2024-11-23 07:09:00
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J.Crew has 2.7 million followers on Instagram, and more than 300,000 on X. But earlier this fall, it announced that it was trying to reach prospective customers the old-fashioned way: by reviving its print catalog. In 2024, everyone shops online. But in recent years, some retailers have returned to the catalog as a way to attempt to grab a bit more of shoppers’ coveted attention. People can and do scroll past the endless stream of marketing emails and digital ads on their phone. But completely ignoring a catalog that appears on your stoop or in your mailbox is tougher. Simply put, you have to pick it up, even if you are planning to throw it in the recycling bin—and brands hope that you might flip through some glossy photos along the way.
Catalogs’ heyday came before the financial crisis—but they never fully went away, and billions have been sent to American consumers every year since. The catalogs of 2024, in part a nostalgia play for those who grew up with the trend, are generally sent to targeted lists of customers who have either shopped with a brand in the past or are deemed plausible future buyers. Some retailers are maintaining what they’ve always done: Neiman Marcus, for example, continues to send a catalog, even as some of its peers have stopped. Both traditional and digital-first companies use catalogs: Amazon has issued a toy catalog since 2018. Brands have started playing with the format too, taking the concept beyond a straightforward list of products: Patagonia puts out a catalog that it calls a “bona fide journal,” featuring “stories and photographs” from contributors. Many of these catalogs don’t even include information about pricing; shoppers have to go to the website for that.
Amanda Mull, writing in The Atlantic in early 2020, foretold a new golden era of catalogs—brands at the time were becoming “more desperate to find ways to sell their stuff without tithing to the tech behemoths.” Since then, the pandemic has only turbocharged consumers’ feelings of overwhelm with online shopping. Immediate purchase is not necessarily the goal; these catalogs are aiming to build a relationship that might lead to future orders, Jonathan Zhang, a marketing professor at Colorado State University, told me. The return on investment for companies is pretty good, Zhang has found, especially because more sophisticated targeting and measurement means that brands aren’t spending time appealing to people who would never be interested (this also means that less paper is wasted than in the free-for-all mailer days, he noted).
With catalogs, brands are supplementing, not replacing, e-commerce: Zhang’s experiments with an e-commerce retailer found that over a period of six months starting in late 2020, people who received both catalogs and marketing emails from a retailer made 24 percent more purchases than those who received only the emails. A spokesperson for J.Crew told me that following the catalog relaunch, the brand saw a nearly 20 percent rise in reactivated customers, adding that this fall, 11 percent more consumers had a positive impression of the J.Crew brand compared with last year. E-commerce is the undeniable center of shopping in 2024, so brands are finding creative ways to use in-person methods to build on its success—including, as I’ve written, reimagining the brick-and-mortar store.
A well-designed catalog may appeal to some of the same sensory instincts that enchant die-hard in-person shoppers. Catalogs work especially well for certain types of products: Zhang said that “hedonic” categories of goods—luxury clothing, perfumes, vacation packages, chocolate—are some of the best fits for stories and photos in a print format. (I smile when I think of Elaine taking this type of luxury marketing to parody levels in her stint running a catalog on Seinfeld.) Zhang himself has been wooed by such a campaign: Around February of this year, he received a mailer from a cruise company (one he had never interacted with in the past). He spent a few minutes flipping through. In August, when he started thinking about planning a winter vacation for his family, he remembered the catalog and visited the company’s website. “That few minutes was long enough for me to kind of encode this information in my memory,” he said. He decided to book a trip.
The catalog has moved forward in fits and starts: 30 years ago, they were the central way to market a product directly to consumers. Then the pendulum swung hard toward online ads. Now we may start to see more of a balance between the two. Some of us would rather turn away from advertising altogether. But if brands are going to find us anyway, print catalogs could add a little more texture to the experience of commerce.
Related:
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Evening Read
Gladiator II Is More Than Just a Spectacle
By Shirley Li
Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Are you not entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus goaded the crowd in a memorably rousing scene. We really were: Here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.
For Gladiator II, now in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it a step further.
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Culture Break
Watch. Say Nothing (streaming on Hulu) captures the struggle of separating who you are from what you fight for.
