The Trump administration has granted preliminary approval for a cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump’s family to operate a federally chartered trust bank, over the protests of Democrats who decried the decision as riddled with conflicts of interest.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank regulatory arm of the Treasury Department, said in a letter on Friday that it was conditionally approving World Liberty Trust Co.’s application for a trust bank charter. The company must still meet additional requirements before it receives final approval, the regulator said.

The decision stands to give new powers and federal credibility to a venture in which Trump and his family retain a substantial financial interest. It’s also among the most direct official actions that the administration has taken involving the president’s private finances.

World Liberty Trust Co. President and Chairman Zach Witkoff said the charter will allow the company to manage its USD1 stablecoin, a crypto token whose value is pegged to $1, under the OCC’s watch.

“USD1 grew because institutions trust how it operates, and confidence at enterprise scale deserves the backing of federal supervision,” Witkoff, the son of Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said in a statement. “We welcome continuous scrutiny from Federal regulators for many years to come.”

While Washington has been in knots over the steady drumbeat of news that Trump-linked businesses are expanding during his second term, the World Liberty application stood out to many.

Some Democrats and ethics watchdogs argued that the bid was one of the clearest examples of the conflicts of interest that administration officials face as they weigh the wishes of Trump family-backed companies. And they were quick to bash the OCC’s approval.

“This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen — and Congress cannot allow it to stand,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Warren and other Democrats unveiled legislation on Friday that would prohibit regulators from approving banks that are owned or controlled by the president or the president’s family, vice president, members of Congress or other top government officials.

A Democratic Senate aide said the Banking Committee would likely probe the OCC’s approval of the World Liberty bank charter next year if Democrats regain control of Congress.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington CEO Donald Sherman called the OCC’s approval “the most egregious example to date of the President’s businesses profiting from his government job.”

“The President continues to boost the crypto market at the expense of everyday Americans who are wondering what happened to the money in their own bank accounts,” he said.

World Liberty, in advance of the approval, had rejected the conflict allegations — saying Trump is not involved in managing the company and that none of its leaders or employees work for the federal government. The White House has similarly said Trump has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his official responsibilities.

Trump and his family nevertheless retain a substantial financial stake in World Liberty Financial. DT Marks DEFI LLC, an entity affiliated with Trump and members of his family, owns about 38 percent of the holding company that controls World Liberty Financial, according to the company’s website. The entity and Trump family members also hold 22.5 billion of World Liberty’s governance tokens.

Trump disclosed nearly $600 million in income from World Liberty token and equity sales in 2025, a major piece of the $1.4 billion of crypto-related earnings he raked in. He has said he does not manage his financial interests, which are overseen by his children.

The approval doesn’t allow World Liberty to open a traditional bank, but rather a national trust bank — a limited-purpose institution that would not make loans or accept federally insured deposits. It’s the latest in a string of such approvals for crypto firms under Trump’s OCC. Others who have received similar green lights include Circle, Ripple and Coinbase.

The charter still provides significant legal and financial advantages. It’ll allow World Liberty to issue and redeem its USD1 stablecoin directly, manage the reserves backing it and offer digital asset custody services without relying on an intermediary. The company could also operate across state lines more easily without having to answer to individual state regulators.

Federal supervision could also bolster World Liberty’s credibility with customers and investors and help expand the use of USD1.

“This is not World Liberty trying to become Chase or Bank of America. This is World Liberty trying to become like Circle,” the crypto giant, said Austin Campbell, a crypto adviser and professor at New York University. The newly acquired charter, Campbell added, “is a regulatory wrapper to be able to hold these things in the way required under U.S. law to do business with both retail and the big boys.”

The decision to approve World Liberty Trust Co. had put Comptroller Jonathan Gould, a Trump appointee, in the extraordinary position of deciding whether to grant federal banking privileges to a business tied to the president’s family.

Gould had rejected calls to pause the review or recuse himself. And he declined a request by Democrats to share the full, unredacted application submitted by World Liberty. “We process applications in a fair and evenhanded manner,” he told lawmakers in February.

Stephen Lybarger, the top OCC official overseeing bank chartering and a longtime career official of the agency, wrote in the approval letter on Friday that the agency followed “established policies and procedures” in evaluating World Liberty’s application.

