“I remember everything, even your ears”
In this edition of the Weekender: the art of collecting, a journalism snafu, and the theory of relativity
This week, we’re collecting rocks, listening to ABBA, sharing animal facts, and traveling at the speed of light.
COLLECTIONS
The art of collecting
Tatum Dooley takes a break from curating art collections to discuss a surprisingly similar hobby: rock collecting.
Collecting like a child
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in Art ForecastI spent the last few weeks on Martha’s Vineyard decidingly not thinking about art. Instead, I walked daily on the beach looking for shells and sea glass. I became a genuine collector: scanning the beach from afar and then bending down to get a closer look at what the terrain had to offer. After gathering rocks, shells, and glass that caught my eye, I went home and researched them.
I learned about tektites and the various crabs that occupy which shells. I looked at a chart that tracked “rare” colours of sea glass and made notes. I cleaned off my finds and organized them by colour and type. If this sounds very childish, it’s because it was.
As a child, I collected rocks and then Barbies. Sophie Haigney wrote about this phenomenon a few years ago in an essay titled “Accumulation and Appreciation” for Affidavit. It’s hard to choose a quote to share, since the whole article is so pertinent to my own experience as a collector—the universal desire to accumulate and project value. “We start collecting with rocks,” writes Haigney. “Rocks are easy targets for young collectors, in part because there is an abundance of rocks almost everywhere on earth. But the point is that there are certain rocks that we choose, taking them into our hands and pockets and jars; rocks that become our rocks,” she continues.
I felt closer to collecting than I have in a while, down on that beach.
There are a lot of similarities between art collecting and rock collecting, minus the accessibility of one and the price of the other. “Some pattern is composed by the child on the beach, in her rock collection, even if it’s hard to discern. Part of what changes over time, if that child moves on from rocks to snow globes to fine art, is, of course, money. Or maybe appreciation,” writes Haigney.
When I’m considering art, I go through the same motions I did on the beach: an aerial sweep with my eyes, curious and open-minded, and then homing in on an artwork that catches my attention, followed by research to learn more. It’s nice to be reminded of the process, of the excitement of discovering and learning, to bring me back to art.
TREASURES
MUSIC
ABBA in context
Fifty years after “Waterloo” changed Eurovision, Fraser Nelson takes a look back at how ABBA’s joyful, lowbrow pop conquered the world.
The Abba insurgency: art and science
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inWaterloo was written as the band’s two men, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, jammed together on the piano. They didn’t agonise about lyrics to pierce the soul of a continent. They weren’t chasing profundity. They were chasing joy. They had a great tune and needed a three-syllable title that wouldn’t need translation. Stig Anderson, the group’s manager, thought about “Honey Pie”, but the Beatles had done that. He came up with “Waterloo” while thumbing through a book of quotations. It was perfect for Eurovision. Bound to please the Brits. He knocked together the words in an afternoon.
It was sung by Benny and Bjorn’s respective partners, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog. They’d try to stand out in spangles and platform shoes. The outfits are now in the Abba museum in Stockholm, but it doesn’t say they were garish for a reason—under Swedish law, tax relief was offered on costumes as long as they were so outrageous that they couldn’t be worn on the street. The end result worked as well in Stockholm as it did in Brighton and then: the world. Waterloo became the greatest-ever Eurovision success.
But there was a bizarre exception: the British panel awarded Waterloo nul points. Here was the great Abba conundrum: they produced a song inspired by British glam rock, named after a British military victory, that was so popular with ordinary Brits that it would go to UK No 1 (as eight more Abba songs went on to do). But that night, the British judges rejected Abba—perhaps feeling they were too crude, too lowbrow, too much like good fun to count as real music.
This was certainly the verdict of Sweden’s music establishment, who seemed shocked at Abba’s victory. A still-shocked Sweden didn’t actually enter Eurovision in 1976, nor was the contest broadcast on television. It was behaving as if it had unleashed a pop monster.
