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.

The Supreme Court released a somewhat surprising—and pretty important—decision yesterday. Should it change the way we think about the Court? Before we get into it, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The comic strip that explains the evolution of American parenting The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous. Stop firing your friends.

Conservative, Not MAGA

It’s good to be back at The Daily! I spent a lot of time last year writing about candidates trafficking in election denial. Looming above all of my coverage was a case at the Supreme Court that would determine the future of election law and, by extension, American democracy. That case, Moore v. Harper, was decided yesterday. I talked with my colleague Russell Berman, a staff writer on our Politics team, about what the decision means, and whether it shifts the dominant narrative about the Roberts Court.

Elaine Godfrey: Russell! I’m so glad we get to talk about this. Yesterday was a big SCOTUS day. In a 6–3 vote, the Court rejected the independent state legislature theory in a case called Moore v. Harper. What is that theory—and why were people so anxious about it?

Russell Berman: The theory basically interprets the Constitution as giving near-total authority over elections to state legislatures, over and above state courts, election administrators, secretaries of state, and even governors. What this means in practice is that because Republicans have overwhelming majorities in many of the closest presidential swing states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina, the adoption of this theory by the Supreme Court would have allowed GOP lawmakers in those states to overrule or simply ignore election decisions they didn’t agree with.

Democrats believed that Republicans would then have used that power to overturn close elections in 2024, just like former President Donald Trump tried to get his allies to do in 2020.

Elaine: Thanks to Trump, there were all kinds of Republicans denying the outcome of the 2020 election, as well as sowing doubt ahead of the midterms. A lot of those candidates lost in the midterms, though, including Kari Lake in Arizona. Is this SCOTUS decision the final coda on the election-denial fight? Are we finally done with that stuff now?

Russell: Not so fast, Elaine. As Rick Hasen points out at Slate, the Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t totally quash the opportunity for election-related shenanigans in the courts. Although the Court declined to give state legislatures unfettered power over elections, it simultaneously warned state courts that federal courts—including the Supreme Court—could still overrule them on cases involving federal elections. That’s what happened in Bush v. Gore, when a conservative majority on the Supreme Court essentially decided the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. And let’s say that in 2024, the Democratic-controlled state supreme court in Pennsylvania issues a ruling on a big election case in favor of Joe Biden. The Court’s decision today served as a reminder that its members could still have the final say.

Elaine: Two Trump-appointed justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, joined three liberal justices in the majority decision in this case. That felt surprising to me. Was it to you?

Russell: Not entirely. Although both Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the majority overruling Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs abortion decision last year, they have not always joined what is now the Court’s far-right wing in election cases: Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, who all dissented from yesterday’s decision. Kavanaugh voted with the majority earlier this month in upholding a key part of the Voting Rights Act, while Barrett joined the dissent.

Elaine: So what does this mean for our understanding of the Court at this moment? Is it more liberal-leaning than Dobbs might have suggested?

Russell: It’s a stretch to call it more liberal. But these decisions suggest that there is a limit to the Court’s rightward shift of the past several years. Chief Justice Roberts in particular continues to resist efforts to upend decades of judicial precedent, and he has had some success in persuading newer justices like Kavanaugh and Barrett to join him. If anything, the Court’s decisions over the past few years suggest it’s conservative but not MAGA. Its ruling in Dobbs was a victory for conservatives, but Trump’s own commitment to the anti-abortion cause has wavered. And in addition to this state-legislature ruling, the Court ruled against Trump several times toward the end of his presidency—and, of course, rejected him in his Hail Mary bid to overturn his defeat in 2020.

Elaine: So you’re saying that Democrats shouldn’t start buying those celebrity prayer candles with Roberts’s face on them?

Russell: Only if they also start buying candles with Mitch McConnell’s face on them. Roberts is playing a role similar to the one McConnell has played in the Senate over the past few years. Roberts either wrote or joined several opinions that have been devastating to liberal causes. He’s helped to eviscerate Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, dramatically expand the scope of the Second Amendment, and limit Congress’s ability to enact campaign-finance regulations. But he’s obviously attuned to public attitudes toward the Court and to that end has tried, with limited success, to restrain the most aggressive impulses of his more ideological colleagues.

