This week, we’re throwing bad parties, soaking plates, and catching up on college radio.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• OpenAI acquires TBPN: , “the talk show that every VC, founder, and CTO in Silicon Valley watches,” announced on Thursday that they’d been acquired by OpenAI for an undisclosed sum. TBPN will apparently retain editorial independence, while “OpenAI will scale and support TBPN as a platform for live conversations, product and industry dialogue, accelerating the reach of new ideas, tools, and technologies to developers and consumers around the world.” A sign that even the most powerful companies are “desperate for storytellers”—and, when it comes to picking media personalities, “you cannot compete with people who are having more fun than you.”

• The marketers deciding your taste: Musician dug into the work of Chaotic Good Projects, “a digital marketing agency that promises to create virality by, among other things, manufacturing hundreds of fake fan accounts for musicians.” Unsurprisingly, many of their clients are pop stars and major commercial successes. “But the roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect (and, apologies to the internet sensations, including people I consider to be genuinely great musicians). Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.” Tellingly, since Eliza’s post went up, Chaotic Good has pulled down some of the more incriminating sections from their website. Many readers are disappointed but not necessarily surprised: “That artists and labels believe they need to create fake accounts to have any chance of getting traction in a tough algorithm-controlled marketplace is another race to the bottom.”

LOVE STORY

Withholding

August Lamm on falling for a man whose last name she doesn’t know.

Purity Embodied

— in

I’m on a patio, drinking seltzer, at the worst party of the summer. It’s my party. None of the guests know each other, few of them want to. The conversation is scattered introductions, biographical facts, and observations about the backyard. I am sitting in a hammock to appear relaxed. The sky is light. The sun will never set. There is no music or booze to save us.

When Robin arrives, I maneuver out of the hammock too quickly and land on all fours. I stand and walk toward him, brushing dirt off my knees.

“I’m so glad you came,” I whisper. “One minute,” I call to my guests, who look on with mounting panic as I enter the house.

I lead Robin upstairs to my bedroom, where I sit down on the bed and begin to cry. I can’t name a single thing that has happened to Robin in the past year, but I still know him better than anyone. Or I know so little that I can imagine the rest.

“It’s a disaster,” I say.

“It’s fine,” he says without conviction.

“I wasn’t ready for this,” I say, trying to smile. “A party. It’s too soon.”

He sits down next to me. Through the open window I hear snatches of forced conversation, long pauses, no laughter. My dad died a month ago. Robin’s dad died a decade ago. This is why I invited him. I am too consumed with grief to wonder if this is fair. Our legs are touching and it’s unclear who’s responsible.

“Do you ever think about us?” I say.

“We’ve tried this before,” Robin says, which isn’t a no.

---

We met on a park bench in London. He had coffee in the corners of his mouth even though it was late afternoon. He invited me to a magazine launch. I said yes because I wanted to meet writers, to become one.

The magazine was Catholic. Everyone at the launch was Catholic, including him. They had posh accents and advanced degrees, which made Catholicism seem more like an academic distinction than a faith. I was curious and asked a lot of questions.

“We don’t follow it to the letter,” a man told me, one arm around his girlfriend’s shoulders.

“There’s room for interpretation,” she confirmed.

Not everyone agreed. “You definitely can’t have sex before marriage,” they said, scanning the room. “Who here told you otherwise?”

I went home alone. The next morning, I called Robin. We got coffee and talked about God. I explained how whenever I missed a bus or train, I imagine I’ve narrowly avoided some horrible fate. Robin was listening so intently that I wanted to say, “I’m not serious,” even though I was.

We began seeing each other once a week. He didn’t live in the city. During his visits, I felt certain that I could possess him if I wanted. I just had to say the word. But during his absences, he was impossible to get ahold of, too busy to make plans, too tired to talk.

“Just get on a train,” I said. “We’ll do something nice.”

“I can’t,” he replied. “I just can’t.”

“I’ll come to you.” But how could I do that? He hadn’t told me the name of his town.

He also hadn’t told me his last name. He was a professional writer, he explained. He didn’t want me to see that side of him, not until we knew each other better.

His work was out there, somewhere, consumed and interpreted, printed and posted and shared. It haunted me. The internet was vast. I tried looking up his first name, his university, his religion. I tried every possible search term, but without his last name, nothing came up.

One night, walking home from a pub, I stopped on a square of sidewalk and told him, “I’m not moving until you tell me your last name.”

“Come on,” he said wearily, as if embarrassed on my behalf. A minute passed in silence. I stepped out of the square and we continued walking.

Keep reading

MOUNTAINS

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Ode to a chore

Great writing has no expiration date. For our first “From the Archives” post, we’re sharing Marian Bull’s 2023 ode to the chore that waits on the other side of dinner: the dishes.

How to Do the Dishes

— in

The end point of cooking is not eating; it is cleaning.

We dream, we plan, we crave, we shop, we chop, we fry, we simmer, we garnish, we serve. And then we eat, sometimes alone and sometimes not, and when the eating is done, a mess remains, record of our pleasure. We must put spices back on their racks, the halved butter stick back in the fridge before it pools on the counter. We must transfer braised greens and ladlefuls of curry into containers that will keep them from spoiling. We must hem and haw over whether cake goes in the fridge or stays on the table, to stare at us for breakfast. We must collect all the surfaces and vessels we have dirtied, and turn them clean again. This is not a result of the cooking process, but the final leg of it.

Sometimes—and I’ve come to dislike this, though I know I’ve done it in the past—a recipe will end with a one-word instructive sentence: “Eat.” They almost never end with phrases like Eat, and then when you’re done, store the rice separate from the soup, or else it will become a big brothless glump. Or, Be sure to soak plates immediately, else you’ll be scrubbing against gnarly pools of congealed yolk. It’s obvious why recipes omit this bit: it would make them too depressing. People read recipes for inspiration and reassurance, not for a glaring reminder of chores.

At most, a recipe’s headnote might nod towards the idea of mess. This often appears in the assurance of “Yes, this recipe asks you to use three pans, but it’s worth it,” or the inverse assurance of “instead of leaving you with three pots to clean, this recipe does all the work in one.” How you might clean those pots, however, is rarely mentioned. The author assumes you can take it from here. Surely your mother taught you?

🍽️

Six years ago I was still working at GQ, chatting with a coworker about his new apartment, about the drudgery of keeping one’s space tidy. I shared a little hack I’d created for myself. Sometimes when I don’t feel like doing the dishes, I’ll set a timer for 8 minutes, and tell myself that when it goes off, I can stop. But I never do. I’m either done or I keep going, it always works. He stared his buffoonishly handsome face at me, warping it into a scowl of judgment, neck tugged back in a reflex of disgust. How many dishes are piling up in your sink?

I felt a brief flash of shame, rescued by indignance. Of course, I thought. This man is rarely feeding himself. He was always going on dates, four or five a week. His dishes did not accrue. The memory appears to me intermittently, that shame blooming anew: the implication that I am always making a mess, that nobody taught me right. Growing up, my father did the dishes alone, rinsing them diligently before lining them up neatly in our suburban dishwasher.

Only now am I remembering that my coworker had, a year prior to our conversation, worked on a story about how to throw a dinner party successfully. The sort of GQ primer that helps men feel competent, I’ve written them too. This one instructed readers to leave the dishes for the morning. Just go to sleep, it said blithely. When I first read this it shocked me, forced my neck back in that same gulp of disgust. Absolutely not.

🍽️

A longer-ago coworker, a brilliant home cook, had an almost militant dinner party cleaning strategy. She hosted lavish feasts—this phrase not an exaggeration—in her studio apartment, and would not let a single guest do the dishes, not even her best and oldest and most generous friends. Tiny apartments without Maytags require specific dish-cleaning strategies, and this one was no different: there were a few inches of counter space, if I remember correctly, and a butcher block. When everyone left, tramping wine-soaked down narrow flights of stairs, she would put on a cassette tape of the Smiths and blast it while doing dishes to her personal specifications, lining everything up just so.

I admired this not just because of the competence it communicated, but because it was a reflection of one cook’s finely honed tastes. Not only did she believe in always buying the nice butter, or architecting obscurely themed meals, but she knew exactly how she liked to do the dishes. I had always wanted to become a person with such strong convictions and such clean plates.

Keep reading

PHOTOGRAPHY

MUSIC

Recommended if you like . . .

Consider this a musical palate cleanser after that exposé on Chaotic Good: Emily White surveys “the wide-ranging, deeply human and often surprising taste of college radio DJs right now.”

10 Albums in Rotation on College Radio in 2026 (So Far)

— in emwhitenoise

Every college radio station has a music library.

At WVAU, we called this the rack: a black wire shelf stacked with promo CDs curated by the music staff, with mini reviews and recommended if you like (“RIYL”) tags lovingly taped onto jewel cases. Sometimes I’d play a song on air for the first time based solely on those notes!

“Our music directors have been writing comments on the records and CDs since the seventies,” Marcus Rothera, general manager of Boston College’s WZBC told me last year. “It’s like an analog Internet comment section.”

I surveyed 80+ DJs in 2025 who say student interest in college radio has surged in recent years, driven by algorithm fatigue, analog nostalgia and a desire for “third spaces.” The New York Times followed with a fantastic profile of KXLU, capturing college radio’s “unpredictability, uniqueness and random brilliance.”

In search of some fresh music recommendations, I asked college radio stations across North America to share their favorite albums of 2026 so far. Many new releases are now submitted and reviewed digitally, so I asked Dusty Henry of KEXP and Another Thought to illustrate the picks.

This isn’t an official chart. It’s a snapshot of the wide-ranging, deeply human and often surprising taste of college radio DJs right now, in no particular order.

Enjoy digging through the stacks. College radio, forever <3

Deep shoegaze distortion coupled with vulnerable, echoing lyrics, Segmentation can piece together the heel-wounded parts of any listener with its heavy sound. The album transcends its mainstream counterparts, taking you on a journey with swirling liminal riffs. An alternative album for an alternative station: Segmentation is the debut album of Heel, who are also active members at Texas A&M’s KANM Student Radio.

Favorite Tracks: “Through Me,” “August,” and “Waste.”

RIYL: Narrow Head, Trauma Ray, Starflyer 59, grungegaze, Gregg Araki films, limerence, wildflower honey, driving in Texas at night, skateparks, the sound of frogs croaking at the lake after sundown, cyberpunk

—DJ playlistmachinemaker (Natalia Silva), Onda Fresalternativa, KANM, Texas A&M (College Station, Texas)

Bouncy, down-to-earth love songs. The Mirror, fittingly introspective, feels both chronological and retrospective, distinctly Meek, yet totally relatable in its romantic storytelling.

Favorite tracks: Gasoline (1), Can I Mend It? (3), Worms (8)

RIYL: Big Thief (of course), acoustic guitar, lavender marriages, if Licorice Pizza is your favorite movie.

—Ella Hegarty, Filet of the Day, WCFM, Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts)

Memphis rapper and producer Gavin Mays continues his foray into the digitally scarred, sample-heavy, and increasingly abstract annals of internet-born hip-hop with EVEN COLDER SPRING. Featuring his signature philosophically inclined stream-of-consciousness lyricism and lo-fi, often drumless production style. A great atmospheric and heady record which continues Mays’ legacy of being one of the most interesting forces in underground hip-hop.

Favorite Tracks: Even Colder Spring – Parts 1 & 2, The Élan Vital, Tribeca, Concrete Masks, Closing Door

RIYL: cLOUDDEAD, Armand Hammer, SpaceGhostPurrp, walking around the city at 3am after you left the party

—DJ Nick (Nick Staudacher), Sonic Valhalla, WCBN, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

Keep reading

EMBROIDERY

FOOD

Bicoastal grains

This post from Emily Wilson and Jamie Feldmar on the wave of “landrace heritage grains” taking over bakeries in L.A. and N.Y. is a great read to whet your appetite for Easter pastries.

The Whole Grains Revolution Has Come for Your Croissant

— and in

Citrus, grapes, nuts: these are the crops synonymous with California agriculture. Avocados, dairy, and lettuces, too. But amber waves of grain? That is, traditionally speaking, a Midwestern thing.

But California has never been bound by tradition, which is why, about 12 years ago, a group of Kern County farmers decided to experiment with growing more whole grains. And not just any whole grains—ancient, heritage breed varieties like Red Fife and Sonora wheat that flourish in Tehachapi, a low mountain valley halfway between Bakersfield and Fresno, that would eventually become the cause célèbre of dozens of L.A.’s best bakers, pastry chefs, brewers, and distillers.

The undertaking, appropriately dubbed the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project, is a joint effort between Alex Weiser of Weiser Family Farms and biologist-turned-grower Sherry Mandell, an incredibly well-connected ball of energy who is largely responsible for getting the grains to said chefs and bakers. With encouragement from L.A.’s own Japanese food luminary Sonoko Sakai and seeds donated by heirloom-grain evangelist Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, what started as a two-acre experiment has expanded to nearly 400 and resulted in Tehachapi-grown grains getting name-checked on menus from Providence to Petitgrain.

Growing landrace heritage grains is good for the planet: they’re drought-tolerant, with unique root systems that spread deep into the earth, functioning as a carbon sink and conditioning the soil between plantings of other crops. It’s also good for the diner: “We grow it because it’s delicious, and it’s delicious because of the way we grow it,” says Mandell. “Even if you only add 15%-30% of a heritage grain or flour to your product, it makes a huge difference,” she says. “You can tell just from looking at it. And once you taste it, it’s life-changing, because that grain becomes a part of the flavor profile itself,” she says, describing items made with whole grains as “deeper” and “more luxurious.”

2,500 miles northeast in America’s other cultural capital, a similarly spirited local whole grain renaissance is underway, led by Brooklyn Granary & Mill, a bakery and mill opened last year by Patrick Shaw-Kitch, a grain whiz and the former head baker at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, alongside his wife, Laura Huss. From their facility on Huntington Street, just off the Gowanus Canal, they stone-mill whole grains such as spelt, buckwheat, rye, einkorn, and various strains of wheat—grown on regenerative farms across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic—for use in pastries and bread at their on-site bakery and for an impressive roster of wholesale clients, including the restaurants Gramercy Tavern and Borgo and bakeries like Elbow Bread and Diljān.

Part of the impetus for Brooklyn Granary & Mill was the 2021 closure of Union Square Greenmarket’s GrowNYC Grainstand, which served as the hub for local, whole grains in New York City; professional and home bakers could purchase regionally grown grains and flour and learn how each variety performs. Furthermore, New York City lacked a milling operation that could supply bakers and chefs with flour milled to order, and just-milled flour means more nutrients, more texture, and more flavor.

Whole grains are perishable in a way many people don’t realize. Once a grain’s seed is cracked, its natural oils are exposed to air and begin to oxidize, eventually going rancid. This means grains are at peak aroma and flavor right after milling, when those oils are still intact. Processed white flour, by contrast, has the bran and germ removed entirely—and it’s precisely those elements that give a grain its color, character, and fat and, with it, most of its flavor.

Accordingly, working with local, freshly milled whole-grain flours requires a certain level of skill and patience. “You usually have to adjust your hydration with whole wheat flours … they’re typically thirstier,” says Navil Rivera, worker-owner at Proof Bakery in Los Angeles, who also notes that gluten levels can vary, so using a mix of whole wheat with AP or a high-gluten flour can help create a more balanced product. But the extra effort is very much worth it: “You’re replacing an ingredient that adds nothing other than structure to the mix with something that adds everything,” says Karen DeMasco, the longtime pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern in New York.

Keep reading

COMING SOON

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

The Real Madrid goalkeeper has started , where he shares his thoughts on “how professional athletes think about money, ownership, and long-term positioning. What I see happening in the sports business right now that excites me, and what I think is overrated. Where I’m investing, what I’m learning, and what I got wrong.”

In Magazine’s new Substack, The Obsessions Index, “monthly guest editors present the cultural oddities and gems that have been lost in time or unfairly overlooked – the books, objects, b-sides + rarities and outsider art you never knew you needed – as well as a keyhole into their own creative processes.”

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.

This week, we’re tracking folk songs, counting bank tellers, studying astrophysics in a gulag, and taking our eyes off the screen.

MUSIC

Rising sun

Who wrote “House of the Rising Sun”? James Taylor Foreman follows the song from New Orleans through the American South, a region that seems to exist 45 minutes outside every major city.

There Is a House in New Orleans

— in

When I lived in California and I told people I grew up in Louisiana, most of the time they would say, “Oh, like New Orleans!” and then tell me they would love to visit one day.

I smile and nod, happy we have a touchstone, but think, No, not like New Orleans, actually. Los Angeles feels closer to New Orleans than where I grew up. But that would start a conversation that ended with glassy eyes, so I go ahead and let them think I’m a NOLA boy.

When I was growing up, though, New Orleans didn’t feel like it was down the road. It felt like the end of the road; about as far away as you could get. It was both the center of the world, being the biggest city in my state, and also the very edge: a liminal zone full of voodoo dream totems and pushy mediums in layers of purple linen. You went there to get drunker than your parents ever need to know about or hear a fortune about a future wife who lives across a body of water with two sons from a previous marriage.

That slightly hokey and wispy spookiness of the Crescent City solidified into downright dread the day I heard that my brother died in a house in New Orleans. He was working as a line cook someplace and trying to recover from his heroin addiction. So, naturally, the radio hit “House of the Rising Sun,” which is set in a sort of mythical New Orleans, began to stick out of the background chatter of chain restaurants. I am the young brother that the singer warns to not “do what I have done.”

I always assumed The Animals (the version you probably know) wrote the song. But no. Bob Dylan? No. Woody Guthrie? No. How about Lead Belly, plucked out of Louisiana’s Angola prison by a record exec? Still no.

Who wrote The Rising Sun?

I can tell you the short answer is nobody knows. The more entertaining answer, and probably also a true one, is that nobody wrote it. It emerged like a singing ghost from the hills, through the thousands of mouths of Southern and Appalachian folk singers, long before we had radio, recording machines, or even trains started striping the woods.

My first job out of college was a traveling salesman, selling software to hospitals all across the country, mostly in the South and Northeast. I went to Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and even so far north as Illinois. Being from a small Southern town, I was surprised to find that the “South” wasn’t just the place below the Mason-Dixon line. You just had to drive about 45 minutes from any major city, and suddenly people were huntin’ and talkin’ with a drawl.

I drove to many places like these, sometimes with “House of the Rising Sun” playing (I especially liked the Alt-J version at the time), thinking about what this country was like before Walmart and a McDonald’s lined every interstate. Because of that universal backlit plastic signage, we can be fooled to think we all live the same sort of lives. But if you do ever drive a little further, which I sometimes did to find a certain rural hospital, a whole different universe opens up. An older one, and one that is probably fading from memory. You can still hear it, if you have the ear for it, through the haunted chords of that song, its first singers’ voices still echoing above the burning pines, the heat beneath its wings.

Keep reading

COMIC

ECONOMICS

Bank tellers, ATMs, and AI

David Oks on why bank tellers survived ATMs but not iPhones, and what this tells us about job security in the age of AI.

Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

— in

A few months ago, J. D. Vance, sitting vice president of the United States, gave an interview to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. During that interview, Vance and Douthat had an interesting exchange:

Douthat: How much do you worry about the potential downsides of AI? Not even on the apocalyptic scale, but on the scale of the way human beings respond to a sense of their own obsolescence? These kinds of things.

Vance: So, one, on the obsolescence point, I think the history of tech and innovation is that while it does cause job disruptions, it more often facilitates human productivity as opposed to replacing human workers. And the example I always give is the bank teller in the 1970s. There were very stark predictions of thousands, hundreds of thousands of bank tellers going out of a job. Poverty and commiseration.

What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work. More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy.

I tend to think that is how this innovation happens.

There are two interesting things about what Vance said, both relating to the example that he chose about bank tellers and ATMs.

The first thing is what it tells us about who J. D. Vance is. The bank teller story—how ATMs were predicted to increase bank teller unemployment, but in fact did not—isn’t a story you’ll hear from politicians; in fact, for a long time, Barack Obama would claim, incorrectly, that ATMs had decreased the number of bank tellers, in order to suggest that the elevated unemployment rate during his presidency was due to productivity gains from technology. I’ve never heard a politician cite the bank teller story before: but I have seen the bank teller story cited in a lot of blogs. I’ve seen it cited, for example, by Scott Alexander and Matt Yglesias and Freddie deBoer; and I’ve heard it, upstream of the humble bloggers, from such fine economists as Daron Acemoglu and David Autor. The story of how ATMs didn’t automate bank tellers is, indeed, something of a minor parable of the economics profession. You can see it encapsulated in this wonderful graph from the economist James Bessen:

So Vance’s choice of example tells us the same thing that his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience did, which is that J. D. Vance—however much he might like to hide it—really, really loves reading blogs.

But the other thing about the bank teller story that Vance cites is that it’s wrong. We do not, contrary to what Vance claims, have “more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created”: we in fact have far fewer. The story he tells Douthat might have been true in 2000 or 2005, but it hasn’t been true for years. Bank teller employment has fallen off a cliff. Here is a graph of bank teller employment since 2000:

So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.

But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?

The answer, I think, is complementarity.

Keep reading

NOSTALGIA

LITERATURE

Ghosts, time, and astrophysics in the gulag

A belly button mole named Boris, a college boyfriend killed on the West Side Highway, and an astrophysicist who spent a decade in the gulag convinced that time could power the stars.

My belly button mole is a ghost named Boris

— in

My great-grandfather was a Russian Jew named Maurice, and when I was a kid, I really liked that I was a little bit Russian, but I didn’t like the name Maurice, so I named the mole in my belly button “Boris.” I’d show it off to everyone in middle school and tell them “this is the Russian part of me.”

Of course I never met Maurice, and I never had any desire to see Russia, but something in me has always tweaked in a beautiful way when I listen to traditional Russian music, and I like to think it’s Boris in my belly button rearing his head to listen. I miss it I need it I want to be inside it. Right now in my community orchestra we’re playing Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances.” It’s deeply Russian so therefore I love it to the point of hyperfixation: I’m listening to it all the time, in and out of rehearsal, and even when I’m not, it’s running in the background of my head. A conductor in Florida once called the second movement a “waltz for ghosts” but it may be more true to say all waltzes are for ghosts, simply because they are music and music itself is a ghost. You can’t touch it or see it but you can feel it and you can measure those feelings in vibrations and these vibrations continue after the music stops, echoing and reverberating, reminding you: remember me.

In addition to the ghost that lives in my belly button, there’s another ghost in my life. My college boyfriend would have turned thirty-six today. His death was thirteen years ago, plus twoish weeks. He died the year after college, hit by a car on the West Side Highway. I’ve honored his death every year. For the first five years, on the day of his death, I would go up to New York City to visit the site and see his friends and family. For the next five years, I decided I didn’t need to make that trip anymore—his friends and I had fallen out of touch—so I would take the day off work and walk around the Arlington National Cemetery instead, surrounded by thousands of surrogate graves. Now I live in Wisconsin and neither option is available to me, so I walk in the woods instead. To me this day is sacred; it feels like my duty to honor him once a year, not because I’m hung up on a former lover, but because here I am, living, while someone who once meant the world to me is not. Why should it be me alive and not him? Doesn’t this mean I have no choice but to feel happy and make the most of it? Usually, by thinking of the dead, I end the day feeling lucky and grateful to be alive. But this year was different. The doctors called me on the morning of the deathiversary with some bad news.

For complicated reasons, they told me they were putting me on two aggressive forms of antibiotics simultaneously. These medicines came with a slew of precautions. Don’t run or you’ll snap a tendon. Don’t eat dairy with dinner. Don’t drink alcohol, of course, but also no soda or caffeine either. Beware the sun: You’ll break out in boils!

So I called the day a bust and told myself that was fine. Life gets in the way. I was grumpy about not running and yearned for sunshine, but a multi-day storm moved in, and I couldn’t miss a sun that wasn’t there. It was good weather to stay inside and read Russian literature (which Boris occasionally commands of me). I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a detailed account of the brutality of the Soviet labor camp system. This is a good book to read when you’re sad. Sometimes it helps to read about things that are much sadder. Millions of people died. Millions more suffered intensely and had to live through it. At one point I wondered: what about menstruation? What would women do in those camps when they bled? But they were all so starved, there was no menstruation. Any possible terrible thing you can imagine is in this book, and worse. You put it down and realize life isn’t so bad.

The Gulag Archipelago tells many, many stories. One of these stories is of an astrophysicist named Nikolai Kozyrev. He worked at an observatory with a disgruntled grad student. For reasons unrecorded, this grad student accused everyone at the observatory of counterrevolutionary activities. Most of his colleagues died. But Kozyrev got off easy: he was sent to prison for ten years instead.

Kozyrev tried to continue his astrophysics work in isolation. But he was limited. He had no materials, no books, no ways to make experiments. He had only his thoughts and his memories. This was not enough. He was “blocked by forgotten figures,” Solzhenitsyn writes. So he prayed for help, and by a stroke of luck, he soon received a book called “A Course in Astrophysics.” (He received one book at random every ten days.) He memorized everything he could before the book was taken away, then continued theorizing the universe. Solzhenitsyn writes that he “saved himself only by thinking of the eternal and infinite: of the order of the Universe—and of its Supreme Spirit; of the stars; of their internal state; and what Time and the passing of Time really are.”

Yes, he thought about all these things. And he was wrong.

Kozyrev came up with an idea that time creates energy, a theory he called “causal mechanics.” He believed that time’s energy was so powerful that it created stars. Yet while he was trapped in a prison cell, scientists around the world were discovering nuclear fusion, the true engine of the stars. When he was released, he refused to believe that stars were powered by fusion, and continued promoting his causal mechanics theory instead. Time not only created stars, he believed, it could be manipulated to make matter disappear; a gyroscope, for instance, would be reduced in matter as it rotated because it absorbed energy from the flow of time. He also created a set of spiral mirrors that he said could concentrate time and allow whoever was inside them to access information from the distant past or future.

He also did good work, especially earlier in his career, about the heat balance and atmosphere of nearby planets. And he maybe saw a volcano on the moon. But no one took his causal-mechanics time-as-energy theory seriously. So ultimately he was marginalized.

Yet time does have energy. Ten years in a prison has a clear, degrading power. For many prisoners, ten years could turn into twenty at the drop of a hat, and the threat of such was sufficient to keep the rest in line. There were many atrocities in the camps, interrogations and starvation and hard work and so on, but the biggest foe was time itself. It makes sense one would reach the other side and see this enemy as powerful enough to charge the sun.

Keep reading

PAINTING

ILLUSTRATED ESSAY

Sensory overload

Briffin Glue illustrates the growing disconnect between our screens and the physical world around us.

Absolute defeat

— in

Keep reading

BUSTED

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

, the fashion features director at British Vogue, has started The Vault, a Substack where she’ll be sharing “the secrets I would tell you if we sat next to each other in the office.”

British writer, director, and television presenter has started a Substack where she’ll chronicle her love of “cats, cooking, caftans, books,” and more.

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.

This week, we’re reading Zola at Disney World, unpacking male desire, and photographing yin and yang.

DESIRES

What men want

A satirical litany of masculine desire that moves from meme to history, landing somewhere surprisingly tender.

Men Only Want One Thing

— in Drunk Wisconsin

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To run away from home at seventeen and offer their services as a deckhand on a ship bound for the New World. To take a drag of a hand-rolled cigarette as they look out over their cattle herd, cowboy hat tipped to shade from the rising sun, tin cup of gritty black coffee in their hand. To build a Roman Castrum while on campaign in Gaul. To feel the sea spray against their beard as they prepare for raiding. To step foot on another celestial body.

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To lead a cavalry charge into enemy ranks. To feed their bloodlust with the boiling anger inside of them. To stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their brothers in a shield wall. To defend the ramparts against the storming enemy. To use the violence inherent to them. To find themselves standing victorious on a battlefield scattered with bodies. To make a heroic last stand. To bleed out contentedly in a liminal place, knowing that they’ve successfully protected their family.

