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American Democracy Requires a Conservative Party

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › america-us-democracy-conservative-party › 675463

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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.

Every nation needs parties of the left and the right, but America’s conservative party has collapsed—and its absence will undermine the recovery of American democracy even when Donald Trump is gone.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

So much for “learn to code” Where the new identity politics went wrong The origins of the socialist slur The coming attack on an essential element of women’s freedom

The Danger That Will Outlast Trump

The American right has been busy the past few days. The Republicans in Congress are at war with one another over a possible government shutdown that most of them don’t really want. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona (channeling the warden from The Shawshank Redemption, apparently) railed about “quislings” such as the “sodomy-promoting” Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said he should be hanged. Gosar, of course, was merely backing up a similar attack from the likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who over the weekend floated the idea of executing Milley and swore to use government power to investigate a major television network for “treason.”

Normally, this is the kind of carnival of abominable behavior that would lead me to ask—again—how millions of Americans not only tolerate but support such madness.

But today I’m going to ask a different question: Is this the future of “conservatism”? I admit that I am thinking about this because it’s also one of the questions I’m going to tackle with my colleagues David Frum, Helen Lewis, and Rebecca Rosen on Thursday in Washington, D.C., at The Atlantic Festival, our annual two-day gathering where we explore ideas and cultural trends with a roster of stellar guests.

Slightly more than a year ago, I tried to think through what being a conservative means in the current era of American politics. I have not been a Republican for several years, but I still describe myself as a conservative: I believe in public order as a prerequisite for politics; I respect tradition, and I am reluctant to acquiesce to change too precipitously; I think human nature is fixed rather than malleable; I am suspicious of centralized government power; I distrust mass movements. To contrast these with progressivism, I think most folks on the left, for example, would weigh social justice over abstract commitments to order, be more inclined to see traditions as obstacles to progress, and regard mass protests as generally positive forces.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of conservative views, and some on the right have taken issue with my approach. A young writer at National Review named Nate Hochman took me to task last year for fundamentally misunderstanding modern conservatism. Mr. Hochman, however, was apparently fired this summer from the Ron DeSantis campaign after he produced a campaign video that used Nazi symbolism, which suggests to me that I do, in fact, understand the modern conservative movement better than at least some of my critics might admit.

In any case, the immediate problem America faces is that it no longer has a center-right party that represents traditional conservatism, or even respects basic constitutional principles such as the rule of law. The pressing question for American democracy, then, is not so much the future of conservatism but the future of the Republican Party, another question our panel will discuss—and one that continually depresses me.

The United States, like any other nation, needs political parties that can represent views on the left and the right. The role of the state, the reach of the law, the allocation of social and economic resources—these are all inevitable areas of disagreement, and every functioning democracy needs parties that can contest these issues within the circumscribed limits of a democratic and rights-respecting constitution. Today’s Republican Party rarely exhibits such commitments to the rule of law, constitutionalism, or democracy itself.

The current GOP is not so much conservative as it is reactionary: Today’s right-wing voters are a loose movement of various groups, but especially of white men, obsessed with a supposedly better past in which they were not the aggrieved minority they see themselves as today. These reactionary voters, as I have written recently, are reflexively countercultural: They reject almost everything in the current social and political order because everything around them is the product of the hated now that has displaced the sacred then.

(Although many of my colleagues in academia and in the media see Trumpism as fascism, I remain reticent to use that word … for now. I think it’s inaccurate at the present time, but I also believe the word has been overused for years and people tend to tune it out. I grant, however, that much of the current GOP has become an anti-constitutional leader cult built around Trump—perhaps one of the weakest and unlikeliest men ever in history to have such a following—and could become a genuinely fascist threat soon.)

America needs an actual conservative party, but it is unlikely to produce one in the near future. The movement around Trump will come to an end one way or another; as the writer Peter Sagal noted in The Atlantic after interviewing former members of various cults, “the icy hand of death” will end the Trump cult because it is primarily a movement of older people, and when they die out, “there will be no one, eventually, to replace them.” Although the cult around Trump will someday dissolve, the authoritarians his movement spawned will still be with us, and they will prevent the formation of a sensible center-right party in the United States.