Elaine: There are a few other really important cases coming down the pike, including one about college affirmative-action programs and another related to President Joe Biden canceling student debt. If there’s a limit to the Court’s rightward shift, does that tell us anything about how these cases will go? Should progressives plan to be happy?

Russell: Probably not. If the pattern of recent years holds, the relief that progressives are experiencing following their victories in this case and in the voting-rights decision will give way to more anger and disappointment when the Court releases its final opinions of the term. Most legal observers expect the Court to deal a fatal blow to affirmative action after a series of decisions that limited its use in college admissions. And they also believe the Court will rule against President Joe Biden’s effort to unilaterally forgive up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers.

Related:

The Roberts Court draws a line. The Court eviscerates the independent state legislature theory.

Today’s News

Wildfire smoke from Canada has blanketed large portions of the United States, leading more than a dozen states to issue air-quality alerts. Former President Trump countersued E. Jean Carroll for defamation after being found liable for sexually abusing her. Carroll’s attorney said that Trump’s counterclaim is “nothing more than his latest effort to delay accountability.” Daniel Penny pleaded not guilty in the killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway after being indicted on counts of second-degree manslaughter and negligent homicide.

Evening Read

(Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.)

The Harry and Meghan Podcasts We’ll Never Get to Hear

By Caitlin Flanagan

The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry content farm is facing contradictory supply and demand challenges. On the one hand, Netflix is reportedly threatening that the couple had better come up with some more shows, or $51 million comes off the table. On the other, Spotify has found that the 12 episodes of Markle’s podcast, Archetypes, were 10 episodes too many (the Serena Williams and Mariah Carey interviews were blockbusters, but after that: crickets). And—in a mutual decision! mutual!—it has cut the couple loose from their $20 million deal. Together, the news stories formed a classic example of the macroeconomic principle of too much, too little, too late.

In rapid response to the Netflix needling came word that the couple was working on a possible prequel to Great Expectations, centered on the life of a young Miss Havisham. It was exactly the kind of project you could imagine them dreaming up and an improvement, perhaps, on one of Harry’s earlier pitches, “Jude the Obscure, but in Vegas.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Telegraph is the perfect app for the terrible 2020s. Selections from the Audubon Photography Awards Top 100

Culture Break

(Netflix)

Read. Kinship can be created in endless ways. Here are books to read when you want to reimagine family.

Watch. Netflix’s Love Village is a strikingly honest reality show where sex is not scandalous; it’s simply part of a well-lived life.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I am turning the big 3-0 this summer, and the milestone has triggered a mixture of all the usual emotions associated with aging: relief at having survived this long, despite my clumsiness and bad sense of direction; anxiety about not having accomplished enough; and horror at the fact that I’m edging toward the end of it all. You know, normal stuff. I feel happy but also in need of closure, some sort of commemoration of this moment. To that end, I’m seeking the wisdom of our (older-than-30) readers: What are the best books, articles, poems, or podcasts you might recommend to someone on the precipice of their 30s? What advice would you like to go back and tell your 29-year-old self? I want to hear it all! Email egodfrey@theatlantic.com.

— Elaine

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Daniel Penny, 24, denies second-degree manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely.

A farming collective of Syrian and Jordanian women in water-poor Mafraq is growing Azolla and changing their lives.

US media reports the team is worth an estimated $3bn (£2bn) but details of the deal are undisclosed.

These are not your average reservoirs.

The plastic-lined cavities span, on average, 20 acres—more than 15 American football fields. Nicknamed “mega-basins,” they resemble enormous swimming pools scooped into farmland; about 100 basin projects are in the works across France. In wetter winter months, the basins are pumped full of groundwater; during punishing droughts and heat waves, those waters are meant to provide “life insurance” for farmers, who are among the region’s heaviest water users.

In 2022, France faced its worst drought on record; 2023 stands to be worse still. In 2020, anticipating future dry spells, federal environmental and agricultural agencies proposed prioritizing and subsidizing basins as “the most satisfactory way of securing water resources.”

