“Screens never appear in our dreams”
In this edition of the Weekender: Dostoyevsky revisited, Y2K nostalgia, and the traveling third space
This week, we’re rewriting Dostoevsky, remembering Tom Stoppard, building community, and time-traveling back to the days of bulky iMacs and AIM.
THE DISCOURSE
This week on Substack
And the Pantone color of the year is. . . white. Pantone released its annual color choice for 2026: Cloud Dancer, a “billowy white.” For some, the color is a “comfort neutral” or a “blank canvas,” exactly what we need as we face a new, likely turbulent year. For others, the lack-of-color color is everything from boring to a recession indicator to a subtle reminder of the Sydney Sweeney “good genes” controversy. Hard to say whether Cloud Dancer is being received any better than 2025’s Mocha Mousse (though, to be fair, people have worn a lot of brown this year).
The $140,000 poverty line: Substackers are debating what it costs to raise a family in the United States. In his Substack and for The Free Press, financial executive Michael W. Green took aim at the federal poverty calculation. Adjusting for modern expenses, he argues, the poverty line for a family of four should be raised from about $32,000 a year to about $140,000. Some have pushed back, including economist Noah Smith, who wrote a post in Noahpinion arguing that the idea was “very silly.” In The Purse, Lindsey Stanberry and Alicia Adamczyk took a practical approach, examining a few real families making that much and describing their lifestyle.
Spotify Wrapped is here. The “listening age” was an especially savvy addition this year, judging by the number of 20- and 30-somethings sharing their geriatric stats. Meanwhile, Substacker Alejandro Aboy created his own version specifically for Substack publishers. Go forth and wrap!
TRENDS
Community in motion
Patrick Kho reports on a new vision for third spaces—those gathering spaces beyond the workplace and the home. This new version is less a physical space where communities might (or might not) interact, and more intentional collectives that are “people first, space second.”
The Rise of the Traveling Third Space
—Patrick Kho in THE CHOW
Athena is among several young people creating what I call “traveling third spaces”: new communities that are people-first, space-second. Traveling third spaces are not physically fixed; they move across cafes, malls, restaurants, and host various programming for a singular community in a particular city. And they exist around the world—in London, a community of the name One House Social Club brings people together in “London’s Best Spots”; in New York, a traveling dinner series called (get this) 3rd Space gathers creatives and entrepreneurs for three-course meals around the city.
The traveling third space recognizes that public spaces are not a guarantor of belonging; they are merely a base upon which people form connections and bond over shared interests.
Ivana Duong, a graphic designer, is engaging in similar work. She’s the creative producer of Critical Mass, a collective/community with regular, twice-monthly meetups for creatives in Hong Kong.
“Once you graduate college and settle more into having a more adult lifestyle, it’s harder to find community,” Ivana says. “With Critical Mass, we niched down particularly to artists and creatives because that’s what the team’s familiar with.”
Critical Mass’ recurring meetup (named “House Party”) is held at Heath Mall every other Wednesday. The draw, Ivana says, is just for a “low-stakes hangout.” Spontaneity is a key part of their programming: people can intersperse in and out at any given time and hang out. It’s also completely free. The collective regularly hosts workshops around zine-making, tattoo design, and logos-making on Figma—activities which continue to attract people with a creative sensibility. (Full disclosure: I’m actively involved in Critical Mass’ programming, and can attest to this firsthand.)
Having a group of creative people in one place “sets a theme” and so “allows for a certain audience to gather” in a way that just going to the park or a cafe might not. At a Critical Mass House Party, you already have common ground with people, as opposed to just, say, approaching someone at a bar. “It establishes beyond the basic need of a place to relax [after work],” says Ivana. “Like, oh, creatives are here!”
TRAVEL
IN MEMORIAM
Remembering Tom Stoppard
Tina Brown dives into the unconventional life and brilliance of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who died last week at the age of 88.
