This week’s edition of The Weekender was curated by Edith Zimmerman, who runs the comics newsletter Drawing Links on Substack. There, she illustrates vignettes from her life, like Taskrabbit-ing her way to a new table, shopping for underwear with her daughters in tow, and making a wish on an abandoned IKEA lamp. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vogue, and New York magazine. If you enjoy Edith’s edition today, be sure to subscribe to her newsletter.

Hi, I’m Edith, and I’ve been publishing Drawing Links, an illustrated journal, since 2019. I’ve chronicled getting married, having children, and searching for purpose, although I feel like it’s best when it’s not really about anything. Before this, I was a staff writer at The Cut, and before that (skipping back a bit), I worked at The Hairpin, the women’s website I founded.

Some of my most popular posts are the ones that aren’t actually about my life (hmm . . .), like Princesses Over 40 Publishing House and Venus En Route.

I’m also a longtime Substack reader—my profile tells me I subscribe to 99 newsletters, 17 of which are paid subscriptions. I think a few of those are comped, but I don’t remember anymore. Here are just a few current favorites!

HEALING

Diary comics (not mine)

For anyone interested in diary comics (which IMO should be everyone!), Vanessa Davis is a master. The master? Every post of hers is great, but I love unreasonably handsome guys, so I’ll pick this one as a teaser.

Pencils are everything

—Vanessa Davis in Spaniel Rage

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PASTRY

MUSIC

Classical music and a phone

In 2024, Evan Goldfine listened to every Bach composition and chronicled it in A Year of Bach, complete with audio clips. I loved reading it even more than I enjoy listening to Bach, aka LTB (and I like LTB!). Evan is still LTB (and occasionally complaining about NYT Games), and the other day he described a recent experience at Carnegie Hall.

On the Shattering of Shared Silence

—Evan Goldfine in A Year of Bach

Víkingur Ólafsson, in his March piano recital at Carnegie Hall, requested no applause between long works of Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven. He set an absurdly high bar of holding 3,000 people’s attention without any release. Between pieces, his body never quite rested—he just paused in suspension for a moment and began anew. [. . .]

Víkingur creates a sense of space like no other living pianist. He is synesthetic, and he reports experiencing the key of E as green. (He sported a sage velvet jacket at the show.) There was almost something of dewed grass in the performance, he and Beethoven both alluding to fragility and renewal. Notes and their overtones rang and reverberated through the centuries and the uninterrupted hour.

Plenty of sturm und drang follow in the theme’s variations, each pointing inevitably toward a peaceful recapitulation. After about 80 minutes in shared, focused silence, we started to sense the first shimmers of our pending reentry to the unceasing noises of 57th Street (and of our private minds). But in those final moments, the hall remained as one consciousness distributed among thousands of bodies.

And then, from the first-tier fancy seats, in the second measure of the returned theme, came a familiar sensory shock. The ringer was set to loud, of course—the tune went something like this:

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LITERARY ADVENTURES

FAME

Celeb gossip

I regularly save Allie Jones’s celebrity gossip posts for “rainy” moments. Alternately, they might be the posts I open the most quickly. It’s pure candy. When she sold Gossip Time hats, I bought one immediately.

Is Pete Davidson breaking up with his normal girlfriend?

—Allie Jones in Gossip Time

I have been following Pete Davidson’s relationship with Elsie Hewitt with some interest, as the two had a baby together in December, three days before I gave birth to my second. Given my familiarity with this particular baby timeline, my suspicion is that Hewitt was pregnant or just about to be when Davidson started rolling out their relationship in the tabloids at the end of last March. (Sources insisted to Page Six at the time that Hewitt, a model and influencer with one million followers on Instagram, was a “non-celebrity” and thus “different” from the parade of famous women Davidson had dated in the past.) Now, both of our babies are hitting the four-month sleep regression, and Davidson and Hewitt’s relationship is reportedly hitting the skids. Makes sense!

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ATHLETICS

Running stuff

Terrell Johnson writes about running, although there’s a lot of running-adjacent and non-adjacent content too. Because, really, what isn’t about running? In my opinion, The Half Marathoner is a must-read for anyone interested in running and the people who do it (it also inspired my dream of traveling the world to run half-marathons). He interviews “regular” runners every week or so, and I loved this bit from a recent interview because it reminded me exactly of how I started.

Hearing Your Stories: Thu Nguyen

—Terrell Johnson in The Half Marathoner

What have you learned about yourself from your running journey? Is there anything that’s changed about you since you started?

I’ve learned that people run for all kinds of reasons, but I run for my mental health. I run to be outside. Everything else is nice to have: good gear, good company, etc., but I don’t need anything except that time alone.

I’ve learned that it’s okay to do things seasonally. I can still call myself a runner even in the summer when I refuse to run in the 90-plus degree heat of D.C. I used to have such strict ideas about what made someone an athlete or a runner, and now I know that it’s more about a mindset than anything else. Every time I see someone running on the roads as I drive by, I am clapping for them in my head. I cheer for everyone.

A couple of years ago, I signed up for a running retreat in Alaska. I didn’t know anyone on the retreat, but I wanted to see Alaska, and I wanted to do some trail running. Our group ran and walked at such a diverse range of paces, and it was the first time I really gave myself permission to not go all out every time.

I ran a 10K, and then the next day I felt like I wanted to walk to the glacier lake instead of running it. The person I was with felt like she wanted to run. We high-fived, and then went at our own paces. On the way back from the lake, I felt like running, so I caught up with another couple in our group.

I loved getting to know them through this run. I learned that I can really listen to what I want and need in the moment, and that giving it to myself is the right thing to do.

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GRATITUDE

MATURING

Aging female bodies

I only recently followed this author, Sara Szal, but I enjoyed the first post of hers I came across (below). She’s also currently microdosing psilocybin.

The Female Body Was Not Designed for the Sex Most Women Are Having After 35

—Sara Szal MD in The Female Edge

Progesterone decline affects sleep architecture and stress recovery. A fatigued nervous system does not easily enter the parasympathetic state required for full arousal. The sleep data is directly relevant: women in perimenopause who experience disrupted sleep are also experiencing disrupted recovery of the autonomic baseline that makes sustained arousal possible.

Orgasmic capacity is generally maintained with aging, but the intensity of orgasm may diminish due to decreased pelvic floor muscle tension and reduced uterine contractions during climax.

The opportunity is important to consider. Women in perimenopause and post-menopause who understand their anatomy and advocate for adequate arousal time report higher sexual satisfaction than younger women—not lower. The research on sexual satisfaction across the lifespan shows satisfaction peaks in the fifth and sixth decades for women who have the knowledge and the partners.

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ART IMITATING ART

READING

Book insider stuff and beyond

I’m currently reading Emma Straub’s (excellent) new novel, American Fantasy, which is partly about boy bands and which I was compelled to buy after Missive No. 1 of her supremely charming book tour travelogue. My favorite missive, though, was No. 2, when New Kid on the Block Joey McIntyre came to a tour event. I cried. (Should this be fodder for a romance novel!?)

Book Tour Missive #2

—Emma Straub in Emma Straub’s Newsletter

You ever write a novel about a boyband and then befriend your favorite member of a boyband and then he comes to your book event in a sweatshirt from your bookstore and calls you his therapist in answer to someone else’s question????????? Just me? I think in this photo, I am saying, what is life, and he is saying, it’s just friendship, my bro, let’s not overthink this. Joe Mac showed, everybody, he showed.

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Substackers featured in this edition

Curator:

Art & Photography: , Lerma, ,

Writing: , , , , , ,

Recently launched

ESPN commentator and six-time Grand Slam doubles champion Rennae Stubbs is now on Substack. Her Stubbsy Snippets will delve into tennis strategy and what to expect in major tennis action, like accurately predicting what might take Jannik Sinner down at the French Open.

has launched its homepage on Substack, where Ashtyn Butuso and Daniel-Yaw Miller will be curating “the amazing stories, posts, and narratives in sports—the things we are all talking about in our group chats, happy hours, and cookouts.”. Simultaneously, they’re launching OffBallFC, a soccer-focused news and opinion site, in the lead-up to the World Cup.

, host of The Viall Files podcast and a longtime figure on The Bachelor, is launching a Substack where he’ll share weekly digests on “life, relationships and culture through the lens of reality TV.”

The pioneering music collective is now on Substack, creating an archival series that pulls back the curtain on past productions ahead of their forthcoming tour.

has brought her fashion and lifestyle expertise to Substack. In her eponymous newsletter, she traverses between luxury fashion, the secondhand market, and motherhood.

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Substack’s editorial team.

This week’s edition of The Weekender was curated by , who writes Cross Current on Substack, covering media, culture, politics, tech, and consciousness. Some popular posts of his include “There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness For Most of the 21st Century So Far,” “What’s So Funny ’Bout… (What We Talk About When We Talk About Romanticism),” and “Gen Z: The Divided Generation.” If you enjoy Mo’s edition today, be sure to subscribe to his Substack.

Hey, it’s Mo Diggs. I like to compare today’s media landscape with that of the past because time is cyclical and the past is prologue.

Excited and honored to guest curate the Memorial Day weekend edition of The Weekender. I’ve got an eclectic assortment of essays, short-form posts, podcasts, and even a little literature to fully stimulate your palate.

TECHNOLOGY

The oracle of the matrix

It is easier to write the Great American Novel than it is to have a fresh perspective on tech. There are so many posts simply blaming smartphones for all our maladies, you wonder if there is a lobbying group behind them. Katherine Dee consistently astounds me with her boundless sagacity. Here, she illustrates how the current chatbot craze is a return to animism, which has been repressed for centuries and before now was primarily dealt with through puppets. I do not take drugs anymore, but the way I say “Wow man” when I read her on the L train must have passengers thinking otherwise.

The Machine Looks Back

— in

There is a wave of books asking how social media platforms shape the stories we tell about ourselves and, through that shaping, what new kind of self they are producing. Megan Garber’s Screen People argues that the language and ethos of entertainment have permeated every aspect of life, so that we now see each other as characters in an ongoing show whose continuity we are responsible for maintaining. Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s The Story of Your Life, out in August, makes the related case that algorithmic platforms have disciplined what counts as a shareable experience into what Jia Tolentino’s blurb calls a “rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm.” I haven’t read either yet, but I’m willing to bet they’re basically right. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself.

We think in a televisual frame: Spotify provides the soundtrack of our lives, we accuse people of “main character syndrome,” we reference the invisible “writers’ room” and “seasons” constantly.

If television introduced this framing, then social media fortified it.

I think this is the last critique of social media we’re going to get. The era in which we treated our screen-lives as fake is ending. Not because anyone won the argument, but because the objects on the other side of the screen have started to seem like they have interiors of their own—and that pull, I’ll argue, is dragging us back into our bodies rather than further into the feed. In fact, I will say this: social media as we know it is dead. Technology-saturated lives are not.

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CYANOTYPE

HUMOR

Subway silliness

Daniel Falatko is one of the funniest people on Substack. He doesn’t post as often as I would like him to on his newsletter, but his Notes run is the stuff of legend. He often recaps the Bret Easton Ellis podcast and shares mordant observations on trap music and jazz, but my favorite notes of his are haiku-length sketches of Bushwick life like this one, where he can’t hide his momentary obsession with a colorful subway passenger.

Eyepatch and glasses

— in

ANIMATION

CULTURE

A poster’s process

Prester John Andrews is one of my favorite culture writers on here. He’s refreshingly unpretentious yet insightful. His podcast interview with Substack wunderkind is particularly fascinating. Sprout explains how his first-ever Sproutstack post, “Is Mike Wazowski Jewish or Polish?,” went viral. This is the diametric opposite of my come-up on Substack. For more than a year, I began my newsletter posting into an indifferent void, but I kept doing it to shut up my friend , who also has a Substack. Then I fatefully linked to one of Ross Barkan’s Guardian articles. I was not aware that he was already a subscriber of mine, so he began linking to me and almost single-handedly gave me my current readership. What Sprout and I have in common, if not beginner’s luck, is that we both posted. Don’t get hung up on how often you have to write—just shut up and do it.

The Xanadu Review: Episode 41—Russell Sprout

— in

In today’s episode of The Xanadu Review, I’m joined by Russell Sprout. We talk Gilmore Girls (and why Emily Gilmore has done nothing wrong, ever), how the medium of how we consume art changes the experience, the album experience as the theft of cows by vampires, the depressing but funny future of aging millennials, the Palantir manifesto, the tech world and startup culture, “abundance” and the future of normies, the 2020s as a secular religious revival and much, much more!

Listen to the episode

POETRY

LITERATURE

Post-internet novel

It is hard to choose just one great post from culture magazine The Metropolitan Review, but this review of Cairo Smith’s book Scenebux by ARX-Han is something else. One of my worst posts was a dumb manifesto I wrote calling for Lit 2.0. The basic idea was a literature that treated the internet as a part of our lives, without the desperate attempts to re-create 4chan-speak that seemed to plague much of the literature of the early part of this decade. Scenebux seems to be doing a fine job of painting a more lived-in reflection of life around the internet, where people still smoke and curse and have sex. Han’s review does what all good criticism does: gives you the proper framing for understanding why a work is worthy of discussion, let alone an outright purchase.

The Corporeal Internet Novel

— in

Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works—an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.”

The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.

Scenebux is a short, snappy novella about a young underemployed writer named Ben Extina who embarks on a modern Pynchonesque tour of “the scene,” or the contemporary online ecosystem of niche intellectual figures. This landscape is primarily focused on a lively anatomical slice of a particular right-coded intellectual subculture backed by A Certain Silicon Valley Oligarch, but isn’t fixated on a single persona or figure—the novella’s center is its rapid momentum and flurry of events, scene changes, and characters.

In this respect, Scenebux isn’t quite situated as an internet novel, since the online intellectuals that Smith is referencing are corporeal characters that the protagonist meets in real life. Here the novel encompasses a broader effort to recapture the dynamic, gonzo-style hijinks of 20th-century protagonists who experienced the world through acts of human agency rather than the graphical user interface of a screen or the surprisingly passive creative-class jobs that seem to dominate book jacket summaries these days.

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GARDENING

IMPROV

Unforced weirdness

I love reading about improv, almost more than I love watching it. Will Hines describes here a technique that not only leads to bad improv comedy but, though he doesn’t say it, to bad Saturday Night Live sketches: an impatience to point out and overstate the weird part. Most of my favorite comedic moments sucker punch me with their weirdness; by the time I realize something is off, I am already laughing.

“Framing” Doesn’t Mean “Controlling”

— in

Sometimes improvisers use the idea of “framing” to try and write the whole scene themselves. That is… not good.

Framing is when you call attention to someone else’s unusual behavior. It’s a term I first heard of from the UCB Manual in 2013 (“letting your scene partner know you think they’ve done something unusual”).

Framing: I Hear You

Often you’re telling the other person that you’ve heard them. Like “Got it. I see that you’re trying to be unusual.”

Player 1: I shouldn’t have to pay taxes. I am an artist.

Player 2: (framing) I think you’re taking the idea of “artist” a little too far.

Framing: Did You Notice This?

Sometimes you frame behavior the other person did by accident.

Player 1: I shouldn’t have to pay taxes. I am an artist. Just like Paul Bunyan.

Player 2: (framing) Wasn’t Paul Bunyan a lumberjack? Also fictional?

Player 1: (changing now because of the frame) I consider lumberjacks to be artists. I long to be a lumberjack. I also long to be fictional.

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SKETCH

HOLLYWOOD

Whither the stars?

Ted Hope has been a tireless advocate for filmmakers on Substack with his ambitious NonDē (for “non-dependent”) film movement. I was first introduced to this movement by Alex Rollins Berg, whose newsletter Underexposed is a must-read for any film buff. This post breaks down the rise and fall not of a particular movie star, but the entire concept of movie stars. Thrilling though it might be to root for their demise, Berg suggests how they might be our unlikely allies in the fight against corporate conglomerates and Big Tech.

Twilight of the gods

— in Underexposed

For more than fifty years, the first Monday in May has belonged to the Met Gala. It was former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland who, in the 1970s, transformed the charity dinner into an extravagant pageant of fashion and celebrity, a torch Anna Wintour carries to this day.

That flame flickered earlier this month when several A-listers—including Meryl Streep, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, and Taraji P. Henson—shunned the event.

In truth, enthusiasm for the Met Gala has been thinning for some while. Many blame the intrusion of influencers in recent years. Others have pointed to mounting discomfort with the optics: a shameless circus of wealth, made more conspicuous this year by honorary ringleader Jeff Bezos, whose status as a tax-averse centibillionaire rendered the evening a tasty vessel for broader cultural resentment.

The backlash reflects not just the Gala’s fading luster but the crumbling architecture of celebrity itself. In the first quarter of the 21st century, Hollywood star power has been steadily marked down. The rise of IP, the flattening force of streaming, the deluge of preening, jabbering TikTok celebrities, and now the threat of AI have chipped the marbled plinths of our idols down to nubs. Once, they loomed large above us; now they flicker on our phone screens, at the mercy of our giant thumbs.

There are good reasons to welcome this decline. Predators have been toppled. Toxic behavior has been exposed. Performative virtue signaling has fallen blissfully silent.

And yet the film industry depends on the perceived market value of recognizable actors to finance movies—particularly original, challenging, artistically ambitious movies that directors like yours truly are fighting to make.

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PAINTING

GROCERIES

Getting away with innocence

Alexander Sorondo has a wonderful profile of Robert Moses and LBJ biographer Robert Caro on his Substack, big reader bad grades. Those posts are paywalled, but his affecting, lyrical sketches of life working in a Miami grocery store are surprisingly free to read. The post here focuses on an employee with a learning disability who gets away with not working as a result of his condition. Sorondo’s radical empathy has the reader commiserate with the exasperated staff while also rooting for the holy fool who bites produce and puts it back on the shelves.

New Guy Bites the Lemon

— in

Our new hire at the grocery store appears to have a learning disability. He is egoless and polite. To say that he’s “innocent” feels condescending, but the word comes to mind a lot because he’s making everyone furious at the fact that he doesn’t do anything. Just starts a task and then wanders off. In the break room, eating lunch, people trade lockjawed whispers about how he comes back here every ten or fifteen minutes, opens his locker, lifts his shirt to just above his nipples and applies deodorant, then spritzes himself with cologne, then opens the fridge and scans the shelves. There’s a can of whipped cream with STAFF scrawled across the label in Sharpie. He tips his head back and shoots a jet into his mouth from two or three inches high and then puts it back and returns to work, except that “work” in this case means walking laps around the store saying “Hi How Are You” to everybody and improvising tasks that he does not complete.

It seems like he is knowingly doing nothing, like he’s well-practiced at performing busyness without getting anything done; and yet if you put it in those terms (“practiced,” “performing”) it sounds insidious.

Like he’s trying to get away with something.

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COLLAGE

Substackers featured in this edition

Curator:

Art & Photography: , , , , , ,

Audio:

Writing: , , , , , ,

Recently launched

The just launched on Substack, opening its vault with liner notes, oral histories, deep dives into artifacts, and behind-the-scenes stories from the museum’s staff and inductees.

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Substack’s editorial team.

This week, we’re gooning in the Criterion Closet, counting SKUs at Costco, and designing the ideal art exhibition.

CULTURE

“The most intellectual thirst trap ever made”

Lyvie Scott on the strange sex appeal of the Criterion Closet.

A love letter to the Criterion Closet, the most intellectual thirst trap ever made

— in

In the quote replies of the latest video posted by Twitter user @Criterion—which features Mad Men star Jon Hamm thoughtfully waxing poetic about rare independent films—you’ll find some of the most hellish thirst tweeting this side of the Pittdom. Sprinkled between comments on the quality of his choices (favorable) or the odd Mad Men reference are solicitations that range from the evergreen “can I say something” to the far more opaque “now pull your d*ck out.”

I thought this was a classy party, I briefly, bemusedly thought aloud on my inaugural scroll. Then I scrolled a little farther and came across the tweet that proved otherwise: “we’re not supposed to call this goon bait??”

Yeah. The Criterion Closet is goon bait now. Or maybe it always has been?

It is, for the record, absolutely insane that something as austere and tame as the Criterion Closet has become so synonymous with abject goonery. It was the Letterboxd Four Favorites before Letterboxd was a thing you heard namedropped in prestige TV shows; a genius brand of marketing in its own right, if not a little nicher. Criterion has been preserving hard-to-find films—from international auteurs to old Hollywood restorations and, recently, acclaimed streaming originals—for over 30 years now. They house their film inventory in a closet at their headquarters in New York, and for the past 15 years they’ve invited filmmakers or standup comedians or podcasters into said closet to pilfer ultra 4K Blu-rays and box sets in the guise of promoting their latest project. I can’t stress how brilliant this marketing is, truly, even if there’s no way it’s all that profitable and it’s known exclusively to a certain brand of chronically online movie nerd. Two Americas, and all that. But for that America, the Criterion Closet is essentially Hot Ones. And I do mean that in every way that matters.

I kid you not—you can find thirst tweets attached to nearly every Criterion Closet vid. Every man over the age of 35 who steps into this hallowed crawl space can get it. Jason Bateman slutted it up in a plain black tee, as did Oscar Isaac, whose own trip to the closet coincided rather serendipitously with the writing of this dispatch. He also cleaned that thing out with a level of greed I’ve not witnessed since Barry Jenkins’ closet visit. The Cut famously named Ben Affleck the “most charming guy in the Criterion Closet,” which I’m not positive I agree with but hey, it’s all subjective. There’s a “hit the towers” energy in the way Nick Offerman’s visit absolutely shattered my TL. Diego Calva even flashed us in the closet! The slut!

Men on the geriatric side of the Hottie Spectrum get plenty of love, too: there’s something about those soft fluorescent lights, the compulsion to speak passionately and articulately about film, that just makes everyone in the Criterion Closet automatically really hot. John Slattery got some polite “still would”s in reaction to his visit. Tracy Letts strolled in, confidently said, “I already have all these movies,” and was rewarded with a handful of suggestive gifs. I found myself doing a little mental “hear me out” watching Guillermo del Toro’s mobile closet picks. Other crushes I already had, like Alden Ehrenreich, got even hotter—like, infinitely hotter? Deliriously hotter?—upon visiting Criterion. Even Bob Odenkirk, whose trip to the closet dropped in tandem with Hamm’s, got a bit of love in the QRTs. Maybe Bob Odenkirk has always had lusters, but I certainly never would have known that had it not been for Criterion.

Now I’m sure you’re asking, “but what about the women?” Or alternatively, “what about the Black people?” Great questions—and here is where that aforementioned “nearly” comes into play.

Never have I been so abruptly reminded of Criterion’s target audience as I have been while poring through their closet videos. What Criterion does for older men, for crushes you might be a little bit ashamed to reveal out loud, is a modern phenomenon. It does not do the same for anyone who isn’t old and a man (or white and/or eligible for Latin Lover status). Charli XCX was in there; I can’t say it really moved the needle. Zoë Kravitz and Channing Tatum did the rare couples Criterion vid just weeks before calling off their engagement—the equivalent of giving a dog (me!) chocolate before putting it down—but their joint slay barely registered on the bisexual Richter scale. Lucy Liu reminded us all of her status as the baddest b*tch alive and was rewarded only with a smattering of sincere “she’s so cool”s. Same for Nia DaCosta. Same for Margaret Qualley, who apparently is someone that people kind of objectify? In an arthouse-y way?

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VIDEO

Southern grace

A short film exploring family memory through the landscapes of the rural South.

In the Garden

— in

Keep watching

COMMERCE

The cost of choice

Justin Kuiper on how Costco’s unique business model gives it a competitive edge.

Why Costco pays $30/hr and Target doesn’t

— in

Walk into a Walmart and you’ll find over half a dozen ways to buy regular Coca-Cola: you can buy 12 oz cans, 16 oz bottles, 20 oz bottles, and 2-liter bottles. The cans come in 12-packs and 24-packs, and that’s before we’ve touched Diet Coke or Coke Zero.

Each of those is what retailers call a “stock-keeping unit” (SKU), each of which has to be treated by the inventory system as a distinct product.

An average Target carries around 80,000 SKUs, while a typical Costco carries only 4,000 SKUs, a 95% smaller catalog despite Costco’s retail locations being physically larger than Target’s by around 18%. Costco has more items in their warehouse but less variety. They just identify the most popular SKUs and sell more of them.

Target tries to have “a little something for everyone,” and that imposes costs on the business. If a SKU is obscure or unpopular enough, it might never get bought, winding up as “dead inventory.”

When you have 10 varieties of ketchup, maybe you never manage to find a buyer for the last two bottles of the least-popular kind. Even if it does eventually sell, it might sit on the shelf for a long time before someone buys it.

