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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is our Science editor Sarah Laskow. Sarah recently investigated whether salsa is gazpacho—and whether gazpacho is salsa. She’s also explored how America’s lost crops rewrite the history of farming.

Sarah is enjoying the sincerity in The Golden Bachelor, despite its cringiest moments; regretting her Shins phase as a New Jersey teen; and thinking about the incredible quantity of oranges consumed in a wonderful children’s book.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Books that changed how our writers and editors think Why America doesn’t build Are pet cloners happy with their choice?

The Culture Survey: Sarah Laskow

The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: Killers of the Flower Moon. I think if you say the words “Martin Scorsese is adapting a David Grann book,” a certain sphere of people will accept point-blank that they have to experience that.

The best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: On the plane to a friend’s wedding in Greece, I decided that as a mom leaving her kids behind to spend time in Athens, I might as well reread Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which begins on a plane with a mom leaving her kids behind to spend time in Athens. I’m not divorced and did not meet a Greek shipping heir on the plane, but I did end up later having drinks with someone who told a story about their complicated relationship with a Greek shipping heir, which I swear Cusk could have written. I wondered if that was why I loved this book even more than the first time I read it. But really I was just so swept away by the way the book works: The narrator is constantly listening to other people tell her stories about their lives, sometimes invited, sometimes less so, which means the novel is both a collection of vignettes with many narrators and a portrait of the narrator, who’s defined as much by what she doesn’t say as by what she does. It’s truly incredible that Cusk wrote this book in three weeks (although three weeks without children does sound like a luxury of time).

On that same trip, I also read Rick Steves’s Pocket Athens, and specifically the chapter that guides you through the National Archaeological Museum. It is a peerless work of a very specific genre of nonfiction. It does exactly the job it needs to, illuminating the story of Greek sculpture for the casual tourist who has no background in the subject. (A friend recommended the guide-museum combo, which made me wonder the same thing about Rick Steves that I wonder about bird-watching: Is it getting more popular, or am I just getting old?) The highlight of the museum, for me, was the Mask of Agamemnon—I’ve seen so many images of it over the course of my life, but the real thing was so shiny and beautifully made; seeing it among the other burial objects with which it was discovered made me imagine the excitement of an archaeological dig where piece after piece of gold emerged from the ground after being buried for thousands of years. [Related: Rachel Cusk won’t stay still.]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: On the theme of ancient treasures, I’m obsessed with The Golden Bachelor. I haven’t been a particular fan of the series—in fact, I identify with the subset of semi-clueless contestants on this season who need to be reminded what the roses and date cards mean. The show can’t quite escape itself: It’s still about a group of extremely groomed women fighting over a man. But I find this particular iteration compelling as a portrait of Boomers and how they imagine the later stages of life. The bachelor in question, Gerry, comes across as both disarmingly genuine and gratingly of his time. I cringed when he ordered food without really stopping to ask what his date might want. That old-fashioned tinge, though, is part of why I’m watching. Like the best reality TV, the show has just enough sincerity to make me root for at least some of these very cheesy people.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: Whitney Houston’s Whitney has always been one of the best albums to listen to, and belt along to, even if, like me, you are a terrible singer. On the other end of the spectrum is the Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow, which just had its 20th anniversary—and which I listened to on repeat at one point in my life. Something about the band’s wordy music spoke to my suburban–New Jersey teenage dissatisfactions, although I always felt a little betrayed that the Shins’ fame was so closely tied to Garden State, a bad film. (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is a much more true portrait of Jersey vibes.) But now I mostly find these songs whiny and can’t stand to listen to any for more than 20 seconds.

Something I recently revisited: My brother-in-law and nephew recently started reading My Father’s Dragon; my 3-year-old isn’t so interested yet, but when I reread the first few chapters—in which Elmer, the young protagonist, meets a cat, learns about a captive dragon, packs his bag with two dozen pink lollipops, and stows away on a ship—I remembered why I had loved it as a kid. One detail I had forgotten is just how many tangerines Elmer consumes after landing on the island of Tangerina. At one point he puts 31 in his bag, then later eats eight in one go and then three more a few hours after. I can eat a lot of small citrus fruits, but that’s a lot of tangerines.

The Week Ahead

The Gilded Age, a period drama set in New York City during the economic change of the 1880s, comes out with its second season (premieres on HBO today). In The Reformatory, a novel by Tananarive Due, a boy who is sent to a segregated reform school in Jim Crow Florida sees ghosts—and the truth (on sale Tuesday). Priscilla tells the story of the teenage girl whom Elvis Presley fell in love with, and the life they built together (in theaters Friday).

Essay

TCD / Prod.DB / Alamy

The Hero Gen Z Needs

By Elise Hanuum

Snoopy was everywhere when I was growing up, in the early 2000s. On TV, the cartoon beagle appeared as a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and starred in the holiday specials my family watched; in real life, his statues were all over Saint Paul, Minnesota, a hometown I share with the Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. After I left for college, Snoopy largely disappeared from my life. But recently, I’ve started encountering him all over again, on social media.

The TikTok account @snooopyiscool, also known as Snoopy Sister, went viral earlier this year and has more than half a million followers. Other Snoopy videos on the app regularly rack up thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of views. This online resurgence, primarily among young people, has mostly been fueled by short, shareable Peanuts clips set to surprisingly apt contemporary music. In them, Charlie Brown’s intrepid pet beagle tags along on the kids’ adventures—they often face some sort of problem but aren’t always left with an easy solution … It seems that a new generation is finally seeing Snoopy for who he really is.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Britney finally tells her story. It’s dark. Sadness and triumph at a Massachusetts boarding school Pain Hustlers is a goofy celebration of greed. “The whole country has PTSD.” A movie about the perils of being a control freak Is a coincidental similarity enough for real intimacy? When America helped assassinate an African leader SNL didn’t need subtitles. Poem: The mowing that woke my daughter

Catch Up on The Atlantic

“How much blood is your fun worth?” Hurricane Otis was too fast for the forecasters. Franklin Foer: “Tell me how this ends.”

Photo Album

Lucerne Bell of Team USA competes in the women’s 400-meter individual medley swimming event at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile. (Francois-Xavier Marit / AFP / Getty)

Shrimp fishing on a Belgian beach, the WNBA-championship victory parade in Las Vegas, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters.

Whatever basketball’s blue-collar bona fides, whatever its associations with the barbershop and the neighborhood blacktop, its culture has proved hostile to at least one category of everyman: the plumber. A few years ago, fans on YouTube and TikTok began uploading grainy footage of star players from previous decades and zooming in on the defenders, usually white guys with short shorts, long mustaches, and very little muscle definition. After these players were centered and freeze-framed, a voice-over would deride them as “plumbers.” As in: “Michael Jordan played against plumbers.”