Why Tom Stoppard Was the Real Thing
—Tina Brown in FRESH HELL Tina Brown's Diary
No, not Tom Stoppard, too! In the verbal slop of modern culture, the loss of his flashing, ambidextrous wit and his playful erudition is a literary blow especially hard to bear. His writing was the enemy of the turgid absolutes that blight our contemporary discourse. He once said: “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”
I have been obsessed with the great Tom since our first meeting, when I was sixteen. He was then the rising—or, rather, the already blazing—thirty-one-year-old star of British theatre. The blaze had been ignited by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which burst from a humble venue at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and wound up at the National Theatre in 1967. When asked later, in New York, what the play was about, he replied, “It’s about to make me very rich.” And it did.
In 1969, Tom showed up at my childhood home in Buckinghamshire to see my film producer father, George Brown, about the possibility of bringing his most recent play, The Real Inspector Hound, to the screen. He lived only twenty minutes away, and eventually bought a country manor nearby for a new life with his second wife, Miriam, a glamorous TV doctor. They became, in a way, the first media power couple, until Tom blew up his marriage in 1990 for one of his leading ladies, Felicity Kendal. (Cf. Charlotte, the wife in The Real Thing, his play about marital infidelity: “There are no commitments, only bargains.”)
He turned up that day at our home, I recall, wearing black and yellow patent shoes, flared velvet trousers, and a trailing student scarf. He chain-smoked as if sipping through a straw. The whole camp look was set off by that sardonic but measured voice and the exotic way he emphasized his ‘r’s. When Tom uttered words like “meretricious” or “rancorous,” the liquid consonants rolled off his tongue with languorous precision. He probably had one of the three most voluptuous mouths of the mid-20th century; the other two were possessed by his friend Mick Jagger and the late Martin Amis. I was mesmerized (though, as an awed teenager, ignored) by a playwright who was also, to all appearances, a rock star.
Tom later became a treasured friend and, five decades later, I still find The Real Inspector Hound the most screamingly funny work in the entire Stoppard oeuvre. Hound is so simple, yet so ingenious in its cavorting concept of a play within a play, centered on two pretentious theatre critics, the lofty Birdboot and the embittered second string, Moon, who get pulled into the country house murder-mystery they have come to review. The play opens with a dead body onstage that remains there for the entire performance, ignored by all the characters, who seem not to notice that it’s a leading clue. The housekeeper, Mrs. Drudge, answers the phone in such Mousetrappish stage-direction lingo as, “Hallo, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early Spring?”
Here was classic, joyful absurdity, devoid of the political confrontation then in vogue in the work of playwrights such as Howard Brenton and David Edgar. “I get deeply embarrassed by the statements and postures of ‘committed theatre,’” Stoppard told an interviewer in 1973. “I’ve never felt that art is important. That’s been my secret guilt.” It’s extraordinary to think that none of Tom’s plays would be staged at the Royal Court Theatre until Rock ’n’ Roll, in 2006. There was a feeling among advocates of committed theatre that Tom was little more than a “university wit”—pretty rich considering that, by choice, he never went to college. Who needed Oxford or Cambridge when you could satisfy your passion for finding things out by shoe-leather reporting? For a time, he held down the job of motoring correspondent for the Western Daily Press, even though he couldn’t drive. (“I used to review the upholstery,” he explained.) Unburdened by a degree, Stoppard spent the rest of his life in a kind of autodidactic frenzy, risking one deep dive after another into subjects as varied as linguistic philosophy, landscape gardening, and nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries. But not once did he drown in solemnity.
PORTRAIT
LITERATURE
Posts from Underground
Vāneçka has begun transposing Dostoyevsky’s classic Notes from Underground into a modern context, translating the text faithfully while updating it to a contemporary setting. In so doing, he brings out the original’s comedy, eschewing the “archaic translations” that “completely bury its manic, self-contradictory energy.”
