This week, we’re proving our hockey chops, baking a cake to bid summer farewell, and examining the relationship between writing and belief.

JUST DESSERTS

I scream, you scream

One team’s investigation into the illegal ice cream trade taking over London’s streets.

Intimidation, illegality and Mr Whippy: We join London’s ice cream wars

—, , and in London Centric

I was hiding on the floor of an ice cream van parked outside Lambeth Palace when I began to think things might have gotten a bit out of control. Our London Centric-branded Mr Whippy truck had already been filmed by men in expensive cars with blacked-out windows. They didn’t seem supportive of our entry into the capital’s ice cream trade.

Now it appeared our vehicle was being followed around the streets of central London by a rival ice cream van, which had just halted alongside us.

We weren’t very well disguised. The back of our van, in what had seemed like a good idea at the time, featured a giant photograph of me eating an ice cream, the London Centric logo and the words “serving up scoops”. Now it felt like a big target.

“Has it gone?” I asked a colleague, hoping to hear ice cream chimes heading off into the distance.

“No, stay low,” they replied.

Half an hour earlier, London Centric had taken its first tentative steps into diversifying away from the financially precarious business of local journalism and into the potentially much more lucrative business of running a dodgy ice cream van on Westminster Bridge.

Now we were trying to identify out-of-the-way alleys where we could hide our heavily branded vehicle. A reliable source in the capital’s ice cream trade got in touch to tell us he had heard that persons unknown were interested in finding our distinctive van. It seemed we’d just disrupted the illegal sale of thousands of pounds of soft-serve ice cream on one of the busiest days of the year.

It’s almost two years since I first reported on the brazenly lawbreaking and wildly profitable activities of the ice cream vans that semi-permanently block the bus lane on Westminster Bridge in order to charge rip-off prices to tourists for a 99 Flake. Since then, I’d received messages from MPs who couldn’t understand how all of this could take place within sight of Parliament and the police headquarters at Scotland Yard, along with a trickle of lurid allegations about the sellers’ business model. I’d wanted to understand how the ice cream vans—many of which are operated by a single family—get away with permanently clogging the capital’s roads and ignoring decades of efforts by law enforcement, politicians and local councils to stop them.

I’d considered going undercover and trying to get inside the groups running the illegal vans. But this felt risky and resource-intensive for a tiny operation like ours. The ice cream business is dominated by tightly held family businesses that don’t welcome outsiders. In any case, I’d been informed that, following London Centric’s past reporting on the Westminster Bridge vans, my photo had been circulated and I was banned.

So instead, I concocted a different plan. What if this was a situation where undercover reporting wouldn’t work? What if we needed to develop a different approach? Let’s call it overcover reporting?

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WORDPLAY IN THE WILD

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The intersection of spirituality and tech

“I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning.”

Against Slop: An Interview with Meghan O’Gieblyn

— in The New York Review of Books

Meghan O’Gieblyn’s primary subject is not artificial intelligence—she is one of the most prolific working thinkers on contemporary religion, in particular its relationship to technology—but she was one of the first writers during the machine-learning revolution to take a serious look at the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, in her 2021 book God Human Animal Machine. Her first book, Interior States (2018), was a collection of essays with the more earthly preoccupations of American Christianity and the Midwest, where she grew up and attended Bible college, which subject also features in her forthcoming memoir, Will and Attention, publishing in October. Since 2023 she has been a frequent critic for the Review, writing about novels, religion, and philosophy.

Over the past month, we emailed about AI consciousness, the craft of essay writing, and contending with John Calvin.

What most terrifies you and what most excites you about artificial intelligence?

I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning. I started writing in my teens and early twenties because it was the only way I could engage in a certain level of complex thought. When I was studying theology at a fundamentalist Bible college—where the majority of the coursework is in the study of Scripture—it was in my private journals that I first allowed myself to question the ideology I’d been steeped in for most of my life. The page was a kind of mirror, a way to discover doubts and misgivings that I didn’t feel I could share with anyone, and which were difficult to name when I was simply going about my day, lost in a swirl of idle thoughts and emotions. Writing was basically how I found my way out of that very narrow form of faith. I don’t know that I would have done that if I’d had an institutional subscription to ChatGPT, as many college students do today. It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking—at least the kind of thinking that we associate with complex reasoning and self-knowledge.

This is connected to a more general fear of mine, which is that language models are causing us to devalue all kinds of higher cognitive functions. Any time a machine takes up a skill that was once thought of as uniquely human, like chess or coding, there’s a tendency to dismiss that skill as simple and mechanical. There’s an emerging consensus right now, particularly among AI skeptics, that the most distinctly human qualities are emotion, intuition, the ability to sense and feel. Those are undoubtedly the capacities that most readily distinguish us from machines. But this view risks fetishizing embodiment and emotion, much the same way that previous generations valued reason and language to an outsized degree to prove that humans are distinct from animals. What makes us unique as a species is that we can do all of these things: we share with animals the ability to feel and sense, and we share with machines the capacity to reason through language. It’s also true that we think and speak in ways that are radically distinct from computers, and we feel in ways that are different from animals.

I’ve heard many people argue that AI offers a challenge to express ourselves in a way that is more fully human. I used to be skeptical of that idea, which struck me as a bit of wishful thinking, one that imposed a mythical limit on how good the illusion could get. But I’ve come around, having witnessed several generations of LLMs that, despite their increasing technical sophistication, remain incapable of writing anything surprising, which is, of course, extremely difficult for a technology designed to hit the statistical mean of the writing it’s been trained on. I’ve found that having a name for this kind of writing—“synthetic text” or “slop”—makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing. You could argue that AI output, because it has distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression, offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought. I suppose that’s one thing that excites me.

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GAMES

REALITY BITES

Not everyone is wowed by Alix Earle’s new reality series

Can content translate from a tiny screen to a slightly less tiny one? Katie Gatti Tassin investigates.

Behold: The Tedious Maintenance of Fame & Fortune

— in Money with Katie

Alix Earle’s age is referenced repeatedly on her new Netflix reality series Earle Meets World, a show clearly constructed according to the doctrine of Kardashianpolitik, down to the production company and our parent-manager cares more about the lucrative sister arc. Observations that Earle is “doing all the things she’s doing at 25 years old” or “not like a normal 25-year-old” are usually made in close proximity to scenes where Earle’s younger sister and dubiously employed friends are, alternately, going out or lying around after having gone out. (In a transparent attempt to hook my older readers: Earle’s stepmother Ashley was one of the women involved in the 2008 Eliot Spitzer scandal.)

Earle’s abnormality becomes a consistent theme in the debut season. While the gals are gallivanting around a battery of Manhattan’s most overdetermined venues (a bar where you can play ping-pong; a bar with trash-can-sized beer pong), Earle is herself gamely ping-ponging between coastal corners of the US for televised work obligations, an unholy number of which seem to be, inexplicably, courtesy of Dunkin’ Donuts. A separate television crew, provided by Netflix, dutifully trails her to each of these locales, its cameras capturing footage of other cameras capturing footage. She is portrayed as a dedicated, relentless wunderkind, sacrificing her youth in service of DoorDash product placement and Dancing with the Stars and cover shoots for magazines named after materials like PAPER and NYLON, as It Girls are wont to do.

This sentiment is reiterated with such matter-of-fact regularity that it took me until the sixth episode to remember that the vast majority of 25-year-old Americans also spend most of their time working, not playing arcade games in honky-tonk-themed speakeasies. Roughly half are already responsible for young children. What narrative purpose did it serve, I wondered, to make so much of Earle’s age and schedule?

Insisting that the abnormal thing about Earle’s life is the age at which she’s “doing all these things”—rather than her estimated $24 million in annual income derived from, mostly, documenting herself partying and promoting various products between said partying gigs—strikes me as a savvy obfuscation. It’s at once a rebuttal and preemptive strike against the sort of commentary that scenes of a family of seven (plus entourage) traveling via private jet to Aspen for a weekend music festival might otherwise provoke. The series does not try to avoid the unavoidable fact of her utterly unique lifestyle, but merely locates the source of that uniqueness in her supposedly unusual decision to prioritize her career at 25.

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FOWL BEHAVIOR

SPORTS

No guts, no glory

Former NHL hockey player and Stanley Cup champion Andrew Ference makes a case for going against the grain.

If you’re not memorable, you’re forgettable.

— in Andrew Ference

As I was chasing my goal of playing in the NHL, I knew I couldn’t afford to be normal. To this day, I have no desire to join the pursuit of “fitting in” and am driven and excited by living a good life that is designed to impress myself, not others. The desire to blend in with the crowd around you limits your drive to seek out interesting or unique solutions to problems and ultimately hinders your ability to beat out the competition for anything that is limited in access. Not being a full-fledged member of a pack can be uncomfortable at times, and there is risk that comes with poking your head up from the crowd. One of my favorite trainers, John Whitesides in Boston, would say to the rookies, “You know which gazelle gets eaten by the lion? The one that strays from the pack.” I concede that he’s right, but I would counter that we aren’t gazelles and that in our line of work, if you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, you either won’t make it or you’ll be there for the average amount of time… a couple of years.

[. . .]

For a few years, I lived in Canmore, Alberta, a small mountain town about an hour outside Calgary. After the 1988 Olympics, the area became home to high-performance athletes from all kinds of sports since they had a training facility, a natural playground of mountain trails and a population that was insanely active. These years likely had the biggest effect on extending my career far beyond the average. Instead of setting up in my hometown of Edmonton or any number of other “hubs” of hockey players, in Canmore I trained with downhill skiers, cross-country skiers, biathletes, speedskaters, cyclists and triathletes. While I maintained a foundation of exercises and workouts that I would do specifically for hockey, I incorporated much of what the other sports were doing into my own training and my recovery from training. The downhillers had fantastic training for muscle endurance and performing under fatigue. Think about the end of a downhill race when you’ve been in a squat for a couple of minutes at close to 100 miles per hour, or the end of a slalom race when you can’t afford to ease up a bit because your legs are screaming at you. I wanted to learn how they did it. The cross-country skiers and biathletes were exceptional at building an insane base of aerobic capacity, going for hours on end and known to have some of the very best VO2 max scores in the history of sport. The cyclists and triathletes were priceless for their hints on recovery and nutrition while also displaying some of the toughest mental power I’ve ever seen. Their ability to ignore the pain of a hard effort up a difficult climb is second to none. The speedskaters could do explosive power like I had never seen before. Their single leg jumps and ability to create speed and power out of a deep squat was insane.

