The Most American Episode of The Daily, Ever.

Michael Bolvaro: From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bolvaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. Today, in celebration of America's 250th birthday, we posed a simple question to some of our favorite colleagues from across the newsroom, people who write about books, movies, TV shows, science, sports, wellness, food. We asked them all, "What is the most American thing on your beat?" Some of their answers will surprise you. Michael Bolvaro: I would say that the TV show that most encapsulates America for me is CBS's Survivor. Some might make you angry. Michael Bolvaro: There's no better choice than Grand Theft Auto. Some might make you think a little bit differently. Michael Bolvaro: All of these things make me angry. All of these urgent issues are tied to the American fixation on parking our cars. But they're all, in their own way, extremely American. There will be blood. August Wilson's Century Cycle. Demolition Derby. How do you capture America? How do you determine the most American book? It's a trap. It's a trap. The Eminem. Get out. Bama Rush. Randy Newman's Political Science. Beloved by Toni Morrison or Huck Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird or Invisible Man. So, here we go. The most American episode of The Daily, ever. It's Sunday, July 5th. Happy Birthday, America. There's a lot of classical music that is quintessentially American. But if I had to pick one, I think the most American of them would be Aaron Copland's Rodeo. Aaron Copland: Rodeo. Rodeo. you know, red, white, and blue, propagandistically American. The tribe has spoken. I'm Jancy Dunn. I write the Well newsletter. And honestly, the most American thing on my beat is that I'm constantly writing about two things. How to be as productive as possible and how to get some rest. I'm Elena Bergeron. I'm an assistant editor for Pop Culture at The Times. When I think about America in sports, I think about the women's and men's Olympic hockey teams wrecking shop at the Winter Olympics, taking home gold, making us proud. My name is Jennifer Salai, and I'm the nonfiction book critic for The New York Times. The most American nonfiction book is Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World, by Henry Gribar. Gribar makes the argument that a lot of questions about how to allocate resources and cities, questions of building affordable housing, all of these really urgent issues are actually tied to the American fixation, not just on cars, but on parking those cars. It really made me understand the country, in a new way. I'm Bill Wasik, and I'm the science editor at The New York Times. When my colleagues and I on the science desk were thinking about what the most American scientific discovery would be, we settled on Robert Goddard's discovery of liquid rocket fuel. I think we were working backwards from the fact that when it was combined with television, from then on, the televised rocket launch became this extremely American phenomenon. It's something that brought the whole country together, and big explosions and flames and smoke, what could be more American than those things? Good morning, it is Bama Rush day one, so get excited. I'm Madison Malone-Kircher, and I am the internet culture reporter on the Stiles desk here at The Times. The most American thing online that I've reported on is Bama. It's the first day of Bama Rush, so that means I'm on my way to Coleman Coliseum for convocation, so I'm going to give y'all a little. Bama Rush is the week before school starts where women flock to the University of Alabama and Tuscaloosa and vie for spots in sororities. This shows up in the form of many, many videos. So I'm going to show you guys what's in my Rush bag. Young women showing what they're buying. My top is Lululemon, my shorts are Free People. What they're prepping, what they're going to wear. My sunnies are from K-Spain. Sorority Rush is sort of this perfect encapsulation of the promise of the American meritocracy. Anybody should be able to get into a sorority, but you have sort of this hidden power structure around social capital, who you know, what you're wearing, and so it's this, to go macro, this friction between the promise of democracy and, like, the exclusivity of reality. My necklace is David Yearman. My earrings are Van Cleef. They're like little chandeliers. I mean, it's a thing that might be easy to dunk on and make fun of, right? Because it's 18-year-old girls, young women, sort of competing for a social club. But modern-day sorority culture is born out of a historical lineage of women who are looking for access into spaces that they didn't have, whether that be social clubs or academia. So there is sort of something positive underneath all of this once you strip away the jewelry and the weird ruffled skorts. This was. This was, at one point, quite revolutionary. Also an American concept, really, if you think about it. We'll be right back. I'm Kim Severson. I'm a national food correspondent for The New York Times. I'm going to try to convince you that you can tell the story of 20th-century America through one food item, and that is the M&M. The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Begins with Forrest Mars, who is the charismatic heir to the Mars empire. His dad, Frank, created the Milky Way bar in the 1920s. It is that Milky Ways are as wholesome and nourishing as they are in general. And so often. And as often happens, Forrest Mars became estranged from his father. He goes to Europe. He discovers that some of the British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War are eating these little chocolate balls covered in hard candy so they wouldn't melt in the heat. Sunny Spain, the garden of Europe. You know, at this point, selling chocolate in the summer in America was a challenge. So here we have Forrest Mars going, Aha! He brings this idea back to the U.S., but he didn't have a lot of chocolate. He didn't really have the raw material. So he partners with Bruce Murray, who's the son of a Hershey executive. So you have the first