Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals, quickly became a cultural phenomenon when it was published in 2011, the kind of novel that appeared on social-media feeds and celebrity reading lists. The book is a marvel—it is slim and ferocious, and proceeds at a relentless pace, as if exhaled in a single breath. Throughout, its gaze remains fixed on the life of a family in upstate New York that is struggling to remain afloat while contending with poverty, isolation, and other deprivations. The reader can guess what exists beyond the frame of this intimate portrait, the social forces shaping the life of this family, but they can never be sure: Torres’s attention does not waver from this close-up.

His second novel, Blackouts, which was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction yesterday, also focuses on a close bond, this time between two people, a young man and a much older one. But this book is considerably more ambitious, and the relationship at its center serves as a conduit for considering neglected and abandoned stories—especially the ones that tend to get erased by those in power. Blackouts incorporates photographs, scripts, and other literary fragments to reclaim history—particularly queer history—and offers important lessons about how the forgotten past might be recovered and assimilated into an understanding of the present.

The opening of this novel resembles a dreamscape—the details are imprecise and ephemeral. Torres begins with a heavily redacted page of text, followed by a picture of a naked man reclining on a table, his face partially obscured, and a besuited man, his face also hidden, standing over him. In the first line, the narrator declares, “I came to the Palace because the man I sought kept a room there.” We soon learn that the narrator—who is never named—arrived at “the Palace” from “the metropolis”; the reader doesn’t know where or even when this story is taking place. As the narrator says, “In the desert, in the Palace, I lost track of time, not just of the hours and dates, but also of a certain sense of the temporal, the march of a single day.”

Instead, Torres draws the reader’s attention to the relationship between the narrator and the person he is visiting, a dying man named Juan Gay. The two men briefly met nearly 10 years before, when they were patients at the same mental hospital. A decade later, the narrator has decided to track down Juan. This time, though, their interactions are charged with urgency, because Juan has a job for the narrator, and time is running short. Juan would like the narrator to “finish the project that had once consumed him, the story of a certain woman who shared his last name. Miss Jan Gay” (the two aren’t related). Jan Gay was a real-life pioneering queer researcher who worked to unmask and deflate negative stereotypes about homosexuality in the 1920s and ’30s. Though it’s not exactly clear what Juan’s project is, he seems determined to weave the disparate elements of Jan’s life and work into a comprehensible record of her contributions.

[Read: Why did gay rights take so long?]

Over the past several years, Juan has compiled many materials related to the project: a folder “stuffed with scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, photographs, and scribbled notes,” and “two massive books whose pages had been mostly blacked out,” though it’s not known by whom. The books form a two-volume report titled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—an actual document authored by the psychiatrist George W. Henry that appeared in 1941, predating the Kinsey Reports by several years. Published by the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, the report comprised 80 case studies about queer people and included their family background, their personal history, and a record of general impressions, among other information. Though Sex Variants was premised on the notion that homosexuality was deviant, it offered a candid depiction of queer life in America at that time and played an essential role in demystifying a lifestyle that was foreign to many. Curiously, unlike the real report, the novel’s version is redacted; when the narrator inquires who has “blacked out all the pages,” Juan replies that he “found the books that way, erased into little poems and observations.”

These redacted pages appear frequently throughout the book, and invite close inspection. On many occasions, I found myself pulling the text closer to my eyes to see if I could determine what had been obscured, or make sense of what remained. These “blackouts” seem to comment on the plight of communities around the world whose histories have been censored or destroyed, or were never documented in the first place. Because they were not members of some privileged class, these people needed to instead fashion a narrative of their past from anecdotal odds and ends.

[Read: Creating the first visual history of queer life before Stonewall]

Much of Blackouts is a kind of Socratic dialogue between Juan and the narrator, yet instead of trading philosophical arguments in order to unearth essential truths, their principal mode of communication is storytelling. The stories that form the backbone of the novel are Juan’s sketches of Jan Gay. Juan reveals that it was Jan who initiated the Sex Variants report, and that she was subsequently erased from its history. The real Jan was already a published author when she started compiling the study, but she needed to secure the sponsorship of a group of scientists to help legitimize it. The group, which became the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, eventually took over the project, nullifying her efforts. Jan’s experiences represent a kind of blackout; her identities—lesbian, female—seem to have prevented her from gaining the authorial credit she deserved. Juan eventually reveals that he knew Jan when he was a child, and supplements the archival material he has collected about her life with memories of the time he spent with her.

As the narrator and Juan discuss Jan’s life, they also begin to exhume memories from their personal histories. At one point, the narrator relates an episode in which he suffered a blackout while the faucet in his kitchen was running; both his own apartment and the one below, where his landlords lived, were flooded. The narrator’s description of his blackout is revelatory:

The landlady’s screams had not reached me directly. Several moments passed until I startled out of my reverie, though on the edges, I felt the screaming; it echoed somewhere deep in my mind. When inside the blackout, I remembered, or relived, and sometimes I relived lives that were not my own. I was somewhere else, with someone else. A woman, a scream, and a great silencing.

This is not a typical blackout, where the victim temporarily loses consciousness and retains no memory of what occurred while they were inert. Instead, the narrator was aware of the unfolding disaster but seemingly unable—or unwilling—to attend to it. Torres implies that some blackouts aren’t absolute; indeed, the redacted books still contain discernable information—“little poems of illumination,” as Juan calls them. Blackouts can yield details that might help construct an account of the past. Regardless of what may have happened to you, the book suggests, the past is recoverable.