“The Comptroller and staff acted consistently with their statutory duties and ethical obligations with respect to the Application,” Lybarger wrote. “Career OCC staff reviewed the application for consistency with the statutory, regulatory, and policy requirements and factors for approval of a de novo application.”

The OCC declined to comment further. The agency consulted with career government ethics officials as it evaluated the World Liberty application, according to a person familiar with the process.

Seven years ago today, Jeffrey Epstein was found hanging in a Manhattan jail, and the usual reactions to a sudden, violent death were reversed.

It was the people who abhorred the convicted sex offender — his victims and all who sympathized with them — who were stricken with sadness and anger. Now, they feared, the full truth about this man and his odious life would never come out.

It was Epstein’s friends and far-reaching galaxy of influential associates who surely allowed themselves a quiet moment of relief back in 2019. Now, they had reason to hope, the full truth about this man and his odious life would never come out.

The anniversary of Epstein’s demise is occasion to note two paradoxes that have emerged over those seven years — and most vividly in recent months, as it has become clear Epstein was a more consequential figure, and more emblematic of a sordid age, even than we knew at the time. Both paradoxes come courtesy, however grudgingly or unintentionally, of Epstein’s one-time friend, President Donald Trump.

The first is the surprising degree to which the truth did indeed come out, and answers were not left hanging with Epstein in Cell 220 on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Yes, there are important matters of detail that remain clouded by mystery. These include the precise details of how Epstein killed himself, in a supposedly secure facility, according to the official medical examiner’s conclusion (which some still doubt), as well as a full illumination of his relationship with Trump and why it apparently dissolved early in the 2000s. Many of the survivors of Epstein’s crimes also remain distraught and hungry for more answers.

But the nature of Epstein’s monstrously manipulative character, and the ease with which he ensnared some of the planet’s wealthiest and in many cases most accomplished people is now commonly understood — in a way that it almost certainly would not be if he had lived. Perhaps he would have reached a settlement with prosecutors, or gone to trial under rules of evidence focused narrowly on a few crimes rather than receiving scrutiny over the broad contours of his life. Any Epstein associates who exhaled in gratitude at his passing in 2019 had it exactly wrong — the ruin of reputations caused by this scandal was only beginning.

That we know the back-scratching and bawdy badinage, with cringe-inducing specificity, that was the essence of how Epstein nurtured his elite relationships is a gift to posterity. It comes of course because of the documentary goldmine of his massive trove of emails. These were released under an act of Congress, largely because important voices in the MAGA movement, later joined by Democrats, defied Trump’s reluctance and insisted they be released.

That gift to posterity as it happens, was central to the second paradox of the Epstein anniversary — and it is an uncomfortable one. At the time, his death looked like a cowardly end to a despicable life of con artistry and sexual predation that could mercifully soon be forgotten. Cowardly and despicable remain true. “Soon be forgotten” is not happening. Epstein’s life, it seems probable, will be known and studied and written about 100 years from now. He’s dead, but the narcissist in Epstein might perversely appreciate that his historical persona will outlive all but a few of his contemporaries’.

The primary reason is because his web of relationships, we now know, is deeply revealing of how an age that produced vast power and wealth became unhinged, at least in some elite precincts, from self-restraint, judgment, or simple decency.

Not everyone whose reputation was besmirched by disclosure of their Epstein interactions was an intimate of his, or necessarily knew the details of his criminal procurement and exploitation of underage girls. But in most instances that have come to light they knew of his reputation as a lothario who, as Trump said in 2002, liked women “on the younger side.” Just like Trump, many of them concluded this contributed, rather than detracted, from an appraisal that he was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” Likely in nearly every case these people were attracted to Epstein because of his wealth, his access to others with wealth, his airplanes and his island, and his self-fashioned aura as an intellectual savant who used his bespoke brain to make money in ways that ordinary mortals couldn’t understand.

If someone early in the 22nd century is curious about what the top levels of American life were like early in the 21st century, it will be hard to avert their gaze from someone whose career intersected in ways that echoed damagingly with two presidents (Trump and Clinton); royalty (the former Prince Andrew); the foremost technologist of the 20th century and the foremost philanthropist of the 21st (Bill Gates); a one-time prince of Wall Street (Jes Staley of JPMorgan Chase and later CEO of Barclays in the United Kingdom); a star of academia and government (former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers), and a long roster of the wealthiest people in the world (such as Epstein confidant Leon Black, the private-equity titan) as well as some of its most prominent intellectuals (like linguist Noam Chomsky, Nobel laureate and molecular biologist Richard Axel, and computer scientist and Unabomber victim David Gelernter).

