A Peaceful Detective Mystery to Watch

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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 Lily Meyer, a staff writer who has published stories about the wisdom of Holden Caulfield , why making America’s houses bigger may have been a mistake , and the Seinfeld theory of fiction .

Lily recommends watching The Sheep Detectives for a heartwarming mystery, listening to any song by the Hold Steady, and reading Brother of the More Famous Jack , by Barbara Trapido, if you want a good cry and a laugh. — Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor A good recommendation I recently received: My friend Eliza Brooke—a freelance culture writer who often covers movies—told me to watch The Sheep Detectives , which I had assumed was for children, but I trust her.

I was absolutely charmed by the film and, at the same time, quite moved by its exploration of how we think and talk about death.

Also, it’s a whodunit, and I love whodunits.

Hollywood, could we please have fewer sequels and prequels and remakes, and more peaceful detective stories? The upcoming arts event I’m most looking forward to: I can’t wait to see the Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock show opening at the Met this October.

I love abstract expressionism, and ever since I read Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women —an exceptional group biography of five abstract expressionist painters, including Krasner—I’ve been fascinated by the arc of her career, which included creating government-sponsored public art during the Depression, making mosaics in the Long Island house she and Pollock shared during their marriage (meanwhile, he got an entire barn as a studio), and the flowering of her own painting practice after his death.

Of course I’m excited to see the Pollock paintings at the Met too, but I’m most eager to see the Krasners.

An actor I would watch in anything: Greta Gerwig.

I saw Frances Ha , the gorgeous, bittersweet ode to female friendship that she starred in and co-wrote, a few weeks after I graduated from college—that is, at a moment when I was heartbroken about no longer living with my closest female friends—and I imprinted on her like a baby duck.

The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism .

Gornick, a “red-diaper baby” raised in the working-class Jewish Bronx, set out to interview former Communist Party USA members and militants about what their political activity meant to them, years after the party had lost most of its following.