When Hurricane Helene knocked out the power in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Friday, Dustin Baker, like many other people across the Southeast, turned to a backup power source. His just happened to be an electric pickup truck. Over the weekend, Baker ran extension cords from the back of his Ford F-150 Lightning, using the truck’s battery to keep his refrigerator and freezer running. It worked so well that Baker became an energy Good Samaritan. “I ran another extension cord to my neighbor so they could run two refrigerators they have,” he told me.

Americans in the heart of hurricane territory have long kept diesel-powered generators as a way of life, but electric cars are a leap forward. An EV, at its most fundamental level, is just a big battery on wheels that can be used to power anything, not just the car itself. Some EVs pack enough juice to power a whole home for several days, or a few appliances for even longer. In the aftermath of Helene, as millions of Americans were left without power, many EV owners did just that. A vet clinic that had lost power used an electric F-150 to keep its medicines cold and continue seeing patients during the blackout. One Tesla Cybertruck owner used his car to power his home after his entire neighborhood lost power.

This feature, known as bidirectional charging, has been largely invisible during America’s ramp-up to electric driving. Many of the most popular EVs in the United States, such as Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3, don’t have it. “It just wasn’t a priority at the time,” a Tesla executive said last year about why the cars lack the feature, though the newly released Cybertruck has bidirectional charging and the company plans to introduce it into its other vehicles in 2025. Bidirectional charging is hardly perfect: Connecting your car to your home requires thousands of dollars of expensive add-on infrastructure and might require pricey upgrades to run extra wiring or upgrade an electrical panel. The Ford Charge Station Pro, which connects the all-electric Ford F-150 to the home’s electricity system, costs about $1,300.

But Hurricane Helene is revealing the enormous potential of bidirectional charging. A new EV doesn’t come cheap, of course, but it has plenty of clear upside over a traditional generator. The latter usually burns diesel, giving off fumes that can kill people who don’t realize that it needs to be kept outdoors; an EV sits silently in the garage, producing zero emissions as it conquers a power outage, even a lengthy one. “I lost a total of about 7 percent of my capacity,” Baker said. “Doing the math, I estimated I could get almost 2 weeks of running my freezer and refrigerator.” Plus, there’s no need to join the hurricane rush to the gas station if your vehicle runs on electricity. In Asheville, which has been especially devastated by flooding, residents have struggled to find gas for their cars.

This resiliency in case of power outages was a major reason Jamie Courtney, who lives in Prairieville, Louisiana, decided to go electric. When Hurricane Francine slammed Louisiana last month, Courtney hadn’t yet connected his Tesla Cybertruck to his home power supply. So, like Baker, he MacGyvered a fix: Courtney ran cords from the outlets located in the truck’s bed into his house to power a variety of appliances during a blackout. “We were able to run my internet router and TV, [plus] lamps, refrigerator, a window AC unit, and fans, as well as several phone, watch, and laptop chargers,” he told me. Over the course of about 24 hours, he said, all of this activity ran his Cybertruck battery down from 99 percent to 80 percent.

As a new generation of EVs (including Teslas) comes standard with bidirectional charging, the feature may become a big part of the pitch for going electric. From a consumer’s point of view, energy has always moved in one direction. People buy gasoline from the service station and burn it; they buy electricity from the power company and use it. But in an electrified world in which cars, stoves, and heating systems run on electricity rather than on fossil fuels, ordinary people can be more than passive consumers of energy. Two-way charging is not just helpful during hurricanes—you might also use some of the energy to run a stereo or power tools by plugging them into the power outlets in the truck’s bed. People have even used EV pickup trucks to power their football tailgates.

Bidirectional charging may prove to be the secret weapon that sells electrification to the South, which has generally remained far behind the West and the Northeast in electric-vehicle purchases. If EVs become widely seen as the best option for blackouts, they could entice not just the climate conscious but also the suburban dads in hurricane country with a core belief in prepping for anything. It will take a lot to overcome the widespread distrust of EVs and anxiety about a new technology, but our loathing of power outages just might do the trick.

