Phones and loneliness, early tennis retirement, and ‘two-parent privilege’
Hello and welcome to another edition of Substack Reads. This week, Magdalene J. Taylor revisits her article on sex and loneliness that sparked so many conversations, former pro tennis player Andrea Petkovic celebrates and laments athletes’ early retirement, Katie Gee Salisbury compares two films with Asian American leads, 86 years apart, and musician Rhett Miller studies his latest song. We hope you enjoy it!
TECHNOLOGY & CULTURE
It’s obviously the phones
A year ago, critic Magdalene J. Taylor published an opinion essay for the New York Times on lack of sex in modern culture that changed her career. With new research out on the decline of hanging out, she digs deeper into the loneliness epidemic and its causes
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That is completely understandable. People are exhausted, they have jobs, they have families. You shouldn’t have to fight for places to be, for things to do offline. At the present moment, we’re stuck. We don’t know how to make friends or date or follow the news or even buy clothing without the help of our phones, and none of it is really our fault. Even as I complain about it, it’s not as though I’m going to give mine up entirely. What I really want for myself and everyone else is to just use my phone less. That is something we are in control of. I want people to prioritize the real world. Sex, the heart of what I most often write about, is one component of that. I care about sex and care about people having it because it’s something real. When I encouraged people to “have more sex” in the Times essay, that is ultimately what I was calling for: a renewed emphasis on the real.
SPORTS
Do not go gentle into that good night
After tennis star Andy Murray announced he is unlikely to play past this summer, a German former professional tennis player remembers her own early retirement from the game
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Old age comes early in a tennis player’s life. While others have just begun their professional aspirations, full of hope and optimism for what the future will bring just before people start framing them as middle-aged, tennis players have already been called “veterans” by TV announcers for a few years. Clearly, I’m not over it. I can forgive but I won’t forget. I was 28!
The interesting aspect of age in an athlete’s body is the slowness with which it comes at first, tricking you into thinking you might just get away with it. There will be enough progressive recovery treatments and surgeons, enough supplements and healthy foods for you to scrape by, and then one day you wake up and it has come for you with a thump. Age so far has gotten all of us, even the quickest ones.
All sports are firmly built on the foundation of youth. When I had my first big success in Australia in 2011, reaching the quarterfinals of a major tournament for the first time, breaking into the top 30, there were already plenty of 18-year-olds all around the world ready and waiting to push me out. Vague, quivering shadows, hard to make out but always there and multiplying by the hour. Every match you play, every training session you finish, is a defeat in the career-lasting war of attrition with your body. At the end of which awaits retirement.
CULTURE & HISTORY
The guy next door
Author Katie Gee Salisbury delves into the cinematic history of Daughter of Shanghai, starring Anna May Wong and Philip Ahn, comparing it to Netflix’s Beef—both works that feature Asian American actors in the lead roles, only 86 years apart
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As quietly revolutionary as Beef is, it’s not the first time we’ve seen two Asian American actors play “regular” Asian American characters on screen. That distinction, of course, belongs to Anna May Wong and Philip Ahn. They were just two Asian American kids who grew up together on North Figueroa Street in downtown L.A. and happened to make it into the movies. Anna May’s father owned the Chinese laundry on the block, while Philip came from a Korean American household.
In fact, the Ahns weren’t [just] any Korean family. Philip’s father, Ahn Chang Ho, more commonly known as Dosan, was one of Korea’s foremost leaders in the early twentieth century. As a statesman and anticolonial revolutionary, he organized Koreans on both sides of the Pacific. When he and his wife Yi Hye-ryeon (also known as Helen Lee) immigrated to the U.S. in 1902, they were the first married couple from Korea to enter the country. Three years later, Helen gave birth to their first child, Philip, who, according to some accounts, was the first Korean American born in Los Angeles.
MUSIC
Where the road goes
The singer and songwriter behind the Old 97’s, Rhett Miller, dissects the first song to drop from the band’s new album, American Primitive
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When I first listened to the playback of the rough mix of this song, I was sitting at the dining room table of a rental house the 97’s were sharing in Portland, Oregon. No one else was around and I had the music cranked pretty loud. I was loving the way the song sounded—each band member at the top of their game, and Peter Buck’s arpeggiated 12-string guitar chiming away. I was feeling so happy. When the bridge hit, and I heard the words “look at all the beautiful things you found,” I began to cry. Heavy tears running down my cheeks and my face all screwed up with unexpected sobs. It came without any warning and the sheer release of it was something I’ll never forget, something that was a long time coming.
