For a brief moment earlier this month, I thought an old acquaintance had passed away. I was still groggy one morning when I checked my phone to find a notification delivering the news. “Obituary shared,” the message bluntly said, followed by his name. But when I opened my phone, I learned that he was very much still alive. Apple’s latest software update was to blame: A new feature that uses AI to summarize iPhone notifications had distorted the original text message. It wasn’t my acquaintance who had died, but a relative of his. That’s whose obituary I had received.

These notification summaries are perhaps the most visible part of Apple Intelligence, the company’s long-awaited suite of AI features, which officially began to roll out last month. (It’s compatible with only certain devices.) We are living in push-notification hell, and Apple Intelligence promises to collapse the incessant stream of notifications into pithy recaps. Instead of setting your iPhone aside while you shower and returning to nine texts, four emails, and two calendar alerts, you can now return to a few brief Apple Intelligence summaries.

The trouble is that Apple Intelligence doesn’t seem to be very … intelligent. Ominous summaries of people’s Ring-doorbell alerts have gone viral: “Multiple people at your Front Yard,” the feature notified one user. “Package is 8 stops away, delivered, and will be delivered tomorrow,” an Amazon alert confusingly explained. And sliding into someone’s DMs hits different when Instagram notifications are summarized as “Multiple likes and flirtatious comments.” But Apple Intelligence appears to especially struggle with text messages. Sometimes the text summaries are alarmingly inaccurate, as with the false obituary I received. But even when they are technically right, the AI summaries still feel wrong. “Expresses love and encouragement,” one AI notification I recently received crudely announced, compressing a thoughtfully written paragraph from a loved one. What’s the point of a notification like that? Texting—whether on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal—is a deeply intimate medium, infused with personality and character. By strip-mining messages into bland, lifeless summaries, Apple seems to be misunderstanding what makes texting so special in the first place.

Perhaps it was inevitable that AI summaries would come for push notifications. Summarization is AI’s killer feature and tech companies seem intent on applying it to just about everything. The list of things that AI is summarizing might require a summary of its own: emails and Zoom calls and Facebook comments and YouTube videos and Amazon reviews and podcasts and books and medical records and full seasons of TV shows. In many cases, this summarization is helpful—for instance, in streamlining meeting notes.

But where is the line? Concision, when applied to already concise texts, sucks away what little context there was to begin with. In some cases, the end result is harmful. The technology seems to have something of a death problem. Across multiple cases, the feature appears bewilderingly eager to falsely suggest that people are dead. In one case, a user reported that a text from his mother reading “That hike almost killed me!” had been turned into “Attempted suicide, but recovered.”

But mostly, AI summaries lead to silly outcomes. “Inflatable costumes and animatronic zombies overwhelming; will address questions later,” read the AI summary of a colleague’s message on Halloween. Texts rich with emotional content read like a lazy therapist’s patient files. “Expressing sadness and worry,” one recent summary said. “Upset about something,” declared another. AI is unsurprisingly awful with breakup texts (“No longer in relationship; wants belongings from the apartment”). When it comes to punctuation, the summaries read like they were written by a high schooler who just discovered semicolons and now overzealously inserts; them; literally; everywhere. Even Apple admits that the language used in notification summaries can be clinical.

The technology is at its absolute worst when it tries to summarize group chats. It’s one thing to condense three or four messages from a single friend; it’s another to reduce an extended series of texts from multiple people into a one-sentence notification. “Rude comments exchanged,” read the summary of one user’s family group chat. When my friends and I were planning a dinner earlier this month, my phone collapsed a series of messages coordinating our meal into “Takeout, ramen, at 6:30pm preferred.” Informative, I guess, but the typical back-and-forth of where to eat (one friend had suggested sushi) and timing (the other was aiming for an early night) was erased.

Beyond the content, much of the delight of text messaging comes from the distinctiveness of the individual voices of the people we are talking to. Some ppl txt like dis. others text in all lowercase and no punctuation. There are lol friends and LOL friends. My dad is infamous for sending essay-length messages. When I text a friend who lives across the country asking about her recent date, I am not looking purely for informational content (“Night considered good,” as Apple might summarize); rather, I want to hear the date described in her voice (“Was amaze so fun we had lovely time”). As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle has written, “When we are in human conversation, we often care less about the information an utterance transfers than its tone and emotional intent.” When texts are fed through the AI-summarization machine, each distinct voice is bludgeoned into monotony.

