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.

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As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.

Four of these nominees, however, are dangerous to the security of the United States and to the well-being of its people: Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), Matt Gaetz (Justice), and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services). The Senate must turn back these nominations, and do so en bloc.

The Gaetz and Kennedy nominations are apparently already in trouble, and more than enough has been written about them. Gaetz is an accused sexual predator (he has long denied the allegations); ironically, he is the least dangerous of this pack. Yes, as attorney general he would green-light every raving demand from MAGA world for investigations into Trump’s enemies, but in a strange blessing, he is also likely to be completely incompetent. The Department of Justice, as Trump himself learned during his first term, is packed to the rafters with very sharp lawyers who would almost certainly jam up any of Gaetz’s unconstitutional orders. Gaetz’s tenure at Justice would be a national humiliation and destructive to the rule of law, but it would also likely be very short.

The RFK Jr. nomination is, in a word, pathetic. Most of his views are little more than pure anti-science kookery, and if he is confirmed, Americans—and especially their children—will be in peril from this anti-vaccine crusader. But he would be a danger to the health of individual Americans (especially those who watch too much TV and spend too much time on the internet) rather than to the continued existence of the United States.

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

Tulsi Gabbard, as I wrote last week, is unqualified for the job of DNI, but she is also a security risk: I have held security clearances for most of my adult life, and had I worked in any federal office next to her, I would have had no compunction about raising her as an “insider threat” because of her political views and her shady international connections. (As a member of Congress in 2017, she held meetings with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad outside of U.S. government channels—an obvious problem for anyone seeking a senior role in national security.)

Gaetz, Kennedy, and Gabbard are terrible choices. The Hegseth nomination, however, is easily the most dangerous and irresponsible of all of Trump’s picks. (Gabbard is a significant hazard, but she would not have a gigantic army at her disposal, and she would not be involved with the control of nuclear weapons.) Like the other three in this group, Hegseth is shockingly unqualified for the job he’s been asked to take, but in this case, the Senate is faced with a proposal to place a TV talking head at the top of the Pentagon and insert him into the nuclear chain of command.

Hegseth has made personal choices that make him unfit to lead the DOD, including his extramarital affairs (which apparently helped tank his chances to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in Trump’s first administration) and a payoff to a woman who claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her. He denies the assault allegation, but in any case, adultery is a criminal violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can be a career-ending mistake for a member of the armed forces.

I will leave aside whether Hegseth’s tattoos identify him as a white supremacist. Hegseth denies the claim. But some of Hegseth’s ink is popular with extremists; that’s why one of his own military comrades reported him as an insider threat in the first place—and not, as Hegseth and some whining conservatives claim, because he is being persecuted as a Christian. I knew many people in federal service with patriotic tattoos. (I have one myself, and no, it’s none of your business where it is.) I am also a Christian who wears a cross—one that I had blessed in a church—every day. That’s not what any of this is about.

Hegseth’s defenders seem unable to understand that neither Hegseth nor anyone else has a right to be the secretary of defense: If the nominee made choices earlier in life that would now undermine his effectiveness in the job, then that’s his problem, not the Pentagon’s. But even if Hegseth were not an example of a sexist, MAGA-bro culture—his statements about women in the military are particularly noxious—the Senate is still faced with the problem that he’s utterly unqualified.

A former Army major, he has no serious background in national-security or defense issues beyond his military service. (And how that service ended is apparently now a matter of some dispute.) He has not worked anywhere in the defense world: not in any of its agencies, not with any of its industries, not with any of its workforce in any capacity. He has never managed anything of any significant size.

Not only would he be incapable of administering America’s largest government department, but he’d also be in a position of terrifying responsibility for which he is unprepared. Imagine an international crisis, perhaps only a year or two from now. President Trump is facing a situation that could be rife with danger to the United States and our allies—perhaps even one that involves nuclear threats. At this dire moment, Trump turns to …

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

The Senate must do everything in its constitutional power to stop this. Trump won the election, but no president has an absolute right to his Cabinet nominations: The Constitution requires the Senate to consent to those nominations. Trump has already warned that if the Senate balks, he will subvert this process by using “recess appointments,” in effect a demand that the Senate take a walk and let Trump do whatever he wants—to consent, in other words, to autocracy.

Incoming Majority Leader John Thune and others who still might care about their duty to the nation have time to go to Trump, right now, and tell him that these four nominations are DOA. They could tell Trump that it is in his own interest—the only interest he recognizes—not to risk multiple defeats. And if the Senate folds and decides to take these up one at a time, Trump will wear them down, likely accepting that Gaetz must be a Succession-style “blood sacrifice,” in return for which Trump gets everyone else. For Thune—who, one assumes, does not wish to begin his tenure as a statelier version of Senator Tommy Tuberville, the MAGA obstructionist who held up military promotions for months—accepting such a deal would be a huge strategic error.

Whomever Trump nominates as replacements will likely be dangerous in their own way. But these four nominees have to be stopped—and right now.

Related:

The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

He was the world’s longest-held death-row inmate. He was also innocent. How Trump could make Congress go away for a while Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab? Europe braces for Trump.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine yesterday to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia, according to U.S. officials. Russia said today that the decision would escalate international tensions and add “fuel to the fire” of the war. Trump confirmed on Truth Social that his administration is planning to declare a national emergency and enlist the military to carry out a mass-deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants. Trump picked Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a Project 2025 contributor, to lead the FCC.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Learning where famous musicians sleep and what they eat can feel like finally glimpsing the unknowable, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity.

Read the full article.

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There’s no longer any doubt that Hollywood writing is powering AI. Researchers are finally unraveling how the mind processes nothing. Trump’s New York sentencing must proceed, Randall D. Eliason argues. American kakistocracy Making government efficient again

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Watch (or skip). Conclave (out now in theaters) treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National. It’s even worse than The Da Vinci Code, Matthew Schmitz writes.

Examine. In a market with thousands of dog toys, Lamb Chop, the 1960s puppet, has somehow become ubiquitous.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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At its best, a presidential biopic can delve into the monomaniacal focus—and potential narcissism—that might drive a person to run for the White House in the first place. That’s what Oliver Stone did in 1995’s Nixon, dramatizing the 37th president’s downfall with the exhilarating paranoia of the director’s best work. Though guilty of some fact-fudging, Stone retained empathy for Richard Nixon’s childhood trauma and lifelong inferiority complex, delivering a Shakespearean tragedy filtered through a grim vision of American power. As Nixon (played by a hunched, scotch-guzzling Anthony Hopkins) stalks the halls of a White House engulfed by scandal, and stews with jealousy at the late John F. Kennedy, the presidency never seemed so lonely.

A presidential biopic can also zoom in on a crucial juncture in a leader’s life: Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln explored its protagonist’s fraught final months, during which he pushed, at great political risk, for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Spielberg’s film was captivating because it didn’t just re-create Lincoln’s famous speeches, but also imagined what the man was like behind the scenes—in backroom dealings, or in contentious confrontations with his wife, Mary Todd. Like its 1939 predecessor, Young Mr. Lincoln, the film wisely limits its scope; focusing on a pivotal period proves a defter approach than trying to capture the full sprawl of a president’s life, a task better left to hefty biographies.

