The Weekender: Banana discourse, texting anxiety, and the great audiobook debate
What we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week
This week, we’re going deep on the $6.2 million banana, wading into the debate about books vs. audiobooks, learning that “you’re luminous” is just a statement of fact, and enjoying a Substack twist on The Twilight Zone.
FUN FACT
Glow in the dark
Ars Poetica’s post about artistic ambition contains a surprising (and appropriately poetic) scientific revelation.
literature will lose. sunlight will win.
I learned recently that human beings glow: a secret shared among cells, too soft for the human eye.
In a study from 2009 performed by Masaki Kobayashi, Daisuke Kikuchi, and Hitoshi Okamura, five men were sealed in dark rooms and monitored with cameras so sensitive that they could detect light at the level of a single photon when kept at -120 degrees and sealed in a completely light-tight room. The men being filmed needed to be in complete darkness, as well as very naked and very clean.
The authors of the study concluded that we all ‘directly and rhythmically’ emit light, stating: ‘The human body literally glimmers. The intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes.’ It is apparently our faces that shine brightest, especially around the cheeks and mouth, revealing the warmth of our breath, the quiet persistence of blood beneath skin and—perhaps to a romantic—words.
Scientists will call it biophoton emission, but I think of it as something more gentle—a light we carry inside us as natural as breathing, a glow that comes and goes with the hours.
It’s a small study, of course, but it’s a startling and delicious thought: that amid the dimness, we are in fact, even if invisibly so, startlingly luminous beings.
PAINTING
FICTION
Welcome… to The Substack Zone
To celebrate the 66th anniversary of The Twilight Zone, 31 writers, artists, and musicians banded together to publish their own eerie works inspired by the show, and dubbed the project The Substack Zone. We’ve excerpted one of the stories below, and recommend clicking through the links at the top of the post to check them all out.
The Last Cup
The world froze. The bouncing numbers of the screensaver halted their journey across Scott’s monitor, trapped in digital amber at 3:49 AM. From the shadows emerged a gaunt man in an immaculate suit, his movements liquid in that static moment. The cherry of his cigarette glowed as he drew a long breath, the only warmth in the suspended air.
His voice cut through the stillness: “Picture, if you will, a man who spends his nights alone with machines, more comfortable with code than conversation. Scott Robison, an IT professional who’s about to discover that some debugging requires more than technical expertise. His morning routine at The Daily Grind coffee shop is the one constant in his carefully ordered world until anonymous text messages begin to arrive, each one warning of impending disaster, each one demanding a choice.
What begins as a simple crush on a barista who knows his order by heart will lead Scott to question the very nature of heroism, sacrifice, and love itself. A tale served hot and fresh at The Daily Grind, where today’s special is tomorrow’s destiny, and the price of saving lives might be higher than anyone is prepared to pay.
Submitted for your consideration: a story of love and timing, where a man’s last cup of coffee might just be his first … in the Twilight Zone.”
Without comment, the man turned away, his footsteps echoing in perfect isolation across the room. The shadows welcomed him back like an old friend. As he vanished, life stuttered forward. The screensaver’s numbers resumed their endless dance, and the clock ticked over to 3:50 AM.
COMIC
Text anxiety
Anjali Kamat’s comic beautifully illustrates the looming shame and anxiety of unanswered texts.
Oh god, my phone
—anjali in anji's mind
ART
Banana discourse
David Roberts: I’m obsessed with the six-million-dollar banana that sold at Sotheby’s this past week.
Ian Leslie: The banana was bought for 35 cents from a fruit stand in Manhattan on the morning of the auction. It was stuck to the wall at Sotheby’s with duct tape, thus assuming its form as an artwork. “Comedian,” by Maurizio Cattelan, was then sold to the highest bidder for $5.2 million ($6.2m with fees). Its new owner is a Chinese celebrity crypto entrepreneur called Justin Sun.
Virginia Chamlee: As the Sotheby’s auctioneer described, the banana is “iconic” and “disruptive,” but it also …. doesn’t exist. The physical artwork itself rots, and is replaced by a grocery-store banana. So it’s really not a banana that’s being sold—it’s an idea.
David Roberts: [W]hat the buyer of the art owns is a certificate of authenticity and explicit instructions on how to affix the banana to the wall. That’s it. There’s nothing to prevent any of us from taping our own bananas on the wall except a modicum of common sense.
Taylor White: Everyone knows what Comedian represents: wealth inequality, the commodification of art, the performative nature of cultural critique, the sense that the art world is mostly a sham. But this familiarity has bred a kind of numbness. We’ve seen it all before, and yet we act as if the banana is something new, as if this time, the critique might change something.
Jonathan Spies: Comedian is a paler shade of yellow than Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Everyone mentions Duchamp in reference to Cattelan, but the most important bit about Duchamp’s Fountain, for our purposes, is the date: 1917. How are our mouths still agape after a full century of this?
Ian Leslie: The bafflement and outrage Comedian generates is not external to the work but incorporated into it—it’s the whole point.
John Greiner-Ferris: Comedian is funny. It’s especially funny to people like me who think some people take themselves way too damn seriously. Like artists. Artists as a group take themselves way too seriously.
Taylor White: The banana is a visual meme, easy to grasp, easy to replicate, and impossible to ignore.
