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For more than a week now, Reddit moderators have been using the site’s tools to protest proposed business changes. The stalemate reveals how much power the site’s users have accumulated over the years—and just how much the site depends on its moderators’ free labor.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump seems to be afraid, very afraid. Pixar’s talking blobs are becoming more and more unsatisfying. The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism

Not a Worker, Not a Customer

If you’re looking for pictures of John Oliver, for some reason, I have a recommendation for you: The Reddit group r/pics. For the past several days, the r/pics forum, normally populated with food pictures and nature shots, has featured a steady drumbeat of photos of the comedian: John Oliver with his wife. John Oliver’s face Photoshopped onto Spider-Man’s body. John Oliver at a desk. John Oliver on his show. Indeed, the group’s moderators have forbidden users from posting anything besides John Oliver photos.

This is more than just a fun stunt (though it is pretty fun for observers). It is one of the various creative ways that Reddit moderators have used their authority in recent days to register discontent with proposed changes to Reddit’s business.

For the past 10 days, moderators of thousands of Reddit forums have been protesting the company’s plans to charge third parties to run apps on the site. Last week, nearly 9,000 forums went dark for 48 hours. Some forums remain shut down this week, and others are continuing to disrupt the normal flow of posts through the pipelines of the platform.

The trouble began after, earlier this spring, Reddit said it would start charging some other companies for Application Programming Interface (or API) access. In April, the company framed upcoming changes as an effort to ensure that it would be compensated when AI companies scraped the site’s reams of user-generated content. More recently, changes have meant that some beloved apps that make the site easier to use will be forced to shut down because of prohibitive expenses.

Reddit moderators can be forgiven for resenting changes that might make their lives harder. After all, they do a significant amount of work for free. Reddit’s users, especially power users such as moderators, contribute in a big way to the quality and growth of the platform. They lead and nurture (and police) communities that gather around various interests, such as relationships, parenting, plumbing, or weighing in on whether, in a given situation, a poster is the asshole. The relationship between Reddit and its users is unique. The company places outsize responsibility on its volunteer moderators, but as a result, they also have outsize power—which means that their coordinated actions can cause much disruption on the platform.

Moderators are not paid employees of the site. But they are not always customers, either—though Reddit has a premium tier, many users don’t pay to use the platform. Reddit, like many tech companies that provide free products, runs ads (cue the adage “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”). Now, with its new rules, the company is attempting to monetize the content that users—and particularly moderators—have been generating for free.

By protesting the changes, moderators are reminding Reddit just how much the site needs them—and how much the moderators need third-party tools. “Many Reddit moderators rely on third-party apps in order to do their jobs,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany, who reports on internet culture for The Atlantic and recently wrote a great book about online communities and fandom, reminded me this morning. “Without them, they’re rightfully concerned that their forums will be flooded with garbage.”

The API debate has exposed broader fault lines on the site, Fraser Raeburn, a historian and Reddit moderator, told me. He said that Reddit should better acknowledge “the role volunteers play within it, in terms of curating content and keeping Reddit a relatively safe and functional part of the internet.” The moderators of his forum, r/AskHistorians, have restricted posts on their forum as part of the protest. Raeburn said he hopes to see Reddit’s leaders engage constructively with questions and clarify how they will handle the disruptions that come from losing some add-ons.

So far, things have been fractious. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told NBC last week that moderators were like “landed gentry,” and suggested that he might make changes that would allow users to vote moderators out. (When I asked Reddit for comment on the recent protests, I was directed to a blog post from last week on the API updates.) For now, moderators remain powerful.

Moderated communities are what have made Reddit distinctive as a platform, and as a result, helped it last. As Kaitlyn pointed out, “Reddit’s model of empowering moderators has given the site a much longer shelf life than I think many would have thought possible 10 years ago.”

It’s not easy for a tech company to make a lot of money and make all of its users happy—especially on a platform that has an open-source ethos. For all the talk among VCs and techies about the power of community, Reddit is demonstrating how fraught the community-based model can be. Especially as Reddit eyes a potential IPO, its corporate interests and user needs may clash.

Raeburn told me he wants this resolved so that he can get back to the reason he’s on the site: talking about history. But for now, he marvels at the way that the site’s structure and culture made this type of action possible. “Reddit had to give us a degree of control over the site because they wanted us to do that work for them,” Raeburn said. “Reddit, probably inadvertently, has created the structure for protest to succeed.”

Related:

Reddit is finally facing its legacy of racism. Inside r/relationships, the unbearably human corner of Reddit

Today’s News

A ProPublica report revealed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had failed to disclose a 2008 luxury fishing trip with a wealthy conservative donor. Alito wrote an op-ed defending himself in The Wall Street Journal. President Joe Biden referred to Xi Jinping as a dictator at a campaign event in California. The Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates in the coming months, despite holding them steady last week.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers reflect on how media portrayals can sometimes be at odds with their own life experiences. The Weekly Planet: Car-rental companies are ruining EVs, Saahil Desai writes. Good luck charging your surprise electric rental car.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Indian dissidents have had it with America praising Modi. How deterrence policies create border chaos We’ve been thinking about the internet all wrong. The future of books is audiobooks.