For a company that prides itself on perfection, the failures of Apple’s notification summaries feel distinctly un-Apple. Since ChatGPT’s release, as technology companies have raced to position themselves as players in the AI arms race, the company has remained notably quiet. It’s hard not to wonder if Apple, after falling behind, is now playing catch-up. Still, the notification summaries will likely improve. For now, users have to opt in to the AI-summary feature (it’s still in beta), and Apple has said that it will continue to polish the notifications based on user feedback. The feature is already spreading. Samsung is reportedly working on integrating similar notification summaries for its Galaxy phones.

With the social internet in crisis, text messages—and especially group chats—have filled a crucial void. In a sense, texting is the purest form of a social network, a rare oasis of genuine online connection. Unlike platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where algorithmic feeds warp how we communicate, basic messaging apps offer a more unfiltered way to hang out digitally. But with the introduction of notification summaries that strive to optimize our messages for maximum efficiency, the walls are slowly crumbling. Soon, the algorithmic takeover may be complete.

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.

I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.

The time gaps are large for all women, and especially large for certain subgroups. Moms with a high-school education or less spend 19 hours a week on cleaning and child care, versus seven hours for dads with a comparable education. Latina mothers devote 26 hours a week to chores and kids, Latino dads less than a third of that time.

Remarkably, having a male domestic partner means more work for women, not less. Married women spend more time on housework than single women; married men spend roughly the same amount as single men. Women’s lower wages and higher propensity to take part-time jobs explain some of the difference: To maximize the household’s total income, the person earning more does less around the house. But other studies have found that women who earn as much as or more than their male partner still devote more time to domestic care. Queer relationships, unsurprisingly, tend to be more equitable.

Perhaps most enraging: The gender divide results in women having fewer hours than men to devote to socializing, exercising, going out, or practicing a hobby. No wonder women tend to experience more stress and burnout.

A generation after the publication of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Second Shift, a lot has changed, and nothing has changed. Women are much more likely to work outside the home, but the distribution of work within the home has not become commensurately equitable. Surveys show that women are not exactly happy with the situation. What would it take for things to be different?

It was once thought that technology was part of the answer. Decades of labor-saving innovations cut the hours Americans spent on chores. A dishwasher saves a household an estimated 200 hours a year, a laundry machine three-plus hours of backbreaking work per load. Yet even as technology improved, homes got bigger, filled with more items to care for. As my colleague Derek Thompson has noted, standards of cleanliness have risen over time too: “Automatic washers and dryers raised our expectations for clean clothes and encouraged people to go out and buy new shirts and pants; housewives therefore had more loads of laundry to wash, dry, and fold.”

You see this tidiness treadmill on TikTok and Instagram: People recommend how to wash your walls, “refresh” your furniture season by season, and organize everything in your pantry in clear acrylic bins. This labor isn’t time-saving; it is never-ending.

The Gender Equity Policy Institute suggests, well, policy changes, including “use it or lose it” parental-leave programs for new fathers, caregiving credits for the Social Security system, and expanded early-child-care programs. But the report acknowledges that the unhappy divide is cultural, and requires cultural shifts as well.

Caretaking is a central way that women perform their gender. The advertising of domestic goods and cleaning products remains intently focused on women. The majority of children still grow up watching their mother do more housework than their father. The gender chore gap shows up in children as young as 8.

Men doing more housework is an obvious solution, but not one that I am particularly hopeful about. Virtually every woman I know who is unhappy with her household division of labor has tried and failed to get her male partner to pick up the slack. The belief that men care less about having a messy home is pervasive, and supported by at least some evidence. In one anthropological study, researchers had people give them a video tour of their house. Mothers almost unanimously apologized for the rooms not being tidier. “Fathers in their home tours would walk in the same rooms their wives had come through and often made no mention whatsoever of the messiness,” UCLA’s Jeanne Arnold reported. “This was pretty astonishing.”

Perhaps the problem is women, and the remedy is for women to do less housework and tolerate a consequentially messier home. “The tidiness level of a home is a matter of simple preference with no right or wrong,” my colleague Jonathan Chait has written, offering an “easy answer” to the chore wars. “My wife and I happily learned to converge on each other’s level of tidiness. We settled—fairly, I think—on a home that’s neater than I’d prefer to keep it, but less neat than she would.”