Virginia Chamlee: The winning bidder of the $6.2 million banana [...] is Justin Sun, a Chinese art collector and the founder of a cryptocurrency platform—so I imagine the idea of a “disruptive” piece of art—and investing in something that doesn’t exist, tangibly, resonated with him.
Ian Leslie: He says Comedian “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community. I believe this piece will inspire more thought and discussion in the future and will become a part of history.” He no doubt expects it to inflate the value of his cryptocurrency.
Judd Legum: The banana is not Sun’s most notable recent purchase.
Nameet Potnis, Thejaswini M A, and Prathik Desai: Just days before, Sun had made headlines by investing $30 million in World Liberty Financial, Donald Trump’s struggling crypto project.
That investment was strategic—it pushed the project over its minimum threshold, triggering a payout of at least $15 million to the Trump family.
Judd Legum: A foreign national under federal fraud prosecution making a purchase that results in an $18 million cash payment to the president-elect has all the makings of a major scandal. But it has been virtually ignored by several major media outlets.
The New York Times, for example, has published five articles about Sun’s purchase of the banana but none about Sun’s $30 million purchase of WLF tokens and his business partnership with Trump.
Nameet Potnis, Thejaswini M A, and Prathik Desai: In a market where narrative drives value, the ability to command attention becomes a form of capital itself.
TAPESTRY
VIDEO
Café society
Nishant Jain turns people-watching into art in this soothing video.
Every cafe window is a carousel of inspiration
—Nishant Jain in The SneakyArt Post
LITERATURE
Reading time
There’s a perpetual debate about whether listening to audiobooks “counts” as reading. Eleanor Stern explores the differences between books and audiobooks, noting how the mediums impact a reader’s relationship to time.
Audiobooks and Written Books Are Different (thank god!)
—Eleanor Stern in Wicked Tongue
[P]rint and audio storytelling place the reader in two utterly different relationships with time and temporality. I love print books partly because they place me, as a reader, outside of clock-time, and in something that we can think of as line-time or page-time. As Claire-Louise Bennett writes in Checkout 19, a book that is in many ways a brilliant meditation on print itself:
“We enjoy turning the pages of the book and our anticipation of doing so is obviously fairly fervid and undermines our attention to such an extent that we can’t help but skim over the last couple of sentences on the right page without taking in a single word. Quite often when we make a start on the left page it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to us. No. No. No it doesn't. And it is only then, isn’t it, that we realize, somewhat reluctantly, that we didn’t quite read the last few lines of the previous page properly.”
In other words, the print book moves forward at whichever pace I choose to set for it, my own pacing interacting with the visual space of the page as well as with the shape of the narrative. Prose writing is special partly because the writer can, like the reader, manipulate time. In the moment between a gun going off and the bullet making contact, a writer can insert chapters of internal monologue (see Tristram Shandy, or Mrs. Dalloway). Or vice versa: the author can boil a lifetime into a sentence, so that decades occupy just a second of the reader’s own time. But a print text allows the reader to mirror the writer, giving them the ability to manipulate time in turn. It’s like being alone in a spacious room. I can move around the architecture of the room in whichever direction and at whatever pace I want. I can labor over a sentence for minutes or speed through a page in seconds, I can skim, I can pause. I spoke earlier of my attention “drifting,” but this is somewhat unfair. Often, in print, when my attention diverges from the words on the page, it is because the words have prompted me to think something through. I take a moment to reflect on what I’ve read, to be reminded of a similar text or a related experience in my own life, and then return to the text, better off than I was before. Maybe because I live the rest of my life according to an external clock, I like the feeling of being freed from it, allowed to enter into a more internally-driven, fluid relationship to time itself.
Audiobooks, meanwhile, place the reader not in a spacious room but on a steadily moving train. The narrative progresses at its own pace, quite independently of the reader. In this way audiobooks achieve some of the excitement and provocation of live performance, in which the thrill comes partly from the sense of existing in shared time with others. Even with film and recorded music/books, which of course lack this live element, there is a sense of being along for the ride, handing over some of one’s agency to a performer, who will use our time the way they want to. Reading a print book can feel like being the only person in the world. Listening to an audiobook feels like following a friend through an unfamiliar landscape, maybe getting a little bit breathless. Keeping up is a pain, and part of the fun.
PAINTING
FOOD
Cardamom rose coffee cake
A classic coffee cafe gets “a little Middle Eastern twist” in Waleed Asadi’s recipe.
THE CUTTING EDGE
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography: Colette Kocek, Celeste Marcus, Kate McBride, Tatum Dooley, Max Nussenbaum
Video & Audio: Nishant Jain, Waleed Asadi
Writing: ars poetica, John Ward, anjali, david roberts, Ian Leslie, Virginia Chamlee, Taylor White, Jonathan Spies, johngreinerferrisstudio, Judd Legum, Nameet Potnis, Thejaswini M A, Prathik Desai, Eleanor Stern
Recently launched
Inspired by the writers featured in the Weekender? Creating 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.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
WOW, "The Substack Zone" is brilliant concept, bringing together so many talented creative people around a singular focus, and helping promote each other at the same time!
Fun fact: The Substack Zone is featured at https://rodserling.com 💥
We've got Sci-fi, horror, speculative--a little something for everyone! Go read a few stories and show these authors some love!