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To be left alone. To fish in silence for a couple of hours, nothing but the sound of water lapping to keep them company. To reflect on their mistakes, and to forgive themselves. To remember their father and knowingly nod as they finally understand him. To devote themselves in their entirety to a project, and to finish that project with a feeling of deserved pride. To leave something behind.

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To feel the contrast of their rough skin against their baby’s soft hand as it grips their finger. To face the terrifying responsibility of fatherhood and accept it. To smell their child’s hair as they sleep soundly in their arms. To blow raspberries on giggly tummies. To teach their son a skill and see him beam with pride as he does it by himself for the first time. To hear their child say “I love you” unprompted.

Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To wake up intertwined with a lover on a lazy Sunday morning, sun shining through the curtains. To bring her coffee in bed. To randomly run into the girl they met at a party a couple years earlier and have the courage to ask for her number this time. To fall deeply in love with their childhood next-door neighbor, decide to marry her at five years old, and stick to that plan for the rest of their life. To be unconditionally loved.

Keep reading

PAINTING

VERY ONLINE

Step right up

Theodore Gary on the internet’s lolcow economy, where fame, addiction, and a cast of predatory handlers converge.

Freak Show

— in

The internet is a freak show like the old circus. Step inside the tent; see the hermaphrodite, the bearded lady. Enjoy it, but never admit it. You weren’t there. You’d never go. You don’t know anything about it at all. And though much has changed since P.T. Barnum, there remains a serious, well-funded industry of promoters and managers and marketers whose income depends on their association with the physically deformed, mentally ill, and socially maladjusted. These people—famous for their ugliness, homelessness, binge-drinking, and public freakouts—are these days called “lolcows” by the internet; that is to say, they produce “lols” like a cow does milk—endlessly, or at least until they die.

The best-known among them must be WorldofTShirts—Joshua Block, to use his given name. Josh is an autistic, gangly twenty-something forced into a liver-shredding alcoholic stupor over the past half-decade by a series of noxious handlers. He has 4 million followers on TikTok. His account blew up during the pandemic, as he, still young and fresh-looking, posted videos of himself doing goofy dances and reviewing various boba teas. In 2021, a video of him screaming the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind” in Times Square amassed 27 million views. So, clever as he is, Josh did it again, and again, and again. Soon enough, he was on a Times Square billboard. Dixie D’Amelio followed him shortly thereafter.

Sometime after his original first surge in popularity, he takes a trip to Mexico. Josh drinks his first drink here, then chooses to have quite a few more. He loses his phone in an Uber. He turns 21 soon after, and with this Josh has had enough of boba tea. He now drinks liquor, as much as he can get. The songs persist, now sung drunkenly, and a manager enters the picture: Michael Quinn. The former owner of Feltman’s Hot Dogs, an oval-faced, barrel-chested, strangely tanned, heavily accented New Yorker, Quinn comes upon Josh’s budding fame and decides to grab a piece of it for himself. Armed with a compulsive need for attention and the money to secure it, he sets about dragging Josh and his roller backpack to the bars, restaurants, and pizza shops of New York City. Together, they have a goofy, silly time. But all is not well. You wouldn’t know it yet, but the man is becoming more erratic, his content more unhinged. Unsupervised by Quinn, Josh records himself licking the subway floor.

Around this time, Josh meets Jason Itzler, Jeffrey Epstein associate, Josh’s second manager, and the King of All Pimps. In the mid-aughts, Itzler became a sort of small-time New York celebrity as the owner/operator of the high-priced escort service New York Confidential. Sent to Rikers in 2005 for his operation of the company, he reemerged in 2008 as a bit player in the prostitution scandal that scuttled former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s political career. In 2011, he was identified as an occupant of the apartment where 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Julia Sumnicht overdosed on GHB. Now on Kick—which is where they send you once you’re banned by Twitch—he streams under the name Mr. Based. Flanked from behind by a gold statue of the Buddha, a human-size gnome, a replica sarcophagus, and a several-foot-tall Tony the Tiger, he now spends his nights like a dirtbag cam-girl: $50 to take a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, $200 to smoke a blunt, $300 to huff Galaxy Gas.

Itzler, I’m sure, needed no advice worming his way into the life of a naïve twenty-something. Isolate. Manipulate. Make him reliant on you. The content became meaner, the fans more rabid, as Itzler established himself in Josh’s life. Gone was that silly and sweet stuff in Josh’s videos, replaced instead by an unrelenting drumbeat of triggers designed to make him go ape. Fans on the street, egged on by Itzler, would yell, “Put the fries in the bag.” “Fuck you, bitch!” Josh would yell back. Mostly, the two sat in Itzler’s opulent apartment, with Josh away from the camera and Itzler right up next to it, drinking until collapse, until Josh went limp. These streams, hard as they are to watch, function as something like a real-time account of Josh’s descent into hell. In a clip pretty neatly summarizing their dynamic, Josh huffs nitrous oxide from a balloon. He jerks and flails and suddenly stops, looking terrified. “I feel lightheaded,” he yells. Peeking over his shoulder, Itzler laughs and points his thumb toward Josh, a smile plastered on his lips. “Look at this guy,” he says. The clip has over 300,000 views.

Keep reading

TRAVEL

Video shared by Varnika

PHOTOGRAPHY

Yin and yang

In a collaboration, Susanne Helmert and Juliette Mansour took turns photographing objects that represented the philosophy of yin, and the other responded with one representing yang.

Holding the Opposite

— and in

What the philosophy of Yin and Yang teaches us is that although they are opposing forces, they exist in relationship to one another. Balance is not created through sameness, but through interaction and transformation.

No matter what I photographed, there was never only Yin or only Yang to be found. And that’s what I ultimately found most interesting: keeping this philosophy in mind while photographing, or while looking at Juliette’s “replies,” made me sit longer with the images, thinking about them in terms of Yin and Yang.

“Yin-Yang is the idea that there is a duality to everything. But rather than this being some kind of oppositional or destructive conflict between two rivals, the Yin-Yang argues that there is a great harmony to be found in the contrast between things. The symbol does not feature a fully black side set against a fully white side. The white has a bit of black, and the black a bit of white. Contrast, yet harmony.”

Although we present the work as diptychs, we invite you to look at the images with this philosophy in mind. You may notice, as we did, that some of them can’t be assigned to one side as easily as others.

Keep reading

FAMILY

Zola at Disney World

In which Am Rod reads the classic novelist at Disney, and finds the distance between a Parisian laundress’s downfall and a Florida vacation rental strangely short.

How Far Down

— in

I recently visited Disney World with my boyfriend, our four-year-old daughter, his parents, his sister, her husband, and their children. The last time we did this trip, I read Therese Raquin by Émile Zola, which made me feel bruised and disgusting, as central Florida can make me feel with its humidity, broken infrastructure, and exposed toes. Confining bad sensations, negative thoughts, allows me to be a better mother, planning and packing, smiling and soothing, remembering to remove the rotting fruit from the backpack after bedtime.

I brought The Assommoir this time. In the foreword, Zola reprimands the scandalized bourgeoisie. It merely describes the society and squalor you have wrought! Don’t guillotine the messenger! It is difficult to not feel like I am in trouble while reading Zola.

The novel’s heroine, Gervaise Coupeau, suffers mightily for her dreams of owning and operating her own laundry business for Paris’s lower class. Earthly comforts, a deadbeat husband and a snake of an ex, keeping up with the Boches, bad luck and medical debt, and an ambitious passivity central to her character slowly erode the working class respectability Gervaise builds in the novel’s first half, until her death goes unnoticed for days and she is dropped in a pauper’s grave. Gervaise often repeats the sentiment, “I don’t want anythin’ special, you know, I don’t ask for much…” With each refrain, the narrator begs the question, Really, Gervaise? Sweet little Gervaise, smiling and planning and packing and soothing, did you not commit sins for your aspiration? Are you so blameless for the fall?

Our Florida vacation rental was in a community of many vacation homes, off the main drag where the movie The Florida Project was filmed. There waves the oversized stucco mermaid, a cross-eyed slattern, hanging from the side of a bootleg merch store, while you wait for a stoplight, controlled by someone who must be drunk or colorblind, to finally, mercifully turn green.

My daughter loved the pool most of all, climbing out, jumping in, climbing out, jumping in, over and over, out and in, up and down. There was a large screen enclosure around the pool to keep out gators. One morning, a red-shouldered hawk perched itself on the fence just beyond our screen to hunt the swamp on the other side.

Besides the alligators, the area reminds me of growing up in Southern California. Orlando is also in an Orange County; there are three approved tract models in the rental home community, which are somehow both enormous and cramped; there are billboards constantly reminding you that a conniving mouse is near; the traffic feels personal and vindictive; the bus stop is a lone bent pole sticking out of a patchy ditch by the box store parking lot; everyone has a pool that they take out a second mortgage to maintain.

I am not nostalgic. My older sister is, in some ways that have become stereotypical of a certain type of millennial. I don’t despise this about her, but I wonder. She reflects wistfully on our childhood, the television shows, the swim meets, the birthday dinners, her probably perfect attendance record in the tenth grade. I ditched, lied, and put myself in morally and physically compromising situations. She trusted our parents implicitly. I loved them.

The strongest memories I have are of family roadtrips, lying in the third row of the van with a damp cloth over my forehead, concentrating on a small, still point, and breathing slowly through my mouth so as not to vomit, while my dad puffed on a big fat cigar, the smoke from which the open car windows would suck out and blow back in my face.

Toward the end of a day at one of the Disney parks, I was feeling good. My daughter was happy and not sunburnt. I had packed the backpack impeccably: just enough toys and provisions to keep her amused in lines and at the table after eating her requisite four bites of lunch, a full change of clothes that we did not use but whose presence cosmically assured we would not need it, battery packs, sunscreen, hand sanitizer, rain ponchos, fruit. In my good mood, I suggested buying a round of beers. The Blue Moon on tap was dyed green for mysterious reasons having to do with James Cameron’s Avatar movie.

Our family set off in a stroller caravan toward the front of the park to find a nice place for a group photo. My boyfriend pushed our stroller. I sipped my green beer and smiled. For all the stink and crowds, it had been a pleasant day. I had not eaten dinner yet and the green Blue Moon was relaxing me. I raised my drink to an extended family of Castilians taking a picture in front of the fake banyan tree that serves as a centerpiece for the park. I felt my phone buzzing in my fanny pack and answered it. “Where did you go?” my boyfriend asked. I looked around and realized I had been walking alone for an unknown amount of time.

Keep reading

PHOTOGRAPHY

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

Singer-songwriter has launched her Substack, , with an essay exploring what it means to be an artist connecting with fans online.

Former U.S. Surgeon General has launched , “a new home for the stories I’ve found and the lessons I’m learning on the road.”

and co. have launched , a Substack that will “make you smarter about the forces moving markets, politics, and society.”

The British journalist and author has joined Substack, sharing political analysis of current events. First up: how war with Iran is impacting Keir Starmer’s premiership.

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.

This week, we’re wandering empty backlots, remembering a colleague in jewel tones, tracing the maker movement, and admiring ostriches.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• Oscars night: The Academy Awards are finally here, and everyone seems to agree that the night’s biggest awards will be a toss-up between One Battle After Another and Sinners. Elsewhere, argues that “the silly ceremony continues to shape culture and discourse in often-overlooked ways,” whatever its waning viewership might suggest. Speaking of waning viewership, defends those Timothée Chalamet comments that some think will cost him Best Actor. And has drinking game rules for anyone looking to spice up what is bound to be a long night.

• Cormac vs. Claude: The New York Times shared a quiz asking readers to identify passages from human writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, and Hilary Mantel, against AI-written passages on similar themes. Substackers were unimpressed: writes that given the ongoing piracy issues of LLMs, the quiz is an “exercise in humiliating the writers featured,” while counters the idea that these quizzes measure what they claim to. And takes apart a McCarthy sentence to show that what the quiz describes as ungrammatical or “clunky” writing is actually a thoughtfully stylized representation of how the novel’s characters speak.

HOLLYWOOD

That’s all, folks

As the film industry gussies up for its biggest night of the year, Dara Resnik reflects on the changing industry and what happens when Hollywood, the industry, becomes estranged from Hollywood, the place.

Say Goodbye to Hollywood

— in

After a certain number of cocktails (I’ll let you guess the over/under), several of my friends have recently turned to me at separate dinners, and sighed, exasperated: “It’s over, isn’t it?” They mean Hollywood. And by Hollywood, they mean the glamorous place and the world-famous business that grew in her womb. The bad news is that the answer is yes. The good news is that the answer is also no.

Before the pandemic, I advised film and television writers—students and professionals—from all over the world to move to Los Angeles. That’s where the money was. That’s where the majority of the exciting jobs were. Even growing up in New York City, the Center of Planet Earth (yes, I said it), it was clear to me that if I wanted to write, produce, and/or direct tentpole films or network television, I had to move to LA. Let’s be clear: I really didn’t want to. I had a rent-controlled apartment on 86th and Broadway. I was writing for magazines. I was living a lovely version of an Upper West Side life I coveted as a kid, but I knew if I was gonna Make It, I needed to be in Hollywood.

And I was right. Every wave of young people that moved here in a given year was essentially a college graduating “class.” The people who moved here in ’99, or ’02, or ’06 and on and on, all knew each other in some way. You’d be drinking beer in some stranger’s S’lake backyard one night and realize their roommate was the guy who had the UTA desk next to your best friend, and now he’s an agent, or the young CE you were meeting with was the assistant you used to talk to on the phone all the time when you were a PA. We rose the ranks together, because while jobs out here have always been coveted, there were just enough of them, and we brought each other up alongside us. Vacating a desk in Disney development for a promotion? You knew that girl who’d just left Barry Josephson’s company (uh-huh) would be excited to take it. Need to quit that agency mailroom gig? No problem, the network of “classmates” you arrived with had your back and there was always, within months, a gig around the corner. And while the cost of living was high, it wasn’t nearly as high as it was in the City That Never Sleeps.

On the crew side, if you wanted to learn camera, you could start as a 2nd AC, and climb the ladder the same way. And if you got “stuck” on a rung, either as a mid-level executive, or in a crew position that wasn’t the above-the-line gig you dreamed of, you could still make a living, buy a house, get healthcare for your family, send kids to college on the salary. And the perks were enormous. Sure, maybe you’d be making the same amount of money as a middle school teacher, but you got to be on a studio lot, attend premieres, get paid for being creative in some way. You grew in an ecosystem that was creating one of America’s biggest, most lucrative exports: film and television.

I wish I could explain to my most recent graduate students how thrilling it used to be on a studio lot. How alive it was with movement and sound and creativity. From 2001-2008, I mostly worked at Warner Bros. (first as an intern for Mimi Leder, then for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, then Pushing Daisies). Lunch was a trip. At one commissary table, a legendary TV director, at another, a background extra for ER on a break, eating Poquito Mas with a fake nail sticking out of his chest. Around the corner, wardrobe for The West Wing rolling by, around the next, two janitors gossiping in the Stars Hollow gazebo. Everyone was part of something bigger than themselves. While yes, the assholes still thrived because welcome to humanity, the feeling of being part of a creative community was pervasive. You couldn’t help but look wide-eyed at your colleagues sometimes and go, “Guys, we’re really DOING IT!”

Sadly, anyone paying attention is finally admitting that has changed. Production has fled. There are fewer buyers, fewer development jobs. The studio lots are devoid of life. I recently had an in-person meeting at the Universal Studios lot, which is huge, and when I inevitably got lost, as I always have, I looked around to ask someone, ANYONE for directions, and I think I literally heard crickets. I was alone. It was eerie. Of course, there are a few productions here and there. But it’s not like it was. And it never will be again. Things change.

Keep reading

ANIMATION

IN MEMORIAM

“They were almost home”

Dia Lupo reflects on a glamorous coworker, her figure-skating daughters, and the shocking airplane crash that took them all.

To be beautiful, to be memorable

— in Broke But Moisturized

“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”

―Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company

Before they were called “Town Hall” meetings, they were called “All Hands.” At some point HR made us change the name because “not everyone has hands.” Believe all 60 of us had both hands but anyway, the point was to get the whole marketing team in a room once a quarter to exchange personality test results and pretend to know what EBITDA means, pretend we control such profitability metrics through Pinterest ads.

In advance of each Town Hall, leadership would pick a few people for these “get to know the team” panels. The questions were personal, and yet everyone’s answers always circled back to work. The host would ask, “Who’s on your Spotify Wrapped this year?” and some middle manager would gush, “Like alllll classical because it helps me focus!” SHUT THE FUCK UP. JUST SAY TAYLOR SWIFT AND WALK THOSE DUSTY ROTHYS BACK TO YOUR CUBICLE.

I remember the last Town Hall I attended before changing teams. We broke for lunch which was, invariably, a taco bar for gringos on SSRIs. Then it was panel time.

Donna Livingston perched upon a stool in her signature glam. Her long, shiny red hair in loose curls; Disney princess eyes with 100 coats of mascara; berry lip. She embodied the bygone elegance of mid-tier city office life, the kind of woman who called a shirt a “blouse” and pants “slacks.” That day she wore black slacks and a deep-pink-hued blouse. I thought to myself, Donna loves a jewel tone. Gotta respect a woman who knows what looks good on her. I’d only ever seen Donna in sapphire and emerald and this shade of pink; it was the color of love refracting off the edges of a ruby.

Donna worked remotely from DC. We were all used to admiring her through a screen, her dedication to Getting Ready every day to work from home. Always warm, always smiling. To see her up there on the panel reminded me that those intangibles like “grace” and “poise” can’t be fully apprehended via Microsoft Teams. Real-life Donna was just so… lovely. That’s the word. Lovely.

At one point, the panelists were asked about their dream jobs. Everyone got fidgety because what on earth would you do if not write website copy for B2B telecom?

They passed Donna the mic and she turned the color of her shirt.

“I would be a figure skater,“ she confessed, her voice shaky and girlish. “My girls skate and it’s the biggest part of our lives.”

Everybody loved Donna, and that was the first time most of us got a glimpse into her personal life. I must have been in a million meetings with her and she never once mentioned this thing that colored a sterile conference room with charm and wonder and truth. And then it clicked for me: that Donna’s glam might be an extension of her passion for skating. It can be a lovely thing, to look the part; it crystallizes your image in the hearts and minds of everyone who meets you.

On January 29, 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a US Army helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington D.C. It was a small flight, 64 people between the crew and passengers, 28 of them returning from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships training camp in Wichita, Kansas. Donna Livingston died alongside her husband Peter and their daughters, Olympic hopefuls Everly, 14, and Alydia, 11, who were known online as The Ice Skating Sisters.

I was working from home when my friend called and broke the news. “The whole office is a mess. Everyone’s crying and leaving for the day,” she said. Meanwhile, our friend Sarah had just taken a job under Donna. Sarah was in California for a conference where Donna was to meet her when she returned from Wichita. She was texting with Donna just before she boarded Flight 5342, wished her safe travels and everything.

What are the odds of knowing someone who dies in a 64-person plane crash? I was too catatonic for statistics but just responsive and incredulous enough to watch the video footage over and over and over. The helicopter looks like it’s being pulled directly into the plane by some invisible force, something bigger and more sinister than human error. The aircrafts collide into a magnificent ball of fire suspended in the night sky. I just kept thinking, they were almost home.

Keep reading

PHOTOGRAPHY

TECHNOLOGY

Of slop and crapjects

Sachin traces the arc from 3D-printed crapjects to vibe-coded slop and proposes a more sustainable way to think about what all this building actually produces.

Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

— in

Whenever a new technology arrives, the impulse is to treat it as something that has never existed before. A clean break from everything that came prior. I catch myself doing this with vibe coding constantly, and I see it everywhere around me. But the most useful lens for understanding a new phenomenon is almost never the phenomenon itself. You want something adjacent, close enough to share structural similarities but removed enough to see clearly. It’s on the lookout for something like this that I started reading more about the Maker Movement of ~2005-2015.

The Maker Movement was the spiritual predecessor to vibe coding. The parallels are hard to miss. Vibe coding has slop. The Maker Movement had crapjects, a term the community coined for 3D-printed objects that served no purpose beyond proving you could extrude plastic into a shape. The Claude Code of that era was a $200 printer from Monoprice and a breadboard.

The scene around making produced what were probably the first internet-native network intellectuals. Chris Anderson (who wrote the widely-read piece about the long tail) left his editor-in-chief role at Wired to start a robotics company called 3D Robotics. Cory Doctorow wrote Makers, a sci-fi novel based around characters who are hacking hardware and business models to survive in a world where everything is falling apart. These were people who gained influence by participating visibly in a making culture and writing about what it meant.

A lot of the intellectual energy of the AI era orbits around AGI: when it arrives, what it’ll do to jobs, whether it will be aligned. The Maker Movement had its own gravitational center, and it was the idea that making physical things with your hands could produce an internal transformation. You would become more creative, more entrepreneurial, more self-reliant. The object you made mattered less than what the act of making did to you.

In 2018, the media scholar Fred Turner published a paper that put this ideology under a microscope. His argument was that the Maker Movement had reinvented the theology of the Western Frontier for the digital age.

The specifics of seventeenth-century Puritanism are obviously gone. Nobody at a Maker Faire was talking about predestination. But Turner traced the literary forms and the millenarian structure—the belief that a great transformation is coming, and that individual discipline will determine who makes it through. In the Maker narrative, the American landscape is economically barren. Jobs have disappeared. Institutions have failed you. And in this wilderness, the lone individual searches inside themselves for signs of the entrepreneurial spirit, the creative spark, evidence that they are among the elect who will build their way to salvation.

Turner’s observation extends well beyond 3D printers. You can trace this same pattern through almost every hobbyist technology scene of the past fifty years. Homebrew computer clubs in the 1970s. Punk zines in the 1980s. The early web in the 1990s. Each one developed a community of practice—what Brian Eno would call a “scenius”—where people played with tools that the mainstream considered toys. Each one generated its own salvation narrative: master this tool, transform yourself, become the kind of person who builds the future.

And each one operated with a useful kind of slack. The tools were unproductive on purpose. Nobody expected your Arduino project to ship to customers. Nobody expected your homebrew computer to compete with IBM. The whole point was that you had permission to fuck around, and the finding-out happened gradually, through play, over years. This is where the old Silicon Valley adage comes from: “What smart people do on the weekends, everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”

Keep reading

PAINTING

ANIMALS

Birds of a feather

In which Jess Nash defends flightless birds as evolutionary pioneers, rather than evolutionary mistakes.

She Rose Under My Heart the Ostrich-God

— in

The 19th-century Japanese master artist Kawanabe Kyōsai is well known for imaginative and satirical visions carried out in energetic, free brushwork. Between political caricatures, animals, ghosts, and acrobats, his scenes favour movement and lightness. It’s no surprise that he often painted birds.

What better subjects to express liberation and motion? Kyōsai’s soaring eagles, ravens, and songbirds share their substance with moving, changing water and buoyant leaves. Their bodies are as free and flexible as the wind. Air passes through their feathers.

Furthest from this lightness among birds is the ostrich—three hundred pounds and fully grounded. Though they share a class, an ostrich would never fit into a Kyōsai picture like a raven or an eagle does.

This is a thick and gawky animal, strutting on heavy legs, with feathers like hair draping thickly over the bulky body and spraying out at the tail. Up the curve of the neck, there are long black eyelashes, big black eyes, and big black nostrils set into a squat beak. Besides the beak and feathers, not much about the ostrich really looks birdlike at all. They have wings, of course, but these are instrumental in running, not flying.

“In some points it resembles a bird, in others a quadruped,” Aristotle wrote of the ostrich in the 4th-century B.C.E. biological study Parts of Animals. He could make no clear sense of what he observed: feathers and hair, two bird legs and a quadruped’s size, wings and no flight. In his taxonomy of animals, the ostrich was ultimately neither avian nor beast. It was classifiable only as “intermediate”. Indeed, many languages reflect a hybrid view of the ostrich: the Greek term strouthokámilos, the Persian shotormorq, the Turkish devekuşu, and the Chinese tuóniǎo each describe a “camel-bird.”

Though post-Aristotle Jewish and Islamic scholars viewed the ostrich unambiguously as a bird, it was clearly not like other birds. It ate strange things; it built unusual nests; most pressingly, it didn’t fly. In Job 39:13-17, God speaks: “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly / But are her wings and pinions like the kindly stork’s?” The stork has wings that, as biology professor Joel Duff reads, “are beautiful and enable flight.” Not the ostrich.

We on foot have always coveted the wide space of the sky, and the natural ease with which birds navigate it. A bird seems to be a light and free spirit, unconfined by its nature. The caging of a bird is a serious cruelty, and doves soar at weddings. A winged human is nothing less than an angel.

(Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended’st, / And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee) / Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating

—Walt Whitman (To the Man-of-War-Bird)

“The human fascination with flight seems to be associated with our desire for the pure transcendence of art,” writes poet Rosemarie Corlett. Leonardo da Vinci, who worked obsessively at building a flying machine, loved birds; he used to buy them at the market so that he could set them free. Wilbur Wright, of the brothers who finally saw the dream of aviation through, wrote:

The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.

Keep reading

NOTEBOOK

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

The musician has launched her Substack: “Part-creative outlet, part-self indulgence, part-community connective tissue: this site is a place for me to document, hypothesize, criticize, vent, narrate, and wring out the excess thought-liquid swooshing around my own personal existential aquarium.”

, the former chief leader writer and columnist at The Observer, has joined Substack, where the center-left journalist will “ask the difficult questions the left too often avoids, from a nuanced and researched vantage.”

The team behind Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film has launched a Substack, sharing the trailer and promising insider access to the movie.

Universal Music has launched a Substack dedicated to celebrating ’s music, “where we revisit the stories behind the songs, the collaborators who helped bring them to life and the cultural legacy that still ripples through a new generation of artists.”

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.

This week, we’re making marriage pacts, singing through sunroofs, inventing Ireland, and wondering who’s been watching.

MEMORIES

I’m here, but I’m really gone

A very ’90s childhood reminiscence, featuring soccer, heartbreak, cigarettes, and Alanis Morissette.

I’m Broke but I’m 6

— in

My feet barely fit on the car console, which is fine because my feet are tiny (brag!). I’m tall enough to have my chest up through the sunroof. Even though we’re driving well below the 20 MPH speed limit, I feel the wind push my hair past my ears, and I imagine myself like the happiest, most well loved family dog. Eyes closed and mouth open, whipping my head back and forth in slow motion.

I close my eyes and raise my hands above my head and scream as loud as I can, louder than the song blasting from the car below me.

I feel drunk, but I’m sober

I’m young, and I’m underpaid

I’m 6 years old. My dad and I are 22 minutes late to my Saturday morning soccer game. 22 minutes late means the game has already started. Not that it matters to my dad and me. I have no concept of time. I am a child. All I know is that we are having a boocoobango good time.

My dad, on the other hand, has complete and utter disregard for the concept of time. A real “don’t tell me what to do” attitude when it comes to man-made rules of the universe. The skill of punctuality has simply passed him by. Life instead imbued him with an evil yet charming sense of humor, pants that never fit, and a personality his coworkers called “bulldoggish.”

I’m tired, but I’m working, YEAH AH

No Dixon family vacation was complete without full-body sweats, a few “god damnits,” and having to turn around and head back to the house because someone (my dad) left their wallet at home. The same wallet that was sitting on the edge of the counter by the coffeepot. The wallet that my mom asked 6 different times if my dad had remembered to grab. The wallet that my dad directly looked at and said, “It’s right here in my hand, Charlotte, where the hell else would it be!”

Multiple reasons led to my parents’ divorce, but I’d like to bet that being married to the human version of the iceberg that sank the Titanic was at the top of my mom’s list.