Basketball fans love to argue about the evolution of the game, and whether yesterday’s superstars had it easier. Putting aside the meme-makers’ contempt for tradesmen, they’re right: Today’s professionals do look more athletic and skilled than their predecessors. But then again, today’s fans are steeped in the current visual style of the game, which has changed over the past few decades. We may underestimate former players’ explosiveness, fluidity, and precision.

To find out whether NBA gameplay has indeed become more challenging, I embarked on an investigation—and I didn’t like what I found. Like many basketball fans in their early 40s, I’m hopelessly nostalgic for the NBA of the ’90s, for Hakeem Olajuwon’s slippery footwork, and Penny Hardaway’s pretty interior passing. But after digging through data and consulting with league insiders, I can’t help but conclude that today’s game really is more rigorous.

A large body of evidence suggests that NBA players now move more explosively than those of previous eras— despite the fact that they aren’t themselves larger-bodied. The league’s average height peaked at 6 foot 7 in 1987, and since then, only the (relatively) diminutive point guards have inched up as a group. Taller players—centers and forwards—have actually shrunk a bit. NBA players packed on weight all the way through 2011, but they’ve since thinned. That evolution can even be seen across individual careers: LeBron James fussily shapes his physique during every offseason, and in recent years he has transitioned to a slimmer frame.  

[Adam Harris: San Antonio, the Spurs, and me]

To measure how those (slightly) smaller bodies move, some NBA teams turn to a company called P3. More than two-thirds of the players who were on pro rosters when the season tipped off earlier this week have worked out at a P3 facility, according to the company. Players are outfitted head-to-toe with more than 20 sensors. They’re asked to perform intense vertical and lateral movements atop special, sensor-laden platforms. Their every twitch is recorded by motion-capture cameras. Marcus Elliott, the founder and director of P3, told me that his system measures raw-force production, power, overall movement, and speed, and that with respect to all of them, “today’s average NBA athlete is 4 to 7 percent better than the average NBA athlete from more than 10 years ago.”

When Elliott first started evaluating players about 15 years ago, many were operating at only 75 to 80 percent of their potential athleticism. They weren’t as ballistic as today’s players, but they could still get by on skills. Most of today’s players, by contrast, are more than 90 percent optimized by their first visit to P3. Elliott compared them to Formula 1 cars: “They accelerate at a faster rate to higher velocities and they change directions quicker.” I asked him about previous generations of players. What cars did they remind him of? “They weren’t Hondas,” he said, “but maybe something in between.” You can decide which is worse: Hondas or plumbers.

Basketball has never been a more global sport; a record 125 international players are on teams’ rosters this season. But before NBA general managers raided the worldwide talent pool for exceptionally skilled players, some taller players basically got by on their height. There were outliers: Bill Walton regularly threw no-look passes from the center position; Magic Johnson played point guard at 6 foot 9; Jack Sikma (6 foot 11) and Sam Perkins (6 foot 9) both stroked it from beyond the arc. But their fellow bigs tended to be clumsy ball handlers who took few shots outside the key. Now shooting and passing abilities are the purview of virtually every player. Centers are logging nearly 30 percent more assists than they did a decade ago. One of them, the 6-foot-11-inch Nikola Jokić, may have the best court vision in the NBA. Centers are also taking more than four times as many three-point shots as they were 10 years ago. Power forwards have become long-range bombers, too; a whopping 40 percent of their shot attempts are now three-pointers.

[Prashant Rao: Why it’s good that Americans don’t dominate basketball]

NBA gameplay has been transformed by these sharpshooting big men. “It used to be that there was always a non-shooting specialist on the court,” Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, told me. Usually, this person would be a pure rebounder or rim protector. Teams could rest their stars by having them defend such players, or design defensive schemes to make sure that the ball ended up in a non-shooter’s hands. Now every team has five shooters on the floor, Cuban explained. “Guys have to work harder on defense. They have to scramble more.”

After Steph Curry and his imitators started shooting from the logo zones way beyond the three-point line about 10 years ago, the space defenders had to scramble across grew much larger. More than half of these ultra-deep-shot attempts miss, and many clang violently off the rim, leading to long rebounds and quicker transitions. Thanks to this shift, and the NBA’s earlier decision to shorten the time by which a team must advance to half-court after gaining possession, the league’s pace has increased dramatically.  

All that speed has drawbacks. In describing today’s players as Formula 1 cars, Elliott wasn’t only emphasizing their acceleration. “The thing about those cars is that they’re dangerous to drive,” he said. And in recent years, wreckage has been piling up on NBA sidelines. Players have missed more games due to injuries than in previous eras. This uptick in injuries—primarily ankle sprains, along with hamstring and calf strains—is somewhat mysterious, because NBA teams have never been more obsessed with the physical well-being of players. (Not that this concern springs from pure altruism. It’s just that most NBA contracts are guaranteed.)

[Read: The ugly side of NBA fandom can no longer be ignored]

NBA franchises previously entrusted the physical care of their players to a staff of two to three people. Most now have a training staff of at least eight—and many players also have their own personal trainers and nutritionists. Asheesh Bedi, the chief medical officer of the National Basketball Players Association, told me that in the olden times, “treatments in the training room were often limited to ice and ‘stim,’” short for muscle stimulation. Now teams have gleaming sci-fi facilities, complete with whole-body cryotherapy chambers, special pools for underwater treatments, antigravity treadmills, and ultrasound machines for advanced imaging. Teams also fly private so that they can time their takeoffs to players’ sleep cycles. When players get soft-tissue injuries, a team’s medical staff can deploy platelet-rich plasma to speed healing. On top of these efforts, the league has also shortened its preseason, and minimized back-to-back games and cross-country flights.

All of this pampering might seem to imply that today’s players have it easy. And yet, injuries are still up, and everyone in the league is trying to understand why. One theory is that today’s players are more injury prone when they reach the NBA, because they’ve been playing in year-round travel leagues since adolescence, if not earlier. Research has shown that Little Leaguers and cricketers who pitch or bowl too many times during their formative years can become predisposed to specific injuries, but so far, no evidence suggests that something similar is happening to young basketball players.

Perhaps the increase in injuries is instead a function of the pro game’s new physical demands. In 2018, researchers measured the movements of professional basketball players in Barcelona in a game setting and found that, among the 1,000 or so actions that players perform during a game, some are especially hard on the body. Jumps were obviously intense—as even casual hoopers can tell you, rough landings lead to ankle sprains. So were accelerations, all-out sprints, and decelerations. According to Elliott, the latter are most likely to give players traumatic injuries and wear and tear, especially when a player has to decelerate on short notice.

