This week, we’re reading a comic about a budding stop-motion designer, following a bananas audition story from Jameela Jamil, taking a road trip through moody farmland, and side-eyeing People’s choice for sexiest man of the year.
COMIC
Model friendship
A short graphic story about art, adolescence, friendship, and ego that rings painfully true.
Bruce was similarly afflicted, but other than video games and our mutual social impediment, we had nothing in common. He was silly and I had little respect for him.
I preferred to make my own friends. I preferred solitary practice, making drawings and sculptures in my room. I preferred to spend hours alone teaching myself stop motion animation.
Benjamin Fargen’s moody shots of Northern California farmland lend a romantic edge to the landscape. They bring Kansas to mind, and make the technicolor of Oz seem almost gaudy in comparison.
There’s something so inviting about a crisp autumn Sunday that beckons you to leave the noise behind and wander along a winding river road. The small towns you pass through seem untouched by the rush of modern life, their quiet dirt roads inviting you to sample a taste of simpler times.
Fall harvest is in full swing here in Northern California. Cornfields sway in the breeze; the fruit trees stand bare, their work done for the year, as the cold north wind whistles through their branches. It’s a season of transitions, where the warm sun on the back of your neck gives way to brisk gusts heralding the next storm.
I’ve been fortunate these past two years, capturing those rare days sandwiched between autumn storms. The skies tell their story, filled with dynamic clouds that shift with the wind, painting shadows across the landscape. The interplay of light and dark creates a dramatic contrast that stops me in my tracks.
These drives are an escape and a reminder—a pause in life’s relentless march. It’s not just about the photos, though they carry memories; it’s about the experience of standing still, feeling the cycle of seasons unfolding before you.
Jameela Jamil’s audition story for The Good Place has no business being as riveting as it is; after all, we know how it ends. And yet her journey through the process—which includes sabotage, an attempted escape out of a bathroom window, and a case of a mistaken dildo—is full of the kinds of twists and absurd turns that any Hollywood writer would envy.
My Uber driver doesn’t speak any English and rushes me out the car at our destination, but it’s not some big TV studio or office building. He’s left me on a quiet residential street in what feels like a suburb of LA. There are no clear house numbers on the doors. I have no idea where I am. I have an English phone that doesn’t work without wifi. I have no maps. I am stranded. I’ve arrived on time, but if I don’t work out where I’m going in the next two minutes I’m going to be late. Fuck.
To my relief I hear the sound of hurried stilettos beating the pavement. I turn around and it’s a beautiful, tall Indian woman. She looks like she should be famous. I wonder if she’s going to this audition. I tell her I’m lost, and I ask her for help. She beams at me with an elegant, sympathetic smile, tells me she isn’t headed to the same place, but stops to give me detailed directions. An angel.
I diligently follow her instructions down the road, cursing the cab driver for dropping me so far away. I’m going and going, but the signposts she has told me to look for are nowhere to be seen, and the area is starting to feel a little edgier. The atmosphere has shifted, and there are suddenly a lot of people visibly on crack everywhere I’m looking. There is a woman openly masturbating on a bench. It is 11am. I decide it’s probably time to turn back.
Finally I am back where I started, and after some digging around in people’s gardens (a fun way to get shot in America) I find the address! It’s just a Hollywood audition in a normal house. This is how some of my favorite pornos start…
I bolt through the door, sweaty, late, and very sorry. The room is full of actors waiting to go in. Nobody smiles. Everyone looks back down at their scripts. I’ve never been in a room like this. As I go to write my name down on the list, I have to move out of the way for whoever is coming out of the audition room. To my shock and awe, it’s ONLY THE FUCKING GIRL WHO TOLD ME SHE WASN’T GOING TO THE AUDITION AND SENT ME TEN MINUTES THE WRONG WAY INTO THE SCARY PART OF KOREATOWN SO NOW I’M FUCKING TWENTY MINUTES LATE AND SWEATING AND FLUSTERED LIKE BLOODY PRINCE ANDREW AREN’T I?
