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J.Crew has 2.7 million followers on Instagram, and more than 300,000 on X. But earlier this fall, it announced that it was trying to reach prospective customers the old-fashioned way: by reviving its print catalog. In 2024, everyone shops online. But in recent years, some retailers have returned to the catalog as a way to attempt to grab a bit more of shoppers’ coveted attention. People can and do scroll past the endless stream of marketing emails and digital ads on their phone. But completely ignoring a catalog that appears on your stoop or in your mailbox is tougher. Simply put, you have to pick it up, even if you are planning to throw it in the recycling bin—and brands hope that you might flip through some glossy photos along the way.

Catalogs’ heyday came before the financial crisis—but they never fully went away, and billions have been sent to American consumers every year since. The catalogs of 2024, in part a nostalgia play for those who grew up with the trend, are generally sent to targeted lists of customers who have either shopped with a brand in the past or are deemed plausible future buyers. Some retailers are maintaining what they’ve always done: Neiman Marcus, for example, continues to send a catalog, even as some of its peers have stopped. Both traditional and digital-first companies use catalogs: Amazon has issued a toy catalog since 2018. Brands have started playing with the format too, taking the concept beyond a straightforward list of products: Patagonia puts out a catalog that it calls a “bona fide journal,” featuring “stories and photographs” from contributors. Many of these catalogs don’t even include information about pricing; shoppers have to go to the website for that.

Amanda Mull, writing in The Atlantic in early 2020, foretold a new golden era of catalogs—brands at the time were becoming “more desperate to find ways to sell their stuff without tithing to the tech behemoths.” Since then, the pandemic has only turbocharged consumers’ feelings of overwhelm with online shopping. Immediate purchase is not necessarily the goal; these catalogs are aiming to build a relationship that might lead to future orders, Jonathan Zhang, a marketing professor at Colorado State University, told me. The return on investment for companies is pretty good, Zhang has found, especially because more sophisticated targeting and measurement means that brands aren’t spending time appealing to people who would never be interested (this also means that less paper is wasted than in the free-for-all mailer days, he noted).

With catalogs, brands are supplementing, not replacing, e-commerce: Zhang’s experiments with an e-commerce retailer found that over a period of six months starting in late 2020, people who received both catalogs and marketing emails from a retailer made 24 percent more purchases than those who received only the emails. A spokesperson for J.Crew told me that following the catalog relaunch, the brand saw a nearly 20 percent rise in reactivated customers, adding that this fall, 11 percent more consumers had a positive impression of the J.Crew brand compared with last year. E-commerce is the undeniable center of shopping in 2024, so brands are finding creative ways to use in-person methods to build on its success—including, as I’ve written, reimagining the brick-and-mortar store.

A well-designed catalog may appeal to some of the same sensory instincts that enchant die-hard in-person shoppers. Catalogs work especially well for certain types of products: Zhang said that “hedonic” categories of goods—luxury clothing, perfumes, vacation packages, chocolate—are some of the best fits for stories and photos in a print format. (I smile when I think of Elaine taking this type of luxury marketing to parody levels in her stint running a catalog on Seinfeld.) Zhang himself has been wooed by such a campaign: Around February of this year, he received a mailer from a cruise company (one he had never interacted with in the past). He spent a few minutes flipping through. In August, when he started thinking about planning a winter vacation for his family, he remembered the catalog and visited the company’s website. “That few minutes was long enough for me to kind of encode this information in my memory,” he said. He decided to book a trip.

The catalog has moved forward in fits and starts: 30 years ago, they were the central way to market a product directly to consumers. Then the pendulum swung hard toward online ads. Now we may start to see more of a balance between the two. Some of us would rather turn away from advertising altogether. But if brands are going to find us anyway, print catalogs could add a little more texture to the experience of commerce.