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Weaknesses of the flesh, the bottle, and the purse are not a recent phenomenon. Nor will people studying this era a century from now be startled to learn that lust and greed can lure people to bad places. But there are three distinct signatures of the Epstein scandal that will surely cause them to wonder: What were those friends and associates of Epstein thinking?

A notable feature of Epstein emails is the intense hunger for connection revealed by many of the people caught up in the scandal. Recall that almost all of the famous examples involve people who already had amassed large achievements and presumably had lots of friends who did not have previous sex-crime convictions (as Epstein did from 2008 onward.) But they were hypnotized by Epstein’s flame even so.

Jes Staley, who traded emails with Epstein filled with suggestive references to women using Disney characters (“Say hi to Snow White”), in 2009 opened himself up to the man who would later destroy his career: “I owe you much. I appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound.” Summers was seeking dating advice from Epstein (Summers wanted to know what to do about a woman who was treating him as a “friend without benefits”) just before Epstein was arrested again in 2019. You might suppose that one benefit of being Bill Gates is that you would no longer be thirsty for anything. But that’s not the case. In 2011, he emailed a colleague about Epstein: “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.” It definitely didn’t work for Melinda French Gates, who reportedly dissolved their marriage in part because of disgust with her husband’s intersection with the Epstein scandal.

Another signature of the Epstein files merits a nod to Hannah Arendt: the banality of creepishness. The notorious collection of tributes assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday is a good example. These purported friends and high achievers toasted Epstein with page after page of double-entendres and chortling sexual references of the sort early adolescents might scribble in a middle-school yearbook. There was the apparent drawing from Trump (he denies it) of a naked woman with his name signed where pubic hair would be. Notably, at mid-life, there were not notes from people recalling the time they helped each other through the illness of a parent, or even the time they stayed up til 3 a.m. talking about politics and sports at an all-night diner. This is life at the top? The superficiality of Epstein and his horny, rich friends was a revelation.

One more reality unveiled by the Epstein files is arguably (without overdoing it) more appealing: The remarkable social fluidity reflected in the modern elite. In an earlier era, inherited social class was a powerful force — facilitating the careers of people to the manner born, but an infuriating limitation for many other talented people. Epstein’s circle included privileged kids like Staley, whose father was a CEO and who went to Bowdoin before Wall Street. But it also included Epstein’s most important patron, Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retail investor, who grew up as a middle-class son of a Russian immigrant and went to Ohio State. Epstein himself grew up near Coney Island and dropped out of college. It turns out modern social mores — which reward networking, scene-making and showy displays of wealth no matter whether new or old — are a more potent force than the previous generation’s old-chum country club culture. This was a phenomenon that had already been established earlier this century by the Bernie Madoff scandal.

What is true in 2026 that was not true in 2019 is that Jeffrey Epstein’s name is going to live in national memory for as long as people are curious about the Trump era. Those emails will find an audience for decades to come.

A Circle K shopper posted a screenshot of an AI self-checkout screen that listed a few flavors of Gatorade at a few dollars apiece, then a line item of $8.5 billion for the American Red Cross, according to the New York Post. — Read the rest

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President Donald Trump on Saturday abruptly called off the “biggest attacks since World War II” against Iran in favor of negotiations, the latest in a seemingly endless series of whiplashes in the conflict.

The energy markets, which typically favor stability and predictability, responded with little more than a shrug.

Crude prices dipped slightly and gas prices remained steady. Even as the war stretches past the six-month mark and the midterms creep closer, Trump has been able to keep retail prices lower than experts say they should be through the sheer power of promises – which have yet to come through – of a swift end to the conflict. On Monday, he took that a step further, chastising the major oil companies for “making too much money” off global oil shortages as a result of the war.

“They better cut the retail price, the consumer price,” Trump said. “I’ll say it loud and clear. I’m not happy about it.”

But Trump’s ability to jawbone the markets may be diminishing at a critical time, three months before the midterm elections when control of Congress is hanging in the balance and his approval is sinking to new lows amid voter anger over cost of living concerns. It comes as global crude oil supplies are running low, the war threatens more energy flows, refiners are running out of spare capacity and the administration has few tools to keep gas prices low.

