“Laughter isn’t always the best medicine. In fact, sometimes it’s the worst.”
In this edition of the Weekender: climbing trees, dressing for cocktails, and unpacking bags
This week, we’re climbing trees, wearing cocktail dresses, litigating relationships, and rifling through handbags.
RECREATION
Go climb a tree
Anna Brones on the joyful surprise of vintage photos of women in trees.
Women in Trees
—Anna Brones in Creative Fuel with Anna Brones
I found a tree to sit in this week. An old maple, gnarled and with enormous twisting branches. I have walked past this tree so many times in the past few years. In fact, this tree was certainly on my family’s property far before I was born. She has probably been there my whole life. But it was only this week that I realized the tree offered a perfect sitting spot.
Perhaps this is because for most of the year, the moss-covered trunk is too soggy to sit on. But now, after weeks without rain, the green moss has gone from damp to dry. Even the licorice ferns that grow out of it have shriveled and browned. Everything in the forest feels crispy, causing any bird moving around in the bushes to sound more like an enormous animal than a small winged organism.
I’ve gone to sit in the tree a few times this week when I’ve needed a work break. The other day I spent the time paying attention to three Steller’s jays who were shouting at each other. One on the ground, two high up in trees on opposite sides of the forest. I wondered what they were talking (yelling?) about.
I used to climb in a cherry tree as a child. One summer I took a bunch of scrap wood and a hammer and built a makeshift treehouse to spend time in. More of a platform than house, but good enough to sit on and read a book. My father and I built a more substantial platform in a different tree a few years later, so high up that it felt like I was entirely removed from the earthly world.
Both of those trees and their respective platforms are now long gone, but it occurs to me that they would make excellent places for sitting and writing, havens amidst the branches. A momentary escape.
One day at a flea market, the German photographer Jochen Raiß stumbled upon a photo of a woman in a tree. It was a chance find, but, as he discovered, it was not the only one. Soon, he was coming across all kinds of similar photos. Over 25 years he assembled an enormous collection of compelling images. Carefree, happy women perched in trees. His collection eventually led to the book Women in Trees.
The photos capture a joyful moment. Women perched in trees, women hanging in trees, women with their friends in trees. It’s assumed that many of these photos were taken by men—husbands and boyfriends in charge of the camera. But even if the smiles are for the photographer, they still feel somewhat subversive. Women taking part in an activity that wasn’t really for them, perched in a place they shouldn’t be. The women are often in dresses, which if you have ever climbed a tree then you know is not the best sartorial option.
I can’t get enough of these photos.
PHOTOGRAPHY
PROFILE
The man behind Claude
Alex Kantrowitz has written an in-depth profile of Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic and one of tech’s most outspoken voices on the promise and perils of AI.
The Making Of Dario Amodei
—Alex Kantrowitz in Big Technology
Dario Amodei was a science kid. Born in San Francisco in 1983 to a Jewish mother and an Italian father, he was interested almost entirely in math and physics. When the dot-com boom exploded around him in his high school years, it barely registered. “Writing some website actually had no interest to me whatsoever,” he tells me. “I was interested in discovering fundamental scientific truth.”
At home, Amodei was very close with his parents, a loving couple who, he says, sought to improve the world. His mother, Elena Engel, ran renovation and construction projects for libraries in Berkeley and San Francisco. His father, Riccardo Amodei, was a trained leathersmith. “They gave me a sense of right and wrong and what was important in the world,” he says, “imbuing a strong sense of responsibility.”
That sense of responsibility showed up in Amodei’s undergrad years at Caltech, where he lambasted his fellow students over their passivity toward the forthcoming Iraq war. “The problem isn’t that everyone is just peachy with the idea of bombing Iraq; it’s that most people are opposed in principle but refuse to give one millisecond of their time,” Amodei wrote in The California Tech, a student newspaper, on March 3, 2003. “This needs to change, right now and without delay.”
Then, in his early 20s, Amodei’s life changed forever. His father, Riccardo, who’d long fought a rare illness, lost the battle in 2006. Riccardo’s passing shocked Amodei, and he shifted his graduate studies at Princeton from theoretical physics to biology to address human illness and biological problems.
