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
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.
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
—Nick Catucci 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.
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
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.
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
—Teddy (T.M.) Brown 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?
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.
TECH
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography: Ella Beech, Kate Parfet, Rose Florence, maddie kl, Nick Susi
Writing: Julia Harrison, Nora Rose Tomas, Nick Catucci, Miller Kopp, Teddy (T.M.) Brown, 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:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Danya Issawi out of Substack’s New York office.
Oh my god thank you for including my poem!!
Resonate with the sentence “do what you do best”.
Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Do what you do best and outsource the rest. Your energy is your most valuable resource, but it’s limited.