This week, we’re piercing our navels, visiting Nantucket as unwanted guests, and remembering friends and family in the ways we know how.

SOCIAL GRACES

On reading the room

The relationship between host and guest is often a tightrope, governed by unspoken codes of conduct. What happens when that social contract flies entirely out the window? Ariel Ehrlich, a self-described undesired visitor, investigates.

Etiquette: How To Act When You’re No Longer Welcome

— in Ari’s Substack

In an earlier essay, I expatiated on how to be likable as a guest.

But what happens when you follow each of my rules and your host still seems to loathe you?

Well, this weekend, I was confronted with that question head-on.

This weekend, I stayed with an old friend at her home in Nantucket, an island I’ve loved since I first set foot on it at the end of the pandemic. It is a deeply emotional place for me, the site of some of the best times of my life thus far. Likewise, the friend is someone whom I have long cherished.

But this weekend was not as spiritually Instagrammable.

At this point, I might disclose that I am by no means a low-maintenance guest. I wake up each morning with approximately 75 pre-breakfast opinions, tell an obscure story from when I was 17 like I’m being interviewed for a Ken Burns documentary, and have yet to come across a tranquil silence that I didn’t feel duty-bound to fill. If hosting were an endurance sport, I would be an Ironman race taking place in the depths of Hell.

Still, one might think they can count on old friends to enjoy their company, despite it all, but this weekend proved me wrong. I am sure that whatever went wrong, I had a hand in it.

I’m not exactly sure where I blundered, though. Nor am I sure how that blunder culminated in my hostess blocking me on Instagram. But we’ll get back to that.

Perhaps it wasn’t any one thing at all, but a thousand at once. A dozen people under one roof, a busy itinerary, little privacy, and exhaustion can make anyone far less urbane than they intend.

I followed all of my own rules:

I made my bed and left my room clean.

Left a Dear Annabelle In Bloom thank-you note.

Lugged flowers and scented candles from the Upper West Side to Sconset.

Thanked my host and her parents sufficiently but not gratuitously.

Displayed excitement and openness to my hostess’s plans.

Only referenced money to say that I’d pay Taylor Swift’s $20 million booking fee for my wedding performance. (And I’d say it again.)

But still, I found myself persona non grata.

I should tell you that it is a rarity in recent years that I am not universally loved. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I’m quite “out there” (in the good way) or simply because I bring the tokenization potential of an obnoxious, pretentious gay Jew, but I find friends more often than I find foes. Perhaps my friends simply suffer from an irreparable level of Stockholm syndrome.

This weekend, my hostess had invited eight other friends from various corners of her life to join us, and I thought it was sure to be a fun, social weekend. I told my therapist how excited I was for such an adult experience.

At the outset of the weekend, I was wondering how I could possibly turn what I expected to be such a wonderful weekend into a Substack other than perhaps by expounding upon the Etiquette of Spending a Weekend in a State of Unfettered Joy. But the universe had different plans.

My mother stitched a needlepoint pillow that says, “I’m Not For Everyone.” My version would say, as one of my BFFLs, Alden, once told me: “Not Everyone Is Going to Be Obsessed With Me.” Though it is difficult to imagine, it is true. Not everyone finds my solipsistic, vocal-fried, Instagram-obsessed, racy, intentionally provocative self to be perfectly charming.

And that’s okay.

But when you find yourself trapped on an island with a hostess who seems to be counting the minutes until your departure, that’s of little comfort.

It was 5 hours into the trip when I realized my hostess might be annoyed. 19 hours when I knew she was. 24 hours when I lost hope. 33 hours when I thought she hated me. 55 hours when I knew she would never speak to me again. Despite realizing that there was no hope with two-thirds of the trip remaining, I continually tried my best to make myself likable and to be the best guest I could be. My friends at home were encouraging me to move up my flight a day earlier, and though I knew that my host would be happy if I did that, I didn’t want to start drama. Remember, this isn’t Temptation Island. It’s Nantucket Island. Go with grace.

One would be acting in poor manners to make the conflict obvious—to say the quiet part out loud. Even if other guests notice the tension between you and your host, there is no upside in playing the part of the Pew Research Center in polling them. When a perceived conflict rests between you and your host, involving others only creates a further source of drama for which you are responsible.

The most [well-]mannered suggestion I can make here is to continually do your absolute best to make your remaining time pleasurable for both yourself and your host. In other words, hydrate with rosé.

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TECH

MEDIA

“I didn’t realize the price of writing online—my editors did”

Mitchell Jackson traces an oral history of one of the modern era’s most seismic magazines.

Inside the Coke-Fueled Rise and Fall of VICE

— in Pirate Wires

Every morning, I log onto TikTok and scroll past a video that triggers my complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Most of these videos consist of a Zoomer skipping down Bedford Avenue to a Dirty Projectors song, past what once were Williamsburg’s hip warehouse clubs and are now Whole Foods and banks.

Caption: If I lived in Williamsburg in the 2010s and worked at Vice, I would be the happiest person on earth…

Vice would never have hired most of these Zoomers, with their straight hair and HR personalities. Vice would have made fun of them. I would know: In 2012, I was the youngest worker at Vice, making fun of such people. The company formed the most influential and traumatic years of my life. [. . .]

Zoomers think Vice—the magazine, founded in 1994, that basically created early-2010s hipster Americana—was the Y2K equivalent of Patti Smith’s Just Kids, the Chelsea Hotel replaced by the Wythe. They aren’t alone. Lately, a cottage industry of “experts” has emerged in an attempt to answer the question: What was Vice? [. . .]

To actually understand what Vice was, you had to have sat in our dusty white Williamsburg warehouse, where dildos flew over your head, weed smoke filtered through the vents, and, occasionally, your 40-something-year-old aging punk co-worker would show up with members of the Bloods, who stole your computer.

Those 40-something-year-old aging punks ran a bizarre business. The world knew Vice for its HBO show, magazine, viral documentaries, and Vice.com, a textual prelude to the “manosphere”—but the company operated a vast array of side hustles. Shane licensed the magazine all over the world (almost every week, it seemed, we’d discover a new Vice office in an Eastern Bloc country) and sold sponsorships to blue-chip corporations. (For instance, Unilever paid $20 million a year to sponsor a women’s vertical called Broadly.) [. . .]

Shane theorized that Vice would eventually dominate every genre and medium, from the internet to cable TV to film. But selling so many products confused audiences, and you can only con Unilever and other advertisers into sponsoring shiny new verticals so many times.

Mostly: Vice was a cult. It was also one of the best business schools in modern history. [. . .]

Everyone at Vice was a sociopath, nerd, or weirdo. I was weird enough.

Weeks later, an HR guy led me under the neon sign, up creaky stairs, past rows of video editing bays, accountants, and a taxidermied bear into a crowded back office filled with cardboard boxes. This was the dumpy editorial bay—the heart of the company. (Every team, except ours, had real office space.)

“Your job is to do what we say,” the associate editor told me. “You will transcribe. You will write blog posts. And you should get to know the old Vice issues...”

He pointed at cardboard white boxes stuffed with old magazines, as if they were junk.

“Who started Vice?” I asked an intern next to me.

“Shane and Suroosh,” he said, before whispering, “and he-who-must-not-be-named.”

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SUMMER READING

REBELLION

Navel-gazing. Literally.

Alyssa Vingan uncovers convalescence where she least expected it: a piercing studio.

So there’s this belly button piercing that healed my inner child

— in sex happens

Like most great millennials, I was raised on MTV. An outsized number of my childhood memories involve something I saw or heard on the network, which indelibly shaped my tastes. The first-ever PG-13 movie I was allowed to watch in a theater was Clueless, a couple of years after I met generational hottie Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” music video. Two of the earliest albums I bought with my allowance were Fiona Apple’s Tidal (1996) and Britney Spears’ ...Baby One More Time (1999) after seeing them on my screen after school. Despite their vast aesthetic and artistic differences, they all introduced me to one tantalizing thing in particular: a belly button piercing.

You couldn’t tell preteen me that there was anything more powerful and sexy than that tiny metal ring. I was enthralled by any navel piercing scene, whether animated into an episode of Daria or in the cult-classic bad girl spiral in Thirteen. I dreamed of growing up to be confident enough in my body to not only bare my midriff with abandon—keep in mind, this was the apotheosis of diet culture, before the current GLP-1 era made it look like child’s play—but also to let some guy I’d just met stick a needle through it without cowering in fear of pain. Plus, the more interested I became in fashion and style as I got older, any additional opportunity to accessorize my collection of surf shop baby tees and Hollister denim skirts was enticing. A belly button piercing personified being carefree but, most importantly, cool—the thing I longed to become most of all.

I remember soft launching the idea of getting a belly button ring to my mom in the early aughts, at the height of my Britney obsession, when my dance team friends and I memorized her video choreography in our rooms on weekends. Like most mothers would, she pulled out the big guns to dissuade me: She had a dear family friend who happened to be an OB/GYN warn me about the scar stretching out when I eventually got pregnant, becoming unsightly sometime in my distant future. When talking about my having a baby, it was never an “if,” always a “when”—like it was what I was supposed to do.

“Doing what I’m supposed to do” is one of the biggest through lines in my life, something that’s become uncomfortably clear as I approach my 40th birthday. People pleasing has shown up in both my personal and professional lives in a way that, in hindsight, has been detrimental to my happiness and, ultimately, my success—but that’s another (probably paywalled) essay for another day. Realizing you have a problem is the first step, but actually doing something about it is another beast entirely. This is why, almost 30 years later, I texted my longtime piercer, hopped in a Lyft to Greenpoint on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and finally pulled the trigger. It’s the type of spontaneity afforded to voluntarily childfree women.

My curiosity and desire had lingered for decades—what reason did I have to continue depriving myself? And what better silly, sexy summer activity for a single girl who’s trying to heal her inner child?

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REGRET

THE WILD WILD WEB

Influencers offline

After a store in Nantucket posted a now-viral sign to ward off content creators, Kate Lindsay unpacks a new round of discourse about who the ire is actually directed toward.

Does hating influencers mean hating women?

— in embedded

“Influencer” was not coined by any one person. It emerged organically out of late-2000s creator culture. And in my 10 years of talking to creators, it’s not a word any one of them has used to describe themselves. When it comes up, it’s usually with air quotes, or an apologetic wince. “I hate that word,” they say.

Is that because it’s sexist? This is the question after a store in Nantucket posted a “No Influencers” sign, prompting a disappointed response from creator (and fellow Nantucket business owner) Paige Lorenze. Creator Levi Coralynn posted a video saying that hating influencers is just an acceptable way to hate women.

Influencing is unavoidably linked to women. I’ve written before about how any time a woman is murdered or commits some kind of social offense or faux pas, the media slap the word “influencer” in front of her name whenever possible to justify breathless coverage of an otherwise private citizen. I also think it’s no coincidence that, as Levi points out, once women unlocked this career path giving them creative and financial independence over their own image and femininity, the first word for it became derogatory.

Now that the term “creator” has gone mainstream, it is worth asking why a publication or person chooses “influencer” instead. I do believe that reason is often sexism. John Sylvia, owner of the “No Influencers” store, told The New York Times that “I feel sometimes my store is used as someone’s background, a stage.” This is a legitimate gripe—but one that could have just as easily been addressed with a sign that said “No Pictures.”

In two decades, mostly female online creators have built an industry that dominates culture and commerce. You are not exempt from their influence, even if you don’t follow them (the Devil Wears Prada “cerulean” monologue comes to mind…). And yet creators are treated like gnats—scourges on a society that nevertheless actively consumes their labor.

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COLLAGES

REMEMBRANCE

“We never have enough time”

Matt Hausfater creates a digital memorial for two loved ones who have passed on.

Remembering Sam & Mara

— in Matt+

One of the first things I told Sam was, “In the old days, before the streaming bubble burst, I tried to sell a network show every year. The networks are buying twenty pitches that they kill by Christmas… I could be one of those dead projects! It’s free money!” // “Let’s fucking go!” Sam said. A few months into our relationship he texted me while I stood in line at CVS. “Do you have anything for Zooey Deschanel? She wants to come back to TV.” I thought about it for a few minutes before realizing that holy shit, yup, I did—a workplace comedy set in a fictional Guitar Center. She would be the Jack Black in the School of Rock character. I sent Sam the one-pager and he sent me a voice note that I wish I still had. “This is perfect, dude!!! Sending to her team right now.” Within weeks I was sitting in front of Zooey, pitching her the show. She said yes before I could even finish my pitch. Sam did that. Put it all together. Connected the dots. Does what any good rep does.

The past six months or so, since January really, Sam had done a few things that made me question our relationship and whether it would last, and if he was a good fit. They are things that I’m not going to go into detail here, but when I look back on them through the lens of the tragic past week, it makes more and more sense. I questioned if Sam was on drugs. The last few times we spoke he sounded… different. He usually had such a positive outlook on Hollywood, even as it continued to contract. We would outlast this change. He would always say, “We’re going to be having a very different conversation come…” And even when things continued to suck, he was super positive… until the last time I saw him in person.

I went to E360 to participate in a table read. It was Day One of the World Cup. I remember because assistants and managers were all streaming the games on their phones. I texted Sam that I was in the building when the table read was over. He told me “AWESOME!! I’ll come down!” I told him I was coming up instead.

He came out to give me a big hug and took me back to his office. I sat down in the low-slung chairs opposite his desk and he painted a pretty dire portrait of the Town. Like I said, he didn’t sound like the Sam I knew. I left his office that day, standing in the courtyard of the building thinking to myself, “I’m not so sure if that is the attitude I like for one of my representatives.”

I had no idea what he was going through. We had joked a few times that we were both “SSRI bois” in therapy, but in LA, who isn’t? Everyone is on something and everybody has a therapist. I didn’t have a clue that he was struggling until the moment I got this text back from him as a response to something we were dealing with on the business side, the last one he would ever send: “Sorry I missed you end of last week. I’ve been dealing with some rather intense personal and health stuff and was about to let you know, but I’m taking a few weeks medical leave. If there’s anything timely, I have a couple of very capable colleagues who will step in. Looking forward to catching up with you on the other side.” I responded in kind, “Oh man. I hope you are okay. I don’t need anyone on your end… PLEASE GET WELL.”

It’s the “other side” bit that haunts me. I assumed he was referring to the other side of rehab, or wherever he may have been going. But upon reading it with 20/20 vision, I ask myself if he already knew then that this was the end.

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POETRY

who’s the fool, fueled by a desire for

the fool is fractured, on a quest for a MacGuffin

absurd, right, yes, just, so, absurd, but

the fool is stretchy, Mr. Fantastic,

not as smart

who’s the fool, surrounded by pylons, there’re’re’re um,

houses, yes, houses, McMansions, origami unfolding

into swans, not the exotic ones, just a flaunting goose

could’ve said ugly duckling, who’s the fool, someone

who wishes

because i said so, temperance, tantrums

crying during mini golf

but always loves the sky worlds, one more

chariot derailing, one more (please)

empress proud, one more

hanging pear, one more(?)

go to sleep, darling

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Substackers featured in this edition

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Writing: , , , , , ,

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Last week, news broke that Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel, which had reportedly sold for $2 million after a 14-way bidding auction, had been pulled from publication by the author’s own agents over suspected AI use.

In an email to publishers, one of his representatives wrote: “Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion. During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilising AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”

This is at least the third such public instance of AI allegations leveled against an author this year alone, preceded by Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl, which was pulled from publication, and H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth, which was initially self-published and, as of now, is still set to be distributed by Simon & Schuster in a seven-figure deal.

Falade, who has now obtained legal counsel, has vehemently denied the accusations. In a statement sent out to several press organizations, he wrote, “Three Black authors received major publishing deals this year, and all three later had deals cancelled or disrupted following suspicions about AI. There seems to be a troubling assumption that when a Black writer produces work that attracts significant attention, the work could not possibly be their own. Meanwhile, there are popular white writers who have publicly mentioned using AI for their writing processes and they’re still doing fine.” On Instagram, Falade has posted snippets of texts and emails from 2021, prior to the advent of ChatGPT, about his book to show he didn’t use AI to write it.

One way or another, it’s clear the publishing industry is in a state of flux, if not panic, over both the growing use of generative AI in literature and accusations of its use. We’ve asked three industry professionals and writers—Kathleen Schmidt, Lincoln Michel, and John Paul Brammer—to weigh in on how scandals like these keep erupting, if AI use has any place in writing to begin with, and where publishing might go from here.

Kathleen is the president of KMSPR, a strategy, marketing, PR, and branding firm focusing on authors, publishers, and publishing-adjacent entities. Lincoln is an author, editor, and professor of fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. John Paul is an author and columnist.

There have been a few big publishing scandals involving AI recently, with Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel, which reportedly sold for over $2 million in a bidding war, most recently pulled by its own agents for suspected AI use. Falade has obtained a lawyer and is seemingly denying the allegations. What were your knee-jerk reactions to hearing the news?

Kathleen Schmidt: My first reaction was, “Oh no, not again.” It was the third such allegation in a short period of time, but the stakes were much higher. A 14-way auction that results in a big advance is nothing to scoff at. When the agents pulled the book, my immediate thought was to find out more about what happened. My second thought was, “How could this happen?” AI allegations had just been put forth in an Atlantic piece about Daggermouth, a self-published book that Scarlett Press (Simon & Schuster) just published—that resulted in a 60% score of AI from Pangram. It was worrisome that we were hearing about another possible case of AI writing so quickly.

John Paul Brammer: My first thought was, “$2 million? I need to write a crime novel.” It’s always wonderful to learn that there is in fact money in publishing, it’s just that I’m not getting it. My second thought, similar to Kathleen’s, was, “Again?” I haven’t read the text, so I’m not at liberty to discuss whether or not it was AI-generated, but I doubt the agents would have surrendered such a payday if there wasn’t something going on there.

Lincoln Michel: My first reaction was “Welp. About time.” I think everyone in the publishing industry has been expecting a big scandal like this for a while. Agents and editors have, I think, been very worried they’d be at the center of a scandal. The fact that the agents themselves recalled this novel surprised me. This wasn’t the publisher getting cold feet. The agents were giving up a huge chunk of money. This makes me assume there’s some there there. However, I do not want to judge an author who is denying and whose work I haven’t read. Unlike other recent AI allegations, the text isn’t out there for us to judge.

How could this have happened? If the allegations are true, the manuscript exchanged many hands and was read several times over by different teams. It seems an internal system of checks and balances failed here.

KS: The problem is that the checks and balances in publishing really come down to an editor and agent’s experience and gut checks. As we have seen with some memoir scandals, there is no fact-checking in publishing. Likewise, there is no uniform policy on checking a manuscript for AI. I was confounded by the fact that 14 different editors had the manuscript that resulted in a bidding war. If the book “dazzled” as the agents have claimed but also had “hallmarks of AI,” it makes me question the entire process. I can’t comment on the book’s merits because I haven’t read it, but it is notable that so many people in the industry jumped in to bid on it. Overall, I think it is becoming more difficult to detect AI. It’s also a risky business to start accusing authors of using it when we depend on something like Pangram, which is not infallible.

I agree with Lincoln that publishers should be conducting LLM training. It is one step in the right direction.

JP: Well, I thought about the Commonwealth short-story prize fiasco/Granta dustup from not too long ago, and I guess what depresses me is that I have to assume there’s a lack of rigorous reading happening among people who should be able to catch this kind of prose. What bothers me most about AI in literature is that, as much as I would love to blame Big Tech, what’s being exposed here is that we don’t have a robust literary culture. The people who are judging these things (I believe, however, that they stood by the Commonwealth story? I’ll check), are awarding this kind of prose, which, whether it was AI-generated or not, is troubling to me. I don’t think the average person needs to be reading Proust in their spare time or whatever, but the fact that the people in our culture who should be discerning readers are being proven time and again to be undiscerning makes me worried about the future of literature. AI is only accelerating and revealing it.

LM: Like the others, I don’t want to judge this book, since we haven’t read it. However, the initial Publishers Lunch article by Erin Somers reported what I’ve heard myself: Many imprints have had to pull books or get authors to rewrite them because of LLM use. They just haven’t made the news. It’s more widespread than many realize. How can it happen? Well, LLMs are really good at evading our current systems. I get several AI emails each day past my spam filter. Every professor I know can tell you they get work that is also likely AI but gets past TurnItIn. It’s tricky.

But also… I’m not sure most people in publishing have studied LLM tics and learned to spot it. They have, perhaps naively, relied on the integrity of the author they work with. You can learn how to spot this stuff, not in every case but in many. I expect publishers will be doing LLM training at some point. Hell, probably everyone (annoyingly) who deals with text or images of any kind in any field will need it.

JP, you mentioned these literary awards are being handed out to potentially AI-generated/assisted prose. Do you think that’s a taste/skill issue in the judging process, or is what we see as “good” literature changing in the age of AI?

JP: A skill issue for sure! Look, I don’t mean to say I can’t be fooled. I’m sure I have been. But for me, it’s usually pretty obvious when I read something that has that AI-affected prose. It seems to me that AI does have a certain libido for a certain style, and for certain techniques. There’s this corny animism everywhere. The bench that watches. The rock that remembers. Etc.

What do you make of the agents themselves pulling the book? They’ll be experiencing a pretty big pay cut themselves.

KS: I think it was a complicated decision. Giving up a $300K commission is not easy, but they clearly had their reasons, most of which allegedly have to do with communication with the author about his suspected AI use. Since we haven’t read the book, it is hard to say what specifically set off alarms. What is notable to me is how public the agents have been about this. It makes me uncomfortable because confidentiality is being broken, and many of their statements struck me as them simply saving face. From what I understand, an editor first noted that they thought AI was used. Then Publishers Lunch ran the manuscript through Pangram. They shouldn’t even have had the manuscript at that point. I think the agents’ reputations may take a hit in this case.

