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The president was on the picket line, and the American public is paying attention to unions. This moment of renewed interest in organizing could energize labor activity in the U.S., but it also turns up the pressure on union leaders.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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“A Genuinely Historic Moment”

“Unions built the middle class,” the president of the United States bellowed this week through a bullhorn emblazoned with an American flag. “You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.” On Tuesday, Joe Biden became the first sitting president to join striking workers on a picket line. In standing with the United Auto Workers, who have been on strike against the Big Three car companies for almost two weeks, he has picked a side. As my colleague Adam Serwer wrote today, “A president on the picket line, telling workers they deserved to share in the wealth they had helped create, was a genuinely historic moment.”

Public approval of unions is the highest it’s been in many decades. Data from Gallup last month found that, after dipping to a low of 48 percent in 2009, around the time of the recession, Americans’ union-approval rating is now at 67 percent, down slightly from 71 percent last year. Three-quarters of respondents said that they sided with autoworkers over management in their negotiations (this was before the UAW strike had actually begun), and support for striking television writers over their studios was nearly as high. A record-high number, 61 percent, said that unions help rather than hurt the economy.

Organized labor has contracted dramatically in the past 50 years: In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization workers, ushering in a period of union decline that has continued since. Now a successful UAW strike could inspire other workers to stand up, potentially even serving as “a reverse PATCO moment,” says Johnnie Kallas, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the project director of its Labor Action Tracker. Kallas’s research shows that so far this year, there have been 291 strikes involving about 367,600 workers. That is an uptick from a few years ago, when his team began documenting strikes. And beyond the numbers, there are other indicators that we are in a strong labor moment, he told me: High-profile victories at Starbucks and Amazon point to a rise in labor interest in private industries. And, of course, there’s the president on the picket line.

Recent strikes may make the public more curious about unions. Many Americans don’t fully understand the potential benefits of unions, Suresh Naidu, an economics professor at Columbia, told me. For decades, “one reason the labor movement has not had so much energy is that it’s been taken for granted that it can’t win strikes,” he said. But given how publicized the UAW’s effort has become, Naidu observed, a successful strike could send onlookers the message that “when you actually have a union that’s willing to go to bat for you, it can really deliver good wages and working conditions.” The high level of current public interest in unions also means that the pressure is on: If the UAW workers do not end up winning a strong contract, it may damage public perception of strikes, Naidu explained. And in strikes like the UAW’s, union leaders need to thread a needle: If they settle for a weak contract or let the strike drag on long enough that it significantly affects workers and their communities, they could lose public support.

As the labor movement gains momentum, workers in such seemingly different industries as Hollywood and mail delivery are making real gains, often on related issues. “We’re seeing a confluence of concerns around the high cost of living, the role of technology in degrading our work, and what people call work-life balance,” Tobias Higbie, the faculty chair of labor studies at UCLA, told me. “These strikes have a way of defining the key conflicts of a particular historical moment.” The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way many people view their lives, he added—and the role that work should play in them. The past few years have also exacerbated public concerns about income inequality, as many bosses and corporations have grown wealthier while workers have struggled with inflation.

Where America’s labor movement will go next is impossible to predict. After months of picketing, Hollywood writers returned to work yesterday with a strong contract in hand; meanwhile, UAW workers are holding the line, and may even expand their strike this week. “Any kind of negotiation is about power,” Higbie explained. “The UAW is giving a master class on how to strategically utilize the power that you do have so that you can get what you need.”

Related:

Trump didn’t go to Michigan to support autoworkers.

The Big Three’s inevitable collision with the UAW

Today’s News

As tensions continue among congressional Republicans, the U.S. government has begun notifying federal employees that a shutdown appears imminent. The House held its first hearing in the Biden-impeachment inquiry; witnesses chosen by Republicans stated that there is currently no evidence of a crime, but that more bank records from the president and his son are still needed. The Senate unanimously passed a dress-code resolution after controversy over Senator John Fetterman’s casual attire.

Evening Read

Paul Spella / The Atlantic

Group-Chat Culture Is Out of Control

By Faith Hill

Here’s just a sample of group chats that have been messaging me recently: college friends, housemates, camp friends, friends I met in adulthood, high-school friends, a subset of high-school friends who live in New York City, a subset of high-school friends who are single, a group of friends going to a birthday party, a smaller group of friends planning a gift for that person’s birthday, co-workers, book club, another book club, family, extended family, a Wordle chat with friends, a Wordle chat with family.

I love a group text—a grext, if you’ll permit me—but lately, the sheer number of them competing for my attention has felt out of control. By the time I wake up, the notifications have already started rolling in; as I’m going to bed, they’re still coming. In between, I try to keep up, but all it takes is one 30-minute meeting before I’ve somehow gotten 100 new messages, half of them consisting of “lol” or “right!” I scroll up and up and up, trying to find where I left off, like I’ve lost my place in a book that keeps getting longer as I read.For better or for worse, we might be in the Age of the Group Chat.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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With river levels dropping, water transportation has stalled and hundreds of dead fish are contaminating drinking water.

This past Sunday, Keila Shaheen woke up to find that, once again, she was the best-selling author across all of Amazon. To get there, she’d outsold every other book on the platform—including Walter Isaacson’s buzzy biography of Elon Musk and the Fox News host Mark Levin’s screed The Democrat Party Hates America. She’d even beat out Oprah.

At just 24, she is a bona fide publishing juggernaut. And yet few outside of TikTok have even bothered to notice. That’s probably in part because her best-selling book isn’t actually a book at all in the traditional sense. It’s a self-published mental-health guide called The Shadow Work Journal, and its success has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of videos posted on TikTok. Inspired by the writings of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, it offers readers prompts and activities for interrogating the unconscious, repressed part of themselves. By getting to know our “shadow,” the Jungian theory goes, we can better understand ourselves and our behavior.