And then there’s a movie like this year’s Reagan, the Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid. Reagan is a boyhood-to-grave survey of the 40th president’s life and administration, with a chest-beating emphasis on his handling of the Cold War that blurs the line between biopic and Hollywood boosterism. Filmed with all the visual panache of an arthritis-medication commercial, the movie is suffocating in its unflagging reverence for its titular hero. In its portrayal of Reagan’s formative years, secondary characters seem to exist primarily to give mawkish pep talks or to fill the young Reagan’s brain with somber warnings about the evils of communism. “God has a purpose for your life, something only you can do,” his mother tells him after he reads scripture at church. Later, in college, he is disturbed by a speech from a Soviet defector, who visits a local congregation and lectures wide-eyed students that they will not find a “church like this” in the U.S.S.R.

Unlike Lincoln, the film seems incapable of imagining what its protagonist was like in private moments or ascribing any interior complexity to him. Even his flirty exchanges with his wife, Nancy, feel like they were cribbed from a campaign ad. “I just want to do something good in this world,” he tells his future spouse on a horseback-riding date. “Make a difference.” The portrayal isn’t helped by the fact that the 70-year-old Quaid is digitally de-aged and delivers his lines in a tinny imitation of the politician’s voice. A bizarre narrative device further detaches the audience from Reagan’s perspective: The entire movie is narrated by Jon Voight doing a Russian accent, as a fictionalized KGB agent who surveilled Reagan for decades and is now regaling a young charge with stories of how one American president outsmarted the Soviet Union.

They say history is written by the winners. But sometimes the winners like to put on a bad accent and cosplay as the losers. Yet despite heavily negative reviews, Reagan remained in theaters for nearly two months and earned a solid $30 million at the box office, playing to an underserved audience and tapping into some of the cultural backlash that powered Donald Trump’s reelection. The film’s success portends a strange new era for the presidential biopic, one in which hokey hagiography might supplant any semblance of character depth—reinforcing what audiences already want to hear about politicians they already admire.

In retrospect, Lincoln, with its innate faith in the power of government to do good, was as much a product of the “Obamacore” era—that surge of positivity and optimism that flooded pop culture beginning in the early 2010s—as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash Hamilton. But the arrival of the Trump era threw cold water on those feel-good vibes, and since Lincoln, presidential biopics have largely failed to connect with crowds. Two lightweight depictions of Barack Obama’s young adulthood arrived in 2016, but neither reckoned with his complicated presidency. In 2017, Rob Reiner delivered the ambivalent and uneven LBJ, which sank at the box office and made little impression on audiences. Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese developed and seemingly abandoned a Teddy Roosevelt biopic.

In development for more than a decade, Reagan emerges from a more plainly partisan perspective. Its producer, Mark Joseph, once called The Reagans, the 2003 TV movie starring James Brolin, “insulting” to the former president. Though Reagan director Sean McNamara expressed hope that his film would unite people across political lines, its source material, The Crusader, is a book by Paul Kengor, a conservative who has written eight books about Reagan and who presently works at a right-wing think tank. And its star, Dennis Quaid, is among Hollywood’s most prominent Trump supporters. In July, Quaid appeared on Fox News live from the Republican National Convention, proclaiming that Reagan would help Americans born after 1985 “get a glimpse of what this country was.”     

The notable presidential biopics of the past were prestige pictures that at least tried to appeal to a wide swath of the moviegoing public, across political spectrums. Even 2008’s W., Stone’s spiritual sequel to Nixon—inferior by far, and disappointingly conventional in its biographical beats—is hardly the liberal excoriation many viewers might have expected from the director; it was even criticized for going too easy on George W. Bush. Released during the waning months of his presidency, when Bush-bashing was low-hanging fruit for audiences, the film portrays the 43rd president as a lovable screwup with crippling daddy issues. As Timothy Noah argued in Slate at the time, “W. is the rare Oliver Stone film that had to tone down the historical record because the truth was too lurid.”

Instead, new entries like Reagan and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the more nuanced film, reflect the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality. Rarely do two movies about the same era of American history have so little audience overlap. Set from 1973 to 1986, The Apprentice portrays Trump (Sebastian Stan) as a young sociopath-in-training, dramatizing his rise to business mogul and his relationship with mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a Svengali of capitalist chicanery molding a monster in his own image. In the most shocking scenes, the film depicts Trump brutally raping his wife, Ivana, and undergoing liposuction surgery. (Ivana accused Trump of rape in a 1990 divorce deposition, then recanted the allegation decades later. Trump’s campaign has called the movie a “malicious defamation.”) The film, in other words, gives confirmation—and a sleazily gripping origin story—to those who already believe Trump is a malevolent con man and irredeemable misogynist. It knows what its viewers want.

[Read: How the GOP went from Reagan to Trump]

So, seemingly, does Reagan, which shows its protagonist primarily as the Great Communicator who tore down that wall. But as the Reagan biographer Max Boot recently wrote, “the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies … Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Reagan resists such nuance, hewing instead to a predictable hero’s narrative. Soviet leaders are swathed in visual clichés: grotesque men sipping vodka in cigar-filled rooms.

Meanwhile, the film renders Reagan’s domestic critics without sophistication or dignity. As Matthew Dallek chronicles in his book The Right Moment, Reagan spent much of his 1966 campaign to become California’s governor sensationalizing and condemning marches protesting the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley, and later called for a “bloodbath” against the campus left. In the film, we see Reagan, as the state’s governor, calling in the National Guard to crack down on Berkeley protesters, but we never learn what these students are protesting; Vietnam is scarcely referenced. (A nastier incident, in which Reagan-sent cops in riot gear opened fire on student protesters and killed one, goes unmentioned.)

A less slanted film might have interrogated the conflict between Reagan’s anti-totalitarian Cold War rhetoric and his crackdown on demonstrators at home. It might also have reckoned with the president’s devastating failure to confront the AIDS epidemic, a fact the movie only fleetingly references, via a few shots of ACT UP demonstrators slotted into a generic montage of Reagan critics set to Genesis’s “Land of Confusion.” But Reagan remains tethered to the great-man theory of history, in which Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War, preserved America’s standing in the world, and beat back lefty Communist sympathizers. A match-cut transition, from a shot of newly retired Reagan swinging an axe at his ranch to young “wallpeckers” taking axes to the Berlin Wall in 1989, literalizes the message for grade-school viewers: The Gipper brought down the wall himself. It’s not that the movie is too kind to Reagan—but by flattening him in this way, it robs him of the conflicts and contradictions that made him a figure worth thinking about today.

In this way, too, Reagan forms a curious contrast to Nixon. A central message of Stone’s film is that even if Nixon had wanted to end the Vietnam War, he was powerless to act against the desires of the deep state (or “the beast,” as Hopkins’s Nixon calls it). In a defining scene, a young anti-war demonstrator confronts the president. “You can’t stop it, can you?” she realizes. “Because it’s not you. It’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.” Nixon is stunned into stammering disbelief.

