A Portrait of an Obsolete Man

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 or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Caleb Madison, The Atlantic’s very own crossword-puzzles editor and the author of the Good Word newsletter. He has written about why AI doesn’t get slang, the true meaning of meta, and the two most dismissive words on the internet.

Caleb recently ventured through the filmography of the director John Ford; his journey culminated in a screening of , starring John Wayne. His other cultural interests include probing the “neoliberal child-product” of —a movie he truly enjoys, for the record—and reading Emily Wilson’s “colloquial.