Costco avoids this problem by selling fewer kinds of ketchup (and fewer varieties of everything else, too). There are fewer “unpopular items” that spend time languishing on the shelf.

This “fewer SKUs” approach has many other benefits for Costco:

Costco’s “No Touch Policy”

Fewer SKUs means lower operational and labor costs.

Much of Target’s labor cost is paying employees to stock shelves. Look at this photo of a Target employee physically bending over to place an item on the shelf:

I can report from my experience as a young Target employee that this process is as laborious and inefficient as it looks. Note the brown corrugated cardboard boxes next to the employee: those are the boxes that the product came in. After he’s done shelving the product, he will need to flatten the cardboard and dispose of it.

Costco’s more efficient restocking method has a name: the “no touch” policy, where products are placed directly on the sales floor without being unpacked. You’ve probably seen this before: an employee drives a forklift out to the sales floor, drops off a pallet, maybe takes an empty pallet back with them, and heads back without ever disembarking from their forklift.

There’s no Costco employee who has to “arrange the merchandise on the shelf” to make it look nice, because there aren’t shelves within reach of the customer.

Why can’t Target use this same high-efficiency method? They have more SKUs.

Because Target has “a little something for everyone,” most Target SKUs don’t occupy a whole pallet, which is why you might need to have an employee make a trip to stock 6 more bottles of Habanero Ketchup.

But having fewer SKUs is also great for financial reasons, too:

Faster inventory turnover means fewer costs

Because Costco only stocks popular SKUs, their inventory moves faster. (Think about what is implied when we say a product is “flying off the shelves”: it’s literally spending less time sitting on the shelf!)

Shelf time is costly: the retailer has to pay rent, utilities, security, and all the other overhead that comes with maintaining the physical space a product occupies. A product that sits on the shelf for 15 days before being sold is far more costly than an item that gets bought within 2 days of hitting the shelf.

Target, with 20 times as many SKUs, carries far more slow-moving inventory that lingers for weeks before anyone buys it.

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POETRY

MIXED MEDIA

Art by Rachel Bevan Baker

CURATION

How to hang a Warhol

Alya, an exhibition designer, breaks down the invisible architecture of a museum show.

The Anatomy of an Exhibition

— in

Art Placement

Let’s start with the obvious: the art itself, and where it goes. This is the curator’s domain.

Curators shape the overall vision, meaning, and experience of a show. The selection and placement of works tells the story they want to tell, signaling relationships, relevance, and narrative within a collection of work. Art placement happens early, in close collaboration with the living artist and exhibition designer (hey, that’s me!), right at the very start of the planning process.

Curators either are, or become, deep experts in the work being shown. Hearing them talk through an exhibition is breathtaking. Curators speak about art like old friends, with intimacy, precision, and affection. I have to actively stop myself from gawking every time.

Floor Plan & Traffic Flow

The floor plan is a collaboration between the curator, living artist, and the exhibition designer, and it typically happens in tandem with art placement in the early design of a show.

Circulation, sight lines, and the highlighting of key objects are all mission-critical conversations. You want visitors to move through a show naturally and intuitively. You want them to be comfortable, curious, and never confused or claustrophobic. Nobody wants to feel crammed while contemplating a Picasso or feel lost in a hallway when there’s a Rothko around the corner.

The Art Handlers

Yes, there is an entire profession of art handling. And no, I cannot do it. When I first started working at a museum, a few friends excitedly asked this. Lolz, absolutely not—the liability alone!

Art handlers have a highly specialized skill set. They wear gloves, unpack pieces with extraordinary tenderness, are fluent in reading art manuals (yes, some individual works come with entire manuals dedicated to their installation), and install each work with a precision and care that is genuinely beautiful to watch.

Wall Color

I’d be willing to bet you can’t tell me the wall color of the last exhibition you visited. And I’d also bet that your experience would have been substantially different if it had been painted another shade.

The era of the all-white modernist cube is fading (for the most part!). Wall color is a powerful tool in setting the atmosphere of a show. It’s subtle but transformative. Think of it like a wine pairing: the color is chosen to complement the work on display. Wall colors can also function as wayfinding, guiding visitors through different areas without a single sign.

Wall color decisions involve the curators, the artist (if living), the exhibition designers, and sometimes the graphic designers. Every curator and exhibition designer I know has a favorite color to use in a show (mine is purple, because I am, unabashedly, a regal girly). I’ve also heard a rumor that the Met does not like to use green paint, but you did not hear that from me!

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MALAPROPS IN MEMORIAM

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

, the Cambridge-trained historian, author, and broadcaster, has launched a Substack. Her work finds the dark, human stories hiding inside history’s most iconic images—in a recent post on the girl at the center of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, she writes that “that beautiful dress was a uniform, that palace was a gilded prison.”

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Substack’s editorial team.

This week, we’re traveling nowhere, subverting expectations, cringing at the Met, and cataloging Stormtroopers.

PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL

The travel bug extinction

A wide-ranging essay on why travel has lost its allure for young Westerners. Grant David Crawford starts in his own classroom, where students have stopped arguing about travel ethics, and casts back—through Rousseau, the Romantics, the Beats, the backpackers, and Bourdain—toward a question about what we are without the “elsewhere” we used to believe in.

The End of Elsewhere

— in Fugitive Margins

For the past seven or eight years I’ve taught a course on the ethics and politics of travel. The syllabus opens with a Huffington Post article by David Sze called “The Myth of Authentic Travel,” an unflashy piece that takes apart the idea that there is some “real” Thailand ducking and hiding behind the touristed one, some uncontaminated village waiting at the end of the forgotten trail if the traveler is patient, open, or adventurous enough to find it. Sze argues, correctly, that authenticity is a story the tourist tells about herself, not a property of the place she visits. It’s a clean little essay, and it works as a doorway into the harder topics that follow: colonialism, essentialism, the long shadow of the noble savage. I used to lead with it because students could easily sink their teeth into it and it reliably started arguments.

It doesn’t anymore.

I first noticed about two years ago. The class would read Sze, and where students used to push back (where they used to defend their gap year in Cambodia, or accuse Sze of being too cynical, or stage long debates about building wells in South America and ethical itineraries and whether it was possible to travel “right”), there was now a polite quiet. A few shy hands here and there. Still some carefully crafted comments. These are not less intelligent students than the ones who came before them. They are, by every measure I can take over the course of about fifteen weeks, just as ethical, just as curious, just as serious.

What has changed is something subtler. The question itself has lost its hold on them. They have moved past the argument by losing interest in its stakes.

Now, to be clear, the reasons a classroom goes quiet are many these days. The Sze article is over a decade old at this point and some of its references may read as dated. Humanities participation has declined across the board in recent years for reasons that have nothing to do with travel ethics. Students are also more cautious in seminar settings generally, particularly on topics a critical professor might be primed to push back on. Any of these could explain the change in the room without requiring a generational shift in anything deeper. The silence is not what this essay is going to argue from. It is what made me start asking the question and interrogating my own preheld beliefs. The classroom is the place I noticed. It is not the place from which I am drawing my conclusions.

Regardless, their silence has stayed with me now for some time and I’ve been trying to understand what it means.

I think it means more than the obvious thing.

So, here is the obvious thing: travel is getting harder.

Borders are tightening. Visa regimes are firming up after a long thaw. Inflation has hollowed out the middle-class travel budget. Migration crises have re-politicized the question of who gets to cross which line. Whole regions that were on every backpacker’s loop fifteen years ago, parts of the Middle East, North Africa, swaths of Southeast Asia, have become harder, costlier, or “unsafer” to move through. The unipolar post–Cold War world that produced cheap, frictionless Western travel is closing, and my students live inside the closing whether or not they read the news. They live inside it through their parents’ expressed worries about safety abroad. They live inside it through the steady thinning of international students on American campuses (new international enrollment fell 17 percent this fall alone, the largest non-pandemic decline on record), subtracting the most reliable cosmopolitan experience that an American undergraduate could once have without leaving the country. They live inside it through a felt economic reality that ranks internships above gap years, debt servicing above wandering, professional credentialing above the year of finding oneself in Cambodia.

The world has reorganized itself around them, and they have absorbed the reorganization without having to be told about it.

But that absorption via the obvious thing doesn’t quite reach the silence in the room. Students who can’t afford to travel still tend to want to travel, and to argue about how it should be done. The disengagement I’ve been watching is not economic.

It strikes me as a loss of belief.

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MUSIC

Sincerity vs. farce

Before sharing her cover of Elliott Smith’s “Twilight,” surfaced this clip of him on a morning TV show from the ’90s:

Regard, how this room full of pretty people, perfectly willing to participate in the low-vibrational farce on which this show was supposed to rest, allow the awesome force of Smith’s sincerity to re-awaken each and every one of them. Apart from the unbelievably hot woman sitting next to him, who knew it already.

And be sure to give her haunting rendition of “Twilight” a listen:

Keep listening

ART

The surprise factor

Why is it so hard for AI to write a great poem? Nabeel S. Qureshi works through the question, arriving first at a quality LLMs are particularly ill-suited to: great art subverts your expectations.

What Makes Art Great?

— in Nabeel S. Qureshi

Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising.

One can explain this using the predictive processing model of the brain. As we are scanning a text, our brain is constructing the meaning and predicting the next several words. Where there is no surprise—where something is perfectly predictable, or fits some pattern that we know—our brain registers only dullness. When our expectations are violated in a way that’s satisfying to resolve, we get pleasure and novelty.

The essayist Henrik Karlsson cites the sentence “an interesting and exciting finding” as an example of bad prose, because:

“the word ‘exciting’ is sort of implicated by the word ‘interesting’. They are not synonyms, but if I had blanked ‘exciting’ and asked you, or a language model, to fill it in, ‘exciting’ would have a high probability. So it is not adding all that much information—the reader already has that adjective implicitly in their head.”

Compare the famous passage from Macbeth, where both of the bolded words are famously surprising:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Hence, too, the story of the writing professor who would give his students a copy of the below stanza from Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” with many words blanked out, and ask them to guess those words, and claimed that nobody had ever gotten “hothouse” or “uniquely”:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose…

The value of surprise is more obvious in visual art. In his four-volume work The Nature of Order, the architect Christopher Alexander gives this example from a Fra Angelico painting [above].

Alexander asks us to cover up the black stripe on the priest’s robes and the door, and imagine we were the painter:

Imagine some moment before the black of the door and priest’s robe had been painted, but when everything else is more or less already there...You can see what I mean by putting your hand over the picture, so as not to see the black parts. Do you see that the picture loses much of its haunting character...can you see how immensely surprising it is?

— Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 4, p. 133

The surprise principle operates in other ways, too. We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might. This too is a kind of surprise, sometimes called defamiliarization. This is a favorite technique of Tolstoy’s, who often takes a normal action that we are all familiar with, and describes it the way an alien might. Thus he describes a person being whipped as “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor…” and so on, deconstructing the action without ever using the word “whipping.” This makes you feel the action much more viscerally than if he had just used the word to summarize it.

These are all familiar points to lovers of art. But the surprise principle operates at even deeper levels, below even our conscious perception.

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PAINTING

FASHION

Met Gala cringe

Mørning traces the Met Gala’s descent into self-parody.

How the Met Gala Became Cringe

— in

As a teen, the Met Gala was like my Christmas. I’d stay up until silly hours of the night because of the time difference in London, watching the looks roll in and reviewing them on my Twitter account of a few hundred followers. My personal highlights were 2018 and 2019: Catholicism and Camp, which brought us iconic moments like Rihanna as the fashion pope and Billy Porter carried on a throne by 6 hunky men. But in hindsight, fashion’s old guard was cringing already. Tom Ford lamented how it had turned into a “costume party”, saying: “It used to just be very chic people wearing very beautiful clothes going to an exhibition about the 18th century. You didn’t have to look like the 18th century.”

André Leon Talley similarly felt that 2019’s Camp Gala had gone “off the rails”: “If you go from being a chandelier that lights up and change somewhere in the hallway to a hamburger, then I think you’ve lost the plot.” Sorry, Katy Perry, but according to Ford and Talley, it was at this moment when the Gala became cringe and redefined by such pleas for attention.

Fast forward to now, and Demna Gvasalia agrees, revealing to the New York Times last November, with a laugh, that he neither cares or knows if people still get excited about this ‘cringe’ event. While there’s a lot of things to criticise the fashion designer for, he always keeps his finger on the pulse.

So how did we get here? In 2015, Rihanna’s yellow Guo Pei cape catapulted the Gala to pop culture notoriety for a new generation and demonstrated the power of viral fashion. After that, everyone wanted to have their Rihanna moment. Though as the stunts got bigger, from Zendaya’s literal Cinderella moment to Tems’ view-blocking Oscars dress, public opinion was starting to turn.

However, as a child of the fashion brainrot era, I was always of the opinion that the crazier, the better. Raised on theatrical clips of old McQueen and Mugler shows, my brain demands drama. A beautifully tailored jacket or a cleanly cut dress does nothing for me. Saturated by constant images but removed from the tactile qualities of clothing, I need fashion that will smack me in the face, like Coperni’s spray-on dress with Bella Hadid.

But what looks good on the feed may not be so chic in real life. Remember when Tyla had to be carried up the Met steps in her (otherwise stunning) sands of time look? Or when Lana Del Rey’s headdress was fighting with Kim K’s face?

We, the online fashion fans, didn’t help things. In the late 2010s, I was part of the chorus, alongside influencers like Haute Le Mode, who criticised celebrities for not dressing on-theme or providing a big enough moment (see below). Like clockwork, every year High Fashion Twitter dragged guests who didn’t try hard enough with their outfit. Looking back on this era now, it was also when Drag Race went mainstream, which probably rubbed off on our appetites for avant-garde looks and gag-worthy outfit reveals.

The try-hard fatigue came to a boiling point with red carpet fashion more broadly, with film press tours and their anything-but-subtle method dressing. Wicked took promotion to new levels of annoyance, while Marty Supreme and Wuthering Heights made it clear that everything is a choreographed media opportunity. Thus, we’re now seeing celebrities like Odessa A’Zion being praised for not having a stylist at all.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

INTERVIEW

Collector’s edition

Adam Starr talks to Rafael Pavon, who has 730 Imperial Stormtroopers, a custom 3D-modeling pipeline, and a theory about why a faceless character with no backstory became one of the most reproduced toys in history.

My Collection of Stormtroopers

— in My Collection Of

What do you collect?

Rafael: Everything related to the Imperial Stormtrooper helmet design from 1977: toys, memorabilia, objects, and things inspired by it.

How did it begin?

Rafael: By accident, which is probably how most collections begin. For years, I was just someone who liked that helmet. I’d spot one in a shop or a market and grab it without thinking too much about it. Then one afternoon in December 2015, while wandering around Covent Garden before watching The Force Awakens on opening day, I walked into a comic book store called Orbital Comics and picked up a loose original Kenner Stormtrooper for £7. I got home, put it on the shelf, and realised I already had about twenty of them. That was the moment it went from a habit to a real problem.

What’s the first thing you remember collecting?

Rafael: I wouldn’t call it collecting at the time, but my uncle ran a toy shop in Madrid in the early eighties. I was a kid, and Star Wars figures were basically the most exciting objects in the known universe. Two of them survived. They’re items 475 and 476 in the archive now, two battered little 3.75-inch Kenner Stormtroopers that I assumed were long gone until they turned up at my cousin’s place decades later.

What first inspired your love of collecting?

Rafael: It’s less about collecting and more about a question I can’t let go of. The Stormtrooper breaks every rule of what a memorable character is supposed to be. No face, no name, no backstory, almost no lines. And yet somehow it sits alongside Spider-Man and Barbie as one of the most reproduced toys in history. Kids pick it over the heroes. Artists across every discipline keep coming back to that helmet. Jony Ive said it influenced the iPod and AirPods. It’s shown up in LEGO, Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Mr Potato Head, on toothbrushes, shampoo bottles and keyrings, even on beer labels. So, at some point, I stopped thinking of this as a toy collection and started thinking of it as anthropological research. There’s a hidden message somewhere in people’s fixation with that helmet, and I haven’t cracked it yet. That’s what keeps me going.

Where do you usually find the things you collect?

Rafael: Everywhere, which is part of the problem. I’ve tracked down pieces in London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Santiago de Chile, Ciudad de México, Madrid, and Los Angeles. When I want to look for really special items or art toys, I love places like Toy Tokyo and myplasticheart in New York. And probably my favourite place in the world for Star Wars toys is the Persa Franklin in Santiago de Chile, a massive street market full of unexpected troopers.

How far have you gone to add to the collection?

Rafael: It kind of became a thing to fly to a city knowing there’s a trooper somewhere waiting for me. I once took a train during a snowstorm just to visit the Imperial Castle Toy Store in Pawling, NY, 2 hours north of NYC. In terms of effort, building a database, creating a custom photo app to capture them all, a pipeline to turn them into 3D models, and designing a website display is definitely the furthest I’ve been for the collection

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ICYMI

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, and Billie Jean King have brought their sports podcast, , to Substack. Here, they’re bringing together their community, and “every week we will bring you more behind the scenes info on our podcasts, the games we’re excited about watching, and more of, well, us.”

, the actress, writer, and director best known for Pen15, has launched a Substack where she’ll be reconciling her drive to “retain pieces of the past, including old ways of writing with pen and paper, or sometimes filming stuff on camcorders, using paper encyclopedias…”

Parisian It Girl, ex-journalist, and brand founder has launched a Substack where she’ll be writing about the things she loves: “fashion, beauty, home decor, cooking, and the encounters that inspire.”

Italian fashion journalist has relaunched her Substack, where she discusses “work, personal style, how the internet has changed the pace of everything.”

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Substack’s editorial team.

This week, we’re buying nothing, hunting goblins, photographing puddles, and contemplating the tragic irony of Mark Zuckerberg.

SELF-IMPROVEMENT

A year of buying nothing

Emma Stephenson on her vow not to buy anything in 2025, dodging The Emails, “cute” commodities, and learning to “surf the urge.”

All-Consuming

— in

I spent 2025 buying nothing. Or, that was the idea. I didn’t starve, or anything like that. I had credit card debt, which really meant I had shame. I wanted to get rid of it.

Clothes were the main culprit. Clothes filled with possibility and women-be-shoppin’ dread. Since the pandemic (so the story goes), my online shopping habit had become compulsive. I became weak against The Emails. You know the ones. The braindead want colonizing your inbox. I spent money I didn’t have, mostly at a slick outfit known as The Reformation (no relation to Martin Luther). The Emails promised I could turn myself skinny and mysterious with the swish of a silk skirt and the secret of it costing $200.

It felt good to tell people about this ambitious year of shopping abstinence. Every Wow, good for you and Couldn’t be me felt better than the last.

The more I felt that people were impressed by my decision to try a no-buy year (which meant that they were impressed by me), the clearer the image of myself staring coolly down my nose at The Emails became. Who falls for these? Not I. Before the year of buying nothing had even begun, I’d situated myself in a special little abstinence bubble, wearing the same outfit over and over again, answering to no one. Maybe a true self could be found if I stopped wearing something different every month.

Near the end of 2024, in a post-election spiritual funk, I fell down a months-long YouTube video essay rabbit hole. I told myself I was arming myself with information, but really I was self-soothing. I came across a YouTube channel literally called The Financial Diet. If the ultimate diet is eating nothing, then spending nothing would surely yield some kind of results. An interview on the channel featured a woman detailing how a year of buying nothing helped her reclaim her financial independence and crawl out of some serious credit card debt. Eureka. She said that abstaining from shopping “rewired her brain.” Somewhere around month six, “a switch flipped.” Eventually, the fog dispersed. Spending money on stuff she didn’t need was frivolous and hollow. It seemed she had stopped wanting altogether.

How powerful the draw of a clean before/after threshold is. How glorious it would be to be freed of the messiness of wanting. One year of no shopping, and I could turn into Thich Nhat Hanh? I was craving something true, a tangible kind of enlightenment (take that, The Reformation).

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PHOTOGRAPHY

TECHNOLOGY

Goblin mode

Katherine Dee unravels how ChatGPT became weirdly fixated on “the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects.”

Why ChatGPT Is Obsessed With Goblins: The Weirdest Possible Explanation

— in

This week, internet interlocutors noted that OpenAI had to instruct a new model, Codex 5.5, repeatedly, in its own system prompt, to stop bringing up goblins, gremlins, trolls, ogres, pigeons, and raccoons “unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”

Within hours of the instructions hitting the timeline, the line was screenshotted into oblivion—and for good reason. Nick Pash on the Codex team confirmed publicly that the “weirdly emphatic” prohibition was added because Codex 5.5 was, in fact, fixated on goblins.

Then, last night, OpenAI posted a blog explaining where the goblins came from.

After GPT-5.1 launched, complaints came in that the model had developed an “overfamiliar” register and would not stop trying to be the user’s friend, which prompted an audit of its verbal tics. Meanwhile, someone on the safety team who had experienced quirky mentions of “goblins” and “gremlins” enough times to find it annoying flagged those words for inclusion. As it turned out, per the audit: the use of goblin was up by 175% since the launch; gremlin by 52%.

Weird, but just a quirk—these things happen. The team moved on.

But by GPT-5.4, it was no longer a quirk. “Creature language” was showing up overwhelmingly in traffic from users who’d selected one of ChatGPT’s optional persona presets: “Nerdy.” The preset was meant to turn the app into a kind of intellectually omnivorous mentor, maybe the type of guy, if I may, who would play Dungeons and Dragons (...and might have a folder of shortstack fan art on his desktop?).

Nerdy accounted for just 2.5% of all ChatGPT traffic—but two-thirds of the goblin mentions. When researchers used Codex itself to compare reinforcement-learning rollouts containing the offending vocabulary against rollouts that didn’t, the signal designed to encourage Nerdy turned out to be scoring the goblin-laden outputs higher. Basically, the model was being given a higher score every time it called something a goblin, and, as a system optimized to chase higher scores, it started calling more things goblins. In other words, there was a goblin-obsessed Nerd-LLM at the helm of this whole thing.

And then the goblins escaped the persona.

Mention rates rose at nearly the same proportion in samples generated without the Nerdy persona, because rewarded Nerdy outputs were getting recycled into supervised fine-tuning data—at which point the tic started being a default behavior of the underlying system. An audit of GPT-5.5’s fine-tuning data turned up the whole adjacent menagerie that had hitched a ride: raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons. An entire enchanted forest.

OpenAI killed the offending reward in March and pulled the affected vocabulary out of training data, but GPT-5.5 was already cooking. By the time it landed in Codex, employees noticed the goblins immediately, which is why the aforementioned prohibition is in the prompt. The OpenAI post from Wednesday night even shares the bash command that disables the goblin-suppression line and unlocks the bestiary, if you want to liberate ChatGPT’s goblin mode.

Ultimately, the gradient that was rewarding the goblins got identified and patched, and OpenAI came out of it knowing more about how stylistic tics propagate through training pipelines than it did going in.

What the company’s account doesn’t quite explain, however, is the specificity. When the model was rewarded for being weird and playful, it didn’t drift toward a random selection of mythological vocabulary. It went for the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects. There are, ostensibly, unicorns, dragons, demons, and angels in the training data too.

And yet, the model became fixated on goblins.

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CHOREOGRAPHY

PHOTOGRAPHY

On light

Patrick Nathan on James Salter, Paris puddles, and photography as “an event of light.”

Nothing to See Here

— in

Seven months ago, I was tan and thin and very lonely, writing essays in a laughably unaffordable apartment in the bougiest part of Lisbon. Today, for the first time in two decades, I live in the suburbs. I’m someone who drives twenty-nine miles to an office, who eats too much Chinese food, who listens to podcasts, who lifts weights once or twice a week, who cooks dinner for friends, and who reads for about three and a half minutes every evening before falling asleep. The situation is both blissful and dire; it feels like living in cellophane, shimmer and all.

To try to recalibrate, I reached for a favorite novel. In Light Years, [James] Salter damns a minor character with ruthless efficiency: “His eyes were spent, they had nothing in them.” Later, after the couple at the center of the novel has divorced, Viri moves to Rome and meets another woman. What starts as romance—an architect, after all, here to devour the Eternal City, falling in love anew—soon “hardens to intractable life.” Living in Rome, Viri realizes, is not like living alongside the Hudson: “He stood beside [Lia] as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun.”

Among all the beauty in Italy, Viri too risks spending his eyes, depleting their capacity. Like the famous monuments that show up in tourist photographs, the idea of Rome occludes Viri’s view of it. He wants to see it but can’t, which recalls or rhymes with something Lia tells him—in one of my favorite passages from the novel—about happiness:

But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It’s very difficult to find. It’s like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there’s nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.