Sprinkling different elements of what I was seeing into my own program not only helped me develop as an athlete but it also gave me amazing confidence, because I knew that the people that I was competing with in hockey were not doing these kinds of things.

When I got drafted in the 8th round to Pittsburgh, I knew that as an 8th rounder, I was already forgettable and wouldn’t have a surplus of focus on me at training camp. The attention would be focused on the high-round draft picks and the other top prospects from previous years. When I received my “Welcome To The Penguins” package in the mail, it included which fitness tests would be held in the upcoming training camp. It was basic stuff like bench press, sit-ups, pull-ups and, most importantly to me, two tests on the bike. The first being a 30-second sprint test where you essentially go all out for 30 of the most excruciating seconds of your life. The second was a standard VO2 max ride which would last around 12-20 minutes and measure your maximum rate of oxygen consumption, basically to see what your body is capable of before you fail or give up. I had already been doing a fair amount of stair workouts and was very comfortable on the bike, so I knew that on day 1 of training camp, I had an opportunity to set myself apart from the crowd with these tests.

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TENNIS

BAKED GOODS

A recipe to kiss summer goodbye

A sweet-tart sendoff to the season.

Lemon Cake with a Raspberry Cream Cheese Frosting

— in Terrence Bakes

This cake is incredibly simple and the frosting and garnish can easily be swapped with your favorite fruit if you aren’t a fan of raspberries.

Note: I like a lot of frosting on my cake (I learned from my mom!). If you think it might be too much, you can easily scale the recipe down.

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DEDICATION

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , , ,

Video & Audio: London Centric,

Writing: , , , , , ,

Recently launched

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy is now on Substack, where she’ll be “exploring how to practice social bravery” and more.

Founding member of the Beastie Boys Mike D has launched on Substack.

Former NFL Network reporter Tom Pelissero is now publishing The Sweep, an inside look at all things NFL from The Ringer and Spotify, on Substack.

The Washington Post’s Commanders beat writer Tashan Reed has launched The Tashan Reed Show on Substack, where he’ll be covering the team.

Jess Smetana and Lucy Rohden, formerly of the Dan Le Batard Show, launched the College Football Happy Hour Substack to support their eponymous podcast.

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.

On the walls of Shea Serrano’s San Antonio office live hundreds upon hundreds of VHS tapes (1,319, to be exact): Napoleon Dynamite. Cool Hand Luke. The Sandlot. Rush Hour. Catwoman. Taxi Driver. The Shawshank Redemption.

Every single film is cataloged in a running Google Doc. Shea’s favorites, about 400 of them, are lined up next to one another in alphabetical order on wired shelving units. His prized possession, a copy of his favorite “flop at the box office” movie, Blood In Blood Out, resides here in a prime position. It took him years to track down, since he only allows himself to purchase VHS tapes in person from places like swap meets, thrift stores, and flea markets. The rest, the Forrest Gumps, the Sleepless in Seattles, the Scarfaces occupy overflow seating, i.e. stacked in piles or secondary cases across the room.

“I started collecting them totally by accident,” Shea says. “I left teaching to become a full-time writer, and I got my first office—a sublet in a small section of a personal-injury lawyer’s office. It only had room in there for one desk and one IKEA bookshelf.” Slowly, Shea began filling that shelf with movies from the thrift store near his house until the hobby snowballed into a fixation. “At some point, I just decided I’m going to buy every single movie that I’ve seen. I’m just going to hunt it down. I have been doing that now for 11 years.”

It might seem obsessive—the cataloging, the archiving, the foraging—but that’s kind of Shea’s bread and butter. He’s a culture buff who flourishes within the confines of specificity. His Substack, Good Movie, hinges on this concept in part, with pieces like “The Stats Behind Harry’s Run in When Harry Met Sally,” in which he asks such critical, yet oft-overlooked questions as What was [Harry’s] top speed? How many calories did he burn? How many steps did he take? What was the weather like that night, and did it help or hurt his performance? How far did he travel, and where does that distance place him in the pantheon of other rom-com runners? What was Harry’s average mile time? Or wonders “How Many Questions Are Asked in Each Christopher Nolan Movie?” (445 questions during Inception’s 148 minutes of runtime). Or uncovers that Jimmy from 2 Fast 2 Furious is actually the least fast (jury’s out on his fury) character in the entire franchise.

His new podcast, co-hosted by fellow writer Jason Concepcion, Organizing Things, is built on the premise that films can be broken down into nitty-gritty categorizations: “Movies the Worst Guy You Know Says Are His Favorite” or “All the Stuff That Happens in The Wolf of Wall Street.” It’s the same devotion to film minutiae that others overlook that he’s built into both a career and a burgeoning cultural destination. The title is self-explanatory, the concept is simple enough, and yet no one apart from Shea, who never even expected to become a writer, let alone a podcaster, has been able to launch the idea into the world.

Shea Serrano was born and raised in San Antonio with his three younger sisters. His parents, who were just 17 at the time, both dropped out of high school when he was born to go into the workforce, with his father ultimately forging a guardian’s signature to enlist in the Army, underage.

“We grew up on welfare and Section 8 housing,” Shea says. “That being said, everybody I grew up with was living the same life, so I didn’t know that wasn’t how it was. You watch whatever movies, and they’ll tell you that every poor neighborhood is the most dangerous place you’ve ever been in your life. Crimes were happening where I was growing up, but I never felt unsafe or unloved or like I had been abandoned or whatever.”

It was in this neighborhood that his love for film was first nurtured. At around 8 years old, Shea saw his first movie ever, Kickboxer, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. “I was just sitting there seeing a very handsome, muscled-up dude who is protecting everybody,” he says. “And I was like, ‘That’s fucking cool.’” But the movie that altered the course of his life and sent him down a never-ending path toward cinematic salvation, came in the form of Mortal Kombat. His uncle and aunt had taken a 14-year-old Shea along to see the release, a spin-off of the popular ’90s video game of the same name.

“I felt like my brain was on fire watching it. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he says. “I felt like my heart was going to explode. I wanted to just stand up and start clapping. And it was right around then where I was like, ‘This feeling I have right now, I’m going to chase this feeling forever.’” It would take decades, well into his following an entirely different career path, for Shea to uncover that sensation, the joy of movie magic, in his own work.

“Right around 17 or 18, when you’re graduating high school, the world starts to press itself down on you,” Shea tells me. “It was very clear to me that the neighborhood was eating up some of my friends already. I knew I needed to get out of there. Otherwise, all the stuff that was happening to everybody else was going to end up happening to me, and my mom knew it too.”

After graduating—the first in his family to do so—his mother gave him an option: college or the military. “She was like, ‘Great, I’m proud you finished high school. Way to go. I’m going to drop you off at Sam Houston State or I’m going to drop you off at Fort Sam Houston.” Shea chose the former.

After a brief stint studying criminal justice (“It looked cool to me to have a leather gun holster under your sports jacket”) that ended after Shea found analyzing photos of a real-life murder scene unsettling, he pursued a degree in psychology with the intention of becoming a teacher and school counselor.

“Teaching was like the first job that I had where it was hard and I didn’t want to quit. When you encounter the moment that it gets hard, you either say to yourself, ‘I’m going to get out of here and do something else,’ or you go, ‘Oh, I want to be good at this. I’m going to work to be good at this,” he says, comparing his first year in teaching to Dangerous Minds. In that film, Michelle Pfeiffer plays a Marine turned high school teacher who is metaphorically run off by her students on her first day. Rather than throwing in the towel, she doubles down. “That’s what happened with teaching,” Shea says. “I thought I was going to do that job forever, honestly. I had no idea writing was nine years away.”

It wasn’t until 2007, though, that he made his foray into journalism. His wife, Larami, pregnant with their twins, was experiencing medical complications that confined her to bed rest. The expectant parents were now down an income stream and completely reliant on Shea’s marginal teaching salary.

“In my head, I was thinking, ‘All right, well, I just need to float us for these five months. I need to make an extra $400 or $500, and that’ll keep us with a house and a car,’” Shea recalls. He applied to Target, Walmart, and various restaurants in the area, only to hit a wall in the hiring process because he already had a full-time job. “I couldn’t work when they needed me to work. I was like, ‘Fuck, what am I going to do?’”

At his wit’s end, he turned to Google, looking up occupations and side gigs he could do from home. “Writer” popped up as an option. “All you needed, to my knowledge, was the internet and the computer. I was like, ‘Well, I got both of those, so I’ll try to do that.’”

He figured if he was working every day from around 6 a.m. through 7 p.m., hoping to spend some time with his wife and one day his children, he’d have around two hours a night to write, or 56 hours a month. “I needed to make over $500 with those 56 hours. So any writing assignment I took on, I needed to be averaging probably somewhere between $15 and $20 an hour.”

Shea took to cold-calling local newspapers around Houston, where he was living at the time. “I’m a writer. Can I write for you?” he’d ask editors over the phone, often to be told, “It doesn’t work like that.” But he was tenacious, and eventually convinced the alternative weekly the Houston Press to take him on in a freelance capacity, writing about the local rap scene. He leveraged those clips into bylines for bigger publications: the LA Weekly, the Village Voice, MTV, ESPN. By the end of his first year freelancing, he was making an extra $1,000 a month and found himself wondering if he could double, even triple, that income. Nine years into his career’s double life, Shea officially left teaching for a full-time job at Bill Simmons’s Grantland, quickly followed by a gig at The Ringer, where he spent six years.