The rest of Amodei’s life has, in some ways, been dedicated to addressing his father’s loss, especially because within four years, a new breakthrough turned the illness from something that was 50% fatal to 95% curable. “There was someone who worked on the cure to this disease, that managed to cure it and save a bunch of people’s lives,” Amodei says, “but could have saved even more.”
Amodei’s father’s passing has shaped his life’s path to this day, says Jade Wang, who dated him in the early 2010s. “It’s the difference between his father most likely dying and most likely living, okay?” she says, explaining that had scientific progress sped up a bit, Amodei’s father might still be with us. It just took a while before he found AI as a vessel to do it.
Upon recalling his father’s death, Amodei grows animated. His calls for export controls and AI safeguards, he believes, have been mischaracterized as the actions of someone irrationally seeking to impede AI progress. “I get really angry when someone’s like, ‘This guy’s a doomer. He wants to slow things down,’” Amodei tells me. “You heard what I just said: my father died because of cures that could have happened a few years [earlier]. I understand the benefit of this technology.”
PORTRAIT
FASHION
Dress code
Articles of Interest on “cocktail attire,” a dress code that’s simultaneously permissive and particular.
Cocktail Attire
—Articles Of Interest in Articles Of Interest
A 1960s shift? That’s a cocktail dress. A full-skirted Doris Day-esque number? Also a cocktail dress. A slinky jersey dress that could be worn to Studio 54? This too is a cocktail dress. In fact, it might be easier to define a cocktail dress by what it isn’t. It’s not a sundress or a playdress for romping around in the day. Nor is it an impressive evening gown, or a flowy dance dress. A cocktail dress is, in the words of Jean Arthur in the 1936 film The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, “something to spill cocktails on.” None of this brings me any closer to pinning down a definition.
Truly, I have imbibed cocktails in all kinds of dress and (during pandemic lockdown) in various states of undress. There is perhaps no other food or drink, with the possible exception of the lobster bib, that demands its own uniform. Despite the sassy assertion of Jean Arthur, the name “cocktail dress” is a bit of a red herring. The notion of the cocktail dress has less to do with the drink itself and more to do with the circumstances that allow for it.
One is only able to kick back with a stiff drink once the chores have been done, the children are put to bed, and there’s a moment devoid of obligation (or, at least, a moment to forget obligation). The freedom to get wasted was, therefore, elusive for most women for most of the cocktail’s history. To give you an idea of the gender disparity: the word “cocktail” entered the American lexicon in 1803, and it was over a hundred years later (!), in 1910, when The Boston American announced, “It has become a well-established habit for women to drink cocktails. It is thought a smart thing to do.”
Sure, at various points in history, everyone—including children—drank beer when it was considered cleaner and more pure than potentially cholera-infected water. But hard liquor? That was on the level of smoking tobacco. It was a privilege for men, unbecoming and sinful for a Victorian woman, who was more or less resigned to her home in the evenings.
In the turn of the last century, the kind of woman who drank cocktails was probably the same kind of woman who was starting to ride bikes and wear bloomers and make noise about wanting to be able to vote. This new “Drinking Woman” led a busy, active lifestyle, extending beyond the private sphere. Into the 1920s, when a woman could finally find herself able to vote, bike, wear pants, and hold down both a job and social engagements, she would soon realize she needed a flexible, versatile dress for her flexible, versatile day. It was like Coco Chanel read their minds.
In 1926, when Chanel presented a simple drop-waisted black dress, Vogue breathlessly described it as “a sort of uniform for all women of taste.” Here it was at last! A ready-to-wear staple, able to get the modern, dynamic woman through all the events of her day! This minimalist dress could go from afternoon to evening to night to late night, and American women took this French design and made it wholly their own. “The real masterpieces of American design are the cocktail dresses,” Christian Dior wrote in his 1957 autobiography. “[T]he cocktail being the symbol par excellence of the American way of life.” Dior, the first designer to proclaim that an even dress was officially called a “cocktail dress,” was enamored of the way that feisty American women lived and drank. The martini, after all, was “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet,” in the words of H.L. Mencken. Similarly to the martini, the cocktail dress was deceptively simple, and mostly just well-accessorized.