[Read: Fiction meets chaos theory]

Juan and the narrator devise literary strategies to overwrite the gaps and redactions in Jan’s story and their own (“But promise me,” Juan says, “you’ll bend, and lie, and invent, make the inertness malleable”). Among other approaches, they engage with each other using the conventions of cinema; on the page, their conversation unfurls as script. As Juan and the narrator converse, details about who they are and when the story is taking place slowly come to light. A procession of proper nouns gradually enters the tale. We learn that the narrator’s father joined the Air Force just after the Vietnam draft ended, that his father is Puerto Rican and his mother is white.

The effect of these subtle revelations is akin to the experience of visiting an optometrist and sitting before a refractor; each page of Blackouts is like a lens that Torres clicks into place, some of them clarifying your vision, others obscuring it, until, eventually, you can see. Torres entwines fact and fiction throughout his novel—“wherever there are facts, those facts are embellished, through both omission and exaggeration, beyond the factual,” he writes at the end—but one thing remains clear: Juan and the narrator’s commitment to uncovering history makes the present more available to them and to the reader, underscoring how difficult it is to fully inhabit the current moment without an understanding of what has come before.

In its robust and multivocal treatment of storytelling, Blackouts provides a guidebook to communities that are seeking to repossess their past. Torres draws the reader into an opaque narrative, and though he leads us toward clarity, we never quite arrive. However, the book seems to suggest that exchanging anecdotes and tales, in the way that Juan and the narrator do, can fortify people who have been marginalized in the here and now, and guide them toward a conception of what could be. For them, storytelling is more than a source of entertainment; it is a key to survival.

If the recent Hollywood strike were a movie, it would have a satisfying ending. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) got the important things they were asking for, namely better residuals for streaming shows and some protections from AI. Fran Drescher, an actor and the president of SAG-AFTRA, made a convincing case that this was a historic victory for labor and women’s empowerment, and recently said Meryl Streep was urging her to run for president of the United States.

The sequel to this saga, however, looks a lot darker. Like previous strikes, this one was instigated by a genuine reckoning for the industry. Every time there is a new technological innovation—TV sets, video cassettes, pay TV, digital downloads—Hollywood has an identity crisis. The latest tech foil was streaming. It was an exciting, generative, endlessly replicated innovation—or seemed that way until everyone started to slow down and look at the numbers. Disney, for example, has lost $10 billion on its streaming service since 2019. And many writers, actors, and studio heads felt it wasn’t working for them either. (Maybe it worked for viewers, on the nights they didn’t feel paralyzed by infinite choice.)

What were the hard truths revealed by the strike? And what will the next year of entertainment look like? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk to Atlantic staff writers David Sims and Shirley Li, who cover the entertainment industry, about the coming realignment of Hollywood and what we should all expect. The term “river of junk” comes up, but so does the term “focus more on curation,” which should tell you that your evenings at home on the couch are at a critical juncture.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Reporter 1: Hollywood studios and striking actors reached a deal late on Wednesday, all but ending one of the longest labor crises in the history of the entertainment industry.

Reporter 2: The union says the contract includes bonuses for streaming as well as AI protections.

Reporter 3: Everybody is ecstatic and excited. This is what the union leaders are describing as historic, as extraordinary.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Last week, the union representing Hollywood actors ended a months-long strike. By all accounts, it was a complete victory for the actors, just as it was for striking Hollywood writers weeks earlier.

Both SAG (that’s the Screen Actors Guild) and the WGA (Writers Guild of America) got a lot of what they were asking for, especially more pay from streaming and protections from AI.

[Music]

This was the first dual strike in Hollywood in over 60 years. And historically, these big strikes tend to come at moments of major change in the entertainment industry.

In the ’50s and ’60s, it was TV sets. In the ’80s, video cassettes and pay TV. And then in the 2000s, downloads of shows and movies. In each of these cases, actors or writers went on strike to earn their fair share.

Now the big transition is streaming. Netflix created this new model, movie studios and TV networks scrambled to replicate it, and the streaming wars created an absurd amount of new shows. But the writers and actors making them often earned far less than they did in traditional distribution models.

Now what does this mean for us, the viewers? It means that the way we’ve gotten used to being entertained—these infinite possibilities on an ever-increasing number of streaming services—that has got to change. Because it doesn’t work for the writers. It doesn’t work for the actors. It doesn’t work for the studios. And for viewers, the seemingly endless parade of pluses—it can’t last forever.

Advertisement 1: Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+.

Advertisement 2: Introducing AMC+, the premium streaming bundle with only the good stuff.

Advertisement 3: Paramount+, a mountain of entertainment. 

Rosin: So today I am talking to David Sims and Shirley Li, two Atlantic staff writers who cover Hollywood, about life after the strikes.

David, Shirley, to understand what we’re going to talk about, let’s quickly set the stage. What happened in the strike? Like, what surprised you over the months that it was happening?

David Sims: The thing that surprised me the most was the actors going on strike. That was everything to this entire story. That the actors went on strike concurrently with the writers, you know—a little after, you know, because the writers went on strike first, obviously—turned this from, to me, a fairly typical narrative of labor relations in Hollywood where the writers are often on their own, to a kind of, This is an existential moment the studios have maybe failed to confront and now must confront. And that shifted the entire narrative to me.