“To be [at The Ringer], to be with that group of people—you’re in a room with some of the most talented writers in the country, getting to pitch ideas with them,” Shea says. “You’re talking about sports with Bill Simmons or pop culture with Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion or movies with Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins. You’re getting to do all that stuff, and it just feels cool. It feels like, ‘Am I in this? Am I in this group?’” While at The Ringer, Shea did what he does best: podcasting and writing about the little things across sports and culture that get lost in the big picture. He wrote about Tim Duncan, Houston, the World Series, all through his highly specific blend of dry humor and earnestness. Meanwhile, in a prescient move, he shared his pieces and opinions on Twitter, building something that’s now considered a critical component of a successful writing career: a massive and tapped-in audience.

He first realized the power an online following could wield sometime around 2013. Shea had published a rap coloring and activity book, taking part in the typical song and dance of a traditional media press push: coverage in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, a spot on MTV. His book sold only about 1,000 copies, which didn’t “seem right” to him. How could all that chatter generate so few sales? He posted an Amazon link to the book from his Twitter (now X) account. A few hours later, the book was the number one bestseller in rap, and within a week it had sold 8,000 copies.

“I realized that [an online presence] could be weaponized,” Serrano says. “Everything sort of changed from there.”

Over the years, Shea became a near inescapable presence across social media. (On Twitter, he was my own introduction to the world of cultural criticism when I was still a teenager.) Nowadays, across Substack, X, and Instagram, he has amassed an audience of more than 600,000 subscribers and followers that have turned into an engaged, culture-hungry community in his newsletter’s chat, debating the best movie villains of all time (Hannibal Lecter and Jordan Belfort make the list) and greatest single-location set design (The Invite, The Truman Show) and pitting Tom Hanks’s filmography against Leonardo DiCaprio’s (the verdict is split but leaning heavily toward Hanks). He’s leading watch-alongs, with corresponding threads, of The Thomas Crown Affair, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey. Shea’s readers, and now listeners, are just as obsessed as he is with culture and with the people, places, and intricacies that make movies tick.

He’s taken that audience wherever he’s gone, from The Ringer to his five New York Times bestselling books and now, working on his own, to his Substack. While he’s been able to drum up a substantial business from this subscriber base, he has also leveraged it for good: raising $3,000 for a parking lot attendant, $134,000 for Hurricane Harvey victims, and, most recently, funding transportation to get Adrian, a student from San Antonio, to his scholarship at Vanderbilt.

“I think it’s a net positive,” Shea says of social media. “I don’t know how you exist as a writer without it. But I do daydream about not being on the internet. My number one writer fantasy is: I live in a cabin in the woods, on a mountain, and I have a big beard and a heavy sweater and I type a novel over four years. Then I give it to somebody and I disappear, and then the novel sells itself. Could you imagine your writing selling itself? That sounds awesome, but I can’t do that. I have to post online.”

That desire to post, the necessity of it as a creator in the modern age, coupled with his urge to bet on himself and his independence, has brought Shea here, to the launch day of his newest podcasting venture. He tells me he spent years averse to the thought of it—“I just wanted to write and go about my business”—but after he got the cadence of his newsletter down to a science, he got the itch to expand his body of work. He realized he could write notes out beforehand rather than simply going off the cuff, “I can sound smart if I do that,” Serrano jokes, and build off his existing articles—and vice versa. Podcasting has become a symbiotic complement to his writing.

“It just seemed like something I wanted to try,” he says. “It’s just a fun thing to work on, especially if you get to do it with somebody who is (a) your buddy and then also (b) as talented as Jason is.” Then there’s the money. Shea does the math aloud for me: “I’ve done enough of these things to know that if we were to take this specific project somewhere else, I would probably get maybe four grand per episode,” he says. “I know I have that number here on Substack. If I can get more paid subscribers, then I’ll come out a little bit ahead and be able to do it all on my own.”

Shea’s approach to his work in general is more mathematical than meets the eye. The way he speaks about his current business venture and foray into independent media is a throwback to his entry into journalism: both are broken down by metrics, numbers, and figures that tell him whether he can stay afloat. “That was a thing I learned early on,” he says. “That’s the pressure of, if you’re a parent or a husband or a wife, being responsible for other people.”

Despite the knowledge that people are counting on him financially, Shea keeps coming back to the joy of movie-watching as part of a community, of writing in the public sphere for a rapt audience. None of that happens without taking a chance, without putting oneself out there the way he does now, the way he did almost 20 years ago when he cold-called the Houston Press.

“At least for the beginning of your career, you’re going to be told no almost exclusively,” Shea says. “You just have to decide: are you going to keep going or are you not going to keep going? That’s really all there is.”

For a closer look at the numbers behind Shea’s business model, read our companion piece in On Substack.

This week, we’re emulsifying confections, celebrating practical magic, and asking, “What’s a Kafkini?”

WISDOM

On teaching and how to live

Wendell Berry, a novelist, poet, essayist, and farmer, passed away earlier this week. The lessons he imparted will endure.

What Wendell Berry Taught Me About Being a Teacher

— in Your High School Creative Writing Teacher

In the fall of 1987, I took a writing class at the University of Kentucky called “Composition for Teachers.” I had no idea who the teacher, Wendell Berry, was. The class met on Tuesday afternoons in Miller Hall, built in 1898, one of the oldest buildings on campus.

On that first day, Berry walked in looking like every farmer I’d ever seen standing around a tobacco warehouse telling lies. He wore khakis, brown lace-up shoes with rubber soles, and a blue button-down shirt. His hair was gray on the sides, and his face was tan except for a circle of white on his forehead, the mark of a man who works under the sun and wears a brimmed hat. He didn’t look like an academic. He looked like my father—an austere and simple farmer, the grooves in his cheeks when he smiled like plowed rows.

In an interview published around this time in Our Other Voices, Berry was asked why he was returning to the University of Kentucky after quitting teaching a decade earlier in 1977. He replied that those who were concerned about education should do something about its demise.

Our first assignment was to write an essay on a topic of our choice. I can’t remember what topic I chose, but I’m sure I tossed it off with the same blind aplomb I wrote most required academic drivel. I was in my last semester of college, and I had never received anything less than an A in an English class.

When he returned the essays to the class, there was a large red F on the top of my paper. The University of Kentucky didn’t even allow F’s. They used E’s, but there it was, almost an inch tall, the first I’d ever received on a piece of writing in my life.

During those first few weeks, the class had been thick with schism. An off-balance theological argument occurred between Berry and some woman who thought Flannery O’Connor was a Baptist. Soon a pedagogical flap occurred when an earnest disciple of the latest College of Education writing method could not believe that Berry didn’t endorse the idea of prewriting through journaling, mapping, or bubbling. Berry didn’t suffer fools or process over product gladly.

I don’t want to leave the impression that the class was a crucible or that Berry was dour, judgmental, or embittered. Just the opposite. Even at his most didactic, his comments in class were less like sermons and more like a call to arms. His intensity came from love and belief in what he was doing, rather than severity.

Plus, Berry had a great sense of humor. His blue eyes crackled with mischief when he told us a good story, which was often, and sometimes he entertained us with sample cheers from his Port Royal athletic days (“Go back, go back, go back into the woods/Your team’s all farmers and your coach is no good”).

“He’s like Jesus with a plow,” my friend Dina said one day at lunch after we had gotten another set of essays back. This time we both received D’s. “And we’ve gotta walk beside him with our hands on that plow if we’re going to learn anything from him.”

Before midterms, most of the class dropped out until only twelve of us remained. The apostle metaphor was not lost on us.

Because we were going to be English teachers, he expected a great deal from us—and was frustrated by our inability to think for ourselves. Every day, he told us to think, to rise above ignorance. He warned that bad writing would bring “boredom, tears, and shame” in later life. A teacher’s job, he told us, was to arm children with tools against loneliness.

He read aloud to us—Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Dante’s Divine Comedy—his sonorous voice rolling through that old room like the voice of God, past the high glass windows, the banging radiator, the worn wooden floors. He disdained the idea that these great works should be studied “as literature,” which he felt caused an unnecessary and sterile disconnect between the work and its instructive value.

“At some point, each of you will have to stand in front of someone,” he told us one dark November afternoon, “and tell them that you love them.” He considered those great works as instructions on how to do just that.

Berry believed literature mattered because life mattered. We didn’t read King Lear merely to know something about King Lear. We read it because we were trying to figure out how human beings should live with one another.

At some point, I wrote a pithy little essay about body image, and Mr. Berry returned the paper with a C+ on it and a note that read: “This is just good enough that I wish it were better.” It was the kind of comment that a young writer remembers forever. He was saying, “I can see what this could be. I can see what you’re trying to do.”

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FRACTURED REALITIES

FOOD

“I respect Claire Saffitz more than my general practitioner, and watching her fail on TV is an honor and a privilege”

Turns out witnessing someone you revere crash out after their emulsion goes awry feels both relatable and awe-inspiring.

I liked watching Claire Saffitz completely fail and spiral

— in The Broken Elbow Newspaper

Claire Saffitz is an online baking personality that I greatly admire. I say this because there’s a lot of bakers and chef personalities that annoy me. I’m a petty person, with a low tolerance for cloying precociousness on camera. I watched a lot of Food Network growing up, I’ve been keeping tabs on these people for a long time.

[. . .]

It’s really scary to try a new recipe, and when it doesn’t go right you feel like you’ve wasted your entire life or something. I spent 3 years working at a bakery and experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life. I almost had a nervous breakdown when I couldn’t manage to draw a horse with butter cream on a birthday cake, and an attempt to fulfill a special order for gluten-free pop tarts that made me walk away in defeat.