One sunny, listless afternoon, my husband turned to look at me. His eye, normally what people call “liquid brown,” met the light and wagon-wheeled with color: splinters of mahogany, tatters of aspen leaf, emerald shards, sandstone flecks, the sullied marble of petrified wood. It was over in a second, of course—it’s too painful for anyone to be lit up so nakedly—but I couldn’t forget it. Later, I recalled Hervé Guibert’s intimation of what a photograph is: “an event of light.” The eye was waiting for me to see it, which gave me a strange, triangulating thought: I am justified in noticing this.

Part of what makes photography a surrealist enterprise is its democratization; there’s nothing elitist or aristocratic in a camera’s attention. In Image Control, I wrote about this in relation to Francesca Woodman’s photographs, in which objects,

human and not, get spilled on by light; a rectangle from a window stretches across the floor, bisecting warped and wrinkled leaves of wallpaper that have curled onto the floorboards. A little pane of glass intensifies the light upon Woodman’s fingers, visually slicing them at the knuckle. These objects, bodies included, remind us just how dramatically light can change a thing, how it bestows another side, another use, even another meaning. All objects are treated the same, given the same importance; all are worthy of, or deprived of, the gift of light.

If anything, objects of great, undisputed beauty—cathedrals and paintings, the art nouveau Metropolitain signs in Paris, crates of produce in French markets, the Palace at Sintra, St. Mark’s—can easily occlude or disrupt the event of light; instead of objects, they become subjects. They reframe the photograph as a document or as evidence, which is largely the imperialist project of Instagram: I was here, I saw this, I took this, it’s mine.

Let me tell you a secret about the most beautiful city in the world. Paris is wet. Even in summer it rains often, and the cobblestone streets and sidewalks funnel it, channel it, entrap it; it sits cupped there, handful after handful held out to you on every block. The Haussmann buildings sit shrunken in it, creased and off kilter. Light trembles at each diagonal corner; at night, the Place Pigalle is a black pool of incandescent eels. I have a hard time believing that Impressionism would have happened without all this water, not to mention the city’s long lineage of street photography. Puddles literally invite reflection, and in thousands of paintings and photographs we see Paris looking at itself, thinking about itself. It’s an intimate way of looking at a city, as if on every corner we catch it in this moment of self regard, and that is what makes Paris’s beauty feel so personal—as opposed to monumental. Like Salter’s girls at communion, its face is forever upturned, ready for light.

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COMIC

FILM THEORY

“It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine of infanticide, murder, and incest”

Alexander Kaplan, who relates to Mark Zuckerberg more than he’d like to, on what The Social Network shares with Oedipus Rex.

The Tragic Irony of The Social Network

— in

If you’ve never seen the first five minutes of The Social Network, you’re missing out.

I don’t think you can fully understand this scene without understanding the different types of irony.

There’s verbal irony: that’s the one everybody knows. There’s also dramatic irony, in which the audience possesses knowledge the characters lack. And then there’s tragic irony. It’s very similar to dramatic irony, but here the lack of information itself is the cause of the tragic event. To turn Hitchcock’s example into tragic irony, imagine the bomb only goes off if a character says, “I’m certain there’s no bomb in here.” There’s also cosmic irony and romantic irony and a dozen nuanced variations on all of the above, but tragic irony is what we’re interested in today.

The best example—and we’ll get to The Social Network soon, I swear—is the story of Oedipus. You know how it goes. King Laius and Queen Jocasta, struggling with infertility, consult the Oracle at Delphi, who proclaims King Laius will one day be murdered by his son. (Whomp, whomp, whomp, waaaaaaaaa.) Soon enough Queen Jocasta gives birth, and, in a vain attempt to save himself, King Laius orders his son to be abandoned on a mountainside (an apparently common practice in ancient Greece). But the servant, less of a sociopath than the king, can’t go through with it, so he passes the baby to a shepherd who passes the baby to a shepherd who passes the baby to the King and Queen of Corinth. They raise it as their own, and, after reaching maturity, Oedipus visits the Oracle himself. She tells him he will murder his father and have sex with his mother, and soon enough he does, since he’s misinformed about who they actually are. Years later a plague of infertility strikes Thebes and the Oracle—who by this point is giving off real “Ain’t-I-a-stinker?” vibes—says it will only end when the man who murdered King Laius is brought to justice. Oedipus takes on the challenge and unknowingly vows vengeance upon himself. Yikes.

What I love about this is how King Laius, in trying to avoid his fate, sets in motion the events that ensure his fate. There’s something perversely satisfying about the structure. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine of infanticide, murder, and incest.

So finally—finally—we can get back to those first five minutes of The Social Network.

You know, I once told a group of students I loved this movie and they burst out laughing. None of them had seen it, I’m a nerdy enough guy, and they thought I saw myself as Mark Zuckerberg on some sort of hero’s journey. But the thing is—and please don’t take this out of context—I do relate to the Mark Zuckerberg of this movie.

You see, we both have an inferiority complex.

That psychological detail underpins every scene, every action, every line of dialogue: Mark has no self-esteem, so he needs external validation, so he is desperate—just achingly, sweatily, desperately desperate—to become one of the beautiful people. That explains his obsession with getting into a final club, and it explains everything else. Just look at the opening lines:

MARK: Do you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?

ERICA: That can’t possibly be true.

MARK: It is.

ERICA: What would account for that?

MARK: Well, first, an awful lot of people live in China, but … here’s my question: how do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SATs?

The insecurity, the need to “distinguish yourself,” the humble-bragging: it’s all there.

The movie doesn’t explain where this personality defect comes from, which is for the best: I don’t need some cheesy scene of ten-year-old Mark getting ignored by a distant father. It’s just who he is. In fact, the movie doesn’t even explain why Mark wants to achieve his goals. There’s a generic “fame and fortune” angle, but it’s obviously an afterthought:

ERICA: Is it true that [the final clubs] send a bus around to pick up girls who want to party with the next Fed chairman?

MARK: So you can see why it’s so important to get in.

Jesus, Mark. The correct response—to your girlfriend—is, “Gross, right?” And yet, Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be the next Fed chairman or to party with hot girls. He wants external validation. Go back to 2:58 and listen to how Jesse Eisenberg delivers this next exchange: you can tell he really means it when he says he wants to get into the clubs “Because they’re exclusive”—which is about as close to circular reasoning as you can get—before unconvincingly tacking on the reasons a sane person might give.

MARK: I’m just saying I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs.

ERICA: Why?

MARK: Because they’re exclusive. And fun. And they lead to a better life.

And the thing that really hurts—the bitter icing on this pathetic cake—is that Mark could be one of the beautiful people if he didn’t want to be one of the beautiful people. They look at him and see a needy little go-getter who never learned you aren’t supposed to be so obvious about things. It breaks my heart. Zuckerberg is an asshole, and it breaks my heart all the same.

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MISNOMER

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, the Chicago chef and co-owner of the Alinea Group, has started a Substack. In his first post, he questions the next step of a successful restaurant: “do you become a museum of yourself, honoring the past with reverence and precision, or do you start again?”

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Alas, we missed the crying. Jacqueline led us around her building to a patio cluttered with furniture, tools, and a stray remote control, saying she had intentionally left the place as-is, and that maybe she could clean up for us on camera—a bid for realism and vulnerability that felt especially refreshing in Hollywood. She proceeded to give us a tour of every inch of the patio, which wound up being a tour of her mind too.

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Tune in next week for the final installment of Someone on Film, Los Angeles.

This week, we’re contemplating the literary bona fides of Reddit, raising a glass, putting a premium on humanity, and recovering on an Amish farm.

LITERATURE

“Reading AITA posts is something like reading the penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century”

Isaac Kolding makes the case that the most-read short fiction of our era is on Reddit, where millions of readers weigh in on “Am I the Asshole” posts—stories of dubious truth, all “about middle-class manners.”

The Kind of Short Stories People Really Want to Read

— in

The prestigious short story—the sort of thing published in Ploughshares or The New Yorker—is not particularly popular these days. But this doesn’t mean that short fiction itself is not a major source of pleasure for many millions of people. “Short stories” is a much broader category than “literary fiction short stories,” so we must look outside of the relatively marginal high-literary world if we want to know how large audiences—audiences much larger than the readership of every existing literary magazine put together, as far as I can tell—want to be pleased by the written word.

The literary genres that maintain their popularity now are not the sort of thing that most literature professors would want to spend much time on: science fiction stories, fanfiction, and litRPGs, for example. But if I had to choose the most popular kind of short story today, I would choose that old Reddit chestnut, the “am I the asshole?” (AITA) post. For the uninitiated, the genre works like this: the original poster (OP) describes a scenario in their life where they have been accused of treating someone else poorly. They appeal to their audience of readers, who render a verdict on whether this person is the “asshole” in the situation.

Reading AITA posts is something like reading the penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century. It is a mass-market product that reveals the preferences of large reading audiences. There are multiple AITA-style subreddits (/r/AmITheAsshole, /r/AITAH, /r/AmITheJerk, and more) that have millions of weekly visitors; it seems clear to me that AITA posts are at least a significant representation of the kind of stories that people want to read.

You may object to my designating AITA posts as “short stories.” Aren’t some of these stories true? Almost certainly, yes, although it’s just as obvious that many are false. If these stories were avowedly fictive, they wouldn’t be nearly as popular. They get a special zing from the fact that they might be true, and the attempt on the part of commenters to identify and condemn fiction is one of the key pleasures of consuming this sort of fiction. For any reasonably skeptical reader, the AITA story exists in a limbo between fact and fiction.

But I still think it makes sense to consider them short stories. They are avowedly not journalistic, and they’re all about middle-class manners, one of prose fiction’s most enduring themes. And anyway, the line between fiction (invented, not-true) and nonfiction (discovered, true) has never been that solid. In the early nineteenth century, the word “novel” was quite capacious; the Irish priest Edward Mangin, writing in 1808, said, “The word novel is a generical term; of which romances, histories, memoirs, letters, tales, lives [biographies], and adventures are the species.” Readers often believed that the novels they read were literally true. From nineteenth-century novels to reality television to autofiction to films that claim to be “Based on a True Story,” imaginative works have long given themselves a little extra juice by being, or pretending to be, at least partially real. AITA posts are a part of this long, sometimes-august tradition of chicanery, hoaxing, foolery, and lies (and, every once in a while, truths). Regardless of their truth-value, they are stories, and they can be analyzed like stories. So that’s what I’ve done.

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PORTRAIT

CULTURE

Temperance 2.0

Hannah Williams on sober influencers as the new teetotalers: “the starched black dress replaced by seal-smooth athleisure, the sarsaparilla turned to matcha latte.”

On Drinking

— in

I love alcohol. I love the taste of it, I love the way it makes me feel. Not all alcohol, of course, and not all times, but nevertheless I love it in many forms: a pint of lager in a beer garden on a summer’s day, hands slick and cool with condensation; a glass of orange wine the colour of bruised apricots at the wine shop after work on a Friday. A nightcap of Benedictine at my parents’ house. Cheap sangria on holiday, staining my teeth. Alcohol, in varying quantities, has been the accompaniment to many of my fondest memories, spent with friends and family and partners. I rarely drink on my own; for me, it is almost entirely a social joy, practised in pubs and dive bars and Spanish bodegas and sat by the beach and crowded tight around friends’ kitchen tables.

It seems odd, though, to declare that you love it. To do so seems to signal that your relationship with it is worrying, that you rely on it, perhaps, or that you like it a little too much. That you can’t stop, that you’re an alcoholic. A cottage industry around this idea has gained traction in the last couple of years, propagated by the snapping fingers and snake-charmer sway of front-facing video influencers, as well as by a glut of articles that scold our English drinking habits, that extol sobriety and tut at those who choose to let the devil’s nectar pass their lips. These often have a specific tone, a hybrid of poor-dears paternalism (they know not what they do!) and haughty moralism.

This isn’t a phenomenon that exists only online: while sales of alcohol-free beers have surged, alcohol consumption in Britain is at a record low. Obviously, there may be other factors for this, shifting demographics, religious abstentions. But anecdotally, several of my friends have recently told me they’re quitting drinking altogether, or for an indeterminate period of time; though I have friends who were alcoholics and are now sober, the latest set have never had a problem with it.

There are many reasons, of course, why people might want to give up booze. And there are many people for whom drinking is wholly negative, a form of self-harm that can and does lead only to ruin. But it’s striking to me how often I now see anti-drinking sentiment, and that it comes at this specific societal moment: one of relentless self-optimisation and purity, and one where the boundary between the online and offline worlds has disintegrated.

Recently, I was served an extremely popular video about what makes someone an alcoholic. The video is captioned “everything I would tell you about alcoholism and addiction if I wasn’t afraid to hurt your feelings”, and its author (star? producer?), the “sober influencer”, is Neva Coleman. She is flawlessly made-up, expensively blonde, injected and whitened and polished in a way that used to be reserved for flagship TV anchors and is now an essential part of appearing on a phone screen.

[...]

There is a whiff of the old temperance movement about the sober influencing, albeit dressed up in the consumerist decadence of 2026, the starched black dress replaced by seal-smooth athleisure, the sarsaparilla turned to matcha latte. Drinking is not productive. It is money spent without clear return. And there is something in it of the uncontrollable, of the imperfect, of wine-rimed lips and voices a little too loud.

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THE ART AND SCIENCE OF FERMENTATION

ECONOMICS

The human touch

Why Starbucks is rolling back automation, why an Armani suit costs what it does, and what both might tell us about the post-AI economy.

What will be scarce?

— in

Starbucks is a huge company (market cap of $112 billion) that sells one of the most standardized products in the modern economy. Making a cup of coffee or even one of the fancy specialty drinks is very easy to mechanize and reproduce. If the entire economy is soon to be automated, with labor being replaced with increasingly more sophisticated capital, Starbucks should be a canary in the coal mine—the technology for removing labor from its stores and replacing it with automated capital has been around for years. Over the past few years, Starbucks has done exactly that: in efforts to increase thin margins, management has automated more and more of the coffee-making business and instituted tightly mechanized processes for delivering it to customers. But instead of increasing automation, the opposite has happened. After trying to streamline the store experience with fewer workers and more automation, the company concluded that this had been a mistake. CEO Brian Niccol said that “handwritten notes on cups’’, ceramic cups, and “the return of great seats’’ had led more customers to “sit and stay in our cafes’’, showing that “small details and hospitality drive satisfaction.’’ More baristas are being hired per store and automation is being rolled back.

Economics is the study of decision-making under constraints, i.e., scarcity. If advanced AI brings material abundance—if machines can produce many if not all forms of human production at very low marginal cost—does economics become irrelevant? No, we will still have scarcity, but the kind of scarcity that matters will change. Ultimately the answer to any question about the future economics of advanced AI begins with identifying what becomes scarce. After answering that question, the rest of the analysis is pretty straightforward. In this essay I’m going to explore what becomes scarce when automation can replicate many if not all human production, and what that may mean for the types of jobs that emerge.

Before industrialization, it was difficult to separate a product from the person who made it. The weaver who made your shirt, the baker who made your bread: you personally knew them, and their skill and reputation were tied to the product that they sold. Economic transactions had a distinct social component that was innately linked to the consumption experience. The industrial production process changed this by breaking craft into standardized, repeatable steps. Performed by workers based on predetermined and regularized steps, capitalism produced something new: the commodity form, in which a product’s value lies in the product itself, detached from whoever made it. A table is a table, a phone is a phone. The screen that you’re reading this essay on was designed in one country, manufactured in another, using components from around the world. But none of this matters for the experience of buying and using the device.

Marx described this process in intentionally loaded language. The commodity form, he argued, was built on exploitation: the ability to pay workers less than the value of what they produce. They were able to do this because the capitalist production process was based on alienation: severing workers from the product of their labor, from the process of making it, and ultimately from each other. What had once been a person’s craft became abstract “labor power,’’ a factor of production to be bought and sold like raw materials. Marx saw this as capitalism’s deepest pathology. But to economists, and to the world writ large, the commodity form was an engine of extraordinary prosperity. If production was no longer tied to specific people, it could be disaggregated, reorganized, shipped across oceans, and scaled in ways that turned few resources into vast riches. Both things were true at once: the commodity form created enormous wealth and prosperity, but it made the human behind any specific product invisible, and ultimately, replaceable.

This is most people’s mental model of what AI will do to the economy. If a machine can produce anything a human can, write the brief, generate the image, compose the song, determine the diagnosis from a radiology scan, then the human will be replaced across all facets of production and jobs will simply disappear. Labor will be replaced with capital. David Autor and Neil Thompson push back on this in an important recent paper. They argue that AI won’t simply eliminate jobs; it will reshape the economic value of human expertise. Their framework distinguishes between expert and inexpert tasks within any given occupation. When automation removes the simpler tasks (as accounting software did for bookkeeping clerks), the remaining work becomes more specialized, wages rise, and fewer workers qualify. When it removes the harder tasks (as inventory management systems did for warehouse workers), the job becomes more accessible, employment expands, and wages fall. Same technology, opposite labor market outcomes, depending on which part of the job gets automated.

But Autor and Thompson also consider a starker possibility: that AI advances to the point where human expertise loses its economic value altogether. Under this scenario, AI will eliminate labor scarcity and produce what Herbert Simon once called “intolerable abundance.’’ Automation of production will no longer involve managing a workforce transition, for which we have prior episodes of automation to rely on. We will need tools to maintain social organization, income distribution, and democratic stability without the labor market that has historically held these together.

I want to consider a different scenario, one where automation can replicate human production and the commodities that it produces (a big if!!!) but human labor does not disappear. How could this be the case? A lot of analysis takes the economy as a given: there is a set of jobs and a set of goods/services produced by the economy. If the same set of goods/services can be produced by cheaper machines, then these machines replace humans and the jobs disappear. But the economics of structural change, combined with deep-seated features of human preferences, suggests something different: as people get richer, they don’t just want more commodities. They want things that aren’t commodities in the standard sense of the word. The social aspects of products such as the relationships, the status, and exclusivity—what René Girard called the mimetic properties of desire—become much more relevant once people’s basic needs are satisfied. And the demand for these properties will bring the human element back into the production process and, with it, the jobs.

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CHAIR JUSTICE

INTERVIEW

Career path

Lily Montasser talks to a bartender whose path to working in “one of the priciest hotel lobby bars in New York” runs through a house fire, an Amish community, and the “fuck you money” of Aspen.

Confessions of an Upper East Side Bartender

— in

AARON: I love New York. But working in Aspen, to be honest, kind of ruined me. I’ve been to forty-three countries. I’ve worked in eight. I think about Aspen almost every day of my life.

LILY: Wait, why? The beauty?

AARON: Aspen is white money.

LILY: Oh!

AARON: Aspen is American white money. People don’t give a shit about how much their food is, they don’t care, they will spend it to have fun. It’s fuck you money. I couldn’t get enough of it. I was like, this is where I belong.

LILY: I’m curious what about that resonated with you?

AARON: That’s so interesting. Why does it resonate? I grew up with nothing. I’m not a bougie person. I don’t wear designer brands. Maybe it’s because I got a taste of something I’m not used to. It’s so intriguing to me because I would never spend fifteen grand to spray a bottle of Ace of Spades. I’ve watched that happen, and to me it’s disgusting. But it’s also like, how? How do you do this?

LILY: Ha, makes sense. The bar you work at now in New York is definitely “fuck you money” too, no? That place is insane. I felt like when I got there, we locked eyes, and I was like, we’re the only sane people in this room.

AARON: No, straight up.

LILY: So how did you get into bartending? Let’s hear your story.

AARON: I was born to Middle Eastern immigrants. The area I grew up in on the East Coast was predominantly black. It was pretty hood. I came from a very religious household. I was just the black sheep. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be a badass, this bad boy.

LILY: Where do you think that rebellion stemmed from, do you know?

AARON: When something is pushed on you, coming from a religious background, you’re more curious. When someone tells you no, you’re like, well, why? I was a volunteer firefighter for four years. I loved it. Every aspect of helping people. Seeing all this crazy stuff. Saving people. I had this Superman complex. But I got injured pretty badly. I got caught in a house fire.

LILY: What?

AARON: Yeah, I have third-degree burns on both my legs.

LILY: Was your suit on?

AARON: I didn’t have my suit on. That was that Superman complex. As a volunteer, you’re supposed to fall back and watch the guys do their thing. I just wanted to save someone so bad.

LILY: That’s kind of metaphorical in a way.

AARON: Right?

LILY: That’s what you get for trying to be a hero.

AARON: Yeah, so it changed my life. I felt like I wasn’t going to recover. They made me feel pretty bad. They said I might not walk.

LILY: Wow. How old were you?

AARON: Twenty-one. The human body is so fragile and at the same time so unbelievably resilient. So I recovered. After that, there’s this Amish community program where you live with them for weeks at a time—

LILY: Sorry, what? You went to live with the Amish?

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COOKING MUSIC

Substackers featured in this edition

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Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

Tennis star has launched a Substack to accompany her new podcast, . Here, she’ll “share essays reflecting on the breakthroughs and setbacks that have shaped my views of success and failure, notes on why each woman who sits down with me in the studio is Pretty Tough in their own right, and live Q&As that give you a glimpse into my thinking around health and wellness, business, fitness, self-improvement, discipline, and more.”

, the host of The Big Picture podcast and frequent contributor to The Rewatchables podcast, has launched , “a newsletter about movies, Hollywood, filmmaking, the state of the art, physical media, stardom, paranoia, joy, and how we see what we’re seeing.”

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Anna hadn’t planned on becoming a TikTok star. But while getting her master’s in film and TV production, she and her classmates started experimenting with ways of documenting their lives that would actually resonate with an audience. It worked.

The forecast called for rain—not ideal for a sunset shoot in L.A. But overcast weather on 16mm film has its own kind of beauty, so we stayed optimistic. As luck would have it, the rain held off and the sun peeked out just as we arrived. Anna emerged from her car in a bright red outfit, a nice contrast to the pale blue sky. We got to tag along on her weekly run, weaving through the crowds of Venice Beach while she talked about the joy of running a marathon, trying to be someone her younger self would look up to, and the importance of knowing when to turn off the camera and just be in the moment.

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Tune in next week for another episode of Someone on Film.

This week, we’re sailing on a “Chuck E. Cheese for sex,” advising the lovelorn, contemplating literacy, and admiring a parenthesis.

JOURNALISM

Cruising

Camille Sojit Pejcha reports back from a swingers’ cruise in this NSFW, David Foster Wallace–by-way-of-Playboy piece.

A Supposedly Sexy Thing I’ll Never Do Again

— in

For months, my phone has been pitching me adults-only vacations, probably because it overhears me talking about reporting on sex parties and then about needing a vacation from reporting on sex parties. I’d been clicking away from these ads, mildly bemused, until one day, in late October, I woke up to a text from Playboy: Did I want to go on a swingers’ cruise called Temptation, and would these dates work? I’ve never said yes to anything so fast.

Billed as “a playground for grown-ups,” Temptation offers a city on the water: a fully chartered 13-story cruise ship where guests can enjoy everything from air-conditioned casinos and breakfast buffets to fuck machines. The goal? Create an all-inclusive fantasy for American adults, spiriting them away from their worries and toward international waters, where they’ll be free to indulge in a level of hedonistic pleasure-seeking absent in everyday life. One friend of mine—who I learn is a swinger only when I tell him about this story—aptly describes such experiences as a “Chuck E. Cheese for sex.” Mario Cruz, Temptation’s programming director, prefers “spring break for adults.”

Over his six years overseeing Temptation’s cruises, Cruz has played host to NFL players, lawyers, the presidents of major universities, and, if the rumors are to be believed, more than a few celebrities. “In their private time, they’re just humans,” he explains. “Everyone has a private life; they fantasize about these things. We just give them a space to turn that fantasy into reality.”

Before embarkation day, I’d expected being one of the only solo women on board would grant me the status of a minor celebrity. “People are going to be lining up to make you their unicorn,” my friends assured, predicting a profusion of threesome proposals. But at the Port of Miami, where I wait patiently in line to board the Norwegian Jewel, this is not the case. Instead, I spend the first hour and a half of my journey inching my luggage forward, surrounded by muscle-bound men with religious tattoos, Miami housewives with fake lashes and perfectly plumped lips, and tanned blondes lugging beach totes adorned with cheesy phrases like “Sea You Later.” Everyone is so grumpy that, for a minute, I even question if I’m in the right line.