JP: Girl, that’s so much money… It does make me wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. Imagine those emails. I get stressed just thinking about them. What I would say is it feels like we’re in a Wild West with this stuff. It’s all so case-by-case.

LM: I will say I think it is smart for literary publishers/agents/etc. to take stands here. I’ve always thought the real issue with LLMs in publishing is quantity. They can pump out endless slop. This slop is already overwhelming things like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited store. I also think we’ll see people turn to customizable LLM slop, paying OpenAI or whatever directly for stories. So I think literary publishers would be smart to make themselves a home for the people who want human-authored work.

This is new territory—deal cancellations on account of suspected AI use—but what might happen to Falade, and other authors in his boat, from here? Is his career stalled? Thwarted? Or will he, and those who have been accused before him, be just fine?

JP: I would not be fine if I lost out on millions of dollars, but that’s just me. I don’t know what will happen in his case, and I probably won’t read the book if and when it comes out (for forensic purposes, I’d probably crack it open, I suppose). But I imagine there will be more cases like this in the near future. I’m against generative AI in literature, but I also recognize things are reaching a fever pitch where people on all sides are struggling to be rational. Yes, I bet some people really will get falsely accused, and while I can’t know if that’s what’s happening here, we do need to start thinking about, like… what happens when someone is innocent but becomes the subject of intense public scrutiny? I worry about that.

LM: Yeah, I can’t even imagine what the author is going through, especially if the accusations are false. I think this could go any way, though. If he can prove authorship, I imagine some big publisher might be interested. Hell, I can imagine some would take a chance just because of the free publicity of the scandal. Getting coverage is the biggest problem for books these days…

KS: I think Jerry Falade should self-publish the book ASAP. That is what I would advise him to do. However, yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that he has now retained a lawyer, so this is about to get very interesting. Conversely, in the case of Daggermouth, Scarlett Press just acquired additional titles from the author, so they are clearly standing by her. I also think we can’t discuss the fallout without noting that the accused are all authors of color. That is a problem in itself that must be addressed.

JP, you mentioned it a bit already, but I’d love to hear all your perspectives on AI in publishing in general. The industry, and readers alike, seem to be rejecting its use, even as an editing tool. Is there any room for it in literature at all?

LM: A problem with any discussion of “AI” is the term is vague and applies to many different technologies, and the uses of a given tech are so wide. I think everyone can agree there’s a vast gulf between using an LLM as a spellchecker and having it churn out a book for you in 45 minutes, as the romance author profiled by the NYT claimed to do. I think the standards will shake out in some way. Even if the legality and such remain murky, some standards for artistic integrity will shake out.

Also… if you use AI in significant ways and are open about it, great! Readers can judge with their eyes and dollars. The problem is that very few such people want to admit what they are doing. That’s the root of all these scandals, really. It’s all the people hiding or lying about their use.

JP: I do think we’re heading to a place where to use technology at all is to use AI. When I do a Google search, it’s Gemini answering. I know some people who are finding ways to abstain, but candidly I’m probably not going to go out of my way to practice absolute nonparticipation. It’s also a funny, paranoid era we’re in, where it feels like everyone suspects each other in some way. Like, Okay, but you use it for X, Y, or Z… right? The Hank Green thing, for example. He basically said he was using it for research, but there are people out there calling for his head on a spike over it. It all feels random and emotional. Which, that was the internet before Claude or ChatGPT… so…

I agree with Lincoln. The lack of transparency is making people act up.

KS: I don’t think we can have absolutes about AI right now, but I do think there needs to be very clear guidelines, and that publishers must come together to create them. It is not a secret that publishers have begun using AI internally. To what extent, I don’t know, but if publishers are using it, they need to be clear about how. I myself use Claude Cowork in my day-to-day because it assists me with administrative tasks like contracts, invoices, and status updates. What we need are differentiators: it is okay to use AI for X, but not Y. The problem, of course, is that you will always have people who use these tools for nefarious reasons. That is my worry with Pangram: You have an AI-detection tool open to the public. They can run anything through it and receive a false positive. What if that happens to an author, who is then publicly blamed, but the accusations are untrue? This is very tricky territory.

Personally, I hate that Google uses Gemini as search results. It really has ruined search, which is a whole other discussion.

JP: There’s a little Gemini sparkle thing in this very Google doc. It showed up for me yesterday, and I don’t know what it wants. I really am an abuelita when it comes to technology, for better and for worse. Like, what happens when I press it? Did I consent to it being here? Basically: I just don’t know if I’m vigilant enough to keep AI at bay from all aspects of my daily life. Someone smart will probably say, “You can disable that by clicking this, then that, etc.!” But I, like most people, am kind of lazy.

How has AI in general changed literature? Or even just your personal approach to literature? Based on what you guys are saying, it seems to be in a state of flux/chaos deciding what to make of it. Is this change in line with what you expected even a year or two ago?

LM: I’m tempted to say… it hasn’t really? It’s obviously caused lots of angst, think pieces, and discourse. There have been a few scandals. But if we’re talking about traditionally published books at least, I don’t think if you walked into a bookstore today and bought 25 new releases and compared them to 25 new releases from five years ago, you’d notice a difference. LLMs have failed to produce any new genre or styles. There hasn’t been some bestseller written by AI that changed how books are published. This may change. As of now, it’s more of a looming threat.

I’m also a professor, and that is a situation where LLMs have changed everything, almost entirely for the worse for everyone. The way assignments are made. How they are graded. How classes operate. The paranoia from both professors and students. It’s a full-on crisis. Nothing like that in publishing yet.

KS: I agree with Lincoln here—AI hasn’t really changed literature. That said, I think what people forget is what consumers want. If we look at the bestseller list, historically, most of the books on it are not great literary works. They are books that the masses read. What does that mean? Well, it could mean that those with less discerning taste could be easily fooled by an AI-written book. That is my concern. We’ve already seen a large swath of the public buy into misinformation when it comes to current events. That tells me a lot about how much AI could affect the book world, especially in nonfiction. It’s a slippery slope we are on, and I feel the industry is in a crisis.

JP: Echoing my esteemed colleagues here to say I’m not sure it has. A lot of literature of the recent past, at least the ones that make it to “the discourse,” gives “warm-blooded LLM.” But yeah, I have concerns! My basic thing is that we have a culture that defines “writer” not as something you do, but as something you produce. Writing should be in the doing. The laboring over small choices on the sentence level. A lot of people think that “writer” is an identity they are being gatekept from by dastardly effort. People feel this way about a lot of things. Technology exists to reduce effort. So I suppose what I’m concerned about is just… the volume of it all. There’s going to be so, so much of it.

LM: Piggybacking on those concerns, I’m honestly less worried about AI-assisted artists than fully automated AI entertainment displacing human art. By that, I mean I could easily see a future where many people pay a subscription to, say, a Disney-GPT partnership (which was sort of in the works with Sora before OpenAI shut it down) to get AI-generated Harry Potter stories or AI-generated Star Wars clips. Maybe you pay extra to get Yoda fighting Voldemort. The focus in most of the media has been on AI quality. I think quantity is the threat. It can produce endless customizable work for very cheap. If AI capabilities improve as all the boosters claim, then why do you need a human there at all? If an LLM can produce a book that’s 95% as good as your average commercial thriller, how many people care about that last 5%? Some will. Many won’t.

If some authors are increasingly interested in or are fully using generative AI to write entire books, what does that say about publishing as a whole? Are we, as a society or industry, pushing writers to produce more than they’re humanly capable of?

KS: It has less to do with publishing as a whole and more to do with what consumers will buy. Let’s take Kindle Unlimited, for example. Do I think there is a lot of AI slop there? Yes. Do I think a lot of people are reading it? Maybe. I think we have to look at the industry’s output as a whole. Generally speaking, the books that sell the most are largely for consumption and not so much for absorption. It’s very much like the film industry. A superhero movie is very different from an Oscar-contending indie film. Book publishing is not that different.

LM: Kathleen’s point is key. Some people act like publishing should equal great books. But publishing equals all books published in all styles and genres. Some editors and imprints are focused on what we might call great art, but others are looking for highly formulaic work that will sell. We shouldn’t be shocked that low-quality bestsellers exist anymore than bland blockbusters or dull reality TV shows. If something sells, industries will put it out.

JP: There’s literature as an industry and there’s literature as a calling, of course, and anyone who embraces the latter probably has a built-in cynicism pertaining to the former. I think it’s always been the case that, if you want to be a bestseller, there are certain shortcuts you can take, sacrifices to your vision and all that. Sorry if it’s a bit woo-woo, but if you know why you’re writing, it does exempt you from a lot of this stuff. As for the mass market, what people are buying, yeah, AI is going to go to town there. Like Kathleen said, publishers pick up subpar literature regularly.

LM: A few years ago, Clarkesworld and some other big science fiction magazines got inundated with AI submissions. They eventually traced the flood back to TikTok “side hustle” accounts that told followers they could make “easy money” submitting AI science fiction stories (every SF writer I know laugh-cried at the idea there’s lots of money in SFF short stories, but I digress). My point is that a lot of the “AI authors” are not actually people who care about writing at all. Many are just some form of scammers or spammers trying to get easy money. So I’m not sure it says that much about publishing per se except that it remains for many prestigious and aspirational to many, and also resented. Every author can tell you about having co-workers, family members, or random strangers say something like “I’ve always wanted to write a novel but I never had time, working in the real world!” or else asking you for advice on “getting published quickly.”

I want to note that I do think some authors are using LLMs in artistically ambitious ways. Universally, though, they say the process takes as much time as writing without LLMs. That’s obviously not the appeal for most people.

It’s interesting to me, as a writer, that so many people want to call themselves writers nowadays, especially when there’s so much fearmongering that reading and literacy is dead. What do you make of that? Is this just a fad?

JP: It always struck me as odd that the tech types on social media who champion gen AI demand to be called “artists.” Like, I thought you guys were ruthlessly practical and results-oriented? Who cares what anyone calls you, if you have the product? But what’s interesting is that, no, it’s not all about the results for these types! They want the identity of “artist” or “writer.” It’s a spiritual thing for them, no less than it is for us. In my opinion, this phenomenon has a deep pedigree that would take too long to get into here. The concept of the authentic, inner self, which is invariably some kind of artist. They don’t read or write, but they’re “writers”! It has something to say about how we approach identity generally, and the thin membrane between contemporary identity and… marketing demographic, I guess. For me, it’s pushed me to locate my identity more in the doing than in the producing. I think a “real writer,” if there is such a thing, has an obligation first and foremost to be a “real reader” today. Be a reader before you’re a writer!

KS: As I wrote in my newsletter last week, it is really about the idea of wanting to be known for something. Many, many people romanticize the idea of being an author. They think you can get rich from publishing books. What they don’t understand is that writing is a craft that people work at for years. AI undervalues that notion, and I don’t think non-writers quite understand that having an idea for a book and writing a book are two very different things. I have ideas for fiction books all the time, but I don’t write fiction, so they stay in my head or in a notebook. Someone else might take those ideas, plug them into an LLM, and get a book out of it. To me, that kills so much of why I was an English Lit major and why I have dedicated my career to book publishing. If some of those same people read literary fiction, they might better understand that it is not so easy to write a good book.

LM: I have always found it a bit odd how many people think they can easily be professional writers in a way they don’t about other art forms. People don’t say, “Oh, I could be an opera star if I just made a little time” or “Everyone has a blueprint for a skyscraper inside them.” I think a lot of it comes down to the technical skills of writing (typing on a laptop, grammar, etc.) seeming to be things everyone learns in school. There’s more to it than that, from my POV! But everyone does write something, even if it’s just texts or emails. It’s easier to fantasize that you could easily write a novel than that you could pick up a guitar and play a killer heavy metal solo or sculpt a great statue with no training. Plus, the supplies are cheap compared to, say, film equipment. But yes, it is a lot harder than it looks!

There seems to be a rumbling, looming worry from authors online, especially with stories like Falade’s in mind, that they might be accused of using AI when they haven’t. Are you seeing that worry in your own work? What about other writers you speak with?

JP: I was concerned when I saw the Substack x Pangram thing. I thought, what if it says my work was AI-generated? I don’t use AI in my writing, but I don’t love the idea of entrusting that fact to Pangram. I guess I’m also just thinking, I don’t want a big chunk of my writing career to be so defined in relation to AI. It feels like those of us who don’t use it have some obligation to talk about it all the time, or to change our styles, to react. It reminds me of Peak Twitter in a way, where there was this giant Eyeball constantly over my work. It’s not good for a writer to feel that way, I think. Even outside of false accusations, which I’m sure will be an issue, there’s the problem of this looming shadow over everything.

KS: I am not crazy about the public having access to Pangram, and I have been very vocal about it. Pangram is getting a lot of free publicity, which helps their funding rounds. We can’t ignore that. There is so much jealousy in the writing world that it is inevitable that people will start falsely accusing authors of using AI. I am not hearing fear from authors I work with, but every now and then, I receive a response from media I’ve pitched asking me if the pitch was AI. It is insulting. We are in a precarious position right now, and I do worry for authors who put in the work. I also worry that journalists who cover the industry are looking for too many “gotcha!” moments that will give them clicks.

I am about to begin writing a book, and yes, I am nervous, but I also have confidence in my writing and will back it up with notes and drafts. That is where things are right now. Authors need their receipts.

JP: To Kathleen’s point, I’ve already seen on social media people quote-sharing essays with some version of “it’s giving AI.” There’s definitely a burgeoning social technology of paranoia and accusations. As fractured as social media is right now, it remains one of the few ways for new writers to be discovered. Weren’t there already enough booby traps in that temple? Yeesh.

LM: It’s all very depressing, and I hate the idea that authors will have to prove their work and have readers skeptically poring over their “evidence” and lobbing accusations on social media without any real proof. (Again, as a professor, I’ve seen how much damage it has done to trust and everything else for professors and students.)

I guess all I can say is that I blame primarily the tech companies, who released these programs without any thought about how they could damage various fields. And secondarily, I blame the AI authors who don’t disclose their use. We wouldn’t be having these problems if everyone were open about it, and the reason they aren’t open about it is because readers have so far been rejecting LLM books. So they lie or hide it to try and basically trick readers. I’m sure they have mental justifications for it, but it still is what it is.

Where do we go from here? AI, both generative and otherwise, seems like it’s here to stay, though its role, if any at all, in reading and writing is still undefined. Publishing and literature is not a monolith, but if you had to make an educated guess, what happens next? What will the industry look like in five years?

KS: Publishing companies need to form an alliance and create uniform AI policies. It can’t be that one publishing house does it one way and another does it differently. The only way to move into the future is to create universal guidelines and provide training. The industry is frustrating in that it is slow to adapt. I really feel we’ve reached an inflection point with AI, so change is necessary, but I also know too much about how the industry works to be overly optimistic.

JP: Standards. Rules. Norms. Those will probably get ossified somewhat. I’ve never known a “healthy” publishing industry, so in some ways my expectations are in a healthy place, I believe. I try not to get too into predictions or anxiety. I have my notebook that I’m scribbling in, and a pile of books to read, and that, to me, is “my job.” All sorts of wacky shenanigans are possible in this industry.

LM: I expect we’ll see a bit of everything. Some segments of readers will be happy to prompt their own LLM outputs without humans involved. Others will be fine paying for “AI-assisted” work. And others—I suspect the majority—will seek out human-authored texts and human-made art, even if they’re fine with LLM use for other things like Google Search or a calendar app. I suspect no one will ever like being tricked, though, and authors who lie about LLM use and get caught will cause scandals. That won’t change.

You’ve all discussed the industry at large, but how do you all feel in your own, personal writing practices at this moment?

JP: I’m buying low on “being literate.” I’ve written about this before, but I do think it’s an exciting time to be a reader and a writer. Reading has a heroic valence to it in the LLM era. Imagine that! You’re fighting the system by reading a book. You’re a prodigy for “using your own words.” I love when the bar is in hell. I’ll say this, at least. My writing is getting weirder. I’m getting into literature that I’m not sure I would have found if I wasn’t reading so many books right now, and I don’t think I’d be reading so many books if my understanding of “writer” hadn’t changed in opposition to all these Big Tech moves. Twitter dying. AI slop everywhere. In a calmer world, I’m still writing essays with the goal of being screenshotted for Twitter, and I’m glad things fell apart enough for me to stop doing that. Consolation prizes abound.

KS: I feel good about my writing, because I know that I am capable, and I am not trying to be any other kind of writer than who I am. Meaning, I am not trying to write the next Great American Novel when I know I write nonfiction. I exercise my writing muscle by publishing a newsletter once per week, which I love. I’ve also been reading a lot of great debut literary fiction lately, which makes me a bit optimistic. Here’s the thing: Before AI, there were still terrible books being published. That will still happen. There are still a great number of people who recognize good writing, and thank goodness for that.

I am also in grad school for a second master’s, and researching/writing papers is something I enjoy doing. Writing means you are constantly building a muscle in your brain. Too many people don’t realize that. There is truly nothing like the satisfaction of writing your own work and it being well-received. I don’t think someone using AI for all of their writing can feel that way. I imagine that is more of a “getting away with it” feeling, which is sad.

LM: Being a writer or an artist of any type—hell, being a person of any type—is not merely about the end point. I don’t write because it’s an easy path to wealth and riches. I write fiction because—I’m paraphrasing my friend and author Helen Phillips here—it’s my favorite thing to do with my brain. I want to expand my own skills, explore my own thoughts, and produce work that only I could create. LLMs have little appeal for me there, outside of perhaps some rote functions like a better spellcheck. Outsourcing your thinking to LLMs risks degrading one’s skills and making your work more impersonal.

What’s the point there? Even if an LLM could write a Lincoln Michel novel that was as good or better than one I write… so what? I didn’t write it. I didn’t learn anything from it. It isn’t mine. Many people treat LLMs like ghostwriters. I also would not hire a ghostwriter to write my work. I became a writer because I like writing. The appeal is in the act itself.

Anything else you want to talk about before we close?

JP: I’m thinking a lot about how this is all impacting young writers. I have my career because of Twitter. I went to state school in Oklahoma. Twitter was an open door to talk to editors, and to pitch. Plus, there was this media apparatus in place to scoop up young writers and supply them with $300 in exchange for a byline and a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. It had problems, yes, and a lot of the issues we’re discussing today seem logical extensions of those same problems. But what is in place for young writers today to be discovered, and how are they navigating LLMs? I suppose, entering “wizened hermit” mode, I would tell them that writing should hurt. It should be hard. There’s only growth when there’s struggle. But as for how to make a living out of it, well, there’s never really been an easy answer on that front. Community is one answer. I’ve been heartened to see more zines and alt lit scenes popping up with a DIY vibe.

I guess I would also say, on the optimistic side: The best writers have always been something apart. The best writers don’t play by the rules. No one can decide what time or culture they inherit. But the most interesting artists make something of it. They transcend it, and widen the scope of what’s possible. To that end, no, I don’t think the next genius of our time is going to be a prompt expert. Well, I hope not, anyway. Egad…

Lastly, I’ve noticed that writers are doing more and more in-person things. Maybe that’s because I, personally, keep throwing parties for them. But it’s fun, and I feel more connected to other writers now than I ever did than when we were all in the same “digital town square.” Play at salon culture! Be pretentious together! It’s a lot more fun than calling each other out on Threads or whatever.

LM: I’m with JP that I do fear for younger writers. I have to go back to the quantity question. AI can produce endless work, which can easily overwhelm our systems. Agent query inboxes, magazine slush piles, etc. There will have to be some way to combat this. An editor simply cannot evaluate 100 times as many manuscripts. They were already getting too many to really read before ChatGPT. So I fear these systems will close down and become more about networking and personal recommendations and such, not because people want to be elitist but because they have to find some way to winnow things down. Will established writers be even more wary of blurbing someone they don’t know? Will agents be less likely to open cold queries? I do think community, as JP says, is one answer. Maybe we will see a flourishing of local art scenes or groups of artists with shared aesthetics.

The other optimistic thing I tell myself is that there will always be people who care about good literature and interesting art. And maybe the flattening effects of LLM text will conversely inspire readers and writers to be more original and more unique in their art. LLM fans love to compare it to the camera, but the camera didn’t kill painting as an art form by any stretch. Instead, it helped push painting into new territory, with styles outside of realism: impressionism, surrealism, cubism, etc. Maybe there’s a utopian scenario where that happens for literature in response to LLM text.

KS: Since I am in the book publicity space, I will say this: Almost every PR platform is now AI-powered, and it is not for the better. In fact, it has made researching contacts and creating media lists more difficult because these systems basically scrape the internet. In the “old” days, we had a system that one guy created and that we manually updated. It was dependable. What is out there now, and what most PR professionals pay quite a bit of money for, is not all that dependable. Interestingly, I think this makes cultivating relationships with journalists more important than ever.

I also worry about the workload of in-house publicists. Most marketing and publicity departments are understaffed, so it is easy to imagine publishers creating an environment where AI assistance is necessary because they don’t want to spend the money on human staff.

I agree with JP and Lincoln that younger writers have an uphill battle ahead of them. How will agents assess queries or manuscripts? Will younger writers be questioned about their work if it seems too good? I think debut novelists are especially susceptible to scrutiny. I don’t envy the position they are in. I also agree with LM regarding systems being overwhelmed. Agents and editors already receive more submissions than is humanly possible to read or keep up with. If the pace of this worsens, it will indeed come down to personal connections and recommendations. If that is the case, I fear we will miss out on some great books.