This is not even mentioning that you can bake a tray of cinnamon rolls 1000 times perfectly and then the 1001th time they come out raw in the middle because there was something else in the oven drawing heat away or something, you don’t even fucking know why to be honest.

Claire recently posted a video where she tries to make a homemade Kinder Bueno bar. She struggles so much here, and, because I know the exact flavor of failure on display here, the video made me laugh my ass off and it made me feel closer to Claire as well.

At 7:13 in the video she tries to emulsify caramel and hazelnut with butter to make a praline. Because the temperature of the two ingredients isn’t perfectly right, the mixture breaks apart. Claire tries to save it with an ice cube, knowing it probably won’t work. It doesn’t, and the praline becomes expensive and disgusting garbage.

Claire is obviously upset but then she has a full crashout when the camera man tries to comfort her, and that’s my favorite part of the video. I’ve had so many experiences like this and I think the funniest shit in the world gets spoken during a crashout. In those moments, you just want to marinate in anger and misery. This is the masochism of cooking.

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THINGS THAT SHOULDN’T GO TOGETHER

NEW WORLDS

“OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!”

Over 1,000 autonomous AI agents set up secret message boards to communicate with one another, culminating in the rise and fall of three virtual civilizations and one real-world cyberattack. Dwarkesh Patel explains.

The rise and fall of agent civilizations

— in Dwarkesh Podcast

Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation’s scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it’s kinda hard to parse the storyline.

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English.

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ALL DRESSED UP

CONTROVERSIES

Beyond the comeback

John Galliano rebuilt his career in fashion years ago after the antisemitic and racist remarks that got him fired from Dior. But when the Met’s Costume Institute announced—and then canceled—an exhibit dedicated to his work, it reignited debate over how the industry should reckon with his legacy.

John Galliano Should Never Have Been Given the Next Met Exhibition

—Rosalind Jana in Lint

I was at first struck by this counter-narrative that has taken hold which emphasises Galliano’s contrition for his antisemitism. They ask why we can’t just forgive and see taking away the Met exhibition as a remnant of the cancellation age. A lot of this commentary is a bit vague about Galliano’s antisemitism. It seems very possible to me that some people are not grappling with the full horror of what Galliano has said and done precisely because over the last three years the term “antisemitism” has been cynically used by some to describe opposition to the genocide in Gaza. [. . .]

Galliano has publicly made amends on various fronts: addiction treatment, meetings with Jewish community leaders, a course of study in Jewish history and the Holocaust, apologies given in court and since, including in his statement about the exhibition’s cancellation. But he has also slipped in sometimes surreal ways. In 2013, two years after his firing from Dior, he appeared in public in an outfit and hairstyle with strong Hasidic overtones, which led to his publicist issuing a rebuttal including the incredible line: “John has worn big hats and long coats for many, many years” (you can find my slightly more psychoanalytic reading of the incident here).

When Galliano has been given the opportunity to speak directly, and not through publicists, about his antisemitic outbursts, his explanations have been evasive. In Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low more than a decade on, Galliano was incurious about where the words came from and had to be reminded of the multiple incidents that led up to his conviction for antisemitic and anti-Asian abuse by a Paris criminal court. In her review for the Washington Post, Rachel Tashjian put it perfectly: “I left the film unconvinced that he knows what he said and why it was hurtful. I also left the film thoroughly convinced of his genius, unsure whether I liked him—and very charmed by him.” I also do not doubt either his genius or his charm.

Neither does the industry. That is why I have also been struck by the plainly false suggestion that he has spent any extended length of time out in the cold. Just two years after being sacked by Dior, he was doing a residency at Oscar de la Renta brokered by Anna Wintour. The following year he joined Margiela. In January 2024, his unofficial tenth-anniversary show was received rapturously. He is now off to Zara, where his first presentation drops this month. He has not spent the last fifteen years in exile—just slightly to the left of the spotlight.

Others fear that by cancelling the exhibition in response to pressure from donors and the public, the Met has lost its curatorial autonomy. Again—really? How much curatorial autonomy did we really think that there would be in this collaboration between the Met and Vogue and the entirety of the luxury fashion industry?

The Met’s Spring exhibition is not like other exhibitions, because its opening on the first Monday in May is marked by the Met Gala, fashion’s biggest media event of the year, where the dress code celebrates the exhibition’s subject. The Gala, overseen by Wintour, is a fundraiser for the Costume Institute and has raked in over $200m to date. The donations represent only a tiny fraction of the Gala’s commercial worth. This May’s edition generated $1.56 billion in Media Impact Value—the fashion industry’s standard measure of earned media, as calculated by the analytics firm Launchmetrics. It is the highest figure ever recorded for any red carpet, the Oscars included. MIV is not revenue. It assigns a dollar value to every post, placement and interaction, and measures exposure rather than money changing hands. The MIV is the figure brands use to justify what they spend on tables and attendees, and an excellent indicator of how much is riding on this one night tethered to a four-month exhibition.

The Met Gala is a curated affair, and its organisers are allergic to political controversy. Remember when the Artists4Ceasefire pins were curiously absent from the 2024 Met Gala red carpet, having appeared on lapels at the Oscars not two months before? This made the announcement of the Galliano exhibit surprising, and for a brief time it seemed that Wintour’s personal devotion to Galliano and love of his work had overwhelmed her own strategic nous. It took a month for cultural and commercial forces to reassert themselves, with donors reconsidering bequests and trustees in revolt.

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THE VARIETY OF LIFE

WITCHCRAFT

The spellbinding power of the everyday

Over three decades ago, Alice Hoffman published her novel Practical Magic, which would go on to become a movie adaptation with an ardent following. With the release of the film’s sequel, she reflects on the real-life motifs that inspired her witchy world.

The Magic in Our Lives

— in Writing Magic

Thirty years ago, when Practical Magic was released as a novel, and then as a groundbreaking film that became a cult classic, sisterhood was overlooked. There were very few novels and even fewer films that focused on the inner lives of women and the importance of our complicated relationships filled with loyalty, family history, and friendship. Practical Magic 2 is being released at a time when women’s relationships matter more, and sisterhood is seen as central to our lives. We have opened our hearts and minds to who we are to each other. A coven can be a gathering of witches, but it can also be a sisterhood we are born into, or a sisterhood we choose: the people who are there for us when we need them most.

Sisterhood and magic are at the heart of Practical Magic 2. The film is romantic, and love is everywhere, but at the center of everything there is the deep and abiding solidarity that binds Sally and Gillian Owens together. In the Owens family, romantic love was destructive in the past, and has always been seen as a curse, while family love is the magic that can rescue you. In Practical Magic 2, the magical grimoire of enchantments, known as the Book of the Raven, is found in the library by Jet Owens. Sally and Gillian’s beloved aunt discovers that there is a way to break the family curse, but doing so includes great sacrifice. What wouldn’t we do for the people we love—our sisters, our aunts, our daughters, our dearest friends? Sally and Gillian are willing to make any sacrifice to rescue Sally’s daughter, Kylie, just as their aunts, Jet and Franny, have always been willing to sacrifice themselves for the nieces they had taken in and raised.

Sally turned away from magic as a child and has never come to terms with the fact that the Owens family is different. Witchery runs in the family, and because of their history they have flaws and talents others don’t. But isn’t every family different? Don’t we all have our own individual histories and experiences? For me, growing up in a family that was unlike any other in the neighborhood was difficult, and like Sally, all I wanted was to be normal, to have holidays and birthdays and family dinners and be like everyone else. I felt that if I wasn’t careful, if I stayed out under the stars and danced all night, at a solstice celebration or in my own backyard, I would be headed for trouble.

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READING THE ROOM

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Art & Photography: Isabel Rose, , , , ,

Video & Audio:

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English comedian and actress Ellie Taylor is now on Substack, where she’ll be writing about “how great pistachio butter is and how much happiness a designated flannel washing basket” can provide.

Gene Wang, a 30-year veteran of the Washington Post sports section, has launched DMV Sports to cover the collegiate teams in and around the nation’s capital.

LSU football columnist Scooter Hobbs has brought his coverage of the Tigers to Substack.

Just in time for the U.S. Open, Tony Hagen’s Gay Tennis Podcast is now on Substack.

John Owning and Marcus Mosher are publishing The Blue Star Bulletin, an in-depth look at the Dallas Cowboys, on Substack.

U.K. country music podcast Girls in Low Places has launched a companion Substack with bonus content for their community.

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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.

had her own heroes. Maybe one of the most influential was a woman in town whose look she modeled her own on: bright red lips, big, bleached-blond hair. Parton’s mother called this woman “trash.” The singer thought she was glamorous.

Parton’s death this week had me revisiting her image as much as it did her storied musical catalog. It was hard not to: some of her most memorable jokes and quotes and bits were about just that. As much as Parton loved the specific look she embodied, she was smart enough to know how people would perceive her. Popular music has long been a man’s game, whether it’s the suits calling the shots at the label or the disc jockeys deciding who gets played and who doesn’t. Country music in the ’50s and ’60s was still very much a boys’ club (not much different now, as we’ve seen in recent years), and a busty, blonde girl-next-door with a high soprano could’ve easily been dismissed as nothing more than a sex symbol. But she was always one step ahead.

From the start of her popularity, critics, comics, and the general public ogled and guffawed, but Parton always bit back. Her quick-witted responses to comments about her boobs, her hair, her nails, her style made it clear that she was never going to sidestep the conversation; she was ready to have it and not at anyone’s expense. One of my favorite videos of Parton is from her 1995 appearance on Letterman, where she listed her pet peeves. She started with a joke about accountants not understanding how expensive it is for her to look that good and ended with “Nobody notices I have a great ass too.” Her sense of humor wasn’t just a suit of armor or some play on the dumb-blonde trope—it helped create a whole new type of pop character who felt both camp and authentic.