I care, but I’m restless

I’m here, but I’m really gone

I’m wrong, and I’m sorry, baby

My voice carries the “Baby!!” out so it tumbles into the next lyric. I am singing with the kind of vitriol only a woman scorned can produce. I am 6 years old.

Recess had been completely obliterated two weeks earlier when Harrison, a blond boy with blue eyes who fit perfectly into my fantasy in which he was the 4th Hanson brother and I was the 5th, asked for the wooden painted heart pin back that he had given me during cursive class. “I don’t have it anymore,” I lied, gripping it tightly in my hand, about to mount the monkey bars. I wanted to be high up so I could look down on him. “You’re lying,” he said. “And YOU’RE a bastard!” I yelled.

Kidding, I didn’t yell that. I didn’t even know the word bastard. I was a child. I was 6 years old.

Keep reading

PAINTING

FANTASY

Once upon a time in Ireland

Sithara Ranasinghe digs into fantasy’s obsession with creating mystical worlds that look—and sound—an awful lot like Ireland.

Fantasy writers are weird about Ireland

— in Sithara’s Newsletter

I don’t think anything exemplifies the Y2K thirst for magic better than the music of Enya, an Irish New Age Pop icon who lives in a castle. Her music offered listeners an escape from the ’90s and ’00s into a vaguely medieval Elsewhere made of rolling fields and enormous fogbanks. (McCoy notes that Enya’s album shot “to the highest [charts] position she had ever occupied” immediately after 9/11.) Although detractors called her songs “uplifting nonsense concealing the most cynically calculated mood music in the history of (Middle) Earth,” when Peter Jackson needed a voice to close out The Fellowship of the Ring, he knew exactly who to call.

Because Lord of the Rings has had such a profound impact on all the fantasy media that’s come after it, Enya’s harps and choirs have been melted into the soup. It’s not Celtic-inspired or Irish, it’s fantasy. But whether it’s music or names or folklore, when “Celtic” becomes the default, what do we do when we need to populate the rest of the fantasy world? Someone needs to be the foreigner to your main kingdom. Worldbuilding is hard, so writers often just borrow real-world stereotypes to serve as a shorthand for the “other.” See that kingdom over there with the curved swords and the veiled princesses and the sand? That’s pretty exotic, right? Well, there you go, that’s the Other.

Thankfully, it’s considered a bit gauche these days to play into Orientalist stereotypes. Ireland, on the other hand, feels a bit safer. As Ellen Jacob (Elle Literacy) tells me, “Compared to most post-colonial places—like India or the Caribbean—we’re in a much better position. We’re in Europe, we’re white, we’re quite wealthy.” Added to that, many American writers can trace distant Irish heritage. Still, this doesn’t stop writers from making some really unusual choices in their portrayal of the fantasy Irish analogues.

The book that made me fall down this whole rabbit hole to begin with was Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief, centring a fiddle-playing, green-eyed, copper-haired thief named Kinch Na Shannack. Kinch is Galtic, meaning he’s from a race of people who drink whiskey, farm tubers, live near peat bogs, and speak with a “handsome brogue” that makes them say “cork and kark almost the same”. His people were forced to mass-migrate west “what with the old Famine”, and if you haven’t guessed which culture the Galts are based on yet, I’ll give you one more clue: Buehlman, an American, self-narrates the entire audiobook in an Irish accent.

If the default fantasy mode is Celtic, and the Othered Foreigner People are, on top of that, Celt-coded, you get what scholar Andrea R. Cox calls a “Celtic double exposure”. Celtic cultures provide both the genre’s background texture and its exotic outsider. What that’s going to give you, of course, are a bunch of stereotypes that range from indulging in the odd potato to being physiologically different to the other humans in your fantasy world.

Keep reading

THE ORIGINAL ART COLLECTORS

TECHNOLOGY

The banality of surveillance

In the midst of the dustup between Anthropic, OpenAI, and the U.S. Department of War, Benn Stancil digs into the “banality of surveillance” and why, despite online tracking going back years, AI heralds a new era in digital privacy concerns.

The banality of surveillance

— in

Prior to working in Silicon Valley, I assumed that data was secure because it was obfuscated by impressive cryptography and stored in buildings that were guarded by tall fences. And I assumed that what we did on the internet was private—and people’s ability to draw any inferences from what we did was difficult—because “surveillance” required complex technologies that could detect faint patterns in millions of disparate signals. Yes, Target might be able to figure out if someone is pregnant before their father could, but that took years of careful observation and sophisticated science. It took well-trained humans working with well-trained models, years in the making.

If only. On an internet where everything is tracked—and man, everything is tracked—surveillance does not require a Ph.D., or even any particularly advanced math. It just requires a junior analyst with 24 hours of free time. Because the real fences around the data we all leave behind—and the real protections of our privacy—are neither tall nor covered in barbed wire. They are simply fences that are annoying to climb. We are not hidden, on the internet; mostly, people are just too uninterested to bother looking for us.

Everyone already knows what happened: The United States Department of War wanted to use Claude. Anthropic wanted them to use Claude, but with restrictions. The two sides could not agree; the negotiations broke down; the negotiations turned into outright hostilities; the hostilities became very public. The Atlantic reports on part of what went wrong:

Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life.

When we hear stories about “mass surveillance” and “artificial intelligence” and the “CIA,” it is tempting to imagine systems of unfathomable reach and sophistication. It is tempting to worry about shadowy government agencies using AI to hack into our phones and turn them into sonar transmitters. It is tempting to see the Greco—a million sensors and cameras feeding into a machine that “doesn’t think, but reasons”:

It reads every permutation in every wager in every seat in the entire casino, hand by hand. It’s wired into floor security cameras that measure pupil dilation, and determine if a win is legitimate or expected. It gathers biofeedback—players’ heart rates, body temperatures. It measures, on a second-by-second basis, whether the standard variations of gaming algorithms are holding or are being manipulated. The data is analyzed in real time, in a field of exabytes.

For better or for worse, reality is almost certainly much more mundane. Nobody wants to use AI to bug our phones, or to build a sprawling nerve system to track our vitals, because our phones are already bugged. Everything we do on them is recorded a dozen times over, by our wireless carriers, by the websites we visit and the apps we use, by the vendors and ad networks those companies are sending their data to, and in the marketplaces that sell that data. We built the eyes of the Greco decades ago.

But that data has remained relatively secure—or maybe more precisely, its potential energy has remained relatively buried—largely because it’s tedious to work with. It’s messy; it’s scattered across different sources and in different formats; combining it together is a pain, and most of us are simply not interesting enough to investigate. Data analysts who work at shadowy government agencies have lives too, and they do not want to write 595-line SQL queries either.

But AI doesn’t mind. And that’s the boring danger of what happens next: Not of AI becoming a superintelligent Sherlock Holmes finding impossible patterns in its enormous mind palace, but of it being a million monkeys at a million typewriters, doing the grunt work no person wanted to do. Because when prying questions are a prompt away—rather than 24 hours of work away—who wouldn’t get tempted to pry?

Keep reading

PACKAGING

RELATIONSHIPS

Just in case

Lily Montasser on her five marriage pacts, and what their prevalence says about how we date now. “When the options are endless, choosing one person can start to feel less like romance and more like closing a hundred tabs you’re not ready to lose.”

Five Marriage Pacts. Zero Boyfriends

— in

I have five marriage pacts. You know, the “if we’re both still single by forty let’s just do the damn thing” deal you make with friends who you wish you were attracted to.

They are as follows:

MILES · 33 · Salt Lake City · Marriage Date: “When we’re forty” · Status: Open

My first pact is with Miles, my best friend in college. He was the first person I met when I stepped onto campus, and remains one of my closest friends to this day. One night outside of a party in junior year, we agreed that if we were both single by forty we would buy a big plot of land in Northern California and call it a day, sleeping with other people if necessary. We solidified the deal with a spit handshake.

CHASE · 36 · Miami · Marriage Date: 01/01/2027 · Status: Cancelled

Next is Chase. Chase and I matched on Raya in 2021, and after a few clumsy dates, our relationship evolved into a flirtatious friendship that included him being my unofficial business consultant and me taking over his lease when he moved to Miami. On a drunken night outside a bar at 3am, we agreed to meet at a church in Vegas in two years and get married if we were both single. A Google Calendar invite was sent. As the date approached, Chase requested a one-year extension.

I recently ran into a mutual friend who informed me that Chase was considering proposing to his current girlfriend. I texted him a screenshot of our cancelled standing reservation. To which he replied “Damn. Report as spam ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

WHIT · 45 · New York City · “Start a Family” Date: N/A · Status: Open

Next is Whit, who I was in an emotionally serious yet technically unofficial relationship with. After several months of on-and-off-again emotional entanglement, Whit proposed we start a family—have children and all live together in a big beautiful brownstone he would pay for. When I asked, “Well, would we, like, date?” He confidently said: “No.” I told him I’d think about it.

FLETCHER · 45 · New York City · Marriage Date: 12/31/2029 · Status: Open

Then there’s Fletcher. Fletcher and I are not terribly close friends nor have we ever had a romantic encounter. He’s a two degrees of separation friend, but I’m always happy to be in his company whenever he comes around. He’s conventionally attractive, tall, muscular, and absolutely hilarious. One night at a house party, Fletcher and I found each other on the couch, lamenting our most recent romantic flops. We agreed to get married if we’re both single in five years. We high-fived and created a Google Calendar invite for Dec 31, 2029.

Keep reading

RESTACK

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

, the independent fashion, culture, and arts magazine, has launched a Substack. Every week, they’ll “share a different story selected by our editors and send it straight to your inbox.”

French oenophiles will no doubt be pleased to see on the platform. The Le Figaro wine critic and lifestyle journalist will be sharing her favorite restaurants, hotels, and, yes, wine.

—a self-described “former child star, current human”—has joined Substack, where she’s sharing dispatches “for all those who grew up and still haven’t figured out what that means.”

Chefs Jack Croft and Will Murray have launched , a newsletter where they’ll share recipes, “getting into the ‘why’ and ‘how’, upgrading your palate so you understand when to add a pinch of salt or a squeeze of lemon, as well as giving you a behind-the-scenes view of what it looks like running one of the busiest restaurants in London.”

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.

This week, we’re terraforming the desert, sniffing Oreos, and attempting to capture a person’s essence in a photograph.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• Citrini moves markets: Despite a caveat at the top of The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis by and that what followed was an imagined scenario, many in the tech and finance sectors viewed the doomer vision of AI-driven economic collapse as if it were news from the future. And the market took notice: the post was cited as a reason the stock market plunged earlier this week. described it as a “brilliant, gut-wrenching approach” to predicting AI futures, while described it as “just a scary bedtime story.” Regardless of the accuracy of the narrative itself, it’s hard not to notice when a work of speculative fiction can move very real markets (and inspire financial firms to publish rebuttals).

• Anthropic vs the Pentagon: The federal government and the AI company Anthropic clashed this week over the company’s hard limits on the use of its technology for mass surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons without human oversight. As of Friday evening, the Trump administration seemed ready to make good on its threat to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which would bar government contractors from using its products and could, per , be fatal to the company’s business. Employees at OpenAI and Google have signed open letters urging their own leaders to back Anthropic and commit to the same stances. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s hippy history and its tech present collided on Hippy Hill, where a “Peace Claude” rally took place.

• CBK dominates fashion discourse (again): Ryan Murphy’s show chronicling the love story of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has led to a new generation’s obsession with her ’90s minimalism. writes about CBK’s discernment as the real reason behind her enduring popularity, while reports that a “CBK tax” on vintage basics has hit eBay and lists the (many) brands trying to capitalize on the moment. reminds us that CBK’s consistent sense of style reflects the fact that she spent only a few years in the public eye before her tragic death. And for those ready to move on from CBK but perhaps not from the ’90s, has a broad list of icons to pick from, including Margaret Thatcher, Al Gore, and Geraldo Rivera.

PORTRAITURE

On photography

Dina Litovsky on the ethics of portrait photography, and why making someone look good isn’t the same as making a good photograph.

What Does a Photographer Owe the Portrait Subject?

— in

During any portrait session, my mind engages in a constant negotiation between the sitter’s preferred version of themselves and my own interpretation of them. The balance is not symmetrical, because no matter how formidable the person in front of me, the photographer always has more power. Every decision, from what to emphasize or conceal to what expression to tease out, adds up to a representation that is outside the subject’s control. This delicate dance comes with a sense of responsibility to ensure that the final portrait is, at the very least, non-manipulative. What makes the process trickier is that no matter who my subject is, my secret desire is that they, if not love, at least don’t hate the final portrait. That is often a tall order.

While [Michael] Heizer laid out his terms up front, many other subjects are less forthright and leave the photographer with more room for interpretation and guesswork. To find the subject’s baseline, I like to ask the person if there are any portraits of them that they love. This gives me a reference point for how they see themselves at their best. In most cases, the image that I’m shown, regardless of the age or sex of the subject, is an idealized representation, but one that is rarely interesting as a photograph. The exercise reveals that while it’s easy to appreciate the artistic merits of someone else’s portrait, when it comes to your own likeness, what matters most is whether the image is flattering.

This is where the struggle comes in. One of my hidden photography superpowers has always been understanding how a person likes to be perceived and what their best angles are. I can make people look good, but that doesn’t necessarily add up to a portrait that goes beyond the superficial and holds enough tension to make it interesting. There are requests that I honor, whether it’s avoiding the “bad side” or concealing sensitive areas like a bald patch. But when it comes to framing and emotion, I often end up at odds with the subject, and the tighter their control over their self-presentation, the more I want to break through that facade and catch them outside their comfort zone.

There are two genres where the complex calculations of how to best represent the subject are reduced to extreme dead ends—celebrity and political portraiture. Celebrity portraits most often cater to the subject (and their PR), with the intention to flatter and beautify the individual. The portraits employ soft light, neutral expressions, fan-blown hair, heroic poses, and airbrushing to achieve the desired effect. The portraits are pleasing to the eye but forgettable, because a pandering representation will always lack the necessary bite to cut through the noise.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is political portraiture, which carries an expectation that a photographer should be critical and harsh when working with an unpopular politician. A few years ago, a magazine put a controversial Republican on the cover with unforgiving light beams that exaggerated the facial pores and made the skin texture look like a volcanic field. I was no more a fan of the politician than most readers of the publication, but I thought the choice of the photo was unethical. Besides taking advantage of the trust between the sitter and the photographer, such an approach, relying on technical cheap shots, lacks the depth and complexity necessary for the image to survive past the immediate cultural moment.

The sweet spot between celebrity and political extremes is where most powerful portraits exist. Viewers are more perceptive than we sometimes give them credit for, and a portrait that’s too flattering or too grotesque won’t land the same way as a more nuanced representation. An insightful portrait reflects the sitter’s personality through clues, colors, and positioning, rather than the brute force of technical decisions.

Keep reading

PAINTING

FRAGRANCE

The best-smelling kid at the playground

Anna Dorn and Crissy Milazzo interviewed writer Emily Gould’s 10-year-old son to get the lowdown on Gen Alpha’s perfume preferences. Read on for some excellent mom shade, a review of perfumes that smell like Oreos, and the age-old question: does this smell good, or am I just hungry?

Smells like Gen Alpha 🍪🍦🍫

— and in

Do you remember the first fragrance you ever smelled? What was it?

Well, my mom used to really just dive into bottles of perfume (not anymore, she has learned how much she should put on now), and when I was much younger, whenever she would be going to a party or a formal occasion she would have perfume on, and a lot of it, too. The only one I can remember that she wore before recent years was a strong sweet-and-sour plum perfume, which she reminded me the name of which was Umé by Keiko Mecheri, which smells great but not in the amount my mom wore, which would never fail to make my nose hurt with how much she wore.

What is your favorite fragrance right now?

Phlur Vanilla Skin. I really like the strong-at-first, smooth vanilla, or even Oreo (as people have told me) scent, because Oreos are peak.

What does your mom smell like?

My mom wears a great-smelling apple pie-scented perfume called Angels’ Share, and she wears Replica “By the Fireplace” perfume, and they both smell great and she finally knows how much to put on.

You live in Brooklyn: what does it smell like?

Just kidding (kinda), but it can smell good, like passing by someone with great perfume, or it can smell absolutely disgusting, such as being on any train station in all of Brooklyn, nobody’s safe.

Do your friends at school like to wear fragrance? If so, what do they wear?

I don’t really know tbh. One of my friends is always like “What’s the point of wearing deodorant or perfume, we’re just 10” (I mean that’s one friend), but when we’re playing sports or having PE, you will not catch more than 1 person within a 3-foot radius of him.

Keep reading

WINTER BLUES

POETRY

Coming

—By Philip Larkin, shared by James Marriott

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

CITY PLANNING

London Bridge, Arizona

In an ode to idealized cities, Naomi Xu Elegant looks at the “kooky midcentury American businessman” who bought the London Bridge, shipped it to the Arizona desert, and built a Disneyfied English village around it.

The ideal city

— in

Only about 60,000 people live in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, one of four towns in the southwest founded by Robert P. McCulloch, a land developer, oil, gas and geothermal energy speculator, and purveyor of lawnmowers, garden tractors, car, boat and airplane engines, and, in 1949, the world’s first one-man chainsaw.

McCulloch was a man of gorgeously midcentury dreams. He founded and ran six eponymous companies before he died in 1977. With the money he inherited from his father and made from his own superchargers, motor engines, oil exploration, and real estate deals, McCulloch produced a working prototype of a steam-powered coupé (1953), manufactured a fleet of two-seat gyrocopters (a strange cousin of the heli) that he hoped would one day sit in every driveway beside the family car (1969), and launched a passenger airline to ferry prospective residents to the various cities he was spawning in the desert (1970). His California home appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in 1956, billed as a “push-button paradise” of futuristic contraptions: rotating sunbeds, self-heating barbecues, automatic whiskey dispensers, and buttons for drawing curtains and turning on the lights.

The doohickey house was located in Palm Springs, about three hours’ drive from Lake Havasu City. McCulloch purchased the land for the city after flying his prop plane over near the border of California and Arizona, scouting for opportunity, and spotting Havasu Lake (actually a reservoir) in the middle of the desert. He enlisted C.V. Wood, the chief designer of Disneyland in Anaheim—which had opened 15 years earlier, in 1955—to design a new town.

Lake Havasu City is the site of McCulloch’s most famous shenanigan: in 1968, he purchased the London Bridge from the City of London. McCulloch did not, as is often repeated, believe he was buying the more distinctive Tower Bridge, nor is his exploit the origin of the phrase “I have a bridge to sell you.” The man knew what he was doing!

The bridge, too weak to support the increasingly heavy vehicles of the modern world, was sinking into the Thames. Rather than demolishing it to build a new one, the city government thought to save some money by seeing if anyone would want to buy it. McCulloch did.

Slab by slab, he had 10,000 tons of 19th-century granite shipped from the UK to an unpopulated patch of desert in Arizona, where he did not even have a river for the bridge to cross.

The plan was to reassemble the bridge on dry ground, laying the arches over the sand dunes and then digging the sand out and rerouting a section of the Colorado River to run underneath it. After their permit to do this was denied, Wood, the Disney designer, pulled strings to get an audience with President Lyndon B. Johnson himself, whom he somehow convinced to let them build the bridge and carry out the minor terraforming work necessary for it to actually function as such.

It took three years and seven million dollars, thrice as much as it cost McCulloch to purchase all the land that would make up Lake Havasu City. It was an extravagant, delightful, ridiculous, and wholly unnecessary gimmick: what could be more American?

Keep reading

PHOTOGRAPHY

MUSIC

Notes from the road

There’s a lot of beauty in Damien Jurado’s dispatch from the road: from the fall of snow to the feeling of history in a venue, from conversations about God with his brother to a live recording of “After Hours Mr. Rogers” by St. Yuma during a soundcheck.

Behold, I say unto you.

— in Damien Jurado

We sailed across the frozen tundra of Wyoming yesterday, through high winds and snow. It was terrifying.

We got word of a pileup that had happened just the night before involving twenty semi-trucks and twelve cars. In total, there were two fatalities and countless injuries. The wait for ambulances must have felt like an eternity in the winter storm.

There is nothing—no civilization between towns. If you have ever driven on Interstate 80 between Utah and Colorado, you will know what I’m talking about. It’s almost haunting, no matter what the season.

The shows have been memorable. After Baker City, Oregon, we were on to Boise, Idaho. We played at a venue I’d never been to before: Shrine Social Club. It was beautiful.

You feel the history immediately when entering the building. Just beautiful. All wood. Chairs that have most likely been there since the opening line the outer parameters of the walls. I kept imagining the countless dances that took place there. Cigarette smoke ages a place—in a cool way. At times, I swear I could smell it still lingering.

My older brother, who lives in Boise, came out to the show. I have a strong bond with him—one that is spiritual. A devout Mormon whose belief is so real, so deep, that you feel its presence as you stand beside him. I’ve only known a few people like this. It goes without saying just how much I love and deeply admire him. He’s the real deal.

We talked for what felt like hours about Jesus and the beliefs pertaining to the Latter-day Saints Church. When he spoke, explaining the answers to my questions, I hung on his every word. When he gave pause while thinking about how to respond to something, it seemed to last an eternity.

He would sometimes pause mid-thought, staring into the atmosphere as if he were fishing or cloud-watching, and say, “You know what? That is a great question. I don’t have the answer to that right now. But if you give me some time to think more about it, and perhaps consult the scriptures, I will have an answer for you.”

I really respected that. Too many people pretend to know when they don’t. There is a certain beauty in not knowing the answers. It’s human.

I walked away challenged, as always after talking with him. I hope to see him again soon.

Keep reading

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

Hot off hosting Substack’s inaugural Spelling Bee, the writer, comedian, and actress has launched a Substack. In her first post, she asks that you think of it as an “ongoing performance art piece about… being irrelevant.”

has launched Principled Perspectives, where the global macro investor and writer will be sharing articles about “principles, tools, and what’s going on with life, work, economics, markets, politics, the changing world order, AI, the Big Cycle, and other such things.”

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.

I’m writing a book about the state of the media that will be published later this year. It’s called How to Save the Media. You can pre-order it here:

Pre-order

It’s a bold title, I know. But there’s little doubt that the media is in crisis. Even as it seems that more news is being consumed than ever, it hardly feels like we’re getting smarter. Mad kings rule the media economy and reap the rewards. News organizations are doing mass layoffs. Impartial reporting is out; jestergooning is in.

But I believe there’s reason to hope. I’ve seen what can happen when publishers take ownership and audiences directly support the work they believe in. I’ve seen a new media market grow from nothing and watched once-struggling writers find financial security. I’ve seen them build new institutions, giving rise to a generation of fresh voices. And I’ve seen audiences vote for the culture they want to see, funding the voices and perspectives they value—leading to more than 5 million paid subscriptions on this platform alone.

So I’m capturing this pivotal time in the pages of a book.

How to Save the Media is about this era of transition, where old gatekeepers give way to new opportunities and direct relationships reign supreme. It’s about an emerging ecosystem where success doesn’t have to depend on who you know or how well you cater to an algorithm. It shows a way to recover from the collapse of traditional media, and escape the deranging effects of the attention economy.

This book tackles the biggest questions facing the media and society, from how to protect the free press to how to resist a robot uprising, taking readers into rooms with some of the biggest media power players of our time, including berserk billionaires and heroic hacks. I’ll blend insider access with outsider perspective, drawing on my history in media and tech across two decades and three continents, from scrabbling freelance journalist to co-founder of Substack. You’ll see how we got here and where we’re going next—from the temple to the garden.

How to Save the Media will be published by Authors Equity, a new publishing company that practices what this book preaches: authors retain full ownership of their work and receive the majority of the sales revenue. The cover art is by my exceptional colleague Joro Chen.

Pre-orders are available now. They matter more than many people realize; they’re what determine whether a book breaks through and reaches a wider audience. So consider pre-ordering if you believe in a different future for media: one where creators own their work, audiences help shape the culture they want to thrive, and power flows to people rather than platforms. This is about saving the media—but also about making it better than it’s ever been.

Pre-order

This week, we’re rating conspiracy theories, getting stuck in 16th-century traffic, and exploring the AI enthusiasm gap between China and the U.S.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• In Pursuit brings former U.S. presidents to Substack: In honor of America’s 250th anniversary, the bipartisan group More Perfect has launched a new essay series penned by American public figures and scholars. First up: shared his thoughts on another George W., praising Washington for his humility and wisdom in voluntarily stepping away from power—praise that some have read as a veiled rebuke to the current administration. has many more essays on the docket, including those by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Chief Justice John Roberts, former first ladies, and other leading historians and public figures.

• Maxximizing: We’ve gone from looksmaxxing to Infinite Jestermaxxing. Horsemaxxing. Symphonymaxxing. Anne of Green Gablesmaxxing. Je ne sais quoi maxxing. We are rough beasts, slouchmaxxing towards Bethlehem. Someone, for some reason, has tried Gaddafimaxxing. Have we finally flymaxxed too close to the sun?

  

CONSPIRACIES

A Great American Art Form

The Kennedys are, yet again, having a moment: RFK Jr. is doing ads with Kid Rock, and Ryan Murphy’s new series about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy is on screens across the country. Meanwhile, Max Nussenbaum revisits the family’s starring role in America’s greatest art form: conspiracy theories.

JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, Reviewed

— in Candy for Breakfast

Forget jazz, Broadway, comics, or hip-hop—in my book, conspiracy theories are the true Great American Art Form. This country was practically built for them: start with a deep-seated distrust of authority, stir in the Protestant idea of unmediated access to individual truth, and top with the First Amendment to let it all bloom in public.

You could even say the United States itself was founded on a conspiracy theory: the Founding Fathers wove a tale of powerful elites (King George) secretly plotting against ordinary people (the colonists) to advance a villainous scheme (subjugate them through oppressive taxation and military control). As with many conspiracy theories, there’s a kernel of truth to this story—but the reality is that what the founders interpreted (or spun) as a deliberate plot against them was really just a patchwork of clumsy, improvised policies from a disorganized British government.

If conspiracy theories are the Great American Art Form, there’s no question as to which is the canonical work of art—our Kind of Blue, West Side Story, Superman, and Illmatic all rolled into one: the theories surrounding the 1963 assassination of our third-best president named “John,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The belief that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone is the country’s most widely believed conspiracy theory—if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory—sustained across generations and deeply woven into American cultural memory through countless books, movies, and TV shows.

In fact, we even have the Kennedy assassination to thank for the term “conspiracy theory” entering widespread use in the first place: as revealed by a declassified 1967 document, the CIA encouraged the use of the then-obscure phrase as a pejorative term to discredit critics of the official narrative.

In his book Reclaiming History, Manson prosecutor and best-selling true crime author Vincent Bugliosi cites 44 different organizations and 214 specific individuals who have been accused of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy, including the Nazis, the Teamsters, the French OAS, Watergate plotter E. Howard Hunt, and Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician. Needless to say, this review will not manage to investigate all of them. The limits of time, space, and human sanity will sadly constrain me to just ten of the most well-known conspiracy theories, which I will evaluate both for plausibility and—far more importantly—for entertainment value.

Keep reading

FULL CIRCLE

HISTORY

“Traffic’s thy god”

Callan Davies on how Shakespeare got to work, and what it tells us about traffic, horses, and a rapidly changing world.

A Shakespearean History of Traffic

— in

Thomas was born around 1514, and he testified at the age of 70 in 1584 about some property issues. Over this time, he would have felt keenly the traffic explosion that characterised sixteenth-century England. The term itself took on association in Thomas’s youth with the ever-expanding commercial movement of goods, coming to stand in for all sorts of kinetic trade. Shakespeare even borrows it to refer to dramatic action itself, setting up “the two hours’ traffic of our stage” (Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, l.12). This was the age of traffic, both in the global and colonial expansion of merchandising and in our more modern sense of a glut of people and vehicles on the move. As the cynical philosopher Apemanthus in Timon of Athens puts it, chiding a merchant, “Traffic’s thy god”! (1.1.239).