We visited Richard’s office, where we discussed the ups and downs of his career as a journalist, then watched him record an episode of The Rushfield Lunch, his weekly live video show. When it wrapped, Richard took us on a tour of historic L.A. theaters1 while offering a realistic assessment of the state of show business.

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This is the last episode of Someone on Film, Los Angeles. Let us know where we should go next, in the comments.

This week, we’re cherishing Jimothy, translating The Odyssey, and getting advice from 10-year-olds.

SELF-DISCOVERY

Great expectations

Emily North explores the experience of “having potential,” and the weight that comes with ambition.

now what am i going to do with all this potential?

— in angel cake

i do not have a fear of aging, but instead i have a fear of time passing and me not opening my mouth wide enough to catch everything. some of you may know one of my favorite quotes is, “kiss the joy as it flies” but lately i don’t just want to kiss it, i want to stick my tongue so far down its throat before it has to leave. i have dedicated this summer to being the one where i do literally whatever i want at all times. as a rule this is how i like to live my life 365 days a year but this summer in particular i have been practicing joie de vivre as if it was a prayer and i am on my knees begging for nothing about my life to change i promise to be good i promise i will be fun and sexy and kind forever i promise i promise i promise i will do anything thank you God amen.

walking around with the weight of your potential has a special kind of power to make you notice the pace at which days, weeks, years fly by in your calendar. i spent the past week with my extended family where my tiny cousins have somehow morphed from toddlers into little teenagers who are able to do k-pop choreography with precision, i overheard my little brother taking work calls from the dining room using a low voice i have never heard before, my sister was talking about when she wants to have a baby, and i realized my parents have had the beach house for almost ten years. lately time has been moving as slow as honey, except for when it slides down my throat it burns instead of feeling sweet. i feel i am wasting my time by lying in the sun and reading books and drinking too many martinis and staying out way too late on a weeknight… i could be using this time to become a better daughter, sister, colleague, friend, future partner and instead i am lying in a pool of my own sweat, physically and emotionally drowning in myself. my anxiety about the slipping of time is extremely self-indulgent, so much so that even typing this essay has made me lose my appetite. to be so obsessed with the pace of your own life and its potential blinds you from the people you pass along the way. happiness fuels self-obsession, despair fuels self-obsession, all i want to do is feel numb and forget who i am and never face anyone who thinks about my potential ever again.

at my best, when i chug along the rosy pink path i make for myself i know that my potential is not finite, it has no expiration date, and i am a girl of exceptional tenacity to make her life exactly how she wants; however, i would be lying if i said i didn’t crack from time to time and think about when it will all eventually leave me.

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PERSPECTIVE

HUMANITIES

“I hate to be that guy, but the book is a lot better than the film”

Emily Wilson, a classical scholar who has translated both The Odyssey and The Iliad, shares her thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s adaptation in an excerpted Q&A.

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken/twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools...

— in EMILY’s Substack

You’ve dedicated much of your career to bringing the Odyssey to life. What are your initial reactions to the film?

I very much hope many people go and see it in cinemas—it’s worth it to see it on the big screen, because so much of the movie is about the visual effects, as well as the very loud soundtrack. This film is an event, and it has a lot of memorable moments. But I hope those who do so will also read or reread the poem. I hate to be that guy, but the book is a lot better than the film.

You’re the first woman to have her translation of the Odyssey published in English. What does that mean to you, and why does it matter?

Mostly, I don’t think it matters at all. It’s a silly little factoid, not something particularly relevant for my actual work. Gender wasn’t a topic in my scholarly or critical work before I began work on the Odyssey. I’d published various books and articles, mostly about male authors and male characters, with very little attention to gender. I’d published earlier translations—of Seneca’s tragedies—and none of the reviewers or readers of those translations seem to have thought my gender mattered for that work, and nor did I. But all of a sudden, “Woman Translates Odyssey” became the universal headline, and then journalists began to ask me endlessly and unstoppably about my supposedly female or feminine or feminist perspective. Whatever I say or do, it continues even unto this day.

I’ve found it quite limiting to have my work constantly framed by journalists in terms of my gender. I see it as both simplistic and anti-feminist to insist that all women’s work has to be viewed as primarily “women’s”, as if all our toys must be pink and no other color—whereas men, lucky things, get to focus on what they actually care about, which might not be gender at all. Everything a woman does has to be described as a “feminist intervention”, even if she doesn’t see it in those terms at all (which I certainly don’t). As members of the unmarked gender category, men get to imagine that their gender has nothing to do with their interpretations or perspectives on the world or on literature or history. I keep urging journalists to ask men about their gender and how it informs their work, and please stop asking me about it, because I really don’t work on gender and it’s not my main interest... but those pleas don’t seem to be going anywhere.

I took on the project of re-translating the Odyssey, and then the Iliad, for reasons that had nothing to do with my gender identity, but had to do with my specific scholarly training and literary sensibilities, as someone with longstanding interests in poetic and narrative form, the long traditions of both ancient and early modern verse, and a very long-standing interest in drama and dramatic narrative. I felt that there was an opportunity to provide English readers with translations in traditional, regular meter—in contrast with the dozens of existing free verse and prose translations—and versions that would, like the originals, have a supple multiplicity of voice and perspective, as well as their emotional directness and vividness. Those proto-dramatic qualities are flattened in many existing translations. In approaching any dialogue or scene in the Homeric poems, I make a conscious attempt to understand how the text portrays multiple perspectives, and I don’t assume ahead of time that women characters will be presented as inferior or ridiculous. But that’s surely not feminism; it’s about being a reasonably responsible, competent translator of these great poems. The bar for what “feminist translation” means ought to be a lot higher than that.

Beyond my own specific work: the fact that most translations of ancient texts into English have been done by men is notable and quite surprising. There are plenty of English-speaking classicists of all genders, so it’s not about lack of people who could do it, in theory. Plenty of women scholars have written books and articles about Homer. In other linguistic traditions (like French and Italian), there are plenty of published translations of ancient texts, including the Homeric poems, by women. I think it may have to do with the different educational traditions, and differing attitudes towards translation in general: in France and Italy, more people of all genders have some knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin (because of the lycée/ liceo schools), so there’s a wider pool of people qualified to translate texts like the Odyssey—it’s not confined to those who have PhDs—and within the Anglophone academy, translation has traditionally been treated as a marginal pursuit—and therefore, the translation of ancient texts is often done by those who aren’t working towards tenure. But I still don’t fully know how to explain the gender gap. Maybe it’s partly about networks: I personally would have never done any of my translations if I hadn’t been invited to do so by specific editors in publishing houses. It seems possible that English-speaking publishers and editors have more often reached out to men, when looking for someone to sign up to create a new translation of a big epic poem. Beyond that, I really don’t know how to explain it.

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TROUBLESHOOTING

TECH

Will AI actually upend life as we know it?

For the past few years, artificial intelligence has been touted as an earth-shattering advancement for humanity. Noah Smith argues that, while this new technology has reshaped our habits in many ways, it has yet to shatter our current reality.

What will more intelligence actually do for us?

— in Noahpinion

Not a lot of people expected that AI would come for the mathematicians before it came for the truck drivers, but it did. The other day, an AI model disproved the Jacobian Conjecture—an 87-year-old open problem that human mathematicians had struggled to solve. The greatest living human mathematician, Terence Tao, turned to AI to help him understand the solution. Around the same time, AI solved a very important open question in quantum cryptography. Solving Erdos problems has now become almost child’s play for the best AI models. And this is the worst AI will ever be at math. Model capabilities, and the amount of compute available, both continue to increase at rapid rates. (Meanwhile, long-distance trucking employment is slightly higher than it was a decade ago.)

I don’t expect mathematicians to actually lose their jobs en masse, of course. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that humankind has invented machines that are smarter than we are. Intelligence isn’t defined for machines the same way it is for humans—AI’s capabilities are spiky in different ways than ours—but it’s undeniable that the technology is improving rapidly in every domain of cognitive capability. It’s still possible to find some mental tasks that humans are better than machines at, but those final advantages tend to disappear almost as quickly as we can identify them. “AGI”, or “ASI”, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly here.

And yet… the world remains much the same. In lots of sci-fi books, as soon as artificial superintelligence arrives, it bootstraps itself to even more godlike intelligence in an explosive “singularity” that rapidly transforms the entire physical universe. Lots of people, especially “AI safety” and “effective altruist” types, expected things to play out basically the same way in reality. But looking around, not much has changed since we entered the intelligence explosion. There’s a huge data center boom, and most people use AI on a daily basis, but we still live basically the same lives—driving to work or taking the train, sitting in front of a computer, scrolling on our phones, collecting a paycheck. People are staying in their jobs longer, but employment hasn’t been disrupted in a significant way:

Meanwhile, we’ve had decently robust productivity growth, but nothing really amazing:

[. . .]

It seems possible that humans are simply incredibly specialized in a few types of cognitive tasks—extracting patterns from sparse data, synthesizing various patterns into “intuition” and “judgement”, and communicating those patterns in language—and that we’ve basically approached the theoretical maximum in those narrow areas… That would explain why AI has gotten much better at things like math and coding and forecasting over the last year but why the basic chatbot interface doesn’t seem much more “intelligent.” It would also explain why when you talk to Terence Tao about math, it’s like talking to a superhuman, but when you talk to him about where to get lunch or which movies are the best, he’ll just sound like a fairly smart normal dude. AI will eventually get better than Tao at math… but it may never get much better than the most thoughtful, eloquent humans at deciding where to get lunch or recommending movies. It may simply not be mathematically possible to get much better than we already are at that sort of thing.

Why would intelligence top out like this? Well, if we think of intelligence as the ability to extract information from data, then even an infinitely advanced model endowed with infinite compute will be limited by the fact that there’s a limited amount of information that can be extracted from the data.

For one thing, data itself is in limited supply. You can’t transform the world unless you can (in some generalized sense) understand it, and you can’t understand the world unless you can measure it, and our ability to measure the world is inherently limited and finite.

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ICONOGRAPHY

PAYBACK

Feud of the fraudsters

A legion of ne’er-do-wells is targeting an already-vulnerable group (contemporary writers). Bess Kalb took matters into her own hands.

How to torment a scammer

— in The Grudge Report

There is a predatory vanity scam targeting authors, in which the scammer writes an email lavishing an author’s work with effusive, specific praise, then invites the author to take part in a book club event, then charges the author to promote the event. The “book clubs” all have European-sounding names, and lack a website or any online footprint, and the emails are glaringly AI-generated. The proliferation of these scammers makes me sad because it means authors struggling to find a readership are falling for them. And PAYING them. It is a vulturous, pathetic, dystopian nightmare that weaponizes AI against the declining publishing industry by making an author feel seen and celebrated, only to siphon hundreds and thousands of dollars from them. Normally, that’s what publicists are for.

To torment one scammer right back, I decided to go completely insane. Here is the record of that saga, for your amusement and mine.

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FREE WILL

PARENTING

When the student becomes the teacher

A child’s worldview is shaped by their caregiver. Turns out the inverse is true too.

Ten things my kid has taught me

— in the examined family

Stella turns 10 years old tomorrow. A decade of Stella is a lot of Stella, and of course, I can’t wait for as many more as life will bless me with. She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met, with some star trails of various family members (dead and alive). She’s a real Leo—confident in her talent, magnanimous and charismatic, and very emotional. Thanks for making me wiser, my girl…

1. Completion is for suckers. The measure of how worthwhile something is should not be whether you finished it. In fact, who says what’s finished? We don’t even know if death is a real ending. Why would we keep doing something once it stops being fun and alive for us?

2. Fluidity is where it’s at. If you worry less about defining yourself or other people, you have more time to respond in the white hot moment to what you feel, what you want to wear, and who you want to crush on. Stella hasn’t read Octavia Butler yet, but damn if she doesn’t live like “the only lasting truth is change.”

3. Feel your feelings and move them along. Stella loves feelings. She has a feelings posters taped on her wall, a wheel of emotions in her room, and notebooks filled with original love songs, dreams, and secrets. When she gets mad, you really know it. When she’s sad, it permeates the room. And then it’s gone—moved on through her body because it had a chance to be exercised, expressed, acknowledged.

4. Apologize genuinely and quickly. Stella can be hurtful, but she also registers when she’s hurt someone and is very quick to apologize—usually in a handwritten note slipped under the door. She doesn’t seem to be hampered by a grand theory that she doesn’t or won’t hurt people, like some of us; she knows she will and she’s explicitly sorry when she does.

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ACCIDENTAL ART

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , , , ,

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

Astead Herndon, a politics reporter and host of the Vox Media podcast “America, Actually,” is now on Substack, where he’ll be writing a “weekly guide to the big ideas and key people behind the political shifts shaping the 2026 elections.”

Musician Lizzy McAlpine has launched a newsletter, The Angel Club, on Substack.

Writer, author, and creator Frankie McNamara has launched Meditations for the Anxious Mind on Substack, where he’ll be posting weekly essays on culture and modern life.

Rob Doing Rob is now sharing nature tips and tricks and glimpses into his “chaotic gardening” on Substack.

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

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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 out of Substack’s New York office.

This week, we’re breaking teeth, writing books, and going on our own odysseys.

COPING

When food mediates grief

Ella Gray Hickman recounts the days after she lost her home in a fire through the bagels, candy, and frozen pizzas she consumed in the aftermath.

What I Stress Ate After My Apartment Burned Down

— in Ella Going Gray

I wake up in Rayne’s bed around 9:00am. Her room is always nice to wake up in. For some reason, the sun never feels jarring or intruding when it shines through her windows in the morning. My husband is calling me to come downstairs to let him in, the firefighters have asked him all the questions they needed to and let him pack up some essentials from the smoldering mess of our apartment. I feel a little guilty because I didn’t think to change out of my sooty pajamas when I collapsed into Rayne’s white sheets and I must assume they smell like smoke by now. It is hard for me to tell because everything smells like smoke to me and will for a few days.

Rayne was awake writing at 3:30am and the first person to pick up my call after the firefighters got us out. The restaurant we lived over, a mom and pop sushi place we loyally kept ordering from even after the health department briefly shut them down and our minor cockroach problem coincidentally went away, was, in that early morning hour, still on fire. My husband, Andrew, had wrangled the cat into his crate before the firefighters chopped their way up to our floor. On the street, he rubbed my back as I hacked black snot onto the sidewalk and then ushered me and the cat into a car to Rayne’s. Despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help feeling very romantic about it all. I was getting on him just a day before about never holding doors open for me. It’s not that I’m surprised by how good he is in a crisis nor how good he is to me in general, but I suddenly feel very aware of it. Sometimes in my head, he’s still 19.

Andrew, my knight in flannel pajama pants and a pair of Caterpillar construction boots some sympathetic Belgian raver gave him on their way to after-afters, arrives at Rayne’s with breakfast from Apollo Bagels, which is funny because we’ve never had them before and right now seems like an odd time to follow a staycation tourist-in-my-own-city impulse. Maybe he went because we’re never in Williamsburg this early or maybe it was because he spent all the early morning from about 4am onward waiting around for the fire chief to show up and say nothing, really, of substance and so the long line seemed less daunting. I can’t tell if the toasted bagel is burnt or if my mouth is burnt, but it crackles when I bite into it. The tomato is gorgeously tender, the thin ribbon of skin on the slices doesn’t even catch as I take a sloppy bite. The salt and acid tang of the tomato stings my tongue in odd spots like metal zaps, but the cream cheese is soothing. It isn’t the most generous layer of cream cheese I’ve ever had on a bagel, but the consistency is far more buttery and silky than I’m used to.

After breakfast, we load the cat and the go-bags into Andrew’s car and relocate to the apartment of our best New York friends from college. Gene and Maude have offered up their couch for the weekend. Once Alamo is settled with litter and food, Andrew takes me back to our place to survey the damage. We each gather a laundry bag of clothing to serve as our respective wardrobes for the foreseeable future and decide that opting for wash and fold is completely worth it. After we drop off our smokey clothes to the laundromat, I want to walk around alone for a little while to clear my head and I want to stress eat sugar. I make my way down Knickerbocker stopping into 99 cent stores to buy packs of socks and boxers and white tee shirts we can wear immediately. It begins raining harder and I realize I should have grabbed the umbrella Gene offered me, but that wouldn’t do anything to keep my slippers dry. I am still wearing the clothing I fled the apartment in: Christmas patterned pajama pants, a big tee shirt covered in paint splatter, and rubber bottomed felt clog slippers. I am soaked-through halfway back to Maude and Gene’s.

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SEA LIFE

DOCUMENTARIES

Portraying a flying, fleeing subject

After Flaco the owl escaped the Central Park Zoo, he became an overnight sensation. One filmmaker took it upon herself to document the moment.

What Is It Like To Be An Owl?

— in Penny Lane Is My Real Name

In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked a famous question about consciousness: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

Nagel chose the bat because, as a fellow mammal, we readily accept that it possesses consciousness, in the sense that it is like something to be a bat. A bat has subjective experience.

But he also chose the bat because it is so weird and alien to us—humans can’t echolocate, for example, or fly—that even if we knew every scientific fact about bat biology, we’d still lack access to what it actually feels like to be one. As Nagel put it, we can rely only on our own experience to provide “the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited.”

Every documentary begins with an impossible ambition: to understand what it is like to be someone—or something—other than yourself. Telling the truth about the experience of any other being is never easy. You never really know if you are getting it right. But at least with human subjects, you can ask them, “What is it like to be you?” You can ask them, “Did I get that right?”

There’s a reason so many people at Q&As will ask a documentarian, “What did [subject of film] think about the film?” They’re looking, in a way, for a fact-check on the whole enterprise of the filmmaker having tried to represent what it is like to be the subject.

With an animal protagonist, the mystery is even more irresolvable. There are no interviews, and no explanations. Just the best available scientific understanding, close observations of behavior, and ultimately, your own imagination.

This is the challenge I found myself facing when an owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and immediately became the most captivating protagonist I’ve ever encountered in real life. This owl, who had lived in captivity his whole life, was now suddenly free. He had begun writing his own story. My job became to try, however imperfectly, to tell it.

What is it like to be an owl? The question announced itself to anyone who saw him on the sidewalk near the Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue.

But we weren’t just asking it about owls in general—we were asking it about Flaco. An individual, with his own personal history, his own individual temperament, and his own subjective experience. That’s the invitation at the heart of Wild Inside: to get to know one extraordinary individual, on an extraordinary quest… who just happens to be an owl.

That said, the first step in avoiding the mistake of anthropomorphism is remembering Flaco is, in fact, not a human but an owl. One must try to understand the owl’s world: his umwelt. This wonderfully German word refers to the distinct perceptual reality of a species, deriving from their unique biological abilities.

And so, I asked embarrassingly basic questions of esteemed scientists over many months as I learned about owl biology. I was delighted to learn that owls, with their forward-facing eyes fixed inside their sockets and their long-range vision, probably see the world not so differently from a birder with binoculars glued to the face. This parallel vision became a visual motif throughout Wild Inside… especially because it so often seemed Flaco was watching us as much as we were watching him.

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MAGIC

FILM REVIEW

“I think I’ve seen this film before”

E.K. Carlisle got the hottest ticket in town—a spot at a screening of The Odyssey—but argues that the plot feels eerily similar to the director’s past work.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey fails to look camp in the eye

— in E. K. C-mail

Nolan, renowned for high-concept sci-fi and action films such as Interstellar and The Dark Knight, is one of the few modern filmmakers that can reliably drum up packed cinemas whatever he puts out. Oppenheimer, his last feature chronicling the life and times of the guy who built the nuclear bomb, was 180 minutes of boring political machinations and Cillian Murphy looking stressed. It still earned nearly $1 billion worldwide.

The Odyssey will no doubt achieve similar success. As a former student of ancient history, I was interested to see how Big Chris would adapt Homer’s lengthy ancient Greek poem for a modern audience. It hasn’t hurt that he’s roped in an all-star cast: Matt Damon as the wandering warrior Odysseus, and Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland as his patient wife and son waiting for him back home.

I had doubts about how well Nolan’s brooding, clinical style of filmmaking would gel the chaotic, colourful world of ancient epic, and I was justified in having them. His preference for high-contrast neutrals creates scenescapes that are expansive and expensive, but dry. We’ve known for years now that our idea of the classical world as one of white statues and gleaming marble temples is completely inaccurate. Ancient cities would have been full of vibrancy, from the painted icons in shrines to intricate wall paintings. Even going back to the Minoan civilization on Bronze Age Crete we find fragments of art that reflect a playfulness and eclecticism that is nowhere to be found in Nolan’s dusty vision of the Mediterranean.

This cultural levity is mirrored in the Homeric poems: although they contain sombre episodes (Achilles brutalising Hector’s corpse, Odysseus losing all his men, Agamemnon sacrificing his own daughter to ensure safe passage of his ships), there’s also many ridiculous moments that can only be described as camp. The oafish cyclops Odysseus encounters also keeps sheep and makes cheese. Circe turns Odysseus’s men into squeaking little pigs. The famous episode of the Trojan horse is unbelievably absurd and borderline comic. You’re telling me Odysseus’s cunning plan is to build a huge equine structure and stuff it with soldiers, and for some reason the Trojans are stupid enough to accept it as a gift, and the subsequent ambush is enough to end a ten year conflict? Have a day off!

But Christopher Nolan re-enacts the episode with a characteristic po-face. The only time that drops is during the Circe scenes: here, he doesn’t lean into humour, but horror, with the soldiers’ transformation into pigs rendered in genuinely grotesque fashion, to the point where I began to wonder if Robert Eggers had suddenly seized directorial control.