Related:

Why the Restoration Hardware catalog won’t die Stores are small now.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Pam Bondi’s comeback David Frum on a good country’s bad choice The Trump-Trumpist divide

Today’s News

A New York judge said that he would indefinitely postpone sentencing in the hush-money criminal case against President-Elect Donald Trump. Former Representative Matt Gaetz said that he will not return to Congress next year but will continue to work with the next Trump administration. Democratic Senator Bob Casey conceded the closely watched Pennsylvania Senate race to Dave McCormick last night.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Cher’s memoir is a valuable document of a young girl thrust into the adult world, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: Alex Reisner’s recent investigation for The Atlantic found that dialogue from tens of thousands of movies and TV shows has been harvested—without permission—by big tech companies, Damon Beres writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Paramount Pictures

Gladiator II Is More Than Just a Spectacle

By Shirley Li

Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Are you not entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus goaded the crowd in a memorably rousing scene. We really were: Here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.

For Gladiator II, now in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it a step further.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Rob Youngson / FX

Watch. Say Nothing (streaming on Hulu) captures the struggle of separating who you are from what you fight for.

Debate. Jake Paul is an emblem of a generation starving for purpose while gorging on spectacle, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Thanksgiving means sharing food with friends and loved ones, which also means that many potluck guests will spend the next few days scouring the web for easy and last-minute recipes. To help inspire readers looking for suggestions, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What’s your go-to dish to bring to a potluck?

There is a calculus to potlucks. The dish you bring must be not only tasty but also impressive, affordable, transportable, easy to serve, and not overly time-consuming—not to mention thematically appropriate. Years of doing the math led me to a simple solution: No matter the party, I bring meatballs. Roll them, bake them, and serve with toothpicks—and don’t forget the dips.

The great thing about them is that they are endlessly adaptable. A fancier gathering might call for veal-and-ricotta balls with a spiced tomato sauce; kids might prefer chicken balls with ketchup. And, of course, they can be made vegetarian.

At a previous job, I was asked to contribute to a cookie-themed potluck. Anxiety struck; I’m a deeply mediocre baker. But the math saved me once again. As I set down a plate of beef-and-pork balls next to trays of whoopie pies and chocolate-chip biscotti, my bemused colleagues waited for an explanation. I pulled out a label: “Meat truffles.” By the end of the meal, not a single one was left.

— Yasmin Tayag, staff writer

***

A staple of my family’s Thanksgiving dinners and summer barbecues is a painstaking mid-century masterpiece we call “rainbow Jell-O”: layers of red, orange, yellow, and green gelatin, partitioned by sweetened condensed milk and cut into bite-size cubes. Making the Jell-O is an all-day affair; each level needs to set in the fridge before the next can be built on top (we skip blue, indigo, and violet as a practical matter).

The recipe, scrawled by my grandmother on a now-yellowed piece of paper, comes from the Japanese American side of my family, which traces its roots through Hawaii, where rainbow Jell-O is sold in convenience stores. The origins of the Jell-O are unclear, but if I had to guess, it might be born of the islands’ unique culinary tradition of drawing magic from shelf-stable foods and wartime rations—in the spirit of Spam musubi.

Is making the Jell-O worth clearing an afternoon and a shelf in your fridge? That perhaps depends on your tolerance for wobbly foods. When one of my college roommates was passed the plate of Jell-O squares on his first Thanksgiving visit, he watched them quake from side to side and politely declined.

— Andrew Aoyama, deputy managing editor

***

I’m a self-conscious cook, even in private; I prefer to stick with minimal ingredients for my meals instead of experimenting with my seasonings and, inevitably, my sensitive stomach. My palate is pretty limited, probably as a result of my boring diet—so I also have no idea if anything I eat tastes good to the average person.

That’s why, when I’m invited to a potluck, I designate myself the Prepacked-Snacks Person. But I make it fun by leveraging my experience as an Oreo connoisseur: My potluck contribution is whatever wacky, seasonally appropriate Oreo flavor is on the market right now. It’s both something you know everyone is somewhat familiar with and more exciting than showing up with the basic snacks you get at the bodega. Plus, I would rather have my friends taste and judge my Pumpkin Spice or Coca-Cola Oreos than watch them pretend to like my homemade chili.

