The first time it happened, I assumed it was a Millennial thing. Our younger neighbors had come over with their kids and a projector for backyard movie night—Clueless, I think, or maybe The Goonies.

“Oh,” I said as the opening scene began, “you left the subtitles on.”

“Oh,” the husband said, “we always leave the subtitles on.”

Now, I don’t like to think of myself as a snob—snobs never do—but in that moment, I felt something gurgling up my windpipe that can only be described as snobbery, a need to express my aesthetic horror at the needless gashing of all those scenes. All that came out, though, was: Why? They don’t like missing any of the dialogue, he said, and sometimes it’s hard to hear, or someone is trying to sleep, or they’re only half paying attention, and the subtitles are right there waiting to be flipped on, so … why not?

Because now I’m reading TV, not watching it. Because now, instead of focusing my attention on the performances, the costumes, the cinematography, the painstakingly mixed sound, and how it all works together to tell a story and transport me into an alternate world, my eyes keep getting yanked downward to read words I can already hear. My soul can’t bear the notion of someone watching The Sopranos for the first time and, as Tony wades into the pool, looking down to the bottom of the screen to read [ducks quack]. Subtitles serve an important purpose for people with hearing or cognitive impairments, or for translation from a foreign language. They’re not for fluent English speakers watching something in fluent English.

This monologue was all internal, though, because I’m in my mid-40s and don’t want to sound like an old man shouting at a cloud. We left the subtitles on that night, and I noticed that even though I knew every word of Clueless (or maybe it was The Goonies), I was still reading along. For the life of me I couldn’t understand how this didn’t drive everyone else crazy too. I said nothing, though. Millennials! What’ll they think of next?

Then, a couple of months later, over New Year’s Eve, my wife and I were about to start watching Don’t Look Up with another couple, Ken Leung and Nancy Bulalacao, when Nancy asked if we minded her turning on the subtitles. Ken is a cast member on the HBO series Industry, and Nancy works in New York theater production, and they’re both a bit older than us—squarely Gen X. They watch almost everything now with the subtitles on, she told us, even Ken’s own show, which is full of rapid-fire financial jargon coming at you in about a dozen languages and a riot of accents. She said it almost like a confession, as if bracing for judgment. But I was too stunned to judge.

Both of them have spent their entire adult lives working in movies, television, theater—the visual arts, where voice and imagery are sacrosanct tools of communication with the audience. Surely a screen actor like Ken would be aghast at the notion of so many people choosing to miss so much of the detail and nuance that he builds into his performances?

Nah. Following the story is the most important thing, he told me recently when I asked him about it for this article, and if you’re getting knocked out of the story because you can’t follow the dialogue, then by all means turn on the subtitles. It’s fine. You have his permission.

I grew alarmed by the way subtitles seem to be creeping into our homes—an addictive substance like TikTok, which, by the way, deserves some blame for this shift, conditioning multiple generations to watch content with text plastered all over it. A war is raging in living rooms and bedrooms across America—a Great Subtitle War. On one side: the bombastic visual effects of post–Game of Thrones mega-budget TV. On the other side: hearing the words. On one side: people like me, the purists and refuseniks. On the other: our friends and spouses, people who just want to follow the plot. The widespread use of subtitles felt, to me, like a lurch backward toward the silent-film era. But I didn’t want to be too doctrinaire. Maybe some exceptions could be made.

Then one night a few weeks ago, I walked into the bedroom to find my wife watching Abbott Elementary with the subtitles on. I’d lost her too.

Just three years ago, the South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho took the stage at the Golden Globes to accept the Best Foreign Language Film award for Parasite and made a heartfelt speech urging us all to watch more stuff with subtitles.

“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles,” he said, “you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

A month later, Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture. About a month after that, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic, and much of the world went into quarantine. Cooped-up Americans were primed for a little experimental viewing; demand for Asian-language content spiked in the U.S. in the months after Parasite became available for streaming, according to data from Parrot Analytics, an entertainment-analytics company. It spiked again, a Parrot spokesman told me, after the September 2021 premiere of Squid Game, another South Korean export, which probably did more than any other single work of culture to bring down Bong’s one-inch wall. The words at the bottom of the screen don’t appear to have distracted anyone from all that arterial spray.

Now subtitles are everywhere, and in fact, they may already be our default mode. According to Preston Smalley, Roku’s vice president of viewer product, a 2022 internal survey revealed that 58 percent of subscribers use subtitles: 36 percent of them switch the subtitles on because of a diagnosed hearing impairment; 32 percent do it out of force of habit. (The remaining third cite a stew of situational issues, such as kids sleeping nearby, other people in the room, and poor audio quality.) Many of the people using subtitles, in other words, do not need them.