It may take years to recover from all of the damage caused by last week’s Hurricane Helene landfall. Flooding and high winds conspired to down trees and power lines and tear up concrete and asphalt, making the thoroughfares that the people of the region rely on impassable. Over the weekend reports from North Carolina…

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The last text message I received on Friday morning from Josh, a close friend since kindergarten, read: “I just had to wade in waist deep water to rescue my dog. Everything I own is ruined. I’m a bit emotional. Sorry. I need a min.”

Cell service dropped. Wi-Fi signal disappeared.

Josh lives 12 minutes from my house, which is near Cherokee, North Carolina. That short stretch of land and water between us made all the difference this week. Scotts Creek, which runs right by Josh’s house and is usually benign enough, swelled and formed a deadly confluence with the Tuckasegee River. And Dillsboro, his tiny community, just a few blocks in total, was submerged beneath the floodwaters that Hurricane Helene induced.

I was on the mountain, and my friend was in the valley.

I’d promised myself I would never be here again—caught in a 100-, maybe 1,000-year flood. This time, I was far from my eastern-Kentucky friends and their scarred banks, still mending from the devastating flood of 2022. These western–North Carolina highlands, largely protected from extensive mining extraction, would protect me and the others who call them home.

And from my front porch, these mountains of my home did hold. These river banks were true. These creeks culled most swells. They kept my promise. My front yard today does not look like the ones I drove past in 2022 as I fled Hindman, Kentucky, a hazy dawn lighting my way on that late-July morning.

What I can’t quite reckon with is that my neighbors’ yards do. Twelve minutes down the road. An hour east, in Asheville. Or just a bit farther, in Boone and most of the communities in between. Sporadic pictures filtering through spotty Wi-Fi service look remarkably similar to the calls for help from two years ago in the Bluegrass State. Death tolls climb. Even in Cherokee, people are making runs on gas. Boil-water advisories are in effect regionally. Friends can’t locate family.

My promise might have helped quell my fears. But promises are premised on what has come before, on what seems reasonable and possible. In Cherokee, we have become accustomed to hearing the phrase for over 10,000 years, in commercials and museum exhibits explaining to tourists how long we, Cherokee people, have existed in our homelands. How many 100-year floods and 1,000-year floods has this land seen in that time? Whatever math governs that past does not hold in this new era, in which I can live more than 40 years without experiencing a natural disaster, and then live through two cataclysmic floods within two years.

On the morning of Thursday, September 26, 2024, I was in Asheville, and the rain had already begun. I learned from my Kentucky experience that I needed to have groceries at home, and water, maps, rubber boots, and a full gas tank in my car. I also knew that I should stop by Biltmore Village to pick up my son’s suit for his high-school homecoming. Yes, I was still imagining that he could escort his friend onto the football field in a few days, maybe even attend the dance. Even as I prepared for a flood, I was sure that I would not have to survive another one.

Biltmore Village is notorious for flooding even under mild rainy conditions, and when I arrived, part of the shopping area was already blocked off. I waited for the store to open; the rain continued to steadily fall. I watched a video on my phone, supposedly from the previous evening, of a car attempting to drive through floodwater just beyond the barricade I could see from my back window. I checked the weather maps again. I decided that my son wasn’t going to need a suit anytime soon.

I drove home thinking about how most people in western North Carolina had not seen the mattresses hanging from trees or known the people stranded on the other side of a creek by a washed-out bridge, as I had two summers ago. They hadn’t smelled the gasoline in the air and watched boats float down KY 160. I drove home unsettled by the thought that I would soon be comparing catastrophic flood experiences.

I texted Josh and told him that he should leave—come stay with me. Bring his dog. I knew the Scotts Creek he saw from his porch in Dillsboro might be calm still, but I also knew how troublesome a creek can become. He assured me that he wasn’t worried.

As I drove, I held on to the promise of these mountains. That, unlike many in eastern Kentucky, they had not been lopped off for strip-mining by coal companies, the lack of vegetation allowing walls of water to cascade down them unrestricted; they did not contain coal-slurry ponds teetering on the brink of collapse, spilling into the hollers below. Yet, in my rearview on Interstate 40 and Route 74, I could see summer homes wedged into mountain slopes like Jenga pieces and far more economically fashioned homes dotting would-be floodplains. Creeks here don’t rise like that, I assured myself. They don’t wipe out western–North Carolina communities. In the back of my mind was an image of Canton, North Carolina, underwater in 2021. Rare. Isolated.