Shirley Li: What was most surprising, I think, was just how unprepared the studios seemed. And their reactions to the writers and the actors going on strike was just so not in their favor. Both of these strikes lasted more than 100 days, and it was the first time that the writers and actors have struck together since the ’60s. So it was a huge movement.

Rosin: David, when you said it was an existential moment, did you mean that the actors and the writers were putting out a message that something fundamentally wasn’t working?

Sims: A confrontation was maybe not going to happen over how Hollywood makes things if it was just the writers on strike. Joining the actors into it—and obviously, you know, dragging it out through many months—was a siren to the entire industry of, like, This streaming model, the way things have progressed in terms of making movies and TV, and the lack of public data about who watches anything, and the, you know, the blind leading the blind in terms of what’s even popular, that’s just not going to work going forward. We can’t all just pretend that there’s no money to go around or that we can, you know, sink hundreds of millions of dollars into unprofitable things.

So in my opinion, and I don’t know what the future holds, obviously, but I think this is probably a good thing for Hollywood to have realized about itself.

Rosin: Right. So they could no longer ignore the fact that there were giant, fundamental, existential questions that they were failing to look at.

Shirley, why don’t we first look at it from the writers’ perspective. It seemed like they weren’t just talking about straightforward pay increases, but a model—the streaming model—that made getting paid fairly kind of impossible.

Li: When you look at the ’07–’08 strike, the last one, it was more about pay than it was about the ability to make a living as a writer in Hollywood. So this time around, that was the overdue question, I’d say: Just how, how has the streaming model and the ramp up in quote-unquote “content,” especially in this post-pandemic period, how has that affected the ability for writers to write and have a career in Hollywood? You know, the streaming model has meant shorter episode orders, fewer freelance script assignments, the death of a ladder to a career. That was maybe the big question. It’s just kind of like, How do writers make a living?

Once the actors joined in, I think the question became: What do people value about Hollywood and the art that they’re making? Do viewers have an understanding of how much work goes into making what you watch?

Sims: The last strike was fought over, you know, prior issues. The internet was sort of a part of it, but stuff like streaming, making shows, had largely just kind of been consigned to, like, Well, that’s so experimental. Let’s let them make this stuff cheaply and we can sort of figure it out later. Like, Let’s let them not pay us too much.

By the time this was roaring around post-pandemic, post- the sort of streaming revolutions that have happened in the last few years, that was no longer something you could kind of just put to the side. You couldn’t just say, like, Yeah, well, Netflix, they’re trying something out.

Now it was sort of like, This is such a huge quadrant, we must make it make more sense.

Rosin: Right. So this strike was long overdue in resolving some old issues that Netflix and other studios had kind of put aside for a while. And then came this new issue, which was AI. What happened there?

Sims: To me, if Netflix in 2010 making shows is considered experimental, AI is considered basically like 99 percent unknown, right? We don’t really totally understand the ways that we can imagine scenarios that are sort of frightening to consider: oh, AI writing whole TV shows all by itself, or actors being turned into digital robots that studios control forever.

Obviously a lot of that is fanciful, but the way that AI had accelerated from something completely marginal to something that was sort of like at the forefront of technological discussion this year, I think both unions and the Directors Guild (who didn’t go on strike) felt like they had to establish a bulwark in this contract that could be built upon. Basically, You aren’t allowed to do much with this without our say so. We don’t even know what it is entirely.

Rosin: So it’s not so much about anything so specific as it is, Whatever decisions you’re going to start making about this, we participate in that decision-making process.

Li: I think it really is just a conceptual thing at this point. Both unions kind of just wanted to set up guardrails. I think this is more specific to the WGA, but it’s kind of like in the ’07–’08 strike, when they were just talking about, you know, the internet producing content and entertainment. It’s like David said, it was so experimental. And so they paid a little bit of attention to it, but then in the years since, it’s like, Oh, goodness. This is so huge, and we’re definitely not earning what we think we should be earning. We don’t even know how many people are watching the stuff that’s exclusively online, that’s exclusively streaming.

So I think that really caught them off guard. And so this time, AI similarly is, like, this conceptual thing where you don’t really know the specifics of how it’ll be deployed. But because of that, it seems even scarier, and so more necessary to just have this language that’s just setting up guardrails.

Rosin: Maybe the fear is that they could all just be one day disposable. David, was that already starting to happen? Were there other ways that streaming has been fundamentally changing their lives as creative people?

Sims: There are all these issues that are—if you just think about TV: The way TV used to be made was uniform. These seasons would run, usually for an entire year, 22 episodes or so. They would have big, robust writing rooms that were an opportunity for young writers to grow and more experienced writers to earn better, and all that.

And then streaming comes along, and more limited stuff comes along, and everything starts to get messed with. Suddenly you’ve got one guy writing an entire show, or you’ve got just a couple people. And this is a lot of the stuff that the WGA was fighting about, which is sort of, like, You’re taking away our career ladders, and you’re taking away our chances to earn and to learn.

Add AI into that mix in the future, right, and then you can just sort of imagine everything getting more extreme. You have prestige stuff from all-star people that is made at a high level, and then you have this river of junk that is created by AI and shepherded along by a couple writers, maybe, who just sort of tweak it to make sense. Where is the middle? It seems to be shrinking in terms of the stuff that gets made and in terms of the people who get hired.