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CANINES

ACCIDENTS

Motherhood offers curveballs even competing on Survivor couldn’t prepare you for

Parvati Shallow has been on several seasons of Survivor, where she’s faced every kind of challenge. Still, having an emergency in front of her daughter was new territory.

Who’s Your Emergency Contact?

— in The Queendom

“Mommy, did you die?” My daughter’s voice rang out in the blackness.

I felt the cold concrete on my left cheek before I opened my eyes. My tongue brushed against my front tooth and felt a jagged edge.

“No,” I hurried to answer her, with my face still on the ground, my body sprawled out on the gritty cement.

What happened? I was so disoriented.

Opening my eyes, I searched in the dark for my daughter. She was standing about ten feet behind me by a wooden beam. Why was she so far away? My thoughts swirled inside my head while I grasped at understanding my predicament. My mouth tasted of blood and dirt.

Okay. I know some things.

What happened: We were under the Santa Monica pier. We’d been rollerskating. I was holding my daughter’s hand and we’d fallen down. My knee had popped and I’d felt lightheaded. I was scared I’d really fucked up my knee. Would I even be able to walk?

The tunnel was black as midnight but just beyond it the sun was blazing bright, making it hard for my eyes to adjust. I remembered sitting on the ground for a bit to stabilize, but my head just kept spinning. Beyond me, people were buzzing through the tunnel on motorized scooters, their screams echoing off the walls and corners.

This was hell.

Before I found myself belly down on the boardwalk, I’d been sitting up, trying to ground myself. I’d been aware of my daughter watching me, her eyes heavy with worry. An urgent energy pulsing off her tiny body, waiting for me—willing me—to stand up.

[. . .]

Now that I had a grasp on the sequence of events I’d just experienced, I had another thought, one that struck me with horror—did I lose a tooth?

Oh my God.

I’d played five seasons of Survivor and had competed as an amateur boxer. I’d sliced my thumb with a machete on Survivor Cook Islands, gotten a fat lip on Survivor Micronesia, and broken my wrist in a quad bike accident while hosting a travel show, but I had NEVER. Lost. A. Tooth.

Sound the alarm!!

All of a sudden, this was a very real emergency, and my head was back on my shoulders right where it belonged.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said assertively to my daughter. She was scooping up my skates which had rolled away when I fell. I watched her face soften in relief when she heard my strong voice, but her eyes still looked worried.

“I’m okay. We have to get out of this tunnel,” I said again to reassure her.

A minute later, we were out in the brightest sunshine under an expansive cloudless blue sky. Hallelujah. We’d been resurrected.

Plopping down on the sand, I called my dentist to make an emergency appointment. They scheduled me for 9am the next day. Then I called my emergency contact.

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COWORKING

THE PROCESS

Selling a novel is one thing. Actually sitting down to write it is another.

Tyler McCall divulges what she’s learned while working on her debut book.

How I Wrote a Book

— in Voted Most Talkative

Whenever I tell someone that I sold a novel, the most common response I get—by a lot—is some variation of, “I could never write a book!”

To that, I say: Not with that attitude!

In all seriousness, I get why books are intimidating. Staring at a blank document and knowing you need to come up with somewhere between 75,000-95,000 words to fill it is like standing at the bottom of a mountain and knowing you gotta make it to the top. And that’s provided you have an idea for a book in the first place!

Having chatted with author friends of mine, I know that every writer has a different approach to turning that blank document into a shiny novel for people to read, so I can’t tell you exactly how to write a book. Finding your process is part of the fun, imo! But I can tell you how I wrote a book and maybe de-mystify that process a little bit, in case you’ve got an idea rumbling around inside your head.

First, my credentials, in case you don’t know me: Hi, my name is Tyler McCall, and my debut novel PEOPLE LIKE YOU comes out in spring 2027! Soon I’ll have a cover and a preorder link and all that fun stuff, but until then, you can follow me over on Goodreads to stay updated.

For some, the very concept of coming up with an idea for a novel is foreign, and I get it. I definitely couldn’t open up a blank document and force myself to come up with ideas. Explaining the way I get ideas for stories actually makes me sound a bit nuts, I think, because the way it has always happened is that I’ll be in the middle of something—showering, reading, out on a walk—and a scene or a bit of dialogue will pop into my head. The characters are already there and they’re real, even if they’re still pretty fuzzy to me.

That’s what happened with PEOPLE LIKE YOU. The initial idea came to me in 2022; it’s funny, actually, how specifically I can remember the moment it happened, because it was January and I was at my in-laws for a delayed Christmas celebration. It was late at night, I was reading because I couldn’t sleep, and the image of Jacob and Charlotte—my two main characters—arguing in a private library sprung into my head fully formed. I could see their dynamic so clearly, that even while they were at odds with each other, they wanted each other desperately. (I really can’t wait until the book is out so I can discuss which scene this is!)

Whenever I have a scene pop into my head that I find interesting, I try to imagine those characters in a few different scenarios. If I can’t put together maybe another five to ten snippets, it usually dies (or, if I like the scene enough, gets absorbed into a different story). But usually, while I’m pulling on those threads, a fuller picture starts to come together and that’s when I know I’m cooking.

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ART

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , , ,

Writing: , , , , ,

Recently launched

, the creative director at Balenciaga, is now on Substack. His first post is an inside look into the making of the fashion house’s most recent couture collection.

Author and speaker is now on Substack, where he’ll be sharing life lessons and philosophy.

Internet fixture Henry Smith has published his first Substack post, an exploration into the phrase “of course.”

The San Francisco Chronicle’s former sports columnist, Scott Ostler, is now on Substack.

Hunter Harris, a Team USA luge athlete, is documenting his journey as a hopeful for the 2030 Winter Olympics on Substack.

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

Start a Substack

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 out of Substack’s New York office.

It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet.

This is less true on Substack, and we aim to keep it that way. As a first step, we’re launching a feature with Pangram in the Substack app today. Going forward, you’ll be able to scan text to see how much of it was likely written by hand or with AI assistance. More on that in a moment, but first let me explain why this matters.

Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink

There is an increasing share of text on social media that is generated by AI—as much as 40% on some platforms, according to Pangram’s estimate. This is a big change. Many people complain their feeds are filled with soulless slop. Others don’t yet realize when they are reading something written by no one.

The core problem is not people using AI, or the quality of its output. Not everything made with AI is slop, and not all slop is made with AI. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That’s Claudefishing.

Here’s how Freddie deBoer put it:

I access human-made art because I know there’s a human behind it and that’s what I’m looking for, other humans, showing me in art what they hide in their selves. Fooling me in that process is just a con.

We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of what we do: building an economic engine for culture. That means helping real people, who think, feel, observe, argue, experiment, consider, struggle, exhort, and care, to make money doing work they believe in. The network is based on trust between people, and that’s why it works.

When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.

What we’re doing about it

This is an emerging space, and we don’t claim to have all the answers. But one thing we do know is that we don’t want to wait until your Substack app turns into LinkedIn before we start to learn and make progress. So to start, we’re launching some new tools that we hope will increase transparency and give us a basis to ask for your feedback.

We’re partnering with Pangram, the leading AI-detection tool. You’ll be able to scan notes, replies, comments, and posts to see an estimate of how much of the text was written by hand or with AI assistance. This will work on text longer than 100 words, published from today on, and will show an analysis only to those who request it.

Note that Pangram can only detect whether AI was used to make the text, not whether great human care went into creating it, nor whether AI tools were used as a source. It is not perfect, but independent research suggests that it detects AI-generated text with a high degree of accuracy. We believe it is beneficial for people to have access to tools like this to help make their own judgments.

We’re also introducing tools for creators, including the ability to add a “How I make this” statement where you can explain your process and set expectations for readers. You can run Pangram on your drafts prior to publication, as well as report and remove any scans on your own work that you believe are mistaken.

These features are available now on web and iOS and will be coming to Android soon. This is just a starting point. Depending on feedback and interest, we are considering tools that will:

• Let you set preferences around AI content for your own community in your Reply Rules

• Give creators more ways to express the individual value they offer, whether through human writing or thoughtful AI use

• Give readers the option to set preferences about what gets recommended to them

• Continue to improve our systems that fight spam, bots, and scams of all kinds as AI accelerates these problems

We’re not against people using AI to assist their work, and we think people should be free to choose which tools they use to express themselves. Some on the platform are human-writing maximalists, others are publicly exploring the frontier of using AI tools while sweating the details to make work they stand behind. We use AI all the time at Substack to write software, do research, and build product features like clipping, translations, and more.

But people should know what they’re getting. For example, you might be fine reading someone’s sharp analysis in which they leaned heavily on AI to present their findings but only want to spend time engaging with replies written by a human hand. Either way, you should have a choice in the matter.

What do you want to see?

We’re all entering this strange new world together, and we can think of no better way to figure out the new tools and new social norms we need than open debate. We want to hear from you: How can Substack help support valuable human creation in the age of AI? When is AI use Claudefishing? When is it great?

Human perspective is the essential ingredient of culture, and this will be true no matter how powerful AI becomes. In fact, the more you expect these tools to keep improving, the more important it is to understand the provenance of what you read. Claude has a lot to offer! But when I want Claude’s opinion, I’ll ask Claude.

This week, we’re asking questions about sales on BookTok, what happens next for Phoebe Gates, and dads with disposable income.

MUSIC

Is “Happy” by Pharrell Williams actually a scourge on humanity?

An investigation into the morality of background sound.

Is ambient music evil?

—Jonah and Erin in Blackbird Spyplane

Can music be evil? I never really thought about it until a few years ago, when I listened to an interview with Nick Cave during which he asserted that it cannot—“that music in itself has a moral dimension. That it’s essentially good. That it works to improve matters.”

Cave argued that this is true of music even at its most hateful, violent, inflammatory, abject, nihilistic, etc.—true, for instance, of the misanthropic music he himself made early in his career. Starting out, he explained, he’d sought the “transcendent impulse in chaos.” He’d been “a drug-addicted young guy” with a “jaundiced, contemptuous view of humanity,” and although this view was “extreme,” it was “also the way a lot of young people see the world, and in many ways, from their perspective, quite rightly so.” Jaundiced and contemptuous music, Cave said, contains the same “potential for doing good” as any other kind.

I think back to this interview whenever I encounter music that seems saturated with malevolent energy. Filosofem by the Norwegian neo-Nazi black-metal band Burzum… “Happy” by Pharrell Williams… brat by Charli xcx … I hear music like this and I wonder if, in its foul and airless vision of the human soul, it counts as evil. But I return to Cave’s absolutist stance, that there is a radical, salutary potential in the act of making and listening to music, and that even the most antisocial, insipid, cynical, narcissistic, and otherwise evil-seeming music is, for that reason, good at its root.

I do think it’s possible to affirm this essential goodness, however, while allowing for cases where music can be twisted to evil ends. And recently, I’ve been wondering whether one of my favorite genres—ambient music—is especially well-suited to evil purposes, albeit in a banal and sneaky way that has only become clear in the past few years.

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LITERATURE

MONEY

More money, more problems?

Allison Raskin, who receives financial assistance from her father, examines what independence really means.

AM I A REAL ADULT IF I STILL FINANCIALLY DEPEND ON MY FAMILY?

— in Emotional Support Lady

Last week, my husband went out of town for the first time since our son was born. For four (restless) nights, I slept in the house as the sole adult in charge of one baby and two dogs. I woke up each morning to cries, carefully administered my son’s medicine, fed the dogs and wrangled everyone for a poop-filled walk involving two leashes and a stroller before starting my workday. As I slowly shuffled down the sidewalk, I took stock of the life I have built for myself. I felt empowered and proud. Then a familiar doubt crept in.

Could I really claim these hallmarks of adulthood if the only thing making them possible is my father’s generosity? As I’ve shared before, my father pays for our childcare and owns our home where we live rent-free. This arrangement is what allowed us to afford having a child in Los Angeles on my income. If I didn’t have my dad’s help, our lives would be very different, and knowing this has made it hard for me to feel like a “proper adult.”

I’m realizing that deep in my soul, I have bought into the idea that financial independence is the cornerstone of adulthood. This icky part of me believes that everything else I do—writing books, coaching couples, parenting—doesn’t “count” as much as making a lot of money and not having to ask my family for help. I do not want to believe this. It goes against all my values and the reality of living in a capitalist society where making six figures in a major city doesn’t go very far. But the feeling of inferiority remains.

If this were simply a debate of logic, rather than emotion, it would be easy for me to stop placing a disproportionate amount of importance on my salary when judging my capability as an adult. There is simply too much evidence against the argument that income has anything to do with your maturity or intelligence. Think about all the brilliant people you know who are underpaid and all the total bozos that take in over a million dollars a year because they were born into the right family. The system is rigged. Boomers are not more wealthy than millennials because they are better at being adults. If anything, their lucky timing has allowed them to dodge the emotional development that financial instability has demanded of younger generations.

Sharing generational wealth isn’t even a modern phenomenon. For centuries, parents have been helping set their kids up for success with advantages like noble titles, trust funds and multi-generational housing. What is the point of amassing wealth in the first place if not to improve the life of your family? If I were in my father’s position, I would be doing the exact same thing for my child.

I know all of this and yet I still feel like I am playing dress-up.

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ATHLETICS & ART

TECH

Shall we consider this a bullet dodged?

Phia, Phoebe Gates’s fashion-tech startup, has recently found itself in hot water after Bloomberg reported that the company was allegedly claiming sales it wasn’t responsible for. Sneha Rampalli, who thought about working there, looks at what’s going on.

I almost worked at Phia

— in Money Whispers

Phia is the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni. They called it the Google flights for fashion, a personal shopping assistant for the young woman who is hustling. Phoebe says, “she shops like a genius, but doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.”

But Ben Edelman, an independent researcher who has spent decades digging into deceptive practices in digital advertising, uncovered wild findings. Phia works as a browser extension, and it engaged in a practice called cookie stuffing.

When a user reaches the purchase phase, even if they had arrived at the retailer through their own search or through a completely different affiliate link, Phia’s extension would silently open a background tab, inject its own referral code, and then take credit for the sale.

Translate: Phia was claiming commissions on purchases it didn’t earn, taking credit for sales that other publishers drove.

This is a fundamental violation of rules in affiliate marketing. You are only paid commission if a user really clicks, that too for your own link, but Phia’s code was generating fake clicks.

Bloomberg tested this across more than 50 sites.

During one test, Bloomberg found that clicking on a link to Nordstrom from a Wirecutter article, “The Best 4th of July Deals Still Live,” triggered a background tab that replaced the Wirecutter affiliate link with Phia’s. The same behavior was observed when Bloomberg clicked on a Google ad from a different publisher’s website.

But when Phia released their statement, they just called it a “bug.”

“Within the last 24 hours, we were made aware that in a recent release our codebase was causing misattributions from a subset of users,” the spokesperson said. “As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue.”

While this is a serious financial crime, Phia is not the inventor of cookie stuffing.

I understand this space pretty well. Before Google and Money Whispers, I co-founded a social impact startup built on affiliate revenue. Early on, I realized the business model was very hard to accomplish. There were minimal returns per purchase, and it required massive volume. So when I saw that Honey was not only surviving but thriving, I was intrigued. Turns out four years later it is the subject of an ongoing class-action lawsuit for nearly identical practices. And one of Phia’s advisors was Honey’s president.

I want to be careful here because I don’t know exactly what was known, when, and by whom, but I do believe the connection matters, because cookie stuffing isn’t some obscure technical glitch. It’s a known practice with a history of legal consequences.

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BEAUTY

Diabolical Lies

How 'The Botox Psyop' Broke Our Brains in the Name of Beauty

Listen now

a month ago · 184 likes · 62 comments · caro claire burke and Katie Gatti Tassin

TRAVEL

Is wonder a finite resource?

Anne Byrn returns to Paris, searching for the same sense of magic she felt over 40 years ago while attending cooking school.

Preserving Fruit in a French Style - No. 400

— in Between the Layers

WHY DO FRUIT PRESERVES taste better in Paris?

And is it possible to go back someplace that once meant something to you and experience that same wonder again?

These were two questions swirling around in my head in late May when I returned to Paris four decades after being a cooking school student there.

In the early ’80s, sensing the need for a more solid culinary foundation, I took a leave of absence from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and enrolled at La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine, at 34 Rue St. Dominique in Paris’s stately seventh arrondissement.

La Varenne had been founded in 1975 by British-American food writer and cooking teacher Anne Willan and was named in honor of Francois Pierre de la Varenne, the 17th-century author of the founding text of modern French cooking. Classes were taught by French chefs and translated simultaneously into English. I did not know it at the time, but La Varenne graduates would become the editors of food magazines, heads of food and beverage programs, famous chefs and cookbook authors, as well as leading caterers and cooking school teachers.

Julia Child was well connected to La Varenne and would appear out of nowhere at a lunch or Sunday brunch in someone’s nearby apartment. It was truly a pinch-me-to-make-sure-this-is-real kind of experience.

The way I finagled leaving a full-time job and hopping on a plane to Paris was to agree to write weekly for the newspaper while I was gone. This was before email or fax, so I wrote my columns longhand and put them in the mail.

Which might sound like an Eleanor Roosevelt way to live out Emily in Paris, but if it allowed me to be away and learn and grow, so be it. A small hiccup was that Delta Airlines lost my bags for a week. Other than that inconvenience, I lived in an apartment on Quai Voltaire along the Seine River, walked to class each morning like a Parisian, and traveled a bit around Europe after classes concluded.

Back then, I soaked in the small things I still love most about Paris—the morning greetings even when you don’t feel like talking—“bonjour madame” (you do feel better after you say it).

I remember fresh flowers on every corner and how people carried bouquets of flowers to give to other people. I remember thinking that the French dressed with such style and I needed to ditch the American white tennis shoes.

I skinned an eel, made my own croissants, perfected béarnaise, and tasted goat cheese for the first time. I took a weekend train trip to the Champagne region. I was in the same room with Julia Child and her co-author Simone (Simca) Beck. I bought my most favorite copper pans at the legendary cookware shop called E. Dehillerin.

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COMICS

BOOKS

What does it take to sell a book nowadays?

As readership fluctuates and social media platforms morph into new beasts, authors are trying to understand how to properly move the needle.

I Spent $44,000 Launching My Book. Three of Those Dollars Worked.

— in Renew with Amy Chan

Today I got the conversion report from the $10,000 TikTok influencer campaign I ran for the launch of UNSINGLE. Guess how many books it sold?

Three book sales.

Not three thousand. Three. That’s $3,333 per book, which makes each copy roughly the price of a used 2006 Honda Civic, except the Civic would have been more useful.

I’m sharing the full breakdown of what I spent, what converted, and what I’d do differently, because I spent a big chunk of my advance trying to give my second book momentum, and most of that money evaporated. If you’re launching a book, learn from my receipts instead of generating your own.

What Not to Do

1. The $10,000 TikTok influencer campaign

The pitch is seductive: creators with engaged audiences talk about your book, the algorithm does the rest. Here’s the thing. The content was good. This was the best video from my campaign, and I mean it when I say it’s genuinely well made: watch it here.

It just doesn’t convert. Views are not sales. People watch a 40-second video about your book the same way they watch a video about a raccoon eating grapes: entertained, moved even, and then they keep scrolling.

2. The $10,000 consulting / speaking gig agency

I paid another agency $10,000 to book speaking engagements in exchange for bulk book buys. They booked zero. Not “fewer than promised.” Zero. When I asked for a refund, they said they put in effort and that I was never guaranteed results. Um, what? After a lot of haggling, they finally refunded a portion of my fee.

3. The $24,000 PR retainer

I hired a PR agency for four months. To their credit, they landed me an hour segment on Tamron Hall, which was big. I got a big spike on Amazon the day it aired and it probably netted about 200 book sales. The Tamron Hall social team posted a few collaboration posts on their IG page, which got hundreds of thousands of views collectively (example of one here). While I can’t measure how many of those translated to sales, it was good reach and credibility.

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FELINES

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , , ,

Video & Audio: ,

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

The editors at Audible have launched Speak Easy, where they’ll be posting a biweekly podcast, listening recommendations, and short- and long-form essays.

Chef and London restaurateur Thomas Straker is now on Substack. He’ll be sharing the dishes he’s cooking at home, the restaurants he’s excited about, the ingredients he’s obsessed with, and the lessons he’s learned from years spent in professional kitchens.

Winston Churchill’s official literary estate will offer “unique access to Churchill’s prolific literary output” and “his vast collection of personal papers” on Substack.

Jordon Cox, aka The Coupon King, is on Substack with “deals, freebies, codes and tricks” for his readers.

Dr. Shefali, a clinical psychologist, has launched Raising Conscious Children, which will include “frameworks you can use with your family” along with reflections on raising children in the modern world.

Journalist and speaker Danae Mercer is now “exploring confidence, motherhood, beauty, ambition, and the stories that shape us” on Substack.

Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate and co-founder of Google DeepMind, has joined Substack and will be “trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality.”

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

Start a Substack

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 out of Substack’s New York office.

The 2026 World Cup matches have been watched nearly 12 billion times worldwide thus far. It’s a moment that arrives only every four years, one that intertwines pride of country with pride of sport, aspiration with indignation, hope and heartbreak. And bolstering it all are the players, trying to stay afloat, if not thrive, under a wave of overwhelming pressure.

Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach know a bit about what that’s like. Foudy, who played on the U.S. national women’s team from 1988 to 2004, and Wambach, who joined from 2003 to 2015 and holds the second-highest record for international goals, have not only helped blaze a trail for women’s soccer but, between them, have participated in eight World Cups, clinching three championship titles for their country. On the pitch, they dealt with the kind of stress involved in elite competition—from proving their merit to processing regret.