Indeed, Stone’s trilogy of films about U.S. presidents (JFK, Nixon, and W.) all reflect some paranoia about the dark forces of state power. (The unabashedly conspiratorial JFK suggests that Kennedy was eliminated by the CIA and/or the military-industrial complex because he didn’t fall in line with their covert objectives.) They are stories of ambitious leaders whose presidencies were hijacked or truncated by forces beyond their comprehension—movies whose villains are shadowy figures operating within the bowels of the U.S. government. It’s not just Stone’s view of state power that makes his films more interesting; it’s that he takes into account forces larger than one man, regardless of that man’s own accomplishments.   

Reagan’s vision of the institution is more facile. Its hero is endowed with near-mythical power to end wars and solve domestic woes; its villains are as clearly labeled as a map of the Kremlin. The film’s simplistic pandering vaporizes complexity and undercuts the cinematic aims of a presidential biopic. It’s a profitable film because it instead adheres to the market incentives of modern cable news: Tell viewers what they want to hear, and give them a clear and present enemy.     

In his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind, the political theorist Corey Robin argues that the end of the Cold War had proven unkind to the conservative movement by depriving it of a distinct enemy. For today’s GOP, a good adversary is hard to find—in the past few years, its leaders have grasped around haphazardly in search of one: trans people, Haitian immigrants, childless women. (And, as always, Hillary Clinton.) In Reagan, though, the world is much simpler: There’s an evil empire 5,000 miles away, and a California cowboy is the only man who can beat it. It’s a flat narrative fit for one of his old B movies.

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Photographs by Justin Chung

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity. During his first day on set, although he had only two lines, he asked Mike Judge, one of the show’s creators, whether his character should speak with a Mandarin accent or a Cantonese one. Judge was stumped. “I just said, ‘Oh, well, which one’s more natural to you?’ ” Judge told me. Yang, who’d grown up in Hong Kong, worried that a Cantonese accent was too generic; American viewers might recognize it from Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies. Because Mandarin is more standard for official and professional contexts, it can sound more formal, and Yang thought this made sense for an ambitious immigrant like Jian-Yang. Judge told me that he now doesn’t remember which accent Yang chose; “I was just glad he was paying that much attention,” he said.

The show’s writers expanded Yang’s role, and he eventually became a series regular, reshaping his character into a sly villain whose befuddled exterior disguises an inner ruthlessness. To deepen his performance, Yang developed a mantra, which he would say to himself in Mandarin before every take: “Wŏ bù zhī dào,” or “I don’t know.” He drew this mantra from his own experience dealing with his parents. “Even when I know something, and they’re like, ‘Why is Netflix not working?,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ ” He grinned at me conspiratorially. “Because I just don’t care to fix it.” That’s how Jian-Yang operates too, Yang said: “I think Jian-Yang knows; he just doesn’t really give a shit.”

And yet, for many viewers, none of this character work mattered. As Silicon Valley grew in popularity, Jian-Yang became the subject of scorn for some Asian viewers and critics, who called out the show’s writers for peddling a caricature of an Asian immigrant with heavily accented, error-prone English. In 2017, a Wired review called him an example of “toxic Asian stereotypes.”

Yang found these reactions exhausting. “It’s like, wow, this is such a big deal for me, and I’m becoming, back in those days, one of the few Asians on TV,” he told me. “But you’re all going to hate on me?” He felt a familiar anguish. The only roles offered to him were goofy sidekicks and background parts, but even when he tried to make characters like Jian-Yang as rounded and complicated as possible, he felt he couldn’t win. “I didn’t understand the beef against Asian accents,” he said. He gets why Asian Americans are sensitive to such portrayals, given Hollywood’s long history of stereotyping, but some of the criticism, he said, felt “a little overblown and a little dumb.” “There’s a constant foreigner bit,” he explained, referring to the industry’s tendency to exoticize Asian characters. “But I was a foreigner.”

Despite the controversy around the character, Jian-Yang ultimately launched Yang’s career. In 2018, the year before Silicon Valley ended its run, he appeared in the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, a box-office hit now considered a watershed moment for Asian cultural representation. This November, Yang is starring in Hulu’s Interior Chinatown, which feels like a different kind of milestone. Adapted from Charles Yu’s National Book Award–winning novel of the same name, the series tells the story of Willis Wu, a background actor on a generic police procedural set in an unnamed city’s Chinatown. For Yang, the role is more than a chance to be a leading man; it also uncannily mirrors his own life. Willis is stuck in small, clichéd parts, juggling Hollywood’s biases and his own ambition, trying to figure out who exactly he wants to be.

Top: Yang as Bernard in Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Bottom: As Jian-Yang in Silicon Valley (2019). (© Warner Bros. Pictures / Everett Collection; Ali Paige Goldstein / © HBO / Everett Collection)

When Yang first emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, at age 13, the move left him dazed. He was one of a handful of Chinese kids at his school, and he barely spoke English. “I was like, ‘Guys, you’re speaking way too fast; I can’t,’ ” he told me. After two years, his mother got a job in Shanghai and left the family behind to return to China, where she stayed for the next decade. Without her, Yang became even more adrift.

His father, meanwhile, embraced their new American life. He celebrated their arrival by buying a Pontiac Grand Am. “He thought it was so fucking cool because we always had, like, Honda Accords, in Hong Kong,” Yang told me. “Then he was like”—Yang launched into an impression of his dad, puffing out his chest, his voice going gravelly—“ ‘American six cylinder, baby! This is great!’ ”

Yang worked hard to assimilate to his new surroundings. In Hong Kong, he’d played competitive Ping-Pong and watched kung fu shows on TV. In Los Angeles, he became interested in basketball and football. He fell in love with American television—Bobby Lee on Mad TV, Ken Jeong on Live in Hollywood. He got into hip-hop and tried to build his identity around music, but still felt like he was faking it. “I wasn’t trying to not be Asian,” he said. “I was just trying to be either funnier or catch a football or something so I could fit in.”

Yang began creating what he now calls a “locker” in his mind, where he hid his former self away so he could “make space in my brain to remember American stuff.” He compartmentalized so successfully that he’s had “a weird memory lapse” about his pre-California childhood in Hong Kong.

When Yang arrived at UC San Diego in 2005, the school’s student body was 37 percent Asian, a higher percentage than any other ethnic group. After years of trying to fit in with his Los Angeles classmates, he found it disorienting to suddenly be one among many. “I’m like, I actually want to stand out,” he said. “I don’t want to be grouped in with all of the Asians.” He grew his hair long and started skateboarding and smoking weed, anything to avoid seeming like a stereotype. But he also worried about disappointing his parents, both of whom had practical jobs—his father was a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, and his mother worked in retail—so he pursued an economics degree and interned at a financial-consulting firm.