Culture Break

Read. “The Night Before I Leave Home,” a new poem by Elisa Gonzalez.

“my brother gets out of bed at three, having lain down / only a few hours before, and pulls on his jeans, and stubs his toe / on the bed frame”

Watch. I Think You Should Leave (streaming on Netflix) is a comedy series that reveals the absurdity of office culture.

Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.

Or play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you haven’t already read it, I recommend checking out Kaitlyn’s book Everything I Need I Get From You, which is about the boy band One Direction but also about how fans reshaped the internet. Come for Kaitlyn visiting the spot at the side of the road where Harry Styles threw up; stay for her analysis about how users influenced and created value for major corporations. Also, I now see Beatles fans in a new light.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

An investigative story by a US news outlet is latest to raise questions about improper conduct by conservative justices.

The phrase serious literature comes with an unfortunate double meaning. When we call books serious, we mean they are satisfying, well written, and worthy of consideration. But we also use serious as an antonym for funny, which can mislead us into assuming that a good book shouldn’t make us laugh. That’s too bad, because humor is a bona fide literary effect, right up there with tragedy, suspense, and profundity—just as much a part of the author’s toolbox but a lot harder to fake.

Let’s be honest: What passes for funny in book marketing falls beneath the standard just about everywhere else. The number of published works that say “Hilarious!” on their cover but turn out to be merely quirky—or the dreaded wacky—is enough to make a reader cynical. The sense of desolation is deepened by the “humor” genre of commercial publishing, in which comedians and influencers monetize audiences they built on television or social media. Many of these books are entertaining, but they tend to prioritize individual gags over sustained effect in a way that crowds out all the other pleasures the reader might be looking for.

Admittedly, this problem seems inherent to the form. Most people who identify as funny learn to make people laugh in the short term, at the level of quips and retorts; to come up with a humorous turn of events is another thing. Memoirs and nonfiction expand this dilemma: If it’s hard to think of amusing plot points, then convincing the reader that real life is funny requires a borderline metaphysical power to shift perception. We might therefore conclude, after being advised for the umpteenth time to read John Kennedy Toole’s execrable A Confederacy of Dunces, that funny literature is a contradiction in terms. It is true that such books are hard to find—but they are out there, and I have recommended some here.

W. W. Norton and Company

The Code of the Woosters, by P. G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse is often cited as one of the great sentence-level writers in English literature, but he made his reputation during his lifetime by putting together clockwork plots. The Code of the Woosters is a Swiss watch. Dispatched by his aunt to the country estate of Sir Watkyn Bassett with instructions to steal a certain piece of antique tableware, the wealthy fool Bertram Wooster takes it upon himself to repair the broken engagement between his old school chum and Sir Watkyn’s daughter, all while dodging one Roderick Spode, a parody of the English fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Bertram’s genius butler, Jeeves, provides him with a steady drip of schemes to navigate this obstacle course, but their deceptions—and the at most intermittent competence with which Bertie executes them—keep getting him in deeper and deeper trouble. This 1938 novel combines old-fashioned dramatic irony with the conventions of farce to produce a high-water mark in Wodehouse’s Jeeves series.

Picador

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

In this satire of American race relations, Beatty makes comedy out of one of the most serious topics imaginable—a project he took on because, according to an interview in Rolling Stone, he “was broke.” The Sellout begins with the narrator, a Black farmer in the suburb of Dickens, California, appearing before the Supreme Court for bringing back segregation and slavery. How did he get there? One thing led to another. After his sociologist father is shot by police, the narrator inherits both his land and his informal role in the community: talking his neighbors out of bad ideas. He does not rise to the occasion, starting a segregated bus so that his friend can live out his fantasy of giving up his seat to a white woman, and then, after crime on the bus mysteriously vanishes, agreeing to expand the program to the local school. Beatty’s narrator isn’t an Uncle Tom figure or the “sellout” he is accused of being so much as a comfortable guy who has concluded that racism isn’t much of a problem anymore. The book’s lesson is not easily distilled, and Beatty relentlessly complicates it in ways that evoke the old maxim: It’s funny because it’s true.

Good Gossip, by Jacqueline Carey

This collection of interconnected short stories is set in late-1980s Manhattan, a done-to-death milieu that Carey revives with metered doses of irony. As controlled and closely observed as the best naturalist fiction, it treats the world of illegal sublets and trivial social distinctions with the light touch and wary empathy it deserves, making something comic out of material that many of Carey’s contemporaries sabotaged themselves trying to make profound. The stories are about, as the narrator puts it, people like her: everyone in New York “if … you took away the guys” and “the people who didn’t know normal things, like the shape of Florida,” and all the others who somehow fail to be like “me and my friend Liz.” Here is the narcissism of small differences, as an occasion not for contempt but for love. Carey’s husband, Ian Frazier, is better known, but she has accomplished something more difficult, threading the needle between capital-R realism and the kind of book you can enjoy as much as you appreciate.

