Dear Wags,

People sometimes ask why we intersperse coverage of the Emmy Awards with musings about Central Asia. We promised you Culture — High, Medium, and Deliciously Low — and believe in truth in advertising. This newsletter was founded on a dangerous assumption, which is that human beings are both fun and smart. We believe you can love the tune Pink Pony Club and be curious about NATO.

That’s the opposite of what a good algorithm would feed you. The editorial term for this is meshugah. When we stray off the Hollywood pitch, some readers are delighted and a few are perplexed. Wouldn’t it be easier to snark about the Hawk Tuah girl?

We didn’t agree with our old neighbor, Andrew Breitbart, about much, but he was correct when he said that all politics are downstream from culture. The fraught world we share is still shaped by ideas. Our distractions say loads about who we are and where we’re headed. So, what we (still) read, watch, and listen to rather matters. The unending fragmentation of contemporary life—which most people bemoan but feel powerless to stop—often feels like a war on civilizational coherence. Who are we really, without the values embedded in shared popular culture?

A fantasy of libertarian tech lords is that we can thrive as disembodied individuals, having whims met by an increasingly bespoke digital interface. In this exchange, there is no need for expired human definitions of culture, among other trifles. Yet we remain animals, and highly social ones at that, driven by the same base imperatives. We now use technological innovation to gratify them.

The ugliness of the past decade suggests that we don’t do so well unmoored from imperfect human-made institutions. If they can’t be saved, we’re likely to impose less forgiving forms of order upon ourselves. We bang on about personal freedom, but crave control over the tangible. Without venerable guardrails, brutes seize what they want. They prefer the grapple to poetry about higher values.

Geopolitically, there are consequences. Too many leaders have adopted the Zuckerburgian credo of move fast and break things. In particular, it’s a boon to those who like to break people. We’ve written about Evan Gershkovich, who was freed on August 1, after 500 days of Russian imprisonment. Liberated with him were Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, U.S. security expert Paul Whelan, human rights activist Oleg Orlov, and numerous political dissidents.

In exchange, Western countries released Russians imprisoned for espionage and other crimes; the most prominent being Vadim Krasikov, the hitman who murdered Chechen exile Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin. That happened in broad daylight, surely with the knowledge that there would one day be a hand-off. Indeed there was—the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War.

The release of unjustly held prisoners, after torturous negotiation with an adversary, is a thing to celebrate. Still, it speaks to a disturbing trend: Authoritarians regularly imprison foreign nationals to gain leverage against Western democracies. Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter and an associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that in the past eight years, the number of U.S. citizens held hostage by states rose by more than 500 percent. There’s some dispute about definitions, but somewhere between 45 and 60 Americans are wrongfully detained.

It’s an old brute’s gambit. Like terrorists, tyrants, sneer at the civilization’s rules and make up their own. Rezaian spent 544 days unjustly imprisoned in Iran, which routinely commits this sort of extortion. Journalists are particularly vulnerable to state hostage-taking, but any foreigner in unfriendly territory is vulnerable. Such crimes shake down democracies and subvert global humanitarian values. Rezaian is part of a bipartisan commission exploring ways to stop it.

We must embrace those delivered from captivity, and remember who gets left behind. “I spent a month in prison in Yekaterinburg where everyone I sat with was a political prisoner,” Gershkovich said upon returning home. “Nobody knows them publicly… I would potentially like to see if we could do something about them as well.”

That impulse speaks to the best in us. The history of our species has never been merely a succession of self-serving deals. There’s a more powerful story we tell ourselves, embedded in the culture we used to share. Humanity is distinguished not by a depressing selfishness, but the novel capacity to care.

Yours Ever,

Marvel still has juice. ‘Nuff said.

When you are a juggernaut, people tend to resent you. Ask Tom Brady. But Deadpool vs. Wolverine keeps crushing records, despite all the pencil necks who said Marvel was a spent cultural force. The picture had a $211 million opening, the sixth largest total ever, and the biggest ever for an R-rated movie—domestically or globally. After this weekend, it will have earned close to $400 million in the U.S. alone. Worldwide numbers are just as boffo. The blockbuster is gunning to pass Inside Out 2, which made more than $1 billion, as the year’s top grossing film.