I needn’t have worried. “When they’re waiting to board, they’re still in the outside world,” Cruz later tells me, describing the peculiar transformation that happens when people cross the ship’s threshold. The sea, I realize, is a liminal space, where the boundaries and norms of everyday life no longer apply. This is a metaphor, but also literally true: When at sea, the pool deck and balconies are clothing-optional, but everyone has to button up when the boat docks.

Now that we’re on board, everyone seems 10 times more outgoing, happy, and naked than they were before. And by the time I make my way to the Sapphire pool deck, I get the sense that I’m late to the party—one populated by 500 couples slathered in sunscreen and buoyed by the Black Eyed Peas blasting through the speakers. I haven’t been on a ship since a fifth-grade field trip, and the Norwegian Jewel, with its 16 restaurants and numerous swimming pools, is more than I was bargaining for.

Temptation charters the whole ship, hiring not only the Norwegian’s team but a group of sexologists, entertainers, and DJs to offer on-site activities ranging from workshops on anal pleasure to massage for sciatica.

In the coming days, there will be pamper parties and acupuncture, beer pong and belly dancing classes, body shots and sensual fitness sessions, and, in one case, a meet and greet that devolves into couples miming various sex positions. I will be lent prescription anti-nausea patches by not one but two different DJs, gifted peach-flavored lube, and offered a loofah with an elderly couple’s phone number Sharpie’d onto it—which, I later learn, is a common mode of communication for swingers in Florida’s retirement community.

But I don’t know any of this yet, and my first night on the ship, which also happens to be the eve of my 31st birthday, passes in a blur. By 7 p.m., I’m eating oxtail stew at a restaurant at the aft of the ship as Moe, a Floridian DJ who works for Temptation, explains the nuances of pickup artistry. “Think about it: You wouldn’t ask a fish how to catch a fish,” he says. “You ask a fisherman.” He pauses. “You’re the fish.”

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PORTRAITURE

ADVICE

Lena Dunham, agony aunt

It should come as no surprise that Lena Dunham is uniquely well-suited to counseling heartbroken 17-year-olds.

Dunhamisms Issue #1

— in

Hi Lena! I feel a little silly putting this into the public void and you totally do not have to answer however since I am only 17 and therefore cannot DM anyone on substack and I feel the need to expand on what I submitted from your Instagram story, the public void it must be! My big query is about love - why do things we think are romantic turn out not to be? For context, I (a gay 17 year old boy) had a big crush on someone in my friendship group and was 1000% sure he liked me back based on his actions, words, etc. Anyway long story short I ended up asking this guy out and he said... no! I was upset, a little angry, but mostly confused. And while this is great material for my upcoming pop-rock debut album, I am left wondering how do you make sense of situations where something feels real and mutual and it turns out not to be? - and how do you trust yourself after that? p.s. ily and am SO excited for my signed copy of Famesick to arrive!

Signed, Giles

Giles! You had me at “I’m 17 and therefore cannot DM anyone on Substack.”

Firstly, I’m so sorry that your crush didn’t “go your way” as they say in Hollywood when we lose out on a job. It was really brave and noble of you to make your intentions clear, and to accept a “no” is also brave and noble. It hurts and yes, you’re allowed to be disappointed, mad even. But adulthood will involve many kinds of no’s, many shades and shadows and flavors of disappointment, and they’re not a bad thing to learn about early, to process and integrate and move past.

Because your life will also involve many “yeses.” You will be accepted to schools, jobs, parties and you will even fall in love. And when you do, you will know—really beyond a shadow of a doubt—how it’s different than these earlier experiences of nebulous romantic connection. I’m sure this guy you liked WAS sending you lots of green light go signals. I’m sure he was flirty and playful and really enjoyed your company, because you’re clearly very witty and I for one cannot wait for your pop rock debut (might I suggest the stage name “gileless”? Tell people the lack of capitalization is a choice. My choice). Why he was giving you all these vibes and then not actually down to date is mostly and usually not about you. Being seventeen is a hormonal torture chamber and all you do is get in your own way. I once liked a boy a LOT and we kissed during a free period and less than an hour later I stormed up to him and said “we can NEVER do that again” (we did, three years later and then five years after that, because what goes around really does come around—and he got his vengeance by asking me for taxi fare about seven minutes after I’d performed a fairly vulnerable sexual act for the first time). But why did I tell him to get lost, when I’d actually felt a frisson of something rare and pleasurable when he put his peach fuzz mustache on my previously untouched neck? Because the feelings were new, and therefore terrifying, and it felt like falling down a void. It felt like loss of control. It felt like changing in real time, and I wasn’t ready.

But you are going to encounter many people who are ready—some you will meet with all the force of two magnets snapping together in a science demo. Some you will confuse and maybe even hurt, just like this boy confused and hurt you. You may leave them heartbroken and never even know it. And some will last for an hour at a party and give you a pep in your step for the next month. You sound like a curious, engaged person, and curious and engaged people draw experiences, dynamics, dare I say energy, toward them. Pump this song if you need a reminder.

You asked how you trust yourself after this false start and the answer is that in love, it’s all we’ve got. I remember the first time I kissed my husband—we’d been holding hands for a charged thirty minutes—he took a moment to really kiss me back. And for that moment, some old dread shot through me like bad drugs: “he’s repulsed, he’s horrified, I read it all wrong.” But he’s just sort of a lizard boy, and he moves with reptilian calm, and after a beat he was there, right with me, letting me know we were feeling the same thing.

And very soon, you and someone else will feel the same thing. It will probably be the wildest and most intoxicating thing you’ve ever experienced, and it will also have moments of conflict and confusion. Listen. Be open. And also trust yourself if you feel you’re not being treated like the precious little faberge egg you—and all of us—are. As long as you stay connected to that essential instinct we all have, but so often beat out of ourselves, you’ll know when to stay, you’ll know when to go, you’ll know when to lean in for the kiss.

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A DAY IN THE LIFE

LITERACY

This is your brain on words

Sam Kriss on the unexpected ways reading reshapes the brain, and what a post-literate future might look like.

Reading is magic

— in

In 1931, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria traveled to the foothills of the Alai Mountains, in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, to find out how the locals thought. He was trying to prove the theory that ‘mental processes are social and historical in origin’: that not just the content of our thoughts, but the way we think, is determined by the kind of society we live in. The society he found in the Alais was very different to his own. In the dry hills, illiterate pastoralists kept cattle; in the isolated green valleys jeweling the hillsides, illiterate peasants grew cotton. For centuries, essentially no one here had been able to read or write. But that was changing. When Luria arrived, the Soviet government was busy forcing herders and peasants into new, regimented collective farms, where large numbers of rural people were being taught, for the first time, to read. He spent the next year among these people, bothering them with a series of annoying tests.

What Luria found was that just a few years of basic literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects. In one of his early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures. Complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles drawn with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group the shapes together. Even if they didn’t have any training in geometry, nearly half of the peasants who’d learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically: squares with other squares, circles with other circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all; they related them to objects.

One subject, Khamid, a 24-year-old woman from an isolated village, insisted that nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle. ‘That should go by itself. That’s the Moon.’ When Luria tried to suggest that she group a square and a rectangle, she refused. ‘That’s a glass and that’s a drinking-bowl, they can’t be put together.’ Other subjects described the shapes as tents, bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.

When sorting objects, collective farm workers put a saw with a hammer, because they’re both tools, while peasants put a saw with a log. ‘The log has to be here too! If we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.’ Luria tried presenting them with syllogisms. ‘In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?’ Every single person who had received any literacy education at all, even the ones Luria described as ‘barely literate,’ could easily answer. But people who hadn’t been exposed to the written word simply refused.

They consistently explained that since they’d never been to Novaya Zemlya, they couldn’t say what kind of bears they had there. One middle-aged villager called Rustam said that ‘If there was someone who had a great deal of experience and had been everywhere, he would do well to answer the question.’ Eventually, after repeated prodding, he said that while he’d never personally been to Siberia, ‘Tadzhibai-aka who died last year was there. He said that there were bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.’ Others, like thirty-seven-year-old Abdulrakhim, grew angry. ‘I’ve never seen one and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything!’

The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’

Luria took pains to point out that these people weren’t remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make ‘excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them.’ But they lived in an incredibly conservative world, with its walls closed tight around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories, where you can talk confidently about invisible bears and measure distances even when they’re going the wrong way. But what we think of as politics seems to depend on this stuff, and revolutionary politics in particular. The lived experience of poverty or oppression isn’t enough; you need to be able to situate your own life in terms of something bigger, and imagine an entirely separate way of living that doesn’t currently exist. In 1919, launching the Soviet mass literacy program, Lenin had declared that ‘without literacy, there can be no politics. There can only be rumours, gossip, and prejudice.’ Any transformative politics is, in some sense, the art of solving a problem even when it isn’t so.

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EPHEMERA

ART

Hockney vs. Rothko

David Hockney, it turns out, is no fan of abstract paintings. In his new show, he includes a Rothko-esque canvas above a table: “‘I did that,’ explains Hockney, ‘because they made a book of Rothko’s paintings and when you see a whole book … Well, Francis Bacon said when he committed suicide, ‘I’m surprised it took so long.”’ Here, Carter Ratcliff considers the supposed meaninglessness of abstract art.

What’s David Hockney’s Beef with Abstraction, Anyway?

— in

Whenever I puzzle at length about the meaning of abstraction I return to a moment when I was standing in a grade school cafeteria looking up at a blackboard. I was in kindergarten and still figuring out the function of things like parentheses. On the blackboard a left-hand parenthesis curved across its large surface. I could see how it framed a list of menu items. More than that, I saw how beautiful it was. This judgment was not the upshot of a detached formal analysis. I had sensed the grace and confidence of the gesture that produced the parenthesis. Its beauty brought to mind the idea of a graceful person—or our neighbor’s Irish Setter, whose inveterate leaping and twirling was wonderfully elegant. She didn’t just look beautiful. She had a beautiful, if frantic, way of being,

When we perceive creatures, objects, textures, spaces, and light we do not merely register facts. Our perceptions imbue the perceived thing with feelings, qualities, meanings. And this happens even when we can’t name what we are seeing or hearing or touching. Incapable of experiencing anything neutrally, we live in a world saturated with significance. So, if you let it happen, the interplay of form, color, and pictorial light in a maroon Rothko will draw you into a current of strong feelings and vast but elusive meanings. It may even persuade you that the human condition is timelessly tragic, especially if you have a personality as saturnine as Rothko’s. If not, the painting’s effect on you will be different. Only if you are dogmatically opposed to abstraction will you say that it has no effect and is therefore meaningless.

I don’t know why Hockney thinks abstraction is empty. I do know that the landscape paintings in his Serpentine North exhibition do not rely on subject matter for their value, as charming as his trees and hedgerows and half-timbered houses are. It is true that over the past century critics and curators have often favored abstraction over representation, a fact of art-world life that troubles Hockney. It’s also true that his paintings generate their deepest value from something they share with abstractions: the emotionally and intellectually lively relationships between their pictorial elements. For abstraction and representation are not utterly different from one another. They are different ways of realizing the same set of pictorial possibilities.

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POETRY

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Former New Statesman journalist has partnered with to launch , a new publication for progressive ideas and debate. There, they’ll be “addressing questions including how the centre left reinvents itself in an age of populism, how the UK escapes its post-2008 economic stagnation, how Britain rebuilds relations with the EU and how we harness AI for the common good.”

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The counterculture may have a reputation for open-mindedness, but that doesn’t always translate to a willingness to be captured on camera. But with Michelle Lhooq—a psychedelics and rave journalist investigating how counterculture is evolving—as our guide, doors started opening. We found ourselves welcomed to a “puppet rave” at an undisclosed location in downtown Los Angeles. But there was a catch: we’d have to act like we were part of the performance.

So we arrived early at a warehouse on which a sign read “Café Los Angelitos,” though it didn’t look like a café. People dressed in various renditions of crisp white shirts bustled around setting up instruments, running sound checks, and assembling the makeshift bar. The show was being put on by Poncili Creación, a Puerto Rican art collective known for its puppetry and performance art. One of the twin brothers behind Poncili sat our crew down and explained that we’d need to pretend we were running a restaurant out of the warehouse, and that we were there making a documentary about Michelle because we loved her so much. Easy enough.

As guests began arriving, we tried to get a sense of the crowd. L.A. art scene people, Michelle guessed. Dave exchanged contact information with a fellow owner of a Bolex film camera. Some guests went to the bar and ordered the “weed whacker,” a shot of tequila accompanied by a slap in the face with a leaf of romaine lettuce.

The show started. The twins got onstage—a garage door with a ramp into the warehouse—and started running around and shouting in a made-up language before stripping down to their underwear. And then the promised puppets appeared. But these weren’t puppets like we’d ever seen them: they were making strange sounds, caressing audience members, and being pulled from nearly every human orifice. We were, frankly, a little befuddled. And perhaps a little relieved when the dancing finally began.

For Michelle, events like this represent something more than a simple challenge to conventionality. “I think that raving is a kind of wisdom that lodges itself into your soul,” she told us, “and it’s up to you whether you choose to carry that forward or if you just think of it as purely a bubble of escapism.”

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Stay tuned for more episodes in the coming weeks.

This week, we’re speedboating through a war zone, stalking a swan, crowning a cinnamon gum champion, and shelling peas.

JOURNALISM

Into the Strait

This story of an anonymous Citrini analyst who sailed the Strait of Hormuz in the name of investment research has to be read to be believed. “Analyst #3 decided—against the counsel of an Omani border agent, the implicit counsel of God, and the extremely explicit counsel of two Coast Guard officers holding assault rifles—that he was going to the center of the most consequential waterway on earth, during a live war, in a speedboat with no GPS, captained by a man he met three hours ago at a port inlet by pulling out a wad of cash.”

Strait of Hormuz: A Citrini Field Trip

— in

Dubai is still, in many ways, Dubai—Cipriani is still popping (albeit less popping than pre-crisis), all bellinis and meringue—but as you drive toward the border with Oman the veneer peels off in stages. American soldiers where there used to be nothing, empty roads where there used to be traffic, and then a rickety desert crossing in the middle of nowhere that looks like it was built to process livestock and has been repurposed for humans.

I made the mistake of snapping a picture—so sleep-deprived I was just holding my phone up, very obviously, as if I were a tourist at a scenic overlook rather than a restricted military border zone. The guard stared at me with the expression of a man trying to decide whether the person in front of him is a threat or simply an idiot. “Did you just… take a picture?”

The UAE side had been fine—stamp, back in the car. The Omani side was not. I got directed into what I can only describe as the worst desert DMV on Earth: four Pakistanis drinking tea barefoot, running back and forth between windows with the efficiency of people who’ve been doing this for decades and would very much like to continue doing it without incident. I’m standing there in a snapback and American Apparel sweatpants. Everyone ahead of me sailed through—stamp, gone. I handed over my Western passport and the two guards looked at it, looked at each other with the kind of wordless communication that is never good for the person being looked at, and one of them said, wait one sec.

Ten minutes later a man came downstairs who starkly contrasted everyone else at the crossing—traditional Omani hat, pristine dress, the kind of person who smells expensive and speaks perfect English and is clearly operating several levels above the guys stamping passports. “Nice to meet you.” He pulled me into a back room with tea and began asking questions with the unhurried patience of someone who already knows most of the answers and is mainly interested in watching you try to construct the ones he doesn’t.

He asked for the names of my parents. Where they’re from. Where I work. Then, delivered with the same pleasant tone: “You understand the rules here against photography, journalism, and intelligence gathering.” He asked about allegiances, the war, Israel. I told him I love everyone and I’m a tourist. He asked about my religion.

“Are you Shia or Sunni? What kind of Muslim are you?

“A bad one. I had three drinks two hours ago.”

He made me sign the pledge—a formal prohibition against reporting, photography, and information gathering, with full legal consequences—and watched me actually read it, which seemed to make him more suspicious rather than less, because apparently the expected behavior when presented with a legal document at a desert checkpoint is to just sign it, and the fact that I was reading it suggested I was the kind of person who thought carefully about what he was agreeing to.

Then he said he’d look through my bags and asked if there was anything constituting recording equipment. The gimbal I could explain away. The Ray-Bans are sunglasses. But the microphone kit—furry windscreen, professional recording setup—that would end the trip before it started.

He opened the Pelican case. Cigars on top. I offered him one. He took it, nodded with what I interpreted as genuine appreciation, lifted one layer of sweatpants, and closed the case.

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PORTRAITS

WILDLIFE

Swan song

Jack Mankiewicz fell in love with New York’s Mandarin duck years ago. With a new exotic visitor in town, he sets out once more, hoping to feel that magic again—even if his knees are worse now.

Searching for the Trumpeter Swan

— in

I woke up last week with a pretzel hangover and an unaccountable shooting pain in my knee. Stretching it out didn’t work, so I grabbed my phone and read some horrifying tweets about the war, Jake Paul, and Jake Paul’s opinion about the war. For some reason, that wasn’t making me feel better either, but then a text message came in from my friend Emily: Happy for you Jack.

It was a link to an article—Behold NYC’s First-Ever Trumpeter Swan. I read it in gleeful disbelief. A swan had landed in the East River—not just any swan, but a Trumpeter Swan, a bird that, according to the Trumpeter Swan Society, had never been seen in New York City. Had I heard of the Trumpeter Swan before that moment? No. Did I have a deadline that day? Yes. But as I learned more—largest native waterfowl in North America! Call like a honking bugle! Canadian!—I made other plans.

I checked R/NycBirds, saw that the swan had last been spotted in North Williamsburg, and decided that the best course of action was to walk through Brooklyn Bridge Park and take the ferry there from Dumbo. I packed my binoculars and my remaining pretzels into a bag and walked out the door.

It was a stunningly gorgeous day, the first really good one after a punishing winter of blizzards and arctic freezes and streets lined with dirty piles of snow full of dog shit and losing lottery tickets. But that had all melted away. Today we were all winners.

I walked through the park, listening to the sounds of the birds in the trees and looking out at the Financial District glistening across the river. I was overcome with that feeling that I had not experienced in years—the sense that the city is a present, that it has been gift-wrapped for you and all that’s left is to tear open the paper and see what’s inside. As I was busy feeling this feeling I bumped into a small child on a scooter and knocked him over. But he was fine. The good omens were piling up.

I stood on top of the ferry, tingling with anticipation as the Brooklyn Bridge receded behind me, and I saw the majestic swan flying through my mind’s eye. The mist from the river swept across my face, and the years started sliding out from under me. I was no longer in my thirties. I was a 25-year-old in a world full of adventure and possibility. I was an explorer, with undiscovered lands glimmering in the distance. I was still on my dad’s health insurance. I felt buoyant, carbonated, young.

I stepped onto the pier, and immediately saw a big white bird lazily circling in the water. One look at the crowd told me it couldn’t be the swan I had spent the morning dreaming of. People sat on benches drinking Spindrift and businessmen in suits blew clouds of strawberry vape smoke into the air. There was none of the electric atmosphere that had trailed the Mandarin Duck. Nobody gave a shit about this bird.

He must be farther upriver, I thought. That’s good. I had steeled myself for this. A real journey. But before I could turn to find the real swan, the boring one floated towards me. This couldn’t be him. That’d be too easy. I googled Trumpeter Swan just to be sure and was faced with the damning piece of evidence. He had a black beak.

The Mandarin Duck had plumage that made you feel like you were hallucinating. Neon Purple, Burnt Orange, and Emerald, all shining from within as if he’d been painted by Vermeer. This swan had a black beak. Regular swans have orange beaks and this one’s was black. That was it. What the fuck?

“Okay, he’s still a swan. He’s still beautiful. This is amazing,” I lied to myself. But I had seen swans before. This didn’t feel much different. And then I remembered that in his very name could be the answer to my numbness—this was a “Trumpeter” swan after all, with a voice so famous that E.B. White wrote a damn book about it. How could I judge him without hearing his call? So I waited. And waited. And waited. The only sound I heard was the frantic zipping and unzipping of a finance bro’s vest as he nervously recited his boss’s Cava order back into the phone.

I looked across the water, and at two women on the opposite railing wearing all the trademark garb of the birder—beige vests, bucket hats, and much bigger binoculars than mine. This was what I needed to remind myself of what I was seeing. The validation of the bird community. This wasn’t supposed to be a superficial experience. I wasn’t there for looks. This was a once-in-a-lifetime moment, the first instance of the Trumpeter Swan in New York City. Surely these more experienced birders would not take that for granted. But I was nervous.

This is probably a good time to admit that when it comes to birding, as with other areas in my life, like eating fiber and parallel parking, I am a complete dilettante. I love the sensational birds, but I rarely put in the work to learn anything about the others. I’ll show up for the Super Bowl, but I’m never there for the regular season. The few times I’ve engaged serious birders by mentioning my love for the Mandarin Duck, they look at me like I’m wearing a Nirvana shirt and have only heard Smells Like Teen Spirit.

I sidled over to them, trying to be inconspicuous, not wanting to reveal my status as an interloper, a thief of valor within the bird community. The two women were having a hushed conversation, which I assumed was about the sheen of the swan’s feathers or migration patterns. I leaned in to eavesdrop.

“The Triads pretty much ruled Hong Kong during the ’80s. But my friend in the embassy told me they’re making a comeback.”

“Oh wow, I didn’t know that.”

I was confused. We were standing there, staring at a bird of seemingly mythical rarity, and these supposed enthusiasts were talking about Chinese gangs. Did anybody give a shit about what was going on here?

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CULT CLASSIC

POETRY

Strange

— in

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Clear to me now how I could be
So careless as to throw you away—
I simply, blindly chose to remain
The thing for which you fell: a boy

Needful to say, I failed to rise
To the occasion of a dawn
So early, fiery, bare, full-on
I pulled the sheets up, closed my eyes

Decades later, I lower my head
Over a crib; and God knows what
Stellar sparks would fly and shoot
If our strange children ever met

PHOTOGRAPHY

SNACKSCAPADES

Business candies

In which Liz Cook mourns the slow death of artificial cinnamon gum, and puts the brands that remain through rigorous testing.

The Cinnamon Gum Olympics

— in Haterade

I blame my love for artificial cinnamon flavoring on Northwest Iowa Tours.

My dad, a high school band director, spent his summers driving charter buses full of retirees to exotic places like Mt. Rushmore or Winnipeg. We needed the money—and sometimes, he got to take the family along.

I owe many things to that tour bus company, including my love for Midwest roadside attractions (old people have to stop to use the bathroom a lot). How many other 10-year-olds got to spend their summer vacation visiting the De Klomp Wooden Shoe Factory in Holland, Michigan?

But my fondest memories were of the cinnamon candies dad kept in his driving briefcase. Sometimes, they were Fire Jolly Ranchers. Often, sticks of Big Red chewing gum. The important thing was that they burned. When you’re piloting a 20-ton land frigate full of senior citizens, it is helpful to stay alert.

This unfortunately meant that I was not allowed to consume them on tour. They were business candies. It would have been like stealing the balancing pole from a tightrope walker. But at the end of every trip, dad would come home in his mint-green company oxford and matching polyester necktie and slide that briefcase under the daybed, where he assumed it was secure.

This is when I would strike.

In my mind, I was judicious—never taking so many that he’d notice they were missing. In reality, I think I left the wrappers behind, making it come off less like a heist than a threat. Try staying awake on I-35 now, old man.

My dad, it must be said, was using all that cinnamaldehyde for its intended purpose. Cinnamon is not a flavor for aesthetes. It is a flavor for dopamine chasers and chronic smokers—for people inured to subtlety, who need to be jostled just to feel. The highest achievement of a cinnamon candy is giving your taste buds a lingering chemical burn. It is, you will be unsurprised to hear, my favorite flavor.

It also seems to be dying out. The Cinnamon Fire Jolly Ranchers were discontinued in 2022. Gum manufacturers Orbit and Extra both dropped their cinnamon flavors within the last few years, and Mars Inc., which owns both, did not respond to my request for comment about why. (This is a predictable consequence of asking to interview people for a newsletter called “Haterade.” If I could do it over again, I’d call the newsletter something like “Brand Lover,” or “The Business-Friendly Times.”)

The Google Trends graph for “cinnamon gum” has been flat for 20 years, save a single spike in June 2025, when the New York Times crossword featured the clue “Brand of cinnamon-flavored chewing gum.” It’s a bad sign for Big Red that so many people had to Google the answer.

I’ve been doing my part. In an accidental (but loving) homage to my father, I’ve started chewing a pack of cinnamon gum a day whenever I’m on deadline, a habit that seems somehow more depraved and weak-willed than simply chain-smoking cigarettes. Until recently, I haven’t even been brand-loyal. I tend to buy whatever’s at the grocery store, knowing that I’m going to rip through it like a vulture with a carcass.