Too many Americans remain complacent, believing that defeating Trump means defeating the entire threat to American democracy. As the Atlantic contributor Brian Klaas wrote yesterday, Trump’s threats on social media against Milley should have been the biggest story in the nation: “Instead, the post barely made the news.” Nor did Gosar’s obscene pile-on get more than a shrug.

Meanwhile, the New York Times opinion writer Michelle Cottle today profiled Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, a man who has called his opponents “degenerate liberals” and who is so empty of character that even Mitt Romney can’t stand him. Cottle, however, noted Vance’s cute socks, and ended with this flourish: “Mr. Trump’s Republican Party is something of a chaotic mess. Until it figures out where it is headed, a shape-shifting MAGA brawler who quietly works across the aisle on particular issues may be the best this party has to offer.”

Something of a mess? That’s one way to put it.

And what about Fox News, the source of continual toxic dumping into the American political ecosystem? “Fox News,” the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle said yesterday, “does not have nearly as much power over viewers’ minds as progressives think. I am not cutting Fox any slack for amplifying Trump’s election lie nonsense. But I also doubt that it made that much of a difference.” Having traveled the country giving talks about misinformation and democracy for years, and hearing the same stories so many times of people who now find it impossible to talk to their own parents, I have no such doubts.

If Trump wins in 2024, worries about Fox’s influence or reflections on Vance’s adorable socks will seem trivial when Trump unleashes his narcissistic and lawless revenge on the American people. But even if he does not win, America cannot sustain itself without a functional and sane center-right party. So far, the apathy of the public, the fecklessness of the media, and the cynicism of Republican leaders mean that no such party is on the horizon.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court ruled against an attempt by Alabama Republicans to retain a congressional map with only one majority-Black district. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states are suing Amazon in a broad antitrust lawsuit that accuses it of monopolistic practices. An increasing number of Senate Democrats is calling for Senator Bob Menendez to resign from Congress following his federal indictment.

Evening Read

Franco Pagetti / VII / Redux

How We Got ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’

By Martin Baron

I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement …

Even that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t contain himself. “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.”

Read the full article.

When Black Hair Becomes a Horror Story

found Sep '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2023 › 09 › the-other-black-girl-black-hair › 675456

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In the 1989 surrealist satire Chameleon Street, two Black men bicker after one says that he prefers women with light skin and “good hair.” After being criticized for the comment, the man makes a self-deprecating joke: “I’m a victim, brotha. I’m a victim of 400 years of conditioning. The Man has programmed my conditioning. Even my conditioning has been conditioned.” Nearly a decade later, the rap duo Black Star would sample the dialogue at the beginning of their song “Brown Skin Lady,” which is framed as a rebuke of this pervasive bias against dark skin and kinkier hair, and an ode to an idealized vision of a head-wrap-donning natural woman whose “skin’s the inspiration for cocoa butter.”

Cocoa butter, a popular component of hair and beauty products targeted at Black women, is an essential ingredient in The Other Black Girl, a new Hulu series based on the 2021 office-novel-slash-surreal-thriller by Zakiya Dalila Harris. The story follows Nella Rogers (played by Sinclair Daniel), a 26-year-old assistant at a New York publishing house where almost all of her co-workers are white. One day, the sweet, muted chocolate scent of cocoa butter wafts toward Nella’s cubicle; she’s soon introduced to her cool new Black colleague, Hazel (Ashleigh Murray), who’s just been hired. But Nella’s initial excitement soon transitions into fear as she realizes that something sinister is hiding beneath Hazel’s head wraps. It turns out that Hazel is a member of a group of young, professional Black women who all use a magical hair grease—one that helps deaden the stresses of corporate racism. Hazel, whom the group calls its “Lead Conditioner,” likens it to “CBD for the soul”; her arrival at Wagner Books is a recruiting mission to force the personality-changing pomade onto Nella, so they can add a future book editor to their ranks.