When the rain became mist and the world grayed into silence the day after losing all communication, I ventured out to check on Josh. He was cleaning his apartment, running dehumidifiers and thanking friends who offered help. He was safe. His dog was safe. He pointed to a group of adults and children washing down the street with hoses and brooms. The children were covered in mud and barefoot. “They’re a church group,” he explained.

I thought back to the pickup truck that had pulled up to the house we were mucking out in Bulan, Kentucky, after their disaster. The man who hopped off the back was the son of the mayor of the next town over and offered us all tetanus shots to stave off the effects of hazardous waste in the floodwaters. I wondered if these church kids had had their shots—if their parents knew they might need one.

As I write this, I don’t know how all the cities and towns of western North Carolina are faring. I know that gas is scarce, and still none of us has reliable cellular or Wi-Fi service. I know that the Dollar General is out of eggs. I know that rockslides cover some roads and many others have crumbled. I know that the hospital in Cherokee cannot send patients to Asheville’s Mission Hospital for critical care. I know that homes are gone and lives are gone. I know that my 11-year-old remarked on how “the people who lived under the bridge have nowhere to go now,” because the waters washed away their encampments.

And I know that, through all the rain and rise and wind, the roadside campaign signs survived, symbols of other promises. Promises that we can curb the tides of global warming. Promises that global warming doesn’t exist. Promises that Appalachia is not forgotten. And I remember that promises don’t do much, and rarely hold. They might help quell our fears, but these promise-makers, too, don’t know what they don’t know. Promises are facades of safety that we make for ourselves, and that politicians often make for us, in place of protective action.

After the waters recede and connectivity returns, what is certain, what I know we can count on, is the tenacity of Appalachia. Faster than the floodwaters rose, the people of Kentucky began organizing for North Carolina. They began reaching out, checking in. I can almost feel them at the borders, pickup trucks loaded, hearts full. A week ago, they probably put out their own campaign signs. Some red. Some blue. Yet they all recognize the white sign of surrender to Mother Nature, arriving to help long before promises from politicians have time to break.

The thing is, Appalachia rarely fails to remember the small towns like Dillsboro. We’re a holler people, loyal to our mountain valleys, not afraid to stretch a helping hand beyond the city centers. And that’s what it will take here. Metro areas like Asheville need an enormous amount of support, but so do our more remote Appalachian communities. And if another flood comes, the people in these towns will care for the next. This fierce allegiance can only go so far; I fear that the world’s choices are once again heralding disastrous consequences for the mountains we have protected for 10,000 years. But I also wonder how people here and in all the places beyond can repair the damage we’ve done. I guess it depends on what we choose to see beyond our own high ground, our state borders, our reliance on someone else’s promise.

Every community has to decide its own values, its own priorities. But sometimes circumstances dictate them, and what promises we can keep. My son’s school still held its homecoming dance on the Saturday following the flood. He didn’t go. It’s possible his suit is still underwater.

After former president Donald Trump said he spoke to Elon Musk about using Starlink in Hurricane Helene-hit areas, the U.S. government said it already had a plan to deploy the systems.

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We knew something had gone terribly wrong when the culverts washed up in our backyard like an apocalyptic art installation splattered with loose rock and black concrete. The circular metal tubes were a crucial piece of submerged infrastructure that once channeled water beneath our street, the primary connection to town for our small rural community just outside Boone, North Carolina. When they failed under a deluge created by Hurricane Helene, the narrow strip of concrete above didn’t stand a chance. Weighted down by a fallen tree, the road crashed into the river, creating a 30-foot chasm of earth near our house.

