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Last week, the roughly 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA went on strike, joining the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May. As my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez put it, “The Hollywood machine … has officially ground to a halt.” I chatted with Xochitl about who really broke Hollywood.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Is Tennessee a democracy? Donald Trump’s “horrifying news” In praise of phone numbers

C-Suite Ignorance

Writing yesterday about the Hollywood strikes, my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez—herself a screenwriter on strike—coined the term C-suite ignorance to explain what’s happening in the entertainment world. “Hollywood CEOs saw the success of Netflix and raced to copy a model without knowing whether it was sustainable, a model that relied on the constant production of new (and costly) entertainment content created by unionized talent,” she explained. “They were wrong about the business, but they were even more wrong to presume that labor would comply.” I called Xochitl to chat about how entertainment executives got it so wrong, and whether she and her fellow strikers feel hopeful right now.

Isabel Fattal: What was the big mistake C-suite executives made when they went all in on streaming?

Xochitl Gonzalez: I remember during COVID times in particular, obviously these things had been in the works, but suddenly everybody was in an arms race to rush out a streaming platform. At that point, I was working on a pilot adaptation of my debut novel. My first thought was, How is this sustainable? It didn’t seem like a model that could work, let alone be matched again and again and again.

Now executives are realizing that this model isn’t making money, which I’m not denying. I think it’s hard to say that you’re going broke and going under when you’re seeing executives get so well compensated, and it’s even more hilarious that even laypeople could see that this would be a difficult model to keep up with. Now executives say that they can’t afford to pay the talent. But they designed a model that exploited a contract—essentially, it was a workaround for the way that actors and writers had always been paid, through residuals.

Isabel: Explain that workaround.

Xochitl: The actors on Friends, for example, are so wealthy because of all the different places that Friends has been licensed and has been watched on cable and broadcast TV. Now that Friends is streaming on Max, the actors make much, much less from that platform. In the past, no one had a substantial issue with the idea that if a show is well viewed, writers and actors should see a piece of that, because we created it. This is not a new idea that we’re introducing. We’re attempting to merely correct the way in which the new system has exploited a loophole.

Isabel: Do you feel hopeful about the strike?

Xochitl: I do. A lot of the concerns of SAG and WGA overlap. I think a lot of people don’t always realize this—and it might be especially true for SAG—but a lot of people that are able to make a living as an actor or a screenwriter are middle-class people. The lion’s share of people are not raking in the dough. The fact that these issues are so existential is making people more resolved. The last time we were on strike together, we got absolutely historic gains. So I am feeling hopeful, but I’m worried in the short term. There’s a food bank in L.A. that’s doing free groceries worth more than $300 for members of SAG. There are people that need those free groceries; it’s a challenge.

I think the people on the ground are going to hold strong, because it’s about more than just being valued for your work. It’s about, are we ensuring that this is a sustainable profession going forward? I think it will get bloody. It’s going to hurt people on the ground a lot. But at the end of the day, I feel we’re going to win. Mainly because, as I said when I wrote about the WGA, without us and the stories and performances, what is there?

Related:

The businessmen broke Hollywood. Four ways to think about the Hollywood writers’ strike

Today’s News

Former President Trump said that he had received a letter informing him that he is a target in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, creating the possibility of another indictment. A U.S. soldier broke away from a border-tour group and ran into North Korea; he is believed to be in custody. According to an email obtained by news outlets, Texas trooper-medics from the state’s Department of Public Safety were told to push people attempting to cross the southern border into the Rio Grande River and to deny them water amid extreme heat.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Researchers at UC San Francisco have released the largest representative survey of homeless people in more than 25 years, Jerusalem Demsas writes. It hints at the root cause of homelessness.

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Evening Read

The Atlantic

A Voicebot Just Left Me Speechless

By Saahil Desai

It’s not that hard to say my name, Saahil Desai. Saahil: rhymes with sawmill, or at least that gets you 90 percent there. Desai: like decide with the last bit chopped off. That’s really it.