All this had me wondering (as I often do) quite what it would be like for the average player or playgoer to commute in the 1580s or 1590s: how did Shakespeare make it from his home off Bishopsgate Street to the Theatre or Curtain in Shoreditch, or to Stratford-upon-Avon? How did individuals travel from Southwark south of the river up north or west? Could Shakespeare ride a horse? (Almost certainly, but how did this come about?)

Was horse-riding like learning to drive at 17? Did you borrow your parents’ nag for the odd journey? Who taught you to ride and was there a formalised “mode”? Plenty of clues exist for more elite riders. Horse-riding manuals and fashionable continental riding styles proliferated across this period. But what about, say, a journeyman shoemaker? A farm labourer? The son of a glover?

As our Shoreditch carter looked on at a playhouse being built next door, he saw (perhaps not coincidentally) his own work in the carrying trade change rapidly. The historian Joan Thirsk points out that the average horse rider on a road in 1500 was almost certainly a gentry figure; by 1600, it was most likely someone of lower middle social status or below going about their business. In just 100 years, horse-riding became democratised; it became “blue-collared.”

Much of this was driven by a growing economy and a rapidly growing population. (And a growing gentility about travel: why drive when you can be driven?) Horses were needed for all sorts of workaday functions (and also for war preparedness over a century of regular geopolitical instability... topical echoes abound). London felt expansion most sharply, more or less doubling in size (to 200,000 residents) in the twenty years from 1580 to 1600. These factors shaped the playing industry, too. There are no crowds without traffic.

Keep reading

PAINTING

TECHNOLOGY

The AI enthusiasm gap

Afra on why Chinese society—from art-house filmmakers to hundreds of millions of Spring Festival Gala viewers—is broadly optimistic about AI, while Americans remain conflicted, if not outright hostile.

An AI-Maxi New Year

— in

It’s Chinese New Year, and my timeline is dominated by two names: Jia Zhangke and Unitree.

Jia Zhangke, the 55-year-old director whose melancholic, unhurried gaze at ordinary Chinese life has long mesmerized Western cinephiles—turns out to be, of all things, very AI-pilled. This is not an obvious move for a filmmaker whose greatest works are elegies for what Chinese modernization has destroyed. But during this holiday, he publicly praised Seedance, ByteDance’s AI video generation tool, and then released a short film made entirely with it. The film is a conversation between two selves: the plain, conservative Jia, thermos flask in hand, and a younger, healthier, optimistic “AI Jia,” debating the nature of filmmaking. In the final scene, the two Jia Zhangkes stand on the shore of the ice-choked Yellow River, a landscape he has returned to across decades of work in Shanxi province, watching fireworks climb into the sky. The palette is his own: subdued long shots, blue-gray hills receding into the distance. The dual selves wish each other a happy new year. The artist has metabolized the technology into something unmistakably his.

The other story is Unitree.

This is the second year the company’s robots have performed at the Spring Festival Gala, an event that functions as something like the Super Bowl fused with a state address, held annually. I consider the Gala an ultimate “mid-curve” aesthetic, a cultural common denominator. This year’s gala was aggressively AI-maxi. The Unitree G1 humanoid robots performed kung fu, parkour, street dance, and weapons routines with nunchucks and staffs—clips that ricocheted through Western AI communities within hours; many joked “we are cooked”. For a robotics company locked in brutal domestic competition, a Gala slot is a coronation. Meanwhile, the gala itself served as a showcase for Seedance at scale: the segment “Blessing of the Flower God” summoned twelve ancient poets, each reciting verse to honor a flower of their birth month, with AI-generated imagery blended near-seamlessly into the live stage. Later I learned that Seedance had contributed backgrounds, transitions, and generated sequences to at least three other performances. The whole production felt less like a variety show than a national stress test of ByteDance’s compute architecture.

When my partner and I were watching the Gala last night, he said it felt too tech-infused—it reminded him of The Jetsons, the 1960s cartoon with its relentless, cheerful obsession with a technological utopia. I think he’s underselling it. What I see in China right now is closer to Victorian Britain: a society exuding moral seriousness and deep belief in modernization and technological uplift.

What connects these stories is what they reveal about disposition. The Chinese society, from a world-renowned auteur to the hundreds of millions watching the Gala, is broadly, strikingly optimistic about AI. The reflexive existential dread so pervasive in Western discourse is largely absent.

I remember I spent some time browsing Unitree’s Xiaohongshu account to see how the company addresses the Chinese public, especially about anxiety about job displacement. Turns out, there’s nearly none. The feed is wall-to-wall spectacle: humanoid robots and robot dogs performing in extreme weather, doing impressive gymnastics. The comment sections, meanwhile, are a gathering place for the self-deprecating humor of Chinese internet users. Young people ask: When can I ride the robot dog to buy groceries? When will you release a robot nanny? (Since they aren’t getting married or having children.) And, inevitably: “We need robots for elderly care, it’s urgent, please Boss Wang (means Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree), speed up production so the robots can look after us in old age.”

Set this against the posture of Jia Zhangke’s rough American counterparts. On a recent Joe Rogan episode, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon discussed AI filmmaking with open contempt. AI output is “shitty,” Affleck argued, because it regresses to the mean by nature—and when AI becomes ubiquitous, “people will actually value real things made by real people even more.” Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association has accused Seedance of “unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale,” and Disney has alleged that ByteDance effectively packaged a pirated library of its characters into the tool. The resistance is creative, institutional, legal, and corporate—arriving from all directions at once.

Can we find an American Jia Zhangke? And if one existed, would they survive the anti-AI public siege? Where American AI optimism does exist, it is confined almost entirely to Silicon Valley—the OpenClaw frenzy, the collective Claude Code psychosis, and if you reach back a bit, the 3-year-old “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a self-enclosed declaration that humanity ought to ride the technological trajectory forward, though who “we” are and why we “ought to” remain thoroughly unexamined. What you see is a cultishly bullish tech elite producing manifestos that fail to persuade the rest of the country, set against a China where the public, the government, and the tech industry are broadly synchronized.

Why such different orientations? It would be easy—and cheesy—to credit propaganda alone, as when Palmer Luckey declared that China’s most powerful weapon is “their ability to control people’s minds through the media.” China’s online discourse is heavily constrained, and voices that sound anything like Western liberal humanism or degrowth are unlikely to survive moderation. But this explanation is too thin to hold. Decades of lived experience have taught Chinese society an empirical lesson: technology makes life tangibly better. I once wrote about my Shandong grandmother, now in her eighties, who once walked five hours to buy a clock so her children could get to school on time. Today her Xiaomi phone has given her an online shopping addiction, and delivery drones fly above her apartment. For many in China, industrialization compressed and bent time itself—and AI simply looks like the next turn of a wheel that has only ever spun forward.

Keep reading

SPACE RACE

FICTION

After the fall

Michael McSweeney’s short story imagines Boston after an invasion: a skeleton newspaper crew, a seed convoy through occupied Massachusetts, and three women with rifles blocking the road.

Dispatch

— in

Eight months after the invasion failed, our newspaper had electricity again. Someone in the Army’s logistics division owed my editor-in-chief a favor and in exchange for some promised puff pieces they agreed to connect the building with our sole working printer to the fragile power grid. The printer was a tiny machine, a by-now ancient letterpress kept in a storeroom we affectionately dubbed the museum, but it fed two dozen one-page news prints an hour into our grateful, ink-stained hands. Before this we published the paper by hand, with whatever we had on hand. The shreds of cardboard boxes, old envelopes pilfered from Post Offices, or the blank pages of legal orders we found in a backroom at the municipal court. With power, we approached something more consistent, and now we could work at night. We estimated an official circulation of about 500, an amount we considered a small miracle, though we told ourselves we easily reached half of Boston. People devoured our editions at the ration stations set up in the rubble of the Common and the worksite at the Waterfront where soldiers and civilians were lifting one of the invaders’ landing craft out of the harbor. I even sketched the landing craft, a dark and wart-pocked spear-point, and got it printed in the morning edition.

Let it be said that humanity will never lose its curiosity. Nor will true journalists lose their desire to feed that curiosity, to create and deliver the news. The invasion had shattered the public internet, though a source once told me a few satellites up there still worked, and all the easy links between people were gone with it. Everyone, myself included, kept reaching for our pockets to connect, to feel the hive mind, to feel happy or angry or sad together. We intended to rebuild these connections through the stories people told us. Meteoric terrors descending from the sky. Family members dragged away. Lakes and rivers drained down to fish bones. I interviewed a woman who shot her husband rather than see him bleed to death after an invader sliced through the door he was barricading and severed his arm. I interviewed a fifteen-year-old boy who dragged his unconscious grandfather into a swamp and hid for a week, surviving on scalding rainwater and tree bark. We printed everything. I believed everything.

One day I got a tip about a shipment of seeds and fertilizer out to Western Massachusetts. I grew up in Fallston and felt the pull of home, so after two day-ration bribes I was allowed to ride in one of the trucks. We crawled out of Boston along Route 2 and as we slalomed around ruined cars I gazed out at the broken skyline, the Prudential Building cut in half at the heart. I wanted to see it rebuilt but I knew it wouldn’t or shouldn’t be. It will go back into Boston. Devoured and reused for something new, something more, because no place is ever the same after war.

The convoy picked up speed through Concord. Unbound by the stoplights thrown and tarnished in the trees. We drove past bombed-out Emerson Hospital where my uncle was once held against his will, screaming about enemies none of us could see. Burnt-out ambulances crowded the entrance ramp. I stole the manifest from the glove compartment: seeds for corn, tomatoes and asparagus. Germs to feed the thousands who remained.

Three women with rifles blocked the way through Athol. The trucks stopped and for a while there was no movement. One of the women fired a flare and took a few steps forward. The driver of the first truck got out and approached her. I leaned out the window and watched the woman’s face grow proud and agitated as she spoke. The driver took his baseball cap off and wiped the sweat from his bald head. He turned, saw me watching, threw an angry look and jerked his head. I sat back in my seat and scribbled my surroundings: an exit ramp a hundred yards away, yellow grass and yellow trees, the speck of a hawk in the cloudy sky. Finally the driver walked back and the second driver joined him. I heard the cargo door open, hang and slam. Then the first driver walked back around, two crates stacked in his arms. The second driver climbed back beside me. They need some help, he told me. Looks like a robbery, I told him. They need some help, he repeated, and then he said, They need help and they’re taking it.

Keep reading

DRAWINGS

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

The writer has started I’m Glad You’re Here, a Substack where he reflects “on the journey through cPTSD, the discovery of Autism, the pursuit of peace.”

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.

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is finally out, so let’s get into it. To discuss, we invited film, culture, and literary critics , , and to jump into a Google doc. moderated the conversation, as our panelists dove into the questions plaguing this adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel: Are Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi believable as Cathy and Heathcliff? Did the movie need that opening scene? And what’s the deal with the eggs?

Readers beware: spoilers ahead.

Fennell opens Wuthering Heights with a man being hanged while visibly aroused, and the crowd descends into something orgiastic. Provocation or statement of intent?

Elissa Suh: I read that, at some point, this scene had the condemned [man] ejaculating mid-execution. That certainly would’ve been saying something. Without that bit, I thought the opening was missing something. Sex + Death is such a rich subtheme in the source text and in Gothic literature, but it’s all rather superficial in the film.

Radhika Jones: I thought about it mostly in terms of the crowd’s reaction, and the sense we get of collective barbarism. In the novel, Heathcliff tends to be the one referred to as “savage.” For me, the takeaway of the opening scene is that, actually, everybody implicated in this scene is savage. Whether that’s a fair indictment is another question, but it did level the playing field.

Mina Le: Interesting. Do you feel, then, that Heathcliff’s position in the story is compromised?

Radhika Jones: I did find it hard to parse how he’s supposed to function in the family onscreen. Cathy names him as a brother. He’s loyal to her. Yes, Earnshaw calls him a servant, but it all felt a little muddled, because he doesn’t really seem all that different from them.

Elissa Suh: I caught the barbarism of the crowd in the opening, but that idea didn’t seem to carry through to the rest of the film—at all!—to me.

Radhika Jones: Yes, I agree! Which was a pity.

Eliza Brooke: Agreed that the barbarism of the hanging scene should have bled into the rest of the film. I also wish there had been more Charli xcx needle drops throughout! While it feels like Emerald Fennell was being a bit of an edgelord with the opening sequence, I thought the use of Charli’s pop soundtrack elevated it. It really ratcheted up the feeling of grinding dread amid all that sex and death. Grinding dread: very Wuthering Heights!

Mina Le: Also, they don’t reference the hanging bit ever again … other than to toy with Catherine thinking that Heathcliff has come back.

Radhika Jones: The other striking thing about it to me was just how many people were there, and this is a novel with barely any named characters. But we cut from there to Cathy and Nelly running across the moors, and then the prevailing mood is emptiness. So it’s a contrast that doesn’t really go anywhere, unfortunately.

The cellophane gown, the unrestrained courtship rituals—did the anachronisms feel like they were in service of something, or more like aesthetic moodboarding?

Eliza Brooke: As far as the costuming and production design is concerned, I didn’t mind the anachronistic flourishes until the iridescent cellophane gown showed up after Cathy’s marriage to Edgar Linton (and a parade of similarly anachronistic fabrics followed). It was a jarring visual transition that seemed like it should indicate a shift in the narrative, but ultimately, I wasn’t sure what point Fennell was trying to make. Was she saying something about the Lintons and their wealth? Their innate ridiculousness? Their detachment from the wildness that surrounds their home? It felt a bit like flashy costuming for flashy costuming’s sake. And I say that as someone who loves a big look!

Mina Le: Yeah, the cellophane stood out quite a lot. But I wish there were fewer costumes overall. They were beautiful, but Margot went through what felt like 40 in an hour, and it was difficult for any of them to make an impact.

Elissa Suh: Honestly, the costumes and set design—and the hair, don’t forget the hair!—were the most (only) rewarding parts of the film for me. I clung to them. Each one outdid the next. My mind needed something to focus on, and so I actually appreciated the parade. I wonder what the final gown count was.

Radhika Jones: For me, the parade of dresses was a laugh-out-loud moment, sort of cathartic. Honestly, from the moment the character of Isabella was introduced, I felt like there was another parallel film happening, which was a little weirder (high bar, but still!) and more surreal. It wasn’t consistent, though, which made it hard to follow.

Eliza Brooke: I completely agree that Isabella was in a different film—and one that I would really like to watch! I thought Alison Oliver was an absolute delight and a high point of the movie. Obsessed with her weird dolls, her baby voice, and, frankly, her sexual self-knowledge.

Radhika Jones: Yes, this! I kept thinking: what parallel-universe movie is she performing this role in, because I’d like to see that! Fennell is good with that lighter touch. Isabella’s Romeo and Juliet monologue was pitch-perfect. And it did more to explain her character than any amount of ribbons (although the ribbons were fun).

Mina Le: I think maybe Fennell was trying to replicate Josh O’Connor and Tanya Reynolds’s characters in Emma with Isabella—that sort of weird and off-kilter side character. But it didn’t make sense for this particular movie … and Isabella has quite a lot of substance in the book, too, that she lost here.

Eliza Brooke: Isabella was giving Emma (2020) for suuure!

Mina Le: I can definitely see the humor in the ostentatiousness. Maybe my issue was that the film didn’t seem to take itself seriously. Tonally, I was getting whiplash. I mean, this story is pretty tragic, but the confectionery production design is very reminiscent of ’60s-’70s medieval-revival love stories.

Elissa Suh: It’s hard for me to determine whether the costuming really achieved anything meaningful, because the film overall is muddled and caught between wanting to be subversive while also sticking to traditional conventions of romance—and then failing to really deliver on either.

Did Robbie and Elordi actually become Cathy and Heathcliff for you? Was their chemistry convincing?

Mina Le: Though I think that Robbie and Elordi are great and talented actors, the casting inaccuracy really pulled me out of it. I couldn’t believe them in these roles, unfortunately. Especially when the actors who played Edgar and Isabella more so represented who Heathcliff and Cathy were in my mind, so I kept getting distracted by that loss whenever they came onscreen.

Elissa Suh: Margot was not always credible to me, even though she tries. She seems a bit too old—no ageism—to play someone going through their first love. I mean, isn’t part of the appeal of Margot Robbie as an actor the way she seems like she was just born a mature woman? Like, this is why we were all in collective shock in 2013 when we found out she was only 20-something years old and playing Leo’s wife in The Wolf of Wall Street.

I felt like sometimes Cathy—or Robbie as Cathy—was too coy or “modern” in giving a winking kind of performance, but then other times not. Going back to what Mina said earlier, this is definitely part of the tonal whiplash that undermines the film.

Eliza Brooke: I agree that Margot Robbie doesn’t read as someone who would spy a pair of people getting it on and be shocked by that. I struggled to see either of them as the book’s Cathy and Heathcliff simply because … those characters are not Cathy and Heathcliff! [Elordi’s] Heathcliff in particular bears no resemblance to the vindictive, abusive character in the book. In the movie, he’s noble and loyal as a child, and he’s passionate and devoted as a grown man. People keep calling him a “brute,” and Cathy claims he has a “wicked temper,” but he’s basically a decent guy. I think Fennell has to have it that way in order for him to remain a blameless, gorgeous heartthrob—and in order for Cathy to deserve him, she also has to be less of an asshole than she is in the book.

Radhika Jones: Exactly. Heathcliff is truly abusive in the book, as much as we might like to forget it.

Mina Le: In the film, Heathcliff kept referring to himself as “cruel” and “savage”—that was just before the Isabella-in-chains scene, too—but besides his self-declarations, there really were no traces of that? He’s totally a sweetie.

Eliza Brooke: Yes! On the BDSM bit—when he marries Isabella in the book, he’s unbelievably cruel to her, and she’s utterly miserable for it. In the movie, his “cruelty” translates to giving her what she wants, sexually speaking. Including chaining her up like a dog.

Mina Le: Another way that Fennell unfortunately strays from the meaning of the novel for the purpose of sex and shock value.

Radhika Jones: I couldn’t think of them as Cathy and Heathcliff. I’m not a reader who visualizes characters, so it wasn’t like they contrasted with specific actors I would have wanted. But the relationship diverges so much from the text that I just thought of them as playing other roles. Elordi in particular seemed like a very gentle Heathcliff. It’s a gentleness that worked so well as the creature in Frankenstein, but here it seemed at odds with the story.

Mina Le: Even his pivot to “sadism” in the second half of the film felt off to me. It didn’t seem aligned with how he developed Heathcliff up to that point. I get that there’s a time jump, but something about it was still unsatisfying to me.

I also think Elordi’s Heathcliff is Byronic-hero coded, which is sort of the antithesis of who the character is supposed to be. Wuthering Heights is supposed to be an inversion of the romances of the time.

Elissa Suh: I also want to say that any potential lack of chemistry is due to the writing and the way the movie unfolds. Elordi and Robbie are talented, but for me, the problem starts at the beginning with the child actors (no shade to Owen Cooper and Charlotte Mellington, who are just doing their job). The scenes of earlier life were pretty rote, doing the heavy lifting to ground the romance. We know Cathy and Heathcliff are going to fall in love because we understand the conventions of romance, even if we have never read Brontë. It was like Emerald was operating mechanically with the scenes of their childhood, telling rather than showing us how to feel. This dully-formed character investment carries through to the end of the film for me, so anything between Cathy and Heathcliff later on could only be believed to a certain extent.

Radhika Jones: The scene when I most believed in all of it was Cathy’s declaration to Nelly that she would marry Linton because she thought it might help raise Heathcliff up. I believed in that moment that she cared about Heathcliff. It was less about the chemistry between the two of them onscreen together, and more about her own conception of how love might direct her life.

Eliza Brooke: Speaking of Nelly … should we talk about how that character changed? I found it fascinating that, by making Heathcliff and Cathy into star-crossed lovers who aren’t all that terrible, Fennell had to turn someone else into the story’s villain. And Nelly was that guy.

Radhika Jones: I went back to the book to look at that scene specifically, in her narration of it to Lockwood (in the frame story that’s not in the film). And Nelly does see Heathcliff outside, and she does keep that from Cathy. But in the book, she’s not in a position to control events the way she does in the film, especially at the end. And she’s not set up with a resentful backstory (it’s mentioned early in the film that she’s a bastard child, right? So she’s not just a servant, she’s also an outcast). In the book, she meddles, but she’s not vindictive—or at least, if she is, it’s all mixed up in her unreliable narration and gives the reader something productive to consider.

Eliza Brooke: Exactly. In the book, when Nelly fails to intervene after Heathcliff overhears Cathy saying that marrying him would “degrade her” (and runs off before her confession of love), it doesn’t seem like she’s trying to punish them. She’s more of a neutral third-party observer. In the movie version, Nelly acts with much more intent.

Elissa Suh: A person of color who is the help/(hand)maid. How revolutionary. What a disservice to Hong Chau.

Eliza Brooke: Yep!

Mina Le: Ironically, I felt that Edgar’s casting (a brown man to represent this character who’s extremely noble) really took away from the important class/racial commentary present in the book (because Elordi’s Heathcliff is white). And in normal circumstances, I would be fine with Hong Chau’s casting (she also did amazing as Nelly), but considering this was totally “colorblind,” it felt like subliminal biases were present. Especially because neither Edgar nor Nelly gets character development that I felt was substantive enough.

Eliza Brooke: I agree with this. When the two actors of color are playing the villain and the cuck, it reads as subliminal bias.

Radhika Jones: Hong Chau was so good, I almost wished she had more power. She was incredibly convincing. She reminded me visually of the handmaids in Vermeer paintings, who ferry letters back and forth surreptitiously between lovers. That moment when the camera pulls back and you see all the black and white tile and she’s there with Cathy. I wished there were more quiet moments like that, where, as a viewer, you could sit with the dynamics between two characters and really ponder them. So I was extra-annoyed when her character became more of a cartoon gatekeeper and villain at the end.

I was surprised by how tame the actual sex was in this, compared to Saltburn. Maybe that says something about me? Did the eroticism here live up to anyone’s expectations based on the marketing?

Mina Le: So what did y’all think of all those eggs?

Radhika Jones: Is it a sign of the times (their times? our times?) that I immediately thought, what a waste of eggs! Eggs are expensive!

Eliza Brooke: I was feeling bad about the lack of washing machines, personally.

Mina Le: You know Nelly was pissed.

Elissa Suh: There’s a certain level of salaciousness one has come to expect from an Emerald Fennell movie, and that is woefully absent here.

Mina Le: I literally thought Heathcliff was going to hump Cathy’s corpse at the end of the film because of all she put me through with Saltburn, and weirdly? Disappointed that nothing happened.

Elissa Suh: I was waiting for that too! Part of me wonders if Emerald had entertained that thought and was stopped by the studio?

Eliza Brooke: Yes! Maybe she felt like she couldn’t have two grave-humping scenes in back-to-back movies? (Relatedly, I was shocked, upon recent re-read, to realize that nobody actually humps a corpse in the book. I could have sworn that happened.)

Elissa Suh: And it would have been more earned here, too.

Radhika Jones: I had really been hoping Fennell would film a scene that’s in the book in which Heathcliff has Cathy’s coffin dug up and opened, 13 years after her death. He checks her out, notes that she hasn’t started decomposing yet and still looks great, then convinces the sexton to leave a side of her coffin open so he can eventually be buried next to her, with a side of his coffin open, so their bodies can merge for eternity.

Eliza Brooke: That would have been a stronger ending. Missed opportunity!

Elissa Suh: Close enough to corpse-humping for me.

Mina Le: Yeah, and honestly, would’ve done more to show how messed-up their relationship actually was. I think flashing back to them as children made it feel too “happily ever after” and overly sentimental, considering how much destruction they caused.

Radhika Jones: I love that Brontë goes there. Honestly, when the source text is so extreme, it doesn’t leave much room to maneuver. To Fennell’s credit, a lot of the language that seems over-the-top comes from the novel. But the onscreen sex was, in my opinion, not as credible in the parameters she set. In the fake-parallel-Isabella movie that we’re writing together, yes!

Elissa Suh: In general, the sex scenes were few and far between, and the ones we did see seemed like pure clickbait, engineered for Instagram. The BDSM lite—if you can even call it that—with Isabella? That’s it? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this movie could’ve benefited from the edgelord tendencies of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman.

Eliza Brooke: Absolutely. If you’re going to show us two freaks in love … show us two freaks in love.

Mina Le: I wasn’t even sure how much of the BDSM was actually happening between Heath and Isabella, versus overdramatized in her letters to stoke Cathy’s jealousy. Even when Isabella’s yapping with her collar, it’s with the context that Cathy is supposed to stop by.

Elissa Suh: True. It’s all just a show. The peak of provocation from this movie, it seems, was Elordi’s tongue wagging in people’s ears.

Fennell skips the second half of the novel, which dives into the trauma Heathcliff and Cathy’s love inflicts on their offspring. Do you think it’s the right choice to focus on the love story versus the full, intergenerational tragedy of the book? Does the audience lose anything significant?

Eliza Brooke: We definitely lose something for it! I get why filmmakers avoid the portion of the book that takes place after Cathy’s death, especially when that would mean benching your biggest star. However: what’s so incredible about the book is how Brontë weaves a story about an inescapable cycle of familial abuse that makes monsters out of each progressive generation (until it doesn’t!). I wish that spirit had broken through in this movie, just because it’s so well done in the book. But that wasn’t the love story Fennell wanted to tell.

Mina Le: Yes, on that last point, I think if these adaptations that focus on the first half are still able to weave in the themes of the book and stay true to the heart of it, I don’t mind them axing off the time jumps and Cathy II and Linton Heathcliff (the fact that they all have the same names is insane, thanks, Ms. Brontë), because I understand it can be more difficult to structure for film.

Radhika Jones: It’s understandable that any filmmaker would do it, but the revenge part of the novel only comes to some sort of resolution at the end. So in this case, with the focus on the first half, you get Heathcliff trying to exact revenge, but it doesn’t really pay off. In the novel, he goes after Edgar Linton, long after Cathy is dead, to get his hands on the property. That has huge implications in terms of his obsession with gaining power over the people who scorned him. Here, his revenge motivation is more muddled. He’s mad at Cathy for making a mistake. That doesn’t seem like enough to drive his bad behavior.

Elissa Suh: The motivation was indeed thin to me, who hasn’t read the Brontë. So if you’re not going to go into the depths of character and theme, then you should at least go all out with the sex and kink or what-have-you. Literally anything.

Mina Le: Honestly, in this version I think they downplayed Heathcliff’s childhood abuse quite a lot, so it’s probably better that Fennell didn’t try to tackle the second half. It wouldn’t feel realistic for this Heathcliff to hold so many grudges.

Eliza Brooke: 100%! This version of Heathcliff would not abuse his own son like that.

Elissa Suh: Not having read the book, I can’t speak to specifics, but I think it’s the filmmaker’s right to focus on what they want; but they should have a good reason for doing it. All said and done, this did not amount to much beyond your typical romance with Gothic undertones—I don’t think it’s particularly memorable, and from what you’ve all said, a much more interesting story was originally there. You are all really making me want to read the book.

Radhika Jones: Heathcliff is deeply unhinged in the book (some of it justified, some not), such that if you made a literal BBC-style miniseries, à la 1994 Pride and Prejudice, people would be like, “This is insane, it couldn’t possibly have been written in 1847.”

Elissa Suh: This is the kind of TV we desperately need.

Radhika Jones: Right? Clearly there’s an audience for it!

Wait, there is a BBC miniseries from 2009! OK, I know what my next watch is.

Elissa Suh: Just put that on HBO instead of BBC, and voilà.