Such a reaction can only be understood by the ideological challenge the band presented to the prevailing musical orthodoxy of the time. Socialistic Sweden had embarked on a cultural strategy devoted (among other things) to mitigating “the negative impact of commercialism”. Abba’s success posed a conundrum to Stockholm’s cultural commissars: if Waterloo and Mamma Mia! were so trashy, the lyrics so absurd, why did the people seem to like it so much?
Critics who had seen the Beatles, Hendrix and the Stones emerge in the 1960s could not quite believe what was happening: was the next big musical thing really a cabaret act from Stockholm? To Johan Fornäs, a Marxist critic, the band’s success was a sign of a sick capitalist society. But the blame, he said, should lie with “the society that causes people to have no energy, or desire, to do anything other than listen to Abba after coming home from work.” (A curse that seems to afflict us still 50 years on.)
The workers of the world were indeed uniting—but under Chiquitita rather than The Internationale. It was pop music’s own quiet Cold War offensive: the Soviet Union (which at one stage tried its own austere Intervision song contest) to rival Eurovision saw Abba records like Americans now see Chinese EVs: forms of enemy fire, corrupting society. Across the iron curtain, punters were going mad for Abba. They’d heard Western pop before, but never of this quality.
The Soviets, in a panic, tried to limit such corrupting influences by placing quotas on imported pop. But in 1976, Poland used its entire foreign album allowance for 800,000 copies of Abba’s album Arrival.
SCIENCE
IN DIALOGUE
Sloppy work
This week, newspapers published a summer reading list filled with made-up titles—a glimpse of what happens when collapsing editorial standards collide with AI, and gutted newsrooms leave no one left to notice.
Lincoln Michel: Over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times—a storied and award-winning newspaper and longtime home of Roger Ebert—published a summer reading list. Almost all the books were fake. There is no Nightshade Market by Min Jin Lee, Boiling Point by Rebecca Makkai, The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, or The Rainmakers by Percival Everett, among other invented titles.
Parker Molloy: Of the fifteen books recommended in the list, a full ten of them are entirely made up.
Lincoln Michel: The article was not only generated by ChatGPT (or similar program), but clearly unedited. No one at the Chicago Sun-Times even bothered a cursory check. And not only the Sun-Times. The article, along with other seemingly AI-generated pieces, were syndicated in multiple newspapers across the country including the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Dan Epstein: I get that standards in the field have slipped across the board, but this is a goddamn disgrace.
Parker Molloy: Marco Buscaglia, who created the content, admitted that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia told 404 Media. “On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed.”
Stewart Mason: The newspaper’s equally lame defense was that the insert the reading list appeared in was an advertorial that came from King Features, a subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation that mostly syndicates comic strips and puzzles. No one at the Sun-Times claimed responsibility for allowing it into the Sunday paper.
Ted Gioia: Why are they publishing garbage without vetting it?
Parker Molloy: The most telling aspect of this story isn't the AI failure itself—we all know AI hallucinates facts—it’s the context in which it happened.
Teddy (T.M.) Brown: The Chicago Sun-Times list is much more about the impacts of media consolidation than artificial intelligence.
Stewart Mason: It is no accident that this happened less than two months after their parent company, Chicago Public Media, laid off 23 journalists and editors in a mass layoff that reduced CPM’s total staff by 20 percent.
Oliver Burkeman: I think people are just embarrassed to admit they haven’t read Allende’s “Tidewater Dreams.” I found it magisterial, a tour de force, a compelling meditation on the nature of memory and fiction itself.
For summer reads that actually exist, —who, it should be noted, does not have a book called “Boiling Point” coming out this summer—has compiled a list: Fifteen REAL Books You Should ACTUALLY Read This Summer.
CINEMATIC ARTS
ANIMALS
“Stupid rat facts”
Rabbit Cavern—as aptly named a Substack as they come—shares strangely entertaining rodent facts in this post, with digressions into historic rat catchers, ferret war dances, and the weird way Paul Hollywood says “taco.”
Stupid Rat Facts
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inOkay, first of all, you probably already know this, but the naming of the guinea pig is “hard to explain,” as Wikipedia puts it.