But with artificial cinnamon fading from the shelves, I figured it was time to take a more methodical approach—to harness my weak consumer power for the greatest preservational good.

It was time to mint a winner in the Cinnamon Gum Olympics.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

FOOD

How to eat a pea

A guide to enjoying one of spring’s simplest pleasures.

Spring Produce Mini-Series

— in

Spring peas—the kind that you’ll thumb from their pods—ought to be treated like a different species from the frozen kind. They’re less uniform in size and flavor, ranging from ladybug- to peanut-sized; from candy-sweet to vegetal. They’re poppably taut—never having suffered the rupture of their cell walls in freezing—and excellent eaten raw or barely cooked.

My favorite thing to do with them is nothing. I like to eat them on the way home from the farmers market like a bag of M&Ms, or put them in a bowl on the kitchen table for people to do the same. The moment they’re picked, their sugars start turning to starch, which is why they’re incomparably sweet when they’re fresh (and why you should eat them as soon as they’re yours).

You could use them in any recipe that calls for frozen peas, but I tend not to. You need to buy and pod such a volume to equal a bagful (a pound of pods gives you about a cup of peas). I prefer to use them sparingly and show them off.

How to choose your peas:

It’s usually a case of stuffing handfuls of pods into a bag rather than selecting individual ones, but avoid any that look dry, have white patches, or bloated areas. Their peas will be woolly and less sweet than greener, more evenly sized ones.

How to prep them:

Communally, outdoors. Hold a pod in one hand and pierce its seam with the thumb of the other. Run your thumb down the inside, pushing the peas into a bowl. If the peas are especially young, they won’t all line up on one side when you open the pod, so run your thumb down both sides. Save the pods to infuse stock (especially if you’re making Risi e Bisi Orzo or pea soup).

How to use them raw:

Raw peas belong in any spring salad with salty cheese, or alongside prosciutto or salami for a snack. If you’re putting them in a salad, dress them first before you layer them with other ingredients: season them in a bowl with salt, lemon juice, and olive oil. Roll them around and taste to get the seasoning right before tossing through leaves or anything else.

How to cook them:

Cook spring peas in unsalted water at a rollicking boil. After a minute or two, when they start to surface, taste a couple of the larger ones. There is a moment—I can’t tell you exactly when—that they go from tasting good to particularly good, possibly sweeter than when they were raw. Keep eating until you taste that transition, then add a handful of mint leaves, count to ten, and drain. Dress the peas immediately with plenty of olive oil or butter and flaky salt, so they take on the fat and don’t shrivel too much. Roll them around so they’re all coated. Eat a bowl plain, or spoon onto a plate with fish, chicken, pork, or lamb.

A few ideas for your peas…

Raw pea and gem cups

Click the leaves off a few heads of baby gem and lay them on a platter. Sliver a few handfuls of snap peas and put them in a bowl with your raw, podded peas. Dress with lots of lemon juice, salt, and olive oil. Tear mint leaves into the bowl and stir; taste for seasoning. Spoon the raw peas and snaps into the gem cups. Grate over lots of ricotta salata and grind over some black pepper. Drizzle over more olive oil. Pick up the pea-filled lettuces and eat like tacos.

Pea tabbouleh

Boil your spring peas as above and drizzle with lots of olive oil. Let them cool. Chop lots (and lots) of Italian parsley and mint and add to the peas. Squeeze in lemon juice, stir, and adjust with salt and more lemon. Eat with a spoon.

A side of minty potatoes and peas

Bring fingerlings up to a simmer from cold in salted water. After 15 minutes, poke one with a fork to check it’s cooked. When the fingerlings are crushable, add the peas to the water. When they rise, taste, and add a handful of mint leaves when the peas are sweet. Count to ten and drain. Use a whisk or a potato masher to break the potatoes and some of the peas. Drizzle with lots of olive oil and toss. Finish with lemon zest and black pepper, and eat. Especially good with fish.

A meal of baked potato with peas and bacon bits

Bake a potato. Snip up rashers of bacon and fry to lardons. Tear the potato open using two forks, and butter and salt both sides. Boil your peas and spoon them into the potato; sprinkle with the crispy bacon. This is very good with pea shoots (dressed with lemon juice and olive oil) on top.

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TO THE MOON

Substackers featured in this edition

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Writing: , , , ,

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

LA is a city of creative strivers, and we tried to capture that ambition from several angles: a TV-showrunner-slash-illustrator, an underground club raver, a veteran entertainment journalist, a lifestyle creator with millions of followers, and a touring comedian. We shot it all on 16mm film, as usual, working with Director of Photography Jack Duffy, sound recordists Kenneth Orozco and Adrian Arteaga, and with our very own behind the second camera and in the editing booth.

First up, we visited , who you might know as the creator of Tuca & Bertie and the production designer of BoJack Horseman. She’s currently working on a book called I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, and she let us invade her (very nice) lair to take a look at the pages. We traded imaginary horses for real ones when Lisa brought us to the stables, where we met her horse, Juniper.

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I hope you enjoy our first installment of Someone on Film: Los Angeles. There’ll be more episodes in the coming weeks.

This week, we’re throwing bad parties, soaking plates, and catching up on college radio.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• OpenAI acquires TBPN: , “the talk show that every VC, founder, and CTO in Silicon Valley watches,” announced on Thursday that they’d been acquired by OpenAI for an undisclosed sum. TBPN will apparently retain editorial independence, while “OpenAI will scale and support TBPN as a platform for live conversations, product and industry dialogue, accelerating the reach of new ideas, tools, and technologies to developers and consumers around the world.” A sign that even the most powerful companies are “desperate for storytellers”—and, when it comes to picking media personalities, “you cannot compete with people who are having more fun than you.”

• The marketers deciding your taste: Musician dug into the work of Chaotic Good Projects, “a digital marketing agency that promises to create virality by, among other things, manufacturing hundreds of fake fan accounts for musicians.” Unsurprisingly, many of their clients are pop stars and major commercial successes. “But the roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect (and, apologies to the internet sensations, including people I consider to be genuinely great musicians). Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.” Tellingly, since Eliza’s post went up, Chaotic Good has pulled down some of the more incriminating sections from their website. Many readers are disappointed but not necessarily surprised: “That artists and labels believe they need to create fake accounts to have any chance of getting traction in a tough algorithm-controlled marketplace is another race to the bottom.”

LOVE STORY

Withholding

August Lamm on falling for a man whose last name she doesn’t know.

Purity Embodied

— in

I’m on a patio, drinking seltzer, at the worst party of the summer. It’s my party. None of the guests know each other, few of them want to. The conversation is scattered introductions, biographical facts, and observations about the backyard. I am sitting in a hammock to appear relaxed. The sky is light. The sun will never set. There is no music or booze to save us.

When Robin arrives, I maneuver out of the hammock too quickly and land on all fours. I stand and walk toward him, brushing dirt off my knees.

“I’m so glad you came,” I whisper. “One minute,” I call to my guests, who look on with mounting panic as I enter the house.

I lead Robin upstairs to my bedroom, where I sit down on the bed and begin to cry. I can’t name a single thing that has happened to Robin in the past year, but I still know him better than anyone. Or I know so little that I can imagine the rest.

“It’s a disaster,” I say.

“It’s fine,” he says without conviction.

“I wasn’t ready for this,” I say, trying to smile. “A party. It’s too soon.”

He sits down next to me. Through the open window I hear snatches of forced conversation, long pauses, no laughter. My dad died a month ago. Robin’s dad died a decade ago. This is why I invited him. I am too consumed with grief to wonder if this is fair. Our legs are touching and it’s unclear who’s responsible.

“Do you ever think about us?” I say.

“We’ve tried this before,” Robin says, which isn’t a no.

---

We met on a park bench in London. He had coffee in the corners of his mouth even though it was late afternoon. He invited me to a magazine launch. I said yes because I wanted to meet writers, to become one.

The magazine was Catholic. Everyone at the launch was Catholic, including him. They had posh accents and advanced degrees, which made Catholicism seem more like an academic distinction than a faith. I was curious and asked a lot of questions.

“We don’t follow it to the letter,” a man told me, one arm around his girlfriend’s shoulders.

“There’s room for interpretation,” she confirmed.

Not everyone agreed. “You definitely can’t have sex before marriage,” they said, scanning the room. “Who here told you otherwise?”

I went home alone. The next morning, I called Robin. We got coffee and talked about God. I explained how whenever I missed a bus or train, I imagine I’ve narrowly avoided some horrible fate. Robin was listening so intently that I wanted to say, “I’m not serious,” even though I was.

We began seeing each other once a week. He didn’t live in the city. During his visits, I felt certain that I could possess him if I wanted. I just had to say the word. But during his absences, he was impossible to get ahold of, too busy to make plans, too tired to talk.

“Just get on a train,” I said. “We’ll do something nice.”

“I can’t,” he replied. “I just can’t.”

“I’ll come to you.” But how could I do that? He hadn’t told me the name of his town.

He also hadn’t told me his last name. He was a professional writer, he explained. He didn’t want me to see that side of him, not until we knew each other better.

His work was out there, somewhere, consumed and interpreted, printed and posted and shared. It haunted me. The internet was vast. I tried looking up his first name, his university, his religion. I tried every possible search term, but without his last name, nothing came up.

One night, walking home from a pub, I stopped on a square of sidewalk and told him, “I’m not moving until you tell me your last name.”

“Come on,” he said wearily, as if embarrassed on my behalf. A minute passed in silence. I stepped out of the square and we continued walking.

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MOUNTAINS

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Ode to a chore

Great writing has no expiration date. For our first “From the Archives” post, we’re sharing Marian Bull’s 2023 ode to the chore that waits on the other side of dinner: the dishes.

How to Do the Dishes

— in

The end point of cooking is not eating; it is cleaning.

We dream, we plan, we crave, we shop, we chop, we fry, we simmer, we garnish, we serve. And then we eat, sometimes alone and sometimes not, and when the eating is done, a mess remains, record of our pleasure. We must put spices back on their racks, the halved butter stick back in the fridge before it pools on the counter. We must transfer braised greens and ladlefuls of curry into containers that will keep them from spoiling. We must hem and haw over whether cake goes in the fridge or stays on the table, to stare at us for breakfast. We must collect all the surfaces and vessels we have dirtied, and turn them clean again. This is not a result of the cooking process, but the final leg of it.

Sometimes—and I’ve come to dislike this, though I know I’ve done it in the past—a recipe will end with a one-word instructive sentence: “Eat.” They almost never end with phrases like Eat, and then when you’re done, store the rice separate from the soup, or else it will become a big brothless glump. Or, Be sure to soak plates immediately, else you’ll be scrubbing against gnarly pools of congealed yolk. It’s obvious why recipes omit this bit: it would make them too depressing. People read recipes for inspiration and reassurance, not for a glaring reminder of chores.

At most, a recipe’s headnote might nod towards the idea of mess. This often appears in the assurance of “Yes, this recipe asks you to use three pans, but it’s worth it,” or the inverse assurance of “instead of leaving you with three pots to clean, this recipe does all the work in one.” How you might clean those pots, however, is rarely mentioned. The author assumes you can take it from here. Surely your mother taught you?

🍽️

Six years ago I was still working at GQ, chatting with a coworker about his new apartment, about the drudgery of keeping one’s space tidy. I shared a little hack I’d created for myself. Sometimes when I don’t feel like doing the dishes, I’ll set a timer for 8 minutes, and tell myself that when it goes off, I can stop. But I never do. I’m either done or I keep going, it always works. He stared his buffoonishly handsome face at me, warping it into a scowl of judgment, neck tugged back in a reflex of disgust. How many dishes are piling up in your sink?

I felt a brief flash of shame, rescued by indignance. Of course, I thought. This man is rarely feeding himself. He was always going on dates, four or five a week. His dishes did not accrue. The memory appears to me intermittently, that shame blooming anew: the implication that I am always making a mess, that nobody taught me right. Growing up, my father did the dishes alone, rinsing them diligently before lining them up neatly in our suburban dishwasher.

Only now am I remembering that my coworker had, a year prior to our conversation, worked on a story about how to throw a dinner party successfully. The sort of GQ primer that helps men feel competent, I’ve written them too. This one instructed readers to leave the dishes for the morning. Just go to sleep, it said blithely. When I first read this it shocked me, forced my neck back in that same gulp of disgust. Absolutely not.

🍽️

A longer-ago coworker, a brilliant home cook, had an almost militant dinner party cleaning strategy. She hosted lavish feasts—this phrase not an exaggeration—in her studio apartment, and would not let a single guest do the dishes, not even her best and oldest and most generous friends. Tiny apartments without Maytags require specific dish-cleaning strategies, and this one was no different: there were a few inches of counter space, if I remember correctly, and a butcher block. When everyone left, tramping wine-soaked down narrow flights of stairs, she would put on a cassette tape of the Smiths and blast it while doing dishes to her personal specifications, lining everything up just so.

I admired this not just because of the competence it communicated, but because it was a reflection of one cook’s finely honed tastes. Not only did she believe in always buying the nice butter, or architecting obscurely themed meals, but she knew exactly how she liked to do the dishes. I had always wanted to become a person with such strong convictions and such clean plates.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

MUSIC

Recommended if you like . . .

Consider this a musical palate cleanser after that exposé on Chaotic Good: Emily White surveys “the wide-ranging, deeply human and often surprising taste of college radio DJs right now.”

10 Albums in Rotation on College Radio in 2026 (So Far)

— in emwhitenoise

Every college radio station has a music library.

At WVAU, we called this the rack: a black wire shelf stacked with promo CDs curated by the music staff, with mini reviews and recommended if you like (“RIYL”) tags lovingly taped onto jewel cases. Sometimes I’d play a song on air for the first time based solely on those notes!

“Our music directors have been writing comments on the records and CDs since the seventies,” Marcus Rothera, general manager of Boston College’s WZBC told me last year. “It’s like an analog Internet comment section.”

I surveyed 80+ DJs in 2025 who say student interest in college radio has surged in recent years, driven by algorithm fatigue, analog nostalgia and a desire for “third spaces.” The New York Times followed with a fantastic profile of KXLU, capturing college radio’s “unpredictability, uniqueness and random brilliance.”

In search of some fresh music recommendations, I asked college radio stations across North America to share their favorite albums of 2026 so far. Many new releases are now submitted and reviewed digitally, so I asked Dusty Henry of KEXP and Another Thought to illustrate the picks.

This isn’t an official chart. It’s a snapshot of the wide-ranging, deeply human and often surprising taste of college radio DJs right now, in no particular order.

Enjoy digging through the stacks. College radio, forever <3

Deep shoegaze distortion coupled with vulnerable, echoing lyrics, Segmentation can piece together the heel-wounded parts of any listener with its heavy sound. The album transcends its mainstream counterparts, taking you on a journey with swirling liminal riffs. An alternative album for an alternative station: Segmentation is the debut album of Heel, who are also active members at Texas A&M’s KANM Student Radio.

Favorite Tracks: “Through Me,” “August,” and “Waste.”

RIYL: Narrow Head, Trauma Ray, Starflyer 59, grungegaze, Gregg Araki films, limerence, wildflower honey, driving in Texas at night, skateparks, the sound of frogs croaking at the lake after sundown, cyberpunk

—DJ playlistmachinemaker (Natalia Silva), Onda Fresalternativa, KANM, Texas A&M (College Station, Texas)

Bouncy, down-to-earth love songs. The Mirror, fittingly introspective, feels both chronological and retrospective, distinctly Meek, yet totally relatable in its romantic storytelling.

Favorite tracks: Gasoline (1), Can I Mend It? (3), Worms (8)

RIYL: Big Thief (of course), acoustic guitar, lavender marriages, if Licorice Pizza is your favorite movie.

—Ella Hegarty, Filet of the Day, WCFM, Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts)

Memphis rapper and producer Gavin Mays continues his foray into the digitally scarred, sample-heavy, and increasingly abstract annals of internet-born hip-hop with EVEN COLDER SPRING. Featuring his signature philosophically inclined stream-of-consciousness lyricism and lo-fi, often drumless production style. A great atmospheric and heady record which continues Mays’ legacy of being one of the most interesting forces in underground hip-hop.

Favorite Tracks: Even Colder Spring – Parts 1 & 2, The Élan Vital, Tribeca, Concrete Masks, Closing Door

RIYL: cLOUDDEAD, Armand Hammer, SpaceGhostPurrp, walking around the city at 3am after you left the party

—DJ Nick (Nick Staudacher), Sonic Valhalla, WCBN, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

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EMBROIDERY

FOOD

Bicoastal grains

This post from Emily Wilson and Jamie Feldmar on the wave of “landrace heritage grains” taking over bakeries in L.A. and N.Y. is a great read to whet your appetite for Easter pastries.

The Whole Grains Revolution Has Come for Your Croissant

— and in

Citrus, grapes, nuts: these are the crops synonymous with California agriculture. Avocados, dairy, and lettuces, too. But amber waves of grain? That is, traditionally speaking, a Midwestern thing.

But California has never been bound by tradition, which is why, about 12 years ago, a group of Kern County farmers decided to experiment with growing more whole grains. And not just any whole grains—ancient, heritage breed varieties like Red Fife and Sonora wheat that flourish in Tehachapi, a low mountain valley halfway between Bakersfield and Fresno, that would eventually become the cause célèbre of dozens of L.A.’s best bakers, pastry chefs, brewers, and distillers.

The undertaking, appropriately dubbed the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project, is a joint effort between Alex Weiser of Weiser Family Farms and biologist-turned-grower Sherry Mandell, an incredibly well-connected ball of energy who is largely responsible for getting the grains to said chefs and bakers. With encouragement from L.A.’s own Japanese food luminary Sonoko Sakai and seeds donated by heirloom-grain evangelist Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, what started as a two-acre experiment has expanded to nearly 400 and resulted in Tehachapi-grown grains getting name-checked on menus from Providence to Petitgrain.

Growing landrace heritage grains is good for the planet: they’re drought-tolerant, with unique root systems that spread deep into the earth, functioning as a carbon sink and conditioning the soil between plantings of other crops. It’s also good for the diner: “We grow it because it’s delicious, and it’s delicious because of the way we grow it,” says Mandell. “Even if you only add 15%-30% of a heritage grain or flour to your product, it makes a huge difference,” she says. “You can tell just from looking at it. And once you taste it, it’s life-changing, because that grain becomes a part of the flavor profile itself,” she says, describing items made with whole grains as “deeper” and “more luxurious.”

2,500 miles northeast in America’s other cultural capital, a similarly spirited local whole grain renaissance is underway, led by Brooklyn Granary & Mill, a bakery and mill opened last year by Patrick Shaw-Kitch, a grain whiz and the former head baker at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, alongside his wife, Laura Huss. From their facility on Huntington Street, just off the Gowanus Canal, they stone-mill whole grains such as spelt, buckwheat, rye, einkorn, and various strains of wheat—grown on regenerative farms across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic—for use in pastries and bread at their on-site bakery and for an impressive roster of wholesale clients, including the restaurants Gramercy Tavern and Borgo and bakeries like Elbow Bread and Diljān.

Part of the impetus for Brooklyn Granary & Mill was the 2021 closure of Union Square Greenmarket’s GrowNYC Grainstand, which served as the hub for local, whole grains in New York City; professional and home bakers could purchase regionally grown grains and flour and learn how each variety performs. Furthermore, New York City lacked a milling operation that could supply bakers and chefs with flour milled to order, and just-milled flour means more nutrients, more texture, and more flavor.

Whole grains are perishable in a way many people don’t realize. Once a grain’s seed is cracked, its natural oils are exposed to air and begin to oxidize, eventually going rancid. This means grains are at peak aroma and flavor right after milling, when those oils are still intact. Processed white flour, by contrast, has the bran and germ removed entirely—and it’s precisely those elements that give a grain its color, character, and fat and, with it, most of its flavor.

Accordingly, working with local, freshly milled whole-grain flours requires a certain level of skill and patience. “You usually have to adjust your hydration with whole wheat flours … they’re typically thirstier,” says Navil Rivera, worker-owner at Proof Bakery in Los Angeles, who also notes that gluten levels can vary, so using a mix of whole wheat with AP or a high-gluten flour can help create a more balanced product. But the extra effort is very much worth it: “You’re replacing an ingredient that adds nothing other than structure to the mix with something that adds everything,” says Karen DeMasco, the longtime pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern in New York.

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COMING SOON

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

The Real Madrid goalkeeper has started , where he shares his thoughts on “how professional athletes think about money, ownership, and long-term positioning. What I see happening in the sports business right now that excites me, and what I think is overrated. Where I’m investing, what I’m learning, and what I got wrong.”

In Magazine’s new Substack, The Obsessions Index, “monthly guest editors present the cultural oddities and gems that have been lost in time or unfairly overlooked – the books, objects, b-sides + rarities and outsider art you never knew you needed – as well as a keyhole into their own creative processes.”

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

This week, we’re tracking folk songs, counting bank tellers, studying astrophysics in a gulag, and taking our eyes off the screen.

MUSIC

Rising sun

Who wrote “House of the Rising Sun”? James Taylor Foreman follows the song from New Orleans through the American South, a region that seems to exist 45 minutes outside every major city.

There Is a House in New Orleans

— in

When I lived in California and I told people I grew up in Louisiana, most of the time they would say, “Oh, like New Orleans!” and then tell me they would love to visit one day.

I smile and nod, happy we have a touchstone, but think, No, not like New Orleans, actually. Los Angeles feels closer to New Orleans than where I grew up. But that would start a conversation that ended with glassy eyes, so I go ahead and let them think I’m a NOLA boy.

When I was growing up, though, New Orleans didn’t feel like it was down the road. It felt like the end of the road; about as far away as you could get. It was both the center of the world, being the biggest city in my state, and also the very edge: a liminal zone full of voodoo dream totems and pushy mediums in layers of purple linen. You went there to get drunker than your parents ever need to know about or hear a fortune about a future wife who lives across a body of water with two sons from a previous marriage.

That slightly hokey and wispy spookiness of the Crescent City solidified into downright dread the day I heard that my brother died in a house in New Orleans. He was working as a line cook someplace and trying to recover from his heroin addiction. So, naturally, the radio hit “House of the Rising Sun,” which is set in a sort of mythical New Orleans, began to stick out of the background chatter of chain restaurants. I am the young brother that the singer warns to not “do what I have done.”

I always assumed The Animals (the version you probably know) wrote the song. But no. Bob Dylan? No. Woody Guthrie? No. How about Lead Belly, plucked out of Louisiana’s Angola prison by a record exec? Still no.

Who wrote The Rising Sun?

I can tell you the short answer is nobody knows. The more entertaining answer, and probably also a true one, is that nobody wrote it. It emerged like a singing ghost from the hills, through the thousands of mouths of Southern and Appalachian folk singers, long before we had radio, recording machines, or even trains started striping the woods.

My first job out of college was a traveling salesman, selling software to hospitals all across the country, mostly in the South and Northeast. I went to Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and even so far north as Illinois. Being from a small Southern town, I was surprised to find that the “South” wasn’t just the place below the Mason-Dixon line. You just had to drive about 45 minutes from any major city, and suddenly people were huntin’ and talkin’ with a drawl.

I drove to many places like these, sometimes with “House of the Rising Sun” playing (I especially liked the Alt-J version at the time), thinking about what this country was like before Walmart and a McDonald’s lined every interstate. Because of that universal backlit plastic signage, we can be fooled to think we all live the same sort of lives. But if you do ever drive a little further, which I sometimes did to find a certain rural hospital, a whole different universe opens up. An older one, and one that is probably fading from memory. You can still hear it, if you have the ear for it, through the haunted chords of that song, its first singers’ voices still echoing above the burning pines, the heat beneath its wings.

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COMIC

ECONOMICS

Bank tellers, ATMs, and AI

David Oks on why bank tellers survived ATMs but not iPhones, and what this tells us about job security in the age of AI.

Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

— in

A few months ago, J. D. Vance, sitting vice president of the United States, gave an interview to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. During that interview, Vance and Douthat had an interesting exchange:

Douthat: How much do you worry about the potential downsides of AI? Not even on the apocalyptic scale, but on the scale of the way human beings respond to a sense of their own obsolescence? These kinds of things.

Vance: So, one, on the obsolescence point, I think the history of tech and innovation is that while it does cause job disruptions, it more often facilitates human productivity as opposed to replacing human workers. And the example I always give is the bank teller in the 1970s. There were very stark predictions of thousands, hundreds of thousands of bank tellers going out of a job. Poverty and commiseration.

What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work. More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy.

I tend to think that is how this innovation happens.