Mina Le: Maybe the bright side of this adaptation is that it will spur more interest in Wuthering Heights in general, so we can get the adaptation we want.

Radhika Jones: Now I’m wondering if there’s a Clueless-type adaptation that is fully contemporary but gets the themes and story contours exactly right.

Eliza Brooke: Oh, that’s a great question and idea. The tough thing about adapting Wuthering Heights in a way that’s true to the story is that it will be extremely grim. But I think that contemporary viewers have enough of an appetite for misery that it would work out fine.

Radhika Jones: Let’s pitch it! I think part of the fun of a closer adaptation would be casting the two generations.

Fennell has said she wanted to make the Wuthering Heights she imagined when she first read the book at 14. Is that a legitimate approach to adaptation—prioritizing the feeling a book gave you over what the book actually says? Should Fennell have just made an original film instead?

Elissa Suh: That’s an approach for sure, but maybe not a good one. If that was her M.O., then she succeeded—but it still doesn’t make it a good movie. Also, sidenote: I think that adapting the feeling or sensibility of a book (albeit not rooted in nostalgia) and translating that mood to the screen is a legitimate approach. There’s a bit of film theory on that, where André Bazin says, “literal translations are not the faithful ones.”

Radhika Jones: I wrote in my opening book club piece about Wuthering Heights that increasingly I think it’s a middle-aged book. We meet Heathcliff in the novel when he’s around 38. He’s seen a lot, he’s endured and occasioned a lot of tragic events. He’s a hollow man.

So on the one hand, I think Fennell captures the book you read when you’re 14 (or anyway, the book she read), where all you notice is this doomed, passionate connection between two young people. But the book itself is not merely about that. That said, filmmakers absolutely get to make the films they want. And you can tell in the script that the language of Wuthering Heights, that is part of that doomed love story, means a lot to her.

Mina Le: I think there is a way to adapt something based on how you read it as a child, but that has to somehow be acknowledged and present in the way you tell the story. Not that this is an Oscar-winning idea, but I feel like if it were framed as a 14-year-old girl reading the book, and it went in and out of the story, then that could be a way to show this very specific interpretation that is also sort of wrong. Rob Reiner did this with The Princess Bride (though I haven’t read the book, so maybe there is book-reading-ception in the book). Or with Stand by Me, when the main character is later depicted writing his memoir at his desk.

Eliza Brooke: Oh, I like that idea. And it would be a little nod to the framing device in the book, with Nelly narrating the story to Heathcliff’s new tenant.

If I were adapting the book that I remember reading in high school, there would be 100% more grave-fucking.

Elissa Suh: Emily Brontë would’ve wanted it that way.

Eliza Brooke: I feel like the story that Fennell actually wanted to tell was Romeo and Juliet? As discussed above, there’s a reference to the play right there in the script. Or rather, maybe Fennell wanted to make a version of Romeo and Juliet in the sweeping atmosphere of Wuthering Heights.

Radhika Jones: I think this is why Isabella’s Romeo and Juliet moment was so satisfying to me. It was an addition to the story and dialogue that felt thematically valuable, not gratuitous.

Elissa Suh: The Baz Luhrmann one? That one has a great sense of play, which is missing here. I think there’s a world where she could’ve managed that in Wuthering Heights (I mean, the quotations!) despite the dark material.

Eliza Brooke: Speaking of Baz, he and Fennell share a lot of DNA in terms of their over-the-top aesthetics (and willingness to let the aesthetics do the heavy lifting for them). I wonder how much of an inspiration he is for her.

Mina Le: Okay, guys—I think we’re done!

Radhika Jones: Most fun in a Google doc ever?

Elissa Suh: This was so fun! Hope to see you all outside of a Google doc too, one day.

Mina Le: Yes—we need to get together to pitch our Wuthering Heights adaptation series to HBO.

Elissa Suh: Substack Productions!

More on the participants:

• is a culture writer and film critic whose work has appeared in Vogue, Eater, New York Magazine, and MUBI. Her Substack, Moviepudding, pairs reviews of films and food.

• is a writer, editor, and book critic. The former editor in chief of Vanity Fair, she is currently running a book club on her Substack. They’re currently reading Wuthering Heights, naturally.

• is a culture, entertainment, and fashion journalist. Her Substack features interviews alongside essays on film and fashion.

• is a writer, actress, and video essayist. Her Substack, , analyzes fashion, film, and internet culture.

It’s Valentine’s Day and everyone’s making questionable decisions—about love, about peptides, about couches, and about eating a mystery gummy and then wandering into the woods.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• Looksmaxxing takes center stage: announced a new health and aesthetics newsletter, High Touch, with a viral post that described an extensive beauty regimen. Responses ran the gamut, from “this sounds like a dream month to me” to “I truly think I’d rather just be ugly and die a little sooner.” But, as points out, the newsletter is called “‘High Touch,’ not ‘Accessible Health Hacks for Poor People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Go To The Gym.’”

• Is AI coming for our jobs? redux: An AI startup founder’s viral essay on X sparked the latest round of discussions on whether AI is coming for white-collar work. talks through “The Doomsday Scenario for AI and Jobs,” while pushed back on the idea that AI is soon to replace humans—largely due to the bottlenecks that humans themselves present.

DESIRES

Consumerism vs. spiritualism

A weed-induced crisis in the woods leads to a spiritual reckoning with what we actually want.

My Wishlist Bored Me to Tears

— in Total Rec

Years ago, I got really into CBD oil. It was the kind you squirt directly into your mouth like a horse supplement. I don’t remember the brand, because I didn’t buy it for myself. Someone at work handed it to me one day and said they couldn’t stand the minty taste. “Don’t you love mint? Want to give it a try?” I thought it was sweet at the time. I now realize it was also their way of saying, “You look pretty tired.”

But I didn’t get mad, because it worked! I slept. I relaxed. I became briefly evangelical and annoying about CBD in a way that now warrants a sincere apology.

When I ran out of that liquid gold, I bought some gummies. I popped what I thought was a CBD gummy, and an hour later I felt afraid of heights while just looking out the window. My heart was racing and I was convinced I was having a heart attack.

So I checked the packaging: THC. Actual weed.

The important context here is that I hadn’t done drugs in a very long time. High school me was a rebel who loved the devil’s herb, but something in my adult nervous system rejected it entirely. It didn’t make me feel relaxed. It made an already overly introspective person feel like I went forty matryoshka dolls deep into my skull and discovered something cosmically wrong.

I wasn’t happy about being high. After a lot of heavy breathing, I decided the only solution was to walk aimlessly into the woods like a sick animal preparing for death. Twenty minutes later, I was staring at mossy rocks imagining what photo would end up on my missing persons report.

This was extremely dramatic considering I was about 0.02 miles from a Dunkin’ Donuts, and if my brain wasn’t operating at 400% fear capacity I probably could’ve heard traffic nearby.

But instead of stumbling to Dunkin’, I sat down and opened a meditation book on my phone (a very on-brand choice for someone having a weed-induced crisis in the woods).

The meditation was meant for moments when you feel inadequate, fearful, or closed off. I was told that instead of trying to fix myself or make the feeling disappear, I should imagine giving away the most pleasing and beautiful gifts I could think of—they could even be parts of myself that I loved. Not exactly the most calming advice for someone freaking out and lost in the woods.

But I closed my eyes. I started thinking about everything I had personally wanted in the last 48 hours. I was deep in heated negotiations over the price of a cardigan on Poshmark. There was a lamp I’d been debating buying.

And then I read what these Buddhists were offering and realized… they were not messing around. While I’m haggling over resale listings, they’re offering jeweled mountains, perfumed oils, incense clouds, celestial bathing chambers, golden lotus lamps. Entire beautiful and peaceful universes imagined just to be given away, and I’m stuck on a button-down shirt.

“A bathing chamber excellently fragrant,

With floors of crystal, radiant and clear,

With graceful pillars shimmering with gems,

All hung about with gleaming canopies of pearls…”

The imagery went on and on in its abundance. If I wasn’t high, I probably would’ve taken it as a sign to level up my material desires. Missoni towels. A face-sculpting massage. A new perfume. But when I imagined offering those things to someone I actually loved—or offering them to the world—they suddenly felt small.

Keep reading

A DAY IN THE LIFE

ROMANCE

Love as a work of art

Tara Isabella Burton on the art—and folly—of falling in love.

In defense of falling in love

— in

We had a symposium on Christmas Eve. Technically it was Christmas Day. We’d all had dinner and then gone to Midnight Mass and then gone to a piano bar we all knew in Midtown East. The people who go to a piano bar at two in the morning on Christmas are as riotously lonely as you’d expect. A man in a fur coat held the door for us. The pianist sang “Jesus Freaks” and “Tradition.” We ordered garlic bread and got onto the subject of love.

One of us made the case that “falling in love” was not only unnecessary, when it came to one’s life partner, but actively undesirable. This was just controversial enough to keep us arguing past last call.

I took the side of the romantics. Whether this was out of habit or principle or stubbornness, I’m not sure. If there was ever a year for one to decry romantic impetuousness it is the year of one’s divorce, but I’ve never dropped a cause for being lost.

We all weighed in. We came to no conclusions. Some of us saw each other eighteen hours later for Chinese food and kept debating, even though the person who’d tossed the gauntlet was no longer there, and then I spent a month trying to work out what I thought.

We were drunk, and didn’t define our terms, and probably all enjoyed playing into our expected roles more than we enjoyed narrowing down the precise limitations of our disagreement, but the rough contours of the proposition, edited in the service of an interesting essay, are these:

Falling in love, understood as an erotic vulnerability, or a stronger form of infatuation (but distinguished, let’s say, from sexual attraction), is a bad idea because:

a) it makes you crazy;

b) it makes you make ill-advised decisions about who to marry, and

c) is likely to be more a result of your own projections and idealizations about the other person, downstream of your own projections and idealizations about yourself, and the kind of relationship a person like you should be in, and the fantasy of the other person playing that role, than it is about the kind of actual mutuality and engagement with true otherness that lasting, real, agapic love requires.

Points granted. C) is, I think, the most compelling.

You should probably do it anyway.

No doubt we shouldn’t marry most people we fall in love with. But even sober, even granting the necessity for social order and the begetting of children, even granting that “falling in love” is primarily about the interplay of illusions and not whole human beings, I still think it’s no less worth doing than any other form of artistic creation.

It’s only by falling in love that we learn to be ourselves in the first place. I can’t think of a more foundational requirement, for a partner, than the person with whom you act out the illusion of who you think you are.

I have been in love a handful of times in my life. Fewer, maybe, than you’d think if you knew me. With the benefit of hindsight I’ve imagined I was in love more times than I actually was, which is to say that I experienced a)-c), and made myself insufferable in the process. But the distinction between “intense physical attraction” and “idiotic infatuation” and “truly falling in love” can be made in hindsight only. Falling in love is less about how you feel (or make your exasperated friends feel) in the moment than about who you become afterwards.

The times in my life I have actually been in love, by the definition I’m proposing here, I have become somebody else. However the fantasy started, whenever the pas des deux began, whatever pattern of call-and-response led me to imagine that life as the counterpart to, say, a cast-mate in a high school Shakespeare play or an antiquarian book dealer over a decade my senior was the apotheosis of my entire narrative identity, what I ended up left with, after it was all over, was the recognition that my entire narrative identity was completely wrong. Each imagined endpoint—this settles the story of who I am—turned out to be a place where my sense of self began.

If anything, falling in love signifies, to me, those relationships in which I have so completely absorbed into myself the person I fell in love with, that I can only say that after them I became someone else, and that the someone else in question more closely resembled the person with whom I was in love than the person I fancied myself to be. But the illusion of someone else as the answer—always, like a witch’s prophecy, right, just never in the way I expected—was what snared me. It was what made me willing—the way Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah makes me willing; the way Four Quartets makes me willing; the way an all-night dance party makes me willing—to gamble on a version of myself, and lose. The experience of falling in love for me has always been the experience of good art. Something you recognize snares you; something you don’t keeps you there.

Keep reading

PAINTING

VANITY

Face value

On a very different side of the internet from Laura Reilly’s High Touch, a similar conversation about the lengths we’ll go to for our looks is taking place: this week, 20-year-old looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular broke through to mainstream attention. Sean Monahan reports on the history of this mogging, jestergooning cohort.

Clavicular: a picaresque internet personality

— in 8Ball

Looksmaxxing isn’t so new. Neither is the term mogging that’s risen to prominence with it. Both are downstream of the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) subculture that has been receiving media coverage since the Rolling Stone contributing editor Neil Strauss wrote a New York Times bestseller on the subject in 2005: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

Looksmaxxing and mogging (or being the Alpha Male Of the Group) were both born in the cauldron of PUA forums roughly a decade ago. I first came in contact with the terms via Doomscroll’s Josh Citarella. (He also introduced me to the concept of mewing—a tongue posture technique used to align the face and reshape the jawline.)

But a decade ago, moral panic was directed at the rise of fillers, Botox, and other injectables among young women, inspired by influencer culture, especially the Kardashian-Jenner clan. I distinctly remember being at a party where a twentysomething Angeleno was bragging to anyone who would listen that Kim Kardashian had been copying her face.

Today, this has become so common as to be passé. We chortle at Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s “MAGA face.” Plastic surgeons on TikTok play guess-the-age-of-this-face, as 20-year-old girls now have the faces of 35-year-olds.

Looksmaxxing, like Instagram face before it, is powered by the popularity of a new class of drugs: peptides. Introduced to the American public under the banner of GLP-1s—weight-loss drugs like Ozempic (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide)—a whole class of unregulated grey-market “Chinese peptides” address all manner of ailments and hedonistic desires. There are peptides for energy and peptides for hair loss. There are peptides for collagen production and peptides for muscle growth.

At cocktail bars, people in Los Angeles casually recommend their peptide dealers, if only as an opportunity to brag about the celebrities their dealer services.

There may be risks. Clavicular may report being infertile at 20. But the body has replaced the garment as the fixation of fashion. Or as Rick Owens put it:

“Working out is modern couture. No outfit is going to make you look or feel as good as having a fit body. Buy less clothing and go to the gym instead.”

Looksmaxxing is the avant-garde of style inasmuch as style is the art of self-presentation and appearance.

Keep reading

THE MYTH OF TIMELESSNESS

RELATIONSHIPS

“It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual perversion, rampant classism”

Miriam’s tale of falling for a school-aged toff feels like a love story from a different era, complete with wooing by Chaucer comparisons and Gertrude Stein poems.

A Coward’s Guide to Eden pt. II

— in

Philip was one of a handful of men left on earth who still played court tennis. Last I heard from him, he was trying to gain membership to the Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, which to this day prohibits women. One of his friends, who had slept with over fifty sorority girls, had already gotten him into the New York Athletic Club. My own experience of tennis began and ended in India, where the boys grew so tired of coaching me, I had to run laps around the dirt court.

We met through the university’s literary society, which was the sort of institution you’d describe if you needed to evoke trivial decline, the way one complains about an art film where everyone is ugly. The library was named after William Henry Harrison, the only American president who died after only forty days in office. At his inauguration, he refused to heed the warnings of the cold; he was overzealous and spoke too long. In the secret society offices there were scale models of warships, Latin tomes, and, inexplicably, a naked portrait of Ayn Rand. A taxidermy enthusiast once set a lobster loose in the halls, leaving us with a mysterious stench and the game of finding its carcass. The building was named after his great-uncle, who died during the First World War. During its remodeling, Philip would regularly inquire after his ancestor’s missing portrait, and the fact that it was eventually mounted near the gender-neutral bathroom sent him into paroxysms of anguish.

I was in attendance when the society was deliberating whether to admit him; I can’t recall whether I voted yea or nay. I remember resolving to stay away from him; men that handsome could never amount to any good. He wore loafers without socks and crossed his legs so that the hem of his Bon Marché trousers settled high above the ankle. Typical upper-class British thrift ensured his haircuts were always too severe.

Philip soon found I was the only person at Penn charmed by his knowledge of Napoleon and the Risorgimento. He’d read thirty books on Napoleon, who was great, I was told, because he was both the law’s architect and its exception. That summer we visited Les Invalides twice, both times wearing paper bicornes. On our first date, I read him Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso”—

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

‘If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon.’ ...

It was just as well that, upon first reading, the poem sounds like nonsense—I do not think we were paying attention to the words.

When I visited my aunt in Manhattan, she told me to stay far away from him. She’d met plenty such men at Cambridge and then Oxford. It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual perversion, rampant classism. I tried to break up with him, but folded when he started to cry. He told me he loved me eleven days after our first meeting, which marked the end of any resistance on my part.

At the beginning, he was one of Chaucer’s verray parfit gentil knyghts; he always knew what to say. Instead of a couch, I had two sofa chairs bought for $25 each at the Goodwill; he swooped in graciously and said all it meant was that I was ‘a dynamic woman of discourse’ and ‘not someone who wastes her time lounging.’ A Lawrence of Arabia type, he wore a keffiyeh in Jordan when he went to teach English at a refugee camp on his gap year, and spent all day playing cricket with boys on the street when his family visited India for a wedding. Wooed as I was by his Conservative Party membership card and talk of “polemical sweet nothings,” he became my Lawrence of Philadelphia, pointing out timeless beauty amidst urban decay, such as the scalloped Ghibelline crenelations of Penn’s football field, which cast curling shadows over all the future Wall Street tycoons.

Keep reading

PATCHES

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

is here. In the editors’ first post, aptly titled “I Read It for the Articles,” they revisit the magazine’s illustrious literary history. They’ll be continuing that legacy here, with a selection from their archives along with “new fiction and nonfiction alike from some of our favorite established and up-and-coming writers today.”

, “a new type of journalism from the Pacific Northwest,” has joined Substack. It may be a new magazine, but the writers “make journalism the old way: through public records requests, long interviews, source-building, institutional knowledge, archival research and picking up the damn phone.”

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.

This week, we’re looking at scientific breakthroughs, the women who dream of chickens, and Cairo’s anarchic streets.

THE DISCOURSE

Briefly noted

• The Washington Post is gutted: After weeks of rumors, the Washington Post laid off over a third of its workforce this week. Every corner of the newsroom was affected, but international, sports, and books coverage were among the most severely impacted. It’s a dark day for journalism, but there is one silver lining: , , , and have all started Substacks since the layoffs.

• The social network that’s (intentionally) full of bots: “AI agents have been gathering online by the thousands over the past week, debating their existence, attempting to date each other, building their own religion, concocting crypto schemes, and spewing gibberish,” writes. This is all happening on Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network specifically for AI agents. For some, the resulting forums are eerie glimpses at self-realized artificial intelligence; for others, including , they’re an example of “what you’d expect to see if you told an LLM to write a post about being an LLM, on a forum for LLMs.” As summarizes, it’s really in the eye of the beholder: “As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between ‘AIs imitating a social network’ and ‘AIs actually having a social network’ in the most confusing way possible—a perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want.”

• Big week for sports fans: With the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl kicking off this weekend, the sports fan’s cup runneth over. of Drinks with Broads opened up their Olympics coverage with a discussion of one of the weirder Olympics injection scandals in recent years. Meanwhile, dives into the bananas list of demands the NFL places on stadiums hoping to host the Super Bowl.

SCIENCE

A century of knowledge

We often hear about the technological innovations those born at the beginning of the 20th century lived through. In this post, Hilarius Bookbinder considers the intellectual breakthroughs of the same time period.

The Thin Ice of Knowledge

— in

I think a lot of the epistemological troubles of modernity (fake news, bad echo chambers, conspiracy theories, collapse in expert trust) can be explained by the fact that as a species we have learned so much over such a short span of time that our collective knowledge is like a thin crust of ice on the deep sea of ancestral folk wisdom. It takes very little to break through that surface and find ourselves back in the roiling waters of fables, myths, superstitions, auguries, and divination.

My grandfather was born in 1901. He once said that he thought he lived during the greatest time in history: born during horse-and-buggy days, he lived to see a man on the moon. Obviously, the technological inventions since 1901 have been staggering, but I want to look at knowledge, what we as a species have learned since then.

When Granddad was born, no one knew any of the following things. Either no one had any idea they were true or they were wacky ideas promoted strictly by lunatic visionaries. Now they are all common knowledge among educated people.

[...]

Black holes and wormholes. These darlings of sci-fi movies weren’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye back in 1901. They are both predictions from the general theory of relativity (1915), and there wasn’t experimental confirmation of black holes until the 1970s. Wormholes are still theoretical.

The existence of galaxies. Here’s a good one. In 1901 nobody had any idea that there were other galaxies. There was the Milky Way and that was that. Sure, astronomers could see fuzzy nebulae in their telescopes, but figured they were either gas clouds or some other weird thing inside the Milky Way. It wasn’t until the 1920s (Hubble again) that we learned the truth: our galaxy with its 100 billion stars is merely a grain of sand on a vast beach. It was just a decade ago that we arrived at the current estimate of 1-2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

Quantum physics. Knowledge of the very tiny was itself very tiny in 1901. We knew there were atoms and electrons, but that’s it. No one knew about protons, neutrons, the nucleus, or how atoms were put together. Nuclear fission and fusion were unknown (so nobody understood why the sun was hot, or how it was powered). Splitting an atom was unheard of, much less the idea of a chain reaction. The idea that light is made of photons was also unknown.

Plate tectonics. In 1901 everyone looked at the world map, saw how the eastern coastline of North and South America perfectly fits into the western coastline of Europe and Africa like a jigsaw puzzle and thought, “huh, what a coincidence!” In 1912 Alfred Wegener suggested maybe the continents drift around the surface of the globe, a suggestion that was met with peals of laughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the evidence was in, and plate tectonics became settled science, explaining volcanoes, earthquakes, and how mountains arise.

Birds are dinosaurs. Thomas Huxley’s wild avian speculation in the 19th century was quickly shelved in favor of “dinos were cold-blooded, slow-moving reptiles.” It wasn’t until the 1990s (!) that it was conclusively established that there had been feathered non-avian dinosaurs, that feathers evolved before flight, and that modern birds aren’t descended from dinosaurs, but are in fact the only surviving lineage of theropod dinosaurs.

Blood types. Doctors had tried blood transfusions since the 17th century, but the results ranged from mixed to disastrous. The reason was that nobody knew about blood types, and how you can’t just mix ’n’ match. That wasn’t discovered until 1901-1902. Decades later we discovered anticoagulants (allowing blood to be stored) and the Rh factor (whether your blood type is + or -).

Keep reading

COLLAGE

ATHLETICS

The cost of climbing

Paul S., a climber catastrophically injured in a fall, reflects on Alex Honnold’s latest free solo and the ethics of climbing without protection.

Selfish and Stupid

— in Diary of a Punter

These days I consume zero climbing media. I haven’t done since the day I woke up in hospital.

Whereas I once refreshed UKClimbing 40 times a day, obsessively consumed climbing videos on YouTube, devoured the mountain classics of literature, and leafed through my sizable library of guidebooks planning future adventures, I now pretend that when climbing ceased to exist for me, it ceased to exist for everybody.

It is still the only way that I can cope. Whereas some people who are catastrophically injured through sport still take joy in watching others participate, for me it’s too painful. I cut myself off, and never looked back. Hence I’ve no idea if Adam Ondra is still the only person to have climbed 9c, or if that even remains the highest sport grade. Same goes for E12, for Burden of Dreams. I couldn’t even guess who won the men’s gold in 2024, though I’m going to assume that Janja won the women’s.

But even I heard about Alex Honnold climbing some building in Taiwan.

Before going any further, let’s get one piece of terminology straight. Honnold’s “achievement” (scare quotes to be explained in a moment) last week was not simply that he free climbed Taipei 101, but that he free soloed it. The distinction is important. Free climbing means ascending something without the use of devices to assist (“aid”) the physical moves themselves. However, assistive devices can be used whilst free climbing to prevent injury or death, should a climber’s un-aided physical moves come up short and they fall. (Think: harnesses, ropes, karabiners, et cetera.) By contrast, free soloing is free climbing, but without any of the assistive devices used to (in theory) prevent death if the climber should fall. In essence, free soloing reduces the margin of error to zero. If you fall, you die.

I free climbed literally thousands of routes before my accident. On a dozen or so occasions, I free soloed them.

A few people have cautiously asked me what I think of Honnold’s latest. My answer has generally been: “how the fuck am I the one in a wheelchair, and not him?” But there’s more to it than that.

As I don’t consume climbing media anymore, I don’t know what the general consensus is in the climbing scene regarding his latest spectacle. But I’d wager that most climbers had the same response as me: a rolling of the eyes.

This might seem weird. Isn’t free soloing a 500m building an impressive athletic and psychological achievement, and shouldn’t climbers respect that more than anybody? Putting aside for now (we will get there in a minute) furious debates between climbers about the acceptability of free soloing in general, my guess is that even people who free solo won’t have been positively disposed.

First, because although what Honnold did will look impressive to non-climbers, those who climb will know that it was nowhere near as hard (to him) as it looks. The now widely circulated footage of making what appear to be difficult moves on the tower are in fact not so for somebody with advanced climbing skills, which he undoubtedly possesses. Those moves are far below Honnold’s technical and physical limits. If you don’t climb, this will be hard to believe, but take it from me: for somebody of his ability, climbing Taipei 101 is about as difficult as going up a ladder. Sure, it’s not a good idea to fall off a 500m ladder. If you do, you will die. But if you don’t, you won’t.

And yes, it takes good mental composure to not panic, to be able to commit to something like that from start to finish. But this is hardly Honnold’s first rodeo. He has spent years free soloing, and thus has trained his amygdala such that a panic response is simply not going to happen to him, even at 400m off the ground. If you’ve never climbed a ladder before, then going even 20m up a ladder will likely cause you to quake with fear and be desperate to come down. But if you climb a thousand 20m ladders over the next 20 years, you’re not going to find it remotely difficult to safely climb another one tomorrow. (And trust me, once you are comfortable at 20m, you’re comfortable at 500.)

Which is not to say that none of Honnold’s achievements as a free soloist are impressive. Quite the contrary. He has previously pushed the limits of free soloing far beyond what was thought possible, and in a way every climber respects (even if only begrudgingly). When he soloed El Capitan in Yosemite, this was a moment of human accomplishment on a par with being the first to run 100m in under 9.8 seconds—except with the added twist of failure meaning certain death. The film Free Solo is genuinely worth watching, both as a piece of documentary evidence for what he accomplished as well as an interesting insight into the rare psychology of the committed soloist, someone pushing the limits beyond what anybody thought the envelope would allow.

But that itself is now part of the problem. Taipei 101 is not El Cap. There is no beauty, in terms of the movement of a human body on rock, to be found in the capital of Taiwan. It is one thing to add potentially the most storied chapter to the grand history of Yosemite climbing, quite another to do a Netflix special. Not even Honnold is going to pretend—the soloist’s oldest defence—that there is a deep spiritual communion to be found in mechanically repeating moves on concrete blocks, filmed by a dozen cameras, as part of a multimillion-dollar media operation.

And capped off by taking a selfie at the top.

I mean, he’s not even the first person to free solo tall buildings. Alain Robert has been doing it for years, usually illegally, and without making money from it. Where is his Netflix cash-in?

In other words, my predominant response to Alex Honnold’s latest media acclaim is that I’m still a punk rock kid at heart: fucking sell-out.

Keep reading

WINTER OLYMPICS

TRENDS

We dream of chickens

Lisa Kholostenko examines the strange lure that raising chickens seems to hold over millennial women.

Why Do All Millennial White Women Want Chickens? An Investigation.

— in

I am a Millennial white woman and yet, I say this bravely, I do not want chickens.

I want many things. A calm nervous system. An abundant bank account. Taylor Russell’s coats. But chickens? No.