More often than not, however, my name gets butchered into a menagerie of gaffes and blunders. The most common one, Sa-heel, is at least an honest attempt—unlike its mutant twin, a monosyllabic mess that comes out sounding like seal. Others defy all possible logic. Once, a college classmate read my name, paused, and then confidently said, “Hi, Seattle.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Searchlight Pictures

Read. August Blue, the novelist Deborah Levy’s latest, continues a career-long search for the authentic self.

Watch. The mockumentary Theater Camp (in theaters now) is an endearing ode to creativity, and a reminder of the importance of artistic community.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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.

Elon Musk and Joe Biden are the unlikely tag team changing the way American journalists approach their jobs.

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An Unlikely Tag Team

Reporters spend lots of time critiquing the president, so perhaps it’s only fair for Joe Biden to take a turn as a media critic.

During an interview last week with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, Biden recounted a story that a reporter at “a major newspaper” told him. According to Biden, this reporter’s editor told them, “You don’t have a brand yet.”

“They said, ‘Well, I am not an editorial writer,’” Biden continued. “‘But you need a brand so people will watch you, listen to you, because of what they think you’re going to say.’ I just think there’s a lot changing.”

I’m curious from whom Biden heard this, because he speaks on the record to the press less than any president in recent memory—he’s given the fewest interviews and press conferences since Ronald Reagan. But for most reporters today, the dynamic the president is describing will be very familiar. Celebrity reporters have always existed, as Elliot Ackerman’s great recent article on the famed World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle underscored, but over the past 15 years, even cub reporters have felt intense pressure to become public personalities, whether the impetus comes from one’s editors or peers or the marketplace.

Yet as I watched Twitter melt down this weekend, I started to wonder whether that moment might actually be starting to pass—a casualty of the unlikely tag team of Joe Biden and Elon Musk. The two have, respectively, helped kill the demand and the means for journalists to brand themselves.

Donald Trump isn’t responsible for the celebrification of the press, but he supercharged it, especially in political journalism. During his presidency, the American public was more fixated on the news than it had been in decades. Journalists, in turn, became celebrities in their own right: Maggie Haberman of The New York Times became a household name thanks to her perpetual stream of Trump scoops. CNN’s Jim Acosta’s press-room grandstanding elevated his renown. The TV-retread Tucker Carlson found his moment as Trump’s greatest media apostle. Books about Trump seemed to shoot up the best-seller lists on a weekly basis.

This has all slowed to a crawl in the Biden era. The president has intentionally pursued a strategy of being boring and normal, and the result is much-reduced attention from the press. It’s hard to think of any reporter who has become a new, massive star since 2021. No Biden-book boom has ensued. Readership at news sites dropped after the 2020 election, and so have TV-news audiences. The calmer mood reverses an infamous tweet: The change is good for our country, but this is dull content.

Musk’s purchase and gradual demolition of Twitter is an even bigger part of the equation. Twitter was a branding machine that allowed reporters to make a direct connection with consumers. A clever or funny or piquant or simply hyperactive journalist could bypass the traditional gatekeepers of their outlet and become famous for something other than—or in addition to—whatever appeared under their byline.

Now Twitter is disintegrating for reasons of both ideology and technology. Although it has always been true that Twitter is not real life, the site brought together an unusually wide spectrum of the population, all in one place. Musk was mocked for calling Twitter a “town square,” but he was right. And because so many journalists were on the site, getting big on Twitter was usually enough to get big outside of it. But Musk’s takeover has encouraged the metamorphosis of the site into what my colleague Charlie Warzel has called a “far-right social network.” That drives away centrist and liberal reporters, but more importantly their audiences. Meanwhile, the site is mired in technical chaos much of the time, which is a problem for users of any political persuasion.