For more than a century, Black writers (and, later, filmmakers) have been sublimating the worst chapters of American history into horror, science fiction, and other speculative works. These genres afford creators the freedom to embellish, reimagine, and comment on social ills by manipulating fear of real phenomena. In the context of horror, disembodied hair—or the wild hair of an unruly character—can elicit particularly visceral reactions. (There’s a reason that one specific image comes to mind when you think of The Ring.) The fraught history of Black hair in the United States provides no shortage of inspiration—not just the way it’s been legally policed, but also the mind-numbing pain of a scalp burn caused by chemical relaxer left in too long, or the headaches that come with tight braids. Taming Black hair can be a haunting endeavor, and works such as The Other Black Girl have used these real-world anxieties as a launchpad for more fantastical stories.

The Hulu adaptation is one of several recent productions that use elements of horror and speculative fiction to dramatize the liabilities of managing Black hair, especially in the workplace. In They Cloned Tyrone, a sci-fi mystery film released earlier this year, the protagonists discover an underground lab where an Afro-sporting white scientist has been conducting behavioral experiments on Black people. To inure Black women to the injustice around them, the nefarious entity has been adding a mind-controlling substance to the chemical relaxers they use to straighten their hair.

A similar plot device appears in the 2020 film Bad Hair, a horror satire set in 1989 Los Angeles, where a production assistant gives in to corporate pressure to ditch her natural Afro-textured hairstyles and get a long, silky weave. With her palatable new tresses, she finally gets considered for the TV hosting gig she’s been working toward for years, but her luck changes when her weave overpowers her—literally—and sets off a bloodthirsty rampage. Or take the 2018 horror-comedy short Hair Wolf, a modern vampire story set in a Black hair salon. Directed by Mariama Diallo (who also directed two episodes of The Other Black Girl), the film follows a white influencer obsessed with Black cultural signifiers who insists on getting “boxer braids”—and whose leeching presence starts changing the appearance of the salon's stylists.

Though these genre works vary in tone and skillfulness, they’re all rooted in the same historical reality: For centuries, Black hair has been surveilled, stigmatized, and even banned from public view by laws such as Louisiana’s 18th-century tignon law, which mandated that Creole women of color cover their hair with a scarf “as a visible sign of belonging to the slave class, whether they were enslaved or not.” After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment discrimination based on race, Black workers began fighting for their right to wear their natural hair without employer retaliation.

Some of these struggles continue today: Because of their hairstyles, Black students have been dismissed from school activities or barred from walking in graduation ceremonies with their classmates; Black job candidates have had employment offers rescinded. At the same time, some social progress has been achieved at the statehouse: Beginning with California in 2019, the CROWN Act (which stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair”) and similar bills have been passed in 23 states, making this form of discrimination illegal. Section I of the California law begins with an acknowledgment that the “history of our nation is riddled with laws and societal norms that equated ‘blackness,’ and the associated physical traits, for example, dark skin, kinky and curly hair to a badge of inferiority, sometimes subject to separate and unequal treatment.”

[Read: When ‘good hair’ hurts]

Hulu’s The Other Black Girl immediately introduces hair as a locus of its characters’ private unease (whereas in the novel, the anesthetizing hair serum isn’t introduced until nearly two-thirds of the way through). In its opening scene, a meek-looking Black woman tries to escape an unseen threat at the Wagner Books office in 1988. As she awaits the elevator in a panic, she reaches through her full, mostly straight hair to scratch her scalp. By the time she makes it onto the subway, she’s rubbed her skin raw, and her fingers emerge from her hair covered in blood. This is the work environment that Nella Rogers, with her Afro and her anxiety, will enter 35 years later—the hunting ground where Hazel will attempt to draw Nella into her cocoa-butter coup.

Hazel, whom the white higher-ups at Wagner seem to love as soon as they meet her, doesn’t look quite like the stereotypical “office pet” Black woman of TV shows past. Hazel sports faux dreadlocks, not straight hair of any kind. They’re often piled high atop her head, a wrap holding them in place. Her styling is decidedly modern, vaguely Afrocentric; she projects the sort of effortlessly chic authenticity that Nella, who keeps her hair in a simple Afro, longs for.