Rosin: Oh my God, that is the most relatable that Hollywood’s ever felt to me. It feels like the way you played out the metaphor, it’s like: Hollywood is America.

Sims: Well, but that’s the thing. And we saw this, as Shirley said, with the studio playbook—which has always been the same—which is basically like, These writers are going on strike. They got the best job in the world. They make so much money. Like, how dare they? Right? You know, We’ll just sweat them out.

That’s always been the playbook in any of these fights. And this time, you got, of course, the message from the writers and the actors of like, You can’t kill us, because we’re already dead. You can sweat us out as much as you want, but we hate our lives, currently. So, [they] are not exactly about to be like, Oh no, we have to get back to our current crappy status.

They felt like, No, we will hold out as long as we possibly can to get a real deal. And then the public reaction is like, Yeah, I kind of get where they’re coming from. Like, I actually sympathize with these writer guys. No, their plight makes sense to me.

I think that took studios by surprise over and over again.

Rosin: And what do the studio heads think about all this? That’s after the break.

[Music]

Reporter 1: The cost of watching streaming services is up by 25 percent. Hulu, Peacock, Apple TV, Netflix, Disney—all raising prices.

Reporter 2: And then there’s Disney. It lost $512 million on its streaming business in just one quarter. It lost 11 million subscribers. But the stock is up this morning because it’s raising prices.

Reporter 3: Streaming services are losing big money on streaming. NBC, our parent company, which owns Peacock, acknowledges it loses money but says it’s worth it to be part of the future of television.

Rosin: So, we’ve talked about the writers. Let’s look at this from the studio-executive perspective. What brutal reality was no longer ignorable about this whole business model?

Sims: There’s long been economic models in Hollywood that make sense, that have existed for decades, both filmmaking and TV and stuff, of how to make money. You know, TV: You write your show, you sell ads against it, and people watch it. You put a movie in theaters, and people buy tickets to see it.

Streaming, obviously, ignores all of that. And Netflix built such an empire by deficit spending its way into creating a giant library that people feel is essential to subscribe to, and that’s worked for them. I’m not here to say, like, Netflix is going bankrupt tomorrow. The problem is that these old, lumbering studios in Hollywood decided, like, Oh God, Netflix is, you know, 10 miles ahead of us. We all have to do the same thing.

So they all spent billions of dollars worth to create their streaming services, which are of less and less interest to subscribers, who are kind of like, I have Netflix. Maybe I have another one or two of these. Like, do I need Paramount+? You know, Do I need, like, you know, AMC+? Do I need all this stuff?

And so a lot of these networks are now floundering. And we see these baffling decisions—of HBO Max being like, Let’s cut a lot of this Sesame Street stuff off our service. And I’m like, Does that make any business sense? You know, Let’s pull these movies off that we made. Let’s just remove them so no one can see them.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Sims: And, like, when you, you know, you make a call or you send an email, they’re like, Well, you know, actually taxwise it makes more money to not have that thing exist. And I’m like, Well, then that’s not a sign of a healthy economical picture.

Li: Yeah, like, if these strikes have revealed anything, it’s that Hollywood is a very poorly oiled machine. I mean, I think these studios, these networks overestimated our collective attention spans for platforms that we would subscribe to.

I mean, it is rather simple. They realized if we’re gonna do streaming, which is how most people were watching things, then you need subscribers, because that’s really the only way you’re gonna turn a profit. So to grow subscribers, then you need things in your library that are gonna attract them.

So to build things that in your library are going to definitely attract people, you launch stuff that’s based on existing IP. So then you sink a gajillion dollars into making film and television, and then you don’t maybe get as many subscribers as you want. And so now you’re very worried about turning a profit.

Rosin: So I think what I want to think about this is: It’s their fault. They’re bad business people. And also they just assumed that we didn’t value originality and creativity.

Sims: Sure. I mean, yes, I don’t think anyone’s been doing a particularly amazing job. So, Disney is sort of the lead example of a major Hollywood studio right now in any sense. And for years, obviously, the backbone of Disney was its animated films and its, you know, sort of place in the culture through that.

But you would see them for years try to figure out, like, How do we appeal to teen boys? You know, they would struggle and struggle and struggle. And then comes the 2010s.

They’re like, Forget it. We’ll just buy the stuff that appeals to the world. Let’s buy Star Wars. Let’s buy Marvel Comics. Let’s just bring these pillars of intellectual property into our big tent. And, obviously, for quite a while, that really worked for them. There was a lot of public excitement about what they did with those properties.

And once again, Hollywood—which is, as Shirley was saying, not a well-oiled machine. Everyone else is like, Well, we should just do that too. But they’re doing it with lesser and lesser pieces of intellectual property. They’re trying to spin franchises out of not much, or they’re trying to, like, get this stuff on its feet really quickly.

And, as it always goes, audiences get kind of sick of it. They recognize something after a while that is derivative, and they start to get bored of it. That is obviously something that’s happening very profoundly right now. Like, you know, with The Marvels, which just came out this weekend (it didn’t do very well), there’s a general sense in the air of like, Okay, the sort of playbook of the last 10, 15 years is over.