Then, one summer night before his last year of college, he paid $5 on a whim to do five minutes of stand-up at an open-mic night in North Hollywood. Onstage, he found that joking about his identity somehow alleviated the strain of feeling like an outsider. “They didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t ‘Jimmy’; I was just the next comedian up, this guy who looks Asian,” he said. “They didn’t come to see me, so it’s almost like I have to address, like, ‘Hey, yeah, I know I’m Asian. This is my experience.’ ”

Yang was more than willing to lean into stereotypes. His early stand-up included an impression of an Asian guy trying to hit on a girl: “Let me holler at you! Come back; I’ll do your nails for you,” he’d say in an exaggerated accent. In another bit, he joked about the lack of Asians on The Maury Povich Show. “You never see some dude walking down the steps of shame and being like, ‘Look, Maury, look. I got small eye; he got big eye. That not my baby, Maury.’ ”

Yang had a relaxed, good-natured stage presence. But these bits were, as he put it, “hacky Asian stuff.” He was happy to confirm audiences’ biases if it made them laugh. Around that time, he started using the handle @FunnyAsianDude for his social-media accounts.

To make a living, he worked as a used-car salesman during the day and as a strip-club DJ at night. The latter “combined the salesmanship I learned in the used-car lot with the microphone skills I’d learned doing stand-up,” he told Conan O’Brien years later. Yang turned down an offer for a cushy finance job, against his father’s wishes, in favor of pursuing open-mic nights. He also began auditioning for TV shows and movies, going out for pretty much any casting call that would have him, as he wrote in his 2018 memoir: “Loud Japanese host,” “Weird Korean Jogger guy,” “Video Game addict.”

“You don’t want to be in a box, but at the same time, when you’re first starting, it’s easy to just be like, ‘Hey, I’m an Asian actor. Call me if you need an Asian actor,’ ” he said. Even after landing his guest role on Silicon Valley, he put his earnings into a used car he could drive for Uber, to make a little more cash.

Then, months after he finished filming the first season, in 2014, HBO offered him a contract to be a series regular. When he got the call, he was killing time on the trolley that rolls through the Grove, an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles. He rode the trolley back and forth in disbelief, feeling like “the gate’s opened,” like he was finally a “real player now in this industry.” He called his dad, who said, in Yang’s words: “Oh, okay, so you have an employment contract with HBO, which is a company. Good. Thank God.”

In person, Yang is warm and easygoing, with an approachable air. One afternoon this summer, we met for lunch at a Thai restaurant in L.A. As soon as he sat down, a woman leaned over and stopped him mid-sentence. “Are you the famous guy?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said. She laughed and held up her phone for a selfie anyway.

Yang could have taken offense that the woman seemed to view him as just a vaguely familiar face; he wouldn’t have been the first Asian actor to be confused with another one. (In his 2020 comedy special on Amazon Prime, Good Deal, he joked about fans who approach him, looking anxious. Are you sure that’s not Ken Jeong? he imagines them wondering.) But when I brought up the incident the next time we met, over dim sum in Monterey Park, he laughed, unbothered. He’s accustomed to this particular kind of fame, to being “that guy I’ve seen before.” It’s a long way from where he started.

Since Yang began his career, in the early 2010s, opportunities for Asian actors have exploded—a surge that Yang attributes largely to the success of Crazy Rich Asians. In that movie, a young Chinese American woman goes to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s family, and is thrown into the high-flying milieu of Asia’s ultra-wealthy. As the playboy Bernard, Yang found a desperate streak beneath his character’s bravado. When the film became a global hit in 2018, it was hailed as proof that Asian-led projects could find commercial success in Hollywood. In 2020, the Korean movie Parasite swept the Oscars; in 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once, led by Yang’s Crazy Rich Asians co-star Michelle Yeoh, did the same. A study published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the percentage of Asian characters with speaking parts in the top-grossing films each year climbed from roughly 3 percent in 2007 to nearly 16 percent in 2022. Asians were the only minority group to see such a big increase in that period.

At the same time, more Asian writers and directors were getting the opportunity to create their own work, which gave rise to a range of Asian characters who are delightfully eccentric but also specific and human. Now there are far fewer roles like the Jian-Yang of early Silicon Valley, and more roles like, say, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s deranged, obsessive duo in Beef, the Emmy-winning drama about a road-rage incident that escalates into a murderous feud. As Jeong, who also appeared in Crazy Rich Asians and has become a close friend of Yang’s, put it to me: “There’s more diversity in our diversity now.”

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

This doesn’t mean that choosing roles was suddenly easy for actors like Yang. Not long after Crazy Rich Asians, he got sent a script for a movie about William Hung, who’d become an early viral sensation after an awkward 2004 American Idol audition during which he gyrated and sang Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” off-key. The writer wanted Yang to play Hung. It was a starring role in a potentially splashy biopic—but Yang turned it down. In June 2020, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he told Rogan that the script made him want to “fucking vomit”; Hung, he said, had “set us back 10 years.” In response, Hung posted a video addressed to Rogan and Yang. “I understand where you might be coming from, because you’re not the only person who believes that I portray Asian stereotypes,” Hung said. But, he added, “I believe everyone has a right to try something new without being judged or ridiculed.”

When I brought up his comments about Hung, Yang grimaced. His objection to the project, he told me, was not about Hung himself but rather about the way the script missed an opportunity to examine why he’d become famous and how his notoriety had affected the perception of Asian Americans, especially Asian men. “People made fun of him,” Yang said. “He was the butt of the joke, and every one of us was called ‘William Hung’ in high school for a couple years.” To Yang, the way American Idol portrayed Hung—how the show “threw him out there, and how America ganged up and laughed at him—that should be the story we’re telling.” Many Asian performers still find it hard to shake the fear that they’ll be turned into a punch line the way Hung was. “In hindsight,” Yang said of those 2020 comments, “I think that was my own frustration, my own insecurity.”

For Asian actors living through this cultural sea change, career choices can seem freighted with a new sense of responsibility and, occasionally, feelings of guilt. I spoke with Jeong about what is arguably his most well-known role, the Chinese gangster Mr. Chow in the 2009 comedy The Hangover. To Jeong, Mr. Chow was “puncturing the stereotype, because there are not a lot of stereotypes where, you know, an Asian man jumps out naked on Bradley Cooper’s shoulder and beats him up.” Still, some things about Mr. Chow now seem to give him pause, including his exaggerated accent. “I haven’t done an accent on live TV since,” he told me. “And there’s a reason for that.”

When I mentioned this to Yang, he shrugged and sighed. “Yeah, yeah, and that’s his battle,” he said. As much as Yang admires Jeong, his own view of what makes for “good” representation seems somewhat different. He doesn’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with an Asian character who has a thick accent, and he doesn’t think breaking down stereotypes requires playing a kind of character audiences have never seen before. He’d be interested in a role that seemed like an Asian cliché—say, a mathematician—if it surprised him. “Is there some more interesting angle about the man?” he said. “Or is it just super one-dimensional: ‘Here’s an Asian guy good at math’?” The question he asks himself about each character now is simple: “Is it human?”

