Since its première, in 2022, “Slow Horses”—Apple TV’s fast-paced espionage drama about a division of MI5 where the screwups and sluggards end up—has become “a treasure to those in the know, and a nonentity to outsiders,” Inkoo Kang writes. The show, starring Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden, boasts nearly two dozen Emmy nominations, and a few wins, but has never reached the breakout status of “Ted Lasso” or “Severance.” Read why Kang thinks the underrated program is the best on Apple TV:newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Eo…

“Sitzfleisch” is a German word that refers to the ability to sit still for a long time. It’s understandable why this is a valuable skill;  in schoolrooms and offices around the world, there are worksheets and spreadsheets to be done. Because there are so many reasons to try to repress our nervous energy, it’s no surprise that there’s a big-time campaign against mind drift. “But it’s worth noting that sitting still and doing just one thing for a long time is, in many respects, at odds with the essential nature of the human mind,” Joshua Rothman writes. Read more about what our fidgeting reveals: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/yQ…

Yiyun Li’s sixth novel, “Music Against the Night,” takes up the lives of two 18th-century musicians: John Field and his wife, Adelaide Percheron. It is to be the first in a trilogy of novels about Field and Percheron, a set of books that will likely be called historical novels. “In one sense that would be right,” Li writes. But another notion occupies her mind: that of what constitutes “the past” and what constitutes “now.” “I think that is my aspiration—not to write historical novels or autobiographical novels but to write to carry the past, and to bring its figures as close to the present as possible,” Li continues. Read Li’s reflection on encountering the past through her writing while being bound to the present through her living: newyorker.com/books/page-tur…

Whatever book you pick up, it’s likely to make you feel better—maybe even a whole lot better. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Ceridwen Dovey writes, in “Can Reading Make You Happier?,” which was published in 2015. Dive into the research behind the therapeutic effect of books: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Wv…