[Read: How NBA moms help their sons deal with the fame and fortune]

“If Luka Dončić is coming at you really hard and then he steps back, you have to try to decelerate out of nowhere, and then accelerate in some other direction” to close out, Elliott said. “Those transitions are so hard for human bodies,” especially if an athlete already has a strain, or some asymmetry that causes him to favor one leg over the other. The spacing of today’s game, and the sheer ubiquity of good shooters, requires players to constantly accelerate and decelerate on defense, and doing so across an 82-game season may be bringing them within range of the human body’s limits. Teams have started strategically benching their best players, forcing the NBA to crack down with new rules intended to keep stars on the floor. Some commentators have even suggested shortening the season, but because the NBA is set to negotiate a new TV deal soon, that’s unlikely.

There is a certain kind of fan who believes that the NBA reached its apex in the ’90s, if not in competition, certainly in physicality. They rightly point out that back then, the rules allowed for a much rougher style of play. To reach the hoop, Jordan had to leap into a violent gantlet of heavy-bodied bigs—Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, and Bill Laimbeer, to name a few—who delivered hard fouls with relish.

But that’s only one kind of physicality. Today’s playing environment puts a different set of demands on a player’s body. They may not have to dodge as many elbows and clotheslines as they did in the paint of yore, but that doesn’t mean their game isn’t more dangerous. That’s not to say that Jordan couldn’t thrive in today’s NBA. It just would have been more difficult. It would have required more from him. He might not have found it so easy to win all those rings.

The TikTokker faces a custodial sentence after posting videos of people without their consent.

Snoopy was everywhere when I was growing up, in the early 2000s. On TV, the cartoon beagle appeared as a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and starred in the holiday specials my family watched; in real life, his statues were all over Saint Paul, Minnesota, a hometown I share with the Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. After I left for college, Snoopy largely disappeared from my life. But recently, I’ve started encountering him all over again, on social media.

The TikTok account @snooopyiscool, also known as Snoopy Sister, went viral earlier this year and has more than half a million followers. Other Snoopy videos on the app regularly rack up thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of views. This online resurgence, primarily among young people, has mostly been fueled by short, shareable Peanuts clips set to surprisingly apt contemporary music. In them, Charlie Brown’s intrepid pet beagle tags along on the kids’ adventures—they often face some sort of problem but aren’t always left with an easy solution. Sometimes Snoopy is a help, and sometimes he’s a hindrance; other times, he’s on his own adventures. Regardless, Snoopy has always been defined in part by how emotional he is. Some fans say that his personality speaks to their inner child: He plays pretend and dreams big, while finding joy in little wins such as receiving a full bowl of food. But Snoopy’s grand feelings also reflect his existential side—a reminder of the comic’s original gloomy tone, the perception of which was softened and sanitized over subsequent decades. It seems that a new generation is finally seeing Snoopy for who he really is.

Despite featuring an adorable dog and his rich fantasy life, Peanuts always had bleak philosophical themes. In the early years of the strip, which first ran in 1950, cultural critics called Schulz a “pop existentialist,” according to Blake Scott Ball, a history professor at Huntingdon College and the author of Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. The comic “was about the difficulty of existing as a regular human being in the 20th century ... just how hard it is to handle the immensity of problems that faced us, and hold all that together with your daily concerns,” Ball told me. Schulz posed serious questions in his stories—about armed conflict, for example, in the era of acute atomic-bomb fears and the beginning of the Vietnam War—but left the answers unclear. In one scene, Snoopy wears his aviator outfit and compares being trapped in his doghouse to being imprisoned.

[From the November 2015 issue: The exemplary narcissism of Snoopy]

Snoopy, despite his broad imagination and silly antics, had personal troubles too. Ball pointed to one edition of Peanuts where Snoopy cries on Mother’s Day because he’s separated from his mom. After helping him send her a card, Charlie Brown muses about how holidays can be difficult for everyone. When Schulz adapted his comics for the animated specials in the 1960s, Snoopy became more anthropomorphic and expressive, and embarked on his own fantastical B-plots. He didn’t speak, instead communicating with noises, including whining and cackling. Still, his angst remained.

Many of today’s young people likely first experienced the Peanuts characters through the animated specials, which explains why those clips trigger a specific nostalgia. But the televised format also lends itself to TikTok. Unlike in the comics, Snoopy in animated form doesn’t have thought bubbles to explain his feelings, so he resorts to over-the-top physicality. When a female poodle pecks him on the cheek, he blushes, his ears standing straight up, then falls into a swoon, as cartoon hearts appear over his head. He sobs loudly at a party but still takes comfort in a small moment of affection—a high five—with a friend, who is also crying. His ability to convey these sentiments, all without saying a word, might have a particular appeal for Zoomers, who have been performing big emotions online since they learned to type. For them, Snoopy has become something of an unexpected avatar for the “internet sad girl”—a certain online persona, raised on Lana Del Rey lyrics and Tumblr, that revels in her sorrow.

The key to Snoopy’s popularity now seems to go beyond his cuteness. Over the years, the character had been turned into a mascot for organizations such as MetLife and NASA. The Snoopy statues in my hometown—which I’d see in the airport, the library, my high school—served both as a tribute to Schulz and as an adorable character for kids to admire. What rings especially true today, however, is the dog’s tumultuous inner life. If the character’s commodification has at times flattened him, his online rebirth in the Zoomer era emphasizes his emotional oscillation, making him feel truer to the original Peanuts and to today’s realities.

This is exemplified by the more contemporary soundtrack to those edited TikTok clips, added over scenes from the cartoon or simply played over a static video of a Snoopy doll. Clips that show Snoopy at his lowest—when he’s taking a walk alone in the rain or lying mournfully on top of his doghouse—are paired with songs such as “Creep,” by Radiohead; “Kill Bill,” by SZA, and “Ketchum, ID,” by Boygenius. Each video communicates overwhelming isolation, anger, sadness. But it’s not all bad. The sad-girl persona tends to be interpreted as gratuitously melancholic, but in actuality, it can simply encapsulate the enormity of one’s feelings—positive or negative. Snoopy gets this. For all his lonely moments, he also has joyful ones. He dances, laughs, and enjoys a good meal. He imagines himself as a writer, a fighter pilot, or just “cool.” When these Snoopy clips recirculate, they feature upbeat hits such as “You Wish,” by Flyana Boss, a song that embodies brazen confidence.