I like sleeping naked. I like when the hangover feels like being underwater. I like writing about you in cheap notebooks with expensive pens. I like people who like me. I like walking up and down 6th Street. I like feeling sore. I like feeling the earthquakes. I like drinking. I like reading about people who like drinking. I like reading about people who fucked up big time. I like reading about people who are lonely. I like white noise. I like the smog. I like the deer at the reservoir. I like passing by your old apartment building. I like being sad. I like dwelling. I like smoking inside. I like the way my skin feels under tights. I like vintage fur. I like four shots of espresso over ice. I like spice. I like candlelight. I like eating dinner after midnight. I like riding the line. I like making up my mind. I like staying up late. I like that I hate cocaine. I like listening to the radio in the car. I like strip mall bars. I like body heat. I like waking up next to my friends. I like wearing their clothes. I like platonic codependency. I like when the attachments run deep. I like thinking about the way things used to be. I like tenderness. I like temptation. I like tough questions. I like saying yes. I like to cry. I like to be described. I like spending money on stupid things. I like vitamins. I like prescription face creams. I like whiskey sours. I like extra cherries. I like magnolias. I like lilies. I like waking up in lots of jewelry. I like perfumes that smell like sunscreen. I like French underwear. I like cutting my own hair. I like disappearing. I like tattoos that don’t mean anything. I like letting the nostalgia get to me. I like when the decision is made for me. I like kissing goodbye. I like talking on the phone at night. I like talking about you. I like wearing all white.
When I think of John Krasinski, an American actor born in Boston, I think Yes, he’s definitely alive. John Krasinski? He definitely inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. And absolutely that oxygen moves his blood. He has internal organs aplenty, neurotransmitters galore. And that’s something special! I don’t think that about everyone. There are some people who are among us but not with us if you know what I mean. (Melania Trump and her body doubles.)
People [magazine] recently took the sentence “John Krasinski is alive, man”—again totally agree, no notes—and added the word “sexy,” then switched the words “alive” and “man.” This is why reading comprehension and media literacy are so important in an era of mass disinformation. A true statement becomes something else … here is where we encounter some problems.
The rumor, via Deuxmoi so take it with a grain of salt, is that the Sexiest Man Alive title is for sale, bought by a man who “knows that people are losing interest in him.” That applies to Krasinski, a CIA agent on television but also in real life, sure, but it also applies to … many of the men who have made the cut! (The Rock, John Legend, Blake Shelton, Michael B. Jordan, Chris Evans, Paul Rudd, Patrick Dempsey almost a decade after he left Grey’s Anatomy…) There’s another rumor that the most obvious choice this year, Glen Powell, declined People’s offer.
John Krasinski could be the sexiest man at an airport Panera. He could very well be the sexiest man on the campus of a small midwestern private university. He could be the sexiest man at a Pottery Barn outlet, getting a great deal on a big lamp. No, John Krasinski was not the sexiest man alive in 2024. He was not even the sexiest man on The Office! (That was David Wallace.) John Krasinski is not even the sexiest man in his own family. That’d be his brother-in-law, Stanley Tucci.
For Walter Martin’s radio episode on guitar players, he brings out the big guns—Django Reinhardt, Keith Richards, and many more—but he also surfaces a few hidden gems. In this clip, he shares a meditative song by folk guitarist Elizabeth Cotten.
Welcome to the tangentially Thanksgiving-related portion of the Weekender. Here, an 18th-century poet’s lyrical salad recipe. (If you’re looking for more, shall we say, useful recipes, check out the Thanksgiving menus we featured last week.)
This week I was in the mood for bread. As someone who is a self-confessed bread fiend and eats it pretty much every day, I don’t make it from scratch as often as I’d like. The joys of homemade bread are plenty. From the making to the kneading to the eating. The smell alone of fresh bread filling the kitchen is something I wish I could bottle up and carry with me. I had deep cravings for some ultra-soft, fluffy, slightly sweet, good-with-everything milk buns. I made these a couple of months ago when I had friends over for brunch and they went down very well and very quickly, so I thought it would only be polite to share them with you too.
One of the ways in which these buns stay so soft and pillowy is in part due to something called a tangzhong. It’s a method used frequently in Chinese and Japanese baking where a paste of flour and liquid (usually a mix of water and milk) is cooked until thick and added into the dough. The tangzhong helps to enhance the texture of the bread, as it’s able to absorb and retain more water and moisture without giving us a really sloppy dough. I also add in some milk powder when making bread like this, and the added protein contributes to the tender crumb and rise of the bread. If you don’t have any, you can still make this recipe with delicious results, but I find it’s a useful ingredient to keep in my cupboards.
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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girl insides mentioned!!
❤️ 💕