That’s how it always goes in Hollywood, though. Like, that is the oldest story in Hollywood. Like, as much as someone might want to bemoan the Marvel Cinematic Universe, take a look at the blockbusters that were coming out in the mid-2000s before it emerged, and you see Hollywood struggling to figure out what people want. There’s always that sort of moment of reinvention that comes.

Next year is going to be kind of weird. It’s going to be light on a lot of this stuff. And, you know, one hopes other stuff will fill its place, and people will go to the movies and watch TV, and there’ll be, you know, more interesting things. And Hollywood will copy that for a while, and eventually everyone will get sick of it, and over and over and over. And that’s how it goes.

Like, that’s sort of the most optimistic view I can have of this.

Rosin: So is Disney, to drill in, actually in trouble? Like, from the way you guys are talking, there’s a panic, and the model that they’ve been following—or thought they were following—over the last couple of years is not making anybody any money. So, do you just have faith in the fact that they’ll pivot and find another model that will keep them afloat for a while? Or is this an actual crisis moment?

Li: I mean, look, Disney+ is definitely in the red this year, right? Like, they’re not making any money. But this is true of so many studios, you know. They replicate the lowest common denominator for any other success. And Disney is maybe the most visible example of a lot of franchise projects that they announce like crazy that are all getting kind of just shuttered or delayed.

I think you’re going to see that outside of Disney, too, though. There’s a lot of structural adjustment. I mean, after these strikes, if they’re going to have to pay people more, these studios aren’t going to increase their budgets. They’re going to cut back on production.

So right now, I get the sense that they’re focusing a little bit more on curation. You see Kevin Feige stepping away from doing Star Wars. There’s only one Marvel project coming out next year. There’s this idea of like, Okay, yeah, let’s slow down. Let’s figure out what people actually want.

But like David said, it’s a cycle. They’re going to see what people want, possibly take away the wrong lessons, and then we’re going to see a wave of very similar things, and then the audience is going to get tired, and then you just have to start all over again.

Rosin: But in that sense, it seems good what happened, sort of like the strikes forced a kind of curation, less of a reliance on churning things out, and more of an emphasis on good—I was going to say the word content, but I’m not going to say it.

Sims: Someone has to say content at least once. It’s unavoidable in any Hollywood discussion.

Li: Content, content, content.

Rosin: Content! No, because in a way you’re saying the human tastes win out. Our boredom with terrible things sort of ends up influencing the movie-making culture in the end.

Sims: It does in the end, yes. It usually takes maybe a little too long, because these are big battleships they have to turn around. As much as it’s like, Oh, are superhero movies done? No, there’s a lot of superhero movies on the release calendars still, and we may be in a situation where none of them connect and it’s a huge problem. It’s more likely it’ll be kind of a mixed bag.

But there will be a shift from the dominance of one thing to the dominance of whatever’s next. Obviously, the big story this year was Barbie and Oppenheimer, which demonstrated huge public appetite for (1) the movies, the collective experience of going to see a movie, and (2) you know, just like, something different.

You know, people do like to see good things. Like, that compulsion exists.

I think during COVID, there was the fear of like, Oh God, is it over? Does nobody want to, you know, pay to see anything anymore? And it’s like, No, no, no. They’ll go if you give them something to see.

Rosin: Yeah. I would think you, David, of all people, being the staunch defender of quality theatrical-released movies that you are, might feel hopeful after the strike. Like, maybe better-quality things will come now.

Sims: I mean, that’s—I don’t want to sound that optimistic. I mean, I think that the peak-TV era—like thinking back to TV, you know, this sort of concept has been much discussed over the last 10 years: There’s so many more shows. There’s so many different networks trying to make original TV and all that. And it’s, you know—this is getting untenable. There’s hundreds and hundreds of scripted shows a year.

That was ending no matter what. It was ending with or without a strike, and with or without a reckoning in Hollywood over what things should cost to make.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Sims: But I do think now that there is maybe a little more of a sensible and realistic price tag to stuff, there’s going to be this kind of awkward and difficult shift of, Yeah, maybe there’s less stuff going around, and maybe, you know, maybe the projects are a little harder to come by, but probably for the best.

Like, so much stuff gets lost in the shuffle right now. So much work gets kind of ignored or not even shown, it might be good to narrow the field a little bit. And that might lead to an emphasis on quality.

I sound hopelessly optimistic saying that.

Rosin: No, you really didn’t, actually. Your voice sounded—the dubiousness was held in your last syllable.

Sims: I have a little dubiousness.

Rosin: So, what should we, the audiences, expect? Like, first in the immediate aftermath of the strike, for you guys who watch the industry very closely, what’s gonna make us happy on our sets and in the movie theater? And then in the long run, what happens in theaters and on TV?

Li: Well, productions are going to come back. Right after Thanksgiving is when a bunch of studio shows are going to start shooting again. So by early 2024, some of your favorite shows will probably be airing their new, shortened seasons. I mean, writers’ rooms have been open for more than a month now because the writers’ strike ended at the end of September.

So, you know, scripts have been written. Once productions resume later this month, I think you’ll get some TV that maybe you’ve been waiting to see. Maybe some. You know, if you’re, if you’re a big fan of the Chicago dramas, I know those are coming back soon.

Rosin: You mean like lower, easy-production stuff that doesn’t require a lot of visual effects and editing?

Li: Yes, exactly.

Rosin: And David, what happens to movies? Theaters?