Now they, alongside tennis legend Billie Jean King, co-host Welcome to the Party, a twice-weekly women’s-sports podcast here on Substack. The Post asked Foudy and Wambach to give us the inside scoop on what it’s like to play at the highest level, the euphoria that comes with winning and the devastation with losing, and how they managed all the chaos of performing on a world stage.

When you’re in the tournament, what is downtime like? Especially while you’re abroad, is there ever a chance to do a little exploration, or are you just locked in?

Julie: Well, you [Abby] may be different than me, but there was really no exploring, because with the Women’s World Cup, we didn’t have that many days in between games. The men’s is expanded a little bit more. We were playing every third or fourth day, and it gets to be a lot—so I would just shut it down, which is so unlike me, because I’m an explorer and adventurer. I want to go see everything, and I’m so curious, but you just couldn’t. Your body would not allow that.

I would spend a lot of time lying horizontal, watching the World Cup. Or if you’re at the Olympics, watching the Olympics.

Abby: Is that true? You would watch?

Julie: I’d shut down. I would gladly watch all the different games and whatever movies. Anything. But I did not want to expend any energy.

Abby: I did a lot of lying down and nothing. But I’m very, very, very good at doing nothing. Do you know this about me?

Julie: There was no Love Island to watch, however, back then.

Abby: No, but for World Cups, depending on what year we’re talking about, we would bring loads of DVDs to watch movies and to watch shows. And this is back in the day when every TV series had 40 episodes. It was wonderful. When you retired, Jules, we got a little bit more amenities when we would travel, so we would have team rooms where there would be video gaming consoles and places to hang out where we could all gather together. But I never watched any other World Cup games. You want to know the only time I watched a World Cup game? I watched Japan beat, I think it was Germany, in the 2011 Women’s World Cup. And I remember watching the end of that game, and I remember when Japan won—we had just beaten Japan—I remember looking at my mom, and I said, “We’re going to win the World Cup.” And I jinxed us. I’ll never forgive myself.

Julie: If you don’t follow the Women’s World Cup history like we do, [the U.S.] lost to Japan in the final in penalty kicks in 2011. However, I will say that was the year that Japan had been going through so much with the tsunami.

Abby: They deserved to win that game.

For each of you, did you have any pre-game rituals you took with you from game to game, tournament to tournament?

Julie: I played with Abby at the tail end of my career and the start of hers. We overlapped at the 2004 Olympics, and I knew that she had some superstitions, but not until we did an episode on these superstitions. She just kept saying, “And then, and then, and then I have this, and then I do this.”

Abby: I actually attribute it to it being a success meter, because every time I scored or did something well in a game, I would just repeat.

Julie: And she scored a lot of goals.

I did have one superstition with my high school team, because we had been winning, winning, winning, and winning—winning a lot. I had to wear the same underwear, which had teddy bears and soccer balls on it, every game, which was such a pain. Do not have that superstition, people. If you have a superstition, make it not underwear. Because sometimes you forget to wash the laundry that week, and then you’ve got to be like, “Oh god. I’ve got to do it in the sink, and I’ve got to dry it out.” It was bad. They were falling apart by my senior year. When we finally did lose, I burnt those underwear, and I was like, “Never again am I doing that superstition.”

The tournament is essentially the world’s biggest stage. Did you ever feel external pressure while competing? And how did you deal with having so many eyes and opinions on you?

Abby: Yes, there is external pressure. And one of the things that I had to keep reminding myself yesterday, after our U.S. men’s team lost, was that “Oh, you are not a player, Abby. You didn’t play.” This thing, them losing, is not negatively going to affect your life in any way. You are safe. I had to remind myself.

Julie: Because you’re bracing yourself for the aftermath of that?

Abby: When I was playing, I was playing for my livelihood. I knew that if we won, if I scored goals, I knew that more would come for me and the life that I wanted.

Julie: To pay the bills. To pay rent.

Abby: Our women’s national team wasn’t paying us a ton of money, and so all the off-the-field endorsement deals really did matter. So I was playing for my life, and when we didn’t win world championships, I was devastated in a way that felt like maybe my life was over in a weird-not-true way. I knew my life wasn’t over, but it kind of was in some ways. There was a lot of that external pressure.

And how do we deal with it? That’s kind of the way that our women’s national team rolls. We want the pressure. That’s kind of our sweet spot. We train in those environments where our coaching staff always try to create the highest, most pressurized, intense moments in training so that when we experienced some of those similar moments in world championships and World Cups, it wouldn’t feel weird. We’d be like, “Oh yeah, this makes sense. This feels normal.”

What about you, Jules?

Julie: Of course you felt external pressure. I remember when we were hosting the World Cup in 1999—this is the World Cup where Brandi [Chastain] scores the winning penalty kick and takes her shirt off and gets naked—and I remember saying to Billie Jean King, who was a friend in the ’90s, that as we were going into that tournament, I was feeling a lot of pressure because we were the hosts, and we were trying to convince people—because this is before women’s soccer was really popular—that they should come to the games and that women’s soccer was a big deal. We were trying to set a standard for what a world event could look like on the global stage for women.

So there was a lot on the line. And I said to her, “What if we don’t do well and this tournament tanks?” And she’s like, “Foudy, pressure is a privilege.”

She was like, “Yeah, it’s a lot, but damn, you’ve done the work. Embrace it. Wrap your arms around it.” So our huge mantra during the World Cup was “Pressure is a privilege.” Our team was very joyful and loved to have fun and do pranks, and so we tried to strike this balance of keeping it loose yet understanding when you step on the field, it’s game time. I think we did a really good job of that, and we ended up winning the World Cup in 1999. Obviously that worked out fine for us. But this is pre–social media. I always say, thank god we didn’t play in the social-media era, ’cause that’s a whole different beast you have to deal with.

After winning a World Cup, after striving for something for so long and essentially climbing your Everest, what’s the feeling that comes right after?

Julie: We call it post-Olympics, post–World Cup blues, and it’s real. And we talk to athletes about it all the time as they’re going into their first World Cup and Olympics. When you train that hard for so long and are so locked in—because it’s years of training; it’s a lifetime of training, honestly—[the blues] just hit you so hard that first time if you don’t know or aren’t expecting it. I’m sure this is the same for people going through a lot of big life events. You’re planning for a wedding or you’ve got this big event that you’ve been working on at work forever. We used to joke and call it trauma bonding, but there is some trauma bonding that happens around the fact that you spend so much energy and time focused on this one thing, that when it’s gone and that thing is no longer there, you feel like, “Well, what am I going to do with my life?”

And it is real. Winning or not winning, it didn’t matter. Even if you won, you feel this emptiness, especially when you’re playing on a team where you love these women. These are your sisters—this sisterhood that you develop, this bond, by essentially dedicating your life to something that matters so much—and it is really hard.

It is a gut punch in terms of how you deal with that mentally. When we lost the 2000 Olympics after we won the ’99 World Cup, and we lost in the final to Norway, it was a handball [call], and I’m still living with it. I still have cold sweats at night sometimes thinking about that handball in 2000 that was 26 years ago, y’all.

I just remember going through depression and struggling. I am not usually like that. I’m very even-keeled with emotions like that. It was hard, and I wish someone had said, “You’re going to be okay.”

Abby: That’s so interesting that it happened to you for both winning and losing, because for me, when we won, the blues were worse. When we won [the World Cup], I think that I gave myself the night to really celebrate, and then the next day I was just adrift. I felt adrift at sea. But when we lost, I was more laser-focused. The mountain just continued on. When the tournament is over, you just can’t process fast enough all that is going on.

Like, what you’re thinking about during the group-stage games, how you’re interacting with the performance of your personal self and then your team or your forward line or your midfield, the leaders or the new kids, or having the conversations with your coaches and trying to block out the noise, but of course some of that gets in. Trying to think about and dream about lifting the trophy at the end and whether you do or not, it’s impossible to process all of it as fast as it’s happening and as fast as you’re experiencing it and feeling it.

It is a wild couple of weeks post-tournament.

Julie: And you’re young and your frontal lobe isn’t even developed. You want me to handle all this? You’re asking too much of me.

Abby: I know. So I drank, that’s what I did. I drank a lot. Not anymore. I’m not subscribing to it. I think that I would have played much longer had I not chosen to do that.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can read, hear, and see more of Abby and Julie on their Substack, Welcome to the Party.

Subscribe to Welcome to the Party

This week, we’re quitting our jobs, making peace with where we call home, and tagging along for the NBA summer league.

CITY LIFE

Dazed by all that

A life in New York is one filled with extremes. Yes, there are the skyscrapers, the parks, the sense of things mattering, the magic of it all, but there are also the rats, the traffic, the high rent, and the stench of the subway in summer. Few are the moments of in-between. Julia Harrison digs into the meat of city living and why she chooses to stay.

ibitha

— in orzo bimbo

At my transfer at 34th someone spits on my skirt and calls me a cunt. At home, I throw the skirt in a hamper with two soaking wet rags that I used to mediate our freezer leak.

Nothing was hard in the actual sense, but miserable things were often happening; tolerable through will, through Checking Privilege. Tar splattered on my foot while I walked Evie’s long-haired dachshund, Mignonette. I was groped on the subway platform at Bergen St. on my way to work: 9:30am, broad daylight. I said “sheesh” and walked farther down the platform.

Other factors: the cluster of baby roaches dead in the kitchen, a bookshelf in the vestibule too heavy to bring up the stairs myself, 13 days off Lexapro, no studio apartments under $2,100.

I had become haunted by the simplest question: What did I care about? The sense of wanting more that had plagued my twenties had now collapsed and become very much the opposite: I wanted less.

If I was staying here, in New York, and being brutally honest with myself: I cared about being in rooms of influence, I cared about being the influence. I cared about being close to minds and bodies and outfits and brands that were determining the actions of other minds and bodies and outfits and brands. Plainly: I cared about being recognized and validated. Which was legacy, I suppose, though really it was identity marketing, selling your personality, losing your personality by selling it.

I saw an old woman hobbling up the Bergen St. steps, two seconds per stair. I never wanted to be her. I watched parents drag their toddlers and their scooters out of ornate double entry doors on the forested streets in Cobble Hill. They looked exhausted. I didn’t want to be them either. I didn’t want to carry a stroller down the Bryant Park subway stairs. I didn’t want to afford my rent through tech consulting. I felt it was too late to pick something else—that what was now was forever.

[. . .]

Around the Oculus, I often saw families visiting New York, all sharing their iced lattes and laughing at something together. I would catch myself wishing for a brief minute to have grown up with a big-teethed Tory Burch mother and a bald, Episcopalian father with a tee-ball coaching hobby. I wished for a state school education, a chubby golfing boyfriend, an insurance sales job; a life where I enjoy Nashville and visit my college roommate in New York once a year. I believe in the multiplicity of man—surely she, too, suffers what I suffer—but I did secretly think her life was easier: Julia with highlights, Julia with Bala ankle weights, Julia with a family group chat that sent pictures of their golden retriever to numerous heart reactions.

I felt less curious and more self-conscious. I felt completely unfunny. I felt very poor.

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POETRY

THERAPIES

The mind-body connection

After years of battling anxiety and depression, Nick Catucci says he’d rather “do planks in jeans than get therapy.” Sometimes it takes getting physical.

Physical therapy is better than psychotherapy

— in RiffPost

I spent the second half of my 20s in a digital media job, starting work from home at 8 a.m., moving to the office until 7 p.m., shuttling back home for a quick nap and takeout, then writing freelance articles from 10 til midnight or later. My waking hours were spent sunk into a couch or slouching at a desk, and my diet was largely carbs and alcohol. I was driven by fear, anxiety, and ambition (and alcohol). When my lower back first seized up—while I was pulling a cooler out of a Ford Explorer at Storm King—I had no idea why it was happening. But I knew I had to do something. I started seeing a chiropractor.

A few years later, I was flattened by depression (and alcohol). I couldn’t admit that I was depressed (or an alcoholic). But I knew I had to do something. I started seeing a psychoanalyst on the Upper West Side. I had a big new job and didn’t want anyone to know I was getting therapy, so I scheduled my appointments for 7 a.m. I can still hear the white noise machines in his hallway, sending needles into my hungover brain. He wore those pants that zip off at the knees.

I’m not saying chiropractic and psychoanalysis are quackery (although I’m not saying chiropractic isn’t quackery). But in retrospect—as my depression, drinking, and physical health worsened—it’s insane that I thought some spinal manipulation and a quest into my unconscious were the emergency interventions I needed. What I later realized, as I tried more chiropractors and other therapy while sober, is that I was not asking for help, but to be fixed. Popped back into place. Steered into solutions.

[. . .]

Talk therapy did always afford me some relief—it was an outlet, and it gave me a sense that I was working on myself. Whether it was real or just some kind of placebo effect, chiropractors also usually provided some relief. I would feel less tense after a visit, and secure in the sense that I was doing something. But seeing therapists never lessened my anxiety, and seeing chiropractors never prevented me from throwing my back out again.

Finally, a friend around my age explained to me how he had banished his back pain for good: He saw a physical therapist. I got a doctor to refer me to physical therapy, where I learned some stretches and exercises to improve my core strength. That was over 10 years ago; I’ve done the exercises pretty consistently and have not been laid out since. It turns out that I was just weak from sitting on my ass too much.

[. . .]

The ultimate paradox for me is that I have spent much of my life inside my head without seeing what was so obvious about my mental and physical health: I worried too much, I worked too much, I drank too much, and I never paid attention to what my body was telling me. I needed other people to help show me this, but it wasn’t my therapists who did. It was my GP, my wife, the writer of a New Yorker article about the death of Joan Didion’s daughter, countless people in “the rooms,” and a sports therapist who showed me how my right foot skews outward, creating tension up my leg and into my glute, which unaddressed, will eventually trigger the muscles in my lower back.

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FREEDOM

SPORTS

Basketball diaries

Miller Kopp is uploading a journal entry each day while in the throes of the NBA summer league.

Day 2/15-NBA Summer League

— in Miller Kopp

I never thought I’d be able to walk out of an NBA(ish) practice and head home to see my parents and dogs.

We got to the gym at around 8:30am, lifted, hooped, recovered, and I also got my combine measurements:

• 6’6” barefoot (I’m sticking with 6’7” when people ask)

• 6’9” wingspan

• ***forgot my standing reach***

• 223lbs

• 7.5% bodyfat

• 43 inch max vert

• 8.5 inch (hand length)

• 9.70 inch (hand width)

Those numbers are cool or whatever, but what really matters is what happens on the court, in the weight room, off the court. Stuff you can control.

I can’t control my wingspan or my hand width, but, boy, can I control my effort on the court. I can control my mind to be sharp as a tack; to execute on both ends of the floor. I can control my voice and how loud I communicate to my teammates.

That’s my mentality, because I’m in the business of controlling what I can control and living with the rest.

Day #2 is always the toughest on the body. As a team you aren’t yet in the “tone it down” phase because there’s still a few days until the first game.

I really tested the conditioning. The shots I missed were short, which is a sign that my legs might have been a little tired OR that I just didn’t shoot my full shot. Maybe one, maybe both, I don’t know, but it is what it is.

The team I was grouped with today did not win a ton of games in the live segments, but I did notice a shift in respect. It feels like after a day of competing, talking, playing, you can kinda feel the heightened level of respect from other players. I feel like that’s earned through just absolutely competing. Guys talking trash and not backing down, sometimes barking back, playing super physical, making your presence felt.

What I learned/saw/felt/experienced/thought:

• Taking charges honestly feels great. 1000x team morale boost.

• It’s better to screw up on the side of aggression and full commitment than screw up by second guessing.

• Having a good warm-up routine and cooldown is always worth the extra 10-15 minutes.

• Do what you do best and live or die on that. For me, that’s shooting the rock and competing my balls off.

• Starting the day reading the Bible always makes my days better. I wake up 30 minutes earlier than I normally would just to give myself enough time to read and write the Bible without being rushed. The 30 minutes of sleep I miss is totally worth it.

• Playing well is a double-edged sword. It is a penny dropped in the confidence bank but can also be a penny dropped in the expectation bank. Don’t let the expectation to repeat a great performance or great day hinder your ability to compete freely. Gotta be aware of trying to live up to past performances or unfair expectations.

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ART

WRITING

Can anyone see what’s on the literary horizon?

AI is here—on our televisions, in our magazines, and in our very own workflows. T.M. Brown questions what role large language models should have, if any, in a writer’s world.

The end of the working writer

— in Is It Supposed To Look Like That?

Sometimes, I think we as writers overestimate how much people care about the quality of writing outside of specific venues like fiction, criticism, and narrative journalism. But the balance of written words produced in the world are not valued for their quality, but rather for their existence. White papers, product copy, SEO blog posts—these are all hypercommercialized pieces of writing meant to serve one specific end purpose: buy this and not that. This is writing as a product and a large portion of that taxonomy is, also, already being created by writers using LLMs. The same, to Joe [Weisenthal]’s point, will start happening to the little quotidian notes we have to send back and forth as part of daily life, the confirmation emails, the thank you notes, the scheduling and rescheduling. I cannot imagine using AI to do any of that, but I also think that a whole mass of people would rather click a button to tell their colleague they’re running 5 minutes late or cancel a reservation at a restaurant. Writing is extremely important to me; that does not mean it is important to everyone.

A few years ago, someone from a creative agency emailed me asking if I had any bandwidth to take on writing a white paper on some extremely esoteric technical topic for a major technology company. I had no idea what the hell any of the materials they sent over said, so obviously I told them of course I could do it and when did they need it by. Two weeks they said, which was a slightly tighter timeline than I usually like so I asked for $20,000. They said yes immediately which annoyingly told me I could have asked for more. But the lack of hassle was always its own blessing.

The best part about this corporate work is that it never needed to be that good and everyone understood that. The people at the agency knew it, the tech company knew it, I knew it. I just needed to make it easy enough so that non-technical executives could read it and understand, like, 60% of the topic. The agency handed me some more background materials: PowerPoints, speeches, PDFs. I think the paper I wrote was about edge computing or something, but I honestly couldn’t tell you anything about it at this point.

Work like this was my living for a long time. I would have to learn something quickly and then write about it from a place of at least passable fluency for a general audience. I did not consider that work part of my creative oeuvre, and in fact made significant efforts to partition it from how I wrote for newspapers and magazines.

Now that I don’t have to do it anymore, I wonder if that commercial writing should be treated the same as, say, this blog? Is all writing real writing?

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CANINES

QUITTING TIME

A leap of faith

When does the safer path become the riskier one? Danielle considers what it takes to leave a steady job and bet on herself.

i quit my big tech job to follow my stupid chungus dreams

—danielle in raw & feral

My passion is sparking delight through the absurd and bringing people together with creative scheming. But that has not been my job for the last four years. My job has been Data Monkey in Big Tech.

For a while I’ve lived a bit of a double life (like Hannah Montana or Batman, one might say). Tricking 3 million people into believing in an evil fake polycule, running a strip show for charity, making men oil up and fight each other… then logging into work to sit in meetings and write SQL queries.

Separating my passions from what financially supports my life was ideal for a while. In my personal projects, I didn’t have to follow anyone’s directives, worry about monetization, or corporately sterilize my ideas. I could create schemes that were purely me.

But at the same time, in building this rich outer world, working a corporate job has felt increasingly disconnected from my identity. I wasn’t achieving what I wanted in either, stagnating because I was trying to hold onto both. And the more I believed that other paths were possible, the more I felt my soul rotting in corporate America.

At some point, I have to take the blonde wig off and sing, or whatever (I didn’t actually watch Hannah Montana).

But it’s never that simple. I’m a chronic over-analyzer and will imagine every possible scenario, mostly worst-case scenarios, so I can “prepare.” I spent most of Autumn wandering around to different parks to lie in the grass and parse the existential thoughts whirling around my mind, transmutating so much angst to ink that it filled two spiral-bound journals that I sniped from work.

I feel I’m constantly seeking the approval of some omnipotent force, which surely was originally represented by my mom, but has contorted into some amorphous, omnipresent being. And my tendency to be extremely hard on myself helps me excel in execution once I’ve decided on a target, but struggle to take that leap of faith in the first place.

And you really need a good dollop of delusion to embark on an unconventional path.

It takes a certain degree of believing you’re exceptional, which I don’t really subscribe to. My own self-assuredness is too capricious, waxes and wanes with the tides, to stake my certainty on.

But what I have become confident in is that most people are not even within eyesight of what they are capable of. So even if I do not have some innate exceptionality, just having the audacity to try puts you miles ahead. And I’ve seen this in most of the projects I’ve done. Nothing is that technically difficult, nothing is prohibitively expensive. I’ve had dozens of projects that’ve gone viral from just ~$10s worth of flyers and tape.

In my existential processing, I’ve rationalized that I do actively want to reduce my risk aversion, as I know it’s holding me back, and every major risk I’ve taken has paid off in spades. Even further, stagnation and ennui have become an even greater risk in my current stage of life. I have the savings to support myself for a year or so. Risk-taking will only become harder. One day I’ll have a mortgage and back pain. Life’s too short to be a floating corpse on the lazy river in my 20s.

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TECH

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , , ,

Writing: , , , , , danielle

Recently launched

Naomi Klein, the bestselling author of Doppelganger, This Changes Everything, and On Fire, is now on Substack.

Sanaa Lathan has launched her Substack, where she’ll be “exploring the practical, the scientific, the mystical, and the deeply human.”

Erik Singer, a linguist and the dialect coach who worked with Austin Butler on Elvis, is on Substack writing all about accents.

The documentarian, journalist, filmmaker, and producer, Dan Taberski, is on Substack. He’ll be sharing episode drops, conversations about the show, and his favorite manifesto lines.

