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.

This was the year of the sold-out stadium tour, double-feature mania, celebrity memoirs (and documentaries), and superhero fatigue. It was also the year of the Hollywood strike, controversy over book bans, and the rise of AI music. The Atlantic’s Culture team looked back on 2023 and compiled lists of the year’s best movies, TV shows, albums, books, and podcasts. Spend some time with their picks this weekend.

“I opted for a mix of old and new, small and giant … from a modest YouTube documentary to a near-billion-dollar-grossing dramatic extravaganza. The business is still figuring itself out, perhaps, but the medium is as vibrant as ever.”

“The dual actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood shut down productions while exposing the problems diminishing the quality of the shows being made. Still, the list below exemplifies the small screen’s creative breadth this year.”

“The music industry has been beset by concerns about market saturation, caused by an ever-rising flood of new songs onto streaming services … But looking back over a year of great albums offers a reminder that more really can be more: more melodies, more breakthroughs, more art.”

“We were drawn to ambitious projects, and looked for writing that was clear and beautiful. Most important, we searched for books that you won’t be able to put down.”

“These shows premiered fresh frameworks, experimented with sound design, and elevated underrepresented voices and stories … We offer them as a compass for unpredictable times, a pick-me-up for winter blues, and, we hope, a hint of clarity in times to come.”

• The Weekly Planet: The most important technology of 2023 wasn’t AI, Saahil Desai writes.
• The Books Briefing: Authors have found themselves blindsided by the realization that their own books have been used to train AI, Gal Beckerman wrote in a September edition we’re revisiting today.
• Atlantic Intelligence: What will next year hold for AI? Damon Beres explores our writers’ analysis of the technology’s trajectory from here.

  Explore all of our newsletters here.

  ---

  Evening Read

  

  The Nocturnals

  By Faith Hill

  While most people are fast asleep, there’s a whole world of people who are wide awake. They go to work, drive around, run errands at 24-hour stores. In this parallel universe, there are rarely crowds, nor traffic, nor lines; no awkward shuffling around other shoppers in the grocery aisle, no run-ins with neighbors or cacophony of email notifications. As the sun rises, these nocturnal people settle down to sleep.

  They don’t all want to live this way. Some of them have to; they have sleep disorders, or night-shift jobs. But some of them want this very much—enough to seek out those night shifts, to train themselves to wake in the dark. They do this because of the isolation, not in spite of it. I talked to people who painted me a magical picture of their nighttime world: of exquisite, profound solitude; of relief; of escape.

  Read the full article.

  ---

  Culture Break

  

  Read. “Valentine,” a new poem by Rachel Coye:

  “The deer in the snow turned away / from my flashlight and kettle / to let me fight with the ice alone. / I was thinking of you then, / of your sleeping head, / of your maskless mouth.”

  Watch. You’ll want to revisit these 25 feel-good movies, compiled by our critic in 2020, again and again.

  Play our daily crossword.

  ---

  When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.