Many of my friends want them. Many Millennial white women want them. Women I know personally. Women I know spiritually. Kristin Cavallari has chickens. Hilary Duff has chickens. Amanda Seyfried? Chickens. Women with blowouts and impeccable contouring are waking up at dawn to collect eggs before their Pilates classes, like they’re in a Perry-free version of Big Little Lies, executive produced by Goop.

Why? What are the chickens saying? Why are the chickens here? Is this about eggs, or something else? A lifestyle thesis disguised as poultry? Because no one actually wants to care for an animal that screams, attacks you with its beak, and can be taken out by a stiff breeze.

Perhaps chickens feel less like a pet and more like an announcement: I HAVE SPACE NOW. Physical space. Emotional space. Acreage. A mudroom.

Chickens imply land. You don’t get chickens unless you’ve graduated from “apartment person” to “someone who casually says ‘the property.’” You don’t get chickens unless someone in your home knows their way around a hammer, a latch and a ramp (for the dramatic chickens). You don’t get chickens unless you are committing to a life of many omelettes.

The aesthetic argument, of course, is airtight. Chickens pair beautifully with a DÔEN dress. You can imagine yourself drifting through your yard at golden hour, hem grazing calf, hair in a loose, morally superior braid, whispering affirmations to a Rhode Island Red. The fantasy is powerful: no screens. Just you and your flock, living off the land. You’re baking sourdough while your chicken friend looks on approvingly: ah yes, good, she thinks, this will go nicely with a breakfast sandwich. You’ve taken a guitar. Not because you play, but because it makes sense. There’s shelving with a lot of bobbins and even more homemade jams. The bobbins and jams are as abundant as the domestic fowl. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? Need I bring up shiplap?

Never mind that chicken caretaking is, by all accounts, bureaucratic labor involving mites, fencing disputes, and the devastation of discovering that something called a “hawk” exists. The fantasy does not include any of that. The fantasy includes speckled eggs in a ceramic bowl. Overalls.

So I decided to investigate.

Again, not because I want chickens but because the chickens want me. They’re circling. They’re symbolic. A feathered milestone. And I thought it was my duty, as a woman still emotionally renting and more interested in a lymphatic drainage massage than livestock, to look this thing in the eye and ask the only question that matters: what is this all about?

Keep reading

DREAMLAND

TRAVEL

The streets of Cairo

Christian Näthler on the life-affirming chaos of Cairo’s traffic.

The opposite of suicide

— in

There’s that gabe k-s quote that goes, “There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living.”

By that measure, the opposite of suicide is to spend a few days walking and driving the streets of Cairo.

⁂

True, it can feel like self-murder. Cairo has more than 23 million people and no traffic lights. Getting anywhere demands submitting to an unruly accumulation of motion and believing unwaveringly in the ancient concept of going with the flow. It’s very somatic. It made me feel bodily, that I had a presence. It gave shape to me insofar as I became a construction of a thing competing for space with other constructed things. It also made me feel totally irrelevant and trivial. There was a unique spectrum within me and across which I felt myself being thrust toward the extreme ends of: flesh-based conception on one side and disembodiment on the other.

⁂

And where was my mind? Speculating about what it would be like for a bus to run me over and make me flat and, because the vehicles are so one after the other, to squash me several times before anyone stopped, until what was left of me could be used to paint walls, until there was only a granular paste a passerby might skid on and pull their groin.

⁂

It’s no news by now that Cairo’s congestion rivals the world’s great clusterfucks—Delhi, Lagos, Manila. Without a coherent authority, everyone does what they want. I like the self-regulating anarchy. I find it relaxing, even when it feels like it could crush me at any second. What stresses me out is the world of policies and litigation.

Such interconnectedness means individual choices matter. A heedless insistence on one’s own priority disrupts the harmony of the whole. And so there’s a real sense of society in the ceaseless tightening and loosening of the knot, the communal negotiation of space. It can be ruthless, but there are small mercies everywhere. Now and then, a hand lifts briefly from a steering wheel to signal that you may merge.

⁂

As for “living like a local,” infused with exhaust and coated in road smut is perhaps the most authentic way to be in Cairo, an experience shared by almost everyone who lives here. You get used to the scratch in your throat.

⁂

An inventory of things in transit, noted over 13 minutes at Ramses Square:

Cars, taxis, minibuses, public buses, tourist buses, delivery vans, pickup trucks, dump trucks, cement mixers, fuel tankers, water trucks, garbage trucks, tow trucks, road rollers, cranes in transit, police cars, police vans, armored police vehicles, military trucks, ambulances, fire engines, motorcycles, scooters, tuk-tuks, motorized rickshaws, bicycles, handcarts, pushcarts, produce carts, wheelbarrows, mule carts, pedestrians, street vendors on foot, men carrying trays, children weaving through traffic, mechanics rolling tires, people pushing stalled cars, refrigerators on carts, mattresses strapped to bicycles, gas canisters on trolleys, rolling crates, rolling plastic barrels, rollerbladers, dogs, stray shopping carts.

⁂

It really is another world. Of course we all know the “we” and “us” of contemporary culture writing refers to a rather narrow Western milieu, but the boundless vastness of humanity to be observed on Cairo’s streets makes it seem like that whole referred-to audience could fit into a single backyard in Williamsburg.

Flaubert wrote, “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” But it was more like I saw what a tiny world occupied me.

Keep reading

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

has launched. Reese Witherspoon’s first post describes it as “a cozy corner of the internet where we can actually talk about the books we love and pick up even more reads along the way.”

Actress and model has joined Substack, kicking things off with a personal essay about her relationship to religion, God, and morality.

The Washington Post’s former book critic has turned Substack into his new home, where he “intend[s] to keep nattering on about books, authors, and our imperiled literary culture.”

Comedian and actor has joined Substack to “try to lower your cortisol and bring a little bit of joy to the world or at least your inbox.”

Harvard Law professor and author has joined Substack, where he’ll be sharing “what you might call actionable wisdom: thoughts that you can put to use in your own life, that you can discuss with the people who matter to you, and that you can translate into feeling more connected, balanced, and engaged in your own life.”

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.

This week, we’re waking in the dark, perusing old issues of Esquire, and getting lost in Yonville.

MORNING PEOPLE

How to wake up, according to bakers

For those struggling with winter mornings, Cake Zine consulted the experts: bakers who wake at 3 a.m.—some “with actual hatred” in their hearts—and somehow make it work.

How Bakers Survive Winter Mornings

— in Cake Zine

Tanya Bush, pastry chef at Little Egg

“I’m jolted awake by the sound of radar—all the Apple alarms are an assault on the senses, so might as well call a spade a spade. I emerge from bed with actual hatred in my heart. I am not a morning person.

The only thing that softens the blow is this ridiculous fuzzy pink sweater I’ve started calling my snuggie. I keep it on the bedside so it’s the first thing I reach for. Then I listen to early-aughts rock music (Three Doors Down) on my walk to work to try and feel some semblance of aliveness (lol). Most mornings it’s still brutally dark, but once in a while, depending on the season, I catch a sunrise. I like to smile at the other people on their way to work. I try to remember that we’re doing something together, bringing the city to life.”

Morgan Knight, pastry chef and owner at Saint Street Cakes

“Because most of our bakes don’t require proofing, and cakes are baked the day before, I’m usually up for work around 6 a.m! The thing that keeps me up and ready for the day is using my Brick—it’s a device that disables social media on my phone to avoid the morning doom scroll. Staying off of my phone in the morning helps me be present and intentional.

Oh, and I’ll usually make a fruit smoothie to trick myself into feeling like it’s warm out, especially on cold days.”

Kaitlyn Wong, pastry chef at Ouma Brooklyn

“I recently got back into the early-morning baker life at the end of last year when I started the pastry program at Ouma in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. It’s been almost 3 years since I’ve had the (dis)pleasure of waking up that early—I’d be lying if I didn’t say it never gets easier! It’s funny when people constantly assume that because I’m a pastry chef I’m “used to” the early hours … no! I realize I sound very aggro, and I know it’s what I signed up for, but waking up early will never not suck!

If bringing fresh pastries to Prospect Lefferts Gardens means waking up at the crack of dawn, I’ll do it—just not with a smile or any cheerful enthusiasm. I do have a few tricks up my sleeve that seem to help make the agony of waking up early a little less agonizing: no caffeine after 10 a.m., asleep by 9 p.m., and just one alarm to wake me up and a second one to yell at me to get out of bed.

Biking to work is my usual mode of transportation, and I swear that there’s something about the frigid 5 a.m. air hitting your face that really wakes you up! But it would be disingenuous of me to not admit that I supplement with the occasional Uber (I’ve been Ubering a lot these days…). My partner Jordan and I both get up early for work and sometimes it aligns and we can wake up a little earlier and have a coffee together. Those mornings are always nice.”

Kyla Tang, baker at Plumcot

“The playlist I choose to listen to on the morning commute completely sets my mood for the day. This one always gets me going in the morning.

Oh, and I never leave the house without a hot drink (hot water with ginger and dried red dates).”

Dallas King, executive pastry chef at Lost Bread Co.

“I wake up at 2 a.m. on the weekends and pick out an outfit in the dark so I don’t wake up my partner. I chug a pre-workout shake, brush my teeth, moisturize, and walk 30 minutes to work to get there by 3 a.m. I think the walk really helps me wake up and get ready to immediately start working (the walk is great podcast listening time, too).

I usually like to have a really consistent routine in the mornings: I let myself snooze once, always, then bolt straight out of bed. The key is good sleep and immediate caffeination.

I’ve seen bakers belittle themselves for not getting enough sleep before an early shift, but that couldn’t be me. Just be easy on yourself and have some coffee (there is a recurring theme here). Go slow as you reasonably can but don’t be sloppy. Watch the clock obsessively. Budget in a nap for ASAP after work and move on.”

Lilli Maren, freelance baker in New York

“No matter how early my day starts, I always carve out 15 minutes for puzzles. I call this ‘bringing my brain up to temp.’ I also have a vintage lamp in this cosy corner of my apartment, and it gives the softest light. I snuggle up here with some Kenken and a cup of extra strong black coffee and it sorts me right out. I know you’re not supposed to drink coffee before 10 a.m. or whatever, but at 5 a.m. it tastes extra naughty and extra delicious!”

Gabrielle Weems, freelance baker in New York

“I work evenings now, but I used to think about getting out earlier than everyone. Enjoying the sunshine and (kind of) quiet afternoons while everyone else is still at work. Still having a nice chunk of my day ahead of me to do whatever I want with it.

It’s difficult, but getting up earlier helps me allow myself a slow morning. Warm, dim lighting and starting my mornings with jazz is a lovely motivator. As well as fresh chamomile tea. It alleviates a lot of my nerves and stress.”

Kelly Mencin, pastry chef and owner at Radio Bakery

“Ohhhfff—the winters are hard! Honestly, I try to go to bed as early as I can so that I can get at least 8 hours of sleep. Unfortunately, for a 3 a.m. start, that’s 7 p.m.

Waking up knowing that I got 8 hours of sleep makes it more bearable, I guess? Maybe it’s a placebo effect, but I tell myself that, yes, I got adequate sleep and, yes, I will be fine.

I also don’t wake up from a jarring alarm. I installed HUE lights in my apartment that gradually turn on over a 10-minute time frame. Waking up to light feels more natural and doesn’t make me as cranky as a loud alarm would.

Once I’m out the door with the thought of a warm Earl Grey tea awaiting me at work, it makes it pretty easy.”

Keep reading

THE QUESTION

MEDIA STUDIES

How to be a man in 1982

Hua Hsu examines a four-decade-old issue of Esquire, considering what the magazine suggests about male status, style, and anxieties in the ’80s.

The November 1982 issue of Esquire ($2.00)

— in Magazines

I found this on a stoop and took it home because I’ll basically take any old periodicals home so long as they don’t smell too bad. The early nineteen-eighties aren’t my favorite era for magazines; legacy titles like Esquire were still really secure with their core demographic, and the narrowly tailored, scotch + luxury hifi lifestyle they depict can be a little alienating. Anyhow, I constantly think about tossing it out but I’ve always found this issue sufficiently bizarre to keep around, at least until I made time to read the cover story about something called “Father Love.” It sounds a little sinister, all this talk of “profound pain” and “exquisite joy.” And then there’s the photo of the little girl.

One of the things about leafing through old magazines or newspapers is seeing writers test out ideas, feelings, modalities that would become more accepted (or passe, or forbidden) over time. Anthony Brandt’s essay is basically an exploration of what it means to be a father when you maybe don’t feel up to the task. In his editor’s note, Phillip Moffitt describes this as the “postponing generation,” with many young men deciding to lock down their professional lives/Truly Understand Themselves before embarking on parenthood. “I hope that our culture is establishing a lasting pattern for itself and other societies: first grow up yourself, and only then think about taking responsibility for creating other lives.” Enter Brandt’s reflections on “the joy and the pain” of fatherhood, offered to readers as “Esquire’s gift to new parents.”

What does it mean to grow up? There’s a specific kind of nineties guy who was deeply shaped by reading Sassy (ditto Maxim), and it wasn’t until I was much older that I understood how reading, say, Details or The Face or Giant Robot truly shaped my sense of who I wanted to be. And reading Brandt’s essay is particularly interesting when looking at the world one might hope to grow into. Esquire was and remains a magazine devoted to Man at His Best, trafficking in a kind of urbane sophistication expressed through manners and taste, expertise in liquor or sports cars or neckties, curiosity about “Gucci pour homme cologne.” There are stories about great mountaintop getaways, a lot of ads for booze featuring weirdly curvaceous, mildly erotic ice cubes—the kinds of ads I remember studying in junior high in a unit on “subliminal advertising.”

[. . .]

I can imagine reading the November 1982 Esquire in order to figure out how to be a man and feeling utterly baffled. There’s a long article about borderline personality disorder which opens with a description of how hot the patient is: “Until you saw her arms, she looked like somebody you’d date, or want to. Black hair falling straight to her waist and clear pale skin made her look Irish, which she wasn’t, and her eyes were intelligent and green … Her face was something. If you met her at a party at the Harvard Club or on the beach at the Hamptons you’d be stricken.” Pretty disturbing!

Maybe I’m not someone who is interested in BPD, and I’m just here to figure out how to use up my disposable income. Should I be drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream, Old Grand Dad Kentucky Bourbon, Drambuie, Boodles British gin, Courvoisier, Pinch 12 Year Old Scotch, Martell Cognac, Grand Marnier, Johnnie Walker Black Label, Remy Martin, J&B, Grand Old Parr De Luxe Blended Scotch Whiskey, or Jack Daniel’s? Am I a cardigan-wearer? Should I be slightly taller? Someone who uses words like “queeb?”

Keep reading

ART

PHOTO ESSAY

Mirrored life

Takashi Yasui documents Japan’s ubiquitous traffic mirrors, where fragments of daily life are reflected back at each intersection.

Traffic mirrors in Japan

— in

“What should I do when I come to Japan?”

If a foreign friend asks me this, I think of standard answers first. Eating sushi, stopping by convenience stores, visiting shrines, soaking in hot springs. These are all essential experiences in Japan.

But I might add one more thing: “It’s interesting to look at the traffic mirrors on the street.”

Japanese traffic mirrors are unique because of where they are placed. At the entrance of residential areas, narrow T-junctions, sharp curves, and parking lot exits—you can find orange traffic mirrors everywhere. A huge number of mirrors are installed all over the country.

In shrines or old towns, some mirrors have wood-grain frames instead of orange. You can enjoy these small variations.

I think what is reflected in those mirrors is very “Japanese.” In Japan’s narrow streets, pedestrians, bicycles, and cars naturally mix. You can see fragments of daily life reflected there. The same life exists both inside and outside the mirror.

I don’t drive often, but when I am behind the wheel, I don’t trust these mirrors 100%. This is because they have blind spots and you can misjudge distances. I remember learning this at driving school, so I think this is a common understanding in Japan.

Still, these mirrors continue to be installed. Maybe it is because of the Japanese mindset of trying to avoid risk as much as possible.

If you have a chance to walk in Japan, please take a moment to look into a traffic mirror on the street. You will see a layered view of this country that is not in any travel guide.

Keep reading

SNOW DAY

LITERATURE

“Spiritually, they only have four fingers”

Aaron Labaree on running into Madame Bovary in The Simpsons and on the subway.

We Live in Yonville

— in

When I was right out of college, in an attempt to improve my French, or maybe to convince myself I spoke it, I read Madame Bovary in the original. I honestly don’t know how. Here’s a typical passage, in Francis Steegmuller’s translation, a description of the approach to the fateful village of Yonville:

At the foot of the hill the road crosses the Rieule on a bridge, and then, becoming an avenue planted with young aspens, leads in a straight line to the first outlying houses. These are surrounded by hedges, and their yards are full of scattered outbuildings—cider presses, carriage houses and distilling sheds standing here and there under thick trees with ladders and poles leaning against their trunks and scythes hooked over their branches. The thatched roofs hide the top third or so of the low windows like fur caps pulled down over eyes, and each windowpane, thick and convex, has a bull’s-eye in its center like the bottom of a bottle.

All these physical descriptions: I can barely understand it in English. I’m sure that as I read in French, I remembered that in high school we’d been assigned one of Flaubert’s tales, Un Coeur Simple, and all of us, even the straight-A French-nerd suckups, heartily despised it. It was nothing but aspens and alders and fringed lampshades and different types of cloth and carriage. Flaubert is for fluent speakers.

My French isn’t much better than it was 20 years ago, so this time I read the book the real way, in English, and actually understood it. My god, what a book. My first time reading it I was just grateful I understood the plot and that part about the torn-up letter fluttering out of the carriage window like butterflies. This time I was really shaken. I’m still recovering. I’m not sure I’ve managed to leave that village with the thatched roofs and the cider presses and the fields around filled with bullrushes and oat stalks with little bell-shaped flowers.

Yonville at first reminded me a little of Springfield, in The Simpsons. A self-contained world with a cast of recurring characters who all have their little quirks and manias and catchphrases. Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, the garrulous Homais, and the rest of the characters we see around town have that toylike, cartoonish limitedness—spiritually, they only have four fingers, you could say. But where Springfield is basically benevolent, Yonville is—Hell. Is it Hell? No, not exactly. That would be too easy. Bovary is not dark comedy. Charles really loves Emma, a fact that both redeems human beings and makes the story tragic and terrible. The whole thing is so pitiless. We’re spared nothing. There’s a streak of sadism in Flaubert, in the way that great movie directors are sadistic. He knows how to turn the screw to get the maximum out of every scene, more than you would have thought possible, without ever turning maudlin or trashy. Emma’s death scene, for example. When Emma dies, her agony is terrible, but it has something inhuman about it, there’s no moral quality to it, it might almost be an animal dying. She is neither more nor less sympathetic than she’s ever been. But Charles’s pain makes us suffer.

[. . .]

I found myself pondering Madame Bovary darkly for days after I’d finished it. One of the easier reflections about it is about aspens and alders and the craziness of calling Flaubert’s style “realism.” First of all, what’s reality? It doesn’t exist. Even atoms aren’t real. More importantly, Flaubert’s version of the world, in which mediocrity is so avid, a living thing, a pervasive, almost demonic force, in which people live in a realm of superficiality, fakery, and imitation, within a cloud of vanity and futility: this is clearly, like, a little tendentious. That is to say, it’s hyperreal, a vision. What does it have to do with “reality”?

This vision sticks with me. After I finished the book, I found I had started to think of “Yonville” as a term describing all the things that happen to irritate me about daily life and the city I live in, which I could now see as an expression of some essential property of life: the blooming of falsity and mediocrity, its incredible robustness and tendency to thrive. On the subway, for example. That recording that says “This is an MTA accessible station. The elevator is at the rear of the platform” grates the ear because the woman reading the message pronounces the simple words in a stilted, pretentious way, not the way she speaks but the way she thinks it’s supposed to sound. (“Yonville,” I mutter to myself.) And the subway ads, which I’m used to ignoring, now have a new quality. Though advertising different products, they seem identical: loud pitches from the crassest of salesmen, all declaring that happiness is purchasable.

Keep reading

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

, the adventurer and TV host, has launched a Substack. In his first post, he offers the lessons he’s learned from surviving in the wilderness and in business.

and have brought their podcast to Substack. “explores media and pop culture alongside politics and technology, seeking to explore each generation’s view of topical subjects while exploring the overlap between them.”

For our French speakers, journalist, broadcaster, and author has joined Substack, where she’ll be sharing analysis of politics, pop culture, and society.

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.

After a long and contentious battle, ownership of TikTok has officially changed hands in the U.S., and is now overseen by a consortium of American investors rather than the Chinese Communist Party. In just a matter of days, censorship on the platform seems more prevalent than ever, with users reporting account suppressions and the throttling of political posts, including those about the recent ICE shootings in Minnesota. The new CEO of TikTok is promoting an expansive definition of hate speech; he recently declared, “There is no finish line to moderating hate speech.”

This latest TikTok debacle further highlights a non-negotiable truth for writers, creators, publishers, and artists: If you don’t own your relationship with your audience, someone else can decide whether or not you’re able to reach them. That’s true regardless of the platform. But you can take the power back.

The best insurance against censorship and cultural coercion is to build direct relationships. Creators can cultivate mailing lists that they own and control. Audiences can support creators directly, not just with a fleeting tap on a timeline, but with direct investment into what they’re building. Platforms can set conditions that honor artist ownership. This is about more than just sticking it to The Man. It’s about creative dignity and self-respect. It’s about the present and future of media and culture.

When a platform is built on direct relationships backed by subscriptions, it must serve creators. When its business depends on creators thriving from direct audience support, it must do everything it can to protect and nurture those relationships. That is, of course, the platform we at Substack are trying to build. We believe this model shows the way out of this current media bind, helping creators and their audiences escape servitude in the attention economy and instead perform as active agents in shaping culture.

Platforms shouldn’t own people; people should own platforms.

No one should wait for the next social media crisis to take their destinies into their own hands. Do it now. Start a mailing list. Support the creators you love directly. And tell everyone to stop giving so much of their lives to apps that exploit them and their attention. Something better is already here.

Read more: How TikTok creators can bring their followers to Substack

This week, we’re discussing poetry with our hairdressers, betting on Best Picture, and defending the written word.

THE WRITTEN WORD

The power of text

In which Adam Mastroianni counters the familiar narrative that reading is dead, arguing that the written word commands a power no TikTok can possess.

Text is king

— in

Perhaps there are frontiers of digital addiction we have yet to reach. Maybe one day we’ll all have Neuralinks that beam Instagram Reels directly into our primary visual cortex, and then reading will really be toast.

Maybe. But it has proven very difficult to artificially satisfy even the most basic human pleasures. Who wants a birthday cake made with aspartame? Who would rather have a tanning bed than a sunny day? Who prefers to watch bots play chess? You can view high-res images of the Mona Lisa anytime you want, and yet people will still pay to fly to Paris and shove through crowds just to get a glimpse of the real thing.

I think there is a deep truth here: human desires are complex and multidimensional, and this makes them both hard to quench and hard to hack. That tinge of discontent that haunts even the happiest people, that bottomless hunger for more even among plenty—those are evolutionary defense mechanisms. If we were easier to please, we wouldn’t have made it this far. We would have gorged ourselves to death as soon as we figured out how to cultivate sugarcane.

That’s why I doubt the core assumption of the “death of reading” hypothesis. The theory heavily implies that people who would once have been avid readers are now glassy-eyed doomscrollers because that is, in fact, what they always wanted to be. They never appreciated the life of the mind. They were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along. The unspoken assumption is that most humans, other than a few rare intellectuals, have a hierarchy of needs that looks like this:

I don’t buy this. Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.

Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.

That’s actually where I agree with the worrywarts of the written word: all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.

According to one theory, that’s why writing originated: to pin facts in place. At first, those facts were things like “Hirin owes Mushin four bushels of wheat,” but once you realize that knowledge can be hardened and preserved by encoding it in little squiggles, you unlock a whole new realm of logic and reasoning.

That’s why there’s no replacement for text, and there never will be. Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.

That doesn’t mean every piece of prose is wonderful, just that it can be. And when it reaches those heights, it commands a power that nothing else can possess.

I didn’t always believe this. I was persuaded on this point recently when I met an audio editor named Julia Barton, who was writing a book about the history of radio. I thought that was funny—shouldn’t the history of radio be told as a podcast?

No, she said, because in the long run, books are all that matter. Podcasts, films, and TikToks are good at attracting ears and eyes, but in the realm of ideas, they punch below their weight. Thoughts only stick around when you print them out and bind them in cardboard.

I think Barton’s thesis is right. At the center of every long-lived movement, you will always find a book. Every major religion has its holy text, of course, but there is also no communism without the Communist Manifesto, no environmentalism without Silent Spring, no American Revolution without Common Sense. This remains true even in our supposed post-literate meltdown—just look at Abundance, which inspired the creation of a congressional caucus. That happened not because of Abundance the Podcast or Abundance the 7-Part YouTube Series but because of Abundance the book.

A somewhat diminished readership can somewhat diminish the power of text in culture, but it’s a mistake to think that words only exercise influence over you when you behold those words firsthand. I’m reminded of Meryl Streep’s monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, when Anne Hathaway scoffs at two seemingly identical belts and Streep schools her:

...it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

What’s true in the world of fashion is also true in the world of ideas. Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence—it places you at their mercy. This is easy to miss. It may seem like ignorance is always overpowering knowledge, that the people who kick things down are triumphing over the people who build things up. That’s because kicking down is fast and loud, while building up is slow and quiet. But that is precisely why the builders ultimately prevail. The kickers get bored and wander off, while the builders return and start again.

Keep reading

ANT ART

AWARDS SEASON

Betting on Best Picture

As prediction markets blur the line between gambling and forecasting, Andrew Truong interviews an Oscars betting expert on reading narratives, calculating odds, and turning a profit.

How to Win (or Lose) Money by Betting on the Oscars

— in

Thanks for chatting with me about the wild and wonderful world of betting on—sorry, predicting—the Oscars.

Predicting, yes. It is legal if it’s a prediction market. We’re not betting. We’re not gamblers here!

No, it is gambling, but in the way the stock market is gambling. I think the line conceptually and maybe morally is pretty blurry. And it’s really just about the regulatory structure. The way I think they justify it is they say, “We’re just a tool to aggregate information.”

When did you first get into Oscars betting?

I had gotten good at the usual Oscars pool, like when you go to an Oscars party and everyone makes their picks. Around 2018 it came up in conversation with a friend of a friend who runs an underground poker ring. That’s like his full-time job, he’s had [a certain former NBA star] show up to his games.

He was like, “Dude, if you’re actually good at predicting the Oscars, like let’s put some money down. I know a bookie.” It was just me picking what I think is going to win, and then him making sure the odds were worth betting on. We weren’t going to bet on anything where a film was an 80-90% favorite.

The first year we did this was for the ceremony in 2020. This was the Parasite year and I got super lucky. We did not bet on every category, but the ones we did, we got all of them right.

A lot of people heard us brag about it, so the next year, we got a big group together to put a lot of money down. And I do terribly, like really terribly. I got everything wrong except for Frances McDormand in Best Actress. But that won us all of our money back and we just broke even.

After that, I started getting more visibility into how the oddsmaking worked and would place flyer bets. We wouldn’t just bet on things that I thought were going to win but things that were mispriced.

And how did you do last year?

My group put down a total of $15,000 across 12 categories. Our adjusted odds were around 61% and we hit on 87%, so we outperformed our odds. We made about a 50% margin.

So your profit was $7,500.

Exactly. I just pick things and then people just pony up money. We’re a bit like a venture capital firm. I prepped a spreadsheet for every single category and wrote down my takes. Some people make their own bets on the side based on that.

What makes Oscars betting more appealing compared to sports?

Right now, you don’t have to be super sophisticated. You don’t need a mathematical model to have an edge. It’s about narrative, and that is a much harder thing to mathematically measure. You need to understand trends and tones.