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

Start a Substack

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 out of Substack’s New York office.

This week, we’re picking unexpected books, renewing creative vows, and contending with unfinished projects.

MUSIC

Finding your voice again

Through the act of creation, Maggie Rogers has embarked on a journey of rediscovery.

somewhere between lost and reborn

— in Maggie Rogers

Everything before 2020, I remember in a straight line. Everything after, I remember as a spiral. This strange post-covid non-linearity. I’m back in my studio again after six years. Just me and my laptop and my synths and my piano. My hair is long and curled by ocean water again. The summer sun has brought my freckles to the surface. For the first time in a long time, I look the same as I did then, in the before. And it feels nearly the same. Like I could fold together two pieces of paper and they’d make a complete image, the middle disappearing altogether.

It’s a strange full circle moment. I feel somewhere between lost and reborn. Writing and writing and writing. Tinkering with songs. Clarifying the vision and going over it once again. Dropbox folders within Dropbox folders. Different versions of the same thing with the hope that one arrangement shift might crack the code.

But I’m trying. Stepping away from the drawing board, turning around, going back again. Asking myself to be brave. Re-learning real, honest vulnerability after ten years in the public eye. I want to say something true. I want to make something urgent and essential. I want to make something that makes me feel.

That’s the music update. It had been a while, so I felt I owed you one. “Owe” is a funny word, but you are very much with me, both within the work and alongside me, on this journey. I’ve written…so many songs. The weight of them is piling up within my arms. I carry them around with me everywhere I go. And I think I’ve got a few more to write. Being a great writer is also being a great editor.

There are mood boards. I’ll show you one day. For the first time ever, there have been multiple titles (This is usually the thing that I have first—even before the music—it sticks, and it doesn’t change. But this album, instead, has been ever-evolving and I’m allowing space for that.) A friend said to me recently, “This album has a birthday.” That was helpful to hear. A sense of pre-destination. The work we create is always creating us. I am renewing my artistic vows. I am choosing to have faith.

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VINTAGE SCENTS

LITERATURE

A novelist’s final project

William T. Vollmann is a prolific, award-winning writer. He also happens to be dying. Alexander Sorondo traveled across the country to interview Vollmann about his magnum opus.

“We Always Leave Things Unfinished”

— in big reader bad grades

“I’ll be dead very soon.”

He doesn’t have a cell phone or use the internet so it takes a week to get the answer but finally his publicist comes back with a politely breathless email confirming that, yes, if I can make it out to Sacramento next week William T. Vollmann will meet me at 9 a.m., June 23, at a small coffee shop that’s been built into an unsuspecting structure and then from there we can walk to his studio, hang out til around noonish.

It’s June 15th.

I start reading his new novel, A Table for Fortune. It comes out in August. It’s 3,096 pages. Calling around, preparing the article, I mention to sources that I’ll be flying out and interviewing Vollmann. A source implores me to read as much as I can. Says they saw someone talking with Vollmann, pretending to’ve read the whole book, but then got outed. I ask if Vollmann was angry. They wouldn’t say angry, no…more like “visibly upset.”

I read faster.

[. . .]

“Chemo mind” keeps him in a fog. The cancer causes pain such that he can hardly sleep. “Last night I got about an hour.” When he finally got up he had to take an opioid, which makes him “fuzzy.” All of this is compounded by the medical marijuana that’s proven a great help but leaves him kinda fried. “I couldn’t believe, after a couple weeks in Cuba, how much sharper I was, mentally, because all I had was my opioids.”

Hence he’s not tangled in any big fiction project right now. For nearly 40 years he’s been working simultaneously on each volume of a sprawling septology, Seven Dreams. It tells the history of the North American continent. Volume Five, The Dying Grass, came out in 2015. Reviews were glowing. The Washington Post called it “the reading experience of a lifetime.”

But every book since then has been a problem: too many pages, too many fonts, the title’s controversial, there’s too much math; releasing a two-volume art book in 2022, with a pair of understaffed indie publishers, Vollmann kept getting galleys sent back with typos throughout, shoddy production quality on the photos, publication running a year behind schedule. He doesn’t have the time for it anymore. He’s working on two short books right now: one’s a long personal essay, the other one’s literary criticism. Straightforward stuff. There’s no mention of fiction.

“Do you feel any pressure to finish Seven Dreams?”

“I’m not gonna touch it.” Resigned and certain. He says finishing even one of the two remaining volumes would likely take “more time than I have left.” Plus the fights it’ll prompt with his publishers. “About a quarter of the last one is completed, and then much less of the other one.”

“I don’t want it to come out looking like a piece of crap so,” he flaps a hand, hits a thigh, “just forget it.”

He shows me a wall with a long art sequence called “CUNT,” with a collection of other paintings beside it: nudes and studies, bodies warped and accurate, writhing or posing. The display is a proud one. He seems happy to show me.

Above the paintings there’s a shelf with a row of framed photos. Artful black and white from reporting trips around the world. Vollmann himself in drag as “Dolores.” A Black soldier. A woman cradling one child on her hip while holding the hand of another. His daughter Lisa in a school photo, smiling.

The illness didn’t feel like much of an obstacle in his Cuba trip, though he did worry about getting detained someplace, his opioids stolen.

In 2024, Granta was planning to send Vollmann to Tajikistan.

“That’s when my cancer came back.”

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OUT OF OFFICE

SELF-ACCEPTANCE

All the world’s a stage

The discourse around what we do for ourselves and what we do for public consumption has reached a fever pitch. Viktoriia Vasileva considers that both journeys might actually yield similar results.

Coming out as “performative”

— in Vik’s Busy Corner

I am in the Union Square Barnes & Noble, hunting for a new puzzle piece to add to my SS26 persona. I decided I will avoid the books that are marketed directly to girls like me: a writer in her 20s quits her corporate girlboss dreams to do something crazy (move to London, work at a restaurant, let a questionable guy treat her badly).

I try on the classics—my brain has been starving for vocab that hasn’t been infected by the internet. I insert myself in between self-serious young men in a wild assortment of shorts in Music, Film, and History. It dawns on me: what about that book about English football hooligans (Among the Thugs) that’s been in my Goodreads forever? I picture myself holding up a cover with a bold Brit chewing on a cig at a classy French bistro in the summer. I hear myself work it into a convo with a guy who looks British but is born and raised in New York as he takes a sip of cold beer. I feel the energy on the other end of a work call shift when they see a quote from a rancid ’80s football fan on my screen. Yea, that’s perfect. I beeline to Sports.

Is this performative? Of course, I am intrigued by the premise: an outsider, whose curiosity wins over survival instincts, throws himself into the world of drunk and reckless lads to figure out the cause of the horrifying violence and chaos they bring everywhere they go. Getting piss drunk and beat up for a story? Real journalism! But the game day decision to drop twenty bucks on admittedly subpar writing rather than some Steinbeck was made because I thought it’d be unexpected for a kind of snobby young woman, like me, to randomly know a lot about the gross ’80s football mob.

Be authentic. Be you. Well, this is me, and my brain is full of tiny, hyperspecific fragments of a life I want to live, a person I dream of being, the people I want to surround myself with, and they don’t always match my reality. Now that I am getting into doors I dreamt about when I started writing this newsletter, both socially and professionally, I feel the pressure to impress. I want to be a clever writer and a smooth conversationalist. I want to look more put together and interesting. I want my ideas to be simple and precise. But I also don’t want to feel like I have to try hard for any of it.

My working theory is that the key to having “effortless” swag, “genius” ideas, and a “dream” career is less about strategy and moodboards, and more about an open and curious mind and arranging your life in a way that brings you to the right people and places intuitively. The same crowd that rolls their eyes at the bros who shop Bode compliment my The Row-presenting loafers that I came across in Spain, guided by a paparazzi photo of Harry Styles I had imprinted in my brain, even though both of us are performing, just for a different crowd and with a different level of precision and mystic.

I am getting back into the habit of making up stupid side quests and picking up weird little hobbies because of course, that’s what makes life fun, but also because it gives me an arsenal of stories, connections, and skills necessary to entertain interesting people and opportunities. I respect the hustle and discipline it takes to send a daily newsletter or post three videos a week and I understand the value of visibility and status these things can get you, but I also know that isn’t how I want to spend my time and I am feeling more confident I can figure out a different way to make my thoughts and ideas visible. Instead of replicating what cool or successful people do in hopes of becoming one of them, I try to imagine what I would do with my time and money if I were 10 percent cooler and more successful, and then I go do it.

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TIME TRAVEL

FILM CRITICISM

Full disclosure: this movie allegedly falls flat

Tom Barrie saw Steven Spielberg’s most recent film. He’s not impressed.

Disclosure Day. Yikes

— in The Chimera

Longtime Spielberg fans will recognise the premise of the film, which is essentially the same as that in War of the Worlds, E.T., A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, hell, even Jurassic Park: how, the film asks, would humanity react to encountering great and possibly otherworldly scientific power? And how might we confront or use that power?

[. . .]

It’s not a bad premise, really. Several of the ingredients here lifted from the well-stocked sci-fi larder, including crop circles and astral projection, offer really good potential for set-piece moments and visuals. There are likewise a handful of excellent action sequences, albeit spoiled by [Josh] O’Connor being forced to exclaim “Oh, gahd, oh, whaht am I doing, oh gahd” over and over again in a sort of sub-Marvel attempt at comedy as he e.g. hijacks one of those massive American SUVs with the blacked-out windows and drives it straight through a rickety clapboard house. There was certainly potential.

The CGI animals were a problem, though. Deer have always been a problem for people tasked with animating them—they have to be light on their feet while still very heavy animals, and studios seem unable to rig their CGI models in the right balance—while the cardinal, raccoon and other beasties that appear in front of Kellner and Fairchild throughout the film also reside firmly in the Hallmark Channel uncanny valley.

The film is also way too slow. Scenes drag. But, more than anything else, it was David Koepp’s script that was the problem. Koepp is a longtime collaborator of Spielberg’s, and while the latter came up with the initial 50-page story, Koepp himself put it down at length on paper (or, apparently, on iPad).

Maybe I noticed this more because I watched the film with closed captions in an accessible screening, but it is absolutely heaving with clunky expositionary dialogue. Ironically, given the captions, there’s so much plot and characterisation spoken aloud in Disclosure Day that it would have been more suitable for a screening for the blind than the deaf: just so many questions in so many rooms. For at least the first hour of this film, everyone tells everyone else every detail of their life story in every scene. When I looked back at my handwritten notes I found I had written and underlined, several times, the phrase “Exposition Day”.

I don’t want to spoil the whole premise beyond the first 30-odd minutes of Disclosure Day’s 145, so allow me to give a handful of examples from within the main characters’ backstories. In the film’s very first scene, Kellner and Jane flee from the goons in a stolen car while he desperately tries to call an ally. “These are satellite burner phones, we only use them once,” O’Connor breathlessly explains to her—and the audience, who presumably can’t be trusted to fill that information in themselves.

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FASHION

ADVICE

Breaking news: reading supports the writing process

Naomi Kanakia has always wanted to be a great writer but ignored some critical advice when she was starting out. Hindsight is evidently 20/20.

Don’t write for a magazine that is bad

— in Woman of Letters

One of the most common pieces of advice for aspiring writers is: “You should read a few issues of a journal before sending them any of your work.”

Like most writers, I ignored this advice, and I submitted quite frequently to journals that I’d never read.

In my defense, when I started submitting, I was writing science fiction short stories, and I was quite familiar with the field. I had been reading year’s-best anthologies for years. I usually read the prize-winning stories. I often bought breakout story collections. I had read slush for a magazine (Strange Horizons), and I’d participated in various workshops. So I had a sense of what the field wanted.

But it was still a mistake to not regularly read any of the sci-fi journals. It’s not that I didn’t try to read them. I’d often get up a head of steam and say, “I am going to start reading [such and such journal] every month.” But then I’d read a few stories, and I wouldn’t like them, so I’d give up.

However, that’s no excuse, since I could’ve just skipped the stories I didn’t like. But, at the time, I felt even the best stories in these journals were unlikely to be better than the greatest stories of the past. In fact, I thought that even the current year’s prize-winning stories usually weren’t as good as the greatest stories of the past.

I did allow that some living writers were truly great—Ted Chiang, Maureen McHugh, Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Greg Egan, and a few others—but these were all writers from the generation above me. I did not attempt to see potential greatness in my peers.

Clearly, I was protecting my self-image. I wanted to be a great writer, and if I’d allowed myself to see that other people were doing something worthwhile, then I would’ve been assailed by a lot of doubts about my own abilities.

At the time, I honestly imagined I’d be a breakout era-defining writer, and that I’d somehow stand alone, and I’d have no peers. Which is absurd! Ted Chiang started publishing around the same time as Kelly Link did, and in some of the same journals. They are certainly peers (to each other). Even if I’d been my generation’s Ted Chiang, I would’ve had a peer.

And I did have a peer group of writers who broke into the top journals at roughly the same time as me: Vylar Kaftan, Aliette de Bodard, Tina Conolly, Caroline Yoachim, Leah Cypess, and a few dozen others. I encountered these writers in various fora, and I connected with them on Facebook, and I met them sometimes at conventions. We were certainly friendly, and I still have fond memories of most of these writers.

But I never went the extra step and attempted to evaluate their work to figure out which of them I truly respected as writers. And that’s something I regret now, because if there had been a writer in this group that I really admired, then it would’ve been very easy to tell them so, easy to start emailing them, and easy to learn from them.

As a writer, I often felt like I was trying to enter various clubs that didn’t want me. But at any given time, there’s always a club that you don’t need to enter: a club that you already belong to. The club comprises your peers—the people who are publishing in the same journals that you’re publishing in. Amongst that group, there ought to be a few people whom you respect. If there’s not, then it means you’re publishing in journals that are bad, and you should really start submitting to different journals.

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INQUIRIES

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , , , ,

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

Joshua Taylor Bassett, an artist, Times bestseller, and Emmy Award–winning actor, is now on Substack, where he’ll be sharing “philosophy, poetry, and songs in the form of essays.”

Versha Sharma, a journalist and editor who most recently served as editor in chief of Teen Vogue, has launched on Substack.

Longtime Miami sports columnist Dave Hyde has joined Substack after leaving the Sun Sentinel. He’ll be focused on analyzing “the biggest stories in South Florida sports.”

Outsiding, a program hosted by and that celebrates “nature, gardens, and the joy that being outside brings,” have brought their podcast and bonus content to Substack.

Former MLB pitcher Ryan Sherriff is now on Substack, where he’ll be writing about baseball, his career, and “what happens when it’s over.”

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

Start a Substack

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 out of Substack’s New York office.

This week, we’re writing obituaries on our own terms, taking leaps of faith, and learning from betrayal.

REMEMBRANCE

Grief in the age of AI

After losing a loved one, some people want to say what they think might sound right. Others just want to say what they know feels right.

A Correction

— in i hate these people

I am on a rage-walk from Rose Avenue to downtown Blacksburg. The Huckleberry Trail smells like honeysuckle and walnut. The birds are louder than I have heard in some time. The sky glows hot like God spilled a cup of lava over the hills. And I have just learned that my uncle used Claude to write my Nana’s obituary.

In years past, I would have surely used this opportunity to ruin a family function or get blackout and fire off some incoherent text messages. I will refrain from that for now, not because I find the use of generative AI in this (especially this, good god, man!) or any context defensible, but because my Nana’s soul is sturdier than that. She does not need my protecting.

But the thing about words after somebody dies is that they are not for the person who is dead. They’re for us, the living. This is not to say that the practice of remembrance is a futile endeavor. It’s how humans connect, keep going, make it all hurt a little less. There is great progress in death. When someone dies, and it hurts, it also means that you were born, that you are alive, that there is this great big web of humans that had to exist for thousands of years through wars, plagues, famines, and great migrations for you to exist. Better yet, the pain means that there are feelings in you, and that they are worth expressing.

So, I say all this now, knowing damn well that it is for me, knowing damn well that I am alive.

What I remember of my Nana is her heart, her mind, her smile, her hands, the way she’d pull a weed or waddle out to the porch with a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of BLTs, that she was always the last person at the dinner table, that her favorite jokes were ones about white horses in mud, that she’d pluck a blacksnake off the pillars on the porch without hesitation and set it free in the pines with a smile, how she’d bust a U-turn on I-81 to get a better look at a red-tailed hawk, how she’d pull up a river rock and snatch a crawdad from behind with fingers like talons, the way she’d sneak up on Papa and yank out one of his leg hairs while he was sleeping, how she’d quell his rage with a stern face, that she figured humans were at their best when they were caring for one another and preserving that world which so graciously allowed them to exist, that home was everything, that it was “Big Rock Candy Mountain” before bed and NPR and Folgers in the morning, that the best way to solve anything was to sit and talk, that she always had a bag of apple slices on her, how she’d kneel in the bow of a canoe while she pointed out big rocks in the rapids, that she always wished we’d stay a little longer, that she’d stand in the driveway and wave until the car disappeared, that she was singing “Country Roads” till she died.

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TINY FURNITURE

ISLAND LIFE

Coming back home

When big-city living lost its allure, the rural Pacific Northwest called to her.

“Our Greatest Lives Depend on Our Living Our Deepest Desires.”

— , in conversation with Blakely Spoor, in Health Gossip

Where did you move from, and why?

I was freshly graduated from college in Nashville, Tennessee, with no idea where to go next. All I knew was that I couldn’t see myself moving to New York City, where 90% of my peers were headed. I decided to spend the summer at my family’s cabin in the San Juan Islands. It turned out that the place I had escaped to in an effort to “figure my life out” was the place where my life began to take root.

How did you ultimately make the decision to move?

Coming here happened easily, and staying here happened unexpectedly. I grew up spending a few weeks every summer of my life on this island. My mom spent every summer of her life coming here with her siblings as well. It is a place that has always felt like “home” in that it was familiar, etched in my blood and my bones. But I never expected to actually live there, especially in my mid-20s. It was supposed to be my perching spot, but a few weeks turned into a few months, which turned into many, many months. And here I still was.

One morning after a chat with my neighbors asking when I would be headed off-island next, to which I responded that I didn’t have any current plans to, I thought to myself, “Oh, so I live here now.”

What were your expectations going in? How did reality compare?

Living here is rural living, most definitely, but it is remote rural living. Its remoteness—no grocery store, no gas station, no hardware store, no ferry, no public access—has always been a part of its appeal for my family and me. It requires a generous amount of forethought, of which I am blessed and cursed to have in excess. What I anticipated being a challenge, however, was the isolation. During the off-season, the island population withers down to under 50 full-time residents, and the majority of them are at least 30 years my senior. There also aren’t any natural-wine bars or specialty coffee shops to enjoy in the company of girl friends. And lord knows, I was very, very single at the time that I moved out there.

Through many baked-good drop-offs, I befriended my elderly neighbors. Living in such a remote place necessitates a genuine companionship with your neighbors. They are your lifeline when there is a big windstorm, if a king tide brings water lapping at your front door, or when your heat goes out. It has become one of the biggest joys of my life to spend time with them, to learn from them, and to care for them, and them for me.

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ANCIENT AFFECTION

MARKETING

The future’s so murky, I gotta wear shades

Last week, Snap made its bid for wearable technology, to unsavory public reception. Camille Moore breaks down what she thinks went wrong.

Snapchat Lost 1 Billion Dollars Because It Failed To Tell A Story.

—Camille Moore in Branding With Benefits

On June 16th, Evan Spiegel walked on stage at the Augmented World Expo to unveil Snap’s new Specs, a $2,195 wearable computer he called the post-smartphone era. By the time the keynote ended, Snap had lost more than a billion dollars in market cap, the stock was down 10 percent, and the internet had decided the glasses looked like solar eclipse viewers.

The product failure is the surface. The real story is the value gap, and it is the most important brand lesson of the year.

The Numbers That Made The Rejection Inevitable

Snap charged $2,195 for a pair of AR glasses with a 4-hour battery and a 136-gram frame. That is six times more than Ray-Ban Meta, which sells for $350 and has moved over 2 million units since its launch in September 2023. Meta now commands 76 percent of global smart glasses shipments. Snap launched into the same category at six times the price, with no story to justify the gap, and the market did what markets do when the math does not math…they tanked the stock.

On the day of the launch, stock analysts split immediately. Rosenblatt kept Neutral with a $6.40 price target. B. Riley moved to Buy at $10, calling Specs a potentially transformative product but noting the high initial pricing may limit early adoption. Behind both ratings is the same uncertainty, i.e., nobody can articulate who this product is for or why they would pay this price for it, including the people who are supposed to be selling it.

Why The Market Rejected It

Spiegel pitched Specs the way founders pitch pre-product startups, on the promise of where computing is going rather than what the product does for the customer today. He called the device more than a decade of development, framed it as the next computing platform, and positioned Snap as the company that defines the post-iPhone era.

That works when you are raising a Series B. It does not work when you are asking a consumer to spend $2,195 on something they have to wear on their face in public. The vision-led pitch has a ceiling, and that ceiling is the moment the product becomes real, and you don’t have value tied to the product. From that moment forward, the story has to be about the customer’s life, not the founder’s vision, and Snap could not answer the only question that mattered… What does this do for me today, and why should I care?

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ARTS AND CRAFTS

FASHION

The reward for a job well-done? Betrayal.

Barbara de Vries helped revive Calvin Klein in the ’90s. All it purportedly took to oust her was a single jealous coworker. Over three decades later, de Vries reveals excerpts from the journal she kept then, as well as advice for aspiring creatives.

The ex-CK design director sharing her diaries from the 90s

— and in 1 Granary

What was your brief when you arrived?