I have been through my share of disasters: the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, many hurricanes in south Florida, the early months of COVID-19 in New York City. In those places at those times, the first noise you heard when you poked your head outside was the sirens, the weirdly comforting sound of first responders coming to rescue you or your neighbors in need—the modern equivalent of the hooves of the cavalry arriving just in time to save the day. But out here in the aftermath of Helene, separated from that lifesaving government infrastructure by impassable roads, mountains covered in feet of mud, and overflowing rivers, there was nothing but silence.

With some roads blocked by downed trees and others destroyed entirely, emergency vehicles have struggled to reach rural areas, like ours, hit by the storm. As soon as the rain and wind slowed down Friday afternoon, people in our community began to emerge from their homes. Recovery efforts, at least for now, have had to be done on our own.

[Marina Koren: America’s hurricane luck is running out.]

One neighbor, a roofer named Russell Taylor, who rode out the storm alone while his wife was deployed with our volunteer fire department, started blazing his chain saw, cutting away the trees that blocked his driveway and the road. In little time, he and others cut a path through so that cars could get by.

Farther down the road, a spring on top of the mountain had burst, causing an avalanche of rocks, water, and farm supplies to tumble toward the houses below. A truck had been thrust against a garage, a trailer had moved hundreds of feet, and the road was flooded.

Dylan Shortt and J. Willson, two Appalachian State University students who had recently moved from downtown Boone and were renting a place at the bottom of the hill, watched the catastrophe unfold outside their window.

“Our road turned into a river,” Willson told me. “You cannot see one inch of gravel.”

That river brought debris that made the road to the house unpassable. A neighbor arrived with a bulldozer, cleared the rubble, and moved on to fix another driveway.

As neighbors watched one another rebuild their roads and cut back debris, the urge to help became contagious. Void of cars, our road became a parade of people from the neighborhood carrying anything they could—chain saws, shovels, food, cases of beer and water—while looking for people in need. The loss of electricity meant that our well pumps couldn’t provide running water. Taylor, who owned a generator, dispensed jugs of water from his bathtub.

Before the storm arrived, my wife had made two giant pots of chili we had planned to serve at our book club. With the electricity out and the refrigerators losing power, the food wouldn’t last long. So we packed it in family-sized serving bags along with a side of chocolate-chip cookies and started knocking on doors. While we were gone, someone came onto our property and repaired water damage to our gravel driveway. (We later learned that it was Chris Townsend, a farmer who lives about a mile away, who just did it while he was driving by on his four-wheeler. He didn’t say a word about it then, and hasn’t since.)

Soon, cars in search of a way off the mountain began to arrive. We learned that Google Maps was directing people down our street as an evacuation route. Because there was no local cell service or internet, no one could alert the app that this path ended with a gap in the road the size of a tractor trailer, which could send unwitting cars plunging into the river. A Ford F-150 came tearing down the street, slammed its brakes and stopped before going over the ledge.

With no indication that our local transportation department was coming with a barricade, we built one ourselves. We stacked lawn chairs, stray orange traffic cones, tree branches, and even a blue playground slide that had washed up in the storm near the edge to warn drivers. John Barry, who plays piano in the local church band, found a downed road sign and balanced it on the other side of the precipice with sticks. Its words broadcast a truly understated warning to oncoming traffic: LOOSE GRAVEL.

“The chasm,” as it became known, is now a gathering space for the community. In a place cut off from the world, all information is delivered, passed along (and perhaps sometimes exaggerated or misconstrued) by word of mouth. It has become the place where families met to check on one another. To shout across the divide and see if anyone needed anything. One side of the hole connects to a road that led into town. For the first few days after the storm, the other remained isolated.

As the waters below receded, people trekked to the bottom of the hole by foot and pulled themselves up to the other side. The next day, steps were built into the mud, making crossing back and forth easier. Then a handrail made of rope was tied between the trees. People began to arrive with food: Pots bubbling with hot soup, bags loaded with candy, and jugs of fresh water made their way back and forth over the land bridge. Anxious people who couldn’t reach their families by phone for days parked their cars at the edge, scrambled across, and were shuttled in strangers’ cars and four-wheelers to see their loved ones.