But critics say that this so-called climate-change adaptation is, in reality, a maladaptation—a lesson in how not to prepare for water scarcity. Already, almost two-thirds of the world’s population experiences a water shortage for at least one month each year, and “basins are absolutely not the solution,” Christian Amblard, a hydrobiologist and an honorary director at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, told me.

Humans have, for millennia, smoothed out seasonal water availability by damming rivers or lakes to create artificial reservoirs. Jordan’s Jawa Dam, the world’s oldest, is 5,000 years old. But the first mega-basins in France were built only a few decades ago and, unlike traditional dams, draw some of their reserves from underground. Once on the surface, this water becomes vulnerable to evaporation (even more so as the planet warms) and to pathogens including bacteria and toxic algae.

France is not the only country collecting groundwater to combat major droughts. Others have done the same, with devastating effects on local people and ecosystems. In Petorca, Chile, about 30 groundwater-rights bearers control 60 percent of the region’s total streamflow; most residents depend on a few daily hours of access to water-tank trucks for their needs. In India, groundwater is a primary source for drinking water; overexploitation has led to declining groundwater levels across the country and could slash some winter agricultural yields by up to two-thirds, experts warn. Iran has increased its groundwater withdrawal by 200,000 percent over the past 50-plus years and now faces a potential state of “water bankruptcy.”

[Read: Suddenly, California has too much water]

Climate change will leave many regions alternating between harsh multiyear droughts and sudden, extreme flooding—all as the water frozen in Earth’s poles, glaciers, and permafrost melts away. Groundwater might seem to be a limitless resource of moisture in the unpredictable and imbalanced future. But it’s not, and scientists say that the freshwater lying beneath our feet should be managed  like any other nonrenewable resource.

“They’re thinking very short-term,” Amblard said of mega-basin proponents. “Water needs to stay in the ground.”

Surface water is all the water we can observe: ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. It coats almost three-quarters of the planet. When we imagine water, we usually envision surface water.

Our stores of groundwater, on the other hand, are invisible and vast.  Most of this water is stored in the gaps between rocks, sediment, and sand—think of it like the moisture in a sopping wet sponge. Some groundwater is relatively young, but some represents the remains of rain that fell thousands of years ago. Overall, groundwater accounts for 98 percent of Earth’s unfrozen freshwater. It provides one-third of global drinking water and nearly half of the planet’s agricultural irrigation.

Water is constantly cycling between below-ground stores and the world above. When rain falls or snow melts, some replenishes surface waters, some evaporates, and some filters down into underground aquifers. Inversely, aquifers recharge surface waters like lakes and wetlands, and pop up to form mountain springs or oases in arid lands.

Despite our utter dependence on groundwater, we know relatively little about it. Even within the hydrological community and at global water summits, “groundwater is kind of sidelined,” Karen Villholth, a groundwater expert and the director of Water Cycle Innovation, in South Africa, told me. It’s technically more difficult to measure than visible water, more complex in its fluid dynamics, and historically under- or unregulated. It “is often poorly understood, and consequently undervalued, mismanaged and even abused,” UNESCO declared in 2022. “It’s not so easy to grapple with,” Villholth said. “It’s simply easier to avoid.”

Take a crucial U.S. groundwater case, 1861’s Frazier v. Brown. The dispute involved two feuding neighbors and “a certain hole, wickedly and maliciously dug, for the purpose of destroying” a water spring that had, “from time immemorial, ran and oozed, out of the ground.” Frazier v. Brown questioned the rights of a landowner to subterranean water on the property. Ohio’s Supreme Court ultimately argued against any such right, on the premise that groundwater was too mysterious to regulate, “so secret, occult and concealed” were its origins and movement. (The case has since been overturned.)

Today, groundwater is still a mystery, says Elisabeth Lictevout, a hydrogeologist and the director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre in the Netherlands. Scientists and state officials often don’t have a complete grasp of groundwater’s location, geology, depth, volume, and quality. They’re rarely certain of how quickly it can be replenished, or exactly how much is being pumped away in legal and illegal operations. “Today we are clearly not capable of doing a worldwide groundwater survey,” Lictevout told me. Without more precise data, we lack useful models that could better guide its responsible management. “It’s a big problem,” she said. “It’s revolting, even.”