ETHICS
Two truths and a lie
Author Kate Stone Lombardi is recounting stories from teaching journalism and writing in prisons. This week, a lesson in ethics uncovers some fraught memories
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As always, we could have spent the rest of this class talking, but we had writing to do. The prompt: Write about a time you faced an ethical dilemma. It could be in prison or not. Was there a clear right or wrong? Be specific and use description. Paint the scene.
One man wrote about whether a revenge shooting was justified, a subject that resonated with the rest of the class.
D’s story opened with, “I was sitting in the Rec Room, eating Ramen noodles and watching TMZ. A guy comes in, carrying all his gear, and goes to the officer, ‘I need to be moved. I’m not safe. You gotta get me out of there.’”
FOOD
Five-ingredient recipes, one big dinner party
Nothing breeds creativity like restriction, writes Rosie Mackean, who shares a monthly full dinner menu for six people
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in , recommended by
Each recipe today only uses up to 5 main ingredients, with salt, pepper, butter and oil being allowed as “givens.” I really, really love cooking like this—it makes me focus on what each ingredient is bringing to the dish, how to stretch it or coax more out of it, and what to pair it with for best results. Not to mention it makes everything cheaper and usually results in recipes that are less time-consuming. It’s a wonderful way to flex and warm up our culinary muscles ahead of spring and summer. March in the UK means everything is starting to wake up but winter’s hangover still lingers. Blossom arrives but lots of trees stay bare, most veg are still in the ground and, let’s be honest, it’s bloody cold. So I’ve created a menu that is minimalist in structure but maximalist in spirit to uplift us, to shake off those wintry blues and welcome spring with open arms and full hearts. Colour was also a big factor in my cooking this month—our dishes are all relatively monochromatic, celebrating the beauty and vibrance of their simplicity.
Our antipasti are Piemontese Peppers, where roasted romano peppers are drowned in a browned butter laced with anchovies and garlic, and Oeufs Mimosa—extra-mustardy devilled eggs. They go beautifully served together, with crusty warm bread.
DATA & ECONOMICS
Understanding “two-parent privilege”
K. Liam Smith reviews Melissa Kearney’s new book, The Two-Parent Privilege, and its bifurcation of America into two societies
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The children of single-parent homes have much worse outcomes on average, but are these problems due to single parents correlating with lower-income households, or is it actually caused by having only one parent? Kearney argues, some of both. Even adjusted for income, kids raised by single parents are less likely to graduate high school, less likely to graduate college, more likely to go to prison, more likely to be unemployed. Why? Being a parent isn’t just expensive; it’s also time-consuming and exhausting. Single parents are more stressed-out, and more stressed-out parents show less “emotional warmth” to their kids. They don’t have as much time to take them to after-school activities, even when they’re free. The kids are also more likely to get in trouble because they just have less supervision. She also shows numerous studies that find that boys do much better with a male [role] model in the home.
The bulk of the book defends the argument that these outcomes are because of how challenging it is to be a single parent—that it’s causal, not correlation.
FASHION
How I lessened the shopping “noise”
You’ve seen the TikTok filters, and Zooey Deschanel is a “winter”—but what is really behind the trend for “getting your colors done,” and how does it even work?
—Anna Newton in
We spent 90 minutes trying on every colour of the rainbow and making notes on the colours that made me shine and the ones that made me look ill and grey around the gills. Me in a pastel was akin to me with food poisoning.
The best part was the draping. Jo focused on one colour and then layered up different tones like I was a big baby wearing a bib. She then peeled them back one by one, like an onion, and we discussed our thoughts layer by layer. One interesting thing was just how quickly ‘my’ colour palette took shape and how easy it was to see the common threads between them.
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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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Lovely edit! This whole 'colours' thing... Need to dig into that!
I hear ya. I used to worry about something constantly. The minute the worry was dispatched with another would show up just to fill the void. I used to catastrophize constantly. With the idea that if I was always worried that I would always be prepared for the worst. Then came Oct 2022 when my daughter came within mins of dying after giving birth to my grandson. This was something that I never even believed was possible and never ever worried about. Thank God she lived but it was touch and go. That was my worst nightmare come to me when I least expected. No amount of worrying would have prevented it. It was then that I realized that my constant thinking about the worst case scenario was robbing me of my enjoyment of the present and I just stopped doing it. I no longer have the energy to create that kind of hyper surveillance. I’m just grateful every day. I’ll
Let the rest of the world sort itself out ❤️