One exercise invites readers to stare at themselves in a mirror for five to 10 minutes and talk to their reflection, writing down their observations afterward. Another has them make a gratitude list. A page on “wound mapping” asks the reader to circle statements such as “hates being alone” or “struggles to let things go” in order to identify their “inner-child wound.” In one video posted on TikTok, which has more than 50 million views, a reader has circled almost all of the statements: “Realizing I have more issues than I thought,” the caption reads. I got my copy during a long trip and did one of the activities on the plane; it turned out that my shadow was tired of flying and wanted to be home.

Shaheen isn’t a practicing therapist, and her traditional mental-health credentials are limited: She graduated from Texas A&M University in 2020 with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and marketing, and took a training course in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) from Achology’s Academy of Modern Applied Psychology, an online school. (Licensed therapists typically have a master’s degree in counseling, thousands of hours of supervised experience providing therapy, and a passing grade on any number of licensure exams.) Instead, Shaheen’s background is in marketing and brand strategy. She’s done this work for various companies, including TikTok itself, where she was a creative strategist. Her knack for storytelling on social media is evident in the book’s viral success: TikTok users have gone rabid over her journal. Some have raved that the workbook is “cheaper than therapy” and posted dreamy videos of themselves filling it out on a sunny day. Others accused it of being demonic and anti-religious. Still more question its legitimacy as a therapeutic tool.

Shaheen defends the book by contending that it can help people. “I firmly believe everyone deserves access to mental-health resources and the chance to embark on a healing journey,” she told me over email, arguing that tools like the journal “can often inspire individuals to seek therapy,” a route she recommends “if it’s accessible.”

Shadow Work Journal videos have passed 1 billion views in total on the platform, and many of these posts function as direct advertising thanks to TikTok Shop, the platform’s new e-commerce brand. The videos feature links to buy the journal in the app. TikTok Shop also offers affiliate features that allow creators who make videos about products to get a commission for each sale. Many of the journal videos use this feature. One 20-year-old part-time student I emailed told me she’d made about $1,000 off of her video about the book. She had requested a free copy of it through a creator program, and in exchange, TikTok prompted her to post about it.

[Read: TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok]

The rise of the Shadow Work Journal is another reminder of TikTok’s power—to generate conversation, to sell a ton of books, to keep people in an algorithmic loop indefinitely. Though it was first published in the fall of 2021, the journal reached hit status this year, after being listed in TikTok Shop. It has sold 290,000 copies on TikTok alone since April—45 percent of its overall sales, Shaheen says, meaning more than half a million sold in total. As a point of reference, Isaacson’s Elon Musk sold 92,560 copies the old-fashioned way in its first week. Shaheen sent me screenshots of four separate times she’d reached the top slot on Amazon since mid-August, including this past Sunday.  

However much they help spread the word, algorithms alone cannot explain the journal’s popularity. Americans’ struggles with mental health are well documented, particularly among young adults, who tend to spend more time on TikTok than older people. Therapy is expensive, commonly stigmatized, and at times inaccessible—many professionals say they can’t meet patient demand. People are looking for help.

That they’re finding it in an affordable, DIY solution is not surprising; self-help books have always been popular in America. That they’re doing this is also not necessarily bad. “The Shadow Work Journal can give valuable opportunities for reflection and growth,” Corey Basch, a public-health professor at William Paterson University, told me. But she also situated the book in a broader context: an era of free, sometimes questionable medical advice on social media. Basch co-authored a 2022 study that examined posts published under the #mentalhealth hashtag on TikTok. Though some legitimate therapists have found success on the platform, Basch characterized the material she’s come across as “consumer-driven and rife with issues related to credibility.” She cautioned that working through tough topics might lead a reader to “rekindle trauma,” and that experts often advise that such work be done as part of therapy with a supervising professional. The journal does come with a disclaimer: “While anyone can do shadow work, a licensed mental health expert is a good option, especially for individuals who have experienced severe trauma or abuse.”

[Read: What in the world is happening on TikTok Live?]

Shadow work, it should be noted, is a niche practice. Though it has its proponents, psychoanalysis has taken a back seat to more empirical methods. Now Google searches for shadow work are skyrocketing alongside sales of the journal. Connie Zweig, a retired psychotherapist and herself the author of books on shadow work, told me that she was “very surprised” to hear how much the topic had blown up. “It’s exciting because it can open doors for people,” Zweig told me, “but it’s also dangerous if people think this is all they need.” She thought the book had “oversimplified” the Jungian idea of the unconscious, at least based on what she’s seen of it in TikTok videos.

Joshua Terhune, a therapist in Indiana with 300,000 followers on TikTok, also had some critiques. He was curious enough to request a review copy of the journal through TikTok Shop and ended up rating it two and a half stars out of five. When I asked him if Sheehan’s CBT certificate would qualify a person to write a shadow-work journal, he laughed and said, “No, not even close.” In response to the criticism that she’s underqualified, Shaheen told me that she wondered whether critics had looked up her author bio: “If they’re not comfortable purchasing any work from an actual certified therapist, that’s okay. They can look at other options.”

She isn’t a licensed medical professional, CBT certificate or not. But Shaheen is a clear writer and an exceptionally shrewd observer of online trends. She’s struck a nerve. In one TikTok from August with 10 million views, the video’s creator extols the Shadow Work Journal for changing her life. “I wasn’t healing. My relationships weren’t successful. And it wasn’t until my shadow journal that I realized I had a lot of unresolved traumas,” she says. “This helped me call all my POWER back to me.” And yes, she’s eligible for commission.