It’s not from Guinea. It’s not a pig. We’re not totally sure why they’re called that. But I’m not gonna get into it further. We have more important information to cover…
There are some crazy guinea pig videos on YouTube, by the way. Sorry, this is another digression, but there’s a 13-minute video of guinea pigs eating watermelon and you don’t even have to pay to watch it. This is free entertainment, folks. Welcome to the 21st century.
Speaking of centuries, in the 16th century, guinea pigs were a very fashionable pet. The upper classes in Europe liked them because they were “exotic,” brought over all the way from South America. Even Queen Elizabeth I owned guinea pigs.
But guinea pigs reproduce very quickly, so before long, the lower classes got their hands on guinea pigs as well, and they stopped being a status symbol.
How quickly do they reproduce, you ask? Genuinely, too quickly. Like, it’s too fast. You might be thinking, “A lot of animals reproduce quickly, it can’t be that bad, I’m sure it’s fine.” No. No it’s not. They have babies so fast. A female guinea pig can become pregnant again as soon as six hours after giving birth. You could start watching “The Irishman” two times in a row the moment a guinea pig gives birth and you’d only be a quarter of the way through your second viewing when the guinea pig would become capable of getting pregnant again. That’s so fast.
For comparison’s sake, humans can technically become pregnant again 3-4 weeks after giving birth, but it’s generally recommended to wait closer to 18-24 months. To put that in a more digestible unit of time, that’s between 3,754 and 5,005 back-to-back viewings of “The Irishman.” I hope this information is helpful as you plan your family’s future.
PAINTING
NOTED
One of my favorite bartenders was a witch who I will call Liza. She had long black hair, milk-white skin and looked like Snow White with tattoos. I loved her because she made great drinks and was the type of person who if you said, “You’re a witch,” would shrug and say, “Of course I am. It’s the only reasonable thing to be if you know anything about math.”
She would put posts up on social media about sacred geometry and sometimes she might ask, “What’s lighting you up right now?” and hundreds of people would respond and she would send a purplish black heart to every one of them.
I officially met Liza because a very angry man was walking towards me. I had already had one unpleasant conversation with this person and didn’t want to have another one. Liza was sitting nearby so I said hello like I knew her. She said hello as if she knew me too, and we made small talk as if we had been friends for a very long time while the man moved on to someone else. She never let on that she’d never talked to me before. After that I would have done anything for her.
Liza left the bar to have a baby, and I didn’t see her for a long time. Then one day I was walking down the street and there she was carrying an infant with a full head of dark hair. She was with her parents who were visiting from downstate. Her mother had black hair with purple tips and the same wonderful essence as her daughter, as if she was connected to another planet somewhere but was still deeply enjoying this one. Her father was good-humored and looked like Kurt Vonnegut and they talked to me as if we’d been friends for a long time and they were happy to see me. Finally Liza said, “Mom! Dad! Stop talking! She doesn’t want to be here all day!”
I didn’t mind. I loved talking to all of them. I felt like I was transported to another world, full of wizards and shapeshifters and this was what people were really like—the rest was all pretend.
Yesterday I saw Liza pushing a stroller down the old slate sidewalks in front of the Conservatory. A thunderstorm was brewing. As she passed that old building, a 19th-century structure with massive pillars, she lifted her daughter up to show her the sky.
The wind blew and the clouds darkened. Leaves spun and tree branches bowed and I thought, How just like a woman to control the weather.
—Published in a Note by Rebecca Barry
POETRY
SUMMER
What we’re watching this week
Monday, May 26, at 9 p.m. ET
will be going live with to discuss dating, relationships, and comedy writing.Tuesday, May 27, at 5 p.m. ET
Chess grandmaster and political dissident
analyzes today’s most pressing issues and suggests the next move.Wednesday, May 28, at 1 p.m. ET
will be interviewing live about her new book, The Genius Myth.
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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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loved the photo of the 8 year old's pockets on laundry day. so perfect!
Not gonna lie that was the creepiest title to see before opening it