Debate. Jake Paul is an emblem of a generation starving for purpose while gorging on spectacle, Spencer Kornhaber writes.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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2024-11-23 03:09:00
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.
Earlier this week, The Atlantic published a new investigation by Alex Reisner into the data that are being used without permission to train generative-AI programs. In this case, dialogue from tens of thousands of movies and TV shows has been harvested by companies such as Apple, Anthropic, Meta, and Nvidia to develop large language models (or LLMs).
The data have a strange provenance: Rather than being pulled from scripts or books, the dialogue is taken from subtitle files that have been extracted from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and internet streams. “Though this may seem like a strange source for AI-training data, subtitles are valuable because they’re a raw form of written dialogue,” Reisner writes. “They contain the rhythms and styles of spoken conversation and allow tech companies to expand generative AI’s repertoire beyond academic texts, journalism, and novels, all of which have also been used to train these programs.”
Perhaps it no longer comes as a major shock that creative humans are having their work ripped off to train machines that threaten to replace them. But evidence demonstrating exactly what data have been used, and for what purposes, is hard to come by, thanks to the secretive nature of these tech companies. “Now, at least, we know a bit more about who is caught in the machinery,” Reisner writes. “What will the world decide they are owed?”
There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI
By Alex Reisner
For as long as generative-AI chatbots have been on the internet, Hollywood writers have wondered if their work has been used to train them. The chatbots are remarkably fluent with movie references, and companies seem to be training them on all available sources. One screenwriter recently told me he’s seen generative AI reproduce close imitations of The Godfather and the 1980s TV show Alf, but he had no way to prove that a program had been trained on such material.
I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies. I recently downloaded this data set, which I saw referenced in papers about the development of various large language models (or LLMs). It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. It even includes prewritten “live” dialogue from Golden Globes and Academy Awards broadcasts. If a chatbot can mimic a crime-show mobster or a sitcom alien—or, more pressingly, if it can piece together whole shows that might otherwise require a room of writers—data like this are part of the reason why.
What to Read Next
2024-11-23 02:39:33
Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Are you not entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus goaded the crowd in a memorably rousing scene. We really were: Here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.
For Gladiator II, now in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it a step further. The sequel has twice as many heroes to root for and twice as many emperors to root against, plus a wild card in the form of Denzel Washington’s conniving arms dealer, Macrinus. In lieu of tigers, battles in the arena now involve a menagerie of baboons, sharks, and a rhino. Even the opening credits have been designed to excite the audience: Key scenes from the previous film are animated in a painterly sequence, which lands on a title card that stylizes the sequel’s name as, gloriously, GLADIIATOR. It’s so grandiose, the audience at my screening started applauding before a single fight had begun.
[Read: Are we having too much fun?]
Set 16 years after the events of Gladiator, the sequel follows Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role). Lucilla secretly sent the young Lucius away to the kingdom of Numidia for his protection after Maximus’s death. In the years since, a lot has happened, which we learn through overly ornate flashbacks and exposition. Lucius has come to resent his homeland and his mother, given their time apart. That resentment grows into rage after Roman forces, led by Lucilla’s new husband, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), conquer Numidia in an opening battle that leads to Lucius’s wife’s death. In Rome, meanwhile, a pair of snotty brothers named Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) have become co-emperors. Their reckless leadership has inspired a resistance led by Lucilla and Acacius, and turned the city into fertile ground for the rise of opportunistic power players such as Macrinus.
The plot, packed with so many shadowy conspiracies and cunning characters, is far less straightforward than the one in Gladiator, to its detriment. But amid the bloat, Scott homes in on how the cycle of ambition and retribution can be hard to break. Bloodshed is the cause and effect of every twist in the story, the reason behind Rome’s tumult and the apparent solution to its woes. Violence demands the spotlight, and Gladiator II draws tension from the fact that many of its characters can’t escape their attraction to brutality. In Scott’s hands, ancient Rome has never been more ruthless—or more exhilarating to watch.