In Sarah Boxer’s 2015 Atlantic article on Snoopy’s legacy, she describes his behavior as a defense mechanism: “Since no one will ever see you the way you see yourself, you might as well build your world around fantasy, create the person you want to be, and live it out, live it up.” As Zoomers come of age, they face a barrage of seemingly hopeless climate and political catastrophes. In the face of this, it’s no wonder Snoopy has become a hero. Sometimes, people just want to throw their hands up at the immensity of the world and retreat to a controlled, interior one—a doghouse of their own—from which they can feel their emotions as much as they want.

TikTok would like to sell me a brush. Or, more specifically, an UNbrush. The $18 implement, made by the hair-tool brand FHI Heat, looks like a regular paddle brush, but with its rear panel removed so that air can flow through its perforated sheet of plastic bristles. Its promise, according to the dozens of video reviews that TikTok has pushed into my feed in the past week, is simple: The UNbrush cuts through tangles like a hot knife through butter, even if your hair is highly textured or coated in salt water after a day at the beach. At times, every third or fourth video in my feed has shown the brush doing exactly that, accompanied by a coupon code—never the same one, never for the same amount—and a link to buy.

The UNbrush is just one of many assorted products—mascaras, office chairs, battery-powered kitchen scrubbers—that have recently gone viral on TikTok Shop, which officially launched in the United States last month. TikTok’s endless stream of unpredictable, algorithmically selected clips has long been a powerful—if erratic—engine for shopping. Many people’s feeds were already full of informal, chatty reviews and product demonstrations that, at their best, feel like you’re getting a genuine tip from a friend. These videos have sold scores of seemingly random consumer goods, so TikTok Shop is the company’s bid to profit from those sales directly instead of sending those dollars elsewhere.

Thousands of sellers have rushed to list their wares on the platform, but TikTok Shop’s rollout hasn’t been universally beloved by the app’s U.S. users. To encourage creators to promote the shop’s products, people with at least 5,000 followers can join an affiliate-marketing program that pays them a commission on any sales they refer with their shopping links—a long-standing feature of more traditional online retailers, made potentially more powerful because of TikTok’s newly closed ecosystem of recommendations and sales. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote during the feature’s test phase this past summer, some users have balked at how much TikTok Shop encourages their fellow TikTokers not just to share recommendations but also to more pointedly hawk products, pushing people’s feeds even further toward a low-rent, Gen Z version of QVC.

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

More than a month into the feature’s full rollout, those concerns seem prescient. The app is clogged with commission-generating sales pitches, listings for potentially counterfeit versions of popular products, and the kind of dirt-cheap plastic doodads that you’ll also see on bargain-basement retailers such as Wish, Temu, and AliExpress. TikTok, although never exactly a flawless source of recommendations, has had at least some utility as a venue for real reviews of stuff you might want to buy from regular people who are trying to sort through the same endless array of indistinguishable junk that you are. But the junk is winning.

TikTok Shop’s stated purpose is pretty logical: Aggregating the products that regularly go viral on the app and giving creators an opportunity to earn money from recommendations is remunerative for the app, for sellers, and for creators. As long as the end result isn’t spammy or unreliable, it also has the potential to be beloved by users, who are already going out of their way to buy a lot of that stuff anyway. However, it can be difficult to tell what’s happening with TikTok Shop, which lives under a tab within the app’s main navigation bar. Like Amazon, it uses a marketplace model, which aggregates listings created by more than 200,000 third-party sellers into a single shopping portal with a single checkout system. This system allows retailers to offer lots of products without taking the financial risk of buying and managing inventory up front.

Amazon, Walmart, and Target, among both other major retailers and upstarts, use versions of the marketplace model for a significant chunk of what’s available on their websites. Sellers buy the inventory, create the listings, and, in many cases, ship the orders themselves, assuming most of the risk and doing most of the work. The platform takes a cut of their sales in exchange for access to their audience of potential buyers. This model has become popular, because it allows wannabe retailers to spin up the online equivalent of a big-box store relatively quickly and with less initial investment.

[Read: Surprise! You work for Amazon.]

The tactic also has some downsides, no matter who is using it. Depending on third parties on a huge scale means that listings can be more unreliable or misleading than those created under in-house supervision, and the inventory risks being low-quality or fake—an issue that even the largest and most powerful marketplace retailers have a hard time controlling. A TikTok spokesperson told me that the app uses a combination of algorithmic and human moderation to remove problem listings, which is a typical approach for marketplace retailers. But some listings go unnoticed until buyers begin to report problems. Listings sometimes use stock images that don’t depict the product they’re actually selling, omit important details on sizing or material composition, or offer counterfeit (and potentially unsafe) products. Even legitimate listings from scrupulous sellers can make for a confusing or scammy-feeling shopping experience, because sellers create a lot of duplicate listings for the same products. That’s especially common on TikTok, where sellers rush to meet demand for the handful of products that have captivated the platform at any particular moment.

All of these issues are immediately apparent when you open TikTok Shop. The particulars of what you see will be tailored to the videos, links, and accounts you’ve interacted with in the past, but if your experience is anything like mine, you are likely to encounter an endless scroll of duplicate listings of dubious legitimacy, most of which advertise products you’ve already been pitched a zillion times on your For You Page. Earlier today, I spent about 20 minutes swiping through my For You Page, which is the primary way that users interact with videos on the platform. In that time, I flipped through 274 TikToks, and more than a quarter of them were recommendations or livestreams linking to products in TikTok Shop.

If a particular recommendation goes viral, its creator stands to profit handsomely. In a follow-up to her original video, the creator behind one of the UNbrush’s most popular reviews posted screenshots of the results in the affiliate system’s user interface. After its first 11 million views, her video appeared to have generated a little over $100,000 in sales, from which she said she’d earned more than $13,000 in commissions. The review now has more than 32 million views, of which I must account for at least a dozen—the video has been pushed into my feed over and over again, as though the algorithm has somehow detected that I have long, curly, ultrafine hair that tangles if you look at it the wrong way.

FHI’s UNbrush seems to be a genuinely useful and well-liked hair tool. But when I toggle over to my account’s Shopping tab, the listings for it are bewildering. Some of them price the brush at $18, the same as you’ll pay at traditional beauty retailers. Others advertise discounts to $14 or $16. Still others price it as low as $2, which strongly suggests that what you’ll receive is a knockoff. Sometimes the listings eventually include, tucked away at the end, an image of the actual product you’ll receive. Confusion over the real UNbrush has launched another round of videos about it, whose creators test the fake and real versions on either side of their head or warn viewers that they’re being scammed, promising that their links will lead to the genuine article.