What comes after Twitter is a much more fragmented landscape. Many social-media sites command significant audiences, but no single platform can do what Twitter once did. A journalist can make a big bet on one platform, or they can try to hedge and be active on Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Substack, and, as of this week, Meta’s Threads—give or take a dozen more. But who has the time? And besides, you don’t get the same reach. TikTok and YouTube command enormous but typically niche audiences. Substack grows slowly and seems to mostly reward writers who were already well-known before migrating to the platform, such as Matt Taibbi or Matt Yglesias. As Twitter refugees joined Bluesky this weekend, my following jumped by roughly 20 percent—to 221. Compare that with the nearly 34,000 followers I have on Twitter. (If I have a brand, it’s a boutique label.)

I’ve been working on reducing my own Twitter use, and I have mixed emotions. Not feeling the pressure to be part of the conversation each day has been freeing (of my time, among other things), though I miss the validation of a clever remark getting lots of engagement. I am not so naive as to hope that the era of journalist branding is over, but with a little luck, 2023 might someday look like a turning point on the road to its demise.

Related:

The White House spent four years vilifying journalists. What comes next? (From 2020) “I was an enemy of the people.”

Today’s News

A suspicious powder was found in the White House while President Biden and his family were at Camp David this past weekend, and tests confirmed it as cocaine. The world’s hottest day ever was recorded on July 3, a record that was subsequently broken again on the 4th. Yesterday, a district judge prevented Biden administration officials and certain federal agencies from working with social-media companies to discourage or filter First Amendment–protected speech.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: E-bikes are going to keep exploding, Caroline Mimbs Nyce explains. We’re stuck in battery purgatory. Work in Progress: Leading economists said we’d need higher unemployment to tame inflation, Adam Ozimek writes. Here’s why they were wrong.

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Evening Read

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

The Great American Eye-Exam Scam

By Yascha Mounk

On a beautiful summer day a few months ago, I walked down to the part of the Connecticut River that separates Vermont from New Hampshire, and rented a kayak. I pushed myself off the dock—and the next thing I remember is being underwater. Somehow, the kayak had capsized as it entered the river. I tried to swim up, toward the light, but found that my own boat blocked my way to safety. Doing my best not to panic, I swam down and away before finally coming up for air a few yards downriver. I clambered onto the dock, relieved to have found safety, but I was disturbed to find that the world was a blur. Could the adrenaline rush have been so strong that it had impaired my vision? No, the answer to the puzzle was far more trivial: I had been wearing glasses—glasses that were now rapidly sinking to the bottom of the Connecticut River.

If the whole experience was, in retrospect, as funny as it was scary, the most annoying consequence was the need to regain the faculty of sight. I did not have any backup glasses or spare contact lenses on hand. The local optometrists did not have open slots for an eye exam. Since the United States requires patients to have a current doctor’s prescription to buy eyewear, I was stuck. In the end, I had to wear my flowery prescription sunglasses—in offices and libraries, inside restaurants and aboard planes—for several days.

Then I went to Lima, Peru, to give a talk. There, I found a storefront optician, told a clerk my strength, and purchased a few months’ worth of contact lenses. Though my Spanish is rudimentary, the transaction took about 10 minutes.

Read the full article.

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Anohni’s message: To save the world, we’ll have to forgive ourselves. A photo appreciation of sharks

Culture Break

Cheryle St. Onge

Read. “Outdoor Day,” a new poem by Nicolette Polek.

“In elementary school, my mother rides the red bus to ‘defense class.’ / Station one she crosses a brook with knotted rope.”

Listen. A collection of some of June’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’m mourning the recent death of the great German free-jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. The usual euphemism is that he’s an acquired taste, but unlike with, say, whiskey or coffee, most people never feel a need to acquire a taste for him. His widest exposure may have been a 2021 cutting contest with Jimmy Fallon, but back in 2001, the saxophonist and former President Bill Clinton told the Oxford American that readers would be surprised to know he was a Brötzmann fan. I emailed Clinton’s spokesperson for comment on the death, but so far I’ve received no response. (If you’re reading this, Mr. President, call me!) The truth is that not all of Brötzmann’s output is difficult listening. This 2022 live performance with the Gnawa master Majid Bekkas and the drummer Hamid Drake is even trancily soothing.

— David

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.