Substack Reads: Our house obsession, the K-pop power shift, and Ukraine’s mobile bakery
Hello and welcome to another edition of Substack Reads! This week, two very different kinds of influencers take us from the obsession with interior design in Los Angeles to baking bread in Ukraine, a writer shares thoughts on the solstice in Scotland, and a French forest garden is erupting in June. We hope there’s something here for everyone. Enjoy!
INTERIOR DESIGN
Why are we so obsessed with our houses?
Interior designer Orlando Soria is spending all his money making two houses in L.A. and Yosemite look the best they can. Why is he so hung up about it?
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in
Every year around December, I get emails from journalists asking me what my “design trends” predictions are for the next year. They want sound bites like “Chevrons are back!” (They’re not. I hate them.) But I tend to shy away from responding to those interviews because I don’t actually believe in design trends, and I most certainly do not want to throw any support behind the idea that people should be scouring the internet to see what “trends” they can overlay onto their homes in the coming year.
My distaste for this comes from my general distaste towards the idea of conformity. The idea that my house should look a certain way because other peoples’ homes look a certain way. Now, I’m not saying I somehow live above design trends and that I’m not influenced by what other people are doing. If you look at my plans for the Londo Lodge kitchen, they are most definitely infused with a lot of things that are trending hard now: traditional architectural styles, millwork, white oak, Craftsman details, and so on. But in an ideal world, designers and design writers are not running around asking each other to conform to whatever is happening design-wise right now. In an ideal world, we’d be designing spaces that will still look good in ten years, because redesigning and refurnishing homes constantly is actually terrible for the environment.
While this need to fit in by having a nice house is definitely the most problematic motive for home improvement of those I’ve described, I actually think it’s the one that might drive me the most.
BUSINESS
The K-pop power shift
Writer Tamar Herman sees in news about K-pop contract disputes a temperature check of where the industry is today
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in
We’re operating in a K-pop age when entertainment companies are losing the same sort of sway they once had and talent is taking a stand for itself. Simultaneously, the bigger companies are getting bigger, as in the case of Hybe or, on a smaller scale, JYP Entertainment, or being incorporated by outside investors and industries, like SM, now under Kakao. Creating business beyond fandom is becoming a big player, with intellectual property (IP) turned into a buzzword and popular acts being turned into cartoon characters and superheroes regularly.
None of this is necessarily new, in that the Korean entertainment industry has always been in development to new stages. But when Bang Si-Hyuk, the founder of Hybe and the man who brought BTS into existence, says K-pop is in crisis, there’s a reason for it. I don’t necessarily agree with some of the perspective that Bang’s shared, that growth of sales is shrinking and so that’s a major problem, in that that is mostly of interest to investors, who have become major power players in K-pop in 2023, while the industry is still seeing major growth in some facets (mostly girl groups rather than boy bands, but that’s another newsletter!). But I do think Bang’s concerns are affirmation of how things are changing so quickly in a way that the norms of the industry in recent years have been scattered to the wind.
Nothing homes in on the up-in-the-air feeling of the moment for K-pop than these trio of contract disputes.
AID
Small miracles, every day
On a hot June day, a mobile bakery delivers fresh bread to people in war-stricken parts of Ukraine. In her new Substack, food Instagrammer, home baker, and TV producer Felicity Spector will bring stories of Bake for Ukraine to life
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in
It is well past eleven o’clock at night, we are in a mobile bakery truck parked in a courtyard in Izmail, southern Ukraine—and Vlad is pulling the last of the sourdough loaves out of a deck oven, their bronzed crust adorned with the Ukrainian tryzub. A cheer goes up: ‘The last one!’—someone shouts ‘Slava Ukraini!’ and the reply echoes back ‘Heroyam Slava!’
An emotional moment—and there will be plenty more of those to come.
Back to that courtyard—and someone begins slicing up one of the just-baked loaves to check the crumb—a packet of butter is produced, a plate appears with slices of salo, or lard. We stand around in the dark, eating pieces of the delicious warm bread, butter melting onto our fingers. It is the end of a long and immensely fulfilling day doing a full test bake on board the mobile bakery, which we hope will be able to bring good-quality fresh bread to people who haven’t had access to it for months.
SCIENCE
The unintended consequences of drug busts
In their new Substack, economist and physician Bapu Jena and physician and public health researcher Chris Worsham argue that it’s critical to watch for the consequences of the opioid crisis and not create new problems
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and in
It’s natural to think that after opioids are seized by police, overdoses might go down in the immediate area, since there would be less opioids around (a direct “availability effect”) and because the seizure might deter illegal sales (a “deterrence effect”).