Sims: 2024 is gonna be a little weird. I cannot deny that. It’s not like there won’t be movies. You know, there’s plenty of stuff on the schedule. Much of it is franchise material and sequels and reboots. You’ve always wanted a new Gladiator movie, right? Here you go. Or, you know, Beetlejuice is back. Everyone’s been waiting.

Like, not to dismiss those projects. They may well be good or resonate with people. But it’s a calendar that’s definitely light on what’s been an economic driver of Hollywood in the last few years, superhero movies especially, and kind of family movies in general, which have taken a little longer to return to the big screens. A lot of that got shunted to streaming out of this idea of like, Oh, well, families are just locked in their homes all the time, right? A misguided idea, in my opinion.

And probably it’s going to mean a year of hand-wringing, a year of like, What are we gonna do? Disney barely has anything. Like, How do we keep people interested?

And it will be kind of ultimately a little meaningless because it will be a year that is filled with Hollywood making stuff, trying to prepare for the next pivot. That’s the way Hollywood works. Everything takes a couple years to kind of reach our shores.

Rosin: Right, right.

Sims: So it’ll be an odd in-between time.

Rosin: Right. So we should read a novel for the next six months. Just read a lot.

Sims: Everyone should just log off and read a novel. And, obviously, there’s going to be some big election next year. I haven’t really looked into it, but I think that may, that may drive a lot of conversation.

Li: It’d be nice if people went and touched grass and voted.

Rosin: All those other things. So just, just to leave people with a little bit of entertainment excitement, you guys as critics, are there any projects that you are looking forward to?

Li: Oh, hell yeah! Right, David?

Sims: So much stuff. Yeah, I think 2024 in film kind of looks awesome.

Rosin: Okay, bring it.

Li: I think, at the top of my list: Dune 2.

Sims: Right, stuff that got pushed from this year.

Li: Yeah, stuff that got pushed. There’s, like, films like The Fall Guy that I’m like, Well, we’ll see what the Gosling has as the stuntman in a film that I’m not sure will be good. But look, I’m excited that there’s stuff that I don’t know much about, and then there’s sequels that I am excited to see.

Sims: I mean, Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to Parasite will come out in March. It’s a big sci-fi movie called Mickey 17. George Miller’s follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa, will come out in May. There are things like that, that are, you know, quote-unquote “IP” but are a little more auteur-driven movies that are probably a little weirder.

Kevin Costner is releasing two parts of some kind of gigantic Western saga that he’s, like, sinking his fortune into. And, you know, Jordan Peele is making a new movie. And, there’s another Joker movie, and, you know, that one, that went so well for the culture last time.

Li: Just can’t wait for the discourse. (Laughs.)

Sims: So there’s plenty of sort of big-scale stuff that I’m excited for. But, of course, the story of movies, especially every year, is like, there’s 20 projects you don’t know about yet, you know, that are on a smaller scale that are waiting to be discovered. Every year it’s the end of cinema. Every year, I don’t know, it kind of muddles through.

Rosin: Yeah. I feel like the category that you guys have resigned yourself to—like you’ve resigned yourself to IP, but weird IP.

Sims: Right, can we at least have fresh or interesting reboots and remakes and sequels? Yes.

Li: Yeah. I mean, reboots, remakes, sequels—they’ll exist for forever, right? But just, like, if they say something fresh, I’m on board. If they’re fun, I’m on board.

Rosin: Well, thank you guys for joining me today.

Li: Thank you.

Sims: Thank you so much for having us. Yeah.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.

Human excellence can take many forms—electric-guitar solos, French braiding, organic chemistry, and the throwing of pizza dough all come to mind—but when it comes to predicting the future, our species is basically an embarrassment. People tend to have little self-awareness about the blinkers of their own presentism. They fear change. They are generally terrible at accurately determining risk. And their views are too often driven by emotion rather than empiricism or even well-informed instinct.

A slightly more charitable assessment is that people actually are good at predicting the future—just less good at predicting when and how any particular future will finally arrive. (The famous shorthand for this mismatch: “Where’s my jetpack?”) The passage of time has meant the emergence of an unintended genre of film and television that underscores this incongruity, in which past depictions of far-off futures are eventually revealed as off base. (Think Back to the Future II’s vision of 2015, filmed in the 1980s, now quickly receding into the past. Or any number of episodes of the original Twilight Zone.)

One of the many things I love about The Atlantic, now in its 167th year of continuous publication, is that our archive is filled with centuries’ worth of imagined futures—the ones that materialized and those that very much did not (or at least haven’t yet). Our newest newsletter, Time-Travel Thursdays, is a portal to these many past possible futures. Some weeks, we’ll share one great story from the vault. Other weeks, we’ll excavate a long-lost debate, mystery, or scandal, or trace the trajectory of a big idea across time.

Over many generations, our writers have made predictions about, among other things, the impecuniosity of the American railways (1860); the decline of the novel (1874); the worsening of the wealth gap (1879); the wholesale replacement of human workers with machines (also 1879); the rise of modern meteorology (1880); the use of electricity to transmit photographs over great distances (1882); the creation of audio books (1889); the end of musical criticism (1903); the need to affix airplane-landing docks to America’s skyscrapers (1921); and, conversely, the belief that air travel would never be adopted by the masses (1928). In our pages people have mused about whether Paris would become “a halfhearted and second-rate New York” (1929); the future of super-guerrilla warfare (1936); the “infinite faith in the future” required to fight against dictators for the future of democracy (1941); and the question of whether and how all life on Earth might be eliminated (1951). Atlantic writers predicted the hyperlinked architecture of the web (1945), and advances in surgery that would make spare-parts banks for human organs as commonplace as auto-supply stores (1980). They have also suggested that someday soon everything will be made of chickpeas (2019).