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

***

I’m pretty sure I first made caramel rolls for my mom’s birthday when I was in high school, but I started sharing them at a Friendsgiving potluck in college. They are basically cinnamon rolls, but instead of topping the buns with frosting, you drown them in a caramel sauce, creating a dish that is soft, sticky, and supremely sweet. Although you can use an online recipe for the bread portion, I use my grandmother’s recipe for the caramel, which lives on a bright-blue note card in a wooden box at my parents’ house, along with all of the other cooking instructions we inherited after she passed away. I’ve heard that caramel is notoriously hard to make, but I’ve never had an issue with hers, which includes two whopping tablespoons of white corn syrup. Her side of the family—my mom’s side—comes from North Dakota, so I always feel like I’m sharing a dish that’s a little folksy: simple and delicious. Caramel rolls don’t just work as a hefty addition to potlucks and as a dessert for any occasion; the leftovers can be breakfast too!

— Elise Hannum, assistant editor

***

I am a man of vanity who likes to appear impressive in mixed company; I am also a man of convenience who likes to expend as little energy as possible, if possible. In a potluck scenario, the latter instinct takes over—largely because there’s just less time and attention to spend on any one dish.

Hence my love of making pulled pork, which maxes out several factors: cheapness of ingredients, ease of preparation, quantity of yielded food, wow factor with friends. The recipe I use is perhaps not the best recipe; it is, however, one of the first recipes I found when I Googled best pulled-pork recipe a few years ago. You can really blow people’s minds by bringing along the appropriate accoutrement—pickles, barbecue sauce, buns—but even by itself, the meat goes with anything.

I first made pulled pork for a Super Bowl party, when I had a sneaking suspicion—informed by my expansive curiosity about flavor combinations, and my history of alcohol consumption—that it would pair well with chips and beer. I will be honest: Despite the ease of “slather in spices and hit the slow-cooker button,” I somehow kind of screwed it up—the cut of meat was too large for the lid to fully cover, and I didn’t let it cook for long enough. But even made poorly, pulled pork is a novel delight—everyone loved it, even as I was mildly ashamed of this inaugural effort. Made well, you’ll be the talk of the party.

— Jeremy Gordon, senior editor

***

This season of life doesn’t seem to afford much time for hobbies, but I do love baking, either solo or with the “help” of my 6-year-old daughter (she is an expert sugar sprinkler). My favorite—and most consistently delicious—thing to bake is challah. I got the recipe, adaptations, and all relevant advice from my sister; it has completely ruined all those dry store-bought versions for any purpose but making French toast.

I learned the art of baking challah during the pandemic, when everyone else was busy with their sourdough starters. Back then, my husband, my daughter, and I had no choice but to eat it all ourselves—fortunately, this recipe freezes well. That was by far not the worst part of COVID, but I prefer to share challah; Jewish food is always best enjoyed in the company of others. I never mastered the traditional braiding of the dough, so I mostly shape it into large, fluffy buns—all the better for tearing apart with your hands. Try topping the challah with everything-bagel seasoning, za’atar, or something more creative. Then bring it to a communal Shabbat or a holiday meal, and enjoy watching your loved ones go back for just one more hunk of soft, warm bread, and then another, and another.

— Janice Wolly, copy chief

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The business-school scandal that just keeps getting bigger Three ways to become a deeper thinker The Atlantic gift guide

The Week Ahead

Moana 2, an animated sequel about a village chief’s wayfinding daughter who must travel into the dangerous waters of Oceania (in theaters Wednesday) The Agency, a thriller series starring Michael Fassbender as a CIA agent who is ordered to leave his undercover life (premieres Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime) This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a collection of short stories by Naomi Wood about motherhood, femininity, and modern love (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Your Armpits Are Trying to Tell You Something

By Yasmin Tayag

The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the color of my blouse. Never again would I twist underneath a hand dryer to dry my damp underarms. It was time to try clinical-strength antiperspirant.