This cycle isn’t unique to the brush. Last month, the most widely discussed problem was with a popular snail-slime skin-care serum. Next month, it might be Stanley insulated cups, a line of colorful tumblers omnipresent in my Shop-tab recommendations. When I search TikTok Shop for Stanley cup, most of the first dozen or so results have at least a couple of markers of a potential fake product: They come in color combinations or holiday designs that Stanley appears never to have made. Their prices are less than half of those charged by authorized retailers, which get their inventory from the brand itself. The handle is attached lower than it is on a version of the cup I own, and the safety warnings on the cups’ base are printed in a different font. A spokesperson for TikTok said that the platform expressly forbids counterfeit products from being sold on its platform and disputed the idea that counterfeits are nevertheless common in its product listings. (After I reached out, TikTok removed five of the seven suspected-counterfeit listings that I had sent to them, but it did not comment on why.)

The irony, of course, is that the enormous amount of guesswork required to navigate this kind of shopping is the reason TikTok’s review and recommendation videos were so popular and influential in the first place. When you have little confidence that you’re making the right choice among a slew of options, when you suspect that what you think you’re buying might not be the product that will ultimately show up, there’s real value to watching someone hold up the results of their purchase in front of a camera and tell you whether their new eyeliner smudged immediately, or if their new leggings stayed up at the gym.

[Read: What happened to Wirecutter?]

That TikTok would give in-house sales a try wasn’t a foregone conclusion, but it was pretty close to one. Shopping on social platforms is already popular in China, where TikTok’s parent company was founded. That’s less the case in the U.S.: In 2019, Instagram launched, with limited success, an in-app shopping feature called Instagram Checkout, which allowed established brands and retailers to list their products within the app. Many American shoppers just don’t seem to trust the idea of buying something on a social platform, even if the experience is pretty slick. But people very obviously do trust shopping recommendations on social media, as TikTok has demonstrated for years. There is a fortune to be made if a platform can cut out the middleman of a well-known retailer and get people to buy directly from those recommendations instead. TikTok, still early in its shopping experiment, might eventually figure out how to do that. Right now, though, TikTok Shop is far more effective as a reminder that a lot of the things that can be made to seem glamorous or ingenious in a two-minute video would be better off delivered directly to the Goodwill to which you will inevitably donate them. At least you’d save your future self an errand.

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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is our supervisory senior associate editor Rachel Gutman-Wei, who works on our Science, Technology, and Health team. Rachel has reported on how handwriting lost its personality and made the case for eating raw batter. She also once ate an apple that had been sitting in the Atlantic offices for more than 400 days during the pandemic. (Those of us who know Rachel are a tad worried about her dietary choices.)

Rachel is currently forgoing social media in favor of the New York Times Games app, defending a high-fantasy series her friends are divided about, and regretting her decision to see the stage adaptation of Moulin Rouge.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Self-checkout is a failed experiment. A worthy heir to David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon MAGA Bluey is stressing people out.

The Culture Survey: Rachel Gutman-Wei

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I loved the audiobook of Blake Crouch’s Recursion, a sci-fi novel in which a mysterious plague called “false memory syndrome” sweeps the globe. For one thing, it’s technically impressive: Crouch deftly handles overlapping, interdependent timelines and the intricate system of rules he sets up for the book’s universe. I also found it personally meaningful: I have a history of bad nightmares, and characters’ experiences with FMS, in which tragedies they vividly remember aren’t real to anyone else, made me feel deeply understood.

I don’t read many nonfiction books (I tend to think too hard about how I would’ve edited them), but this spring, I devoured Sabrina Imbler’s memoir, How Far the Light Reaches. Imbler gracefully weaves together stories from wildlife and their own life, and allows discomfort and beauty to inhabit the same page. More than one chapter made me stop reading to reconsider how I see both the natural world and the human one. [Related: The “mother of the year” who starved for 53 months]

A good recommendation I recently received: My colleague Marina Koren recommended Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican Gothic to me years ago, but I only got around to the audiobook this summer, and I loved it. The story, set in 1950s Mexico, follows a young socialite as she visits her cousin, who has married into a cold and reclusive English family that is most definitely hiding something. It’s delightfully, mysteriously creepy—spooky season is a great time to read it.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Earlier this year, I learned that some music I thought was quiet could be very, very loud. I managed to snag tickets to the Atlantis, a new venue in D.C. that holds fewer than 500 people, for a concert by the Head and the Heart. I’ve described their music to uninitiated friends as “chill” and “gentle,” but when the six-piece band crowded into that tiny space, the effect was overwhelming. I especially enjoyed screaming along during “Down in the Valley,” a song I used to think was a bittersweet lamentation for the parts of yourself you can’t change. Now I see it as a celebration of those parts.

I love just about any song I can belt along to, but my current obsession is Muna’s “I Know a Place.” It’s about finding somewhere you know you belong, and people who are there for you even when you’re hurting. I swear my soul left my body when I saw the song performed live. (If you were standing next to me at the Anthem that night, I most certainly stomped on your feet by accident while jumping three feet in the air, and I am very sorry.)

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I’m currently abstaining from social media, so the No. 1 way I’ve been turning my brain off is through the New York Times Games app. My mom, my sister, and I all wake up with Connections and Wordle and send one another our scores. I work on the medium and hard Sudokus in my downtime and play Spelling Bee with my husband over dinner. The games add a little quiet ritual to my day, and they feel unlike social-media time-wasting in two important ways: First, I’m very aware that I’m doing something meaningless. And second, you only get one of each puzzle a day, so there’s no risk of infinite scroll. [Related: The unspoken language of crosswords]

The last debate I had about culture: Last year, my friends got me into A Court of Thorns and Roses, a high-fantasy series by Sarah J. Maas that was all over BookTok. (I am not on TikTok, but my understanding is that ACOTAR, as we fans call it, is still quite prominent there.) I was recently on a hike with another friend, who said that she got midway through the second book before giving up in exasperation. She felt betrayed, because she’d been told that the books were literary (nope), feminist (hardly), wildly sexy (eh) vehicles of ingenious world-building (your mileage may vary). I grant my friend, who is a discerning reader, all of these points. But I would fight a Blood Duel to defend ACOTAR’s honor as an unfailingly entertaining set of page-turners, and I can’t wait for Maas to finish the next installment.

Something I recently revisited: My sister is a fierce fan of Moulin Rouge, the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film, so when I saw that the national tour of the stage adaptation was coming to D.C. this fall, I bought us tickets. By midway through the first act, when, instead of the movie’s melancholy-yet-defiant rendition of Randy Crawford’s “One Day I’ll Fly Away,” Satine sings Katy Perry’s “Firework,” we both realized that we’d made a terrible mistake. Things only went downhill from there; we lost it when, at the show’s emotional climax, Christian began singing Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” My sister came over later that week to watch the original, and we both felt much better.