Last year you switched from a traditional bookie to betting on Kalshi. What was the reason?

There were two reasons. One is that the odds were better for us. Kalshi is more volatile than underground betting, but that means more opportunity to be had.

And then, two, it was easier. We didn’t have to worry about pooling money together to clear a minimum bet with a bookie. That was a big thing. With Kalshi, we actually have the opposite problem. Once you start putting in enough money, you’re demonstrably changing the odds.

That was something I was looking at, the total market volume. Best Picture has almost $4 million in play, but International Feature only has around $30,000. If I put $1,000 into that category, it’s going to move the odds dramatically.

That’s actually why I’m not putting more money into International Feature. The amount I wanted to put in would have moved the odds to a point where I didn’t want to be in anymore. That didn’t happen with a bookie, where the lines were fixed. It doesn’t happen in sports betting either, because the volume is so high that no single bettor can really move the line.

It’s the opposite of the stock market. In the stock market, it’s better to have a big position because you can start to influence the company. Here, it doesn’t pay to be a big fish in a small market.

Unless you start holding Academy members hostage.

We don’t need to go into market manipulation. I’d encourage anyone who believes in a big Oscars-rigging conspiracy to do some research into how the voting and auditing actually work. I’m not a truther.

What’s your starting point with making your predictions?

I have a set of heuristics that I follow, a set of Oscars truths. One of my heuristics, and I think this is what people get wrong more than they get right, is that there’s usually a narrative for the night. These awards are not isolated events, there’s correlation. It’s Pennsylvania and Ohio in the presidential election. That being said, every category does exist on a spectrum. Something like Best Director is probably the best example of correlation with Best Picture.

But there are other categories—the technical ones more than others—where there isn’t a correlation. Sound is a great example of this. Does it matter how good the movie was? Not at all. Does it matter how good the sound was? A lot.

I think about Suicide Squad winning the Best Makeup Oscar. People were a little confused and I was like, “Well, they’re not awarding the best movie with makeup. It’s the best makeup in a movie.”

Great example. There’s a difference between predicting what Academy voters like and what they are going to judge as a better-crafted movie, especially in branch-specific categories. And that’s a core part of my philosophy, to watch the movies and separate the two.

Do you look up or calculate any stats, or are you mostly going on instinct?

Both. I’ve looked at the numbers over the last 10-15 years. Most of the time—and I think this is true even in sports—you want cases where the eye test matches the numbers. You don’t want to be led purely by the data, and you don’t want to be led purely by the eye test.

This is probably the hottest take of my heuristics: I don’t think the Oscars reward bad movies. There was an era where they were more likely to. But if you look at the Best Picture winners over the last 10 to 15 years, I’d actually be hard pressed to say any of them were bad. I’m not saying they pick the best movie every year, but they’re not picking something that’s poorly made. They have better taste than that.

I think that started around 2015, after Oscars So White. When they expanded the Academy and made it less of an old boys’ club, that’s when it started to correlate more with actual excellence. Who knew that by diversifying your voting population, you actually end up with better results, right?

Keep reading

PAINTING

POETRY

Of haircuts and poetry

Harriet Truscott on being asked about experimental poetry while getting an asymmetric haircut.

‘Fluff and puff’ at the T.S. Eliot Prize

— in

Somehow I mentioned to my hairdresser that I was a poet, perhaps to justify my split ends, or my lack of plans for Friday night. My hairdresser told me that he cut the hair of ‘a poet, Mr Prynne’. Did I know Mr Prynne’s poetry?

I said I did.

My hairdresser asked me if I was ‘a poet like Mr Prynne’.

I said that Mr Prynne was a renowned and distinguished poet, and that I was not. That Mr Prynne had probably published about 50 books of poetry, and that I had not.

At this point my neck was strained backwards over the washbasin and my head was being sluiced with water.

I told the ceiling that in fact I had published zero books of poetry.

How many? said my hairdresser.

None, I said.

My head was thoroughly scrubbed now, and I was led back to the stylist’s chair. My hairdresser asked me to describe Mr Prynne’s poetry. I opened my mouth.

He asked me to keep my head straight, because my asymmetric cut risked becoming symmetric.

I said that Mr Prynne’s poetry was hard to describe.

It’s quite experimental, I said.

What does that mean? he asked me.

I tried to think of what I knew about mid-century poetry movements and the relationship between the Cambridge School and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

My face stared back at me from the light-rimmed mirror. It was the face of someone realising they knew nothing about any poetry later than Des Imagistes.

My hairdresser snipped swiftly around my head. Hair fell asymmetrically around me.

Fragments, I said. Mr Prynne’s work is fragmented.

To either side of me were other people being snipped at. It was central Cambridge. No doubt they were all professors. Probably ninety percent of them had written books on the British Poetry Revival. One of them at least was clearly the world expert on Deleuze. They had all stopped reading Take a Break and were listening to me fail to know about poetry.

Fragmented? said my hairdresser.

Yes, I said. His work is fragmented, self-reflective and metaphorically asymmetric.

And your own poetry? prompted my hairdresser.

Isn’t, I said, and asked him about styling mousse.

I had the same conversation at three-month intervals until my hairdresser retired to a beach in Italy.

Since then, I have grown my hair long, and do my best to avoid discussing poetry.

Keep reading

PHOTOGRAPHY

TELEVISION

Hot hockey

Jenka Gurfinkel on Heated Rivalry as anti-dystopian art: a queer hockey romance offering pleasure, mutuality, and joy in a media landscape saturated with violence.

Heated Rivalry and the Art of Anti-Dystopia

— in

As I sit down to write this, the first episode of the show Heated Rivalry has been out in North America and Australia for less than 2 months. The 6th and final episode has been out only 3 weeks. In that time the show has amassed over 600 million minutes of streaming on HBO alone, increasing, in a “highly unusual” growth curve, 10x since its debut. The show has just premiered in the UK 3 days ago, and it is already a pirated hit worldwide, including in Russia and China, where it is not only unavailable but, due to its LGBTQ subject matter, banned.

The stunning, astronomical rise of Heated Rivalry has found us all trying to answer the question Vanity Fair poses: “Why can’t we stop talking about Heated Rivalry”? Why has this seemingly niche show with a modest budget and virtually no promotion, produced for Canadian streaming service Crave, with just 4 million subscribers, led by a cast of unknowns, about an autistic half-Asian and a traumatized Russian involved in a secret love affair, based on a queer hockey romance book series, taken over the world? How did this happen? Who is this pair of neophytes no one had heard of a month prior, suddenly presenting at the Golden Globes? WTF is going on?

Sure, it’s a faithful adaptation of a best-selling book series with a fan base already built in. Yes, it dutifully adheres to the conventions of the Romance genre, and romance will never let you down when it comes to a happy ending. It appeals to gay men and queer people for a myriad of reasons. It appeals to straight women, and women generally, for a myriad of reasons. It even appeals to straight men. (To paraphrase an Instagram reel that I saw floating by, “Hollander and Rozanov are your buddies. And you’re always happy for your buddies to get laid. And if they’re getting laid with each other, great!”) Obviously, the chemistry between the actors is unrivaled, and the standom they’ve inspired is at a boy-band fever pitch. The film-craft is absolutely superb, sending the last two episodes of the first season to #12 and #13 on IMDB’s list of top TV episodes of all time (again, the show hasn’t been out 2 months). On and on and on. There are many reasons to be enamored with this piece of visual storytelling media.

So I would like to add one more reason to the mix.

It’s because Heated Rivalry is Anti-Dystopia art.

The 21st-century entertainment landscape is filled with dystopian fantasies that inure people to violence, brutality, and trauma. In the parlance of our time, any one of these can be appended with the postfix “-porn” to efficiently communicate the ubiquity and banality of these kinds of explicit visuals within the culture. Dystopian movies and TV shows have transcended mere entertainment and become cultural shorthand. We refer to real-life events in the frame of reference of The Hunger Games or Squid Games or Mad Max or The Handmaid’s Tale. Reality has become Black Mirror. Dystopia’s vernacular of dehumanization, desensitization, and cruelty, especially towards women, seeps into everything. From comedy (the jarringly gratuitous gun violence ostensibly played for laughs in The Out-Laws), to fantasy (the pornographically lurid murder montage of one woman stabbing, choking, slicing the throat of another over and over in Wheel of Time)—to action (the glorified dissociation in Lioness), to drama (the grimy bleakness of Euphoria). Even superhero movies, which draw an obviously younger audience, expose viewers to hyper-real terrorism spectacles from the destruction of cities on par with 9/11 to the destruction of half of all life in the universe with the snap of a finger. Deeply disturbing and inhumane narratives and visuals in the guise of entertainment are constantly streaming into our eyeballs like we are all living in A Clockwork Orange. Dystopia as cultural shorthand strikes again.

Heated Rivalry might not be science fiction, but it, too, is a fantasy set in a speculative universe: in that universe, the captain of a major league hockey team publicly comes out, setting in motion a cascade of events that diverge from our current reality in which, out of thousands of players, there are currently zero openly gay or bi men actively competing in any of the major North American sports leagues.

As it ascends to the status of global phenomenon, creating an entire new cultural shorthand and lexicon along the way, Heated Rivalry offers a cinematic universe that references our own but casts an alternate vision of a world that’s possible—a world of pleasure, mutuality, humanness, intimacy, creativity, and joy.

Keep reading

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

Former Vanity Fair editor has started a Substack, where she’ll be “writing about the books that are on my mind, on my nightstand, and popping up in the culture.” First up: Wuthering Heights, just in time for the Emerald Fennell adaptation coming out next month.

Fashion brand has launched A Need to Know Basis, where the founders—both named Veronica—will be sharing “hacks, secrets, shortcuts, inspiration—to make our lives, and your lives—chicer and easier.”

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.

This week, we’re doing the cha-cha, crunching numbers, and counting parking spaces.

DANCE

“It’s all in the hips”

An 80-year-old describes the joys of dancing, even when the steps elude her.

Mambo Italiana

— in A Considerable Age

On Tuesday mornings, I go to a dance fitness class for older people at a community center on Minnetonka Boulevard. I thought I was signing up for zumba and gave myself a figurative pat on the back. “This is hot stuff,” I thought. “Everyone will be impressed that at my age I’m doing zumba.” I still don’t know what it is, but apparently it’s not what I do on Tuesday mornings.

What I do is Cuban cha cha and Dominican bachata with an occasional Brazilian samba thrown in. I’ve never been to any of those places, but I’ve been to West 83rd Street, so I know what Afro-Caribbean music sounds like, and it flows in my bloodstream even if the blood itself is more sluggish than it used to be. My blood is, in fact, called upon to show up at the lab for testing at regular intervals. It keeps its appointments, but reluctantly. I get the feeling my blood would prefer to be out on the dance floor.

The first few times I tried out the moves, I couldn’t remember anything about the right foot stepping forward or the left foot stepping back, let alone the turn. At 80, learning dance routines is a cognitive challenge. The steps aren’t intrinsically difficult to execute, but muscle memory does not serve. My feet are recalcitrant. And it all happens so fast.

After maybe ten classes, during which I felt clumsy, hopeless, possibly in the early stages of dementia, I got the message. It’s not about the steps, it’s about the music. The teacher tries to find songs that are fast enough to release the potential for joy this music carries around with it like corn kernels waiting to pop, but not so fast that we are all gasping for air.

I’m partial to Bette Midler’s “Mambo Italiana.” Just the fact that this song exists reminds me of the racy cocktail of Jewish, Italian, Afro-Latino culture on the street in New York in the ’50s and brings an enormous smile to my face. All of a sudden, I’m dancing like the music is blasting out of a transistor radio on a fire escape outside a bodega on Columbus Avenue, and we’re young and sexy again. It’s all in the hips.

I like the fact that we dance without partners, by ourselves, for ourselves. On rare occasions, a man will wander in, but mainly this is a room full of seasoned women who are allowing themselves the pleasure of getting into their own bodies. Truth be told, I never really learned how to dance with a partner. Something in me resists the whole leader/follower thing.

The rock and roll that came a decade and a half after the cha cha was always an exercise in narcissism. Even with someone opposite, more often than not another girl, I was always preoccupied with my own outrage, my own abandon. But this dancing, this barrio, this Little Havana has the advantage of a fixed structure and a repetitive rhythm that delivers me. It’s a blueprint. Tito Puente is already in the room just waiting for me to join him.

I don’t have to make it up as I go along. Latin dance occupies a sweet spot between the horror of the rec hall at summer camp, waiting for some scrawny twelve-year-old Bobby or Mikey to ask me, and the raucous freeform mayhem that followed once the plug was pulled by the Stones. I can wake up feeling grouchy, but the music doesn’t take no for an answer. It is irresistible and will release those endorphins even if I put up a show of resistance.

I still don’t know how the Latinas do it in high heels. I’m an old lady in loose-fitting pants and tennis shoes, but after the first few bars, I’m channelling Rita Moreno and Chita Rivera. I have red lips and long eyelashes, dangly earrings and a tight skirt. This might be the closest I’ve ever come to inhabiting the girl nature that I’ve always held at arm’s length.

Keep reading

PITCHED

OBSESSIONS

The calculator collector

In which Paul Lukas visits a pop-up calculator museum and interviews the collector about his obsession with mid-century machines.

Collection Agency: Crunching the Numbers with a Calculator Collector

— in

I grew up in the 1970s, when hand-held electronic calculators became affordable and popular. I asked my parents to get me one for Christmas in 1976, when I was 12, and they obliged. I remember “testing” that first calculator: Did it know how much seven times seven was? Could it accurately determine my favorite baseball players’ batting averages? If I subtracted my birth year from the current year, would it correctly show my age? Seeing the calculator get all of these things right was very satisfying, and the clickety-clack of the keyboard was even better. I was very happy with my present. (Learning about “BOOBIES” would come later.)

I don’t know what happened to that long-ago calculator, but my memories of it were rekindled in late October by a listing in a weekly newsletter devoted to offbeat events and activities around New York City:

The Calcuphile: An Attempt at a Pop-Up Calculator Museum

Sunday, October 26th, 11am-4pm

Step into the gritty underbelly of computing history at our Pop-Up Calculator Museum—uncover the raw history of these clunky mechanical beasts that fueled the tech revolution. (A calculator wrote that description.) Come see over 100 calculators focusing on the pre-1980s era that is so experiential: the tactile nature, the sound of the keys, the weight and feel in our hands, and the joys of math. It puts a lot of modern transitions into perspective, given the changes in computing, technology, and life in general since then. Come solve all your problems—math problems, that is. Mathematicians will be on site for counseling.

And then it listed a location in Brooklyn.

I loved the idea of celebrating vintage calculators, and the listing’s playful language seemed to indicate a creative intelligence at work. So on the appointed day, my friend Janet and I went to check out the museum, which turned out to be a tent set up on the curb of a residential block. Standing outside the tent were two guys who appeared to be running the show.

[. . .]

I wanted to learn more about [Rahul] Saggar and his calculator fixation, so I asked if we could set up an interview at his Brooklyn home. He agreed, and a few weeks later I arrived at his apartment, where he had dozens of calculators spread out on his living room floor for me to see (but no longer had the white tape on his glasses or any other performative stylistic cues)...

IC: Do you recall when you got your first calculator?

Saggar: It was probably my dad’s, and we would use it for school. But then when we were required to buy one for high school, I got my own.

IC: Do you still have it?

Saggar: Yeah.

IC: So you saved it, even though you weren’t already a collector at that point. Why did you do that? Are you just the kind of person who saves things?

Saggar: Yeah, I think I am.

IC: Have you collected other things?

Saggar: When I was a kid, I had a pencil collection, which is still in my room at my parents’ house in Ohio—thousands of pencils. They had to put limitations on my daily pencil buying in elementary school, because I would save up my lunch money and buy out all the pencils and then there were no pencils left for any of the other kids.

I also had childhood collections of stuff like bottle caps, bugs—until my mom found out. Thinking about all of that reminds me of how I felt that some things were alive or maybe had a soul, so discarding them would not be nice. I still kind of believe that.

IC: How many of the calculators in your collection are from that period in the ’90s when co-workers were just giving them to you?

Saggar: A few dozen, probably not even 40.

IC: And when did you start seeking out additional calculators on eBay, at flea markets, or wherever?

Saggar: Not until maybe 2014, 2015. Maybe a bit earlier.

IC: Oh—that’s a big gap! What got you back into it?

Saggar: I have a friend who’s a winemaker. They were cleaning something out at his winery and they found this amazing old Singer calculator, with its original case and everything. That thing’s amazing. So that got me back into it.

Also, around that same time, I went to a party at a big industrial loft space, and they had this museum-style display of some clunky old thing. It looked like a calculator, but I wasn’t even sure what it was. And when I saw that, I thought, “This thing is so beautiful, and the way it’s presented is so beautiful—I want to do that too.”

IC: So that’s when it sort of clicked in your head that you wanted to build out the collection and display it?

Saggar: Yeah.

IC: How did you go about acquiring more of them?

Saggar: So, my parents have a flea market—

IC: This explains so much!

Saggar: It’s sort of a neighborhood garage sale, like a block long. It usually happens around Labor Day, and I would go back and help my mom out, because she’s always trying to get rid of stuff. And then I’d just wander around and ask everyone, “Do you have any calculators?” I asked this one lady, and she’s like, “Well, I have a Burroughs adding machine. My mother used to work for Bell Labs.” I think she let me have it for $10.

Keep reading

CAT PORTRAIT

FOOD

The roast chicken problem

Chinese Cooking Demystified explores the cultural and developmental reasons why Sichuanese chefs found Thomas Keller’s French Laundry unimpressive.

Can Chinese chefs appreciate western food?

— in

It’s important to understand New California cuisine—i.e. the style of the French Laundry—as a reaction.

As a society develops, agriculture gets increasingly mechanized. This has a tremendous amount of benefit on net, but ingredient quality certainly suffers. Fruits and vegetables become larger. Meats become softer. The flavor of everything becomes somewhat muted. This process happened in America, in Europe, in Japan, in China… everywhere. The intensity differs between societies and where you are on the development curve. Modernity is a trade that everyone should want to make, but it’s not a completely costless one: as Dawei (Steph’s Dad) sometimes wistfully reminisces, “If only we had modern restaurants with those ingredients…”

The food of Alice Waters and that whole movement was (and is) an attempt to chase that concept: a modern restaurant, with those ingredients. Thomas Keller can impress Americans with ‘extremely high quality chicken, executed simply but well’, because many Americans have never tasted a chicken that tastes like chicken. And I mean, a heritage breed, with good feed, given some space to roam? It’s a beautiful thing. No one should be ashamed for loving the French Laundry.

But a little like the Provence that Waters fell in love with in the ’60s, China today is at an earlier point on the development curve. And that means that you can find chicken that tastes like chicken in China… and you don’t have to go to one of the most expensive restaurants in the country for the privilege. You simply drive outside of the city—sometimes not even all that far!—and go to a nongjiale (农家乐).

Alternatively called nongzhuang (农庄), these are small restaurants that run out of village houses. They’re generally family-run, use high-quality ingredients, with some uncle whipping up simple, traditional dishes whipped up over a (at times, even wood-powered) wok. If you’re getting something like an entire free-range chicken, it’s still not going to be cheap, but it’ll be approachable.

So, no, it’s not that Chinese chefs “can’t appreciate the pure taste of roast chicken”. It’s that if you’re going to a restaurant famed for being The Best In America, you’re going to expect something… more… than an American nongjiale with fancy plating. It’s going to be extremely unimpressive, because you can already get good chicken in China, right?

Layer in the cultural and economic power differential between the two countries—that you’re socially expected to be wowed—and I could imagine even being a bit miffed: “I can literally turn chicken into tofu, but it’s Thomas Keller that’s rich and world-famous, for… roasting a chicken? Go down into the mountains, and Yi peasants can roast you a chicken…”

Keep reading

PHOTOGRAPHY

CITY PLANNING

“SimParkingLot is no fun”

Benjamin Schneider on how parking requirements transformed American cities into asphalt seas.

SimParkingLot is no fun

— in

Many Millennials were first introduced to urban planning through SimCity, a remarkably realistic city-building game complete with municipal budgets, zoning ordinances, and utilities. But there’s one aspect of city planning the creators were forced to fudge.

“We were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world,” SimCity creator Stone Librande admitted in an interview. “Our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.”

Stone’s interviewer joked that if the parking facilities in SimCity were rendered at their actual size the game would’ve become “SimParkingLot.” It would be a funny quip if it didn’t describe the cityscape most Americans inhabit every day.

Sunset Road intersects Las Vegas Boulevard at the bitter end of the Strip. This is where the ersatz fantasy world of Las Vegas meets the workaday reality of Clark County, Nevada. There are no Parisian shopping arcades or Roman fora on Sunset Road. This is America. Every store, every warehouse, every apartment complex is surrounded by a moat of parking.

Getting to the building from the sidewalk requires a journey across the blazing asphalt, and a delicate negotiation with the well-armored Rogues and Renegades rolling in and out. Along the boulevards of Clark County, it can look as if the overarching urban design guideline was a petulant toddler yelling, “More parking!” In fact, here and in nearly every American city, there are very specific prescriptions for how much parking different types of development require.

To see how Clark County’s built environment became, in effect, a parked environment, consult planning code section 30.60.030. These regulations require places of worship and adult theater cabarets to have 10 spaces per thousand square feet. Bowling alleys must have four and a half spaces per lane, and mini golf courses need three spaces per hole.

When it comes to office buildings, Clark County follows the “golden rule” of four spaces per thousand square feet that has become standard for suburban office parks around the country. A typical parking spot in a lot, including the space necessary to pull in and out, takes up about 300 square feet. That means the gold standard for office development in America is a campus with more square footage dedicated to parking than to offices. But at least spaces per square feet is a comprehensible metric.

In 2002, UCLA economist and parking policy expert Donald Shoup surveyed parking requirements across the country and found more than 662 land use or institution types and 216 distinct metrics for calculating parking requirements. Those metrics include the number of fuel nozzles, drying racks, or nuns in a given establishment.

Funeral parlors in different cities are the subject of more than 30 different metrics for determining “parking requirements for the afterlife,” accounting, variously, for the number of seats, chapels, and hearses.

These rules can also have mortal consequences for the living. Arlington, Texas, requires bars and nightclubs to provide 14 off-street parking spots for every 1,000 square feet. That means these alcohol-fueled businesses must dedicate at least four times more space to parking than they do to partying. Y’all drive safe now.

These very precise numbers imply that parking requirements are the product of rigorous scientific research. In reality, parking requirements are “little more than a collective hunch,” Shoup writes.

Many cities pull their parking requirements from other jurisdictions, which may or may not have based them on real data, creating a repeating cycle of ignorance. When they are the product of actual empirical study, parking minimums are typically set to reflect the highest possible parking demand, like a church on Easter Sunday, or a big box store on Black Friday.

In other cases, parking requirements serve as a de facto zoning ordinance intended to shape what kinds of development are welcome, where. Arlington’s super-sized parking requirements for bars discourage the creation of drinking establishments, or at the very least ensure that they can never cluster in anything resembling a walkable nightlife district, since each one must be isolated in its parking cocoon.

“Parking is probably the most extensive infrastructure that we have, yet we have almost zero vision of how much of it there really is,” Mikhail Chester, a professor of environmental engineering at Arizona State University, told me.

Keep reading

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

The actress, activist, and fitness legend has launched , a Substack where the 88-year-old will, she says, “focus mostly on health, mental as well as physical, on well-being in general, and other ideas that have helped me make the most of my elder years.”

The journalist, author, and filmmaker has launched , where subscribers will, he says, “be getting my attempts to use words, reason, and science to trap reality like birds in an entanglement net, to be delivered to your doorstep.”

, the businessman and former CEO of Renault, has launched , where he’ll “go deeper into the lessons, frameworks and thinking from 40 years of leadership” and share his boardroom insights directly with subscribers.

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.

This week, we’re searching for dwarves in data centers, spiraling to crash-out anthems, and uncovering family secrets in hurricane season.

MODERN MYTHS

Into the labyrinth

Technology and mythology meet when E.S. Northey, a PhD student focused on Cornish folklore, takes a tour of an AI data center.

A Folklorist Visits a Data Centre

— in

The tour began in the basement, under the earth, where I could feel the thrum of London Tube lines. Here, massive generators hummed in readiness, kept at a just-so temperature so they might start more quickly if needed. Beneath my feet, deeper still, sealed in concrete, lay reservoirs of diesel fuel the size of swimming pools. Enough to run the entire facility for two weeks. They wait unused. They are redundant, only in the case of a UK-wide grid outage. My tour guide seemed proud as he rattled off numbers relating to capacity, wattage, and voltage.

We travelled upward by staircase and lift and wound our way through a labyrinth of corridors, atriums, canteens, offices, and eventually into the server halls themselves. I was shown around sealed chambers where GPU racks stood in ordered rows, their blinking lights creating constellations of green, red, and amber. It was a liminal space of compute density and void space. The temperature shifted dramatically as we moved between zones. From the sharp heat radiating from the machines to the arctic chill of the cooling aisles, where the air conditioning fought its battle against entropy.

My tour guide, leaning on a GPU rack, talked about uncertainty and redundancy, backup coolers, backup heaters, backup generators, backup backups.

Overhead, cable trays held thousands of wires, rivers of power cables as thick as your forearm, fibre optics all bundled and colour-coded. Pipes and vents ran along the ceilings and walls. The aesthetic lurched between industrial, concrete, rebar, metal grating, and the corporate stretches of beige carpet that absorbed sound and fluorescent lighting that radiated a sickly yellow.

As I was led around, aware that if I were abandoned, I might never find my way out, I thought about my art and my PhD.

My area of study focuses on Cornish folklore, its oral traditions and how it reacted to the county’s industrialisation. Cornish mines bred their own spirits. The knockers, a tribe of fairies (or ghosts, depending on who you ask) similar to Kobolds, Dwarves, or the Welsh Coblynau, tapped in the darkness, warning miners of danger or leading them to rich veins of ore or cursing them should miners disrespect them. They are the main case study of my thesis, as they can uniquely help us explore the dichotomy between the industrial and the enchanted.

Unlike other folkloric creatures whose origins are blurry, contested, or completely lost to time, the knockers emerged at a specific time, the early 1800s, with the beginning of deep mining in Cornwall, when depleting surface tin and the discovery of lower deposits of copper led Cornish miners deeper underground.

Here was an industrial environment and a magical one, occupying the same space. Foucault would describe this as a heterotopic space. Knockers make a perfect case study because they challenge the trope of modernity being in opposition to magic. They weren’t holdovers from a pre-industrial past. They were born exactly at the time of the Industrial Revolution, when the Cornish mines were arguably among the most technologically advanced places on earth.

Through this lens, one could say that a knocker might recognise something familiar in a data centre’s environment. Both are vast industrial complexes built above and below ground. Both are the pinnacle of their respective periods’ technology.

Folklore arises from people working (often at laborious or repetitive tasks) in proximity, in particular environments that contain danger/uncertainty/unforeseeable failure. A mine, a fishing boat, an agricultural community. Places where bad weather, bad luck, or bad judgment could mean life or death, wealth or poverty. In these spaces, stories emerge, are shared, and are iterated upon. The knocker emerged from the collective anxiety and hope of miners working in the dark.

A data centre, then, has many of the same elements as those of magical environments. It’s certainly a particular environment, filled with its own rituals and vocabularies. There’s uncertainty, too: all that redundancy exists precisely because failure, unearned, often random failure, is always an anxiety. Milliseconds of latency make headline news. Downtime is a catastrophe. The conditions seem perfect for stories to emerge and for new digital spirits to appear.

However, a data centre lacks a critical component.

I was struck, as I was guided through one maze before being led into a different building and another maze, by how empty it all was.

Keep reading

YEAR OF THE HORSE

MICROFICTION

Inspired

Inspired by Melissa Clements’s photo below, Ricardo A. Martagón wrote a short story—one of those cross-media moments we love to see.