And as it turns out, it is a Millennial thing, or at least Millennials are leading the way. A full two-thirds of Roku’s Millennial customers use subtitles, more than any other generation, including seniors, though Smalley attributes that in part to technical hurdles, which is a polite way of saying that older users don’t always know how to turn them on.

Watching a Korean-language film such as Parasite with subtitles, of course, isn’t the same as leaving them on for Abbott Elementary. One experience requires them for most English speakers, the other super does not. But they’re also exactly the same thing. You’re still reading words at the bottom of the screen, it’s the same eye movement, the same mental-conditioning process—so what’s the difference if the actual language being spoken is English or Korean or some distant alien tongue from the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Subtitles, in other words, are a door that swings both ways. They can usher you into a rich new cultural experience, only to flick you in the ear during the experience itself.

Once the subtitles are on the screen, my friend Ken said, you feel, subconsciously, that “there’s somebody else in the room. There’s a third person, and they’re telling you what’s being said—they’re being very quiet, they’re minding their own business, but they’re here.” And of course that affects the experience. Imagine, he said during our Zoom call, “if our conversation right now was being subtitled live.”

I get it; not everything is art. Most things we watch don’t require or deserve such reverence. You don’t need spotless mise-en-scène to get the full experience of Is It Cake? But what if it’s The Sopranos? My wife and I recently watched Dead Ringers, which was so visually clever and twisted and sumptuous that I can only imagine how great it would’ve been without subtitles. If you ask me, there’s no defense for anything that requires us to take our eyes off Rachel Weisz, let alone two Rachel Weiszes.

Set aside the qualitative debate over whether this cultural shift is better or worse—let’s at least agree that it’s different. Ken says he appreciates the way subtitles help him and his wife follow along, but he also now finds himself doing something he calls “lazy listening”: “You begin to rely on the subtitles,” he said, “and then without them, you’re suddenly like, I never had an issue hearing things before. How come I do now?”

The writer-director Hannah Fidell—whose Hulu series, A Teacher, starring Kate Mara as a predatory high-school teacher, was based on her 2013 indie film on the same subject—is likewise worried that subtitles are changing viewers’ habits. I assumed that a filmmaker would feel most violated on behalf of their camera shots, but Fidell was, if anything, more aghast at the trouncing of her sound mix. Subtitles make you literal-minded, she says, and oftentimes, the scripted words transcribed on the screen say one thing while the actor’s performance of them says another. I asked Fidell how she would feel if a friend turned on the subtitles while watching the pilot episode of A Teacher.

She went quiet for a moment. “I would be so pissed,” she said.

Game of Thrones, which premiered in 2011 and ended in 2019, shifted the home-viewing paradigm in any number of ways, but it was also the tipping point in this struggle between the audio and the visual. Game of Thrones, Andrew Miano, a longtime film producer, told me, is when we all started turning up the volume to hear the dialogue. Miano made The Farewell, starring Awkwafina, about three-quarters of which is in Mandarin with English subtitles. His issue isn’t with subtitles; it’s with the swelling ranks of always-on-ers, a group that now includes his wife. “It drives me crazy,” he said.

House of the Dragon—last summer’s Game of Thrones prequel—is what broke me. How was anyone supposed to follow that show without subtitles? House Targaryen. House Velaryon. Rhaenys. Rhaena. Rhaenyra. The Sea Snake. The Crabfeeder. Now three years have passed. Now 10 years have passed. Now a different actor is playing Rhaenyra, but the same actor is playing Rhaenys. Dragons shrieking and throwing flames over all of it. What the hell is going on here?

I still didn’t turn subtitles on, though, until halfway through the season, when the cast reshuffled after the second time jump and my options were either (a) turn on the subtitles or (b) pause and rewatch every scene multiple times, requiring an average of three viewing hours per episode. Besides, all of the shots on that show are too dark anyway.

The good news, according to Onnalee Blank, the four-time Emmy Award–winning sound mixer on Game of Thrones, is that it’s not your fault that you can’t hear well enough to follow this stuff. It’s not your TV’s fault either, or your speakers—your sound system might be lousy, but that’s not why you can’t hear the dialogue. “It has everything to do with the streaming services and how they’re choosing to air these shows,” Blank told me.

Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for “Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale” and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it’s been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them. That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones’ run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she’s got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show’s final season, AT&T bought HBO’s parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.