Read the full article.

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The thin line between biopic and propaganda How Jimmy O. Yang became a main character Cher has a history lesson for us all. The most coveted screenshot in the literary world What the men of the internet are trying to prove “Dear James”: I used to have friends. Then they had kids.

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David Frum: A good country’s bad choice The Trump-Trumpist divide Inside the mind of Pete Hegseth

Photo Album

In a protest demanding action on climate change, members of Indigenous organizations hold large cutouts of world leaders’ heads above the waters of Botafogo Bay. (Tuane Fernandes / Reuters)

Check out these photos of the week, showing a climate-change protest, a mummified saber-toothed kitten in Russia, a virtual taekwondo championship in Singapore, and more.

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Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)

In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.

[Read: The Trump-Trumpist divide]

Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.

The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority.

The strategy was not without risks. His claims of presidential immunity drew scoffs from many legal scholars, as well as judges on the first two levels of the federal court system. But the Supreme Court took as long as possible before issuing a ruling substantially agreeing with Trump—the majority included three Trump-appointed justices plus a fourth whose wife was deeply involved in the election-subversion effort.

Even then, the strategy relied on Trump winning the presidential election, which was not a sure bet. Had he lost, the cases would likely have continued, and he might well have lost those. The documents case, though not as grave as Trump’s attack on the basic fabric of the Constitution, was clear-cut in its facts. And in the only criminal case against Trump that did go to a jury—widely viewed as the most tenuous case against him—he was quickly convicted. (Sentencing in that case is now indefinitely paused, also because of Trump’s election.)

But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election.

This was the problem with Garland’s calculation: It may have temporarily restored the proper function of the Justice Department, but it didn’t win back public approval, nor did it really benefit the Justice Department in court. Garland appointed Smith as special counsel after Trump entered the presidential race, so as to create an appearance of insulation from politics. Little good that did: The Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon delivered a blatantly political ruling throwing the case out because she deemed the appointment unconstitutional.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect.

Not only that, but the Justice Department will be led by the lawyers who developed Trump’s strategy. His new nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, spoke outside his trial in New York and defended him in his impeachments. His appointees for deputy attorney general and principal associate deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, represented him as defense lawyers. D. John Sauer, who argued the immunity case at the Supreme Court, will be solicitor general, the fourth-ranking post at DOJ.

The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.

Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the foolish hope of using them for higher purposes—then we had better establish what we stand for.

Labels matter in politics. They can also lose their meaning. There is, for example, nothing “conservative” about the MAGA movement, which is, in large part, reactionary, looking for a return to an idealized past, when it is not merely a cult of personality. Today’s progressives are a long, long way from their predecessors of the early 20th century—just invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s name at a gathering of “the Squad” and see what happens.

Even the terms left and right—derived, let us remember, from seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution—no longer convey much. Attitudes toward government coercion of various kinds, deficit spending, the rule of law—neither party holds consistent views on these subjects. The activist bases of both Democrats and Republicans like the idea of expanding executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. Both see American foreign policy in past decades as a tale of unremitting folly, best resolved by leaving the world to its own devices. Both brood over fears and resentments, and shun those who do not share their deepest prejudices.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

What is worse is the extent to which the MAGA- and progressive-activist worlds are more interested in destroying institutions than building them. Both denounce necessary parts of government (the Department of Justice on the one hand, police departments on the other); seek to enforce speech codes; threaten to drive those they consider their enemies from public life; and pursue justice (as they understand it) in a spirit of reckless self-righteousness using prosecution as a form of retribution. Neither group of wreckers, for example, would really like to see, let alone help rebuild, the great universities as politically neutral oases of education rather than incubators of their own partisans.