Into the Underground
—vāneçka in nova·nevédoma
I’m a sick man. . . I’m a spiteful man. Unattractive man I am. I think I have depression. Although I don’t understand anything about my condition and don’t know whether I have it at all. I’m not in therapy and never been to therapy, though I respect psychology and have read Freud. Besides, I constantly self-diagnose; well, at least enough to respect the profession (I’m smart enough not to self-diagnose, but also educated enough to self-diagnose). Nah, I won’t go to therapy out of spite. You won’t understand it. But I do understand. I obviously can’t explain to you for whom exactly things are worse because of my spite; I know perfectly well that I’m not hurting therapists by not going to therapy; I know better than anyone that I’m only fucking myself over with all this and nobody else. But still, if I don’t go to therapy, it’s out of spite. I’m depressed, so let me get even more depressed!
I’ve been living like that for a while—maybe twenty years. Now I’m forty. I used to work, now I don’t. I was a toxic IT support guy. I was rude and took pleasure in it. I mean, I didn’t steal company equipment, so I had to compensate myself somehow. (Bad joke; but I won’t delete it. I wrote it thinking it was witty, but now that I see I just wanted to show off pathetically—I’m deliberately leaving it in!) When users would come to my desk with their tickets, I’d grind my teeth at them and feel inexorable pleasure when I managed to upset someone. Almost always managed to. Mostly they were all timid types: you know—users. But among the self-important ones there was some middle manager I especially couldn’t stand. He refused to submit and kept stubbornly following up on tickets. I had a war with him over his tickets for a year and a half. I finally broke him. He stopped following up. Though this happened when I was younger. But do you know, dear readers, what the main point of my spite was? The whole thing, the nastiest thing, was that every minute, even in moments of my strongest bile, I shamefully realised that I was not only not spiteful, but not even a bitter person, that I was just barking at shadows for nothing and amusing myself with it. I’m foaming at my mouth, but bring me some little treat—a cup of coffee or whatnot—and I’ll calm down. I’ll even feel touched, though afterwards I’ll grind my teeth at myself and suffer from insomnia for months. That’s just my way.
I lied to you above, lied that I was a toxic IT guy. Lied out of spite. I was just messing around with the users and that one guy, but in reality I could never be mean to anyone. I was constantly aware of many, many other feelings opposite to that. I felt them swarming in me, these opposite feelings. I knew they’d been swarming in me my whole life and trying to get out, but I wouldn’t let them, I didn’t, never did. They tortured me to the point of shame, brought me to convulsions and—I was completely fed up with them! Don’t you reckon, dear readers, that I’m repenting something before you now, that I’m asking your forgiveness for something? . . . I’m sure that you do reckon. . . But anyway, I assure you, I don’t care even if you do. . .
PAINTING
NOSTALGIA
Y2K
Drew Austin on the adolescence of the internet, and the difficulty of capturing the moment in media.
The Last People Before the Internet
Last week, I went to a party at my friend’s parents’ house, and her lime green iMac from high school had been taken out of storage and placed on a side table in one of the rooms. Long since functional, it sat on display like a sculpture and got a lot of attention. Not just an iconic piece of Y2K-era industrial design and a perfect visual emblem of an idealized pre-9/11 culture, the iMac G3 is also a powerful source of personal nostalgia for older millennials, evoking a phase of youth as reliably as the AOL Instant Messenger pings and chimes that would issue from its speakers nonstop. Before computers flattened into two-dimensional screens and effectively disappeared, when they still possessed some awkward heft, this was about as good as they ever looked.
That was my second encounter with a candy-colored early-’00s iMac in the last two weeks. An identical one appeared in a play called “Initiative” I’d just seen, currently showing at the Public Theater for another week, which takes place over four years of high school between 2000 and 2004. The play is a coming-of-age story about a group of friends who live in suburban California and bond over an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons game that runs the course of their high school years. The play was excellent (and five hours long), but what initially interested me about it was the choice to set it in the early ’00s, not just because I’ve been paying attention to how aging millennials like myself are reflecting upon our own past and narrativizing it but because those years remain a surprisingly under-historicized era—now as far in the past as the ’70s were in 2001, yet somehow not feeling all that distant or entirely separate from the present, the way prior decades did (in contrast, the ’80s already felt quite dated in the ’90s). The lime green iMac and similar props, along with constant AOL Instant Messenger usage and occasional references to background events like 9/11, thus perform an important function in the play: Without those details, the setting might pass for contemporary. The mall attire that the suburban teenage characters wear, for example, represents the early ’00s but has also returned in various forms in the years since, and still does. You don’t have to look too hard to find “Y2K fashion” or cargo pants today.