The Other Black Girl is at its best when it treats these differences between Nella and Hazel with humor. Nella’s friend, Malaika (Brittany Adebumola), for instance, is a Rihanna-loving style chameleon who judges Nella’s hair and attire with as much vigor as she questions the eerie plot unfolding at Wagner. While Malaika chaperones Nella at a “hair party” in Hazel’s Harlem brownstone, she tries to figure out what’s in the product that Hazel wants to use to braid Nella’s hair. After Hazel declines to answer, Malaika chastises her gullible friend for going along with the plan. “Girl, I taught you better than that,” Malaika says to Nella. “You are on a hair-care journey, and you’re gonna throw it out the window for some unknown ingredients?”

These comic moments recall the witty asides that peppered the show’s influences, most notably Get Out and Scandal. They’re also particularly engaging because the series is pretty light on thriller elements—and because they don’t feel bogged down by explanation. These scenes suggest that the show trusts its viewers to already know that natural hair care usually really is a journey. They reminded me of a bit in the shape-shifting sketch-comedy series Random Acts of Flyness, whose first season featured an episode in which a white judge sentences an anthropomorphic textured wig for offenses including “general badness,” “a tendency to split ends,” and “criminal damage to a perfectly functional plastic comb.” Spoofs like that sketch are especially refreshing because they know how exhausting such conversations about “good hair” can be. The sketch addresses a painful, sometimes dangerous form of discrimination, but the absurdity of its visuals and the confidence of its writing keep it feeling inventive.

The Other Black Girl doesn’t quite succeed at threading its disparate styles into one cohesive series. But the end of the season suggests that a second chapter could land with a little more finesse. In the show’s final scenes, when Nella seems to have acquiesced to the cocoa-butter conspiracy, we see her at Wagner rocking a long, silky black wig. Her co-workers are in awe of the newly minted editor’s empowered disposition, but behind the closed door of her fancy solo office, Nella smirks slyly. She’s in on the secret now, and she’s going to have some fun. What she’ll do as an undercover Conditioner is anybody’s guess.

Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate

found Sep '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2023 › 09 › streaming-services-netflix-max-cost › 675264

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The first question plaguing omnivorous, content-hungry humans with a spare hour or two is this: What should I watch? In recent years, a second question has come to dominate our evening streaming rituals: How do I watch it? Drenching your eyeballs in sweet television can be surprisingly tricky, requiring some amount of research to determine which streaming platform has whatever you want to watch and, crucially, if you pay for it already. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and Hulu are still sometimes not enough to watch the most popular shows, especially if you want to see Idris Elba attempt to outfox plane hijackers (you’ll need Apple TV+ for that).

Most evenings I find myself stuck in this phase, during which time I am likely to cycle through something resembling the five stages of grief. There’s Denial (I swear I had a Paramount+ account); Anger (I cannot believe I have to pay for Paramount+); Bargaining (I promise I will cancel my subscription after the one-week Paramount+ trial period ends); Depression (I cannot believe I didn’t remember to cancel Paramount+ after the trial period ended); Acceptance (Let’s just head to Netflix and watch Suits).

You, me, all of us, we live in a time of abundance. Streaming is a modern marvel that allows us to watch obscure documentaries, reality shows, Con Air, and more videos than any old Blockbuster could hope to stock. Yet the act of consuming content has never felt more frustrating than it does today. Not only has the landscape fractured into endless streaming platforms, the user experience on each one has degraded. Ads are everywhere, and thirsty streaming services looking to juice engagement metrics with questionable features. Last month, Variety reported that Warner Bros. Discovery has plans to integrate CNN alerts for breaking news into its popular streaming service, Max—disturbing your episode of Succession. Maybe worst of all, it’s getting more expensive. For the first time this fall, the monthly price for a bundle of the top streaming services ($87) is expected to exceed the price of an average cable package ($83).