Catapult

Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler

This novel by my favorite living essayist starts with a tragedy and ends somewhere more ambivalent. After the narrator’s boyfriend dies, she moves to Berlin and has a series of Young Writer–type experiences, such as drinking beer with other expats, going on internet dates, and taking conscientious but wage-appropriate care of other people’s children. Oyler makes this series of nonevents work by bringing a second layer of consciousness to the material—a suspicion of her own knowingness that captures the muddled project of curating yourself, of trying to be someone on purpose. The narrator reacts to her boyfriend’s death with a kind of guilty relief: It resolves all the tensions in their relationship without her having to do anything. But realizing that introduces a whole new set of problems. Oyler makes it funny by allowing her fictional stand-in to look petty, vain, and selfish—like a real person.

[Read: Lauren Oyler on the drama of swiping and scrolling]

W. W. Norton and Company

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman

Oh, for the days when famous scientists wrote amusing books instead of going on Twitter to correct the rest of us! Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics and helped determine why the space shuttle Challenger exploded; he also came from working-class Queens and spoke with an accent so thick that many of his peers accused him of putting it on. This episodic memoir, which ranges from his childhood in Far Rockaway to his work on the Manhattan Project to his life as a charmingly unreluctant public figure, keeps returning to one central theme: how funny it is to act dumb when you are in fact really, really smart. In a letter turning down an offer from the University of Chicago, he explains that the salary is so high, he would finally be able to afford a mistress, which would complicate his life to the point that he could no longer concentrate on physics. This kind of self-deprecation evokes Feynman’s first principle of science: “That you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Watching one of the greatest minds of the 20th century proceed as though he were a blockhead is an inspiration to those of us who will not be advancing the field of quantum mechanics anytime soon.

Graywolf

Erasure, by Percival Everett

Since the vaudeville era and the early days of Hollywood, ethnic minorities have defined American comedy on stage and screen, but the publishing industry seems to prefer that writers of color present themselves as the subjects of grim generational trauma. In Erasure, Everett goes straight at this limiting convention with a bitterness so evident that the reader cannot help but laugh. The English-professor protagonist, enraged by the success of his peer Juanita Mae Jenkins’s novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto and goaded by his agent’s complaint that his own writing is not “Black” enough, writes a book whose working title is My Pafology. He eventually changes it to Fuck. The full text of this fictional novel appears within the book, giving us both Everett’s parody of Black literature that panders to white audiences and his idea of what would happen if that parody were unleashed upon the world: First the author is ashamed, then he gets a bunch of money, and then he wins an award. Erasure suggests that the best time to write something funny is when you’re so angry that a laser is about to shoot out of your mouth.

[Read: Percival Everett’s revenge tale of a very rich man]

A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge, by Beau Sia

The modern poem seems to refuse to be funny on abstract principle: For every James Tate, there are a dozen turtlenecked postformalists intent on having no fun at all. Sia is not that kind of poet. A luminary of the tragically unhip but extremely fun New York City slam scene, he wrote ANWA II in response to the best-selling and deeply not good collection A Night Without Armor, by the pop singer Jewel. (The legend is that he did it in four hours.) Sia meticulously tracks Jewel’s book, using her titles as jumping-off points for his own verse, replacing the illustrations with crude pencil drawings and re-creating the original cover design, in which the author looks sad on a field of handwritten, painfully earnest lines (“I die on the page every time / What do you know about push-ups?”). There are definitely moments in this collection when he prioritizes the dick joke over the metaphysical conceit, but it reminds us that poetry can be vital and messy.

Ecco

The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt

This Western, narrated by the fatter and more sensitive of two brothers working as hired killers, starts with a rapturous description of the cool brother’s new horse: how strong and steady it is, its physical beauty and preternatural speed. The narrator juxtaposes this Cormac McCarthy–esque prose with the observation “My new horse was called Tub.” This kind of deadpan humor buoys deWitt’s novel without ever sinking to parody, making it a rare instance of a genre comedy that doesn’t break the frame. Charlie and Eli Sisters are dispatched to find a chemist who has discovered a mysterious and valuable formula. One a sociopath and the other just moody, the brothers travel across a 19th-century West that is comic and tragic by turns, searching for one fortune and finding another. The novel is an audience-seeking missile, combining the danger and forward momentum of pulp Westerns with a literary yearning for beauty and decency.

[Read: The Sisters Brothers is a brutal, funny, and surprisingly graceful Western]

Grand Central Publishing

The Stench of Honolulu, by Jack Handey

Handey’s best-known contribution to American letters remains his “Deep Thoughts” sketches on ’90s episodes of Saturday Night Live, but the man who wrote “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” works surprisingly well in prose. This intensely stupid, deeply wonderful comic novel is narrated by a frenzied dolt who presents Hawaii as a land of savagery. Handey manages to wield his comedic genius without breaking the boundaries of his narrator’s distorted worldview, so the tale is relayed with a potent combination of unearned confidence and complete ignorance. The book begins, “When my friend Don suggested we go on a trip to the South Seas together, and offered to pay for the whole thing, I thought, Fine, but what’s in it for me?” That’s about the register we’re working in, here: at once moronic and efficient. The density of jokes is Airplane!-level high, but Handey achieves a success rate unequaled in written comedy.