Yet men are perfectly capable of recognizing a mess when it is not theirs. The sociologists Sarah Thébaud, Leah Ruppanner, and Sabino Kornrich asked people to look at photographs of an open-plan living room and kitchen; half saw a living space cluttered with dishes and laundry, and the other half saw a tidy area. The participants rated how clean the room was on a 100-point scale, and said how urgent they thought it was for the owner to take care of it. Men and women had essentially the same ratings of how clean the space was and how important tidying up was.

In a second experiment, the same researchers told study participants that the photos were taken by someone looking to rent out their place on an Airbnb-type site. Some participants viewed rooms hosted by “Jennifer,” some by “John.” The participants thought that Jennifer’s clean space was less tidy than John’s, and were more judgmental in their assessments of the female host.

Women internalize this kind of judgment, making the individual desire to keep things clean inextricable from the social expectation to do so. Women are critiqued for having pans in the sink and grime on the countertops in a way that men aren’t. Women’s cortisol levels go up when their space is messy in a way that men’s cortisol levels don’t. Asking women to clean less means asking women to accept more criticism, to buck their culture, to put aside their desire for a socially desirable space. At the same time, men internalize the message that an untidy home is not their responsibility.

The best path forward might be for men and women to applaud messy, normal, mismatched, lived-in spaces. We should recognize that multinational conglomerates are in the business of devising problems that need solutions, which are conveniently available at Walmart and Target; we should admit that everything done in front of a camera is a performance, not reality; we should acknowledge that being welcomed into someone’s house is a gift of connection, not an invitation to judge. Easy enough for me to say. I am one of the millions of us who cannot seem to put down the vacuum, even if I do not want to pick it up.

It’s become one of the most important rites of passage in the book-publication process—more meaningful to some writers than a book party or book-cover reveal. For many authors, in fact, no book deal is complete until they’ve posted it.

It is the Publishers Marketplace book-deal social-media post, a screenshot of the charmingly retro-looking blurb from a publishing-industry trade website that announces the details of an author selling their book.

Search for “Publishers Marketplace” on Instagram or X or Threads and you’ll find hundreds upon hundreds of examples. The authors who are sharing deal announcements represent almost every genre: children’s lit, grown-up thrillers, BookTok-influencer bisexual rom-coms, and all points between. Some posts are pretty minimal—the screengrab, a caption, perhaps a touch of winking irony to deflect from appearing too braggy. Others are unabashedly earnest in their enthusiasm, comporting the anachronistic typeface of Publishers Marketplace into new-media forms: dancing around it enthusiastically in a TikTok green screen, posting it alongside baby photos of themselves. (“My entire life has been about reaching my unreachable dreams,” reads one.)

Authors have built their own galaxies of exalted cultural meaning out of the Publishers Marketplace deal-announcement screengrab—perhaps even more now, in an environment where anyone can self-publish independently. A significant number of Americans claim that they someday want to write a book. A commonly cited New York Times opinion piece from 2002 pegs it at upwards of 80 percent; more recent polling found that “more than half” of Americans have an idea for a novel. A deal is irrefutable evidence of the closest thing to employment that a would-be author can achieve. It’s proof that the novel they’ve been working on for years hasn’t just been a hobby; now it’s officially a job (though sometimes a job barely begun—deals can be made on the basis of a sample chapter).

Once the rarefied air of authorial status has been attained, today’s “Publishers Marketplace Official” writers (that’s the going phrase on social media) can safely perform the ad hoc public role of The Author online. Some even share their own Publishers Marketplace–themed fan merch. Custom mugs seem especially popular; at least one publishing company, Avid Reader (a division of Simon & Schuster), offers a Publishers Marketplace–screengrab mug as part of its new-author welcome package.

Social media is ostensibly a form of publicity, a way to generate buzz for a book. But the deal post likely does very little to move copies. David Black, the founder of the eponymous New York literary agency known for representing hundreds of authors across genres, points out that many publication dates are usually years away from deal announcements. “In terms of sales,” he told me, “the impact is not great.” The post, instead, has become the visual icon of the modern literary era, an illustration of the anxieties, expectations, and terminal onlineness of being an author today.

Publishers Marketplace has been in business since the early 2000s, a literary-world counterpart to trade publications such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, which have covered film- and TV-industry business dealings for the past century or so. Today, the Bronxville, New York–based book-market site, billed as “essential” daily reading, operates with a modest crew of just five full-time employees. Every year, it announces about 14,000 unique book deals, which can be accessed using a $25-a-month membership model (popular with professionals in the field, such as agents and editors, who use it to monitor the publishing industry in real time), or a $10 “Quick Pass” that lasts 24 hours—ideal for those who just want to access and screenshot their own deal announcement once.  