We are living in a steaming paradox. As both an entertainment business model and a consumer experience, streaming has become a victim of its own success. It is a paradigm shift that is both beloved for giving us more choice than ever before, while also making it harder than ever to actually enjoy that abundance.

At first, streaming felt revolutionary, even seductive. Netflix debuted its service in 2007, right in the middle of my time at college. This introduction to binging TV episodes is a moment in time forever commemorated by a not-so-gentle decline in my grade point average from freshman to sophomore year. The proposition was simple: pay a reasonable monthly fee for a single destination of inexhaustible entertainment. For a while, Netflix, like any good tech product, simply worked—on your laptop, your phone, even a stranger’s TV at an Airbnb rental.

Naturally, Netflix’s runaway success kicked off a streaming arms race. Studios poured billions into building tech products, and tech companies poured billions into becoming production studios. In 2014, Netflix became the first streaming platform to be nominated for an Academy Award. Soon after, platforms and studios entered expensive bidding wars over new titles and funded more shows and movies than ever before in attempts to acquire new sign-ups. Executives felt they had no choice but to adapt to the on-demand subscription model, all while confessing that the business of streaming seemed shaky.

Now we are living through the contraction. The simple truth is that it is incredibly expensive to produce and distribute content at Netflix scale and without a head start. According to The Wall Street Journal, the traditional entertainment companies, such as Disney and Warner Bros., who’ve spun up streaming businesses to compete with Netflix and its chief rivals have “reported losses of more than $20 billion combined since early 2020.” Streaming platforms across the board are dealing with subscription fatigue: Only so many people are willing to pay for so many platforms.

In response, major streaming services across the board have raised prices, while Netflix has cracked down on password sharing. That’s to say nothing of the content itself, the production of which is slowing down and, according to dissatisfied viewers, appears less ambitious. Complex bundle tiers are beginning to emerge. Interested in Disney+? That’ll be $8 dollars a month. Unless you want it ad-free, then it’s $11 a month. How about Hulu? That’s $8 a month or $80 a year if you’re willing to put up with ads, or $15 a month without ads. But what if I told you that you could have Disney+ and Hulu together? That’ll cost you $10 a month with ads; an ad-free version will run you $20 a month. Want to add ESPN+ to the bundle? No problem, just add $3 a month. Or $10, if you don’t want those pesky commercials. Got it?

Although the streaming arms race has unlocked more studio back catalogs and resulted in more original content, actually accessing all the options means shelling out more money. The most famous instance of this is when NBCUniversal decided to launch its own streaming platform, Peacock, and stopped licensing The Office to Netflix. The decision cost NBCUniversal $500 million, and required Netflix subscribers to fork up another $12 a month to continue streaming the hit sitcom. Cutthroat studios may behave as if streaming is a zero-sum game, but for most consumers, it’s not. Multiple acquaintances of mine have been reduced to once-unthinkable practices, like keeping spreadsheets to track how much money they’re spending on all their different streaming subscriptions.

Not that cable was better and we should return to a time before Tubi (or Mubi, Crackle, Popcornflix, Vudu, and Crunchyroll). But for all its shortcomings, cable made sense in a way that the modern streaming environment does not. In a podcast with my colleague Derek Thompson, the media analyst Julia Alexander recently described cable as a “beautiful, socialistic almost, experiment.” Our current streaming landscape may offer consumers the à la carte experience cord-cutters once clamored for, but there’s a Hobbesian quality to it all. For the studios, writers, and actors themselves, the streaming model is mostly untenable, taking away the money that Hollywood’s creative people used to make off of reruns, among other things. It’s possible that the promise of streaming—and the precarity it introduced—may kneecap the entire film and TV industry for years to come.

If what has happened to streaming feels familiar, that’s because it is. Occasionally, as the writer Cory Doctorow has argued, tech platforms offer a service that’s genuinely helpful or unique, and subsidize the cost for users in order to hook them. Once users are dependent, the companies “abuse” them, squeezing out revenue by either jacking up prices or surveilling users and selling the data, which is part of a process he calls “enshittification.” Maybe you’ve noticed that Google Search isn’t as helpful as it once was. But there is another side of enshittification, too. Sometimes, a new service emerges, offering an idealized, likely heavily subsidized version of itself—so good, in fact, that it is adopted quickly and then relentlessly copied by competitors to the point that it becomes economically unsustainable. Think MoviePass.