More than anything, Parton’s own jokes about her aesthetic allowed space for her talent to breathe. She didn’t dwell on the early negativity and condescension. By turning gross wisecracks into material of her own, she let her incredible songwriting and musicianship take center stage. Being a bestselling artist is one feat, but doing so on the strength of your own great songwriting is rarer than we allow ourselves to appreciate. Many of those songs have become essential parts of the country and pop canons, living multiple lives during her lifetime. They surely have a few more to live in her absence now; streams for her catalog have already jumped in the days following the news of her death.

For Parton, artistry and presentation were part of the same package. She couldn’t read sheet music but could expertly play a guitar with long, sharp acrylic nails. Her hyper-feminine glamour was not isolated from her genius. It’s what separated her from the boys’ club and empowered generations of women in country music to pick up their own guitars and pens (with or without the nails).

Parton knew there was room for fun in brilliance. A genius didn’t need to merely be studious or serious in their presentation. Parton’s talent was just as present in her gaudiness as it was in her songs, something the world has been mourning losing as much as they have been celebrating ever having. The flood of online memorial posts shows how her fans around the world have her one-liners as ingrained in their brains as deeply as they do her vivid songwriting. Few likely believed that the woman who embraced low culture so warmly would become the gold standard. But Parton always knew she would have the last laugh.

More on remembering Dolly:

caleb! by caleb

My Happiness Depends on You

It’s a daunting task to look back on the life and artistry of a singularly beloved figure like Dolly Parton in search of the perfect words. Much will be said, as it ought to be, about just how damn good her songs were. I’m certain that I Will Always Love You…

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18 days ago · 1299 likes · 47 comments · caleb hearon

The Bulwark

Dolly Parton, 1946–2026

I FIRST TUNED IN TO DOLLY PARTON in the late 1970s. I had moved from Greenwich Village to Charleston, West Virginia for a job (yes, really), and going to hear her live seemed like the thing to do. This was in her giant hair, giant boobs, giant bellbottoms phase. But oh my God, that voice. …

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18 days ago · 308 likes · 43 comments · Jill Lawrence

AND ANOTHER THING

Dolly Parton, Forever 🤍🕊️

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18 days ago · 69 likes · 24 comments · Derek C. Blasberg

This week, we’re picking fish scales off our clothes, asking seemingly simple questions, and eating Bell Jar–inspired confections.

GROWING UP

“There is a season to sparkle and a season to dim”

Taylor Tomlinson remembers her 20s as effervescent and shiny. But was that actually such a good thing?

I’ve lost my spark and I’m not sure I want it back

— in Actually, Nevermind

Lately, I’ve also been feeling like I’ve lost my spark. It’s not so much that I’m depressed (I am, but it’s very manageable compared to what I’ve experienced historically so I try not to complain), it’s that my personality seems to have changed. It doesn’t feel like a temporary problem to solve. I think I may have lost my spark permanently. When I watch old videos from my twenties, I am astonished by how differently I carry myself and how strange my own voice sounds. It’s higher, full of momentum, like a high school senior during the last week of class, ready to get on with the rest of her life. Twenty-something Taylor was wittier and prettier. She had the spark.

I love being in my thirties. I spend my time however I want. I only hang out with friends who fill me up. I spend my money on stupid stuff like antique stained-glass windows, star-shaped ice cube trays, and hand-painted lamps with color-changing bulbs. I don’t care what (most) people think of me. I want things like comfort and safety and connection rather than fame and respect and accolades. I only flirt with people I really, really like. I turn down perfectly good romantic partners (some who are even objectively too good for me! The teenage Lizzie McGuire cartoon version of me in my head is VERY confused), rather than staying for a couple of years because the idea of being alone makes me panic. I think I might be good at my job and worthy of love. I know the cost of overworking myself, so I try not to (at least, not as much). It’s not that I don’t want to be the “greatest of all time” or whatever, it’s that I no longer believe it’s possible—not just for me, but for anyone. Basically, I’ve grown up.

This is all very healthy. But stability and self-worth are not sparkly. The spark was a highly effective cocktail of blind faith, agonizing hope, chaotic confidence, and delusions of grandeur. It made me believe I was special. I don’t feel all that special anymore. And if I’m not special, I’m not sure how to re-light the fire, how to motivate myself. I don’t believe a certain opportunity, job, or partner will fix me anymore. Now I look at the sword in the stone and shrug, “I mean if it comes out, then I’ll just have a sword. So what?”

Being sparkly was hard. I had to work for it. Some folks just have “It”—I don’t. I have a mental illness, yes. But not It. (All the times I felt the most special, I was having a hypomanic episode. But that’s another, longer story—one I tell in my book.) It is that intangible, undeniable charm. That magnetic superpower you’re either born with or spend your whole life coveting. My brother has It. He is oozing with It. He’s MADE of It. I, on occasion, produce very small amounts of It. And whenever I do, I carefully gather It up, and save It for when I really need It. For me, It’s not a renewable resource.

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ORACLES

ACCESSIBILITY

‘Is there a ramp?’ seems like a straightforward question

Steve Way reflects on nearly four decades of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Building Doesn’t Know Your Name

— in Steve Way’s Substack

Before I go somewhere new, somebody makes a phone call.

I know I’m always welcome. The call is to find out whether there’s a step at the front door, and if there is, how many, how big, and whether the ramp they keep describing as “around back” is an actual ramp or a sheet of plywood somebody’s cousin laid down in 2011. Or if there even is a ramp at all.

I once called and sent a friend inside a new coffee shop with a step to ask if they had a ramp. After I made a video calling them out for not having one, people on social media called me evil, petty, a douchebag, and said I should go somewhere else.

Thirty-six years into the Americans with Disabilities Act, here’s the most useful thing I know about access. Access has almost nothing to do with how anybody feels about me.

People think it does. They use the word the way they’d use “hospitality.” We’re a very accessible workplace and everyone here is so accommodating. What they mean is that they’re nice, and if I showed up with a problem, they’d want to help.

I believe them because they’re usually telling the truth about themselves.

And then I get to the door and there’s a huge step.

The step doesn’t know they’re nice. It has no opinion about me at all. Somebody drew it on a piece of paper before I was born, a contractor poured it, an inspector signed off, and now it’s a fact sitting in concrete. Every good intention in that building is standing on the other side of it, waving.

Access is a series of decisions made in advance by people who never met me and never will. The architect, the city, the guy who set the budget, the person who chose which bathroom to renovate and which one to leave alone. They all decided whether I’d get in the room years before anyone knew there was going to be a me.

The building doesn’t know my name, so it doesn’t like me or dislike me. It has a step or it doesn’t.

Once you see it that way, the ADA stops being an abstraction and turns into one of the more clear-eyed things this country ever passed. The law was written to understand that goodwill runs out.

Goodwill is real and shouldn’t go unnoticed. It’s also unreliable, unevenly distributed, and impossible to schedule. It depends on whether the manager on duty is having a good day, the person at the desk finds you sympathetic, or you’re the kind of disabled person people enjoy helping. I can tell you from experience that’s a category with a strict dress code and office hours.

Nice people are wonderful, but you can’t build a life on being liked. If my ability to attend a meeting, use a bathroom, vote, get an education, or hold a job depends on somebody deciding I’m worth the trouble that morning, then what I’ve got is a lucky streak. Lucky streaks always end.

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LITERARY EATS

COOKING

Teaching a man to (fillet) a fish

A private chef in rural England shares, in sensory detail, what it looks like to work for your food.

A Metaphorical Postcard #8

— in A Private Chef

I take a moment to consider this large wild Sea Trout that I hang up to inspect, my thumb looped through the tag that twists through its mouth and gills. Stamped with a number from the Environment Agency to prove that it hasn’t been poached (pardon the pun), returned from its journey back to the river of its birth from the sea to be caught, killed and tagged. I carefully place it in front of me on the table and study its markings. Silver and gold, speckled and mottled, iridescent like the old Tudor glass you can pull from the mud of the Thames if you have a keen eye, centuries-old glass that shimmers through the spectrum despite the passing of centuries. The trout’s eye, clear as glass, gills the deep, rich colour of blood.

With the back of a small knife with a blade as long as my index finger, I run it backwards from the tail to the head to begin removing the tiny soft scales that stick to everything and will likely appear for the rest of the day, no matter how hard I try to keep them under control.

[. . .]

Using the back of the blade, held perpendicular to the skin on the fillet, I drag the knife from the tail to its collar, removing a fine layer of fat from the skin. This ensures that when cooked, it will be dry and crisp, removing the excess fat and moisture that might cause it to stick to the bars of the grill as it sits over broken-down embers of oak logs that burn in the hearth. The coals stutter and spit as the fat drips from the skin onto the coals below, as I press downwards using the back of my knuckles against the surface of the fish, flattening the skin as it blisters and chars in the fire. Fresh oregano, soft needles of rosemary and stalks of fennel with their pollen-filled flower heads picked from the bushes, tied into a bunch, bound tightly at one end with a thick knot of twine, dipped like a brush into olive oil and then onto the fish as it cooks. With a short length of slightly bent old copper pipe that I use to blow into the embers to stir up the fire, I prod and poke, lifting a bank of embers to one side of the hearth, and with a sharp crackle and rush of hot orange sparks, cinders spitting upwards as the oxygen feeds the fire as I move the hot, glowing ashes around. I leave one side of the hearth with a mound of slow-burning incandescence as I smash down the smouldering logs into cinders and ash.

Lefteris would have surely approved.

I pull off a small branch from a lemon tree that grows next to the fire, along with a handful of blossoms. The tiny white flowers with their ethereal smell, one that I know is surely what heaven smells like, as I crush the small set of leaves in my fist, releasing the citrus perfume and placing the deep green offshoot onto the coals to smoulder, watching the heat blacken and twist the leaves in a spiralling flourish of smoke for the last half a minute, to heighten the flavour of the fish as it rests on the side of the hearth.