Yang’s stand-up comedy has evolved, too. He still riffs on being Asian, but his material is more precise, and more personal. In his 2023 special for Amazon Prime, Guess How Much?, he jokes about the frugality of his mother, with whom he’s grown close again after their long separation. (She loves a bargain; he says her catchphrase is “Guess how much?”) He still plays with stereotypes, but now he has a knack for turning them on their head: Joking about the global rise of K-pop, he says, “I had a 15-year-old white kid come up to me, trying to explain the different members of BTS … I’m like, ‘Dude. They look the same to me.’ ”

Last year, Yang changed his Instagram handle from @FunnyAsianDude to just @jimmyoyang. “If I log on every day on Instagram, I see ‘Funny Asian Dude,’ I’m saying that to myself over and over again: I’m only the funny Asian,” he told me. “But I think I’m more than that. And I could be more.”

In Interior Chinatown, Willis lives in a crowded apartment complex and works as a waiter at a restaurant called the Golden Palace while dreaming of becoming a “Kung Fu Guy.” What Willis doesn’t fully understand is that he’s actually a background actor—otherwise known as a “Generic Asian Man”—in a procedural called Black & White, which is occasionally set in the Golden Palace. (The show within the show stars a Black male detective and a white female detective, who flirt and banter with unrelenting cop-show swagger.) Over time, Willis becomes entangled in the plot of Black & White, landing bigger and bigger roles, and gradually realizing that he’s been trapped inside a Hollywood stereotype all along.

The first episode opens with Willis witnessing an incident related to a crime that Black & White’s detectives are investigating. He starts to notice the strangeness of his circumstances and, with the help of a new-to-town cop, he searches for his long-lost brother, a Kung Fu Guy who may know more about what’s going on.

Yang as Willis in Interior Chinatown (2024) (Mike Taing / Disney)

Charles Yu’s novel is structured like a screenplay, with stage directions full of character descriptions and lyrical digressions. Yu, who is also an executive producer, told me that he wrote the book in part to untangle his anxieties about the way cultural depictions of Asian people have influenced his perception of himself. “Like, Is this face lovable? ” he said. “Do we deserve to be characters, let alone main characters?” He wanted the mechanics of Willis’s world to reflect Hollywood’s narrow logic about race.

The novel is so high-concept that adapting it for the screen was a gamble for Hulu. But the series cleverly uses the tools of television to render the layered realities of the book. The lights in the Golden Palace darken to indicate when Black & White is filming and Willis has entered that world. When Willis goes from being Interior Chinatown’s star to Black & White’s Generic Asian Man, the show challenges the audience to find him again, somewhere in the background of its shots.

And the book’s central metaphor has been made usefully concrete. On the day I visited the set of Interior Chinatown, Yang was filming a scene, invented for the show, that required him to repeatedly run into a pair of doors. The doors lead to the police precinct, the setting for Black & White’s highest-stakes subplots, where Generic Asian Men like Willis are not allowed. Willis is largely a dramatic role, but there are moments of physical comedy, and Yang was clearly having fun with this one. He improvised different takes: He tailgated a group of people, trying to sneak in behind them—blocked. He sidled up to the doors as if he could trick the inanimate wooden panels into staying ajar—blocked again. He took a running start, falling right before he reached the threshold.

When Yang first read the script for Interior Chinatown, he thought of all the ways in which he’d lived Willis Wu’s life. He’d looked for jobs as a background actor by calling Central Casting, the same agency that employs Willis; he’d even worked at a restaurant called Chop Suey in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. But Yang also thought that Interior Chinatown, with its self-awareness and depth, was a new kind of story.

He found a shirt that he’d worn in his 20s, when he still worked as a waiter, and smeared it with chili oil. He put on the scuffed-up Goodwill boots he’d worn back then, too. Then, in a hotel room, he auditioned for Willis over Zoom. In the scene Yang read, the reality-bending mechanics of Black & White are absent. Instead, Willis has a difficult conversation with his father, reluctantly admitting that he feels unmoored in life, and asking for advice, only to get stern replies.

At first, Yang had trouble evoking Willis’s emotions, and worried that he was forcing his tears. Then the episode’s director, Taika Waititi, stepped in. Waititi urged Yang to think about how Willis’s real motivation is to leave the conversation, but he stays out of some helpless instinct: to oblige his father, maybe, or because he’s holding on to the hope that he’ll hear what he wants to hear—that his father understands Willis’s angst. The note evoked a memory for Yang; as a teenager, he’d struggled to communicate his feelings to his father, because when he did, he found it hard to bottle those feelings back up again. “When I was younger,” he told me, “and I’d ask my dad about my mother—like, ‘Why did she move to Shanghai?’—I couldn’t help but start uncontrollably sobbing.”

Yang realized that Willis’s dynamic with his father was one he knew well: the push and pull between wanting to say everything and holding back, the emotional gulf that can stretch between an immigrant father and his more assimilated son. “I don’t know anyone who embodies better a bunch of the feelings and anxieties, and insecurities, that are part of why I wrote the book,” Yu told me of Yang.

If Yang’s relationship with his father was once more strained, lately that has changed. Richard Ouyang has been so encouraged by his son’s success that he recently started auditioning for roles himself. Ouyang told me that Yang now gives him professional advice: “Jimmy always asks me to be more serious about acting and take some classes,” Ouyang wrote by email. “Yet I think I am too old to learn any new tricks and prefer to be a Nepo Daddy!” In May, father and son did an ad for Toyota together, with Ouyang dryly complaining about his son’s driving skills as they navigate a snowy wilderness. “It was so cute—he was so stoked,” Yang said of his father. “He posted it all over his Chinese social media.”

Yang has also reconnected with the younger self he’d placed inside that mental locker back in 2000. His childhood comes rushing back at certain moments: when he smells stuffed fish cakes like the ones he used to eat with his mother at the shop near their Hong Kong apartment; when he’s speaking Cantonese; and, sometimes, when he performs. Playing Willis helped him rediscover, he said, “stuff that I’ve taken for granted, that I’ve forgotten”—the memories of who he was before.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Against Type.”

Editor’s note: This search tool is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the OpenSubtitles data set. You can read more about this data set and how it’s been used to train AI here. Find The Atlantic's search tool for books used to train AI here.

Editor’s note: This analysis is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the OpenSubtitles data set. You can access the search tool directly here. Find The Atlantic's search tool for books used to train AI here.

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: These 183,000 books are fueling the biggest fight in publishing and tech]

The files within this data set are not scripts, exactly. Rather, they are subtitles taken from a website called OpenSubtitles.org. Users of the site typically extract subtitles from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and internet streams using optical-character-recognition (OCR) software. Then they upload the results to OpenSubtitles.org, which now hosts more than 9 million subtitle files in more than 100 languages and dialects. Though this may seem like a strange source for AI-training data, subtitles are valuable because they’re a raw form of written dialogue. 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. Well-written speech is a rare commodity in the world of AI-training data, and it may be especially valuable for training chatbots to “speak” naturally.