For me, it was perfect timing, but I was also perfect timing for him. He gave me complete freedom to basically do what he had asked me to do: revive what was then Calvin Klein Sport. Very quickly, we realised it was a stupid name and a stupid placement in the department store. It was hanging with Liz Claiborne and those kinds of lines—not even Bridge lines, more like what they called “Missy” lines. Awful. Donna [Karan] was doing great with DKNY, so we realised we had to position it next to her, and that was a big influence.

So it was a clean slate. I didn’t have to walk in anybody’s footsteps. I just had to do what I did best. I could combine everything I’d done up to that point, and it worked. It worked with my team, but I also think it worked because Kate [Moss] came along at exactly the right time. What we did was create the collections, and they inspired all the other elements.

When I was reading the journal, it wasn’t completely clear what had created the tension around your exit. What happened?

I had endometriosis at the time, so I went away to have a procedure. In the middle of recuperating, I got a phone call from Calvin’s assistant asking if there was a helicopter pad anywhere near here. I showed you the woods here [on an earlier call], and I just laughed and said, “Why does he need to land a helicopter?” But he wanted to come to me in a hurry. I said, “No, I’m back next week. I’ll see you next week.” That was a bit of a flag that something was going on. I didn’t know what it was.

Before that, sometime in June, my head designer, Elaine, and I had this great idea to do a CK sneaker, because sneakers were huge at the time. So we said, let’s do it, I took the idea to Calvin, and he thought it was brilliant. Literally a day later, Barb Warner, who headed up the licensing department, came storming into my office, screaming at me. “How dare you go behind my back? Do you know who I am?” I think at that moment she decided she was going to get rid of me.

She had Calvin’s ear, she was friends with him. By the time the fashion show styling happened, she was sitting next to Calvin, where I usually sat. I was completely blindsided by it. I had no idea that people could even be like that. It was something you read about, but I didn’t really think about it. Also, we were too much of an island to know any of the gossip or any of the stuff that was going on within the company. That was intentional, but it worked against us in the end.

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MOVIE REVIEWS

MEMORY LANE

Ponchos of seismic proportions

When Ali Royals was six years old, her parents tasked her with deciding where to go to kindergarten. In the end, it was one water-wicking garment that won her over.

THE RAINCOAT THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

— in Permanent Record

I was an only child for six years and my parents acted accordingly for each one of them, treating me not as an infant or a toddler, but as some semblance of an equal, a 3-foot-tall adult deemed responsible enough to make her own decisions. The most notable decision with which I was personally entrusted: where I would attend school. There was no shortage of options in the walkable radius of my childhood home in Baltimore: co-ed options at Calvert, Park, or Friends, all girls at Roland Park or Bryn Mawr.

I only ever remember touring Calvert—run as tightly and glamorously as a glossy New England boarding school, covering kindergarten through eighth grade, the kind of institution that has its own specific script of handwriting that all children must learn and reproduce to perfection.

My dad remembers it too. “The tour finished and you said ‘Tour’s not over. I want to see some classrooms. I need to see the library.’” He’ll laugh the story out over a glass of wine when, every so often, the subject of my childhood precocity finds itself broached.

The tour guide allegedly obliged my request, showing me the classrooms for kindergarteners (or, as they call kindergarten at a school such as this, “Pilot”), as well as the middle school library. I remember this little magnetic lamp with a carousel of horses you could arrange however you pleased. And I was pleased alright. It was so close to home I could’ve walked the path to school with my eyes closed—something my best friend’s brother would do a few years later; eyes open, he walked his 7-year-old self home in a bout of defiance after getting sent out to the hall for causing trouble.

But then there was McDonogh—far outside that 2-mile circumference, a whopping 30-minute drive away, a former school for orphan boys situated on 800 acres of farmland in Owings Mills, Maryland. I have no memory of the tour itself except for one incredibly influential promise: all incoming kindergarteners would receive their very own rain poncho.

I was transfixed by the possibility of becoming a first-time poncho owner. It radicalized me into a single-issue voter. Other schools had just about everything—proximity, friends I already knew, particular penmanship—but they didn’t have rain ponchos. So that was that. I told my parents I wanted to go to McDonogh. They honored my decision. And so I went, for 13 years, kindergarten through 12th grade, all catalyzed by a singular poncho: orange and plasticky, perennially crinkled, a tiny eagle wearing a poncho of its own emblazoned on the front.

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SCHMEAR SHAM

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , , , ,

Writing: , , Blakely Spoor, , , ,

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Diane Rehm, a radio executive and broadcaster for nearly 50 years, is on Substack and releasing perks for paid subscribers, like access to exclusive interviews and an open chat forum.

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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 out of Substack’s New York office.

This week, we’re injecting fun back into the writing process, discarding outdated personal opinions, and watching Adele (the singer) become a Dell (the computer).

THE ARTIST’S WAY

“In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun”

Julie Andrews (as Mary Poppins, of course) sang it first, but Monica Heisey is putting it in writing.

WORK: it’s supposed to be fun

— in WORK/LIFE

i have never felt very comfortable with the stance, held by some writers, that writing as an undertaking is both very difficult and emotionally intolerable. while i understand there is plenty about being alone with your thoughts, sharing your ideas in public, and attempting to take something from inside your mind and bring it into the physical realm that is uncomfortable, it is not difficult like digging a ditch. it is not intolerable like having your heart broken, or even like having a sunburn. when people say things like “writing is torture,” i often think, if you really feel this way, why not do something else?

i encountered this line of thinking so frequently in the early days of my career that it occasionally caused me to doubt myself. i loved writing. i couldn’t believe i got to do it for a living, and found it, often, actively fun. did this mean i was doing it wrong, somehow? was there a more arduous and therefore more correct method that would lead me to create stronger work? if suffering for one’s art provided no special benefit, why were writers i admired constantly tweeting or appearing on panels to say their working life was hellish and exhausting?

to this day there is a little voice in the back of my mind that pops up once in a while to suggest i am shirking “real work” by enjoying myself. i was immensely soothed to see ali smith, an objectively wonderful writer with a prolific output, call herself “immensely lazy” in an interview at the hay festival, holding a beer and suggesting she doesn’t really work until she has a deadline and a paycheque scheduled, adding that she “does basically nothing until she has to” and considers staring into space an important part of the creative process. there, i thought watching it, is someone who is enjoying their working life.

this is not to say that i do not have bad days, or that i am immune from complex feelings about, in particular, the “putting it out into the world” part of writing. in the last week of editing my most recent novel i dreamt every night about dying or being murdered or murdering someone else. one night i physically felt the tip of my nose touch the lid of my own coffin as it closed over me. it was not, let’s say, “chill.” but the actual writing, in the day, sat up in bed and combing through pages, killing only my darlings, was almost pure pleasure.

so! four paragraphs of bragging about how i loooove to work and have sooo much fun doing it… this is insufferable, you are probably thinking. i hope this bitch gets back into her own coffin and stays there! give me a minute. i have tips.

outline, then follow your nose

working in tv has trained me to outline very intensely, which was at first annoying and time consuming but which i have now come to realize means i have done most of the difficult work (figuring out what to say, rather than how, which is the fun part) by the time i sit down to properly write, and crucially allows me to jump around in the draft without damaging its structure. once i have my outline, i write everything on it that seems the most fun first, depending on my mood, the weather, the amount of time available on a given day. there are inevitably less exciting parts of every draft to write—depressing bits, events based painfully on real emotional experiences, interstitial passages that tell the reader how much time has passed, etc—but if you’ve accumulated enough scenes you are proud of, you’ll be pleased to connect them with the less interesting work.

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FLORALS

REHABILITATION

My stint of vocal rest and relaxation

A Lady Gaga concert, four flights, and a day on set filming a documentary: Brendon Holder’s vocal cords have taken a beating. Now, at the urging of his ENT and speech therapist, he’s tuning his chatter to a new volume.

Small Talk

— in Loosey

I lost my voice two months ago and had to go on severe vocal rest. I “served” some of it back in Toronto, and I’m only just getting back to normal. The ear, nose, and throat doctor shoved a camera scope down my right nostril and confirmed that I have a polyp on my right vocal cord. When I saw him over a month ago, he told me that I must reduce speaking immediately to avoid surgical intervention. The doctor prescribes me weekly sessions with a speech therapist and commands me to avoid smoking (lol), fried foods (nice try), sending voice notes (devastating), and soda, the latter of which I hold out on for three whole weeks.

As of today, I have had five sessions with the speech therapist in a small white office at the southern tip of Manhattan. She records my progress through a headset microphone that makes me feel like a pop star whenever I wear it. In our sessions over the last five weeks, I practice making “vvvv” and “mmm” sounds. I blow bubbles from a straw into a small cup of water and practice “speaking towards the front of my face.” I feel like a toddler, or an alien learning to be a human. Miraculously, it works.

We discover that I lost my voice after a series of unfortunate events. The inciting incident was Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem Ball” at Madison Square Garden, where I sang along (loudly). This was followed by a quartet of long flights shortly after: a 36-hour trip to Los Angeles to meet with a podcast host, followed by a dry-aired flight to Tokyo to film a documentary. It is my speech therapist’s theory that on those flights, I became a victim of the altitude’s dehydration, which only made my voice hoarser.

During that period when I unknowingly ruptured my vocal cords, I never once stopped talking, making conversation everywhere I went, both small and tall.

Once on vocal rest, my talks become smaller. Brevity is a virtue. I’m not supposed to speak louder when someone interrupts me, and, in the beginning, I find this incredibly frustrating. There are times when I forget that I’m supposed to be reducing my vocal load: in a heated debate over dinner, when my favourite song plays at a Yebba concert, during the carols of a wedding. Most injuries are music-related, I realize. It’s hard to be quiet in a city as loud as New York, but soon I become used to it. Soon, I even enjoy it.

I pull someone in close to speak to them, not wanting to compete with the background chatter of a restaurant or the loud music of a party. It becomes more challenging in groups when I can’t project my voice to the masses. I worry that people will think I’m being exclusionary as I direct my short bursts of conversation to one person and not a group, a small-talk faux pas.

But there’s something refined, even sensual, about speaking softly and not adjusting your volume to what is around you.

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TECH

ILLUSTRATION

On becoming an online legend when you least expect it

An artist’s accidental role in one of the internet’s most enduring memes.

I Made the Animorphs Covers. I Did Not Expect This.

— in My Adventures as an Illustrator

I’ve been doing cover art for over fifty years. More than two thousand covers, by my last count. I’ve painted for Baen, Bantam, Tor, Del Rey, Scholastic. I spent seven years as a matte artist at Disney. I’ve done space operas, military science fiction, horror, fantasy, kids’ series. I painted the Heroes in Hell series. I painted the Honor Harrington run. But the thing I am most remembered for is the Animorphs covers.

My students at Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts don’t believe me when I tell them I did the covers. Adults go wide-eyed at conventions. Even though the editions with my covers are long out of print, Animorphs is still around. I am surprised by the continuing presence of those covers as internet memes.

Sometime around 2012, someone on Tumblr photoshopped one of my covers to show the rapper Pitbull transforming into a pit bull. It got reblogged tens of thousands of times in a week. Then someone made Adele morphing into a Dell computer. Then it was everywhere.

I am continually amazed by this. The specific way they became famous is not a way I could have planned. The generation that grew up with them reached the age where you make jokes about your childhood at exactly the moment when the internet rewarded that kind of joke.

The format is simple. Start with a person, then transformation, then animal.

Anyone can replicate it with the cover design as a template. The pun structure, Pitbull into a pit bull, Adele into a Dell, maps perfectly onto what the covers already do. Little did I know that I would spend time creating a format specific enough that strangers could repurpose it for jokes. That is not what I was trying to do, but I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a form of success.

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ATHLETIC DRIP

CULTURAL CRITICISM

Olivia Rodrigo and the girls who came before her

Eliza McLamb, a musician herself, examines what it means to be a teen girl in the spotlight.

The teen idol survives

— in words from eliza

The teen idol has a tragic legacy. She’s a famous child, working while her peers are befriending one another and developing identities in small containers. Her container is big, bigger than the stage or the television screen. Her container is the industry, the internet, the world. Normal children are unlucky enough to shoulder the burden of their parents’ expectations, but she is gifted the responsibility of considering the fans, those reaching creatures that supposedly give much more than they take. Though they sure seem to take a lot. The famous child is generating income that is solely dependent on the maintenance of a personal brand while that brand goes through puberty and changes in immeasurable ways—physically, hormonally, psychologically, and spiritually. The famous child is debated about, decided upon.

When I was young, I was obsessed with a Marina and the Diamonds song called “Teen Idle.” It’s about being a teenager and wanting to be adored and also wanting to die, because being depressed is sometimes the closest we get to embodied living, and because death is what happens to girls who are adored too much. At twelve, I understood every word and sang along with fervor: “FEELING SUPER SUPER SUPER SUICIDAL!”

This kamikaze impulse is part and parcel of being a teenage girl, that maniacal high of wanting what you want so badly that you must also imagine yourself destroying every piece of it. Coincidentally, and unfortunately, this is also how we feel about the teen idol herself.

I think Olivia Rodrigo is awesome. The music is undeniably, consistently great, and Olivia’s attitude towards the process of creation is one of the most heartening perspectives in the industry right now. She’s a self-described fangirl who embraces all the best aspects of loving something, which is to say that she makes an effort to be a part of, and therefore enrich, the thing itself. I imagine that it would be easy to become wildly famous and immediately distracted by the access, the money, the shoes; Olivia has great shoes, but she also utilizes the better parts of such ascendancy by collaborating with her idols and taking her work seriously enough to merit putting herself in conversation with them.

In a music culture of self-flagellating individualism, algorithmic wars of attrition, and watered-down trend cycle regurgitation, Olivia stands apart by having clear references and being unafraid to reference them. She plays the game, but has her terms; in her most recent album cycle, she prioritized live debuts over the increasingly popular, endless waterfall release of singles, trying to chance the streaming algorithm. A clear believer in art as work, she’s collaborated with several artists across mediums over the course of her most recent campaign and prioritized a cohesive visual language above a one-off viral moment.

Olivia Rodrigo is completely special on her own accord, unique in a way that is irresistible to young teen fans and established music critics alike. And she is also a fascinating composite of the women who came before her, women who macheted through the jungle that is our mad culture. I realize that I have a problem with narrative, with wanting bad things to lead to good things, and for an inevitable conclusion to arrive and make all the pain ultimately worth it. But it’s hard not to look at the arc of Olivia’s career and see the women who made it possible, women who struggled against the tide so as to make space for a teen idol to finally survive intact.

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PAINTING

CH-CH-CHANGES

U-turns fully encouraged

Humans are fickle creatures. Ayan Artan says that’s just fine.

things i’ve changed my mind about.

— in rent free.

• double denim.

• debuts having to be good. witnessing the debut is quite literally gathering around a sapling, puzzled at its blatant infancy. how odd to expect anything remotely complete from an artist just beginning to give themselves permission to create. voice and perspective are earned. we should give artists the time to earn them.

• olives. they’re delightful little pebbles of umami. i was merely a tasteless freak.

• productivity. you are not a machine whose value depends on output. you are a person. living is the point, not figuring out how much you contribute to your country’s GDP.

• addison rae. i’m charmed by her grit, her hunger. striving looks good on women, especially ones who know how to resourcefully turn infamy to their advantage. she surprised me. her take on taste being a privilege set off a lightbulb for me. i’m rooting for her.

• the idea that art saves lives. i think people save themselves. all we do is reflect our audience back at themselves. we cannot conjure up from within you a strength that you do not already possess.

• men in arsenal jerseys. if you can support the same team for eleven years, there’s a hidden emotional strength within you i would love to test the limits of.

• the beach. i have always hated sand, but i have of late been daydreaming of our shores and lido beach and somali mermaids and pearls. perhaps i don’t hate beaches. perhaps i only hate the ones away from home.

• revisiting work. you are not the same person you were a year ago. there are a thousand versions of every film, every book, every album. it cannot be a waste of time to see what new thing reveals itself to you. it’s perhaps the critic in me but give yourself permission to change your mind.

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TREND-SPOTTING

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , James, , ,

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

, an actor, writer, and filmmaker who has worked on projects like Reservation Dogs, Backspot, Marvel’s Echo, and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, is now on Substack, exploring “creativity & style, queerness & identity, Indigeneity & family, love, sex, grief and the ways we try to make sense of our messy-ass lives.”

, a singer, songwriter, and member of the band Westlife, is now writing and podcasting about music, soccer, and family on Substack.

Journalists Jason Langendorf, Eric Raskin, David Greisman, Bill Dettloff, and more have come together to launch The Good Fight. The new publication has resurrected the former ESPN/Grantland Ring Theory podcast and is using long-form video to tell boxing stories from across the world.

, an interior designer, author, and the founder of House Nine Design, has launched No Place Like Home. It will feature essays about her “wonderfully chaotic life” as well as “educational content, curated edits, and the insider interiors thinking” she shares with her clients.

, a lexicographer, etymologist, author, and resident word expert on Channel 4’s long-running quiz show Countdown, is now on Substack.

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

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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 out of Substack’s office in New York City.

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

This week, we’re re-familiarizing ourselves with DJ Khaled, committing to curiosity, and splurging within reason.

RETROSPECTIVE

Another one

Mary H.K. Choi, whose new novel is out this week, reflects on the makings of her first bestselling book: DJ Khaled’s biography.

Keys Open Doors

— in choitotheworld

Technically, it was my first New York Times bestseller, but more crucially it was the first time I was tasked to write a book without any idea of how to go about it. I had written several celebrity profiles by then. I had been on tour with Rihanna for seven days with a caravan of other journalists, but nothing had quite prepared me for sliding into the fiefdom of a rap personality as they were blowing up.

If you’ll remember, this was when DJ Khaled, whose name is Khaled Khaled, had gone stupendously viral on Snapchat for getting lost at sea on jet skis at night. It was a harrowing yet heartwarming ordeal and all the while, lit only by the glow of his phone, he narrated the events through a series of reassuring platitudes. The key is not to panic. The key is to make it. The ocean is real. The key is never give up. It’s not easy to win.

He’d already had wins. Most notably, the colossus All I Do Is Win, as well as eight studio albums, but this is the moment where America noticed him. The morning shows wanted him. Ellen. Martha Stewart. He’d become a household name and knew it, and everything he said caught fire. He churned out content like an influencer in a clout house, shining his light on his workouts, his brief stint with veganism, his chef, the stone lion in his yard, his partner, his lotion, his cronies, his cars and, occasionally, his biographer.

As Khaled’s star was rising, the book deals inevitably arrived and my name quickly made the short list. Years later I’d find out how much Khaled made on the deal, and while that figure is not my business to share, what I can say is that I was offered about $25ishK and had six weeks to turn it in. It felt doable. I could sense the momentum and had always been a fast writer. They put me up in the St. Regis for three nights and I knew that if I could get even two hours with him every day, I would have enough for a business book of aphorisms that would not only chronicle his origin story but give color to his life.

The long and short is that it was classic rap shit and he ignored me for all three days as I skulked around his house. I eventually elbowed my way onto his tour bus so I could get time with him on his way to Atlanta. At this stage of his life DJ Khaled was afraid of flying and this ended up being a gift. I interviewed his partner Nicole, his right hand Kiko, his photographer and videographer Ivan, as well as many of his friends. I still have Fat Joe’s number in my phone from that time and both Cool and Dre’s. I also have Big Boi from Outkast’s number in my phone, but that was from something else.

The longer, longer story is that I observed DJ Khaled for about 8 or 9 days total, this trip and later when he came to New York. I blended into the decor, threading my way through the crowds that clamored towards him like fast zombies for “fan luv,” I overheard his conversations, he was constantly calling people, and learned who this man was beyond the phrases.

Mostly I watched DJ Khaled, obstinately sitting in his sight line like a begrudging, plotting cat with my notebook and recorder. On day five of him not speaking to me, I decided I’d invoice him directly for more money since he was eating into my deadline. I’d seen how dedicated he was in securing the bag and wanted his attention. “I’m raising my rate,” I said. “I’m going to invoice Patty” (his childhood friend who also ran operations at the time).

He told me, and I’ll never forget this, that he had a special, tailor-made key for me:

“Are you an artist?” He asked me. I was startled by this sudden pop quiz and hesitated. “Of course you’re an artist,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hired you if you weren’t an artist. But if you’re an artist, don’t talk about money before you make the art,” he advised. “Make the art, then secure the bag.”

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SUMMER SILVER

RELIGION

“A hallmark of mania”

A candid, personal exploration into the zone where spirituality and mental health intersect.

Religious Madness

— in Shifting Tides

My spiritual director once asked me to do my best to differentiate between experiences that felt real and experiences that were actually true. It was wise counsel, though almost impossible to apply in the moment. During the experience itself, there is no clean distance from which to evaluate it. There is simply the reality of the experience: the opening of the senses, the cosmic feeling, the sense that all humanity is interrelated, the feeling that you have finally seen what has always been there. It is difficult to describe, partly because experiences like this are almost by definition ineffable. It doesn’t emerge as a logical argument to be handed across the table, which is why throughout the ages most have often reached for poetry.

Mania does not always feel like madness from the inside. Sometimes it feels like transcendence. I have had experiences like this before, and looking back, I can say that at least one of them does not seem authentic to me anymore, while another one still does. I realize how strange that may sound. How do I get to decide that? What does authentic even mean in this context? What does it mean for something to be real?

I do not have a clean answer, and I am increasingly suspicious of anyone who does. Each person has to wrestle with that question from within his or her own tradition, experience, community, and conscience. For me, I answer from within Christianity. Did God reveal something real and true to me? Was it from God? Did it draw me toward love? Did it humble me? Did it endure? Did it form something good in me after the intensity faded?