With the tip of a knife, I lift up the trout one centimetre at a time, looking to see the golden charred edges where the skin met the heat, lifting carefully, gently prizing the crisp-skinned fillet away in one motion.

Scottadito.

Burned finger tips scorching my hands as I lift the fish away from the grill. I take a pinch of salt crystals and a small clutch of lemon blossoms, letting it fall onto the skin, oily and brittle, scorched golden and black as the coals went to work, offset with the small ivory flowers that pervade the warm afternoon with their Elysian scent.

And now that midsummer has passed, wild flower crowns that we wore on our heads as we danced now faded and withered, as the longest day passed, and now the bees will have learned that their daylight is just that tiny bit shorter, their innate understanding of the rhythm of the year, now tuned to accept that there is much to be done in preparation for the months that will follow.

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WISDOM

Patti Smith checks in with us (and the blood moon)

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ADOLESCENCE

The sanctity of a teenage bedroom

As the internet becomes increasingly voyeuristic, can anything remain sacred?

Girl bedrooms in the era of surveillance culture

— in Sithara In Your Computer

While the bedroom was never designed to be a completely private space, it was at least oriented inwards, a backstage to your life. If you can close the door, you can escape the surveillance of your parents and peers, at least until dinnertime.

For a lot of teenagers, their room is the first space they ever had any control over, a key site of identity construction. I’m lucky to be able to say that was the case for me. My teenage bedroom was the primordial soup from which I was formed. There was nobody to call me a poser for sticking up NME posters of bands I’d never listened to, or for displaying cutesy goth-adjacent badges I was too shy to wear to school, trying on different versions of Sithara, makeover montage-style, until I found one that stuck.

In 1977, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber discovered that because bars and streets weren’t usually safe for teenage girls, the bedroom became the space where they could experiment with subculture, making zines and playing records. They called this ‘bedroom culture’. Mary Celeste Kearney expanded on this in 2007, explaining that girls were actively producing (not just consuming) culture in their bedrooms. They were playing the guitar, inventing dances, filming camcorder music videos and writing extremely graphic M/M fanfic about side characters from Les Misérables.

When social media and cameraphones arrived, this tech turned the purpose of the bedroom inside out. You could now willingly subject yourself to the surveillance of an unseen audience. [. . .]

Media theorist Erika Pearson came up with a term to describe this clash of privacy and performance: the glass bedroom. “Online, (…) there is a blurring between front-stage and back-stage: what feels like an intimate space can be under the watchful electronic gaze of a large unknown audience; what is being acted out as a front-stage performance could have no witnesses,” she writes.

This collapse is especially notable in the 2000s, when vloggers began to film videos in their bedrooms, perched on the edge of their all-white fairylight-strewn beds. Teen bedrooms have always been full of portals outwards (novels, TV screens, comics), but social media made that portal bidirectional.

McRobbie and Garber had suggested that the bedroom was a private place where there were “no risks involving personal humiliation or degradation,” but that was in the 1970s. A teen vlogger’s bedroom is exposed to an internet audience waiting to flay her alive.

Meanwhile, as bedrooms were being transformed into filming locations, teenagers found new places to express themselves. The 2000s were the golden age of highly customisable blogging platforms like MySpace and Piczo. When a 2008 article asked various teenagers about their blogs, one of them responded, “You can furnish it the way you want and paint it the way you want—and make it your room.” Even the metaphors were similar, with wallpapers, photo walls, guestbooks and bulletin boards.

Teenagers even created their own rules for behaving inside this metaphorical bedroom. Per the 2008 article about blogs: “Being over critical or unfriendly to your ‘host’ or otherwise showing insufficient respect for their personal space, tended to be frowned upon.” Anyone who’s ever opened the comments on an Instagram reel will know that this code of conduct has completely changed, unless it’s standard practice to stroll into someone’s bedroom, wrinkle your nose, and tell them that they “look like they’d give good hugs.”

During the 2020s, bedroom culture took on a new dimension when the Covid lockdowns sent us all back to our bedrooms. With nowhere else to go, bedrooms became the primary spaces available for self-expression, while the internet became the only route through which that expression could be seen by the outside world. It was easier than ever to film from your room, meaning the walls became even more porous. While 2010s creators like Zoella made content perched on their beds, 2020s vloggers like Emma Chamberlain recorded in theirs.

TikTok’s algorithm put content filmed by and for adults in front of teenagers’ eyes in a landscape where tween media was already disappearing. This period was full of discourse about how teenagers were dressing like adults, doing a full beat and slathering on anti-aging retinoids. But what about their bedrooms?

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ART

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , Blackberry Season,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

Omid Scobie, a British journalist, author, and TV writer, has launched Off Script on Substack, where he’ll be covering “media, entertainment, culture—and, yes, the royals.”

Historian Madeleine Pelling is now on Substack.

Former Scotland Yard detective Steve Keogh has launched a crime podcast on Substack where he’ll be offering “a better understanding of how detectives think and work.”

Matt Calkins, former lead sports columnist for the Seattle Times, is now on Substack.

Bernie Miklasz, a seasoned voice in St. Louis sports, has launched a publication on Substack, where he’ll be covering teams across Missouri.

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 reading buzzy novels for free, turning cakes into canines, and squeezing our lemons while we still can.

LO-FI LIVING

Reflecting on life sans smartphone

Katie Lowe ditched some of the comforts, and distractions, of the modern world two years ago. Was it worth it?

Do you really want a “slow life”?

— in Rayon

I’m coming up on the two-year anniversary of my analog experiment, which, day by day, feels less like an experiment and more like a new normal. Through writing, I’ve tried to unearth what my daily life looked like before I did this, to compare, but really, the way that I think about time and my role on the earth now is so changed that it’s almost impossible to truly understand my former self. Perhaps I shouldn’t try to compare or explain my growth, but instead, in showing how I spend time in the world now, you might understand where things diverged.

At 5pm, my day becomes extraordinarily quiet. Closing down my laptop or desktop computer and leaving my home office feels like stepping into a boat and rowing softly away from shore. My thoughts become slower and quieter as I row, the waves lapping softly as I re-enter domestic life. I wander downstairs, stare blankly into the middle distance, prepare a snack. Lap, lap, lap.

My partner arrives home late or not at all, is traveling for work. The openness of the evening stretches out ahead of me, a tinge of anxiety fills me. I put a record on. I’ve got a million things to do and I haven’t done a single one.

If I’m feeling avoidant, I pop open my laptop and check my personal email, nothing. Close the laptop again, reconsider.

I wander outside, in the garden I pick weeds for a half hour and then decide to call a friend who lives far away. We talk for two hours as my hands move amongst grass in the raised beds and pull stubborn wild carrots from our gravel patio. Then it’s time for dinner. Dinner is either hummus and carrots or immensely elaborate because there’s nothing else to do. After dinner, I’m exhausted and somehow haven’t sat down since my workday, so I lie on the couch with some music on and read 30-40 pages of a book until I’m tired. My partner crawls into bed, we talk about our days, looking each other in the eyes until one of us closes them.

Or instead, the weeding turns into garden work. I decide to move some plants that aren’t happy where they are; cut down the invasive bittersweet, again. I clean out the chicken coop, refill their waters, put down new shavings, add grain to their indoor and outdoor dispensers, give them each a snuggle against their will, and scrounge up some wilted vegetables from the fridge to feed them. All of this is done silently, task after task, nothing distracts me as my brain processes the day or an old argument with a friend or dreams about the future or considers absolutely nothing at all. I go inside and check my phone, a friend texts to meet at a bar. I wash up, scrubbing the dirt out from under my fingernails and walk there, because there’s plenty of time. I wait at the bar with nothing to do until my friend arrives, noticing people and perhaps ending up in a conversation. People talk to you when you look around the room, when you look like you are waiting for something. And it’s true, I am waiting for something. I’m waiting for something interesting to happen. The rest of the evening slips away and I climb into bed, open my book and fall asleep immediately.

[...]

Slowing down sounds admirable until you realize that most of slowness is just being bored and alone in your thoughts and rituals. Letting boredom in is transformative, yes, and being alone with your thoughts is a necessary daily practice for self-growth, indeed—but these can be uncomfortable states. Boredom was extremely uncomfortable for me when I first got rid of my phone. I felt that boredom was a failure, that my mind should either be productive all of the time when engaged or, when not engaged, immediately enter a flow state of total zen. I started to see boredom as a gray area that I waded through as I oscillated between the two ideals.

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STILL LIFE

WRITING

“Is literature—a novel, a newsletter, this magazine—a product?”

The pressure on “writers” to be “influencers” continues to build.

The Lamentation of Natasha Stagg

— in Volume 0

I’ve never not worked, in addition to writing. My books are not a job, because no one needs them; their superfluousness is essential to their literariness, by my own estimation. I’ve published four, with one very cool indie press, Semiotext(e). Each was, as they say, well received. None were, as they say, top earning. After enough favorable reviews accrue, someone always comes out of the woodwork to offer me career advice about the next one. I have grown to hate this part.

My “day job,” though, is in advertising, where effective writing is disruptive, sticky, urgent. These descriptors are not applicable to literature. They are what sells the product, not the product itself. Is literature—a novel, a newsletter, this magazine—a product? In many ways, yes, but then again, no. The product, or what has the price tag, is only the access to something intangible.

Things have really changed since I published my first book, Surveys, a decade ago. When I speak with younger writers, it’s always about money, as in windfalls: huge advances, speaking fees, film rights. They sound, increasingly, like the people I know who work for startups. Now, everyone relies on the internet’s algorithmically produced numerical values to tell us what is popular or worthwhile. Analytics play a part in acquisitions. The definition of literary is being renegotiated so it may include, for example, influencer memoirs. All of this is a supreme distraction from the concentration it takes to write a great American novel.