According to research papers, the subtitles have been used by Anthropic to train its ChatGPT competitor, Claude; by Meta to train a family of LLMs called Open Pre-trained Transformer (OPT); by Apple to train a family of LLMs that can run on iPhones; and by Nvidia to train a family of NeMo Megatron LLMs. It has also been used by Salesforce, Bloomberg, EleutherAI, Databricks, Cerebras, and various other AI developers to build at least 140 open-source models distributed on the AI-development hub Hugging Face. Many of these models could potentially be used to compete with human writers, and they’re built without permission from those writers.

When I reached out to Anthropic for this article, the company did not provide a comment on the record. When I’ve previously spoken with Anthropic about its use of this data set, a spokesperson told me the company had “trained our generative-AI assistant Claude on the public dataset The Pile,” of which OpenSubtitles is a part, and “which is commonly used in the industry.” A Salesforce spokesperson told me that although the company has used OpenSubtitles in generative-AI development, the data set “was never used to inform or enhance any of Salesforce’s product offerings.” Apple similarly told me that its small LLM was intended only for research. However, both Salesforce and Apple, like other AI developers, have made their models available for developers to use in any number of different contexts. All other companies mentioned in this article—Nvidia, Bloomberg, EleutherAI, Databricks, and Cerebras—either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

You may search through the data set using the tool below.

Two years after the release of ChatGPT, it may not be surprising that creative work is used without permission to power AI products. Yet the notion remains disturbing to many artists and professionals who feel that their craft and livelihoods are threatened by programs. Transparency is generally low: Tech companies tend not to advertise whose work they use to train their products. The legality of training on copyrighted work also remains an open question. Numerous lawsuits have been brought against tech companies by writers, actors, artists, and publishers alleging that their copyrights have been violated in the AI-training process: As Breaking Bad’s creator, Vince Gilligan, wrote to the U.S. Copyright Office last year, generative AI amounts to “an extraordinarily complex and energy-intensive form of plagiarism.” Tech companies have argued that training AI systems on copyrighted work is “fair use,” but a court has yet to rule on this claim. In the language of copyright law, subtitles are likely considered derivative works, and a court would generally see them as protected by the same rules against copying and distribution as the movies they’re taken from. The OpenSubtitles data set has circulated among AI developers since 2020. It is part of the Pile, a collection of data sets for training generative AI. The Pile also includes text from books, patent applications, online discussions, philosophical papers, YouTube-video subtitles, and more. It’s an easy way for companies to start building AI systems without having to find and download the many gigabytes of high-quality text that LLMs require.

[Read: Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old law]

OpenSubtitles can be downloaded by anyone who knows where to look, but as with most AI-training data sets, it’s not easy to understand what’s in it. It’s a 14-gigabyte text file with short lines of unattributed dialogue—meaning the speaker is not identified. There’s no way to tell where one movie ends and the next begins, let alone what the movies are. I downloaded a “raw” version of the data set, in which the movies and episodes were separated into 446,612 files and stored in folders whose names corresponded to the ID numbers of movies and episodes listed on IMDb.com. Most folders contained multiple subtitle versions of the same movie or TV show (different releases may be tweaked in various ways), but I was able to identify at least 139,000 unique movies and episodes. I downloaded metadata associated with each title from the OpenSubtitles.org website—allowing me to map actors and directors to each title, for instance—and used it to build the tool above.

The OpenSubtitles data set adds yet another wrinkle to a complex narrative around AI, in which consent from artists and even the basic premise of the technology are points of contention. Until very recently, no writer putting pen to paper on a script would have thought their creative work might be used to train programs that could replace them. And the subtitles themselves were not originally intended for this purpose, either. The multilingual OpenSubtitles data set contained subtitles in 62 different languages and 1,782 language-pair combinations: It is meant for training the models behind apps such as Google Translate and DeepL, which can be used to translate websites, street signs in a foreign country, or an entire novel. Jörg Tiedemann, one of the data set’s creators, wrote in an email that he was happy to see OpenSubtitles being used in LLM development, too, even though that was not his original intention.

He is, in any case, powerless to stop it. The subtitles are on the internet, and there’s no telling how many independent generative-AI programs they’ve been used for, or how much synthetic writing those programs have produced. But now, at least, we know a bit more about who is caught in the machinery. What will the world decide they are owed?

"It's very disheartening to see women tear other women down," the Anyone But You star says.

The Hollywood actor says he was bullied as a child in Wales because of his religion and sexuality.

Writers are great gossips. Get one or three of us alone at a party; add a few gin or whiskey drinks. Ask a question about somebody’s professor from grad school, or about that (married) handsome writer who slept with that other (married) writer at a conference. Lord help the authors whose group texts get subpoenaed and then printed for the world to see.

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two monolithic California writers who died within days of each other in December 2021, were prolific generators and subjects of literary gossip. Didion, the essayist who anatomized and often eviscerated the ’60s, was successful and venerated for most of her career; Babitz, who captured everything sordid and beautiful about Los Angeles, had a more troubled life and career, followed by a late surge of popularity as a misunderstood genius.

Opposites at first glance, they were also connected in many ways. Both were bolstered and weighed down in equal parts by their status as persona, image, idea. The photographer Julian Wasser turned both into literal icons—Didion leaning on her Daytona-yellow 1969 Corvette Stingray, Babitz playing chess in the nude with a fully clothed Marcel Duchamp. Decades later, both women’s books are the sort that people post on Instagram and TikTok to prove something ineffable and particular about themselves.

Lili Anolik’s new book, Didion and Babitz, a dishy gloss on the pair, purports to be interested in pushing past persona and performance to find the truth, the humans underneath. It opens with a quote from Babitz, who wrote that gossip has “always been regarded as some devious woman’s trick,” and yet “how are people like me—women they’re called—supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the V.I.P. room?” Anolik, like Babitz, is out to redeem the disreputable practice.

She doesn’t come to the story in a disinterested way. While working on a biography of Babitz, Anolik became close with the writer, and she remains in touch with Babitz’s sister and friends. There’s something endearing about the power of Anolik’s love for the author, but something dispiritingly deflating about this latest homage to her. Babitz’s work, for all its frisson and humor, also feels particular, alive. Anolik, by contrast, gets trapped on the flat surfaces. As much as the book seems earnestly set on redefining both of these women, the truth it captures more than any other is how quickly wit can slip into caricature, fun and fizzy gossip into cruelty.

The catalyst for the book, the reason for its existence, is this: Babitz was infamously messy. Lovers complained of cat hair in their meals; trash, tissues, and rotting food littered her floor. Anolik recalls the smell being so intense that she would have to leave and walk around the block when she visited. After Babitz was moved into an assisted-living facility, her sister, Mirandi, was left to manage the cleanup. On New Year’s Day 2021, Mirandi FaceTimed Anolik to report a surprising discovery in the back of a closet: a box that held more insight into Babitz’s relationships than either of them had known. Anolik was able to dive in after Babitz’s death. The anecdote itself feels like the perfect material for a book: Shouldn’t we all be rummaging around in the messy closets of the mysterious dead, looking for one last remnant that might reveal a hidden truth?