[Marina Koren: North Carolina was set up for disaster]

This far-western region of mountainous terrain in North Carolina was long ago known as one of America’s “lost provinces,” a place notoriously unreachable thanks to its poorly maintained roads and lack of access to the outside world beyond southern Appalachia’s network of hollows. The early Scotch-Irish settlers who carved a home in this rugged terrain became known for their extreme self-sufficiency and distinct culture. Modern infrastructure and transportation has made these areas more accessible in recent decades—Boone is home to Appalachian State University (where I teach) and has become a popular vacationland for tourists—but Helene’s onslaught is a stark reminder that age-old vulnerabilities remain.

We are still learning the catastrophic toll of the storm on communities like ours in southern Appalachia. Homes are destroyed, lives lost, and infrastructure devastated. Rebuilding will require extraordinary means and support, both public and private. We don’t know how long it will take for emergency crews to reach our community, to fix the power and repair the damage. But in the meantime, people aren’t waiting around.

“The rain’s over,” declared Sarah Sandreuter, a 23-year-old who lives on our side of the chasm. “It’s time to get to work.”

Electric vehicle fires have made headlines for years now, but in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the Category 4 hurricane that caused record devastation from wind, rain, and storm surge, EVs are spontaneously combusting and saltwater is a main culprit. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis urged EV owners to get their vehicles…

Read more...

Emergency crews work to clear roads, restore power and reach people left stranded by deadly storm.

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This weekend, at his rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump descended into a spiral of rage and incoherence that was startling even by his standards. I know I’ve said this before, but this weekend felt different: Trump himself, as my colleague David Graham wrote today, admitted that he’s decided to start going darker than usual.

At this point, voters have everything they need to know about this election. (Tomorrow, the vice-presidential candidates will debate each other, which might not have much of an impact beyond providing another opportunity for J. D. Vance to drive down his already-low likability numbers.) Here are some realities that will likely shape the next four weeks.

Trump is going to get worse.

I’m not quite sure what happened to Trump in Erie, but he seems to be in some sort of emotional tailspin. The race is currently tied; Trump, however, is acting as if he’s losing badly and he’s struggling to process the loss. Other candidates, when faced with such a close election, might hitch up their pants, take a deep breath, and think about changing their approach, but that’s never been Trump’s style. Instead, Trump gave us a preview of the next month: He is going to ratchet up the racism, incoherence, lies, and calls for violence. If the polls get worse, Trump’s mental state will likely follow them.

Policy is not suddenly going to matter.

Earlier this month, the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote about very specific policy questions that Kamala Harris must answer to earn his vote. Harris has issued plenty of policy statements, and Stephens surely knows it. Such demands are a dodge: Policy is important, but Stephens and others, apparently unable to overcome their reticence to vote for a Democratic candidate, are using a focus on it as a way to rationalize their role as bystanders in an existentially important election.

MAGA Republicans, for their part, claim that policy is so important to them that they’re willing to overlook the odiousness of a candidate such as North Carolina’s gubernatorial contender Mark Robinson. But neither Trump nor other MAGA candidates, including Robinson, have any interest in policy. Instead, they create cycles of rage: They gin up fake controversies, thunder that no one is doing anything about these ostensibly explosive issues, and then promise to fix them all by punishing other Americans.

Major news outlets are not likely to start covering Trump differently.

Spotting headlines in national news sources in which Trump’s ravings are “sanewashed” to sound as if they are coherent policy has become something of a sport on social media. After Trump went on yet another unhinged tirade in Wisconsin this past weekend, Bloomberg posted on X: “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Well, yes, that’s one way to put it. Another would be to say: The GOP candidate seemed unstable and made several bizarre remarks during a campaign speech. Fortunately, Trump’s performances create a lot of videos where people can see his emotional state for themselves.

News about actual conditions in the country probably isn’t going to have much of an impact now.

This morning, the CNN anchor John Berman talked with the Republican House member Tom Emmer, who said that Joe Biden and Harris “broke the economy.” Berman countered that a top economist has called the current U.S. economy the best in 35 years.