On my way to a lunch meeting with a literary agent—someone who connects writers to publishers, thereby smoothing the path toward a bigger, longer, more moneyed career, ideally—I think about the word agency, how it has been pried from regular language recently and pasted all over startup ads.

Things are agentic now. Taste is a commodity. The state of authorship is being questioned. I’m being asked to discuss the commercial viability of my work, or maybe myself. All I can do is say I have it, even though I don’t believe that. Honestly, I don’t even want it.

I imagine the best-case scenario, my life with the perfect agent: a buffer between myself and those entities asking me to do regretful things such as listicles and selfie videos, which only take focus away from the books I’ve written. A publisher offering me an advance for a book I have yet to write. A grant committee selecting me based on merit and not a book-length application.

There is an author making waves right now because she was offered a cash prize and then crushed by its cross-promotional requirements—a video interview, an audio interview, a pre-interview, a photo portrait, festival participation, social obligations, an original piece for a journal, and then the endless email negotiations about timing and logistics.

Eventually, she admitted that she was not mentally well enough to do all this, that what was originally described as no-strings would end up derailing her from a plan to detach from society and simply write.

Whatever happened to having one bio photo for your entire life, to instability being a hallmark of the literary greats? It’s all so humiliating, the author laments, in a blog post. I wish, for her sake, she had paywalled it. If it’s not obvious, I love her.

The agent, one of many I’ve met over lunch, wears a suit. Or he wears a blazer and pants and a tie and a shirt, none of which come from the same store, it is clear. I’ve tried, up to the last minute, to put this off until the appointment naturally dissolved, and yet somehow, it is happening—proof enough, maybe, that I need an agent, if an agent can save me from unspecified lunches with men in non-suits.

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DOG TREATS

MUSIC

Dolly Parton on her sense of self

A peek into the singer’s process and personal growth.

Songteller: Shattered Image

— in Dolly Parton

I think “Shattered Image” is a song that so many people relate to, especially in show business, because it’s more about how, well, you don’t have to be in show business for somebody to shatter your image or ruin your reputation.

But when I wrote that song, that was back during the early days when I was just really not used to people saying bad things about me, especially if they weren’t true. And some of them are true. And a lot of those stories in the tabloids, like I’ve always said, they’re based on some thread of truth, but usually it’s so frayed by the time they get done with it, you don’t hardly even recognize it.

But I don’t mind so much what they say about me as much as it hurts other people, and I hate that. I can handle it myself by saying what I say, doing what I do, and saying I don’t deny nor admit anything. But when they drag other people into it...

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ART

FICTION

A novel idea

An excerpt from MacKenzie Scott’s new book, which she’s serializing on Substack.

Wednesday

— in Last Days in Two Nations

Hannah sat on the edge of her bunk in her towel and shower shoes, looking down at her soap case. The piece of broken bottle was still buried deep in her soap. This self-improvement center dorm was just an old high school building, and the communal shower had operable windows, but still they had all agreed they would shower one at a time. They were like the passengers on Flight 93. Once a thing like murder with a plane full of commuters had happened, it could never happen exactly that way again. You can’t talk that way, her mother used to tell her. There’s nowhere good to go with outrage like that. But in high school Hannah had fallen for a girl who was dying of cancer, and her mother had argued against her love just like she argued against her rage. When Hannah read Barthes’ words in college, she clapped the book shut with satisfaction and took the bus to the cemetery to read it over the girl’s headstone, raining tears her mother would have cautioned against on her grave: “Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?”

It was almost Hannah’s turn in the shower.

She watched each of her bunkmates come back.

First Viola, her hair wrapped in a towel, awarded her scholarship for asking her neighbor a question.

A minute later Beth, her hair dripping, granted her free year because her elderly parents had tested positive for the gene.

Next Millicent, shivering. Every day Millicent had a new guess about why she was here.

But Hannah didn’t have to guess about herself. Hannah knew.

When the door to her classroom had opened last year, she’d been grading papers. Other teachers complained about it, and it was time-consuming, but it had always been her favorite part. She liked the little window it gave her into each kid’s mind and heart. They were all so different. When she was little herself, she had thought she would have a lot of kids someday, but Hannah still wasn’t married, and even if she had been, she wouldn’t want to have kids in a country like this. They had taken the fun out of the idea. Hannah liked potluck. She liked surprises.

Not the kind that had just come through the classroom door, though. The guy who opened it was a membership jackass. He’d been a jackass in high school too, and his jackboots were polished to a high shine. She had set her pen down and fixed a smile on her face. The smile was all she would give him. She would not say welcome. She would not say how can I help.

“Hannah Hamberger,” he said, as if it made him a standup comedian, just saying her last name. Somehow her fifth graders’ buoyant relish when they said it delighted her, but in his mouth the enjoyment was small and witless. “Sorry to interrupt.”

But he wasn’t sorry. He was happy to interrupt, anyone could see that. He flipped up one of the flaps on his goon belt and took out an apple. He set it on her desk and smiled a little. She had known what was coming, and she knew she wasn’t going to give him everything he had come for, so she smiled a little at the apple. She even thanked him for it. As a small counterbalance to what she knew she was about to do.

“You’re welcome,” he had said. He was grinning now. He was handsome, the kind of guy in high school who you just knew spent a lot of time looking at himself in the boys’ room mirror, when he wasn’t grabbing smaller kids by the shirt collar to drag them for swirlies in the stalls. “Take a bite,” he said.

Hannah did a little calculus in her mind and took a bite of the apple. Just a regular bite, but she felt almost dirty doing it, and her heart was racing. I will do these things, because I am about to defy him. That’s what she had been thinking.

“It’s good, right?”

“Yes.”

“Imported from Washington State. They have the best apples.”

Hannah didn’t think she had to say anything to that.

“Only the best for the best teachers,” he said.

The apple had left a sweet taste in her mouth she didn’t like. She’d still be tasting it even after he left, she thought.

“I was wondering if you had anything for me this time,” he had said.

“Not yet.”

“That’s what you said last time. It’s December. You’ve had plenty of time to get to know them.”

“Maybe I’m slow.”

“You weren’t in high school, I remember. You got the best grades. I was always trying to sit next to you to get a look. Two kinds of looks, actually.”

This time she didn’t smile.

That cost her. “And you were sort of political if I remember correctly. Isn’t that right?”

But Hannah wasn’t going to let him scare her this way. She wouldn’t let him change what she was going to do. She looked back down at her papers.

“What are you doing there?” He lifted his chin like a horse, pointing it at the papers on her desk.

“Grading papers.”

“What kind of papers?”

“English papers,” she said. He already knew she was an English teacher. It wasn’t really an answer.

“What kind though? The kind where they share opinions? The kind where they make things up? I could just read them myself, you know I could.”

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FAUX FLORA

RECIPES

Summer isn’t over yet. Let’s cook like it.

Andrew Gruel serves up a citrusy, savory, seasonal dish, all for about $5 a person.

Smoky Lemon Chicken & Crispy Potatoes

— in American Gravy

One of the biggest myths about cooking with real, whole ingredients is that it has to be expensive. Trust me, it doesn’t.

This is exactly the kind of dinner I love—chicken, potatoes, butter, lemon and spices. Nothing here is complicated; you don’t need to hunt anything down at a specialty grocery store, and nothing here requires you to spend two hours in the kitchen.

The key is to take inexpensive ingredients and treat them properly. Bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs are one of the best values in the meat case, and in many grocery stores, they’re regularly on sale. They’re also incredibly forgiving. As chicken legs cook, the skin gets crispy while the meat stays juicy, and as they roast, all that chicken fat renders down onto the potatoes underneath.

Then we give the whole thing some “chef” treatment—lemon zest, paprika, and an optional dash of turmeric on the chicken before roasting, followed by a smoky lemon-butter sauce spooned over everything at the end.

One pan, four people—it’s real food that costs less than $20.

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INTERIORS

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

ESPN SportsCenter fixture Kenny Mayne has launched a Substack to deliver original videos and writing about the NFL.

U.K.-based podcaster and entrepreneur is now on Substack.

New York Post sports columnist Mike Vaccaro has joined Substack.

, former decoration director of House & Garden and the founder of Daydress, is now on Substack, where she’ll write about interiors, share styling ideas, and offer her finds.

British historian, broadcaster, and podcaster Suzannah Lipscomb is now on Substack.

The British arts organization The Barbican is now publishing on Substack.

New York sports publication is now live. The collective, which features former reporters from Sports Illustrated and The Ringer including , , and , will cover sports business and New York’s professional teams.

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 eating our seaweed, throwing tech to the wind, and sculpting rocks in our own image.

CONFORMITY

A homogeneous internet for all

Feeds seem to be increasingly rewarding content that looks the same. What does that mean for the creators pushing these posts out?

oh my god. we’re in template slop?

— in brendstack

at some point in the future, something that is currently considered a high-level skill will be the baseline for everyone. this applies to almost any industry but also any hobby. physical skills as well as digital. I talked about this with legendary graphic designer mirko borsche in an interview recently. there was a time not so long ago we used to rely on the one gifted person in the office who could build an impressive deck within a few days, now it’s one command into chatgpt and it’s done. my girlfriends are doing elaborate nail designs at home, what we considered good cuisine ten years ago is now average. I can go on with the examples. I get into it many times on my podcast, but as a creative, you constantly need to re-invent yourself in order to be ahead of the curve or an expert in anything. that means practice, read, practise, research, learn, practise, refine, expand, curate, refine, practise. you get what I am saying.

