining what an alternative mode of living can look like. I don’t think I’m moving back to my hometown any time soon, but do we think I can convince my Midwestern parents to live in Brooklyn?

Connections, the most fun (and sometimes frustrating) game on the internet

I absolutely loved word games as a kid — Scattergories forever — and have gone through various phases ever since (Bananagrams, Words with Friends, Code Names, you get it). While I was a real Wordle head for a minute, I somehow resisted the siren song of the New York Times’s latest viral hit, Connections. That is, until I read Rebecca Jennings on the game and why people love (and hate) it. I do need to brag that my very first category was purple.

📹 What the Red Sea ship attacks are really about

We’ve been covering the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea for months, and this excellent explainer by Rajaa Elidrissi and the Vox video team gives some much-needed context to a complicated story. Take 10 minutes to learn about the rise of the Yemeni rebel group, the motivations behind the ship attacks, and what it all means for their war-torn country.

One big problem with how we rank countries by happiness

One of the most valuable classes I took in high school (and then again in college) was statistics. It really changed the way I looked at the world and made me question basically any number or study I came across. This is why I love this piece by Sigal Samuel that looks at the methodology for the viral World Happiness Report. Turns out, comparing yourself to others is bad!

🎧 The Yips

When Simone Biles took herself out of competition during the 2020 summer Olympics (which actually took place in 2021, because Covid), casual sports fans learned about “the twisties,” a gymnastics-specific version of the yips. The yips are a phenomenon in which you suddenly can’t do the thing you are in fact very good at — but is this a mental problem, or is something physiological at play? Unexplainable digs into this fascinating question.

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