“Labor Day is the point where gas prices are baked into the election,” said Republican pollster Frank Luntz. “That last summer trip determines how voters evaluate their cost of living.”

And the higher gas prices come at a time when Trump repeatedly promises to escalate the war and then says it’s almost over a few hours or days later. That is starting to degrade his ability to cause price drops, a former adviser cautioned.

“His credibility has been a little bit shot,” said a former Trump adviser close to the White House, granted anonymity to avoid reprisal.

“The markets aren’t paying attention to him, they’re paying attention to what’s happening and, with respect to oil prices, it is a huge liability for the Republicans,” the adviser said.

Trump on Monday acknowledged that dynamic but expressed no urgency. He told reporters in the Oval Office that he was in no rush to end the conflict, though he acknowledged the need to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of global energy supplies flowed before the war. He hinted at the midterm stakes for his party if the conflict does not end soon.

“I’m under no time constraint,” he said. “I don’t happen to be running, but a lot of very good Republicans are running.”

Trump’s ability to move the markets may be the only tool the administration has left to keep gas prices in check, said Rory Johnston, an oil market researcher and founder of the Commodity Context newsletter.

The Trump administration has drawn down the U.S. Petroleum Reserve to its lowest level since President Ronald Reagan’s first term. Oil majors are warning that the lack of refinery capacity could keep prices high for the foreseeable future.

“The market is so entrenched on this idea that eventually this will resolve by Trump deciding and ceding some ground on some issue, likely kind of even symbolic control of the Strait of Hormuz,” he said. “So the market’s going to be constantly watching for any sign that he’s shifting there.”

While experts continue to marvel at Trump’s ability to get the markets to bend to his whims, there is little consensus on when that power will dissipate.

Trump has “less credibility” in terms of moving markets, but it has not totally dissipated, Patrick de Haan, head of petroleum analysis at pricing service GasBuddy.

“I don’t think credibility completely goes to zero,” he said. “Hard to know though when it really bends.”

Trump’s push to keep energy prices low has also been buoyed by reduced Chinese oil imports, the successful rerouting of about 7 million barrels per day of Saudi Arabian crude through the Red Sea and releases from strategic petroleum reserves.

The administration released nearly 3 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last week, bringing the reserves down to their lowest level since February 1983, according to Department of Energy data. About half of the 218.5 million barrels the Department of Energy said it would make available to the market have now left the salt caverns along the Gulf Coast.

As the summer driving season winds down, consumers expect gas prices to fall as well.

If the national average price of a gallon of gas is still above $4 by Saturday, de Haan noted, it will set a new record for the latest in the calendar year that prices are so high.

Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump turned up the heat on Exxon Mobil and Chevron over high gasoline prices on Monday, blasting his longtime industry allies for “making too much money” while Americans struggle with higher prices at the pump.

Oil majors have reported bumper quarterly earnings, buoyed by higher crude prices caused by the supply disruptions in the Middle East and the soaring profit margins for refineries. That has put targets on the backs of companies as the Trump administration faces mounting pressure to show it is working to bring down high gas prices ahead of the midterm elections.

“Based on a shortage, they’re making too much money,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday. “I don’t like it, and I should be the last one to say because I’m a big free enterprise guy — nobody bigger.”

Trump specifically called out the two biggest U.S. oil producers by name after both reported strong earnings on Friday.

“Chevron, too much money. Exxon Mobil, too much, too much money,” Trump said. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”

The average U.S. retail gasoline price has hovered near $4.10 a gallon for the past week, up from less than $3 before the United States and Israel launched their attacks against Iran in February.

In late June, Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate big oil companies for not bringing gasoline prices down fast enough as crude oil prices weakened. Pump prices are generally set by the retailers, often sole proprietors, who own gas stations, rather than major oil producers.

Chevron declined to comment on Trump’s remarks, and Exxon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The two companies’ chief executives warned in earnings calls Friday that a shortage of refining capacity could keep gasoline prices high through the fall.

Andrea Woods, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, which represents major oil producers, said in a statement that higher prices are “driven by global supply, demand and continued uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz and other critical shipping lanes—not by any one company.”