There are two interesting things about what Vance said, both relating to the example that he chose about bank tellers and ATMs.

The first thing is what it tells us about who J. D. Vance is. The bank teller story—how ATMs were predicted to increase bank teller unemployment, but in fact did not—isn’t a story you’ll hear from politicians; in fact, for a long time, Barack Obama would claim, incorrectly, that ATMs had decreased the number of bank tellers, in order to suggest that the elevated unemployment rate during his presidency was due to productivity gains from technology. I’ve never heard a politician cite the bank teller story before: but I have seen the bank teller story cited in a lot of blogs. I’ve seen it cited, for example, by Scott Alexander and Matt Yglesias and Freddie deBoer; and I’ve heard it, upstream of the humble bloggers, from such fine economists as Daron Acemoglu and David Autor. The story of how ATMs didn’t automate bank tellers is, indeed, something of a minor parable of the economics profession. You can see it encapsulated in this wonderful graph from the economist James Bessen:

So Vance’s choice of example tells us the same thing that his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience did, which is that J. D. Vance—however much he might like to hide it—really, really loves reading blogs.

But the other thing about the bank teller story that Vance cites is that it’s wrong. We do not, contrary to what Vance claims, have “more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created”: we in fact have far fewer. The story he tells Douthat might have been true in 2000 or 2005, but it hasn’t been true for years. Bank teller employment has fallen off a cliff. Here is a graph of bank teller employment since 2000:

So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.

But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?

The answer, I think, is complementarity.

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NOSTALGIA

LITERATURE

Ghosts, time, and astrophysics in the gulag

A belly button mole named Boris, a college boyfriend killed on the West Side Highway, and an astrophysicist who spent a decade in the gulag convinced that time could power the stars.

My belly button mole is a ghost named Boris

— in

My great-grandfather was a Russian Jew named Maurice, and when I was a kid, I really liked that I was a little bit Russian, but I didn’t like the name Maurice, so I named the mole in my belly button “Boris.” I’d show it off to everyone in middle school and tell them “this is the Russian part of me.”

Of course I never met Maurice, and I never had any desire to see Russia, but something in me has always tweaked in a beautiful way when I listen to traditional Russian music, and I like to think it’s Boris in my belly button rearing his head to listen. I miss it I need it I want to be inside it. Right now in my community orchestra we’re playing Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances.” It’s deeply Russian so therefore I love it to the point of hyperfixation: I’m listening to it all the time, in and out of rehearsal, and even when I’m not, it’s running in the background of my head. A conductor in Florida once called the second movement a “waltz for ghosts” but it may be more true to say all waltzes are for ghosts, simply because they are music and music itself is a ghost. You can’t touch it or see it but you can feel it and you can measure those feelings in vibrations and these vibrations continue after the music stops, echoing and reverberating, reminding you: remember me.

In addition to the ghost that lives in my belly button, there’s another ghost in my life. My college boyfriend would have turned thirty-six today. His death was thirteen years ago, plus twoish weeks. He died the year after college, hit by a car on the West Side Highway. I’ve honored his death every year. For the first five years, on the day of his death, I would go up to New York City to visit the site and see his friends and family. For the next five years, I decided I didn’t need to make that trip anymore—his friends and I had fallen out of touch—so I would take the day off work and walk around the Arlington National Cemetery instead, surrounded by thousands of surrogate graves. Now I live in Wisconsin and neither option is available to me, so I walk in the woods instead. To me this day is sacred; it feels like my duty to honor him once a year, not because I’m hung up on a former lover, but because here I am, living, while someone who once meant the world to me is not. Why should it be me alive and not him? Doesn’t this mean I have no choice but to feel happy and make the most of it? Usually, by thinking of the dead, I end the day feeling lucky and grateful to be alive. But this year was different. The doctors called me on the morning of the deathiversary with some bad news.

For complicated reasons, they told me they were putting me on two aggressive forms of antibiotics simultaneously. These medicines came with a slew of precautions. Don’t run or you’ll snap a tendon. Don’t eat dairy with dinner. Don’t drink alcohol, of course, but also no soda or caffeine either. Beware the sun: You’ll break out in boils!

So I called the day a bust and told myself that was fine. Life gets in the way. I was grumpy about not running and yearned for sunshine, but a multi-day storm moved in, and I couldn’t miss a sun that wasn’t there. It was good weather to stay inside and read Russian literature (which Boris occasionally commands of me). I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a detailed account of the brutality of the Soviet labor camp system. This is a good book to read when you’re sad. Sometimes it helps to read about things that are much sadder. Millions of people died. Millions more suffered intensely and had to live through it. At one point I wondered: what about menstruation? What would women do in those camps when they bled? But they were all so starved, there was no menstruation. Any possible terrible thing you can imagine is in this book, and worse. You put it down and realize life isn’t so bad.

The Gulag Archipelago tells many, many stories. One of these stories is of an astrophysicist named Nikolai Kozyrev. He worked at an observatory with a disgruntled grad student. For reasons unrecorded, this grad student accused everyone at the observatory of counterrevolutionary activities. Most of his colleagues died. But Kozyrev got off easy: he was sent to prison for ten years instead.

Kozyrev tried to continue his astrophysics work in isolation. But he was limited. He had no materials, no books, no ways to make experiments. He had only his thoughts and his memories. This was not enough. He was “blocked by forgotten figures,” Solzhenitsyn writes. So he prayed for help, and by a stroke of luck, he soon received a book called “A Course in Astrophysics.” (He received one book at random every ten days.) He memorized everything he could before the book was taken away, then continued theorizing the universe. Solzhenitsyn writes that he “saved himself only by thinking of the eternal and infinite: of the order of the Universe—and of its Supreme Spirit; of the stars; of their internal state; and what Time and the passing of Time really are.”

Yes, he thought about all these things. And he was wrong.

Kozyrev came up with an idea that time creates energy, a theory he called “causal mechanics.” He believed that time’s energy was so powerful that it created stars. Yet while he was trapped in a prison cell, scientists around the world were discovering nuclear fusion, the true engine of the stars. When he was released, he refused to believe that stars were powered by fusion, and continued promoting his causal mechanics theory instead. Time not only created stars, he believed, it could be manipulated to make matter disappear; a gyroscope, for instance, would be reduced in matter as it rotated because it absorbed energy from the flow of time. He also created a set of spiral mirrors that he said could concentrate time and allow whoever was inside them to access information from the distant past or future.

He also did good work, especially earlier in his career, about the heat balance and atmosphere of nearby planets. And he maybe saw a volcano on the moon. But no one took his causal-mechanics time-as-energy theory seriously. So ultimately he was marginalized.

Yet time does have energy. Ten years in a prison has a clear, degrading power. For many prisoners, ten years could turn into twenty at the drop of a hat, and the threat of such was sufficient to keep the rest in line. There were many atrocities in the camps, interrogations and starvation and hard work and so on, but the biggest foe was time itself. It makes sense one would reach the other side and see this enemy as powerful enough to charge the sun.

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PAINTING

ILLUSTRATED ESSAY

Sensory overload

Briffin Glue illustrates the growing disconnect between our screens and the physical world around us.

Absolute defeat

— in

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BUSTED

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

, the fashion features director at British Vogue, has started The Vault, a Substack where she’ll be sharing “the secrets I would tell you if we sat next to each other in the office.”

British writer, director, and television presenter has started a Substack where she’ll chronicle her love of “cats, cooking, caftans, books,” and more.

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

This week, we’re reading Zola at Disney World, unpacking male desire, and photographing yin and yang.

DESIRES

What men want

A satirical litany of masculine desire that moves from meme to history, landing somewhere surprisingly tender.

Men Only Want One Thing

— in Drunk Wisconsin

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To run away from home at seventeen and offer their services as a deckhand on a ship bound for the New World. To take a drag of a hand-rolled cigarette as they look out over their cattle herd, cowboy hat tipped to shade from the rising sun, tin cup of gritty black coffee in their hand. To build a Roman Castrum while on campaign in Gaul. To feel the sea spray against their beard as they prepare for raiding. To step foot on another celestial body.

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To lead a cavalry charge into enemy ranks. To feed their bloodlust with the boiling anger inside of them. To stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their brothers in a shield wall. To defend the ramparts against the storming enemy. To use the violence inherent to them. To find themselves standing victorious on a battlefield scattered with bodies. To make a heroic last stand. To bleed out contentedly in a liminal place, knowing that they’ve successfully protected their family.

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To be left alone. To fish in silence for a couple of hours, nothing but the sound of water lapping to keep them company. To reflect on their mistakes, and to forgive themselves. To remember their father and knowingly nod as they finally understand him. To devote themselves in their entirety to a project, and to finish that project with a feeling of deserved pride. To leave something behind.

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To feel the contrast of their rough skin against their baby’s soft hand as it grips their finger. To face the terrifying responsibility of fatherhood and accept it. To smell their child’s hair as they sleep soundly in their arms. To blow raspberries on giggly tummies. To teach their son a skill and see him beam with pride as he does it by himself for the first time. To hear their child say “I love you” unprompted.

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To wake up intertwined with a lover on a lazy Sunday morning, sun shining through the curtains. To bring her coffee in bed. To randomly run into the girl they met at a party a couple years earlier and have the courage to ask for her number this time. To fall deeply in love with their childhood next-door neighbor, decide to marry her at five years old, and stick to that plan for the rest of their life. To be unconditionally loved.

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PAINTING

VERY ONLINE

Step right up

Theodore Gary on the internet’s lolcow economy, where fame, addiction, and a cast of predatory handlers converge.

Freak Show

— in

The internet is a freak show like the old circus. Step inside the tent; see the hermaphrodite, the bearded lady. Enjoy it, but never admit it. You weren’t there. You’d never go. You don’t know anything about it at all. And though much has changed since P.T. Barnum, there remains a serious, well-funded industry of promoters and managers and marketers whose income depends on their association with the physically deformed, mentally ill, and socially maladjusted. These people—famous for their ugliness, homelessness, binge-drinking, and public freakouts—are these days called “lolcows” by the internet; that is to say, they produce “lols” like a cow does milk—endlessly, or at least until they die.

The best-known among them must be WorldofTShirts—Joshua Block, to use his given name. Josh is an autistic, gangly twenty-something forced into a liver-shredding alcoholic stupor over the past half-decade by a series of noxious handlers. He has 4 million followers on TikTok. His account blew up during the pandemic, as he, still young and fresh-looking, posted videos of himself doing goofy dances and reviewing various boba teas. In 2021, a video of him screaming the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind” in Times Square amassed 27 million views. So, clever as he is, Josh did it again, and again, and again. Soon enough, he was on a Times Square billboard. Dixie D’Amelio followed him shortly thereafter.

Sometime after his original first surge in popularity, he takes a trip to Mexico. Josh drinks his first drink here, then chooses to have quite a few more. He loses his phone in an Uber. He turns 21 soon after, and with this Josh has had enough of boba tea. He now drinks liquor, as much as he can get. The songs persist, now sung drunkenly, and a manager enters the picture: Michael Quinn. The former owner of Feltman’s Hot Dogs, an oval-faced, barrel-chested, strangely tanned, heavily accented New Yorker, Quinn comes upon Josh’s budding fame and decides to grab a piece of it for himself. Armed with a compulsive need for attention and the money to secure it, he sets about dragging Josh and his roller backpack to the bars, restaurants, and pizza shops of New York City. Together, they have a goofy, silly time. But all is not well. You wouldn’t know it yet, but the man is becoming more erratic, his content more unhinged. Unsupervised by Quinn, Josh records himself licking the subway floor.

Around this time, Josh meets Jason Itzler, Jeffrey Epstein associate, Josh’s second manager, and the King of All Pimps. In the mid-aughts, Itzler became a sort of small-time New York celebrity as the owner/operator of the high-priced escort service New York Confidential. Sent to Rikers in 2005 for his operation of the company, he reemerged in 2008 as a bit player in the prostitution scandal that scuttled former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s political career. In 2011, he was identified as an occupant of the apartment where 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Julia Sumnicht overdosed on GHB. Now on Kick—which is where they send you once you’re banned by Twitch—he streams under the name Mr. Based. Flanked from behind by a gold statue of the Buddha, a human-size gnome, a replica sarcophagus, and a several-foot-tall Tony the Tiger, he now spends his nights like a dirtbag cam-girl: $50 to take a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, $200 to smoke a blunt, $300 to huff Galaxy Gas.

Itzler, I’m sure, needed no advice worming his way into the life of a naïve twenty-something. Isolate. Manipulate. Make him reliant on you. The content became meaner, the fans more rabid, as Itzler established himself in Josh’s life. Gone was that silly and sweet stuff in Josh’s videos, replaced instead by an unrelenting drumbeat of triggers designed to make him go ape. Fans on the street, egged on by Itzler, would yell, “Put the fries in the bag.” “Fuck you, bitch!” Josh would yell back. Mostly, the two sat in Itzler’s opulent apartment, with Josh away from the camera and Itzler right up next to it, drinking until collapse, until Josh went limp. These streams, hard as they are to watch, function as something like a real-time account of Josh’s descent into hell. In a clip pretty neatly summarizing their dynamic, Josh huffs nitrous oxide from a balloon. He jerks and flails and suddenly stops, looking terrified. “I feel lightheaded,” he yells. Peeking over his shoulder, Itzler laughs and points his thumb toward Josh, a smile plastered on his lips. “Look at this guy,” he says. The clip has over 300,000 views.

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TRAVEL

Video shared by Varnika

PHOTOGRAPHY

Yin and yang

In a collaboration, Susanne Helmert and Juliette Mansour took turns photographing objects that represented the philosophy of yin, and the other responded with one representing yang.

Holding the Opposite

— and in

What the philosophy of Yin and Yang teaches us is that although they are opposing forces, they exist in relationship to one another. Balance is not created through sameness, but through interaction and transformation.

No matter what I photographed, there was never only Yin or only Yang to be found. And that’s what I ultimately found most interesting: keeping this philosophy in mind while photographing, or while looking at Juliette’s “replies,” made me sit longer with the images, thinking about them in terms of Yin and Yang.

“Yin-Yang is the idea that there is a duality to everything. But rather than this being some kind of oppositional or destructive conflict between two rivals, the Yin-Yang argues that there is a great harmony to be found in the contrast between things. The symbol does not feature a fully black side set against a fully white side. The white has a bit of black, and the black a bit of white. Contrast, yet harmony.”

Although we present the work as diptychs, we invite you to look at the images with this philosophy in mind. You may notice, as we did, that some of them can’t be assigned to one side as easily as others.

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FAMILY

Zola at Disney World

In which Am Rod reads the classic novelist at Disney, and finds the distance between a Parisian laundress’s downfall and a Florida vacation rental strangely short.

How Far Down

— in

I recently visited Disney World with my boyfriend, our four-year-old daughter, his parents, his sister, her husband, and their children. The last time we did this trip, I read Therese Raquin by Émile Zola, which made me feel bruised and disgusting, as central Florida can make me feel with its humidity, broken infrastructure, and exposed toes. Confining bad sensations, negative thoughts, allows me to be a better mother, planning and packing, smiling and soothing, remembering to remove the rotting fruit from the backpack after bedtime.

I brought The Assommoir this time. In the foreword, Zola reprimands the scandalized bourgeoisie. It merely describes the society and squalor you have wrought! Don’t guillotine the messenger! It is difficult to not feel like I am in trouble while reading Zola.

The novel’s heroine, Gervaise Coupeau, suffers mightily for her dreams of owning and operating her own laundry business for Paris’s lower class. Earthly comforts, a deadbeat husband and a snake of an ex, keeping up with the Boches, bad luck and medical debt, and an ambitious passivity central to her character slowly erode the working class respectability Gervaise builds in the novel’s first half, until her death goes unnoticed for days and she is dropped in a pauper’s grave. Gervaise often repeats the sentiment, “I don’t want anythin’ special, you know, I don’t ask for much…” With each refrain, the narrator begs the question, Really, Gervaise? Sweet little Gervaise, smiling and planning and packing and soothing, did you not commit sins for your aspiration? Are you so blameless for the fall?

Our Florida vacation rental was in a community of many vacation homes, off the main drag where the movie The Florida Project was filmed. There waves the oversized stucco mermaid, a cross-eyed slattern, hanging from the side of a bootleg merch store, while you wait for a stoplight, controlled by someone who must be drunk or colorblind, to finally, mercifully turn green.

My daughter loved the pool most of all, climbing out, jumping in, climbing out, jumping in, over and over, out and in, up and down. There was a large screen enclosure around the pool to keep out gators. One morning, a red-shouldered hawk perched itself on the fence just beyond our screen to hunt the swamp on the other side.

Besides the alligators, the area reminds me of growing up in Southern California. Orlando is also in an Orange County; there are three approved tract models in the rental home community, which are somehow both enormous and cramped; there are billboards constantly reminding you that a conniving mouse is near; the traffic feels personal and vindictive; the bus stop is a lone bent pole sticking out of a patchy ditch by the box store parking lot; everyone has a pool that they take out a second mortgage to maintain.

I am not nostalgic. My older sister is, in some ways that have become stereotypical of a certain type of millennial. I don’t despise this about her, but I wonder. She reflects wistfully on our childhood, the television shows, the swim meets, the birthday dinners, her probably perfect attendance record in the tenth grade. I ditched, lied, and put myself in morally and physically compromising situations. She trusted our parents implicitly. I loved them.

The strongest memories I have are of family roadtrips, lying in the third row of the van with a damp cloth over my forehead, concentrating on a small, still point, and breathing slowly through my mouth so as not to vomit, while my dad puffed on a big fat cigar, the smoke from which the open car windows would suck out and blow back in my face.

Toward the end of a day at one of the Disney parks, I was feeling good. My daughter was happy and not sunburnt. I had packed the backpack impeccably: just enough toys and provisions to keep her amused in lines and at the table after eating her requisite four bites of lunch, a full change of clothes that we did not use but whose presence cosmically assured we would not need it, battery packs, sunscreen, hand sanitizer, rain ponchos, fruit. In my good mood, I suggested buying a round of beers. The Blue Moon on tap was dyed green for mysterious reasons having to do with James Cameron’s Avatar movie.

Our family set off in a stroller caravan toward the front of the park to find a nice place for a group photo. My boyfriend pushed our stroller. I sipped my green beer and smiled. For all the stink and crowds, it had been a pleasant day. I had not eaten dinner yet and the green Blue Moon was relaxing me. I raised my drink to an extended family of Castilians taking a picture in front of the fake banyan tree that serves as a centerpiece for the park. I felt my phone buzzing in my fanny pack and answered it. “Where did you go?” my boyfriend asked. I looked around and realized I had been walking alone for an unknown amount of time.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

Singer-songwriter has launched her Substack, , with an essay exploring what it means to be an artist connecting with fans online.

Former U.S. Surgeon General has launched , “a new home for the stories I’ve found and the lessons I’m learning on the road.”

and co. have launched , a Substack that will “make you smarter about the forces moving markets, politics, and society.”

The British journalist and author has joined Substack, sharing political analysis of current events. First up: how war with Iran is impacting Keir Starmer’s premiership.

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

This week, we’re wandering empty backlots, remembering a colleague in jewel tones, tracing the maker movement, and admiring ostriches.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• Oscars night: The Academy Awards are finally here, and everyone seems to agree that the night’s biggest awards will be a toss-up between One Battle After Another and Sinners. Elsewhere, argues that “the silly ceremony continues to shape culture and discourse in often-overlooked ways,” whatever its waning viewership might suggest. Speaking of waning viewership, defends those Timothée Chalamet comments that some think will cost him Best Actor. And has drinking game rules for anyone looking to spice up what is bound to be a long night.

• Cormac vs. Claude: The New York Times shared a quiz asking readers to identify passages from human writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, and Hilary Mantel, against AI-written passages on similar themes. Substackers were unimpressed: writes that given the ongoing piracy issues of LLMs, the quiz is an “exercise in humiliating the writers featured,” while counters the idea that these quizzes measure what they claim to. And takes apart a McCarthy sentence to show that what the quiz describes as ungrammatical or “clunky” writing is actually a thoughtfully stylized representation of how the novel’s characters speak.

HOLLYWOOD

That’s all, folks

As the film industry gussies up for its biggest night of the year, Dara Resnik reflects on the changing industry and what happens when Hollywood, the industry, becomes estranged from Hollywood, the place.

Say Goodbye to Hollywood

— in

After a certain number of cocktails (I’ll let you guess the over/under), several of my friends have recently turned to me at separate dinners, and sighed, exasperated: “It’s over, isn’t it?” They mean Hollywood. And by Hollywood, they mean the glamorous place and the world-famous business that grew in her womb. The bad news is that the answer is yes. The good news is that the answer is also no.

Before the pandemic, I advised film and television writers—students and professionals—from all over the world to move to Los Angeles. That’s where the money was. That’s where the majority of the exciting jobs were. Even growing up in New York City, the Center of Planet Earth (yes, I said it), it was clear to me that if I wanted to write, produce, and/or direct tentpole films or network television, I had to move to LA. Let’s be clear: I really didn’t want to. I had a rent-controlled apartment on 86th and Broadway. I was writing for magazines. I was living a lovely version of an Upper West Side life I coveted as a kid, but I knew if I was gonna Make It, I needed to be in Hollywood.

And I was right. Every wave of young people that moved here in a given year was essentially a college graduating “class.” The people who moved here in ’99, or ’02, or ’06 and on and on, all knew each other in some way. You’d be drinking beer in some stranger’s S’lake backyard one night and realize their roommate was the guy who had the UTA desk next to your best friend, and now he’s an agent, or the young CE you were meeting with was the assistant you used to talk to on the phone all the time when you were a PA. We rose the ranks together, because while jobs out here have always been coveted, there were just enough of them, and we brought each other up alongside us. Vacating a desk in Disney development for a promotion? You knew that girl who’d just left Barry Josephson’s company (uh-huh) would be excited to take it. Need to quit that agency mailroom gig? No problem, the network of “classmates” you arrived with had your back and there was always, within months, a gig around the corner. And while the cost of living was high, it wasn’t nearly as high as it was in the City That Never Sleeps.

On the crew side, if you wanted to learn camera, you could start as a 2nd AC, and climb the ladder the same way. And if you got “stuck” on a rung, either as a mid-level executive, or in a crew position that wasn’t the above-the-line gig you dreamed of, you could still make a living, buy a house, get healthcare for your family, send kids to college on the salary. And the perks were enormous. Sure, maybe you’d be making the same amount of money as a middle school teacher, but you got to be on a studio lot, attend premieres, get paid for being creative in some way. You grew in an ecosystem that was creating one of America’s biggest, most lucrative exports: film and television.

I wish I could explain to my most recent graduate students how thrilling it used to be on a studio lot. How alive it was with movement and sound and creativity. From 2001-2008, I mostly worked at Warner Bros. (first as an intern for Mimi Leder, then for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, then Pushing Daisies). Lunch was a trip. At one commissary table, a legendary TV director, at another, a background extra for ER on a break, eating Poquito Mas with a fake nail sticking out of his chest. Around the corner, wardrobe for The West Wing rolling by, around the next, two janitors gossiping in the Stars Hollow gazebo. Everyone was part of something bigger than themselves. While yes, the assholes still thrived because welcome to humanity, the feeling of being part of a creative community was pervasive. You couldn’t help but look wide-eyed at your colleagues sometimes and go, “Guys, we’re really DOING IT!”

Sadly, anyone paying attention is finally admitting that has changed. Production has fled. There are fewer buyers, fewer development jobs. The studio lots are devoid of life. I recently had an in-person meeting at the Universal Studios lot, which is huge, and when I inevitably got lost, as I always have, I looked around to ask someone, ANYONE for directions, and I think I literally heard crickets. I was alone. It was eerie. Of course, there are a few productions here and there. But it’s not like it was. And it never will be again. Things change.

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ANIMATION

IN MEMORIAM

“They were almost home”

Dia Lupo reflects on a glamorous coworker, her figure-skating daughters, and the shocking airplane crash that took them all.

To be beautiful, to be memorable

— in Broke But Moisturized

“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”

―Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company

Before they were called “Town Hall” meetings, they were called “All Hands.” At some point HR made us change the name because “not everyone has hands.” Believe all 60 of us had both hands but anyway, the point was to get the whole marketing team in a room once a quarter to exchange personality test results and pretend to know what EBITDA means, pretend we control such profitability metrics through Pinterest ads.

In advance of each Town Hall, leadership would pick a few people for these “get to know the team” panels. The questions were personal, and yet everyone’s answers always circled back to work. The host would ask, “Who’s on your Spotify Wrapped this year?” and some middle manager would gush, “Like alllll classical because it helps me focus!” SHUT THE FUCK UP. JUST SAY TAYLOR SWIFT AND WALK THOSE DUSTY ROTHYS BACK TO YOUR CUBICLE.