Among the many considerations Atlantic writers have given to the future, an old favorite of mine is the 1861 essay “Concerning Future Years,” by the Scottish writer A. K. H. Boyd, who urges the reader to appreciate the precious and finite quality of their “one life, the slender line of blood passing into and passing out of one human heart.” In doing so, he contemplates the future not in terms of technological, political, or civilizational change, but on a simultaneously more intimate and universal level. (As was The Atlantic’s style at the time, the essay does not actually carry his byline, but Boyd is listed as the author in various accounts and indexes.)

“Concerning Future Years” feels remarkably contemporary more than 160 years after it was first published. Boyd sees the future as something that an individual moves through time to reach, inextricably tied to the experience of living. He cautions against taking for granted even the most ordinary of life’s pleasures—the climbing of trees, the taking of walks, the presence of a child making daisy chains. “In this world there is no standing still,” he writes. “And everything that belongs entirely to this world, its interests and occupations, is going on towards a conclusion. It will all come to an end … Many men of an anxious turn are so eagerly concerned in providing for the future, that they hardly remark the blessings of the present. Yet it is only because the future will some day be present, that it deserves any thought at all.”

I’m drawn to Boyd’s essay, 19th-century lilt and all, in part because I am a sap when it comes to earnest acknowledgments of the good luck we are given with every new second of every new day—but also because it orients the reader toward the reason for the cultural obsession with time travel in the first place, a preoccupation that I share: that is, we are all time travelers, moving through our lives and through history, bearing witness to forces of tremendous change much greater than we are, mostly oblivious to the malleable quality of time even as it bends around us, far more connected to the individuals who came before us than we sometimes realize. When you stop to contemplate the sweep of what’s changed, and study the history of ideas, you inevitably find a connection through time—and perhaps through the pages of a very old magazine—to the travelers who have come before. And in doing this you will find you are sometimes lucky enough to receive unexpected wisdom and insight from another age. Or at the very least, a swell of gratitude for the people and world around you, just as they are right now.

The deadly drug may be coming to European shores

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people… Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Those were the last words posted online by Robert Bowers before he massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. It was the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. In previous postings, Bowers explained the grievances that led him to commit mass murder. He shared meme after meme asserting that Jews were conspiring to flood the country with brown people in order to oppose and displace the white race. “Open you Eyes!” declared one, “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!”

On Wednesday night, the world’s wealthiest man affirmed this same conspiracy theory on X, formerly Twitter, the social media site he owns. Like so many of Elon Musk’s acts of self-immolation, it happened in the space of a tweet. The incident began with a post from a conservative Jewish user, who complained about anti-Semitic content on social media during the current Gaza conflict. “To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right,’” he wrote, “You got something you want to say? Why don[’]t you say it to our faces.” A small-time white nationalist account soon responded by attributing this anti-Semitism to minorities, and blaming it on the Jews:

Jewish commun[i]ties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.

You want truth said to your face, there it is.

This exchange would have languished in obscurity had Musk not replied to this bigoted bromide with six words: “You have said the actual truth.”

It should not need to be said, but sadly it does: Jews—a famously fractious people that includes Jared Kushner, George Soros, Bill Maher, and Noam Chomsky—do not have a shared consensus, let alone a collective conspiracy to subordinate white people through immigration policy. And even if there were a unified Jewish agenda, it would make absolutely no difference. That’s because, contrary to deranged delusions of anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists, public policy is not set by the 0.2 percent of the world population that is Jewish, but by the 99.8 percent that isn’t.

All of these basic facts somehow escaped America’s most famous entrepreneur.

Over an hour later, after it became clear that Musk’s missive was doing profound damage to his already dented reputation, the billionaire attempted to clean up his claims about the Jewish community’s perfidy by saying that he was only referring to the Anti-Defamation League—as though being anti-Semitic towards one group of Jews is somehow less objectionable. (It’s not.) In any case, the walkback lasted five minutes. After another critic complained that it was “not fair to say or truthful to say that ‘Jewish communities’ promote dialectical hatred towards white,” Musk replied: “You[’re] right that this does not extend to all Jewish communities, but it is also not just limited to ADL.”

None of this is new. It wasn’t the first time Musk had echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from his social-media bubble. And it wasn’t the first time he’d blamed anti-Semitism on Jewish actions, pinning the prejudice on its victims. After months of marinating in the most conspiratorial cesspools of his own site, Musk arrived today at his inevitable destination.

But just because Musk’s affirmation of white-nationalist ideology was the unsurprising outcome of his online radicalization spiral doesn’t make it any less devastating—or dangerous. Anti-Semites believe that a miniscule Jewish minority controls the direction of the non-Jewish majority. But the truth is the opposite: The fate of the tiny Jewish community rests in the hands of non-Jewish society. Whether the anti-Jewish ideas of Musk and others become the new normal is not up to Jews; it’s up to everyone else.