“So instead of this algorithm analyzing the loudness of the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths,” Blank explained to me, “it analyzes the whole show as loudness. So if you have a loud music cue, that’s gonna be your loud point. And then, when the dialogue comes, you can’t hear it.” Blank remembers noticing the difference from the moment AT&T took the reins at Time Warner; overnight, she said, HBO’s sound went from best-in-class to worst. During the last season of Game of Thrones, she said, “we had to beg [AT&T] to keep our old spec every single time we delivered an episode.” (Because AT&T spun off HBO’s parent company in 2022, a spokesperson for AT&T said they weren’t able to comment on the matter.)

Netflix still uses a dialogue-anchor spec, she said, which is why shows on Netflix sound (to her) noticeably crisper and clearer: “If you watch a Netflix show now and then immediately you turn on an HBO show, you’re gonna have to raise your volume.” Amazon Prime Video’s spec, meanwhile, “is pretty gnarly.” But what really galls her about Amazon is its new “dialogue boost” function, which viewers can select to “increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects.” In other words, she said, it purports to fix a problem of Amazon’s own creation. Instead, she suggested, “why don’t you just air it the way we mixed it?”

The silver lining of tech companies trying to fix problems of their own creation is that, every so often, they stumble onto an ingenious solution. Roku offers a replay feature in which the subtitles show up when you press the 20-second rewind button. It saved Miano’s marriage, and it might save yours. Roku also offers an “automatic speech clarity” feature, though Roku is more akin to an operating system for your television than a streaming platform—it’s just the middle man, sonically speaking—so the option is more of a bandage than a cure. Home-theater providers such as Sonos, meanwhile, offer their own dialogue-boost capabilities, in case you want to pay a second tech company to fix what the first one broke.

Or you can just turn on the subtitles. In any version of our streaming future, subtitles will be the simplest, most cost-effective solution, so maybe what the snobs among us should hope for is that the creators themselves will seize back some creative license over exactly how those words look on the screen. Brett Pawlak, the director of photography for Disney+’s new television series American Born Chinese, told me that although he doesn’t compose shots to leave room for words at the bottom of the screen, the rising ubiquity of subtitles reminds him of the creative hurdle presented about a decade ago, when some directors started incorporating characters’ text messages. The visual challenge, in other words, requires a visual solution.

The appearance of the subtitles on your screen also varies widely by platform—the streamers control that dial too—and some of them put more effort into the task than others. But their default typefaces are all clunky and robotic and bear no connection to the content. If they can beam Severance into our homes and invent dialogue-boost features, surely they can figure out how to let us pick our own typeface, or shrink the font size, or move the words to a different spot on the screen. You know who’d really benefit from that? Deaf people! Non-English speakers. Anyone who finds that subtitles make them feel included in the culture, rather than shut out of it. And maybe the ubiquity of words at the bottom of the screen will inspire filmmakers and showrunners to craft their own subtitles as a viewing option—you can watch this Jordan Peele art-house horror series with Hulu’s charmless sans serif or with Peele’s signature typeset.

Or, to echo Blank, you could just air it the way she mixed it. Her home still frowns on unnecessary subtitles, but that might change as streamer platforms continue to wreak havoc with her sound mixes. “The world is getting louder,” she said. And if subtitles offer us a way to turn down the volume a little bit, maybe that’s not so terrible. She knows a losing battle when she hears one.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Mike Pence and Chris Christie are each expected to announce their 2024 presidential candidacy this week. As the Republican primary field continues to grow, so do candidates’ awkward attempts to prove that they’re just regular people. Below, I explore the fraught nature of “dressing for the job you want” on the campaign trail.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The murder rate is suddenly falling. Get rid of the debt ceiling once and for all. How parking ruined everything Americana Cosplay

One of the most memorable scenes from HBO’s political satire Veep is an unsettlingly realistic campaign spot. Jonah Ryan, a WASPy, weaselly Capitol Hill aide, attempts to rebrand himself as an everyman when he runs for Congress. In lieu of his navy blazer and khakis, Jonah dons a flannel shirt and a puffy vest, and chops wood (poorly). He looks uncomfortable merely holding the axe, let alone swinging it.

I thought of Jonah this past weekend as former Vice President Mike Pence rolled into Des Moines, Iowa, straddling a Harley-Davidson. Pence mugged for the cameras in a black leather vest, jeans, and cowboy boots. To be fair, Pence was the only presidential candidate who actually rode a motorcycle to Senator Joni Ernst’s annual “Roast and Ride” charity glad-handing event, so he deserves a little bit of credit. But the photos were, well, quite funny. Pence has spent years cultivating a distinct personal image—that of a stoic, soft-spoken churchgoer who never has a hair out of place. Picture Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, then imagine his exact opposite: That’s Pence.