The last thing that made me cry: Moulin Rouge the movie.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Moulin Rouge the musical.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Tara Skurtu’s “Morning Love Poem” wrings my heart out like a sponge. Here are the opening stanzas:

Dreamt last night I fed you, unknowingly,

something you were allergic to.

And you were gone, like that.

You don’t have even a single allergy,

but still. The dream cracked.

The Week Ahead

Let Us Descend, a new novel by Jesmyn Ward, follows an enslaved woman who opens herself up to the spirit world (on sale Tuesday). [Plus: Read a short story adapted from it in The Atlantic.] Fingernails, a sci-fi romance film in which a woman explores whether you can love two people at the same time (limited theatrical release begins Friday) The limited-series drama Fellow Travelers follows two men who fall in love during the height of McCarthyism (premieres Friday on Showtime).

Essay

Melinda Sue Gordon / Apple TV+

A Slow, Staggering American Conspiracy

By David Sims

When the World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) gets off the train in Osage County, Oklahoma, he is walking into the turn-of-the-century boomtown of Fairfax, a bustling throng of activity that has sprung up out of nowhere following the discovery of oil. Wandering salesmen press leaflets into his hand and promise he can get rich quick; luxurious automobiles buzz around, the atmosphere pulsing with a feeling of runaway success. But as Burkhart is driven by an Osage man named Henry out to the countryside through fields of pumping derricks, he asks whose land he’s on. “My land,” Henry says gruffly.

As it thrusts the viewer into this epic tableau, a world of sudden and overwhelming wealth at the start of the 20th century, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is suffused with the dreadful sense of storm clouds gathering on every horizon. Adapted from David Grann’s best-selling book, the film explores the history of the Osage Nation as it reaped the rewards of oil residing underneath its land and immediately found itself in the crosshairs of an overwhelming force: pioneering American exceptionalism, which Scorsese demands that the viewer recognize as brutal white supremacy.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

You can learn to be photogenic. Taylor Swift did what Hollywood studios could not. Pete Davidson might be the comedic hero we need now. No, really. Only Wes Anderson could have adapted Roald Dahl this way. Jesmyn Ward: “She Who Remembers” Why children are everywhere in Louise Glück’s poetry A poet reckons with her past. Nine books that push against the status quo An elegy for a late, great American composer Beware the language that erases reality. Poem: “Explaining Pain”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

What Sidney Powell’s deal could mean for the Fulton County case against Trump The annoyance economy How a common stomach bug causes cancer

Photo Album

Tourists take a boat ride through Pingshan Grand Canyon, in Hefeng County, China.(Ruan Wenjun / VCG / Getty)

A cranberry harvest in Massachusetts, a new science-fiction museum in China, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In any war, onlookers from far outside the conflict zone have to decide what to believe about what is happening. This sounds difficult in theory, and it’s even more so in practice.

This week, after a deadly explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, anybody checking social media for news would have immediately seen conflicting stories about what had happened. Initial news reports cited Gaza’s health ministry in asserting that the blast had come from an Israeli air strike. Almost instantly, counter-stories blaming the Palestinians went viral. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden said that data from the U.S. Defense Department had convinced him that the blast was caused by a malfunctioning Islamic Jihad rocket, and some open-source intelligence researchers cautiously agreed with that version of events. More detailed analyses are still pending, but a broader meaning of the hospital story has already been well established: It is “misformation” one way or another, circulated cynically to slander Israel or Palestine, depending on your worldview.

Some facts about the war are, of course, clear. In Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, terrorists killed some 1,400 people and took about 200 hostages. They then hijacked hostages’ social-media accounts to livestream their confinement and taunt their friends and family, producing images that shocked and horrified the world. Gaza health officials say that in the past two weeks, more than 3,500 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, have been killed by Israeli air strikes.

Further specifics and unconfirmed reports, though, are not just minor details. They’ve become powerful memes that influence the way people conceptualize the conflict. These are “memes” not in the sense of being funny or unserious, but in the sense that they are copied and pasted with abandon, and spread because of their emotional impact and narrative concision.

Sloppily sourced or bad information may be spread, in part, by malicious actors, but it gains added purchase because people are anxious and uncertain, and because they naturally gravitate toward stories that feel true in the context of their worldview. A report from the open-source intelligence group Bellingcat has debunked numerous widely shared stories about the violence in and around Gaza, noting that those incidents “did not require sophisticated image manipulation techniques” and “were simply miscontextualized and misrepresented, knowingly or unknowingly, by those who initially posted them.”

Take the claim that circulated just after Hamas’s attack: that the terrorist group had beheaded as many as 40 babies. This assertion was made on the front pages of tabloids and in Instagram posts from celebrities with millions of followers; it was even made reference to by Biden, before his staff walked it back in a later statement. The claim was reposted more than 100,000 times on Twitter, according to data collected by the disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones, who is also an assistant professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, in Qatar.

The story was a rumor treated as fact. The original report, from the journalist Nicole Zedeck of the Israel-based TV channel i24, was that soldiers had told her of the deaths of 40 babies and children. David Ben Zion, a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, also claimed that Hamas had “cut heads of children, cut heads of women.” Numerous news outlets made efforts to investigate the claim about the babies and children, and were unable to substantiate it. The IDF could not confirm it either.

Two days after Zedeck’s report, the Israeli military released images of what appear to be a dead infant and the charred body of a child. This produced another cycle of debate, with some participants making the argument that fact-checking the specifics of how babies had been murdered by Hamas was beside the point, considering that they had been murdered, and also that, per U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Hamas beheaded some of its victims. Others put the new photos through artificial-intelligence detectors in an attempt to discredit them, while 4chan users added to the chaos by making fake versions of the photos in an effort to undermine the originals. Conspiracy theorists jumped on an opportunity to deny that the Hamas attack had happened at all, or falsely claimed that Zedeck had made up the whole “40 beheaded babies” story on her own, as a deliberate lie.

Through all of this, the unsubstantiated details of the original beheading allegations retained much of their effect. A story that is so extreme and objectionable, Jones told me, captures the attention of people who might not otherwise be following the conflict. American onlookers didn’t have to know much to know this: There is no defense for something so despicable as beheading babies. Israel itself has used the 40-baby meme to rally support on social media. In a bizarre video (now deleted) that was posted to the @israel TikTok account, cartoon unicorns bounded around in front of a pink sky for a few seconds, until they were replaced by the message 40 INFANTS WERE MURDERED IN ISRAEL BY THE HAMAS TERRORISTS (ISIS).

This jarring combination of imagery and argument is a perfect example of the tone and logic of the current debate about the facts on the ground. After a historic church in Gaza was hit by Israeli bombing on Thursday, it was quickly looped in as a point of evidence for other arguments happening online. (“If they’ll bomb a church, they definitely bombed the hospital,” for example.)