The director is a master at pulling elegance out of rough-and-tumble set pieces. During the assault on Lucius’s home, embers swirl like snow, flecks of water and mud smack into the camera lens, and every strike of a sword or blow of a fist lands with primal intensity. Inside the Colosseum, despite the noticeably heavy use of CGI, Scott finds striking images in the chaos: A pool of blood blossoms underwater. An arrow zips across the field. A gladiator tosses sand into the air. These shots are mesmerizing for the viewer, and convey the strange allure of battle for the combatants themselves.
These energetic fight scenes are matched by a collection of flashy performances, with those playing the villains stealing the show. Mescal and Pascal embody their roles’ gravitas and become almost feral when they’re forced into the Colosseum. But Quinn and Hechinger have much more fun leaning into their characters’ boyish petulance, echoing Joaquin Phoenix’s work as the man-child emperor, Commodus, from Gladiator. Washington, however, runs away with the movie: Armed with a Cheshire-cat grin, heaps of jewelry, and seemingly limitless glasses of wine, Macrinus toys with Rome like it’s a massive chessboard full of pawns, and the actor embraces the script’s numerous swerves. He imbues the character with an infectious glee in every scene, whether he’s cheering on the men cutting one another down inside the arena or quietly attempting to manipulate Lucius into doing his bidding.
For all the fun it’s having, Gladiator II does require a working knowledge of its predecessor’s story to understand the stakes, which also means it magnifies the original film’s flaws. The characters are more thinly drawn, with shallow motivations in spite of the plot’s contrivances. The dialogue is more stilted, packed with pat observations about the “dream of Rome” in the face of an empire that repeatedly fails to learn its lesson. And the ending puts forth the vague notion that Rome’s future relies on unifying its people—an earnest sentiment, maybe, but a rather dull conclusion to reach after two hours of savagery.
Then again, Gladiator II doesn’t claim to offer anything more than pure spectacle. The finale gestures at the idea that hope is its own form of power, but even Lucius admits to its limits as a peacekeeping force. “You look to me to speak,” Lucius says as he addresses opposing armies about to fight. “I know not what to say.” Maybe Macrinus, who believes that Rome is doomed to brutality and bloodshed, has a point when he asserts that violence is “the universal language.” After all, to borrow a revered gladiator’s words, it’s undeniably entertaining.
2024-11-23 02:29:29
Matt Gaetz’s nomination to serve as attorney general lasted just more than a week. For Donald Trump to have selected him in the first place was shocking, not only because of Gaetz’s total lack of law-enforcement experience but also because, until recently, he had been under investigation for sex trafficking by the same department that he was now being tapped to lead. By yesterday, it had become apparent that these allegations were too serious for his nomination to move forward, and he announced that he had withdrawn from consideration. It may be, according to The New York Times, “the earliest such failed cabinet pick in modern history.”
One can imagine the president-elect’s team breathing a sigh of relief at dodging a confirmation hearing likely focused on such a toxic sex-abuse scandal. But Gaetz was not the only troubled nominee. Of the spree of selections that Trump has so far unveiled for his incoming Cabinet, two others—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth—have been accused of sexual harassment or assault, and another—Linda McMahon—has been named in a lawsuit alleging that she enabled sexual abuse. (All, including Gaetz, have denied the allegations.)
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, for one Cabinet nominee to be accused of sexual impropriety may be regarded as misfortune. For two Cabinet nominees to be thus accused looks like carelessness. For four—well, that moves beyond carelessness into outright malice.
[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump’s most dangerous cabinet pick]
The existence of allegations against Gaetz was not a secret. Last year, the Justice Department quietly wrapped up an investigation into whether the then-representative had broken federal sex-trafficking laws by paying women—including, reportedly, a 17-year-old girl—for sex. That probe did not result in any charges, but the House Ethics Committee has been working to compile its own report on Gaetz’s conduct; the committee has so far declined to make the report public, but details from it began dribbling out to the press following Gaetz’s nomination. A document published by The New York Times, which the paper reports was produced by the Justice Department and provided to the committee, maps a spiderweb of Venmo payments—some in the thousands of dollars—connecting Gaetz, male associates, and a network of women.