Every book deal—whether the humblest indie or the industry-shaking eight-figure multibook contract with international rights—is formatted the same way: The book’s title is listed in a large font on top, followed by the name of the author(s), the publisher, and then a single paragraph containing essential information about the book in question, including the names of the agent and acquiring editor. Industry professionals are fluent in its secret language, which can include terms such as good deal and very good deal to indicate the range of dollar amounts offered for each book as an advance payment. As with a tombstone in the mergers-and-acquisitions business, there is an insider lingua franca that casual followers wouldn’t know.  

[Read: How to write a book without losing your mind]

For many authors and their social-media followers, such nuances matter less than the fact that a deal was secured at all. In the early days, typically agents with a Publishers Marketplace subscription would take a screenshot and share it with authors, who would place it on Facebook or what was then Twitter. Today, Instagram appears to be the dominant platform (despite Publishers Marketplace itself having no active presence on the app). Michael Cader, who founded Publishers Marketplace, said the staff is aware of the importance the site has gained on social media. In 2020, the company even started offering a ready-made “screengrab” click option that produces a version of a deal-announcement image for posting with a single click. “We know some authors think of it as a mark of arrival,” he told me, “and we are honored to be able to help them memorialize and share their achievements.”

I spoke with multiple writers working in diverse genres about the phenomenon, and they were, let’s just say, a bit reticent about describing posting habits. Asking writers about what they do on social media is like asking someone whether they color their hair or are taking Ozempic—the details can feel embarrassing, even if the behavior itself is commonplace.  

One of the top posts I saw on Instagram for Publishers Marketplace is this one by June CL Tan, an international best-selling author of contemporary young-adult fantasy novels, including Darker by Four. She told me that “Publishers Marketplace Official” really does have meaning as the first time that a book enters the public sphere. Trying to sell a book can take years, and the timing varies from author to author, project to project—and “many, if not most, authors suffer from imposter syndrome,” she said. “Seeing the screengrab or the announcement on Publishers Marketplace does feel more official, as it can act as evidence that the deal is really happening.” The journalist Jason Diamond, who announced the sale of his first novel in April, told me the post also externalizes what otherwise can feel like an isolating endeavor. “I don’t want to sound like a sad bastard,” he told me, “but being a writer can be a very lonely profession.”

Deep down—or not even that deep down—people also see the post as a kind of status symbol, a “club jacket,” as various people told me. “Writing a book is really fucking hard,” Black said. “For some people, this kind of announcement is helpful because it carves out their place in the world.”

[Read: The authors who love Amazon]

I’m convinced that the website itself, largely unchanged since the early 2000s, is the secret sauce to this whole thing: The naive, disarming, Web 1.0 charm of the Publishers Marketplace screengrab cuts through the ambient friction of our extremely online 21st-century lives, arriving as something rare, authentic, and complete. Though verily the modern publishing industry is changing—and self-publishing on Amazon and other platforms is thriving—many authors are still attached to the markers of success that they remember from the pre-digital era. They’re chasing the feeling they get the first time they see their very own book at the library, in airport bookshops, on newspaper best-seller lists—things that they remember about the books they grew up reading. The post’s old-fashioned look is a dopamine hit to an author’s heart: What could be more tethered to tradition than the act of writing a novel, an art form that first became broadly popular in the 19th century?

The post is, of course, also a utilitarian initiation into what it means to be an author online—that is, self-promotional. Today’s writers are ever more expected to turn themselves into brands. Noah Galuten, a James Beard Award–winning cookbook author (we share an agent), told me that he finds something “very performative” about the post. Yet it’s also, simply, what is required in today’s market. “Cynically, if I see someone posting that, I don’t know—it seems a little thirsty,” Galuten said. “But if I do know you, then I’m happy for you … Like, what else am I supposed to post? A picture of myself cheering or signing a contract like an athlete?” Though the Publishers Marketplace post may not directly correlate to sales, it is a practical place to start the self-marketing journey, to make consumers out of followers.

Which gets at what really makes the post such a big deal: So many people claim to be working on a book, but getting paid for it matters. It’s what turns a writer into an author.

Or so authors like to think. “After you make this post, what then?” Black, the agent, said. “You still have to do the work.” After all, once the deal’s procured, the book must still be edited; sometimes it hasn’t been finished yet. But even if that next great American novel you so cheekily shared via screengrab fails to materialize—well, you might have to pay back the advance. Online, though, you’ll still always be Publishers Marketplace Official.