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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.

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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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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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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.