Also not secret were the allegations against Kennedy, Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, who was accused this past summer of allegedly groping his children’s young nanny in 1999, and Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, who was named in a lawsuit filed last month as allegedly enabling the sexual abuse of young teenagers during her time as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. Most disturbing, however, may be the case of the Fox News host Hegseth, named by Trump as the incoming secretary of defense despite having been identified as unqualified for far more junior positions during Trump’s 2016 campaign. After Trump selected Hegseth last week, The Washington Post reported on the existence of a legal settlement over a 2017 rape allegation against the nominee.
The underlying police report, published by Mediaite, makes for a grim read. Hegseth’s accuser describes speaking with him at a bar during a conference held by the California Federation of Republican Women; according to a memo to the Trump transition team reported on by The Washington Post, her husband and young children were staying with her at the same hotel. Somehow—she did not remember how—she ended up in an “unknown room” with Hegseth, who, she told police, blocked her from leaving. Hegseth agreed that the two had had sex, but he told police that the interaction had been consensual. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump transition team was “blindsided” by the allegations.
In a previous political era, a president-elect might have rushed to avoid association with this kind of behavior. But this is Trump, who has himself been accused by 27 women of sexual misconduct. In May 2023, he was held liable in civil court for sexual abuse against the writer E. Jean Carroll. (He has denied all accusations.) This past spring, a New York jury found him guilty of orchestrating an illegal hush-money scheme shadowed by uneasy dynamics of sexual power and consent. As the 2024 campaign wore on, Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator J. D. Vance, leaned on ever more explicit misogyny as a campaign strategy, courting young men while attacking single and childless women. On Election Night, the far-right influencer Nick Fuentes went viral with an X post reading “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
[David A. Graham: Trump 2.0 is already stooping lower]
Allegations of violence and impropriety in Trump’s Cabinet, too, are nothing new: In 2017, Andrew Puzder, his pick to lead the Department of Labor, backed out of consideration after accusations surfaced of past domestic abuse. Over the course of a single week in February 2018, two of Trump’s top aides resigned after disturbing allegations of physical abuse surfaced against them from their respective ex-wives. (Each of these three men denied the allegations against him; Puzder’s ex-wife later said she regretted the allegations in a letter to senators regarding her former husband’s confirmation.) And, of course, there was the bitter confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court despite credible sexual-assault allegations against him.
Still, the choice to begin a new administration with this particular slate of picks represents a remarkable commitment to moral ugliness. It’s as if Trump looked back at the Kavanaugh confirmation and viewed it not as regrettable, but as a model for what to do next. Gaetz will not get his hearing, but the others might. And if there’s something Trump loves, it’s watching television.
2024-11-23 01:45:00
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
A 16-year-old girl may be wise, funny, well educated, and ambitious, and she can probably hold her own in conversation. She may have reached her adult height and shoe size. By this point in her life, she has probably read books or heard songs that will make a permanent mark on her. She may have had sex or fallen in love; she may be dead serious, and be determined to be taken seriously. But a 16-year-old girl is still a child.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
On Wednesday, Vanity Fair published a profile of Augusta Britt, a woman the author calls the “secret muse” of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died last year. According to Britt, McCarthy was 42 when they met in 1976; she was 16, a runaway fleeing an abusive childhood. She tells Vanity Fair’s Vincenzo Barney that McCarthy ferried her across the border to Mexico, forged her birth certificate, and began a sexual affair with her. Britt is adamant that their relationship was consensual: “It all felt right. It felt good … I loved him. He was my safety.” But McCarthy also used her experiences in his novels, she alleges, conjuring and then killing off characters based on her. “I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about,” she says. “I felt kind of violated.”
Girls have long been asked to grow up quickly. Reading about Britt made me think of an article my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote this week, about Cher’s self-titled memoir (the first half of a promised duology). This volume follows her from birth to 1980, dealing in large part with her unstable childhood—which was marked by abuse, deprivation, and frequent moves around the country—and her scrappy rise to fame. At 15, she was in Los Angeles cavorting with movie stars such as Warren Beatty. At 16, she writes, she met the 27-year-old Sonny Bono. When she became homeless, she moved in with him, initially as a friend. “One day, he kissed her, and that was that,” Gilbert writes. The entity known as Sonny & Cher was born. He would be her husband and creative partner for the next decade, and they’d be divorced before she was 30.