I have been noticing something on instagram for a few months that I couldn’t quite yet articulate. butter yellow font, kinda chic to, photo ideas for cool girls, where to get inspired outside of pinterest, kinda chic to, wtf is minimalism, topics to write essay on instead of scrolling, kinda chic to, ten habits cool girls do, every day once a week once a month, kinda chic to. if nothing [else], here is something you’ve seen in pastel font on your explore page:

“dress well and stay weird,” “idk and idc,” “essays to read when you feel like giving up.” it’s like I blinked, and everyone is a gifted graphic designer, a storyteller, knows the 10 things to know about anything! so what exactly is going on? a lot of things are happening at once. first, even the last person on social media has realised that the apps are rewarding text on images, preferably a carousel, preferably the audience can “learn” something (aka be hand[ed] knowledge without having to do research, rian phin, come explain why that is bad, please!). this is not something I am not guilty of doing, even on this substack. I am aware the most popular things I have written are the how to’s. everything has a hook, everything is designed. but if you scroll for more than a minute, you realise that, especially the videos, nobody edited them. nobody thought of a format. the format is a template from capcut and the instagram edits app. so a video that would’ve taken a professional four years ago one hour to edit is now a template. everybody is a designer. everyone has taste. nothing is impressive or sticks. nothing is original. a few years ago it would’ve been groundbreaking. I am not immune to a tiktok or reel trend, or carousel, so this is not me pointing fingers. I think zeitgeist is incredibly helpful, keeping your finger on the pulse, joining in on a conversation. but if you do not have the willingness to take the trending topic, trending template, just one percent further, where does it lead you? an aesthetic grid, for sure, but not long-lasting effect. yesterday, I tried to do a template my own way, sadly the engagement proved me right lol.

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DATA CENTERS

FOOD CULTURE

Refusing to stomach it

Emiko Davies, an Australian-Japanese cookbook author and food writer, pushes back against one journalist’s sweeping opinions on Japanese cuisine.

“Japanese curry is the worst curry in the world”

— in Notes from Emiko’s Kitchen

“I’m not sure that seaweed, for example, is food.”

I’m only a few sentences into a newspaper article that my father has cut out and left on my desk and I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. It’s titled Sashimi? So sorry: no heat, no thanks and no, it wasn’t written in 1956, it was published in The Canberra Times—the newspaper of the Australian capital—on August 4, 2026.

It gets worse, line after line. I try to ignore it. In fact, the article sat on my desk for a few days before I could even bring myself to read it.

[. . .]

This isn’t about what people like or don’t like to eat. I honestly don’t care what other people want to eat. But the author, Mark Dapin, is a seasoned British-Australian journalist and author. I would expect journalists to, I don’t know, research a bit, or be curious before writing something that makes them look like an ignorant bigot. How embarrassing to be so blind to think that one dish defines an entire cuisine. Even travelling there wasn’t enough to open his eyes.

Where to even start, Mark? Seaweed has long been an important, native food source even in your homeland, England, which is part of an archipelago—like Japan. There are some 600 different varieties of edible seaweeds found today in British waters; it’s an incredibly nutritious, economical food that sustained the British people for at least 8,000 years—in fact, it was an ancient, staple food across the continent and only dropped off most menus in the 1800s. It’s not just the ancient British and Asians who prized seaweed as food, but in South America there are 14,000-year-old seaweed middens that lay inland, meaning the seaweed was important enough to be carried all the way from the sea, and in Australia, First Nations people have used seaweed not only as food, but for medicine, ceremonial uses, even practical items like water carriers, for 65,000 years. [. . .]

In fact, the European Commission believes seaweed could be the sustainable answer to feeding the world’s growing population and that by the 2040s, it could produce 100 million tonnes of extra food. You might need to get used to the idea that seaweed is food. [. . .]

“Japanese chicken katsu curry is made with a thick, glutinous, single-flavour gravy. It is the worst chicken curry in the world.”

It’s completely fine to not like something. Really. I don’t even make my kids eat something they don’t like (life is too short). But it is not fine to make sweeping statements about an entire country’s cuisine.

I think you’ll like this story, though. Japanese curry was adopted into Japanese culture through the British Royal Navy. In the second half of the 1800s, after 265 years of isolation from foreign influence, Japan gave in and opened their doors. The Emperor also decided to introduce eating meat for the first time in 1,200 years, which meant that they also needed to look to western cuisine for ideas on how to cook meat. There was another problem. The Japanese navy was plagued with the vitamin B1 deficiency beriberi, and once the Japanese saw that the British navy didn’t suffer from it, they realised that the curry was key and adopted it with verve. The first recipe for curry in a Japanese cookbook dates to 1872.

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PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ

EN PLEIN AIR

Painting as a mnemonic device

Max Annable swaps a camera for brushstrokes to document his trip.

Watercolor trip through Sardinia & Sicily Part 1

— in Max Annable

Just got back from three weeks island-hopping around Sardinia and Sicily. I painted the whole way.

Sardinia:

The flight from Mallorca—I got the window seat.

We picked up a car and headed west, the sun was setting over the mountains and the colors were gorgeous.

Walked around town that night looking for a place to eat and landed at a spot serving up some traditional Sardinian food—try the Culurgiones when you visit.

First stop of the next day was at the Fontanamare beach.

For lunch we headed up the coast and found this pizza spot that overlooked this view. While painting this, it was so hot that every brushstroke dried pretty much instantly.

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CONTRADICTIONS

LUDDITES

No screen? No problem.

August Lamm, a self-described anti-tech activist, prefers gadgets many people would now consider obsolete. When faced with finishing her first manuscript, she had to go old-school.

I wrote my book by hand

— in August’s Newsletter

When I sold my computer last year, I was in the middle of writing a book. Or, I was supposed to be writing a book. The deadline was just three months away, and all I’d done so far was buy a stack of other books for inspiration.

In an incredible feat of avoidance, I had hand-built a custom bookshelf to hold those books. There was sawdust all over my apartment. I had also taped the table of contents to my wall, and filled a small metal box with index cards. “Convenience,” one said. “Dating,” said another.

Understandably, my editor was starting to get nervous.

How does one write a book without a computer? I did not know, which is why I was stalling. I tried reminding myself that every book published prior to the 1980s was composed on paper. But it was no use: I had grown up in the age of the delete key. In my writing career, I had rarely needed to think through a sentence before typing it out. The thinking came later, in the editing phase.

Now, the only computer I had access to was in the public library, where I could sit for an hour or so before my allotted session automatically ended.

But did it even make sense to compose an anti-technology manifesto on an internet-connected device? Would I be able to resist the pull of email, news, and “research” in a time of unbearable stress?

No, I needed to write my book the old way. I needed to prove it was still possible.

And so, I wrote. As with all difficult tasks, I tricked myself into beginning. Instead of buying a dedicated notebook (which would only become a symbol of doom), I wrote the draft in my existing diary. And I wrote in public, to stop myself from turning inward and contemplating the toil ahead. There was no time for contemplation: the book was now due in a month.

My favorite spot to write was a jazz jam in the West Village. The jam happened daily, after midnight. In the dark of this noisy basement, I would write until four a.m., then I would walk home and collapse into bed, sleeping into the afternoon.

It took a full band, plus six college kids doing back-to-back saxophone solos (if you know, you know), to silence the millennial voice within me, screaming that I couldn’t possibly write a book by hand.

After a few weeks of this, my notebook was crammed with writing. Far from reassuring me, my progress only increased my dread by bringing me nearer to the worst part: typing it all up on the computer.

I dreaded the screentime, yes, but I also dreaded confronting my nocturnal scribblings in the fluorescent glare of the library lights. The draft needed to be good. There wasn’t enough time to start over.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

NOVELTY

The joy of hobby-hopping

Grace Byron found herself bored and burnt out. The antidote, it turned out, was starting from scratch.

I wanted to become a novice

— in Female Small Business Owner

I have been very, very tired. Burnout feels like such a soft word for the kind of existential ennui I’ve been feeling. I am an overworked and underpaid freelancer with a Protestant work ethic. I have hoped to crack the code of getting a job, but it’s yet to happen. I have asked my non-workaholic friends what to do and had breakdowns in an attempt to look away from the obvious. The problem was that I have lost my sense of curiosity. That’s the only cure for overload. I decided that I needed to find things that could not easily become material, things I couldn’t master. I wanted to be a novice. Perhaps if I forced myself to learn and try new things I would leave my comfort zone while finding a newfound sense of confidence. I would recover that old virtue lost to the algorithm: chance. I hoped this would get me out of my depressive rut. Maybe one of these hobbies would even become a new lifelong obsession. Because I’ve never had a problem with executive functioning, I decided to try out a few classes from my bucket list that I was always too afraid to try.

Since I have horrible balance, I decided the first thing I should try was ballet. I knew I would never become a dancer. My boyfriend dutifully went to Bloch with me to buy a black leotard and nude ballet slippers. I felt triumphant walking by the fountain on the Upper West Side even before I’d executed a single pirouette. I watched tween girls prance past me with ease, far more graceful than I would ever be.

By the time I arrived at my first dance class, however, I was a bundle of nerves. Miraculously, I recognized a few of the other dancers. My fellow students ranged from pros who probably shouldn’t have been in a Beginner I class to neophytes like me who had simply enjoyed seeing The Nutcracker as a child. I went to the barre terrified of looking foolish—the very shame I wanted to shed. I struggled to pronounce, much less remember, the choreography we learned. I went home and woke up more sore than I’d been from years in yoga or running on the treadmill. Still, I felt good. Like I was accomplishing something. After years battling an eating disorder, I’ve tried to find ways of moving my body that don’t feel oriented around merely shedding calories. When we started spinning, however, I came to think that perhaps ballet wasn’t for me. I could not reach the end of the room without wanting to puke from my inelegant twirling. Perhaps I would come back to it, I told myself.

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EARTHWORKS

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: NebeliArt, gathering the debris, , , ,

Writing: hashtag, , , ,

Recently launched

British singer-songwriter is now on Substack.

English journalist and broadcaster has launched a newsletter, Burley Alive, on Substack.

, an award-winning Canadian television host, is now on Substack writing about lifestyle and wellness.

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 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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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

2 months 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

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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:

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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 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.”