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.

America’s public schools owe a great deal to the efforts of 19th-century abolitionists and reformers. In a new story for The Atlantic’s special issue on Reconstruction, my colleague Adam Harris wrote about how Reconstruction shaped America’s modern public-education system. Reformers in the South such as Mary Brice worked to realize the then-radical notion that free, universal schools should serve all students. I called Adam this week to discuss the backlash faced by early efforts to build public schools, and how that opposition is still embedded in discussions about public education today.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The one-state delusion Why activism leads to so much bad writing Why older socialists are quitting the DSA How the Negro spiritual changed American popular music—and America itself

An Antagonism That Lingers

Lora Kelley: I think a lot of people today take public schools for granted. I certainly consider them a stable constant in American life. So I was really struck by your reporting on how much opposition public schools, especially those serving Black students in the South, faced in the 19th century and after. Was the concept of public schooling in America inevitable at any point in the country’s history?

Adam Harris: It was never really inevitable. The idea of all people being educated, particularly Black people, was once out of the question for large swaths of the South. From the beginning of the nation, school had always been for well-off families. You had parochial schools, you had a lot of private schools, and subscription schools where families could pay based on the amount of classes that students attended.

Into the 1800s, multiple southern states passed bans on Black folks—both enslaved and free Black people—learning how to read, because there was this thought that if they did, it would engender rebellion and antagonism to the system. Black literacy was often viewed with suspicion, because the thought was that if enslaved people learned how to read even things like the Bible, because of the liberation theology that courses throughout the Old Testament and parts of the New Testament, they would rise up and fight against the power structure. If you think about some of the rebellions and revolts of enslaved people—such as Gabriel’s Rebellion and Turner’s Rebellion—these were largely based on folks who had learned how to read the Bible.

Lora: Do you still see traces of this antagonism toward Black literacy and education today?

Adam: This antagonism toward Black education still lingers. The public-school ecosystem today is relatively stable. But you also see vestiges of past discrimination in education systems, not just at the K–12 level, but also at the college level. For institutions in places with a low tax base, or places with high levels of poverty, the schools are less well-funded. That leads to an instability that bad actors naturally are preying on at this moment.

We’ve lately seen a push toward a rejection of history, because of the idea that if you tell the history in an accurate way, then it may lead people to question some of the assumptions that we have built into our systems. Telling the full, robust nature of what the Founding Fathers did, and what kind of people they were outside of their political exploits, is important to having a broad understanding of history, and an understanding of why things are the way they are. If we’re looking at America as a project—trying to perfect this democracy, trying to work toward a more perfect union—then questions can start to lead to actions to try to change those flawed pieces of the system.

Lora: At the end of your article, you wrote, “In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, the most serious effort to date at realizing Brice’s dream nationally.” Do you see Mary Brice’s legacy being undone in education today?

Adam: Over the past several years, we’ve seen a lot of stories about the resegregation of public schools, where you have areas that effectively created new school districts, taking resources away from students in Black and brown communities. We’ve seen the Supreme Court strike down race-conscious admissions, which effectively blunts an already limited tool to make higher education more equitable and accessible to a broader range of people. Taken together, this moment—and the push to walk back some of the gains of the ’60s and the ’70s—is an assault on Brice’s legacy.

I often think about how, in his last address as a president, George Washington implored Congress to fund education. He talked about the way that education is how we build national character and how we build good citizens. We’ve known how important education has been since America’s founding. We’ve seen visionaries pushing for a more equitable education system. That is a goal that remains worthwhile, and it’s under attack.

Related:

How Reconstruction created American public education What The Atlantic got wrong about Reconstruction

Today’s News

Israeli troops entered al-Shifa Hospital in pursuit of hostages and Hamas fighters who they claim are operating in tunnels underneath the complex, which could not be independently verified. Hamas and the hospital deny the allegations. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in person for their first conversation in a year. The man accused of attacking Paul Pelosi with a hammer testified in court yesterday about being drawn into right-wing conspiracies.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Has alcohol left humanity better or worse off? Conor Friedersdorf gathers readers’ opinions.

Evening Read

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Why So Many Accidental Pregnancies Happen in Your 40s

By Rachel E. Green

After she turned 42, Teesha Karr thought she was done having kids. Six, in her mind, was perfect. And besides, she was pretty sure she had started menopause. For the past six months she’d had all the same signs as her friends: hot flashes, mood swings, tender breasts. She and her husband decided they could probably safely do away with contraception. But less than a month later, Karr felt a familiar twinge of pain in her ovary—the same twinge she’d felt every time she’d been pregnant before.

Karr felt embarrassed. “Teenagers accidentally get pregnant. Forty-two-year-old women don’t usually accidentally get pregnant,” she told me. But, really, 42-year-old women accidentally getting pregnant is surprisingly common.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

That joke isn’t funny anymore. The law of worst-case scenarios The future of obesity drugs just got way more real.

Culture Break

Taken in Kibbutz Be'eri (Photography by Jerome Sessini / Magnum for The Atlantic)

Read. “Safe Room,” a poem by Agi Mishol and translated by Barbara Mann.

“Now that death creeps all around / and the pecans are bursting their shells, / I hide within Hebrew.”

Watch. Season by season, For All Mankind (streaming on Apple TV+) has become less a tale of an alternate future than a meditation on historical memory.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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