“Our industry shares the goal of delivering affordable, reliable energy for consumers,” she said.

Trump also criticized Chevron CEO Mike Wirth in a social media post Monday morning for failing to credit the administration’s policies for the company’s record quarter.

“The only thing he conveniently forgot to mention is that, without the genius, foresight, strength, and stability, of the TRUMP Administration, the Oil Industry, and our Country itself, would be DEAD!” Trump wrote, adding that all oil companies must “get your consumer (retail!) Oil Prices DOWN, NOW!”

Charlotte was cleaning out her parents’ garage last summer when she found a box of catalogs, circa 1996–1999. dELiA*s, MoxieGirl, Alloy — they were all there. “Instant flashback,” she says, describing how she sat right down on the concrete floor to page through them. Growing up in what she calls “rural suburban” Pennsylvania, Charlotte and her older sister made yearly pilgrimages to the Urban Outfitters flagship store in Philadelphia to spend their summer-job money on baby tees and suede Converse One-Stars. But in between, Charlotte, now 43, says they fought over who got the first look at the mail-order catalogs that, at the time, were the first to cater specifically to a tween and teen-girl audience.

Flipping through them three decades on, she realized what made dELiA*s and its ilk so different from the other mail-order catalogs that materialized every few months in her family’s mail pile like L.L. Bean, J. Crew, Tweeds and Talbot’s. “The whole thing was very Girl Power. [The models] looked their age and made goofy faces or looked like they were shouting. It wasn’t like ‘okay, stand there and look pretty.’” The catalogs delivered a rush, Charlotte said, because “It felt like they were telling a story that regular teen magazines kind of couldn’t.”

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These days, nostalgia for a more analog world keeps growing, even for those who weren’t alive during much of it (one marketing survey found that more than a third of Gen Z is nostalgic for the 1990s) and that might explain the Instagram Reels, Reddit forums, YouTube videos, and Tumblrs that look wistfully or snarkily or earnestly back to a decade when everything was so much slower. The internet was slower and the information more avoidable; both waiting and anticipation were part of the standard framework of living. And shopping was something that required time, planning and forethought. Before the advent of yawning, warehouse-sized big-box stores, print catalogs served as portals to the future: Just opening one, Charlotte’s sister, Aimée, says, “was a completely different experience than walking into a store, because you were alone with your imagination and immersed in possibility.”

As a form of media, mail-order catalogs themselves were a story of longing and aspiration that came to define shopping as an American way of life. What you bought and where you bought it from was a statement about who you were and who you could be. This was as true of the inch-thick catalogs from department stores like Sears (whose holiday-season edition was upgraded from mere catalog to “Wish Book”) as it was of the thousands of specialty retail catalogs, from J. Crew and Tweeds to Swiss Colony and Fingerhut, that followed its lead.

Aimée thinks that Millennials in particular have so much nostalgia for catalogs because they were the generation that witnessed e-commerce overtake mail order. “We didn’t know at the time that the internet was going to basically turn into a 24-7 shopping mall,” intent on making shopping quotidian and constant, she says. “I think a lot of us weren’t prepared for the way that having tons of choices for what to buy and where to buy them would become kind of paralyzing.”

But there’s also a nostalgia for catalogs as self-contained and curated; a static set of choices rather than pages and pages of search results. There’s a stark contrast between the frantic sense of urgency online retail often whips up (It’s limited edition! This item never goes on sale except right now! OMG there’s only one pair left in your size!) and the catalog’s invitation to flip, peruse, think, rethink — basically, to shop deliberately rather than reflexively.

For a long time, the only catalogs that mattered to me were the ones from Scholastic Books handed out in elementary school classrooms, and the catalog from a little shop in Vermont called The Enchanted Dollhouse. The former was purpose-driven, with check boxes next to each book; the latter, pure fantasy that was much more inspirational than acquisitive. Then, at the home of my Friend With Cool Parents, I got a load of catalogs from Think Big!, a 1980s-era retailer devoted to giant versions of normally small things (crayons, paper clips, forks) and Esprit, whose catalogs were the first I’d ever seen that featured real people (often Esprit employees), modeling the label’s bright sweatshirts and shorts.

The first ever Delia's Catalog, Winter 1995.

