“My uncle used Claude to write my Nana’s obituary”

In this edition of the Weekender: blowing off tech-induced steam, escaping the city, and how one pair of glasses is tanking a company

Image by Vijay Sarathy

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

REMEMBRANCE

Grief in the age of AI

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

A Correction

—daisy cashin in i hate these people

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading

TINY FURNITURE

ISLAND LIFE

Coming back home

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

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

— Lily Sperry, in conversation with Blakely Spoor, in Health Gossip

Where did you move from, and why?

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

How did you ultimately make the decision to move?

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading

ANCIENT AFFECTION

MARKETING

The future’s so murky, I gotta wear shades

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

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

—Camille Moore in Branding With Benefits

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

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

The Numbers That Made The Rejection Inevitable

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

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

Why The Market Rejected It

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

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

Keep reading

ARTS AND CRAFTS

Card by Sarah Hardt

FASHION

The reward for a job well-done? Betrayal.

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

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

— 1 Granary and Barbara de Vries in 1 Granary

What was your brief when you arrived?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading

MOVIE REVIEWS

Shared by 11am Saturday

MEMORY LANE

Ponchos of seismic proportions

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

THE RAINCOAT THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

—Ali Royals in Permanent Record

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading

SCHMEAR SHAM

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: Vijay Sarathy, Lindsay O’Brien, The August Journal, Sarah Hardt, 11am Saturday, stephia

Writing: daisy cashin, Lily Sperry, Blakely Spoor, Camille Moore, 1 Granary, Barbara de Vries, Ali Royals

Recently launched

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

---

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.