Streaming appears to be a mix of the two. It is a genuine technological achievement that ushered in an embarrassment of riches. Like MoviePass, the earliest iterations felt almost too good to be true, combining great value with true utility. The model was beloved, but also copied to the point of absurdity. In the long run and in times of non-zero interest rates, it’s entirely possible that the model is unprofitable. It is also a story of scale-chasing that leads to irrational business decisions, lighting piles of cash on fire, and, ultimately, providing users with slowly degrading or bewildering products.

What is left is a cognitive dissonance that comes along with our streaming rituals—the feeling of being presented with infinite choice while also experiencing a vague sense of loss. Perhaps this is because people like myself are unable to understand how good we have it. But there is something about our current streaming paradox that also speaks to the feeling of living a life mediated by Silicon Valley. Perhaps the lesson is simply that infinite choice is glorious in theory, but in practice, it is undesirable and only able to exist undergirded by fractured, bureaucratic, and algorithmic systems. It’s a notion both timeless and distinctly modern: A fundamental experience of being alive on the internet in 2023 is getting everything you asked for and realizing the end product is not what it seems.

The Beverage Universe Keeps Expanding

found Sep '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › beverages-non-alcoholic-expanding › 675221

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In recent years, a massive selection of new drinks has popped up on the market, including a spate of alcoholic seltzers and a bunch of no-alcohol options. To discuss the state of beverages ahead of the long weekend, I convened a roundtable with our health and technology writers Amanda Mull, Ian Bogost, and Charlie Warzel.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Retailers bet wrong on America’s feelings about stores. The other work remote workers get done America needs hunting more than it knows.

Throwing Drinks at the Wall

Lora Kelley: Why are there so many drinks on the market right now?

Amanda Mull: Part of it is the economics of the drinks industry. There’s pretty low overhead relative to a lot of other food categories. One of the biggest costs is shipping, but everything else that goes into making a beverage—the ingredients, one of which is just water; the ability to find a manufacturer; the shelf life—is pretty favorable. So profit margins are better than in other areas of packaged food. It’s a friendly area to get into.

Also, in a lot of consumer categories, trying to switch someone from one product to another is a really expensive and difficult enterprise. But in beverages, you have a lot of people in a very large market who are open to and actively seeking new options.

Ian Bogost: The global nonalcoholic beverage market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. If you can capture a very tiny fraction of this enormous market, it can be extremely lucrative.

Charlie Warzel: I read some Kantar market research that found that the number of “beverage occasions” has remained static, at about 35 a week, but the way that people are consuming their beverages is different, and what they want out of them is different. It seems there is a shift toward emotional experiences with beverages. People aren’t drinking beverages more frequently, necessarily, but how we’re doing it has changed.

I moved away from New York City in 2017. Going into a bodega in 2023 in New York City now, from a beverage standpoint, is a truly mind-blowing experience. It feels like being a kid at a toy store. I have so many different options—this one might soothe me; this one sort of tastes like a root-beer float.

Ian: The precursors to this situation we’re in are also worth mentioning. The rise of bottled water is, of course, huge—people shifted from thinking of hydration as drinking from a fountain to picking up water as a packaged good. And then there was the Starbucks-ification of coffee. The third thing is, the number of impulse-purchase opportunities has massively increased both in stores and everywhere else, including in places that wouldn’t have sold you a beverage in the past. And the fourth thing is just market segmentation and lifestyle marketing in general. Now you can feel you’re the kind of person who would try Charlie’s calming beverage or root-beer beverage or the CBD drink or whatever it is. You are marking identity with much greater willingness and self-consciousness than just having a brand affiliation.

Lora: Is this much variety good for consumers? For example, who would something like a nonalcoholic White Claw—which is said to be coming next year—be for?