But that’s not how addiction works; people with opioid use disorder who are physiologically dependent on opioids are unlikely to simply stop taking opioids because their previous source went away. More likely, they’ll find a new source of opioids—and if that source isn’t supervised medical treatment, changing sources carries the risk of not knowing the potency of what they’re about to use. This, combined with the potential for reduced tolerance for opioids when patients go without them for a stretch of time, makes it easier to accidentally overdose.
Foxes, gannets, and burial grounds
Debut novelist Ali Millar returns to her maternal ancestral home on the summer solstice, the day her father died two years ago
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in , recommended by
Evening, I sit on the wide kitchen windowsill watching the sea, one fleck of white separates itself from the waves, as if a crest has risen from the sea. Soon, the sky is thick with them, they are not waves but birds, rising in the air, clear now of the pressure from earlier. They rise higher and higher, surf on the thermals, before positioning themselves carefully, diving down to hit the water, the splashes audible through the open window. I watch as one by one they all fall. I have seen birds fall from the sky before, but not like this. One winter, when we lived on a farm, I walked the children home through frozen fields as over the next field, pheasants flew, a barrage of shots and they fell, pirouetting in some violently choreographed dance. I said to my son I thought it beautiful, he said only from this field, in the next, it would not be the same. He was five, and right. If the gannet hits the water the wrong way, they’ll break their necks. I watch them rise to the surface of the water, they all get it right.
GARDENING
The June garden erupts
While Kate Hill tries to eat everything in her sprawling and silently growing French farmhouse garden, she shares a recipe for clafoutis and weed trends from the Chelsea Flower Show
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So June. Oh, musical June! Each year, when the tracks of French sunshine peak at 15 and a half hours of daylight, the sun rising at 6:15 and setting at 21:45 pm, I am solar saturated with a sort of preserving panic to capture the sweet fruit and sunny days in canning jars and odd glasses and old bottles. This year, like in my garden efforts, I am trying a different tack that reflects my hampered stamina. I look to see how I can instead munch my way through the garden, a modest handful of greens at a time, preparing one meal, one garden drink, every afternoon. I eschew the pantry hoarding of the past and promise to collect a few essential prizes—those solitary stemmed cherries in a jar of kirsch-like brandy, one strict batch of vin de noix—green walnut wine—and, of course, just a few meager jars of apricot jam. Okay, make it a dozen.
Of all the June foods and ways, I celebrate those most summery and ephemeral of recipes—featuring abundant eggs, soft stone fruit, and the barest amount of sugar to declare this a dessert rather than breakfast. Clafoutis is always paired with cherries now, but I use fully ripe apricots and white peaches—the first of June’s stone fruit—often avoiding the unnecessary “to pit or not to pit” chitchat. (My solution? Do what you like…) This is my go-to recipe, simplified to a formula of one tablespoon of flour and sugar for each egg plus enough milk to make a thin batter. I like cooking like this, and it reminds me that I don’t always need a book or recipe, just a bit of coaching. Try it and see.
POETRY
37 things
Inspired by writer Marlee Grace, poet Kat Farrell-Davis reveals 37 truths on her birthday
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in , recommended byMy Great Aunt Lavera woke from a nap convinced she was having a heart attack at the exact instant her twin brother was impaled through the chest and killed in a car crash.
Labor is decided upon and initiated by the baby.I once left my body on I-75, watched my car turn sideways in five lanes of oncoming traffic, a semi missing my car by inches. In that moment, I whispered, “I’m not ready” and felt the thing that was listening.
The African Grey bird species is thought to have the speaking/thinking ability of a human toddler.
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Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray.
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Another week of SUBSTACK Reads and i cant say it enough that we are getting tired of the same of 5 writers that Substack keeps pushing in every post 😂. I know, Bailey must be tired of reading my weekly criticism but this is exactly what I was saying yesterday....Ted Goia, Paolina Pampliano, Alexander Beiner, Rob Henderson, Matt Taibbi...I mean at least take a break from these writers for a week!
The excuse that these writers are being promoted weekly because they are successful in amassing a larger audience is like saying that everyone else with a lesser audience are horrible writers 😂
Happy Weekend Substackers 🕺🏻
So very honored to be featured here and that sort of puts my modest Substack to task. It’s not all about big numbers, but heartfelt communication and community and keeping a commitment to myself to write. Merci from deepest darkest Camont--a quiet place to work.