“Initiative” is not specifically about the internet, but it captures the technology’s rapidly growing role in early-’00s social life. The specific time period it portrays, between the summers of 2000 and 2004, bookended by misplaced Y2K anxiety and the arrival of Facebook, was solidly the AOL Instant Messenger era: AIM was released in 1997, peaked in 2001, and declined more rapidly after 2005, losing ground to SMS texting and social media. Early in the play, one character’s younger brother helps him download it, telling him that “AIM isn’t nerdy, it’s just a way to talk to people online.” The play is peppered with such amusing reminders of what it felt like to be figuring out the internet, before it was all so obvious (“message boards aren’t real life!”), and the janky early-’00s internet forms a backdrop for the characters’ similarly awkward adolescence: simultaneous spoken AIM conversations overlapping with in-person dialogue, case-sensitive usernames with underscores projected onto the walls of the set, Goatse links spelled out verbally by a character.
I rarely think about AIM today, despite the huge role it played in my life as a teenager. And when I saw the lime green iMacs, I realized I never think about those anymore either. Napster endures in memory as an inflection point for media consumption and the music industry. But overall, that era will increasingly seem like a transitional phase, more difficult to place as time passes and history is divided into two parts, before and after the internet. September 11 was the ultimate historical event, meanwhile, occurring right in the middle of all this, during AIM’s peak year of usage. Perhaps 9/11 has drawn all the air out of the room, dominating our memory of that time so completely that it’s hard to see anything that didn’t align with the seriousness it dictated. Any work of fiction set around that time must carefully measure its proximity to that event or risk being somehow “about” 9/11—a problem that ’80s and ’90s period pieces rarely face.
The migration of culture into digital space has surely made the recent past feel more ahistorical. In that sense, the early ’00s were the end of something as well as the beginning of something else. It’s not that any less happened then but that more of what did happen resists straightforward depiction. The challenge of portraying online activity in film and TV has always fascinated me, because it raises uncomfortable questions about how we use that technology as well as how storytelling works. Showing a screen on another screen usually feels like the worst solution to the problem. Another option is to set the story in a time or place where screens don’t exist. There is an archaic but persistent idea that any drama worth portraying happens in real life, not on a screen, but that is probably just a holdover from when screens were one-way channels of static, pre-packaged entertainment, not portals to a dynamic environment where a lot does happen. People like to point out that screens never appear in our dreams, suggesting that deep down we all long to get off our phones, but as I’ve wondered before, maybe it’s just that the dream is the screen, our phones framing our reality so comprehensively that we already think we live inside of them.Keep reading
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography: Melissa Lakey, Josh Gosfield, Ali Liebegott
Video & Audio: Ade
Writing: Patrick Kho, Tina Brown, vāneçka, Drew Austin
Recently launched
Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has joined Substack. As he says, “Communication is changing, and I want to be a part of that. People have a right to know how decisions that affect them are taken and why. That’s why I’m now on Substack.”
Kamala Harris also joined Substack this week. The former Vice President’s welcome video echoes Keir Starmer’s message: “I think it’s so important to be where people are, and speak with people where they are, and that includes online and here on Substack.”
The New Yorker has joined Substack, launching as “a book club, but for magazine articles.” Each week the editors will share a New Yorker story for free, for readers to enjoy and discuss.
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 Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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I dream about screens
No, you don't have dreams with screens in them. Some of us have them all the time, from computers to phone screens, to an entire visual field that behaves like a user interface... This is social meme that's become a myth that needs to die.