Amanda: We’re in a period of a lot of brands, both established and upstarts, throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. When companies can detect changing habits among people, there is this real rush to figure out what products address those new desires.

Charlie: Throwing stuff at the wall may also be an attempt to capture a weird bit of cultural virality. When Liquid Death was first announced, it was this weird start-up water, but it became a very successful brand. You laugh at it, then you’re buying it. It would be truly unhinged to be walking around at work with a nonalcoholic White Claw. But maybe that will take off among a strange segment of consumers, or get popular on TikTok.

Ian: Brand value, and brand management, used to be much more conservative than it is today. It was unthinkable—even in the 1990s, when there were a lot of new drinks—for a brand with the recognition of White Claw to imagine undermining that by confusing the consumer about their value proposition. Instead, what a beverage company would have done is launch a different brand. For whatever reason, there’s now a willingness to experiment with brand properties. Social media is definitely a part of it.

As for whether this is good for consumers: It’s absolutely bad to have all of these packaged goods and all the plastic. But capitalism says that choice is always good for consumers. On the one hand, you’re like, Maybe there’s too much choice. But then you think about all the parts of the economy where you have almost no choice or no choice at all. If there was only one drink or three drinks, that would be worse.

Lora: To what extent have we reached peak beverage? Will the market keep growing?

Amanda: Generally, in consumer markets, when you see this quick expansion in the players and the products, you eventually do see a shakeout. There is stuff that just won’t work: It won’t be sustainable on a revenue basis; it won’t find a market; it won’t have a viral moment. So I think it will shake out eventually. I don’t know if we’re there yet.

I think there’s probably still room to grow, especially with growing interest in low-alcohol or no-alcohol drinks. And I think there’s probably room left in the athletic-hydration market, which expands out into the hangover market. Over the course of industrialized-beverage history, I don’t know if there’s ever been a period of real contraction. It just keeps growing.

Ian: I don't think there’s peak beverage. The universe expands.

Charlie: Look at the change in habits around drinking alcohol. There are people that are saying, “It’s very clear that alcohol is very bad for you; we should be drinking less.” But for many people, that means adding more things to their arsenal of drinking.

I keep Athletic Brewing IPAs in my fridge, and I also, on occasion, will have a regular IPA. Now I am buying two different things. In my own life, I see how my beverage universe has expanded just because I have a slight change in my own habits and preferences.

Lora: Before we go, what are you all drinking right now?

Amanda: I have a lemon-lime Liquid I.V. in like 35 ounces of water.

Ian: This is just coffee out of our office espresso machine.

Charlie: I don’t have it on me, but this summer, I discovered the Waterloo brand of seltzers, and it’s a revelation. It’s the beverage of the summer.

Ian: A year or two ago, I became a pure LaCroix drinker. I kind of burned through the flavored LaCroix, and now I’m almost exclusively a plain-seltzer drinker. It feels like getting back to basics.

Today’s News

The August jobs report showed steady hiring and increased unemployment in the U.S. Russia has placed its new nuclear-weapons system, the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, on combat duty. Hong Kong and Guangdong canceled flights and evacuated almost 800,000 people to prepare for the arrival of Typhoon Saola.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman asks: Could AI ever write like Stephen King and Margaret Atwood?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Supreme Court Justices Are Just Like Anyone Else

By Adriane Fugh-Berman

What do some Supreme Court justices and physicians have in common? Both take gifts from those who stand to profit from their decisions, and both mistakenly think they can’t be swayed by those gifts.

Gifts are not only tokens of regard; they are the grease and the glue that help maintain a relationship. That’s not always unhealthy, but it’s important to note that gifts create obligation. The indebtedness of the recipient to the giver is a social norm in all cultures, and a basic principle of human interaction—something the French sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote about in his classic essay The Gift.

This sense of reciprocity is subconscious and powerful, and doesn’t necessarily require a quid pro quo. In other words, a material gift need not be reciprocated as a material gift, but may be reciprocated in other ways, including a more favorable bent toward a company, a group, or a person.

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