Still … at least he didn’t autograph a Bible! Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was also in Iowa this past weekend, and he graciously signed someone’s copy of the good book. (His wife, Casey, was photographed in her own motorcycle leather, adorned with an image of Florida, a gator, and the phrase Where Woke Goes to Die. She and her husband took an SUV, not a hog, to the event.)

As his campaign gets under way, DeSantis is also undergoing a Jonah-like evolution. He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, yet he’s still learning basic retail-politics skills. My colleague Mark Leibovich recently observed DeSantis up close on the trail in New Hampshire. While working the rope line at an American Legion hall, DeSantis “smiled for the camera like the dentist had just asked him to bite down on a blob of putty; like he was trying to make a mold, or to fit one,” Leibovich wrote.

To be sure, the performative “I’m just like you” campaign pitch is by no means a purely Republican phenomenon. Remember in 2015, when Hillary Clinton informed us that she was “just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids”? Or way back in 2003, when John Kerry tried to court Philadelphia voters by visiting the divey cheesesteak mecca Pat’s and doomed his campaign by asking for Swiss cheese instead of Whiz?

In the last presidential election cycle, after being dogged by accusations of hiding from the coronavirus pandemic in his basement, Joe Biden released his own how-do-you-like-me-now campaign ad. As an electric guitar strummed in the background, Biden revved the engine of his convertible Corvette Stingray, then tore off down what looked like a very safe private road, ostensibly in support of an electric-vehicle future. The spot unintentionally called to mind the 2009 Onion headline “Shirtless Biden Washes Trans Am in White House Driveway.”

I asked my colleague Amanda Mull, who spent 10 years in the fashion industry and writes about consumerism, why presidential candidates lean into the same form of über-Americana year after year. “Politics is a strange industry full of fundamentally strange people who mostly don’t quite realize how odd they are,” she said.

She went on, “This working-man Americana cosplay is, on some level, an acknowledgement that politicians exist separately from regular people, and it’s an attempt to bridge a gap on an aesthetic level that they are incapable of bridging interpersonally. But they’re weird guys, so the end result is the exact opposite—they look so uncomfortable, so uncanny in their little jeans and boots, that they might as well have just landed from outer space.”

The current Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, skipped Iowa altogether this past weekend, but rest assured, he’s been busy doing his own pandering. Last week, Trump proposed a yearlong “Salute to America 250” party to be held at the Iowa state fairgrounds in celebration of the country’s coming semiquincentennial in 2026. “Together we will build it, and they will come,” Trump proclaimed. You could virtually smell the rising corn.

Related:

Ron DeSantis’s joyless ride Why won’t Trump’s rivals just say it? Today’s News A sonic boom was heard in the D.C. area after military jets scrambled to respond to a private flight crossing into restricted airspace. The plane was determined not to be a threat. The California attorney general is investigating whether a group of migrants that, on Friday, was flown to California on a private plane was sent by the state of Florida, calling it “state-sanctioned kidnapping.” The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, on allegations that the company is mishandling customer funds and lying to regulators and investors. Evening Read Illustration by Jo Imperio

In Defense of Humanity

By Adrienne LaFrance

On July 13, 1833, during a visit to the Cabinet of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson had an epiphany. Peering at the museum’s specimens—butterflies, hunks of amber and marble, carved seashells—he felt overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of nature, and humankind’s place within it.

The experience inspired him to write “The Uses of Natural History,” and to articulate a philosophy that put naturalism at the center of intellectual life in a technologically chaotic age—guiding him, along with the collective of writers and radical thinkers known as transcendentalists, to a new spiritual belief system. Through empirical observation of the natural world, Emerson believed, anyone could become “a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition”—finding agency, individuality, and wonder in a mechanized age.

Read the full article.

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Read. A new collection of Charles Portis’s work makes the case for his place in the American canon.

Listen. The newest episode of the How to Talk to People podcast discusses what we owe our friends in a culture that prioritizes romance.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The NBA Finals are tied at one game apiece, and if you’re not already watching, you still have time to tune in. The Denver Nuggets are vying for their first title in franchise history. Hardly anybody expected their opponents, the No. 8 seed Miami Heat, to make it this far, but their star, Jimmy Butler, is one of the greatest competitors in all of basketball. He’s going up against the mesmerizing Jamal Murray and the two-time MVP Nikola Jokić, who, despite his 6-foot-11-inch stature, can dribble and pass like a guard. Game 3 is Wednesday, and the series will go to at least five (hopefully more).

— John

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.