The last question has become especially important, because time has become one of the only tools I trust. I cannot always discern an experience while I am inside of it, but I can sometimes see what it produces after the fact. I can see whether it still rings true months later, whether it leaves an imprint on my soul that helps me live better, whether it makes me more compassionate, patient, honest, and connected to God and other people.

The first experience I think of had all the marks of religious intensity. There was an opening of the senses, a cosmic connection, euphoria, grandeur, and a special mission from God. Everything seemed to speak to me, and at the time it was Disney movies. I was convinced there were messages everywhere. I abandoned an incredible opportunity for my family because I believed I was supposed to start what I thought could become the next Charles Xavier school for the gifted. Even writing that sentence is painful because it sounds absurd from a distance, but at the time it was charged with meaning. It felt coherent. It felt beautiful. It felt like God was doing something extraordinary and I had finally understood my role in it.

I do not look back on that season only with embarrassment. That would be too easy, and it would not be entirely honest. It was one of the most euphoric seasons of my entire life. There is one night I still think about often. I was sitting in the back of my truck under the stars at 3 a.m., overwhelmed by my closeness with God and what I thought he was doing. My face almost hurt from smiling. I felt held by the universe. I felt chosen. I felt alive in a way that depression makes almost impossible to imagine. When everything is gray and heavy, when my body feels like concrete and God feels distant or silent, I remember that night and ache for it. I want the stars and the smile and the nearness back.

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MATTERS OF THE HEART

READING

Wherefore art thou, attention span?

Modern life is essentially slinging the thought “Am I reading enough?” on an unending hamster wheel in perpetuity. John Paul Brammer offers a prognosis, and potential cure, for literary rumination.

How I Learned to Read Way, Way More

— in John Paul Brammer

You’ve probably heard this, or said it yourself: “I’d love to read more, but I can’t.” I can’t focus. I can’t sit still. My mind wanders. “I can’t crack it.” People who want to read more are aware of the tender goodness inside literature, but the barrier is too stubborn. They’ve become too weak to pierce the skin. Or so they think.

If you’re hoping for an easy trick to bypass this obstacle entirely, I’m sorry to disappoint. There is, or at least there was for me, a mandatory effort on this front. But as with breaking into anything, it’s useful to find the weak points. It was while probing that I found my way in. The sweet spot wasn’t attention, really, but something closely related to it.

Curiosity is a child. It’s greedy and unpredictable and has two modes. It’s either in frantic activity, or it’s dead asleep. When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away. A child curious about the taste of dirt will find their way to dirt. The whole of the child’s spirit will narrow toward dirt. The child will slip through any gap in the pen. The strictest parents know there’s always a gap. “No” means nothing.

When I consider the attention crisis as a curiosity crisis, some things become clearer. For argument’s sake, embrace some hypothetical good news: our faculty of attention isn’t shrinking after all. We’re as capable of sustained attention as any of our forerunners, including the French ones in voluminous powdered wigs who attended the grand salons and kept vast personal libraries. The problem, in that case, would be misapplication.

It’s no coincidence the internet is holding our attention with ever more colorful, infantilizing distractions. Take those AI-generated videos of anthropomorphic fruit. Sugary. Bright. The strawberry cheats on the banana with the pineapple. And then what? The strawberry gets pregnant and gives birth to a pineapple. The banana is present. And then what? The only thing that distinguishes this from entertainment for babies is its lewdness and lack of a perfunctory moral lesson. If prayer makes the Catholic more like a saint, then pure attention, spent like this, makes us more like crass, immoral babies. Attention here is only the price. The thing that’s spent. The child stole the credit card.

You’ve experienced curiosity at full bore. You’ve lost hours to true crime on YouTube, surfaced from a show at three in the morning, tracked a fight between strangers on the internet down to the last granular detail. There’s something juvenile about this, isn’t there? Helplessness in the face of an urge. It’s like eating ice cream with your hands. Eat. Eat. Eat. This is pure attention, and we spend a great deal of time in it. It’s dissociative and pleasurable. It can be abused.

The parent’s power is discipline and discernment. Nothing, I’m sorry to say, will make vegetables taste like ice cream. But you can live in such a way that the tongue’s relationship to sugar changes. People trying to get back into reading sometimes reach for the densest, most impressive novel, then bow out believing they’re too stupid to access it. Intelligence isn’t the culprit, but palate.

Where to start? By living the life you live, you already have books and authors in your periphery, names that recur. Answer them.

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SOMETHING TO CONSIDER

CHA-CHING

Word to the wise

A retiree dishes on the money management tactics, and regrets, that have carried her through life.

Phone a Friend: 81 Years Old and Not Being an Idiot

— in Phone a Friend

What you’re saving for right now:

In the last couple of years, I’ve made a big switch in my attitude towards spending. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to know I don’t have a long path ahead of me. When I first retired, I would look at the money in my bank and divide it by the number of years I expected to live and ask, “Will it last?”

My mantra now: “Don’t be an idiot, do it while you can.” I want to create memories with my family and friends while I’m healthy — traveling, hiking, going to restaurants.

What you like to splurge on:

My biggest splurge is that I’ve remained in my extremely large, expensive apartment alone.

What you skimp on happily:

At this point in my life, I’m not going to do a major renovations to my apartment. My kitchen cabinet doors don’t all close. I don’t have central AC. I’ve thought about redoing these things but then I ask myself: “Is that really going to make me happier?” Screw it. When I sell, they’ll do it.

Money advice you’d give other women:

I can’t emphasize this enough: Married women and couples living together must know what’s going on with their money. You should know what’s exactly in all of your accounts.

I’ve been shocked by a couple of cases of divorce or widowhood where women have been really screwed by their partner. I know of a young couple who is divorcing right now and to her surprise he owes $600,000.

Retiring in New York City:

I have been incredibly fortunate to have saved enough to have a good retirement. Being retired in New York is wonderful. You go outside and even if you don’t meet someone, you are reminded that there is life out there.

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AIR MAIL

REALITY BITES

All fingers point West

Hunter Harris posits an investigation into the inescapable Summer House drama swirling online.

32 Questions for Amanda Batula

— in Hung Up

Now that her charade of accountability at the Summer House reunion is over, we can get into the nitty-gritty. There are still dozens of questions for Amanda Batula, questions that she completely ignored or did not answer, and a few follow-ups she wasn’t asked. West agrees that he’s an incorrigible womanizer when pressed, but Amanda enjoys a victim narrative at the reunion, perhaps for the benefit of Kyle, who still loves her. (Of course he wants to think of her as manipulated and isolated! That’s the wife we’re watching him try to reconcile with this season on In the City!)

The most satisfying moment of the reunion, for me, was a question from Mia: “Amanda and West, did you honestly just come forward because there was so much speculation? Or were you guys going to continue to lie to us?” Now that’s a question I want answered. In the best-case scenario, what was the plan here? When were they going to share this with their friends, let alone the rest of the world? Amanda wakes from her slumber to give one answer that sounds real: “To be so honest, in that moment [we] came forward because of the speculation, because there were a lot of things I was still trying to understand and figure out, including the Meija situation,” she says. Mia again: “So it had nothing to do with, like, hurting your friendship with Ciara? It had to do with figuring out if West was actually exclusive with Meija?”

My group chat is still buzzing with questions left outstanding after the reunion’s final part aired. (A great comment from Meg Zukin, after Amanda said that she’s only been in a bubble thinking about herself: “We know!”) I treated this like an assignment: what would I have asked Amanda?

1. If you weren’t thinking about the potential (and likely) fallout from this relationship—in your friendship with Ciara, in your breakup with Kyle, in the larger friend group—what were you thinking about?

2. What did you think when you saw West leaving thirst comments under Ciara’s IG posts weeks before you announced your relationship?

3. When you say “sorry” to Ciara, are you apologizing for lying to her, or for having feelings for her ex?

4. Even though I don’t buy this part of the story at all: what did you do the day after West told you he had feelings for you?

5. Did you expect the cast to press West on his relationship with Meija?

6. West agreed with Andy that it seems dangerous to be in a relationship with someone with very clear commitment issues. What makes you certain that, despite embarrassing Ciara, Meija, and himself, he won’t embarrass you?

7. Did West detail his private conversations with Kyle about your marriage to you?

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SPORTS

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: Erika Lee Sears, Abigail Sandler, Tessa Perlow, Meecham Whitson Meriweather, Val Webb

Writing: Mary H.K. Choi, Shifting Tides, John Paul Brammer, Zach Zimmerman, Alexandra Nassif

Recently launched

, an engine for “independent and unfiltered journalism written by some of the UK’s leading reporters” has launched on Substack.

Alex Cooper has launched an offshoot of the Unwell universe on Substack. will be publishing two volumes of essays, deep dives, and pop culture commentary every month. The first issue included contributions from writers like , , and .

DC is now on Substack, where it’s rolling out pieces from the perspectives of the characters in the upcoming Supergirl movie.

Bestselling crime author and former Traitors contestant Harriet Tyce is now writing on Substack in Cat among the Pigeons.

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

Start a Substack

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 out of Substack’s office in New York City.

This week, we’re learning about weird medieval guys, making eye contact with strangers, and getting lost in the Backrooms.

ANCIENT TEXTS

Take antiquity seriously

A field guide to medieval art.

How to interpret medieval marginalia 101

—weird medieval guys in weird medieval guys

After perhaps my 9,000th time seeing someone describe medieval marginalia as ‘doodles’ or the product of ‘boredom’, I thought it might be nice to put together a brief guide to some of the themes and ideas that recur in the margins of manuscripts, hopefully helping to showcase the fact that these drawings were usually anything but ‘random’! In fact, far more interestingly, these little characters and scenes were part of a complex and visually dense world rooted in religion, pop culture, humor, and folklore.

Illuminated manuscripts were essentially always written first and illustrated second in the late Middle Ages. The scribes would add their writing to unbound, empty pages, working carefully around blank fields where painted miniatures and initials would later be added by a separate artist or artists. We do not know exactly what sort of education these artists would have obtained. However, they almost certainly would have had a degree of literacy in their native tongue and a familiarity with the scriptures they were illustrating, even if this did not extend to a firm grasp of written Latin.

Understanding this is crucial for pushing back on the idea of medieval marginalia as ‘random’, since it opens up the possibility of considering marginal drawings in relation to the rest of the page and manuscript as a whole—crucial context that is often neglected when we encounter marginalia as isolated snippets online. Artists were not simply filling in blank voids but adding adornment to a canvas already rich with meaning imparted by the scribe. Thus, the first step to understanding a piece of marginalia should always be to trace it back to its source, if possible. Have a look through the entire work and see what themes and images recur.

Works like the 13th-century English prayerbook known as the Rutland Psalter show extensive evidence of the marginal artists playing on specific words and lines from the scriptures featured on the same page. I highly recommend Betsy Chunko Dominguez’ fantastic paper “Playing on Timbrels: The Margins of the Rutland Psalter” for a more complete exposition, but I will go over a couple examples here.

In the lower margin of folio 11r of the Psalter, two men seem to be engaged in a fierce struggle, with one of them apparently trying to rip off the other’s ear. Moving their eyes back up to the start of the opposite page, a reader would have been greeted by the following line from Psalm 5:

Verba mea auribus percipe Domine intellege clamorem meum.

Give ear, O Lord, to my words, understand my cry.

Thus, our marginal brawl becomes a clever pun on the notion of ‘giving ear’—perhaps a way of making the text more engaging and memorable for its reader.

On folio 87v, the artist has extended the letter p from the word conspectu in Psalm 86 (85 in the Vulgate) into an arrow fired from the bow of one monster into the rear end of another.

Conspectu means ‘to behold’ or ‘to consider’, and the famous medieval scholar Michael Camille connected the arrow’s placement to the notion of gaze as a type of visual penetration.

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BROWSING

FILM CRITICISM

The creepypasta-to-movie pipeline

Can internet lore translate to the big screen?

Backrooms is 6 7 for adult men

—Clare Frances in Famous and Beloved Newsletter

Backrooms, a new horror movie directed by a 20-year-old that just bulldozed the box office with an $81 million debut, is based on a viral social media idea: not a video game, not a character, not a product. The trades will tell you that it is based on a YouTube series also directed by the 20-year-old, Kane Parsons, but that’s only part of the story. The idea of “backrooms” started on 4chan, where people would post pictures of empty rooms, usually inspired by vague discussions of abandoned capitalist spaces and the liminality they conjure, and make up stories about them. This was right before COVID, whose mandated social alienation enabled media domination by short-form video, and computer-generated videos of abandoned rooms would go viral on TikTok, the platform where people now call the color wheel “color theory” and say it’s “amazing.”

But an important, primal text here is, in fact, a video game: Five Nights at Freddy’s. The first-person horror game ushered in a new era of social media content about video games, where players and viewers became indistinguishable. Where the commonplace, boomer-legible stand-in for “video game player who is way too into video game lore” was no longer a sad adult but a normal child. “Creepypasta” is now, fully, a mainstream aesthetic movement. I’m sure video game scholars will have differing perspectives, but, in overly reductive terms, that is my oral historiographic conclusion based on my research and lived experience: there is Before Freddy and After Freddy.

Freddy’s is jumpscare-based and set in an abandoned, fictional stand-in for Chuck E. Cheese. It is really high-concept and simple—a game for children—but lent itself well to retroactive lore-writing and social commentary. Despite the undercurrent of creepy, haunted animatronics, it is also basically spatial horror: your avatar is a security guard who has to explore and tinker with the abandoned space, which in sequels balloons to include rivers and theme park rides.

The popularity of Freddy’s, in tandem with Minecraft, the COVID-era ubiquity of the Nintendo Switch, and pandemic-enabled video creation, is the ecosystem wherein “backrooms” was forged as an aesthetic object of the commons. My point is that Backrooms is as much a “prestige horror” movie, a fake characteristic, as it is a kids’ movie, a real characteristic. The latter comes from its clear roots in Creepypasta junk. The former comes from its distribution, with A24 providing glossy promotion, championing an underdog 20-year-old YouTuber-director. But don’t get it twisted: Backrooms is trashy, disposable, intellectually offensive junk.

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MATTERS OF THE HEART

APPEALS

A petition for a fresh start

Anna Delvey makes a case for reinvention.

Who gets permission to move on?

—Anna Delvey in The Delvey Report

Few might know this fun fact, but paths towards your own ankle monitor are not one but plenty, and not all of them involve an unwavering commitment to a life of crime. Different models help authorities with different tasks. Some are meant to police alcohol consumption after a DUI. Others are used during criminal pretrial supervision when there’s a risk of absconding. Some enforce curfews during parole. Others are used during immigration proceedings to ensure the wearer doesn’t disappear into the country and live happily ever after as an undocumented fugitive.

To the untrained eye, however, the device itself—an updated scarlet letter in the form of a black plastic box attached to a rubber strap—looks exactly the same regardless of purpose. Absent context, the wearer could be anyone from a serial killer to a foreign nun with visa problems.

Once you’ve completed the hard part—executing the choices that led to your current circumstances—you are presented with two options. You can cover it up, or you can leave it visible.

Both choices are wrong.

You’re either flaunting it or hiding it. You’re either insufficiently remorseful or performing remorse manipulatively. Reprehensible either way.

Redemption is wonderful in theory. But in practice, redemption is apparently just deeply offensive, and surviving humiliating circumstances a little too well becomes its own kind of crime.

The public says it wants accountability, but what it actually wants is permanence. Permanent guilt, permanent silence and permanent shame. An identity frozen in its most unflattering moment and preserved until the end of time in a quick Google search result. A life sentence of public humiliation, after which you’re expected to die as the version they decided on.

I’d love to argue that most of what I’ve managed to accomplish has happened in spite of my past, not because of it. Life is already hard enough under normal circumstances, and even though I’m all for sprinkling in a healthy amount of adversity here and there, adding years of legal obstacles rarely improves the experience.

At what point, exactly, does someone stop being defined exclusively by their worst decision? Is it immediately following release from custody, the way we restore someone’s right to vote and possess money but not necessarily their right to possess dignity? Or maybe at some point in the future, like your right to own a firearm? Or is the answer Never? Because saying “well, you shouldn’t have committed a crime in the first place” means that punishment doesn’t end when the sentence does.

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AGED BEEF

REQUIRED READING

The (literal) white whale of literature

For those of us who need to be reminded that “Mephistophelian” is an adjective.

The 74 most incredible lines in “Moby Dick”

—Delia Cai in Deez Links

Well, it took nearly four months, but we made it. Shortly before leaving for the airport last week, I turned that final dastardly page in Moby Dick and felt bliss, exhaustion, a fleeting jolt of total cultural superiority, as well as the kind of Pavlovian sleepiness that comes from having ended most nights in this calendar year with at least a couple of pages of Melville’s finest.

Was it worth it? Absolutely yes, though I now think endurance for endurance’s sake should never be the prevailing motivation. (You are, after all, talking about someone who read the Bible twice in high school—partially so she could see if there were any loopholes no one was talking about, but mostly for the flex.) While I was somewhat prepared for the amazing figurative language, the meticulous whaling knowledge, the (less enjoyable) old-timey sailor rants, I wasn’t at all prepared for how funny and downright sarcastic the writing could be.

And while I do not plan to ever reread all that again, I did want to commit to memory (and maybe save you 3.5 months of your life with) a list of my favorite zingers, with page numbers included if you end up ordering the same edition (which I do recommend even though it is too fucking big to take anywhere with you… hmm… there’s a metaphor in that…). Bolding is my own; imagine I’m underlining it with a pencil to show you amidst a shared bout of literary ecstasies. Anyway, I salute you, Mr. Melville. I am also absolutely certain that you would have loved Twitter.

1. Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? (p.4)
   

2. What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? (5)
   

3. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable inflection that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (6) (“The two orchard thieves”!! What a way to reference the reference.)
   

4. But as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. (7) (Really, the whole first chapter is just perfect.)

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INTERIORS

MISSED CONNECTIONS

Coy at the coffee shop

Harry Hill discovers that spending mornings away from your phone could mean an uptick in awkward eye contact.

Making eye contact with a guy at the coffee shop instead of Scrolling

—Harry Hill in Stuff

I can’t stress enough how much fun it is to go outside each morning without my phone. Isn’t it a thing that deaf people see better? Or blind people taste more? The idea that when one of the senses is cut off, the others are heightened? If I’m talking out of my ass it wouldn’t be the first time. I swear I read that somewhere once. That’s what being outside without my phone feels like; I’ve cut off my nose and now my eyes can see clearer, my ears can hear louder. There’s nowhere to look but at the world around me, nothing to see except for everything.

Being outside is level 1. Going into an establishment is level 2. Making eyes with a man in said establishment? Level 3. I walked into Joe Coffee (which is lowkey one of my opps but we can discuss that another time) and ordered a cortado (randomly my new go-to as of last week) and made my way off to the side to wait for my drink. Usually at this point I’d be scrolling, chatting, waking my brain up with reels, like a bowl full of spaghetti to the face. Today, I was looking around me curiously like a baby on the subway, eyes wide in a stroller. My first time in this coffee shop without a phone. Googoo literal gaga.

And then a gay guy walked in. And I watched it happen. We locked eyes. He ordered an iced coffee, black. He turned and looked at me. I whispered a faint smile, even though he wasn’t my type (dark grey-ish hair and grumpy-looking, probably mid-30s). Again, this is where I’d go back to my phone, to my reels, to a video of a girl eating a dot cake. I stayed in the coffee shop with Grumpy and he kept looking at me. He got his iced coffee before I got my cortado and made his way over to where I was standing near the condiment station.

He gave me a look like aren’t you gonna say something? No, dude, get your Splenda and go. I wanted to say, “Hello. We aren’t getting married. I’m here without my phone and I made eye contact with you because I’m re-learning how to be on Earth after spending many, many years on Planet Reels. Enjoy your coffee.”

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SELF-REFLECTION

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: Sydney Hirsch, Abby Nierman, Mariola Rosario, Catherine Lacey, Everett Williams, Kathleen Schmidt

Writing: Clare Frances, weird medieval guys, Anna Delvey, Delia Cai, Harry Hill

Recently launched

Book Gossip, New York Magazine‘s biweekly newsletter about “what the literati are really thinking” written by Jasmine Vojdani, will begin publishing on Substack. The latest letter featured an interview with Ann Patchett, a survey on how literary magazine editors are screening submissions for AI, and a scene report from Allie Rowbottom’s book launch.

Longtime ESPN sports columnist, author, and sports documentary producer Howard Bryant has joined Substack to share his insights about stories “located at the intersection of sports and society.”

Togethxr—the women’s sports content collective co-founded by Olympians Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, and Sue Bird—has launched a Substack. Their publication, Yeah, I Said It, will weigh in on pressing issues in women’s sports and cover signature events in depth, including the softball Women’s College World Series.

Fergal Keane, an Emmy- and BAFTA-winning BBC war correspondent, has left his post after 37 years to launch his own Substack, where he’ll cover international politics and keep a diary of his travels.

Georgia Davies, a musician in The Last Dinner Party, has joined Substack. The Hunger and the Road will serve as “part travelogue, part food diary, part confessional.”

Kilian Jornet, a professional ultramarathoner, trail runner, and ski mountaineer who has scaled Mount Everest twice in one week without supplemental oxygen, has launched a Substack. His first piece is about returning to the mountain marathon Zegama and competing on an unresponsive knee.

Jonny Mulyk, a chef who once ran a restaurant specializing in pasta, is now on Substack. He’ll be sending out new, weekly recipes to his subscribers.

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

Start a Substack

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 Danya Issawi out of Substack’s office in New York City.

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

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

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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

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