I remember the last Town Hall I attended before changing teams. We broke for lunch which was, invariably, a taco bar for gringos on SSRIs. Then it was panel time.

Donna Livingston perched upon a stool in her signature glam. Her long, shiny red hair in loose curls; Disney princess eyes with 100 coats of mascara; berry lip. She embodied the bygone elegance of mid-tier city office life, the kind of woman who called a shirt a “blouse” and pants “slacks.” That day she wore black slacks and a deep-pink-hued blouse. I thought to myself, Donna loves a jewel tone. Gotta respect a woman who knows what looks good on her. I’d only ever seen Donna in sapphire and emerald and this shade of pink; it was the color of love refracting off the edges of a ruby.

Donna worked remotely from DC. We were all used to admiring her through a screen, her dedication to Getting Ready every day to work from home. Always warm, always smiling. To see her up there on the panel reminded me that those intangibles like “grace” and “poise” can’t be fully apprehended via Microsoft Teams. Real-life Donna was just so… lovely. That’s the word. Lovely.

At one point, the panelists were asked about their dream jobs. Everyone got fidgety because what on earth would you do if not write website copy for B2B telecom?

They passed Donna the mic and she turned the color of her shirt.

“I would be a figure skater,“ she confessed, her voice shaky and girlish. “My girls skate and it’s the biggest part of our lives.”

Everybody loved Donna, and that was the first time most of us got a glimpse into her personal life. I must have been in a million meetings with her and she never once mentioned this thing that colored a sterile conference room with charm and wonder and truth. And then it clicked for me: that Donna’s glam might be an extension of her passion for skating. It can be a lovely thing, to look the part; it crystallizes your image in the hearts and minds of everyone who meets you.

On January 29, 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a US Army helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington D.C. It was a small flight, 64 people between the crew and passengers, 28 of them returning from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships training camp in Wichita, Kansas. Donna Livingston died alongside her husband Peter and their daughters, Olympic hopefuls Everly, 14, and Alydia, 11, who were known online as The Ice Skating Sisters.

I was working from home when my friend called and broke the news. “The whole office is a mess. Everyone’s crying and leaving for the day,” she said. Meanwhile, our friend Sarah had just taken a job under Donna. Sarah was in California for a conference where Donna was to meet her when she returned from Wichita. She was texting with Donna just before she boarded Flight 5342, wished her safe travels and everything.

What are the odds of knowing someone who dies in a 64-person plane crash? I was too catatonic for statistics but just responsive and incredulous enough to watch the video footage over and over and over. The helicopter looks like it’s being pulled directly into the plane by some invisible force, something bigger and more sinister than human error. The aircrafts collide into a magnificent ball of fire suspended in the night sky. I just kept thinking, they were almost home.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

TECHNOLOGY

Of slop and crapjects

Sachin traces the arc from 3D-printed crapjects to vibe-coded slop and proposes a more sustainable way to think about what all this building actually produces.

Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

— in

Whenever a new technology arrives, the impulse is to treat it as something that has never existed before. A clean break from everything that came prior. I catch myself doing this with vibe coding constantly, and I see it everywhere around me. But the most useful lens for understanding a new phenomenon is almost never the phenomenon itself. You want something adjacent, close enough to share structural similarities but removed enough to see clearly. It’s on the lookout for something like this that I started reading more about the Maker Movement of ~2005-2015.

The Maker Movement was the spiritual predecessor to vibe coding. The parallels are hard to miss. Vibe coding has slop. The Maker Movement had crapjects, a term the community coined for 3D-printed objects that served no purpose beyond proving you could extrude plastic into a shape. The Claude Code of that era was a $200 printer from Monoprice and a breadboard.

The scene around making produced what were probably the first internet-native network intellectuals. Chris Anderson (who wrote the widely-read piece about the long tail) left his editor-in-chief role at Wired to start a robotics company called 3D Robotics. Cory Doctorow wrote Makers, a sci-fi novel based around characters who are hacking hardware and business models to survive in a world where everything is falling apart. These were people who gained influence by participating visibly in a making culture and writing about what it meant.

A lot of the intellectual energy of the AI era orbits around AGI: when it arrives, what it’ll do to jobs, whether it will be aligned. The Maker Movement had its own gravitational center, and it was the idea that making physical things with your hands could produce an internal transformation. You would become more creative, more entrepreneurial, more self-reliant. The object you made mattered less than what the act of making did to you.

In 2018, the media scholar Fred Turner published a paper that put this ideology under a microscope. His argument was that the Maker Movement had reinvented the theology of the Western Frontier for the digital age.

The specifics of seventeenth-century Puritanism are obviously gone. Nobody at a Maker Faire was talking about predestination. But Turner traced the literary forms and the millenarian structure—the belief that a great transformation is coming, and that individual discipline will determine who makes it through. In the Maker narrative, the American landscape is economically barren. Jobs have disappeared. Institutions have failed you. And in this wilderness, the lone individual searches inside themselves for signs of the entrepreneurial spirit, the creative spark, evidence that they are among the elect who will build their way to salvation.

Turner’s observation extends well beyond 3D printers. You can trace this same pattern through almost every hobbyist technology scene of the past fifty years. Homebrew computer clubs in the 1970s. Punk zines in the 1980s. The early web in the 1990s. Each one developed a community of practice—what Brian Eno would call a “scenius”—where people played with tools that the mainstream considered toys. Each one generated its own salvation narrative: master this tool, transform yourself, become the kind of person who builds the future.

And each one operated with a useful kind of slack. The tools were unproductive on purpose. Nobody expected your Arduino project to ship to customers. Nobody expected your homebrew computer to compete with IBM. The whole point was that you had permission to fuck around, and the finding-out happened gradually, through play, over years. This is where the old Silicon Valley adage comes from: “What smart people do on the weekends, everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”

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PAINTING

ANIMALS

Birds of a feather

In which Jess Nash defends flightless birds as evolutionary pioneers, rather than evolutionary mistakes.

She Rose Under My Heart the Ostrich-God

— in

The 19th-century Japanese master artist Kawanabe Kyōsai is well known for imaginative and satirical visions carried out in energetic, free brushwork. Between political caricatures, animals, ghosts, and acrobats, his scenes favour movement and lightness. It’s no surprise that he often painted birds.

What better subjects to express liberation and motion? Kyōsai’s soaring eagles, ravens, and songbirds share their substance with moving, changing water and buoyant leaves. Their bodies are as free and flexible as the wind. Air passes through their feathers.

Furthest from this lightness among birds is the ostrich—three hundred pounds and fully grounded. Though they share a class, an ostrich would never fit into a Kyōsai picture like a raven or an eagle does.

This is a thick and gawky animal, strutting on heavy legs, with feathers like hair draping thickly over the bulky body and spraying out at the tail. Up the curve of the neck, there are long black eyelashes, big black eyes, and big black nostrils set into a squat beak. Besides the beak and feathers, not much about the ostrich really looks birdlike at all. They have wings, of course, but these are instrumental in running, not flying.

“In some points it resembles a bird, in others a quadruped,” Aristotle wrote of the ostrich in the 4th-century B.C.E. biological study Parts of Animals. He could make no clear sense of what he observed: feathers and hair, two bird legs and a quadruped’s size, wings and no flight. In his taxonomy of animals, the ostrich was ultimately neither avian nor beast. It was classifiable only as “intermediate”. Indeed, many languages reflect a hybrid view of the ostrich: the Greek term strouthokámilos, the Persian shotormorq, the Turkish devekuşu, and the Chinese tuóniǎo each describe a “camel-bird.”

Though post-Aristotle Jewish and Islamic scholars viewed the ostrich unambiguously as a bird, it was clearly not like other birds. It ate strange things; it built unusual nests; most pressingly, it didn’t fly. In Job 39:13-17, God speaks: “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly / But are her wings and pinions like the kindly stork’s?” The stork has wings that, as biology professor Joel Duff reads, “are beautiful and enable flight.” Not the ostrich.

We on foot have always coveted the wide space of the sky, and the natural ease with which birds navigate it. A bird seems to be a light and free spirit, unconfined by its nature. The caging of a bird is a serious cruelty, and doves soar at weddings. A winged human is nothing less than an angel.

(Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended’st, / And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee) / Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating

—Walt Whitman (To the Man-of-War-Bird)

“The human fascination with flight seems to be associated with our desire for the pure transcendence of art,” writes poet Rosemarie Corlett. Leonardo da Vinci, who worked obsessively at building a flying machine, loved birds; he used to buy them at the market so that he could set them free. Wilbur Wright, of the brothers who finally saw the dream of aviation through, wrote:

The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.

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NOTEBOOK

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

The musician has launched her Substack: “Part-creative outlet, part-self indulgence, part-community connective tissue: this site is a place for me to document, hypothesize, criticize, vent, narrate, and wring out the excess thought-liquid swooshing around my own personal existential aquarium.”

, the former chief leader writer and columnist at The Observer, has joined Substack, where the center-left journalist will “ask the difficult questions the left too often avoids, from a nuanced and researched vantage.”

The team behind Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film has launched a Substack, sharing the trailer and promising insider access to the movie.

Universal Music has launched a Substack dedicated to celebrating ’s music, “where we revisit the stories behind the songs, the collaborators who helped bring them to life and the cultural legacy that still ripples through a new generation of artists.”

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.

This week, we’re making marriage pacts, singing through sunroofs, inventing Ireland, and wondering who’s been watching.

MEMORIES

I’m here, but I’m really gone

A very ’90s childhood reminiscence, featuring soccer, heartbreak, cigarettes, and Alanis Morissette.

I’m Broke but I’m 6

— in

My feet barely fit on the car console, which is fine because my feet are tiny (brag!). I’m tall enough to have my chest up through the sunroof. Even though we’re driving well below the 20 MPH speed limit, I feel the wind push my hair past my ears, and I imagine myself like the happiest, most well loved family dog. Eyes closed and mouth open, whipping my head back and forth in slow motion.

I close my eyes and raise my hands above my head and scream as loud as I can, louder than the song blasting from the car below me.

I feel drunk, but I’m sober

I’m young, and I’m underpaid

I’m 6 years old. My dad and I are 22 minutes late to my Saturday morning soccer game. 22 minutes late means the game has already started. Not that it matters to my dad and me. I have no concept of time. I am a child. All I know is that we are having a boocoobango good time.

My dad, on the other hand, has complete and utter disregard for the concept of time. A real “don’t tell me what to do” attitude when it comes to man-made rules of the universe. The skill of punctuality has simply passed him by. Life instead imbued him with an evil yet charming sense of humor, pants that never fit, and a personality his coworkers called “bulldoggish.”

I’m tired, but I’m working, YEAH AH

No Dixon family vacation was complete without full-body sweats, a few “god damnits,” and having to turn around and head back to the house because someone (my dad) left their wallet at home. The same wallet that was sitting on the edge of the counter by the coffeepot. The wallet that my mom asked 6 different times if my dad had remembered to grab. The wallet that my dad directly looked at and said, “It’s right here in my hand, Charlotte, where the hell else would it be!”

Multiple reasons led to my parents’ divorce, but I’d like to bet that being married to the human version of the iceberg that sank the Titanic was at the top of my mom’s list.

I care, but I’m restless

I’m here, but I’m really gone

I’m wrong, and I’m sorry, baby

My voice carries the “Baby!!” out so it tumbles into the next lyric. I am singing with the kind of vitriol only a woman scorned can produce. I am 6 years old.

Recess had been completely obliterated two weeks earlier when Harrison, a blond boy with blue eyes who fit perfectly into my fantasy in which he was the 4th Hanson brother and I was the 5th, asked for the wooden painted heart pin back that he had given me during cursive class. “I don’t have it anymore,” I lied, gripping it tightly in my hand, about to mount the monkey bars. I wanted to be high up so I could look down on him. “You’re lying,” he said. “And YOU’RE a bastard!” I yelled.

Kidding, I didn’t yell that. I didn’t even know the word bastard. I was a child. I was 6 years old.

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PAINTING

FANTASY

Once upon a time in Ireland

Sithara Ranasinghe digs into fantasy’s obsession with creating mystical worlds that look—and sound—an awful lot like Ireland.

Fantasy writers are weird about Ireland

— in Sithara’s Newsletter

I don’t think anything exemplifies the Y2K thirst for magic better than the music of Enya, an Irish New Age Pop icon who lives in a castle. Her music offered listeners an escape from the ’90s and ’00s into a vaguely medieval Elsewhere made of rolling fields and enormous fogbanks. (McCoy notes that Enya’s album shot “to the highest [charts] position she had ever occupied” immediately after 9/11.) Although detractors called her songs “uplifting nonsense concealing the most cynically calculated mood music in the history of (Middle) Earth,” when Peter Jackson needed a voice to close out The Fellowship of the Ring, he knew exactly who to call.

Because Lord of the Rings has had such a profound impact on all the fantasy media that’s come after it, Enya’s harps and choirs have been melted into the soup. It’s not Celtic-inspired or Irish, it’s fantasy. But whether it’s music or names or folklore, when “Celtic” becomes the default, what do we do when we need to populate the rest of the fantasy world? Someone needs to be the foreigner to your main kingdom. Worldbuilding is hard, so writers often just borrow real-world stereotypes to serve as a shorthand for the “other.” See that kingdom over there with the curved swords and the veiled princesses and the sand? That’s pretty exotic, right? Well, there you go, that’s the Other.

Thankfully, it’s considered a bit gauche these days to play into Orientalist stereotypes. Ireland, on the other hand, feels a bit safer. As Ellen Jacob (Elle Literacy) tells me, “Compared to most post-colonial places—like India or the Caribbean—we’re in a much better position. We’re in Europe, we’re white, we’re quite wealthy.” Added to that, many American writers can trace distant Irish heritage. Still, this doesn’t stop writers from making some really unusual choices in their portrayal of the fantasy Irish analogues.

The book that made me fall down this whole rabbit hole to begin with was Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief, centring a fiddle-playing, green-eyed, copper-haired thief named Kinch Na Shannack. Kinch is Galtic, meaning he’s from a race of people who drink whiskey, farm tubers, live near peat bogs, and speak with a “handsome brogue” that makes them say “cork and kark almost the same”. His people were forced to mass-migrate west “what with the old Famine”, and if you haven’t guessed which culture the Galts are based on yet, I’ll give you one more clue: Buehlman, an American, self-narrates the entire audiobook in an Irish accent.

If the default fantasy mode is Celtic, and the Othered Foreigner People are, on top of that, Celt-coded, you get what scholar Andrea R. Cox calls a “Celtic double exposure”. Celtic cultures provide both the genre’s background texture and its exotic outsider. What that’s going to give you, of course, are a bunch of stereotypes that range from indulging in the odd potato to being physiologically different to the other humans in your fantasy world.

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THE ORIGINAL ART COLLECTORS

TECHNOLOGY

The banality of surveillance

In the midst of the dustup between Anthropic, OpenAI, and the U.S. Department of War, Benn Stancil digs into the “banality of surveillance” and why, despite online tracking going back years, AI heralds a new era in digital privacy concerns.

The banality of surveillance

— in

Prior to working in Silicon Valley, I assumed that data was secure because it was obfuscated by impressive cryptography and stored in buildings that were guarded by tall fences. And I assumed that what we did on the internet was private—and people’s ability to draw any inferences from what we did was difficult—because “surveillance” required complex technologies that could detect faint patterns in millions of disparate signals. Yes, Target might be able to figure out if someone is pregnant before their father could, but that took years of careful observation and sophisticated science. It took well-trained humans working with well-trained models, years in the making.

If only. On an internet where everything is tracked—and man, everything is tracked—surveillance does not require a Ph.D., or even any particularly advanced math. It just requires a junior analyst with 24 hours of free time. Because the real fences around the data we all leave behind—and the real protections of our privacy—are neither tall nor covered in barbed wire. They are simply fences that are annoying to climb. We are not hidden, on the internet; mostly, people are just too uninterested to bother looking for us.

Everyone already knows what happened: The United States Department of War wanted to use Claude. Anthropic wanted them to use Claude, but with restrictions. The two sides could not agree; the negotiations broke down; the negotiations turned into outright hostilities; the hostilities became very public. The Atlantic reports on part of what went wrong:

Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life.

When we hear stories about “mass surveillance” and “artificial intelligence” and the “CIA,” it is tempting to imagine systems of unfathomable reach and sophistication. It is tempting to worry about shadowy government agencies using AI to hack into our phones and turn them into sonar transmitters. It is tempting to see the Greco—a million sensors and cameras feeding into a machine that “doesn’t think, but reasons”:

It reads every permutation in every wager in every seat in the entire casino, hand by hand. It’s wired into floor security cameras that measure pupil dilation, and determine if a win is legitimate or expected. It gathers biofeedback—players’ heart rates, body temperatures. It measures, on a second-by-second basis, whether the standard variations of gaming algorithms are holding or are being manipulated. The data is analyzed in real time, in a field of exabytes.

For better or for worse, reality is almost certainly much more mundane. Nobody wants to use AI to bug our phones, or to build a sprawling nerve system to track our vitals, because our phones are already bugged. Everything we do on them is recorded a dozen times over, by our wireless carriers, by the websites we visit and the apps we use, by the vendors and ad networks those companies are sending their data to, and in the marketplaces that sell that data. We built the eyes of the Greco decades ago.

But that data has remained relatively secure—or maybe more precisely, its potential energy has remained relatively buried—largely because it’s tedious to work with. It’s messy; it’s scattered across different sources and in different formats; combining it together is a pain, and most of us are simply not interesting enough to investigate. Data analysts who work at shadowy government agencies have lives too, and they do not want to write 595-line SQL queries either.

But AI doesn’t mind. And that’s the boring danger of what happens next: Not of AI becoming a superintelligent Sherlock Holmes finding impossible patterns in its enormous mind palace, but of it being a million monkeys at a million typewriters, doing the grunt work no person wanted to do. Because when prying questions are a prompt away—rather than 24 hours of work away—who wouldn’t get tempted to pry?

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PACKAGING

RELATIONSHIPS

Just in case

Lily Montasser on her five marriage pacts, and what their prevalence says about how we date now. “When the options are endless, choosing one person can start to feel less like romance and more like closing a hundred tabs you’re not ready to lose.”

Five Marriage Pacts. Zero Boyfriends

— in

I have five marriage pacts. You know, the “if we’re both still single by forty let’s just do the damn thing” deal you make with friends who you wish you were attracted to.

They are as follows:

MILES · 33 · Salt Lake City · Marriage Date: “When we’re forty” · Status: Open

My first pact is with Miles, my best friend in college. He was the first person I met when I stepped onto campus, and remains one of my closest friends to this day. One night outside of a party in junior year, we agreed that if we were both single by forty we would buy a big plot of land in Northern California and call it a day, sleeping with other people if necessary. We solidified the deal with a spit handshake.

CHASE · 36 · Miami · Marriage Date: 01/01/2027 · Status: Cancelled

Next is Chase. Chase and I matched on Raya in 2021, and after a few clumsy dates, our relationship evolved into a flirtatious friendship that included him being my unofficial business consultant and me taking over his lease when he moved to Miami. On a drunken night outside a bar at 3am, we agreed to meet at a church in Vegas in two years and get married if we were both single. A Google Calendar invite was sent. As the date approached, Chase requested a one-year extension.

I recently ran into a mutual friend who informed me that Chase was considering proposing to his current girlfriend. I texted him a screenshot of our cancelled standing reservation. To which he replied “Damn. Report as spam ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

WHIT · 45 · New York City · “Start a Family” Date: N/A · Status: Open

Next is Whit, who I was in an emotionally serious yet technically unofficial relationship with. After several months of on-and-off-again emotional entanglement, Whit proposed we start a family—have children and all live together in a big beautiful brownstone he would pay for. When I asked, “Well, would we, like, date?” He confidently said: “No.” I told him I’d think about it.

FLETCHER · 45 · New York City · Marriage Date: 12/31/2029 · Status: Open

Then there’s Fletcher. Fletcher and I are not terribly close friends nor have we ever had a romantic encounter. He’s a two degrees of separation friend, but I’m always happy to be in his company whenever he comes around. He’s conventionally attractive, tall, muscular, and absolutely hilarious. One night at a house party, Fletcher and I found each other on the couch, lamenting our most recent romantic flops. We agreed to get married if we’re both single in five years. We high-fived and created a Google Calendar invite for Dec 31, 2029.

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RESTACK

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

, the independent fashion, culture, and arts magazine, has launched a Substack. Every week, they’ll “share a different story selected by our editors and send it straight to your inbox.”

French oenophiles will no doubt be pleased to see on the platform. The Le Figaro wine critic and lifestyle journalist will be sharing her favorite restaurants, hotels, and, yes, wine.

—a self-described “former child star, current human”—has joined Substack, where she’s sharing dispatches “for all those who grew up and still haven’t figured out what that means.”

Chefs Jack Croft and Will Murray have launched , a newsletter where they’ll share recipes, “getting into the ‘why’ and ‘how’, upgrading your palate so you understand when to add a pinch of salt or a squeeze of lemon, as well as giving you a behind-the-scenes view of what it looks like running one of the busiest restaurants in London.”

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.

This week, we’re terraforming the desert, sniffing Oreos, and attempting to capture a person’s essence in a photograph.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• Citrini moves markets: Despite a caveat at the top of The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis by and that what followed was an imagined scenario, many in the tech and finance sectors viewed the doomer vision of AI-driven economic collapse as if it were news from the future. And the market took notice: the post was cited as a reason the stock market plunged earlier this week. described it as a “brilliant, gut-wrenching approach” to predicting AI futures, while described it as “just a scary bedtime story.” Regardless of the accuracy of the narrative itself, it’s hard not to notice when a work of speculative fiction can move very real markets (and inspire financial firms to publish rebuttals).

• Anthropic vs the Pentagon: The federal government and the AI company Anthropic clashed this week over the company’s hard limits on the use of its technology for mass surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons without human oversight. As of Friday evening, the Trump administration seemed ready to make good on its threat to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which would bar government contractors from using its products and could, per , be fatal to the company’s business. Employees at OpenAI and Google have signed open letters urging their own leaders to back Anthropic and commit to the same stances. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s hippy history and its tech present collided on Hippy Hill, where a “Peace Claude” rally took place.

• CBK dominates fashion discourse (again): Ryan Murphy’s show chronicling the love story of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has led to a new generation’s obsession with her ’90s minimalism. writes about CBK’s discernment as the real reason behind her enduring popularity, while reports that a “CBK tax” on vintage basics has hit eBay and lists the (many) brands trying to capitalize on the moment. reminds us that CBK’s consistent sense of style reflects the fact that she spent only a few years in the public eye before her tragic death. And for those ready to move on from CBK but perhaps not from the ’90s, has a broad list of icons to pick from, including Margaret Thatcher, Al Gore, and Geraldo Rivera.

PORTRAITURE

On photography

Dina Litovsky on the ethics of portrait photography, and why making someone look good isn’t the same as making a good photograph.

What Does a Photographer Owe the Portrait Subject?

— in

During any portrait session, my mind engages in a constant negotiation between the sitter’s preferred version of themselves and my own interpretation of them. The balance is not symmetrical, because no matter how formidable the person in front of me, the photographer always has more power. Every decision, from what to emphasize or conceal to what expression to tease out, adds up to a representation that is outside the subject’s control. This delicate dance comes with a sense of responsibility to ensure that the final portrait is, at the very least, non-manipulative. What makes the process trickier is that no matter who my subject is, my secret desire is that they, if not love, at least don’t hate the final portrait. That is often a tall order.

While [Michael] Heizer laid out his terms up front, many other subjects are less forthright and leave the photographer with more room for interpretation and guesswork. To find the subject’s baseline, I like to ask the person if there are any portraits of them that they love. This gives me a reference point for how they see themselves at their best. In most cases, the image that I’m shown, regardless of the age or sex of the subject, is an idealized representation, but one that is rarely interesting as a photograph. The exercise reveals that while it’s easy to appreciate the artistic merits of someone else’s portrait, when it comes to your own likeness, what matters most is whether the image is flattering.

This is where the struggle comes in. One of my hidden photography superpowers has always been understanding how a person likes to be perceived and what their best angles are. I can make people look good, but that doesn’t necessarily add up to a portrait that goes beyond the superficial and holds enough tension to make it interesting. There are requests that I honor, whether it’s avoiding the “bad side” or concealing sensitive areas like a bald patch. But when it comes to framing and emotion, I often end up at odds with the subject, and the tighter their control over their self-presentation, the more I want to break through that facade and catch them outside their comfort zone.