Within the box were letters, including a single one from Babitz to Didion, which Babitz almost certainly never sent. As was already publicly known, Didion had helped Babitz get her first story published in Rolling Stone magazine and worked with her on her first book, Eve’s Hollywood. That is, until, as Babitz told friends, I fired her. In the acknowledgements, Babitz thanked Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, “for having to be everything I’m not.”

[Read: The “L.A. woman” reveals herself]

The letter is a more detailed snapshot of the women’s relationship. It begins: “Dear Joan.” (“That Joan, the Joan,” Anolik comments—one of many interjections.) “Just think Joan,” writes Babitz, “if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work, they’d invent reasons … could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” The letter is deeply charming and also a little bit combative. It’s impossible to read it and not want to know more about how and when and why these women overlapped.

At first, Didion and Babitz suggests loose connections. Like Eve (and most other writers), Joan had a rocky beginning; 12 publishers rejected her first novel. The one who finally said yes did so, in part, because of the help of an older man, Noel Parmentel Jr., with whom Joan was in love—only to be spurned. Also like Eve, Joan had her heart broken. But then Joan got married early. Eve never did. Parmentel told Anolik he’d advised Didion to marry Dunne and thereby “invented Joan Didion.”

Soon enough, Eve and Joan’s timelines converged. Didion and Dunne moved out to Hollywood; Babitz started coming to their house on Franklin Avenue. Yet just as she begins to show how their lives intersected, Anolik starts to lean into all that divides them. For instance, she muses on the rock legend they had in common (one as subject, the other as lover): “The difference between their perceptions of [Jim] Morrison is the difference, I think, between their roles on the scene: Joan an observer of it; Eve a participant in it. Or perhaps it’s the difference between being a starfucker, which Joan and Dunne emphatically were … and one who fucks stars.”

From here, the binaries metastasize: Didion was volatilely thin; Babitz loved to eat (one chapter is titled “Eve Bah-bitz with the Great Big Tits”). Didion cooked and cleaned; had the kid, the house, and the husband. Babitz never did. Didion knew how to play the career game; Babitz mostly either failed at it or had no interest. At the same time, Anolik’s tone, especially with regard to Didion, begins to shift. She asks, “Was the moment Eve realized she’d lost to Joan the same moment she realized that she and Joan had been in a competition all along?”

As Anolik progresses through the thickets of their lives, she treats Babitz to warm stories and close readings (if sometimes dismissively) but begins to take hits at Didion (often parenthetically). She side-eyes a friend of Didion’s giving her a rave in The New York Times: “Confirmation of Joan and Dunne’s sly careerism.” When the couple moved to a cliff-top home in bourgeois-bohemian Malibu, they “abided by mainstream values,” much to the ire of Babitz. Of that shot in front of the Corvette, Anolik says (in parentheses): “How could Joan be sexual?” More often than not, Didion is collateral damage in the war to lionize Babitz, her self-sabotaging, sexy alleged frenemy.

Every time Anolik noses her way toward parallels between Didion and Babitz, she veers away, doubling down instead on the split between them.

One major missed opportunity traces back to that unsent letter. It was a response to Didion’s openly expressed disdain for the women’s movement. Anolik acknowledges Babitz’s own ambivalence—“Feminism offended her sense of style: it had no style.” Both women attempted to gain and keep power in a male-dominated field, and yet neither was quick to ally herself with any ideologically self-defined group. Both used their strengths, performed their public personas—Joan with her steely reserve, Eve with her froth and sex—to attain whatever status they could in a literary world built mostly to slap them down. But Anolik does not linger on these complications, nor on how necessary it might have felt to each woman to be perceived on her own terms.

When it comes to Didion, Anolik’s gossip is tinged with judgment. She writes that “there were people who believed” that Dunne was bisexual; that he spent a year living in Las Vegas without Didion, leaving her alone with their young daughter, Quintana (this is well-trod territory that Dunne wrote a book about); that Dunne once grew so angry that Didion begged a friend not to leave her alone with him. And yet, Anolik writes, “by the eighties, Joan would be telling the New York Times that she and Dunne were ‘terrifically, terribly dependent on one another.’” Anolik calls this “a statement that warms the heart. Or chills the blood.” Or, just maybe, both sentiments, many others, can be true at the same time.

Babitz also dated many complicated men, but those relationships are described in less reductive ways: Some were married, some she took money from. She and the prominent magazine journalist Dan Wakefield dated for a year, but he claimed to have been certain he wouldn’t survive a second. “My God, the decadence!” is how he described the relationship to Anolik years later. Babitz gets to be knotted, yearning, complicated—as well she should. Didion stays a “cool customer”—as she called herself with notable irony in a memoir—and not much else.

One of the dangers of anecdotes, the raw material of gossip, is how easily stories can be weaponized. Almost always in Didion and Babitz, the Babitz tales grow and richen, and Didion tidbits are dropped as damning evidence.

Following Anolik’s lead, I’d like to present one of her passed-along anecdotes as evidence of something else: the all-too-common impulse to pit one woman against another, and, in doing so, to reduce her to her least attractive parts. While writing the book, Anolik received a short email from the writer David Thomson, a friend of the Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta. He told her that Didion had called Mehta the day after she’d sent him the manuscript of The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about her husband’s death and her daughter’s grave illness, and asked, “Will it be a best seller?”

[Read: Joan Didion’s magic trick]

Anolik’s interpretation: “Thomson’s story shows what Didion was willing to do for the sake of her writing (anything) and what it cost her in a human sense (everything). When I said earlier that she’d crawl over corpses to get where she had to go, I was, it turns out, speaking literally. The Year of Magical Thinking is her crawling over the corpse of Dunne, crying all the while, but still crawling, still getting where she had to go.” Later, Anolik writes of the best seller in question: “I reject its fundamental narcissism. (It purports to be about Dunne, is really about Joan.) I reject, too, its fundamental dishonesty. (I believe Joan feels grief at Dunne’s passing, but not only grief. To be alone was for her, I suspect, a kind of fulfillment.”

My turn: No one literally climbed over a corpse. Nor did anyone do it figuratively. To believe that presupposes not only that literary ambition forestalls any other desires, but that Didion’s single question in the course of a professional conversation expresses her complete feelings about her work. This is the fundamentally reductive power of gossip. What if, instead, Anolik had asked other people about this time? What if, instead, she’d considered how and why work might have felt like mercy, a suture in that wound of a year?

I felt squirrely, queasy, writing this essay. I kept thinking: What has the world done to us, and particularly to women, to make us so quick to make such blanket statements, to make us think that only a single type of woman writer might have a right to make it out intact? But then, of course, I knew.

Like most writers, and most women I know, I love gossip. Sometimes, when I’m out with friends, I lose hold of myself. My words flatten. It feels intoxicating—and later it feels sickening. Gossip is narrow-minded, sloppy; it reifies the teller’s already established sense of what the world is; it gives us power and control; it makes us feel safe in a culture that often makes us feel the opposite. Almost all of the best writing follows an antithetical impulse: to let go of that control, to find and put down stakes in spaces of not knowing, to reach inside those hidden boxes and get as close to the chaos as we can bear.