Cher’s book is a valuable document of a young girl thrust into the adult world. Her current perspective, at 78, allows for frank assessments of difficult situations: Cher’s grandmother Lynda gave birth to her mother, Jackie Jean, at 13; Jackie Jean married Cher’s father, Johnnie, at 19 and immediately regretted it. Her daughter finds no romance in their union. “Gullible and trapped, my mother was living at a time when women had little or no support from society, so, seeing no other way out, she went back to Johnnie even though she claimed she never loved or trusted him,” Cher writes. (Johnnie would later run off without a word.) A boyfriend of her mother’s professed his love for Cher. “It was a shockingly inappropriate statement on any level,” she writes, “but especially since I was only fourteen.”
For all her keen hindsight, Cher’s writing about her life as a teenager is imbued with authentically teenage feelings. Her awkwardness and fears are on the page alongside the effervescent highs of first crushes and successes. When they moved in together, she says, “Sonny and I became more like a brother and sister, or perhaps more accurately a father and daughter, because I was the insecure kid full of phobias, the teenager who didn’t like silence and couldn’t get to sleep unless the television was on.” When her mother found out she was living with Bono and demanded she return home, Cher was “certain that I’d be grounded until I was fifty and never see Sonny again.”
These passages make the reader feel close to the adolescent Cher. They also emphasize just how young she was, despite her talent and savvy, and how much she was up against. “I’m hard-pressed to think of another celebrity author so insistent on dispensing with rose-tinted reminiscences,” Gilbert writes. “Cher wants you to know that for most people—and absolutely for most women—the 20th century was no cakewalk.” Even as she admits that she genuinely loved Bono, she details his cruelties. He mistreated her domestically (controlling her; acting out when jealous) and professionally (he let hundreds of thousands of dollars of back taxes pile up; he owned 95 percent of “Cher Enterprises” while his lawyer took the remaining 5 percent).
What strikes me most is how much time separates Cher’s career highs from her teenage years—and the unique perspective that time affords her. The events she’s recalling occurred a lifetime ago. Her book ends before she wins an Oscar for Moonstruck, before she releases “If I Could Turn Back Time,” before the success of Believe, and long before her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. Looking back, Cher sagely understands that her 16-year-old self, meeting Bono for the first time, still had so much life in front of her—so many honors, relationships, stumbling blocks, and milestones were yet to come. The same is true of any 16-year-old girl.
Cher Has a History Lesson for Us All
By Sophie Gilbert
The singer has long stood for a brassy, strutting kind of survival. Her new account of her early life explains how that came to be.
Break It Down, by Lydia Davis
Davis is a master of the very short story, and the collection that made her name, Break It Down, includes such works as the four-sentence “What She Knew,” where an insecure young woman tries to understand why men are flirting with her, and the six-sentence “The Fish,” where a woman confronts “certain irrevocable mistakes” in her life, including the dinner she’s cooked for herself. These nimble, acrobatic shorts—which established her as a formidable figure in American literature—are contrasted by longer stories that showcase Davis’s dry humor and keen emotional insight. In “The Letter,” a woman sits through a long-awaited breakup conversation: “Right away she lost her appetite, but he ate very well and ate her dinner too.” And the title story is a cathartic, sensitive look at the cost of a failed relationship: “You’re left with this large heavy pain in you,” a man mourning a lost love reflects, “that you try to numb by reading.” Davis’s stories plunge directly into the hurt of everyday life, leaving the reader both comforted and entertained. — Celine Nguyen
From our list: What to read when you have only half an hour
📚 A Town Without Time, by Gay Talese
📚 Private Rites, by Julia Armfield
How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character
By Shirley Li
“You don’t want to be in a box, but at the same time, when you’re first starting, it’s easy to just be like, ‘Hey, I’m an Asian actor. Call me if you need an Asian actor,’ ” he said. Even after landing his guest role on Silicon Valley, he put his earnings into a used car he could drive for Uber, to make a little more cash.
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