WATERCOLOR
PERKS
A good wife
—Posted in a Note by father_karine
around 7 or so years ago, my husband received a life-saving kidney transplant. some people say there’s no point to marriage if you don’t have kids, but one of the perks was that they let me go into the operating room to see him right afterwards. he wasn’t even fully conscious yet, but still slipping in and out of the ether.
i recall how suddenly well he looked lying there, likely an effect of the massive amount of fluids injected directly into his veins. he hadn’t looked well for some time so this was a sight for me. while he was still asleep, i did what any loving wife would do. i took out my phone, snapped a photo of him resting, and used one of those cheesy “face swap” filter apps that was popular at the time to turn him into a very whorish looking woman. the app gave him huge jugs, like triple e territory, which spilled out over his hospital gown. because his eyes were shut, it also super imposed these weird soulless fake AI eyes over his eyelids that made the picture look so uncanny and deranged, particularly when combined with the IV tubes and hospital equipment in the background.
i texted this cursed image to his two brothers, male cousins, and close guy friends, all of whom were relying on me (the wife) for real-time health updates, with the caption that the surgery was a success, but that they got his file mixed up so there were some extras added.
when my husband finally came to, i showed him the picture and the comments from his buddies (most of which were sexually harassing him) and he laughed so hard a nurse came over and yelled at me and asked me to leave because she was worried that he had popped the sutures and they needed to bring the doctor back to check him out.
the moral of this story is two-fold: first, being married is cool because they’ll let you into hospital rooms and stuff where you can be an absolute menace, and second, laughter isn’t always the best medicine. in fact, sometimes it’s the worst.
DRAWING
LEGAL AID
Method of modern love
Antonia Bentel’s “legally non-binding but emotionally enforceable contract for anyone recovering from Modern Romance.”
We regret to inform you this is a relationship
—Antonia Bentel in ANTO AESTHETICS
ARTICLE I: INTENT CLARIFICATION PROTOCOL (ICP)
1.1 Statement of Intent
You agree to state Your intentions out loud, in actual words, within the first three (3) engagements (“Dates”) or net-positive physical encounters (“Orgasms”), whichever comes first.
1.2 Permissible Intentions for Pursuing a Relationship with Me
Permissible intentions are limited to the following:
(a) You want to be in a Relationship with Me.
1.2.1 If You fail to meet the criteria outlined in 1.2, You may not enter into a Relationship with Me; however, You are granted eligibility to enter into the Conditional Pursuit Pathway (“CPP”).
Under the CPP, You will be granted the title Friend with Benefits and may continue to pursue Me recreationally if and only if:
(a) You are only interested in something ‘low pressure’ (i.e., casual sex), but promise to not pretend otherwise to extract affection or boosts to your ego when lonely; or,
(b) You are unsure of your emotional availability, but vow not to weaponise your confusion against emotionally hopeful parties (i.e., Me).
Participation will be monitored and any misuse of the CPP—e.g., pretending to be in love with Me and acting as such—will result in immediate disqualification from any future Relationship with Me.
1.3 Impermissible Intentions for Pursuing a Relationship with Me
Impermissible intentions include, but are not limited to:
(a) You are seeking validation without the intention of reciprocating basic emotional availability;
(b) You want to simulate a Relationship without having to call it one (see: Situationships, Article II); and,
(c) You are only with Me because You recently discovered your ex is dating someone new.
Should You pursue a Relationship with Me with any of these impermissible intentions, You understand they shall be punishable by:
(a) legally mandated counselling;
(b) immediate removal from the Emotional Playing Field; and,
(c) three (3) consecutive hours of eye contact with Your own reflection under harsh fluorescent lighting.
IN THE BAG
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography: Heidi Zin, Lawson Chapman, Layne Mercer, Jessie Kanelos Weiner, suy <3
Video & Audio: Suleika Jaouad
Writing: Anna Brones, Alex Kantrowitz, Articles Of Interest, father_karine, Antonia Bentel
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Thanks so much for featuring my watercolor!
I just love the picture aesthetics in this article ❤️