There are two genres where the complex calculations of how to best represent the subject are reduced to extreme dead ends—celebrity and political portraiture. Celebrity portraits most often cater to the subject (and their PR), with the intention to flatter and beautify the individual. The portraits employ soft light, neutral expressions, fan-blown hair, heroic poses, and airbrushing to achieve the desired effect. The portraits are pleasing to the eye but forgettable, because a pandering representation will always lack the necessary bite to cut through the noise.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is political portraiture, which carries an expectation that a photographer should be critical and harsh when working with an unpopular politician. A few years ago, a magazine put a controversial Republican on the cover with unforgiving light beams that exaggerated the facial pores and made the skin texture look like a volcanic field. I was no more a fan of the politician than most readers of the publication, but I thought the choice of the photo was unethical. Besides taking advantage of the trust between the sitter and the photographer, such an approach, relying on technical cheap shots, lacks the depth and complexity necessary for the image to survive past the immediate cultural moment.

The sweet spot between celebrity and political extremes is where most powerful portraits exist. Viewers are more perceptive than we sometimes give them credit for, and a portrait that’s too flattering or too grotesque won’t land the same way as a more nuanced representation. An insightful portrait reflects the sitter’s personality through clues, colors, and positioning, rather than the brute force of technical decisions.

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PAINTING

FRAGRANCE

The best-smelling kid at the playground

Anna Dorn and Crissy Milazzo interviewed writer Emily Gould’s 10-year-old son to get the lowdown on Gen Alpha’s perfume preferences. Read on for some excellent mom shade, a review of perfumes that smell like Oreos, and the age-old question: does this smell good, or am I just hungry?

Smells like Gen Alpha 🍪🍦🍫

— and in

Do you remember the first fragrance you ever smelled? What was it?

Well, my mom used to really just dive into bottles of perfume (not anymore, she has learned how much she should put on now), and when I was much younger, whenever she would be going to a party or a formal occasion she would have perfume on, and a lot of it, too. The only one I can remember that she wore before recent years was a strong sweet-and-sour plum perfume, which she reminded me the name of which was Umé by Keiko Mecheri, which smells great but not in the amount my mom wore, which would never fail to make my nose hurt with how much she wore.

What is your favorite fragrance right now?

Phlur Vanilla Skin. I really like the strong-at-first, smooth vanilla, or even Oreo (as people have told me) scent, because Oreos are peak.

What does your mom smell like?

My mom wears a great-smelling apple pie-scented perfume called Angels’ Share, and she wears Replica “By the Fireplace” perfume, and they both smell great and she finally knows how much to put on.

You live in Brooklyn: what does it smell like?

Just kidding (kinda), but it can smell good, like passing by someone with great perfume, or it can smell absolutely disgusting, such as being on any train station in all of Brooklyn, nobody’s safe.

Do your friends at school like to wear fragrance? If so, what do they wear?

I don’t really know tbh. One of my friends is always like “What’s the point of wearing deodorant or perfume, we’re just 10” (I mean that’s one friend), but when we’re playing sports or having PE, you will not catch more than 1 person within a 3-foot radius of him.

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WINTER BLUES

POETRY

Coming

—By Philip Larkin, shared by James Marriott

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

CITY PLANNING

London Bridge, Arizona

In an ode to idealized cities, Naomi Xu Elegant looks at the “kooky midcentury American businessman” who bought the London Bridge, shipped it to the Arizona desert, and built a Disneyfied English village around it.

The ideal city

— in

Only about 60,000 people live in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, one of four towns in the southwest founded by Robert P. McCulloch, a land developer, oil, gas and geothermal energy speculator, and purveyor of lawnmowers, garden tractors, car, boat and airplane engines, and, in 1949, the world’s first one-man chainsaw.

McCulloch was a man of gorgeously midcentury dreams. He founded and ran six eponymous companies before he died in 1977. With the money he inherited from his father and made from his own superchargers, motor engines, oil exploration, and real estate deals, McCulloch produced a working prototype of a steam-powered coupé (1953), manufactured a fleet of two-seat gyrocopters (a strange cousin of the heli) that he hoped would one day sit in every driveway beside the family car (1969), and launched a passenger airline to ferry prospective residents to the various cities he was spawning in the desert (1970). His California home appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in 1956, billed as a “push-button paradise” of futuristic contraptions: rotating sunbeds, self-heating barbecues, automatic whiskey dispensers, and buttons for drawing curtains and turning on the lights.

The doohickey house was located in Palm Springs, about three hours’ drive from Lake Havasu City. McCulloch purchased the land for the city after flying his prop plane over near the border of California and Arizona, scouting for opportunity, and spotting Havasu Lake (actually a reservoir) in the middle of the desert. He enlisted C.V. Wood, the chief designer of Disneyland in Anaheim—which had opened 15 years earlier, in 1955—to design a new town.

Lake Havasu City is the site of McCulloch’s most famous shenanigan: in 1968, he purchased the London Bridge from the City of London. McCulloch did not, as is often repeated, believe he was buying the more distinctive Tower Bridge, nor is his exploit the origin of the phrase “I have a bridge to sell you.” The man knew what he was doing!

The bridge, too weak to support the increasingly heavy vehicles of the modern world, was sinking into the Thames. Rather than demolishing it to build a new one, the city government thought to save some money by seeing if anyone would want to buy it. McCulloch did.

Slab by slab, he had 10,000 tons of 19th-century granite shipped from the UK to an unpopulated patch of desert in Arizona, where he did not even have a river for the bridge to cross.

The plan was to reassemble the bridge on dry ground, laying the arches over the sand dunes and then digging the sand out and rerouting a section of the Colorado River to run underneath it. After their permit to do this was denied, Wood, the Disney designer, pulled strings to get an audience with President Lyndon B. Johnson himself, whom he somehow convinced to let them build the bridge and carry out the minor terraforming work necessary for it to actually function as such.

It took three years and seven million dollars, thrice as much as it cost McCulloch to purchase all the land that would make up Lake Havasu City. It was an extravagant, delightful, ridiculous, and wholly unnecessary gimmick: what could be more American?

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PHOTOGRAPHY

MUSIC

Notes from the road

There’s a lot of beauty in Damien Jurado’s dispatch from the road: from the fall of snow to the feeling of history in a venue, from conversations about God with his brother to a live recording of “After Hours Mr. Rogers” by St. Yuma during a soundcheck.

Behold, I say unto you.

— in Damien Jurado

We sailed across the frozen tundra of Wyoming yesterday, through high winds and snow. It was terrifying.

We got word of a pileup that had happened just the night before involving twenty semi-trucks and twelve cars. In total, there were two fatalities and countless injuries. The wait for ambulances must have felt like an eternity in the winter storm.

There is nothing—no civilization between towns. If you have ever driven on Interstate 80 between Utah and Colorado, you will know what I’m talking about. It’s almost haunting, no matter what the season.

The shows have been memorable. After Baker City, Oregon, we were on to Boise, Idaho. We played at a venue I’d never been to before: Shrine Social Club. It was beautiful.

You feel the history immediately when entering the building. Just beautiful. All wood. Chairs that have most likely been there since the opening line the outer parameters of the walls. I kept imagining the countless dances that took place there. Cigarette smoke ages a place—in a cool way. At times, I swear I could smell it still lingering.

My older brother, who lives in Boise, came out to the show. I have a strong bond with him—one that is spiritual. A devout Mormon whose belief is so real, so deep, that you feel its presence as you stand beside him. I’ve only known a few people like this. It goes without saying just how much I love and deeply admire him. He’s the real deal.

We talked for what felt like hours about Jesus and the beliefs pertaining to the Latter-day Saints Church. When he spoke, explaining the answers to my questions, I hung on his every word. When he gave pause while thinking about how to respond to something, it seemed to last an eternity.

He would sometimes pause mid-thought, staring into the atmosphere as if he were fishing or cloud-watching, and say, “You know what? That is a great question. I don’t have the answer to that right now. But if you give me some time to think more about it, and perhaps consult the scriptures, I will have an answer for you.”

I really respected that. Too many people pretend to know when they don’t. There is a certain beauty in not knowing the answers. It’s human.

I walked away challenged, as always after talking with him. I hope to see him again soon.

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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.

I’m writing a book about the state of the media that will be published later this year. It’s called How to Save the Media. You can pre-order it here:

Pre-order

It’s a bold title, I know. But there’s little doubt that the media is in crisis. Even as it seems that more news is being consumed than ever, it hardly feels like we’re getting smarter. Mad kings rule the media economy and reap the rewards. News organizations are doing mass layoffs. Impartial reporting is out; jestergooning is in.

But I believe there’s reason to hope. I’ve seen what can happen when publishers take ownership and audiences directly support the work they believe in. I’ve seen a new media market grow from nothing and watched once-struggling writers find financial security. I’ve seen them build new institutions, giving rise to a generation of fresh voices. And I’ve seen audiences vote for the culture they want to see, funding the voices and perspectives they value—leading to more than 5 million paid subscriptions on this platform alone.

So I’m capturing this pivotal time in the pages of a book.

How to Save the Media is about this era of transition, where old gatekeepers give way to new opportunities and direct relationships reign supreme. It’s about an emerging ecosystem where success doesn’t have to depend on who you know or how well you cater to an algorithm. It shows a way to recover from the collapse of traditional media, and escape the deranging effects of the attention economy.

This book tackles the biggest questions facing the media and society, from how to protect the free press to how to resist a robot uprising, taking readers into rooms with some of the biggest media power players of our time, including berserk billionaires and heroic hacks. I’ll blend insider access with outsider perspective, drawing on my history in media and tech across two decades and three continents, from scrabbling freelance journalist to co-founder of Substack. You’ll see how we got here and where we’re going next—from the temple to the garden.

How to Save the Media will be published by Authors Equity, a new publishing company that practices what this book preaches: authors retain full ownership of their work and receive the majority of the sales revenue. The cover art is by my exceptional colleague Joro Chen.

Pre-orders are available now. They matter more than many people realize; they’re what determine whether a book breaks through and reaches a wider audience. So consider pre-ordering if you believe in a different future for media: one where creators own their work, audiences help shape the culture they want to thrive, and power flows to people rather than platforms. This is about saving the media—but also about making it better than it’s ever been.

Pre-order

This week, we’re rating conspiracy theories, getting stuck in 16th-century traffic, and exploring the AI enthusiasm gap between China and the U.S.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• In Pursuit brings former U.S. presidents to Substack: In honor of America’s 250th anniversary, the bipartisan group More Perfect has launched a new essay series penned by American public figures and scholars. First up: shared his thoughts on another George W., praising Washington for his humility and wisdom in voluntarily stepping away from power—praise that some have read as a veiled rebuke to the current administration. has many more essays on the docket, including those by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Chief Justice John Roberts, former first ladies, and other leading historians and public figures.

• Maxximizing: We’ve gone from looksmaxxing to Infinite Jestermaxxing. Horsemaxxing. Symphonymaxxing. Anne of Green Gablesmaxxing. Je ne sais quoi maxxing. We are rough beasts, slouchmaxxing towards Bethlehem. Someone, for some reason, has tried Gaddafimaxxing. Have we finally flymaxxed too close to the sun?

  

CONSPIRACIES

A Great American Art Form

The Kennedys are, yet again, having a moment: RFK Jr. is doing ads with Kid Rock, and Ryan Murphy’s new series about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy is on screens across the country. Meanwhile, Max Nussenbaum revisits the family’s starring role in America’s greatest art form: conspiracy theories.

JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, Reviewed

— in Candy for Breakfast

Forget jazz, Broadway, comics, or hip-hop—in my book, conspiracy theories are the true Great American Art Form. This country was practically built for them: start with a deep-seated distrust of authority, stir in the Protestant idea of unmediated access to individual truth, and top with the First Amendment to let it all bloom in public.

You could even say the United States itself was founded on a conspiracy theory: the Founding Fathers wove a tale of powerful elites (King George) secretly plotting against ordinary people (the colonists) to advance a villainous scheme (subjugate them through oppressive taxation and military control). As with many conspiracy theories, there’s a kernel of truth to this story—but the reality is that what the founders interpreted (or spun) as a deliberate plot against them was really just a patchwork of clumsy, improvised policies from a disorganized British government.

If conspiracy theories are the Great American Art Form, there’s no question as to which is the canonical work of art—our Kind of Blue, West Side Story, Superman, and Illmatic all rolled into one: the theories surrounding the 1963 assassination of our third-best president named “John,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The belief that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone is the country’s most widely believed conspiracy theory—if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory—sustained across generations and deeply woven into American cultural memory through countless books, movies, and TV shows.

In fact, we even have the Kennedy assassination to thank for the term “conspiracy theory” entering widespread use in the first place: as revealed by a declassified 1967 document, the CIA encouraged the use of the then-obscure phrase as a pejorative term to discredit critics of the official narrative.

In his book Reclaiming History, Manson prosecutor and best-selling true crime author Vincent Bugliosi cites 44 different organizations and 214 specific individuals who have been accused of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy, including the Nazis, the Teamsters, the French OAS, Watergate plotter E. Howard Hunt, and Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician. Needless to say, this review will not manage to investigate all of them. The limits of time, space, and human sanity will sadly constrain me to just ten of the most well-known conspiracy theories, which I will evaluate both for plausibility and—far more importantly—for entertainment value.

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FULL CIRCLE

HISTORY

“Traffic’s thy god”

Callan Davies on how Shakespeare got to work, and what it tells us about traffic, horses, and a rapidly changing world.

A Shakespearean History of Traffic

— in

Thomas was born around 1514, and he testified at the age of 70 in 1584 about some property issues. Over this time, he would have felt keenly the traffic explosion that characterised sixteenth-century England. The term itself took on association in Thomas’s youth with the ever-expanding commercial movement of goods, coming to stand in for all sorts of kinetic trade. Shakespeare even borrows it to refer to dramatic action itself, setting up “the two hours’ traffic of our stage” (Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, l.12). This was the age of traffic, both in the global and colonial expansion of merchandising and in our more modern sense of a glut of people and vehicles on the move. As the cynical philosopher Apemanthus in Timon of Athens puts it, chiding a merchant, “Traffic’s thy god”! (1.1.239).

All this had me wondering (as I often do) quite what it would be like for the average player or playgoer to commute in the 1580s or 1590s: how did Shakespeare make it from his home off Bishopsgate Street to the Theatre or Curtain in Shoreditch, or to Stratford-upon-Avon? How did individuals travel from Southwark south of the river up north or west? Could Shakespeare ride a horse? (Almost certainly, but how did this come about?)

Was horse-riding like learning to drive at 17? Did you borrow your parents’ nag for the odd journey? Who taught you to ride and was there a formalised “mode”? Plenty of clues exist for more elite riders. Horse-riding manuals and fashionable continental riding styles proliferated across this period. But what about, say, a journeyman shoemaker? A farm labourer? The son of a glover?

As our Shoreditch carter looked on at a playhouse being built next door, he saw (perhaps not coincidentally) his own work in the carrying trade change rapidly. The historian Joan Thirsk points out that the average horse rider on a road in 1500 was almost certainly a gentry figure; by 1600, it was most likely someone of lower middle social status or below going about their business. In just 100 years, horse-riding became democratised; it became “blue-collared.”

Much of this was driven by a growing economy and a rapidly growing population. (And a growing gentility about travel: why drive when you can be driven?) Horses were needed for all sorts of workaday functions (and also for war preparedness over a century of regular geopolitical instability... topical echoes abound). London felt expansion most sharply, more or less doubling in size (to 200,000 residents) in the twenty years from 1580 to 1600. These factors shaped the playing industry, too. There are no crowds without traffic.

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PAINTING

TECHNOLOGY

The AI enthusiasm gap

Afra on why Chinese society—from art-house filmmakers to hundreds of millions of Spring Festival Gala viewers—is broadly optimistic about AI, while Americans remain conflicted, if not outright hostile.

An AI-Maxi New Year

— in

It’s Chinese New Year, and my timeline is dominated by two names: Jia Zhangke and Unitree.

Jia Zhangke, the 55-year-old director whose melancholic, unhurried gaze at ordinary Chinese life has long mesmerized Western cinephiles—turns out to be, of all things, very AI-pilled. This is not an obvious move for a filmmaker whose greatest works are elegies for what Chinese modernization has destroyed. But during this holiday, he publicly praised Seedance, ByteDance’s AI video generation tool, and then released a short film made entirely with it. The film is a conversation between two selves: the plain, conservative Jia, thermos flask in hand, and a younger, healthier, optimistic “AI Jia,” debating the nature of filmmaking. In the final scene, the two Jia Zhangkes stand on the shore of the ice-choked Yellow River, a landscape he has returned to across decades of work in Shanxi province, watching fireworks climb into the sky. The palette is his own: subdued long shots, blue-gray hills receding into the distance. The dual selves wish each other a happy new year. The artist has metabolized the technology into something unmistakably his.

The other story is Unitree.

This is the second year the company’s robots have performed at the Spring Festival Gala, an event that functions as something like the Super Bowl fused with a state address, held annually. I consider the Gala an ultimate “mid-curve” aesthetic, a cultural common denominator. This year’s gala was aggressively AI-maxi. The Unitree G1 humanoid robots performed kung fu, parkour, street dance, and weapons routines with nunchucks and staffs—clips that ricocheted through Western AI communities within hours; many joked “we are cooked”. For a robotics company locked in brutal domestic competition, a Gala slot is a coronation. Meanwhile, the gala itself served as a showcase for Seedance at scale: the segment “Blessing of the Flower God” summoned twelve ancient poets, each reciting verse to honor a flower of their birth month, with AI-generated imagery blended near-seamlessly into the live stage. Later I learned that Seedance had contributed backgrounds, transitions, and generated sequences to at least three other performances. The whole production felt less like a variety show than a national stress test of ByteDance’s compute architecture.

When my partner and I were watching the Gala last night, he said it felt too tech-infused—it reminded him of The Jetsons, the 1960s cartoon with its relentless, cheerful obsession with a technological utopia. I think he’s underselling it. What I see in China right now is closer to Victorian Britain: a society exuding moral seriousness and deep belief in modernization and technological uplift.

What connects these stories is what they reveal about disposition. The Chinese society, from a world-renowned auteur to the hundreds of millions watching the Gala, is broadly, strikingly optimistic about AI. The reflexive existential dread so pervasive in Western discourse is largely absent.

I remember I spent some time browsing Unitree’s Xiaohongshu account to see how the company addresses the Chinese public, especially about anxiety about job displacement. Turns out, there’s nearly none. The feed is wall-to-wall spectacle: humanoid robots and robot dogs performing in extreme weather, doing impressive gymnastics. The comment sections, meanwhile, are a gathering place for the self-deprecating humor of Chinese internet users. Young people ask: When can I ride the robot dog to buy groceries? When will you release a robot nanny? (Since they aren’t getting married or having children.) And, inevitably: “We need robots for elderly care, it’s urgent, please Boss Wang (means Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree), speed up production so the robots can look after us in old age.”

Set this against the posture of Jia Zhangke’s rough American counterparts. On a recent Joe Rogan episode, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon discussed AI filmmaking with open contempt. AI output is “shitty,” Affleck argued, because it regresses to the mean by nature—and when AI becomes ubiquitous, “people will actually value real things made by real people even more.” Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association has accused Seedance of “unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale,” and Disney has alleged that ByteDance effectively packaged a pirated library of its characters into the tool. The resistance is creative, institutional, legal, and corporate—arriving from all directions at once.

Can we find an American Jia Zhangke? And if one existed, would they survive the anti-AI public siege? Where American AI optimism does exist, it is confined almost entirely to Silicon Valley—the OpenClaw frenzy, the collective Claude Code psychosis, and if you reach back a bit, the 3-year-old “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a self-enclosed declaration that humanity ought to ride the technological trajectory forward, though who “we” are and why we “ought to” remain thoroughly unexamined. What you see is a cultishly bullish tech elite producing manifestos that fail to persuade the rest of the country, set against a China where the public, the government, and the tech industry are broadly synchronized.

Why such different orientations? It would be easy—and cheesy—to credit propaganda alone, as when Palmer Luckey declared that China’s most powerful weapon is “their ability to control people’s minds through the media.” China’s online discourse is heavily constrained, and voices that sound anything like Western liberal humanism or degrowth are unlikely to survive moderation. But this explanation is too thin to hold. Decades of lived experience have taught Chinese society an empirical lesson: technology makes life tangibly better. I once wrote about my Shandong grandmother, now in her eighties, who once walked five hours to buy a clock so her children could get to school on time. Today her Xiaomi phone has given her an online shopping addiction, and delivery drones fly above her apartment. For many in China, industrialization compressed and bent time itself—and AI simply looks like the next turn of a wheel that has only ever spun forward.

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SPACE RACE

FICTION

After the fall

Michael McSweeney’s short story imagines Boston after an invasion: a skeleton newspaper crew, a seed convoy through occupied Massachusetts, and three women with rifles blocking the road.

Dispatch

— in

Eight months after the invasion failed, our newspaper had electricity again. Someone in the Army’s logistics division owed my editor-in-chief a favor and in exchange for some promised puff pieces they agreed to connect the building with our sole working printer to the fragile power grid. The printer was a tiny machine, a by-now ancient letterpress kept in a storeroom we affectionately dubbed the museum, but it fed two dozen one-page news prints an hour into our grateful, ink-stained hands. Before this we published the paper by hand, with whatever we had on hand. The shreds of cardboard boxes, old envelopes pilfered from Post Offices, or the blank pages of legal orders we found in a backroom at the municipal court. With power, we approached something more consistent, and now we could work at night. We estimated an official circulation of about 500, an amount we considered a small miracle, though we told ourselves we easily reached half of Boston. People devoured our editions at the ration stations set up in the rubble of the Common and the worksite at the Waterfront where soldiers and civilians were lifting one of the invaders’ landing craft out of the harbor. I even sketched the landing craft, a dark and wart-pocked spear-point, and got it printed in the morning edition.

Let it be said that humanity will never lose its curiosity. Nor will true journalists lose their desire to feed that curiosity, to create and deliver the news. The invasion had shattered the public internet, though a source once told me a few satellites up there still worked, and all the easy links between people were gone with it. Everyone, myself included, kept reaching for our pockets to connect, to feel the hive mind, to feel happy or angry or sad together. We intended to rebuild these connections through the stories people told us. Meteoric terrors descending from the sky. Family members dragged away. Lakes and rivers drained down to fish bones. I interviewed a woman who shot her husband rather than see him bleed to death after an invader sliced through the door he was barricading and severed his arm. I interviewed a fifteen-year-old boy who dragged his unconscious grandfather into a swamp and hid for a week, surviving on scalding rainwater and tree bark. We printed everything. I believed everything.

One day I got a tip about a shipment of seeds and fertilizer out to Western Massachusetts. I grew up in Fallston and felt the pull of home, so after two day-ration bribes I was allowed to ride in one of the trucks. We crawled out of Boston along Route 2 and as we slalomed around ruined cars I gazed out at the broken skyline, the Prudential Building cut in half at the heart. I wanted to see it rebuilt but I knew it wouldn’t or shouldn’t be. It will go back into Boston. Devoured and reused for something new, something more, because no place is ever the same after war.

The convoy picked up speed through Concord. Unbound by the stoplights thrown and tarnished in the trees. We drove past bombed-out Emerson Hospital where my uncle was once held against his will, screaming about enemies none of us could see. Burnt-out ambulances crowded the entrance ramp. I stole the manifest from the glove compartment: seeds for corn, tomatoes and asparagus. Germs to feed the thousands who remained.

Three women with rifles blocked the way through Athol. The trucks stopped and for a while there was no movement. One of the women fired a flare and took a few steps forward. The driver of the first truck got out and approached her. I leaned out the window and watched the woman’s face grow proud and agitated as she spoke. The driver took his baseball cap off and wiped the sweat from his bald head. He turned, saw me watching, threw an angry look and jerked his head. I sat back in my seat and scribbled my surroundings: an exit ramp a hundred yards away, yellow grass and yellow trees, the speck of a hawk in the cloudy sky. Finally the driver walked back and the second driver joined him. I heard the cargo door open, hang and slam. Then the first driver walked back around, two crates stacked in his arms. The second driver climbed back beside me. They need some help, he told me. Looks like a robbery, I told him. They need some help, he repeated, and then he said, They need help and they’re taking it.

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DRAWINGS

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The writer has started I’m Glad You’re Here, a Substack where he reflects “on the journey through cPTSD, the discovery of Autism, the pursuit of peace.”

The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.