two Nepo babies, really, in candy in America, coming together, creating the M&M, 1941. When a soldier is out in the field and away from cat cooks, he must carry his own ration. The first contract he had was with the U.S. government in World War II. So all the soldiers are getting these little carton tubes of M&M's in their rations. They all come back. They're like, hey, love the M&M's. And so, boom, the M&M becomes very popular national candy. Because M&M's milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Almost crucially, M&M's is a great example of American marketing, too, right? So we all will remember, if you're over 40, melt in your mouth, not in your hand. Melt in your mouth, not in your hand. Melt in your mouth, not in your hand, sir. They were the first candy on the space shuttle. They opened that big M&M's store in 2006. And I think you'll remember, crucially, the M&M's spokes candies. Just your friendly neighborhood M&M's. Sit down. Of course, the red M&M and the yellow M&M were sort of the glitzy stars. And then we had Mrs. Brown, who had some heels on. She was kind of a corporate boss lady M&M. My shell is brown. It just looks like my milk chocolate is showing. Only a fool would think I'd actually. So at some point, Mrs. Brown got a makeover and the stiletto heels were replaced by a more sensible shoe, thus thrusting the M&M into the heart of America. America's culture wars. Which is that the brown M&M has, quote, transitioned from high stilettos to lower block heels. Also less sexy. That's progress. And then there was the purple M&M, which was kind of the inclusive M&M, if you will. This, of course, thrust the M&M even deeper into the culture wars. The company added obese and distinctly frumpy lesbian M&M's to promote, quote, feminism and body positivity. In other words, explain. And that was that. Something I think is really interesting that a lot of people don't know is that the M&M has had an outsized influence on American agriculture. Now there are two exciting candies to choose from. 1954, they decide to add the peanut M&M. And the new M&M's peanut chocolate candy. You know, the tricky thing about peanuts is they go rancid very quickly. The last thing you want to do is eat a rancid peanut M&M that will put you off M&M's for a long time, which the company realized. And so they've developed various kinds of peanuts to grow for their peanut M&M over the years. Georgia is the country's leading producer of peanuts, according to UGA's Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development. In the 2000s, the company worked with agriculture specialists at the University of Georgia to create the perfect peanut for the peanut M&M. The Georgia 09B. It's a high-yielding, high-olake, TSWV-resistant runner-type. So, you have this great ag story. M&M's, again, is a little bit in the news with our current Maha health movement. One of the big Make America Healthy Again tenants is to get rid of artificial dyes in food. And M&M's has been trying desperately to do that. They can reliably recreate the red and yellow with natural ingredients like tumerics and beets. Really difficult with the blue and the brown. So, you may be seeing weird, slightly less vibrant colored M&M's in your packs as they're trying to figure it out. But again, M&M's, the great American food story. Really, the story of American food is really the story of innovation and of money and of our incredible need to eat sweet things. *whistles* When I heard The Challenge, what is the most American book? When I was asked about the most American play. First, I panicked. I actually came up with ten plays. That would be August Wilson's Century Cycle. But then I chose the book The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoré Fanon Jeffers. My name is Helen Shaw. I'm the chief theater critic at The Times. I am M.J. Franklin. I'm an editor at The New York Times Book Review. In The America Cycle, Wilson sets each of the ten plays in each of the ten decades of the 20th century among a group of very loosely related families in the Hill District in Pittsburgh. The book weaves together two separate storylines. The first is about this girl growing up in the late 20th century. The second storyline is the story of her ancestors as they're living on the land that later becomes Georgia, that later becomes the America that we know and love today. Those two storylines converge, and as they converge, you really see how history, American history, is alive and present with us today. It still shapes how we live. It shapes our experiences. The past is not just the past, but it's something that's still present with us. And that's why I love it. All ten plays together make a really beautiful kind of statement about what August Wilson thought was happening with the African-American experience, what he thought Black culture was facing in the 20th century, and what sort of reparations it was capable of making in the spirit. There are all of these big, lofty, important ideas in it, but it is carried in this just delightful, compelling vehicle. That's the love songs of W.E.B. That is August Wilson's Century Cycle. I'm Alyssa Wilkinson, and I am a movie critic here at The New York Times. To me, the most American movie is Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 epic, There Will Be Blood. I drink your milkshake. I drink it up. Don't bully me, Daniel. There Will Be Blood is about an oil man named Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who is pushing out across, really, the West in order to do something about it. I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. And often in American westerns, we see that as kind of a positive thing, and it is inverting that trope. This man, he does pull it off. He becomes fabulously wealthy when we finally see him near the end of the film. He has built an incredible mansion. It has kind of famously a bowling alley in it, but he is absolutely miserable at the end of the film. You have none of me in you. You're just a bastard from a basket. And we see that all of his wealth did not insulate him from what actually