Like so many other Trump defenders, Emmer didn’t care. He doesn’t have to. Many voters—and this is a bipartisan problem—have accepted the idea that the economy is terrible (and that crime is up, and that the cities are in flames, and so on). Gas could drop to a buck a gallon, and Harris could personally deliver a week’s worth of groceries to most Americans, and they’d probably still say (as they do now) that they are doing well, but they believe that it’s just awful everywhere else.

Undecided voters have everything they need to know right in front of them.

Some voters likely think that sitting out the election won’t change much. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein pointed out in a recent article, many “undecided” voters are not really undecided between the candidates: They’re deciding whether to vote at all. But they should take as a warning Trump’s fantasizing during the Erie event about dealing with crime by doing something that sounds like it’s from the movie The Purge.

The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told: If you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension; you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car … One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It’ll end immediately.

This weird dystopian moment is not the only sign that Trump and his movement could upend the lives of wavering nonvoters. Trump, for months, has been making clear that only two groups exist in America: those who support him, and those who don’t—and anyone in that second group, by his definition, is “scum,” and his enemy.

Some of Trump’s supporters agree and are taking their cues from him. For example, soon after Trump and Vance singled out Springfield, Ohio, for being too welcoming of immigrants, one of the longtime local business owners—a fifth-generation Springfielder—started getting death threats for employing something like 30 Haitians in a company of 330 people. (His 80-year-old mother is also reportedly getting hateful calls. So much for the arguments that Trump voters are merely concerned about maintaining a sense of community out there in Real America.)

Nasty phone calls aimed at old ladies in Ohio and Trump’s freak-out in Erie should bring to an end any further deflections from uncommitted voters about not having enough information to decide what to do.

I won’t end this depressing list by adding that “turnout will decide the election,” because that’s been obvious for years. But I think it’s important to ask why this election, despite everything we now know, could tip to Trump.

Perhaps the most surprising but disconcerting reality is that the election, as a national matter, isn’t really that close. If the United States took a poll and used that to select a president, Trump would lose by millions of votes—just as he would have lost in 2016. Federalism is a wonderful system of government but a lousy way of electing national leaders: The Electoral College system (which I long defended as a way to balance the interests of 50 very different states) is now lopsidedly tilted in favor of real estate over people.

Understandably, this means that pro-democracy efforts are focused on a relative handful of people in a handful of states, but nothing—absolutely nothing—is going to shake loose the faithful MAGA voters who have stayed with Trump for the past eight years. Trump’s mad gibbering at rallies hasn’t done it; the Trump-Harris debate didn’t do it; Trump’s endorsement of people like Robinson didn’t do it. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Close enough: He’s now rhapsodized about a night of cops brutalizing people on Fifth Avenue and everywhere else.

For years, I’ve advocated asking fellow citizens who support Trump whether he, and what he says, really represents who they are. After this weekend, there are no more questions to ask.

Related:

Trump is taking a dark turn. Peter Wehner: The Republican freak show

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

North Carolina was set up for disaster. Will RFK Jr.’s supporters vote for Trump? Hussein Ibish: Hezbollah got caught in its own trap.

Today’s News

Israeli officials said that commando units have been conducting ground raids in southern Lebanon. Israel’s military is also planning to carry out a limited ground operation in Lebanon, which will focus on the border, according to U.S. officials. At least 130 people were killed across six states and hundreds may be missing after Hurricane Helene made landfall last week. A Georgia judge struck down the state’s effective six-week abortion ban, ruling that it is unconstitutional.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: The decision to have kids comes down to a lot more than “baby fever”—and it may be about more than government support too, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Director Bartlett Sher, star Robert Downey Jr., and writer Ayad Akhtar OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Playwright in the Age of AI

By Jeffrey Goldberg

I’ve been in conversation for quite some time with Ayad Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He’s one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can’t be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God’s sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he’s used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn’t believe that this should be controversial.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Amanda Marsalis / Trunk Archive

Remember. Kris Kristofferson’s songs couched intimate moments in cosmic terms, pushing country music in an existentialist direction, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Debate. Twenty years after Lost’s premiere, the mistreatment of Hurley on the show (streaming on Netflix and Hulu) has become only more obvious, Rebecca Bodenheimer writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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