Babitz didn’t just fuck the star; she wrote about him too. Anolik admires her article about Jim Morrison: “What gives that piece its peculiar power is that you can see Eve changing her mind about Morrison on the page. The tenderness she feels for him sneaks up on you as you read it, as I suspect it did on her as she wrote it.” This is the feeling I waited for in this book, but Anolik never lets either woman surprise her. She pulled that letter out of that sealed box only to stuff these brilliant women, especially Didion, back into the places they already occupied.

Didion said all writing is by nature an act of bullying: “It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way.” The job is then to mitigate the bullying, to turn the language in as many different directions—middle, under, over, opposite—as a writer can. There are enough gestures in Didion and Babitz to suggest that its more savage slights weren’t quite intentional. When we start talking and talking, our words can feel accidental, out of our control. But it’s necessary to name the ways that language can harm, distort, debase—and then try and try again toward something more.

When Donald Trump seemed poised to win the presidential election in 2016, Trevor Noah, then the host of The Daily Show, began the program’s live night-of special on a somber note. “It feels like the end of the world,” he said to a silent audience. “I’m not going to lie. I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight, because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants.”

On Tuesday night, Noah’s predecessor, Jon Stewart, returned to anchor the same live presidential election-night special for the first time since 2012, and Stewart’s mood was noticeably lighter than Noah’s. Stewart didn’t make any apocalyptic declarations; instead, he seemed desperate to make his studio audience laugh—“We are obviously digging through the results to find some that you like!”—without reminding them too much of the election’s likely outcome, which had begun to clarify when the hour began. Stewart may have built his reputation as an acerbic comedic truth-teller, but on Tuesday night, he seemed subdued, more interested in soothing his viewers than in delivering biting assessments of the returns.

The overall approach felt oddly inert, perhaps a sign of how confusing the world of political comedy has become. That’s in part because comedians came to play a substantial role in Trump’s third presidential campaign. Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, went on a tour of podcasts hosted by comics who appeal to young male voters, including Tim Dillon, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan. Trump’s team also invited the comic (and another podcaster) Tony Hinchcliffe to take the stage at a rally last month at Madison Square Garden, where he made disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans that received the kind of backlash many pundits called this year’s “October surprise.”

Forget attaining celebrity endorsements from pop stars and Hollywood’s A-list talent, in other words. Both Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, seemed to recognize the need for unconventional forms of outreach, but the Trump campaign in particular eschewed traditional journalists in favor of provocative comics and hosts who would provide friendly platforms for the former president. “A survey of many hours of conversations between these comedians and Trump mostly reveals slavish affection,” observed The New York Times of Trump’s podcast appearances, “and even a certain kinship … Trump and his hosts share a disdain of news media, a reflexive paranoia about so-called cancel culture, a delight in transgression and a love of cruel insult jokes.”

[Read: Why democrats are losing the culture war]

That shift toward comedians as sources of ideological validation has left established satirists such as Stewart in an odd position. Though Stewart has enjoyed plenty of success this election year—his return as the Monday-night anchor for The Daily Show helped reverse the viewership decline that happened during Noah’s stewardship, and his contract was recently extended through 2025—he continues to face an uphill battle in maintaining his impact.

As the face of a long-running television program, Stewart is constrained by ratings concerns and runtime logistics, but he’s also committed to performing a routine that’s barely changed over the years: an opening monologue, followed by correspondent-led segments, a guest interview, and a “moment of zen.” The new cohort of podcasters may also care about audience engagement, but they’re nimbler with their content—and they’re becoming more influential as a result. Stewart’s chosen platform for his comic punditry isn’t the dominant approach for political comedy anymore. (Several of The Daily Show’s offshoots, such as Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show, and Jordan Klepper’s The Opposition, failed to last, and on Tuesday, The Daily Show was the only late-night show to air a live special.)

Yet Stewart has seemed reluctant to adjust his strategy—or to criticize the actions of some of his peers. Note how he responded to Hinchcliffe’s set at the Trump rally: On an episode of The Daily Show, he praised Hinchcliffe as “very funny” and defended him against the negative news coverage of his set. In some ways, Stewart did what he’s often done: take aim at the larger institution of the media rather than a fellow comic. But by sidestepping the opportunity to scrutinize the growth of the comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline, he avoided examining his own role as a purveyor of political humor.

Other comedians have been more willing to consider their field’s shifting responsibility. In a Substack post, the ex–Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac chided his former boss for his reaction to Hinchcliffe. “For Jon, it seems like comedians should be free to say whatever they want, wherever they want,” Cenac wrote. “And he seems more willing to defend the idea that the circumstances surrounding their jokes are irrelevant as long as people laugh.” Those “circumstances”—taking stages at rallies rather than clubs, offering their podcasts as prominent campaign stops—have also caught the attention of Marc Maron, one of the most prominent podcast-hosting comedians. Maron posted a statement to his website a week before the election criticizing contemporaries he believed had become mouthpieces for misinformation and casual bigotry. “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote. “Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant … When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism.”

[Read: What happened to Jon Stewart?]

Maron’s comments double as a demand that his fellow performers recognize the stakes of participating in this political moment. But the comedy world’s response to those stakes has run the gamut. Perhaps some of the podcasters he’s calling out want to wield actual power to sway voters—and therefore, like the powerful leaders they’re catering to, build a dedicated fan base of their own. Other comics, like the team behind Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” may see their role as entertainers meant mostly to gesture at the issues driving headlines. After this latest election cycle, the one thing that seems clear is that political comedy—the point of practicing it, the changing flavor of its influence—is growing ever muddier.

For Tuesday night’s live show, meanwhile, Stewart opted to provide mostly distraction. His punch lines were as soft as his analysis of election results, struggling to dispel the undercurrent of unease. That’s not entirely Stewart’s fault: His audience seemed tense from the start, and the show faced some unexpected developments, including announced guest Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania canceling at the last minute, forcing Stewart to improvise and fill the extra time. Only at the end of the hour did Stewart fully embrace his own distress at the election returns, putting his head in his hands as he delivered a closing statement. “Look,” he began, before groaning and stumbling over his words. “What we know is that we really don’t know anything … I just want to point out, just as a matter of perspective, that the lessons that our pundits take away from these results, that they will pronounce with certainty, will be wrong. And we have to remember that.”

The plainspoken commentary was a refreshing moment that cut through the preceding aimlessness—but it also revealed a truth about the comedic genre’s stalwarts, like Stewart. Americans look to voices such as his in anxious moments; it’s why SNL has booked the typically no-holds-barred stand-up Bill Burr to host its postelection show this weekend. Yet Stewart has never claimed to be anything more than a performer, even when he was deemed the “most trusted man in America” during his initial run hosting The Daily Show. As he pointed out, none of us knows anything—perhaps, least of all, the comics who are tasked much too often with making sense of the nation’s chaos.