happens often to people when they do become fabulously wealthy. I thank God I have none of you in me. So we see this kind of taking of this trope, that persists throughout the American imagination and flipping it on its head. It's a movie about capitalism, but in a kind of cynical way. It's a movie about the dangers of unfettered liberty. It's a movie about the pursuit of power, even above wealth. When you watch this movie, you can see parallels to questions about entrepreneurialism in the 21st century. I love it. I love it. You have a great chance here. But bear in mind, you can lose it all if you're not careful. Out of all men that beg for a chance. So it's not that all of everything about America is bad, but it is about when the ideals that sometimes are associated with the American project are taken to their final kind of end. The kind of idea of unfettered liberty, the unfettered pursuit of power, those things, are ultimately destructive, not just to a person's life. Mr. Daniel? But really to their soul. I'm finished. Hey, I'm Zachary Small, and I'm a culture reporter at The New York Times writing about everything from video games to fossils and art. My name is Elizabeth Vincentelli, and I write about culture for The New York Times. When you think of a video game that is trying to take in all of the weird complexities of American culture, there's no better choice than Grand Theft Auto. I think that the most American thing I've ever witnessed is a demolition derby. Grand Theft Auto is a series of games. The new one is coming out at the end of this year, and you're essentially plopped into some crime-ridden city in America, and you are a criminal. And you can. You can do whatever you want. Oh, you're a psycho, you know that? A demolition derby is when people get into an arena, and they ram into each other until there's one car left standing, as a matter of speaking. It's as American as South Park, as burlesque theater. It's shock and awe. It's P.T. Barnum. It's about mayhem, violence, chaos, and a lot of other things. I do find it incredibly thrilling, though. I have to say, my first one, I was screaming. I lost, I really lost my mind. There's some impulse to just really push the limits. Test the boundaries of what you can get away with, the mayhem. I do feel like that's very American. I think you can make the argument that there's no work of comedy that sums up a particular part of the American character better than Randy Newman's Political Science. I think you can make the argument that there's no work of comedy No one likes us, I don't know why We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we tried But all around, even our old friends put us down Let's drop the big one and see what happens This song is a jingoistic American advocating for bombing the world into smithereens smithereens. He's not saying we're going to bomb the world because of some grand plan or because of some ideology or because of some thought-out geopolitical reason. He's saying bomb the world because he's annoyed and mopey and let's just see what happens. This is not the anger of the underdog. This is the anger of the underdog. This is the resentment of a powerful who feels like the underdog. And that really feels like it captures where we are. We've been as a country for quite a long time. It's kind of a downer of an answer, I realize. What's more American than that? They all hate us anyhow So let's drop the big one now Let's drop the big one now We'll be right back. My name is Jason Farago and I'm one of the critics at large of the New York Times where I write principally about art, architecture, monuments and the way it all fits into the wider world. When I'm thinking about whether, whether one work of art could be called the most American, there's really one that immediately comes to mind and it's the Statue of Liberty. Really, even before she was fully erected, she was turned into, and I don't use the word lightly, an icon, an actual sort of visual representation of the United States as such. This French work of art that is, in my view, the most American work of art. You know, I went in for the first time, I think, certainly the first time I can remember in my life, just a couple of weeks ago, and the thinness of the copper. It's less than an eighth of an inch thick. And the armature designed by Gustave Eiffel of a tower you might know in Paris, holding her all up. And that malleability of the copper and the idea that there's this sort of extraordinary symbol that's also an empty shell. It's something that's very, very strong, but it's also vacant. You know, you could spend a lot of time with your therapist talking about how these contradictions might embody a certain American ideal and a certain ideal of liberty that I think goes wholly underestimated. I'm A.O. Scott. I'm a critic at large at the New York Times Book Review. To me, if I had to pick one poem as the most American poem, I think it would be Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by Walt Whitman. Floodtide below me, I see you face to face. Clouds of the west, sun half an hour high, I see you also face to face. This is the actor Jeffrey Wright reading Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me. On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds, that cross returning home are more curious to me than you suppose. And you, that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me and more in my meditations than you might suppose. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, he originally called it Sundown Poem, and it's a kind of a description of crossing over from Brooklyn to Manhattan, crossing the East River at sunset. But what makes it so vivid and interesting and so American in a way is that he uses this experience of basically a daily commute to meditate on a whole state of connection between the past, the present, and the future. What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years? Between us, whatever it is, it avails not. Distance avails not, and place avails not. I too lived. Brooklyn of ample hills was mine. I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island and bathed in the waters around it. But it's not all like sweetness and light. We're not necessarily all like great, wonderful people. I mean, we're talking about New York City, you know. It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall. The dark threw its patches down upon me also. The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious. The great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meager. Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil. I am he who knew what it was to be evil. So I love that passage because it's saying, like, it's not that we're all great people. One thing that we have in common is that we can be terrible. We're sort of, we're low and mean and jealous and lazy and all of these things. But that is also what makes us this great community, this great democracy. And I think, in a way, what he's saying is that if you have an idea that there's going to be democracy, that you're going to have a democratic way of living, it has to include that. It has to acknowledge that. That we're not angels. We're not perfect. And we have to, in some way, embrace, you know, our low as well as our high aspects. Gorgeous clouds of the sunset drenched with your splendor, me or the men and women generations after me. Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers. Stand up tall masts of Manhattan. Stand up beautiful hills of Brooklyn. It distills. It distills for me in a way that not many other literary works do. A kind of an idea of America as extending into the future. So there's this idea that America is a space and a community and an experience that's defined not by a shared past, but by a shared future. And that, to me, makes it kind of wonderfully and in a sort of utopian, democratic way, quintessentially America. Thrive, cities, bring your freight, bring your shows. Ample and sufficient rivers expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual. Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting. You have waited. You have waited. You always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers. We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward. Not you anymore shall be able to foil us or withhold yourselves from us. We use you and do not cast you aside. We plant you permanently within us. We fathom you not. We love you. There is perfection in you also. You furnish your parts toward eternity, great or small. You furnish your parts toward the soul. My name is Gia Corliss, and I'm the dance critic at The New York Times. I think dance. has more pieces about America than I even realized. Two of the most American dance pieces are Stars and Stripes by George Balanchine, 1958, and Appalachian Spring by Martha Graham, 1944. Appalachian Spring, it's set to music by Aaron Copland, which is. I know that there's another Aaron Copland score in this presentation, but Aaron Copland is worth mentioning twice, and many more times. And it's about a frontier couple, and they're starting their life together. Stars and Stripes is set to Sousa music, as arranged by Hershey Kay. Stars and Stripes, you know, they're baton-twirling majorettes, and there's a huge flag that rises. It rises from the floor at the end of the ballet. It's kind of crazy. The dancing is technical. It's classical ballet. It's like making this. putting this serious art form on top of this subject. I don't know that he was making fun of America, but while also loving it. And Graham was like. She was showing what America is, and showing what an American artist makes, and why they make it, and why that is important. I think, you know, they're both dances about optimism and hope, and keeping the faith with your eyes wide open. They see things for what they are. And I think that, you know, being funny and serious at the same time is really healthy. They're very American. ♪ ♪ I'm John Caramonica. I'm a pop music critic at The New York Times and the co-host of PopCast, our pop culture talk show. Um, when presented with the absurdist project to identify the most American pop song, immediately I thought of all the easy outs there could be. Uh, it could be a Jay-Z song, ♪ ♪ a Paul Simon song, ♪ ♪ hell, a Barry Manilow song. ♪ ♪ And I realized pretty quickly that none of those were correct, because those reflect ideas about America that I think we often wish about ourselves, but it may not reflect the actual mess of the country that we live in. So, I picked a song called "Trump, Trump, ♪ ♪ Baby ♪ by a Florida rapper named Forgiato Blow. ♪ ♪ Forgiato Blow refers to himself as the mayor of Magaville. He's a white rapper. He is an avowed Make America Great Again cheerleader. ♪ ♪ This song came out in July of 2024, a few months before Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House. White House. Look, I don't know if this song is good. It's probably not. But this is something that could only exist in the current version of America that we have. This is an, I believe, accurate reflection of a certain segment of how this country views culture and politics. That's the version of America that I felt needed to be talked about. God, I trust to take the devil away, lock Joe Biden up and throw the key away. I often find that of all the cultural forms, all the medium, film, television, things happen the fastest in music. You see little tweaks and changes in the culture first in a pop song. There are things happening in these spaces that are discomforting and maybe radical. They may be hard to listen to, but we can't afford to ignore them. In summation, I want to say, yes, I understand the spiritual gap between listening to a pop song and listening to a pop song. I understand the spiritual gap between listening to a pop song and listening to a pop song. It contains music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Chris Wood, and was engineered by Sophia Landman. And somehow, shocker, makes no mention of Billy Joel. That's it for the Sunday Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow. I'm Michael Bilboro. I'm Michael Bilboro. I'm Michael Bilboro. I'm Michael Bilboro.