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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.

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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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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.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Earlier this week, The Atlantic published a new investigation by Alex Reisner into the data that are being used without permission to train generative-AI programs. In this case, dialogue from tens of thousands of movies and TV shows has been harvested by companies such as Apple, Anthropic, Meta, and Nvidia to develop large language models (or LLMs).

The data have a strange provenance: Rather than being pulled from scripts or books, the dialogue is taken from subtitle files that have been extracted from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and internet streams. “Though this may seem like a strange source for AI-training data, subtitles are valuable because they’re a raw form of written dialogue,” Reisner writes. “They contain the rhythms and styles of spoken conversation and allow tech companies to expand generative AI’s repertoire beyond academic texts, journalism, and novels, all of which have also been used to train these programs.”

Perhaps it no longer comes as a major shock that creative humans are having their work ripped off to train machines that threaten to replace them. But evidence demonstrating exactly what data have been used, and for what purposes, is hard to come by, thanks to the secretive nature of these tech companies. “Now, at least, we know a bit more about who is caught in the machinery,” Reisner writes. “What will the world decide they are owed?”

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI

By Alex Reisner

For as long as generative-AI chatbots have been on the internet, Hollywood writers have wondered if their work has been used to train them. The chatbots are remarkably fluent with movie references, and companies seem to be training them on all available sources. One screenwriter recently told me he’s seen generative AI reproduce close imitations of The Godfather and the 1980s TV show Alf, but he had no way to prove that a program had been trained on such material.

I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies. I recently downloaded this data set, which I saw referenced in papers about the development of various large language models (or LLMs). It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. It even includes prewritten “live” dialogue from Golden Globes and Academy Awards broadcasts. If a chatbot can mimic a crime-show mobster or a sitcom alien—or, more pressingly, if it can piece together whole shows that might otherwise require a room of writers—data like this are part of the reason why.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

“What I found in a database Meta uses to train generative AI”: “Nobel-winning authors, Dungeons and Dragons, Christian literature, and erotica all serve as datapoints for the machine,” Alex Reisner wrote in an earlier investigation for The Atlantic. AI’s fingerprints were all over the election: “But deepfakes and disinformation weren’t the main issues,” Matteo Wong writes.