[Read: 2050 is closer than 1990]

Water experts are certain, however, that humans are relying on groundwater more than ever. UNESCO reports that groundwater use is at an all-time high, with a global sixfold increase over the past 70 years. Across the planet, groundwater in arid and semi-arid regions—including in the U.S. High Plains and Central Valley aquifers, the North China Plain, Australia’s Canning Basin, the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, South America’s Guarani Aquifer, and several aquifers beneath northwestern India and the Middle East—is experiencing rapid depletion. In 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey found that the country had tripled the previous century’s groundwater-withdrawal rate by 2008. Many aquifers—which, because they are subterranean, cannot easily be cleaned—are also being contaminated by toxic chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers, industrial discharge, waste disposal, and pumping-related pollutants.

Because these waters are hidden and can seem “infinite,” Lictevout said, few people “see the consequences of our actions.” She and other hydrology experts often turn to a fiscal analogy: All of the planet’s freshwater represents a bank account. Rainfall and snowmelt are the income. Evaporation and water pumping are the expenditures. Rivers, lakes, and reservoirs are the checking account. Groundwater is the savings or retirement fund—which we are tapping into.

“We have to be careful about dipping into our savings,” says Jay Famiglietti, an Arizona State University hydrologist and the executive director emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security.

As they face down hotter and drier growing seasons, some French farmers say the water backup of basins is crucial to food security. (Agriculture, according to the federal government, accounts for two-thirds of France’s total water consumption.)

“If we don’t continue with this project, there are farms that won’t survive,” Francois Petorin, an administrator of the 200-plus-farm Water Co-op 79, in Western France, has said. "We have no other choice."

Under a deal with local water authorities, farmers can access set volumes from the basins in exchange for reducing pesticide use, planting fields with hedges, and increasing biodiversity. Proponents of the mega-basins also argue that they would be careful to pump only when groundwater levels are above certain thresholds and would draw from shallow aquifers that could be quickly recharged by precipitation.

[Read: One nation under water]

Experts don’t disagree that groundwater must be a part of adapting to climate change. But many argue that overdependence on and overexploitation of a shrinking natural resource cannot be the solution to a problem created by the overdependence on and overexploitation of nonrenewable natural resources.

Instead, experts told me that regulated groundwater tapping could be paired with other adaptations—many of which involve reducing water use and consumption. Farmers could swap out water-intensive crops such as corn (which is grown on 60 percent of France’s irrigated lands, much of it for livestock) in favor of drought-resistant species adapted to local climates. They could employ  more efficient irrigation technologies and plow less, which would make for healthier, more permeable soil, which could retain more water and filter it down more effectively to aquifers. Reducing meat consumption and cutting down on food waste would also shrink water use. Instead of drawing groundwater up for dry seasons, we could inject and help infuse water into depleted aquifers for storage.

“It is a common resource, at the end of the day,” Villholth said. “It’s an issue of equity. It’s almost a democratic question.”

That’s certainly how France’s mega-basin opponents see it. They have staged numerous protests and acts of civil disobedience, including planting hedges on land earmarked for basins and excavating crucial pumps and pipes. In March, thousands of activists (30,000 according to organizers, 6,000 according to state officials) faced off against 3,000 militarized police over the construction of a new mega-basin in Sainte-Soline, in western France, that would supply 12 farms. Organizers say 200-plus people were injured by tear-gas grenades and rubber-ball launchers. A few weeks later, a French court approved the construction of 16 heavily subsidized mega-reservoirs in western France, including the one at Sainte-Soline.

This is one advantage of mega-basins: They make the invisible hyper-visible. “It puts the matter in front of everybody,” Villholth said. Pulled to the surface, groundwater becomes more measurable, as does its use—as do debates over the ethics of its use. But that won’t tell us how much is left. If we’re not careful, we’ll discover that only once it’s all tapped out.  

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.

Jordan Thomson was also found taking coffee, washing detergent, vodka and meat from Worthing stores.

The Duke and Duchess of Wales were among the guests at the wedding of Jordanian Crown Prince Hussein and Saudi architect Rajwa Al Saif.

Jordan's crown prince weds daughter of Saudi family in ceremony packed with stars and symbolism.