It’s easy to conclude that social media has been failing us. (As a friend of mine recently put it, the platforms have never felt “more evil and unhelpful.”) That’s not because, as some have argued, none of the information that gets posted can be trusted. Despite obvious and egregious failures in attempting (or not attempting) to moderate news reports about this conflict, these sites are not the root cause of war’s confusion. Videos and images shared to social media can still be useful firsthand reports. And although misinformation spreads quickly on social media, so do critiques of official stories with possible holes in them.

Social media does, however, allow the information chaos to expand and fold back in on itself more quickly than ever before. It also lends itself to familiar vices: sarcasm and self-satisfaction. Human lives get remixed as trolley-problem hypotheticals, or as memes to make a point, even as we move further and further away from an accounting of actual events as they’re happening.

The protest began with a prayer. Several thousand Muslims knelt in rows before the Capitol building yesterday afternoon, their knees resting on the woven rugs they’d brought from home. Women here, and men over there, with onlookers to the side. Seen from the Speaker’s Balcony, this ranked congregation would have looked like colorful stripes spanning the grassy width of the National Mall.

“We are witnessing, before our eyes, the slaughter of thousands of people on our streets,” Omar Suleiman, the imam who led the prayer, had said beforehand. “We are witnesses to the cruelty that has been inflicted upon our brothers and sisters in Palestine on a regular basis.”

The prayer group was part of a demonstration hosted by more than a dozen self-described progressive and religious organizations to call for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire. After Hamas massacred more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in its October 7 attack, Israeli bombardments of Gaza have reportedly killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were also civilians.

[Peter Wehner: The inflection point]

Although the protest’s organizers spanned a broad spectrum of faiths and group affiliations, it appeared that a majority of the rally attendees were Muslim, judging by the sea of multicolored head scarves and traditional dress. But progressives of other faiths were there, too, waving the red, white, and green flag of Palestine. Rally-goers called for President Joe Biden and the United States to stop supporting Israel’s blockade and air assault on Gaza. (The first convoy of trucks carrying aid entered Gaza through Egypt this morning, the United Nations reported.) As I moved through the crowd, we heard speeches from Gazan expats and representatives from progressive groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Movement for Black Lives, the Working Families Party, and the Center for Popular Democracy.

“Enough is enough,” Alpijani Hussein, a Sudanese American government employee who wore a long white tunic, told me. He and a friend carried a banner reading BIDEN GENOCIDE. Every time Hussein, a father of four, sees coverage of children killed in Gaza, he told me, he imagines his own kids wrapped in body bags. “I’m a father,” he said. “I can feel the pain.”

For nearly two weeks, the world has watched, transfixed, as a litany of horrors from the Middle East has unspooled before our eyes. First, the footage from October 7: the tiny towns on the edge of the desert, bullet-riddled and burning. Parents shot, their hands tied. Women driven off on motorcycles and in trucks. The woman whose pants were drenched in blood. And approximately 200 people—including toddlers, teenagers, grandparents—stolen away and still being held hostage.

Then, more death, this time in Gaza. The body of a boy, gray with ash. Rubble and rebar from collapsed concrete buildings or their ghostly shells. TikTok diaries from teenagers with phones powered by backup generators. “They’re bombing us now,” the teens explain, somehow sounding calm. Almost half of Gaza’s population are under 18; all they have known is Hamas rule—the Islamist group took over in 2007—and a series of similar conflicts. A barrage of rockets fired by Hamas and other militants; a wave of air strikes from Israel.

But this time is different: Israel has never been wounded this way—October 7 represented the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and over the protest hung a frantic sense that the vengeance had only just begun. Hackles were up and, at one point, a police car drove by, sirens blaring. Two women near me clutched each other nervously, but the officer drove on without stopping.

[Conor Friedersdorf: A collection of narratives on the Israel-Hamas war]

Inside the Capitol, a plain consensus prevailed: Many members of Congress from both parties have opposed a cease-fire and expressed strong support for the U.S. providing military aid to Israel. But outside, things weren’t so simple; they never are. None of the people I met said they supported Hamas, and certainly not the recent atrocities. But many said that the violence cuts both ways. “Israel is a terrorist country in my eyes—what they’ve been doing to the Palestinians,” Ramana Rashid, from Northern Virginia, told me. Nearby, people held placards reading ISRAEL=COLONIZERS and ZIONISM=OPPRESSION. Many protesters told me they did not believe that Israel has a right to exist. At various points in the protest, the crowd broke into the chant “Palestine will be free! From the river to the sea!” (Whatever that slogan might mean for protesters—an anti-colonial statement or an assertion of homeland—for most Israelis it is clearly denying the Jewish state’s right to exist.)

“A cease-fire is the minimum to save lives,” a D.C. resident named Mikayla, who declined to give her last name, told me. “But what we really need is an end to the occupation.” Leaning against her bike, she shook her head no when I asked whether Egypt should open its doors to fleeing Palestinians. “If Egypt lets Gazans leave the Gaza Strip, then that is the definition of ethnic cleansing,” Mikayla said.

Other protesters I spoke with expressed concern only for ending the daily suffering of Gazans. The humanitarian crisis came first; the rest, the political stuff, would come later.

Sheeba Massood, who’d come with her friend Rashid from Northern Virginia, burst into tears when I asked why she’d wanted to attend. It was important to pray together, she told me. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim, if you’re Palestinian, if you’re a Christian, if you’re Jewish,” Massood said, “we are all witnessing the killing of all of these children that are innocent.” Everything else, she said, was politics.

When I asked the demonstrators what might happen in the region, practically, after a cease-fire was enforced, most of them demurred. “I’m not a politician to know all the details and technicalities of it,” a Virginia man named Shoaib told me. “But I think just for one horrible thing, you don’t just go kill innocent kids.”

Every person I met was angry with Biden. The president has been unwavering in his support for Israel since October 7, and in an Oval Office address on Thursday, he reiterated his case for requesting funds from Congress for military aid to Israel. That same day, a senior State Department official resigned over the administration’s decision to keep sending weapons to Israel without humanitarian conditions.

[Read: Around the world, demonstrations of support, grief, and anger]

In his remarks on Thursday, Biden spoke of the need for Americans to oppose anti-Semitism and Islamophobia equally. Friday’s demonstrators, so many of whom were Muslim Americans, were not impressed with that evenhandedness.

“Mr. President, you have failed the test,” Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, said from the podium outside of the Capitol. Ice-cream trucks parked nearby for tourists played jingles softly as he spoke. “You broke your promise to restore America’s moral authority.” Frankie Seabron, from the Black-led community group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, led the crowd in chants of “Shame” directed at Biden. “This is a battle against oppression,” she said. “We as Black Americans can understand!” The crowd, which was beginning to thin, cheered its agreement.