To call those made politically homeless by the rise of Donald Trump “conservatives” no longer makes sense. To be a conservative is to want to slow down or stop change and preserve institutions and practices as they are, or to enable them to evolve slowly. But in recent decades, so much damage has been inflicted on norms of public speech and conduct that it is not enough to slow the progress of political decay. To the extent that the plain meaning of the word conservatism is indeed a commitment to preservation, that battle has been lost, and on multiple fronts.

We certainly are not “progressives” either. We do not believe that progress is inevitable (and can be accelerated), or that history bends in a certain direction. Being on the right side of history is a phrase that sends chills down the spines of those of us who have a somewhat dark view of human nature. The notion that the arc of history bends inexorably toward justice died for many of us in the middle of the 20th century. Moreover, the modern progressive temper, with its insistence on orthodoxies on such specifics as pronouns and a rigid and all-encompassing categorization of oppressors and victims, is intolerable for many of us.

What we are is a kind of old-fashioned liberal—a point recently made by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Liberal is not an entirely satisfactory term, but given the impoverishment of today’s political vocabulary, it will have to do.

What does being a liberal mean, particularly in a second Trump term, when politics has become coarse and brutal and the partisan divide seems uncrossable?

It begins with a commitment to the notion of “freedom”—that is, a freedom that most suits human nature at its finest and requires not only the legal protection to express itself but a set of internal restraints based on qualities now in short supply: prudent good judgment, the ability to empathize, the desire to avoid unnecessary hurt, a large measure of tolerance for disagreement, an awareness that error awaits all of us. We agree with Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued in Democracy in America, that it is mœurs—mores or habits of belief or norms—and not laws alone that keep America free.

If this does not sound like a partisan political agenda, that is because it is not. It is, rather, a temperament, a set of dispositions rooted in beliefs about the challenges and promise of free self-government. It is an assertion of the primacy of those deeper values over the urgency of any specific political program, and reflects a belief that, ultimately, they matter more.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, whose early-19th-century writings shaped the idea of a liberal education, famously captured these qualities in his description of the product of such an education:

He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out loud. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injury … He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust … He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits.

These qualities will, no doubt, seem otherworldly to many. They are not the stuff of which a vigorous political party will be built; they are easily mocked and impossible to tweet. They are more the stuff of statesmanship than politics. They will satisfy neither of our political parties, and certainly none of their bigoted partisans. They will not, at least in the short run, capture the imagination of the American people. They are probably not the winning creed of a political movement that can capture the presidency in 2028, or secure majorities in the House or Senate.

[Caitlin Flanagan: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

But principled liberals of the modern American type can exercise influence if they are patient, willing to argue, and, above all, if they do not give up. We can write and speak, attempt to persuade, and engage. Our influence, to the extent that we have it, will be felt in the long term and indirectly. It may be felt most, and is most urgently needed, in the field of education, beginning in the early years when young people acquire the instincts and historical knowledge that can make them thoughtful citizens. It is a long-term project, but that is nothing new: The struggle to eliminate formal discrimination on the basis of race and religion in public life took a very long time as well.

True liberals are short-term pessimists, because they understand the dark side of human nature, but long-run optimists about human potential, which is why they believe in freedom. At this troubled moment, we should neither run from the public square nor chant jeremiads while shaking our fists at the heavens. We need to be the anti-hysterics, the unflappable skeptics, the persistent advocates for the best of the old values and practices in new conditions. We need to persistently make our case.

Nor is this a matter of argument only. We need to be the ones who not only articulate but embody certain standards of behavior and thought. We may need the courage that the first editor of this magazine described as the willingness to “dare to be, in the right with two or three.” For sure, we should follow the motto that he coined for The Atlantic and be “of no party or clique.” If that means journeying in a political wilderness for a while, well, there are precedents for that. Besides, those who travel with us will be good company—and may be considerably more numerous than we now think.