Don't say you didn't read it… pic.twitter.com/fDsuubYcjn

— Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) October 6, 2024

Catalogs have long had a formative impact on would-be consumers, offering a sense of aspiration on behalf of a future self, or a peek into the pasts of their loved ones. J. Crew was a revelation to one friend who was elated, at age 15, to have pages and pages of unisex garments — barn jackets, rugby shirts, roll-neck sweaters — that could be emulated with some judicious thrifting. Another noticed that his father always seemed to be in a good mood when a catalog from Orvis showed up in the mail, and was able to slowly piece together a close relationship that started when he asked his dad to explain fly fishing. A longtime IKEA enthusiast, meanwhile, described a moment of heartache when she ordered something from the company and found out that not only does the company no longer pack its latest catalog in the box with merchandise, there are no more paper catalogs at all. “The stores always stressed me out. I could go through [the catalog] in the peace and quiet of my own apartment and actually be able to breathe while browsing, then make a list, with aisle numbers, for what I wanted to buy. They have digital versions of their catalogs now, but I just can’t see that process being as fun.”

It’s too simple to say that the internet killed the catalog, especially since the demise of mail-order retail was consistently predicted as early as 1990, in a New York Times piece reporting that “Even for J. Crew, the Mail-Order Boom Days are Over”: “[T]hese are tremulous times for consumer buying, and the years of dynamic growth for mail-order catalogs are dusty memories. Even the fabled Lands’ End, one of the most successful and envied mail-order catalogue operations, has been struggling with sinking profits recently.”

Mail-order retailers actually embraced the internet fairly early on, in part because so many of them already had the fulfillment infrastructure and marketing to transition catalog customers smoothly online. In many cases, it wasn’t the internet that changed their fortunes, but financial restructurings involving private equity that turned fulfillment protocol away from customer service and toward speed and efficiency. (One former J. Crew call-center employee recalls “wanting to explain to people why they were paying more money for increasingly bad quality even though I had nothing to do with it.”)

1979 Sears catalog bathroom carpeting. Pick the one you want to die on. pic.twitter.com/myDy1B09wQ

— Nick Prueher (@nickprueher) September 1, 2016

By 2005, when the trade publication Catalog Age changed its name to Multichannel Merchant to reflect the rise of e-commerce, even legacy brands like Lands’ End and L.L. Bean could see that the future of mail-order retail was online, even if many of their customers remained staunchly analog. E-commerce scaled and sped everything up; even dELiA*s successful proto–fast-fashion model, which gave customers access to trends while they were still peaking, couldn’t match the European fast-fashion juggernaut of H&M, Zara, Mango and more that arrived in the United States in the early 2000s. Charlotte wonders if what resonates with Gen-Z about dELiA*s-era mail order might be the gap between when items were ordered and when they arrived: “You had a few weeks of imagining how this cargo skirt or that track jacket was going to make you just a little bit more confident, and that was a lot of the magic.” It’s not that the clothes were ever disappointing, she clarifies — it’s just that the anticipation was such a big part of the process.

The diminishing returns of instant gratification might explain why catalogs are nearly always, according to trade publications and business journals, on the verge of a renaissance. Even Amazon can recognize the importance of a piece of direct mail that makes holiday shopping less likely to cause choice paralysis. But retail businesses have in many cases lost the consumer trust that originally made their catalogs a promise of consistency and quality. What customers are more likely to count on these days is that corporate restructuring will result in worse quality — erratic sizing, cheaper materials, and more slapdash production — and a matching level of customer service.

Meg and Hamilton Swan, the insufferable yuppies of “Best in Show,” are introduced in the mockumentary rhapsodizing about the ease of mail-order shopping (“We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogs”), particularly as it sidesteps the need to talk to strangers in person. It’s tempting to think that if the Swans were shopping in 2026, they’d be longing to once again hear the friendly tones of an  L.L. Bean representative rather than deal with yet another AI assistant on the website from a company whose parent company is plagued by data leaks.

Online shopping, says Charlotte, “is something I avoid, especially as I get older — I just don’t have the patience to decode the sizing differences of four different brands selling basically the same shirt.” She and Aimée have joked about the prospect of starting a dELiA*s for middle-aged former indie girls, but it always ends, she says, “with us on Instagram, looking for something we know is already out there.”

The post The mail-order catalog disappeared. Can it be revived? appeared first on Salon.com.