As is generally the way, the program went on far too long. After two hours of speeches, the enthusiasm of an already thinned-out crowd was waning. The temperature dropped and raindrops fell, gently at first, then steadily. Finally, after organizers distributed blood-red carnations to every rally-goer, the group began the trek to the president’s house.

The demonstrators marched slowly at first up Pennsylvania Avenue, struggling with their banners in the driving rain. But as the remaining protesters got closer to the White House, the rain paused, and the sun peeked through the dark clouds. The protesters laid their flowers in the square before the White House gates—an offering and a demand for a different future for Gaza.

Can a former TV personality who's vowed to blow up Argentina's central bank win Sunday's elections?

In 1925, a new, highly desirable trait was invented. Press reports hailed a new Hollywood star: Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, an Austrian noble and tennis champion, who was rumored to be appearing in a film from the megaproducer Samuel Goldwyn. What made the 39-year-old Hollywood material? “He is photogenic,” Goldwyn told a reporter. Newspapers quickly credited the producer with coining a new word.

As it turned out, von Salm-Hoogstraeten’s acting career did not take off, but Goldwyn’s turn of phrase sure did. Now, nearly a century later, photogenicity is essential to the vocabulary of the selfie era. A photogenic person, common thinking goes, looks effortlessly good in a photograph. On social media, photogenicity has become a kind of currency: the intangible “it” factor that can lead to a high follower count. As a result, articles now promise to unspool the secrets of photogenicity; people on TikTok have been taking random stills from their videos to apparently determine whether they’re photogenic. For the rest of us, the concept might serve to justify an aversion to selfies (we’re not unattractive; we’re just not photogenic).

Yet delve into the research, and there’s little direct evidence for the idea that some people are naturally better looking on camera. Perhaps, instead, when someone gets called “photogenic,” what people are really referring to is a practiced sense of ease in front of the camera—and the ability of a photographer and photographic technology to capture it. Photogenicity, in this sense, is more nurture than nature. It is probably less of a measure of how attractive one looks than of how well someone has reconciled themselves to the particularities and limits of modern technology.

To understand this, let’s break down some pervasive assumptions underlying photogenicity. First: There is little universal understanding of who has it and who doesn’t. “To a surprisingly large extent, we disagree on who we individually think of as attractive” in photographs, Clare Sutherland, a psychology lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, told me. Psychological studies, including Sutherland’s own, have demonstrated that a person who is rated as very attractive in one photo might be considered much less attractive in another. “There’s going to be a lot of individual variation in how we make this judgment about whether or not someone looks photogenic,” Sutherland said.

That extends to ourselves too. In a 2017 study, Sutherland and a group of researchers found that, given a set of 12 photos of their own face, participants generally preferred very different photos of themselves to the ones their peers did. The same disjuncture in how we perceive our photographed face was also the subject of a 2014 study in Japan. In it, researchers took photos of each participant, then lightly modified them, increasing or decreasing the size of eyes and mouths. Participants were then given four photos of the same person’s face and asked to pick which one had not been modified. In the end, people were worse at identifying their real face than their peers’. We are, in other words, terrible judges of what we look like to other people. Thus, when we insist that we are not photogenic, we probably don’t know what we are talking about.

The study in Japan suggested that perhaps a person’s professed lack of photogenicity stems from their unfamiliarity with how they look on camera. The theory is intriguing—but it doesn’t account for the possibility that photogenicity might really be a kind of on-camera savvy. Photogenic people might have mastered their relationship with image-capturing devices. Models swear by the importance of angles, and there is some truth to the idea that how we orient our face in photos informs the final product. For example, photos taken from above tend to make people look trimmer, whereas photos taken head-on might emphasize the broadness and power of our body.

Sometimes this plays out involuntarily: Numerous studies since the 1970s have found that we tend to pose with the left side of our face, a phenomenon that Alessandro Soranzo, a psychology researcher at the U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University, speculates might have something to do with brain chemistry. “Our right hemisphere of the brain is the one that is more involved in emotions,” Soranzo told me. And because the right hemisphere governs the left side of the face, “our left side is more expressive emotionally,” he said. Whether that actually translates into our left looking better remains a matter of debate, according to Soranzo.

Another factor that complicates photogenicity is the historical bias built into photographic technology. In the 20th century, Kodak calibrated the light and coloration of its photos according to a photograph of a white woman named Shirley. Black and brown people subsequently found that their skin did not show up accurately. While researching early references to photogenicity in newspaper archives, I encountered numerous articles that acknowledged this bias quite explicitly, including one in the Illustrated Daily News in 1934 proclaiming the camera to be “kindest to blondes” because of “their ‘photogenic’ coloring.”

When you understand the history of the concept, “you can see just how fluid and unstable the very idea of photogenicity is,” says Sarah Lewis, a professor of African American studies at Harvard and the founder of the Vision & Justice initiative, an organization that publishes research on visual culture. Photography is still not a level playing field, and, as Lewis has written, anti-Black bias lingers in many digital photos today. For example, cameras that add artificial light or optimize exposure tend to distort the skin color of Black people in particular. Using different kinds of lighting according to one’s skin tone, then, is key to creating the appearance of photogenicity.

That brings us to the last component of photogenicity—the person taking the photo. I was struck by a comment by Naima Green, an artist and a commercial photographer who often works with nonprofessional models. She told me that she encounters many subjects who tense up in front of the lens. “They’re so hyperaware of the camera that they want to make sure they’re doing everything right for me,” she said. “And when you are just more in the moment, I think that really changes what happens in the picture.” Instead of contorting people into rigid poses, Green prioritizes making people feel comfortable on set with her. The trick is in finding sitting or standing positions where their body can relax. It is a small tweak, but a telling one. We can all do this for ourselves, too, even when posing for a selfie.

[Read: How to have a realistic conversation about beauty with your kids]

The reality is that the people most often considered photogenic are probably also the ones who have repeated exposure to photos of themselves—say, models or actors. Sure, they may be considered conventionally beautiful, and they may be good performers who know how to work with a camera. But perhaps their greatest asset is simply how many reps they’ve put in. As a result, they are attuned to the camera’s tendencies, and they are relaxed in front of it.

Maybe those of us who are not professional posers just have to remember that photogenicity may be a skill you can work to improve, like any other. If we choose to, perhaps we can take so many photos of ourselves that we know our visage from every angle. We can learn the lighting that matches our complexion. We can master the poses that make us feel most like ourselves. At some point, we might cease to be surprised by the image looking back at us.