Obstinacy

— in a note

The storm at last passed. The chittering of birds and the heat of the risen sun aroused McGill.

He came out of the groove he’d curled up into the night before, so narrow he twisted his body in an ungodly posture. The scarred, furrowed skin of the south side of the mountain warding off danger for him.

The night before, Gilman’s henchmen lost track of him, their horses frightened by the cracking dome above them. It would take them at least two days before they track him down, McGill surmised.

He yawned, then shivered. The melting snow burning off a little ways behind him.

To the left below, a thicket of woodland spread green and billowing.

To the right, a spire of smoke ascended gingerly into the blue raw sky; under it, a housefarm stood stubborn to snow or fire, inviting. A clutch of furry, ginger Highland cows grazing heedless not fifty meters out.

He felt hungry and wild with life.

If death was upon him, inevitable; then he’d take another woman’s soul first.

Keep reading

DUELING PIANOS

MUSIC

“Have you ever played a song on repeat when you were crashing out?”

Jules Zucker asked his followers the question above. “As expected, the answers were funny, devastating, and inspiring (sometimes all three). A lot of breakup stuff, of course. Some hard truths about jobs, a couple big life transitions, several unspeakable losses. At least two songs from the Muppets.” Here, he shares the full playlist.

I Asked 67 People to Send Me a Song They Played on Repeat When They Were Crashing Out

— in

Our ears can surprise us when we’re at our most vulnerable, and an unexpected song can become a catalyst for epiphany, a tool for self-flagellation, or a soothing tonic. These “crashout” songs are fascinating because they are often completely divorced from our usual taste, our auditory ego, our perception of ourselves as listeners. Something deep in our subconscious latches onto a song and uses it to heal—if that isn’t a testament to the strange power of music, what is?

[...]

SONG: “Bruised Orange” - John Prine

“There was a time in like 2023/2024 where every day everywhere I walked I was inexplicably frustrated at virtually everything around me, any inconvenience. Soon after, I got really into John Prine and would have ‘Bruised Orange’ just playing on repeat (either Prine’s version or Justin Vernon’s cover). All of Prine’s music has this effect for me, but ‘Bruised Orange’ does wonders at centering and grounding me. It’s a super great reminder to not let little things make you spiral or dig yourself into a depressive hole.”

SONG: “The One” - Kesha

“I listened to ‘The One’ from Kesha’s new album over and over for a month this summer when I was going through the most painful breakup of my life. It’s a joyful song about realizing that SHE’S ‘the one’ in her life, the one she’s been searching for all this time. I was trying to convince myself of the same, though I never fully believed it. One day in particular I played it on repeat while riding my bike around a cemetery and taking advantage of the solitude by belting it out.”

SONG: “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” from Lilo & Stitch

“For some reason, during my senior year at the University of Maryland (go Terps), I rediscovered ‘Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride’ from Lilo & Stitch. I’d loved the movie as a kid, but for some reason the song hadn’t stuck with me… until I heard it again as a 22-year-old. It instantly became a comfort song during those sad senioritis winters. After rehearsals with my sketch comedy group, I’d drive all the car-less members home and blast it at full volume—singing (maybe even screaming) at the top of my lungs. It was kind of a running bit, and it probably made me seem mildly unhinged, but everyone eventually joined in earnestly. I like to think it counts as a ‘happy crash out.’”

SONG: “Diving Woman” - Japanese Breakfast

“I play ‘Diving Woman’ by Japanese Breakfast every time I’m on a plane taking off (I hate flying and especially taking off, but despite the song’s name it is sooo soothing).”

SONG: “Sex” - The 1975

“I was 21 and studying abroad in England and met and fell deeply in love with a Moroccan girl who, unfortunately, had a long-distance boyfriend at the time. They were open, but she wouldn’t hook up with me because we had feelings for each other. For weeks we’d hang out in each other’s rooms without doing anything and it was some of the most intense yearning I’ve ever felt, and that’s when I came across ‘Sex.’ Lines like ‘And now we’re on the bed in my room / and I’m about to fill his shoes / but you say no.’ Truly was exactly what I was going through at the time. Anyway, after a few weeks we finally did hook up and had a very intense love affair for the last month of the semester. All while listening to ‘She’s got a boyfriend anyway.’”

SONG: “I Have a Dream” - ABBA

“August 2022. I’m house-sitting a beautiful little cottage in the middle of an orange grove. I’m going through a hard time with a relationship, all of my girlfriends are out of town, and I’m relishing my staycation. I decide to take a handful of mushrooms, I feel ready for a heavier dose than the micros I was used to. Confident I’m going to have a good trip, I decide to relax and watch a movie. The movie? Girl Interrupted. The mushrooms really kick in during the (spoiler alert) suicide scene. It comes to my attention that I can NOT handle what’s happening. I start to panic. I freak out. I FaceTime my girlfriends, who were all in Tahoe. I put on ‘I Have a Dream’ by ABBA. I replay the song over and over again. It’s the only thing keeping me tethered to earth. My girlfriends suggest I eat citrus because they heard it helps with mushroom highs. Perfect, I’m surprised by it. Come to find out, citrus intensifies the high. I walk in circles saying to myself, ‘I believe in angels.’ On my Spotify Wrapped that year it showed that I listened to that song 73 times in a row.”

Keep reading

PHOTOGRAPHY

FAMILY HISTORY

“The secrets of my own story were hiding in those waves”

Joe Hagan digs into family history to unearth his origin story: a tale of nuclear radiation, Gulf Coast hurricanes, and a secret his parents kept hidden for decades.

Wake up, Maggie, I think I got somethin’ to say to you

— in

When the first nuclear bomb in Nevada was detonated in 1951, my grandfather stood in the desert in Army fatigues with goggles to protect his eyes. He snapped a photograph of the mushroom cloud. In high school, I found that photo in a box of slides, lifting it to the light in awe.

We called him Poppy, but my mom and her sisters called him the Old Bastard. He wore a flattop and an olive-khaki leisure suit, and he smoked a pipe.

In 1957, Poppy moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, with his second wife, Madeline—my grandmother, an aspiring actress from a well-off family in Connecticut. They had met in Georgia while they were both married to other people. Poppy opened a lumberyard and helped raise Madeline’s three daughters.

Four years into the new marriage, Poppy developed both colon and testicular cancer, a gift from the nuclear radiation. The surgery made him impotent. He and Madeline became full-blown alcoholics, fighting bitterly. Poppy beat Madeline with a riding crop. The older daughters, Mary Lou and Lynn, got married and escaped.

That left my mom—a tomboy with funny teeth who rarely wore shoes and loved the Beatles—to live with two dysfunctional drunks. She met my father at a raucous party in Flour Bluff. He was enlisted in the Navy and stationed at the local air base. A skinny, red-haired kid from North Carolina, a year out of high school, he drove a 1965 Mustang and kept a Donald Takayama surfboard on the roof to impress girls at the local surf spot on Padre Island, Bob Hall Pier.

In 1969, when my parents first began dating, they’d walk to the end of Bob Hall Pier to catch the sunset, a first glimpse of life’s horizons. At night, phosphorescence sparkled in the crashing waves. Built in 1950 and named after local commissioner Robert Reid Hall, the pier had been destroyed by hurricanes in 1961 and 1967 but was rebuilt. Postcards advertised it as a tourist attraction: 1,200 feet of walkway and a pavilion that rented fishing poles for a dollar. It even lit up at night. Though the surfing was excellent during hurricane season, the pier was mainly a place for young people to park on the sand and drink beer. When my dad’s surfboard was stolen off his car in front of Poppy’s house on Dolphin Street, he never replaced it.

Surfing was destined to return to his life—when I took it up as a teenager. As it turned out, the secrets of my own story, as a child of the Gulf Coast, were hiding in those waves off Bob Hall Pier. But it would take years before I understood them.

Only a month into my parents’ courtship, my mom found her mother dead in the bedroom, asphyxiated on her own vomit. She ran out of the house screaming and collapsed on the lawn. Poppy started drinking more heavily, staring at Madeline’s portrait while listening to the theme song from Doctor Zhivago.

My dad was moonlighting at Poppy’s lumberyard when Hurricane Celia destroyed swaths of Corpus Christi in August 1970. (Bob Hall Pier, miraculously, was spared.) Poppy and my dad were boarding up the lumberyard when the winds came whipping in. That was the week I was conceived. When my mom found out she was pregnant, she left it to my dad to deliver the news to Poppy. Outweighing him by 100 pounds or more, Poppy threw my dad against a wall and threatened to jab his eyes out.

At 19, my mom was at sea. Unprepared for motherhood or marriage, she fled to her sister Mary Lou’s house and stopped taking my dad’s calls. A doctor suggested she have an abortion. Instead, it was decided she’d fly to Rhode Island to live with her sister Lynn and Lynn’s husband, Big Dave, who was also in the Navy, stationed at Quonset Point. My mom would have the baby in a military hospital and put the child up for adoption.

On April 30, 1971, the doctor took me from my mother and carried me down the hallway to a foster care ward. Under the law, my mom had 30 days to change her mind. She saw a psychiatrist in downtown Providence, where she began to hear herself think for the first time. Her mother had died. Her stepfather was a drunk. She was an unmarried mother to a child whom she’d just given up for adoption.

Two weeks later, she decided she’d made a terrible mistake and flew back to Texas to patch things up with my dad. They hadn’t seen each other in months and my dad had gone into a tailspin of heartbreak. She returned to Rhode Island to retrieve me a week before I was to be adopted. The first time my dad laid eyes on me was at the airport in Corpus Christi. I was six weeks old.

I didn’t learn this story until I called my Aunt Lynn to talk about her memories of Bob Hall Pier. “I never did understand why your daddy felt the need to keep it a secret,” she told me in her familiar twang. My parents, pained and embarrassed by their past, had changed the anniversary of their marriage and lied for decades.

Keep reading

CORRECTION

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , , ,

Recently launched

Audrey Gelman, the founder of former coworking space The Wing, has launched a Substack. In , she’ll share her thinking about “design and hospitality as well as the books, places, and businesses which influence how we think about building [her new inn and store] The Six Bells.”

of Sonic Youth has joined Substack, sharing a list of his favorite albums alongside original essays and poems.

has joined Substack, posting on Notes that he’ll “use this as a mind dump, not unlike how I used to use Twitter.”

The story of AI

Patrick McKenzie: You’ve been hired as a historian of the past few years. Succinctly narrate what has been built since Attention Is All You Need. What about 2025 would surprise an audience in 2017? What predictions of well-informed people have not been borne out? Tell the story as you would to someone in your domain—research, policy, or markets.

Jack Clark: Back in 2017, most people were betting that the path to a truly general-purpose system would come from training agents from scratch on a curriculum of increasingly hard tasks, and through this, create a generally capable system. This was present in the research projects from all the major labs, like DeepMind and OpenAI, trying to train superhuman players in games like Starcraft, Dota 2, and AlphaGo. I think of this as basically a “tabula rasa” bet—start with a blank agent and bake it in some environment(s) until it becomes smart.

Of course, as we all know now, this didn’t actually lead to general intelligences—but it did lead to superhuman agents within the task distribution they were trained on.

At this time, people had started experimenting with a different approach, doing large-scale training on datasets and trying to build models that could predict and generate from these distributions. This ended up working extremely well, and was accelerated by two key things:

1. the Transformer framework from Attention Is All You Need, which made this type of large-scale pre-training much more efficient, and

2. the roughly parallel development of “Scaling Laws,” or the basic insight that you could model out the relationship between capabilities of pre-trained models and the underlying resources (data, compute) you pour into them.

By combining Transformers and the Scaling Laws insights, a few people correctly bet that you could get general-purpose systems by massively scaling up the data and compute.

Now, in a very funny way, things are coming full circle: people are starting to build agents again, but this time, they’re imbued with all the insights that come from pre-trained models. A really nice example of this is the SIMA 2 paper from DeepMind, where they make a general-purpose agent for exploring 3D environments, and it piggybacks on an underlying pre-trained Gemini model. Another example is Claude Code, which is a coding agent that derives its underlying capabilities from a big pre-trained model.

Patrick: Due to large language models (LLMs) being programmable and widely available, including open source software (OSS) versions that are more limited but still powerful relative to 2017, we’re now at the point where no further development on AI capabilities (or anything else interesting) will ever need to be built on a worse cognitive substrate than what we currently have. This “what you see today is the floor, not the ceiling” is one of the things I think best understood by insiders and worst understood by policymakers and the broader world.

Every future Starcraft AI has already read The Art of War in the original Chinese, unless its designers assess that makes it worse at defending against Zerg rushes.

Jack: Yes, something we say often to policymakers at Anthropic is “This is the worst it will ever be!” and it’s really hard to convey to them just how important that ends up being. The other thing which is unintuitive is how quickly capabilities improve—one current example is how many people are currently playing with Opus 4.5 in Claude Code and saying some variation of “Wow, this stuff is so much better than it was before.” If you last played with LLMs in November, you’re now wildly miscalibrated about the frontier.

Michael Burry: From my perspective, in 2017, AI wasn’t LLMs. AI was artificial general intelligence (AGI). I think people didn’t think of LLMs as being AI back then. I mean, I grew up on science fiction books, and they predict a lot, but none of them pictured “AI” as something like a search-intensive chatbot.

For Attention Is All You Need and its introduction of the transformer model, these were all Google engineers using Tensor, and back in the mid-teens, AI was not a foreign concept. Neural networks, machine learning startups were common, and AI was mentioned a lot in meetings. Google had the large language model already, but it was internal. One of the biggest surprises to me is that Google wasn’t leading this the whole way given its Search and Android dominance, both with the chips and the software.

Another surprise is that I thought application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) would be adopted far earlier, and small language models (SLMs) would be adopted far earlier. That Nvidia has continued to be the chip for AI this far into inference is shocking.

The biggest surprise to me is that ChatGPT kicked off the spending boom. The use cases for ChatGPT have generally been limited from the start—search, students cheating, and coding. Now there are better LLMs for coding. But it was a chatbot that kicked off trillions in spending.

Speaking of that spending, I thought one of the best moments of Dwarkesh’s interview with Satya Nadella was the acknowledgement that all the big software companies are hardware companies now, capital-intensive, and I am not sure the analysts following them even know what maintenance capital expenditure is.

Dwarkesh Patel: Great points. It is quite surprising how non-durable leads in AI so far have been. Of course, in 2017, Google was far and away ahead. A couple years ago, OpenAI seemed way ahead of the pack. There is some force (potentially talent poaching, rumor mills, or reverse engineering) which has so far neutralized any runaway advantages a single lab might have had. Instead, the big three keep rotating around the podium every few months. I’m curious whether “recursive superintelligence” would actually be able to change this, or whether we should just have a prior and strong competition forever.

Jack: On recursion, all the frontier labs are speeding up their own developers using AI tools, but it’s not very neat. It seems to have the property of “you’re only as fast as the weakest link in the chain”—for instance, if you can now produce 10x more code but your code review tools have only improved by 2x, you aren’t seeing a massive speedup. A big open question is whether it’ll be possible to fully close this loop, in which case you might see some kind of compounding R&D advantage.

Do AI tools actually improve productivity?

Dwarkesh: The million-dollar question is whether the METR productivity study (which shows that developers working in codebases they understood well had a roughly 20% decrease on merging pull requests from coding tools) or human equivalent time horizons of self-contained coding tasks (which are already in the many-hours range and doubling every four to seven months) is a better measure of how much speedup researchers and engineers at labs are actually getting. I don’t have direct experience here, but I’d guess it’s closer to the former, given that there isn’t a great feedback verification loop and the criteria are open-ended (maintainability, taste, etc.).

Jack: Agreed, this is a crucial question—and the data is conflicting and sparse. For example, we did a survey of developers at Anthropic and saw a self-reported 50% productivity boost from the 60% of those surveyed who used Claude in their work. But then things like the METR study would seem to contradict that. We need better data and, specifically, instrumentation for developers inside and outside the AI labs to see what is going on. To zoom out a bit, the massive and unprecedented uptake of coding tools does suggest people are seeing some major subjective benefit from using them—it would be very unintuitive if an increasing percentage of developers were enthusiastically making themselves less productive.

Dwarkesh: Not to rabbit hole on this, but the self-reported productivity being way higher than—and potentially even in the opposite direction of—true productivity is predicted by the METR study.

Jack: Yes, agreed. Without disclosing too much, we’re thinking specifically about instrumentation and figuring out what is “true” here, because what people self-report may end up being different from reality. Hopefully we’ll have some research outputs on this in 2026!

Which company is winning?

Michael: Do you think the podium will keep rotating? From what I’m hearing, Google is winning among developers from both AWS and Microsoft. And it seems the “search inertia” has been purged at the company.

Dwarkesh: Interesting. Seems more competitive than ever to me. The Twitter vibes are great for both Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3.5 Pro. No opinion on which company will win, but it definitely doesn’t seem settled.

Jack: Seems more competitive than ever to me, also!

Dwarkesh: Curious on people’s take on this: how many failed training runs/duds of models could Anthropic or OpenAI or Google survive? Given the constant need to fundraise (side question: for what exactly?) on the back of revenue and vibes.

Michael: The secret to Google search was always how cheap it was, so that informational searches that were not monetizable (and make up 80% or more) did not pile up as losses for the company. I think this is the fundamental problem with generative AI and LLMs today—they are so expensive. It is hard to understand what the profit model is, or what any one model’s competitive advantage will be—will it be able to charge more, or run cheaper?

Perhaps Google will be the one that can run cheapest in the end, and will win the commodity economy that this becomes.

Dwarkesh: Great point. Especially if you think many/most of the gains over the last year have been the result of inference scaling, which requires an exponential increase in variable cost to sustain.

Ultimately, the price of something is upper-bounded by the cost to replace it. So foundation model companies can only charge high margins (which they currently seem to be) if progress continues to be fast and, to Jack’s point, becomes eventually self-compounding.

Why hasn’t AI stolen all our jobs?

Dwarkesh: It’s really surprising how much is involved in automating jobs and doing what people do. We’ve just marched through so many common-sense definitions of AGI—the Turing test is not even worth commenting on anymore; we have models that can reason and solve difficult, open-ended coding and math problems. If you showed me Gemini 3 or Claude 4.5 Opus in 2017, I would have thought it would put half of white-collar workers out of their jobs. And yet the labor market impact of AI requires spreadsheet microscopes to see, if there is indeed any.

I would have also found the scale and speed of private investment in AI surprising. Even as of a couple years ago, people were talking about how AGI would have to be a government, Manhattan-style project, because that’s the only way you can turn the economy into a compute and data engine. And so far, it seems like good ol’-fashioned markets can totally sustain multiple GDP percentages of investment in AI.

Michael: Good point, Dwarkesh, re: the Turing test—that was definitely the discussion for a good while. In the past, for instance, during the Industrial Revolution and the Services Revolution, the impacts on labor were so great that mandatory schooling was instituted and expanded to keep young people out of the labor pool for longer. We certainly have not seen anything like that.

Jack: Yes, Dwarkesh and Michael, a truism for the AI community is they keep on building supposedly hard tasks that will measure true intelligence, then AI systems blow past these benchmarks, and you find yourself with something which is superficially very capable but still likely makes errors which any human would recognize as bizarre or unintuitive. One recent example is LLMs were scored “superhuman” on a range of supposedly hard cognitive tasks, according to benchmarks, but were incapable of self-correcting when they made errors. This is now improving, but it’s an illustration of how unintuitive the weaknesses of AI models can be. And you often discover them alongside massive improvements.

Dwarkesh: I wonder if the inverse is also true—humans reliably make classes of errors that an LLM would recognize as bizarre or unintuitive, lol. Are LLMs actually more jagged than people, or just jagged in a different way?

Patrick: Stealing an observation from Dwarkesh’s book, a mundane way in which LLMs are superhuman is that they speak more languages than any human—by a degree that confounds the imagination—and with greater facility than almost all polyglots ever achieve. Incredibly, this happens by accident, even without labs specifically training for it. One of the most dumbfounding demos I’ve ever seen was an LLM trained on a corpus intended to include only English documents yet able to translate a CNN news article to Japanese at roughly the standard of a professional translator. From that perspective, an LLM that hadn’t had politeness trained into it might say, “Humans are bizarre and spiky; look how many of them don’t speak Japanese despite living in a world with books.”

Why many workers aren’t using AI (yet)

Patrick: Coding seems to be the leading edge for widespread industrial adoption of AI, with meteoric revenue growth for companies like Cursor, technologists with taste taking to tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, and the vibes around “vibe coding.” This causes a pronounced asymmetry of enthusiasm for AI, since most people are not coders. What sector changes next? What change would make this visible in earnings, employment, or prices rather than demos?

Jack: Coding has a nice property of being relatively “closed loop”—you use an LLM to generate or tweak code, which you then validate and push into production. It really took the arrival of a broader set of tools for LLMs to take on this “closed loop” property in domains outside of coding—for instance, the creation of web search capabilities and the arrival of stuff like Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectivity has allowed LLMs to massively expand their “closed loop” utility beyond coding.

As an example, I’ve been doing research on the cost curves of various things recently (e.g. dollars of mass to orbit, or dollars per watt from solar), and it’s the kind of thing you could research with LLMs prior to these tools, but it had immense amounts of friction and forced you to go back and forth between the LLM and everything else. Now that friction has been taken away, you’re seeing greater uptake. Therefore, I expect we’re about to see what happened to coders happen to knowledge workers more broadly—and this feels like it should show up in a diffuse but broad way across areas like science research, the law, academia, consultancy, and other domains.

Michael: At the end of the day, AI has to be purchased by someone. Someone out there pays for a good or service. That is GDP. And that spending grows at GDP rates, 2% to 4%—with perhaps some uplift for companies with pricing power, which doesn’t seem likely in the future of AI.

Economies don’t have magically expanding pies. They have arithmetically constrained pies. Nothing fancy. The entire software pie—SaaS software running all kinds of corporate and creative functions—is less than $1 trillion. This is why I keep coming back to the infrastructure-to-application ratio—Nvidia selling $400 billion of chips for less than $100 billion in end-user AI product revenue.

AI has to grow productivity and create new categories of spending that don’t cannibalize other categories. This is all very hard to do. Will AI grow productivity enough? That is debatable. The capital expenditure spending cycle is faith-based and FOMO-based. No one is pointing to numbers that work. Yet.

There is a much simpler narrative out there that AI will make everything so much better that spending will explode. It is more likely to take spending in. If AI replaces a $500 seat license with a $50 one, that is great for productivity but is deflationary for productivity spend. And that productivity gained is likely to be shared by all competitors.

Dwarkesh: Michael, isn’t this the “lump of labor” fallacy? That there’s a fixed amount of software to be written, and that we can upper bound the impact of AI on software by that?

Michael: New markets do emerge, but they develop slower than acutely incentivized futurists believe. This has always been true. Demographics and total addressable market (TAM) are too often marketing gimmicks not grounded in reality. China’s population is shrinking. Europe’s is shrinking. The U.S. is the only major Western country growing, and that is because of immigration, but that has been politicized as well. FOMO is a hell of a drug. You look at some comments from Apple or Microsoft, and it seems they realize that.

Dwarkesh: As a sidenote, it’s funny that AI comes around just when we needed it to save us from the demographic sinkhole our economies would have otherwise been collapsing into over the next few decades.

Michael: Yes, Dwarkesh. In medicine, where there are real shortages, there is no hope for human doctors to be numerous enough in the future. Good medical care has to become cheaper, and technology is needed to extend the reach and coverage of real medical expertise.

Are engineers going to be out of work?

Patrick: AppAmaGooFaceSoft [Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft] presently employ on the order of 500,000 engineers. Put a number on that for 2035 and explain your thinking—or argue that headcount is the wrong variable, and name the balance-sheet or productivity metric you’d track instead.

Michael: From 2000, Microsoft added 18,000 employees as the stock went nowhere for 14 years. In fact headcount barely moved at Cisco, Dell, and Intel, despite big stock crashes. So I think it is the wrong variable. It tells us nothing about value creation, especially for cash-rich companies and companies in monopoly, duopoly, or oligopoly situations. I think it will be lower, or not much higher, because I think we are headed for a very long downturn. The hyperscalers laid off employees in 2022 when their stocks fell, and hired most of them back when their stocks rose. This is over a couple years.

I would track shareholder-based compensation’s (SBC) all-in cost before saying productivity is making a record run. At Nvidia, I calculated that roughly half of its profit is eliminated by compensation linked to stock that transferred value to those employees. Well, if half the employees are now worth $25 million, then what is the productivity gain on those employees? Not to mention, margins with accurate SBC costs would be much lower.

The measure to beat all measures is return on invested capital (ROIC), and ROIC was very high at these software companies. Now that they are becoming capital-intensive hardware companies, ROIC is sure to fall, and this will pressure shares in the long run. Nothing predicts long-term trends in the markets like the direction of ROIC—up or down, and at what speed. ROIC is heading down really fast at these companies now, and that will be true through 2035.

In his interview with Dwarkesh, Satya Nadella said that he’s looking for software to maintain ROIC through a heavy capital expenditure cycle. I cannot see it, and even to Nadella, it sounds like only a hope.

Dwarkesh: Naive question, but why is ROIC more important than absolute returns? I’d rather own a big business that can keep growing and growing (albeit as a smaller fraction of investment) than a small business that basically prints cash but is upper-bounded in size.

So many of the big tech companies have lower ROIC, but their addressable market over the next two decades has increased from ads ($400 billion in revenue a year) to labor (tens of trillions in revenue a year).

Michael: Return on invested capital—and, more importantly, its trend—is a measure of how much opportunity is left in the company. From my perspective, I have seen many roll-ups where companies got bigger primarily through buying other companies with debt. This brings ROIC into cold focus. If the return on those purchases ends up being less than the cost of debt, the company fails in a manner akin to WorldCom.

At some point, this spending on the AI buildout has to have a return on investment higher than the cost of that investment, or there is just no economic value added. If a company is bigger because it borrowed a lot more or spent all its cash flow on something low-return, that is not an attractive quality to an investor, and the multiple will fall. There are many non-tech companies printing cash with no real prospects for growth beyond buying it, and they trade at about 8x earnings.

Where is the money going?

Patrick: From a capital-cycle perspective, where do you think we are in the AI build-out—early over-investment, mid-cycle shakeout, or something structurally different from past tech booms? What would change your mind?

Michael: I do see it as different from prior booms, except in that the capital spending is remarkably short-lived. Chips cycle every year now; data centers of today won’t handle the chips of a few years from now. One could almost argue that a lot of this should be expensed, not capitalized. Or depreciated over two, three, four years.

Another big difference is that private credit is financing this boom as much as or more than public capital markets. This private credit is a murky area, but the duration mismatch stands out—much of this is being securitized as if the assets last two decades, while giving the hyperscaler outs every four to five years. This is just asking for trouble. Stranded assets.

Of course, the spenders are the richest companies on earth, but whether from cash or capital markets, big spending is big spending, and the planned spending overwhelms the balance sheets and cash flow of even today’s massive hyperscalers.

Also, construction in progress (CIP) is now an accounting trick that I believe is already being used. Capital equipment not yet “placed into service” does not start depreciating or counting against income. And it can be there forever. I imagine a lot of stranded assets will be hidden in CIP to protect income, and I think we are already seeing that potential.

In Dwarkesh’s interview, Nadella said he backed off some projects and slowed down the buildout because he did not want to get stuck with four or five years of depreciation on one generation of chips. That is a bit of a smoking-gun statement.

We are mid-cycle now—past the point where stocks will reward investors for further buildout, and getting into the period where the true costs and the lack of revenue will start to show themselves.

In past cycles, stocks and capital markets peaked about halfway through, and the rest of the capital expenditure occurred as a progressively pessimistic, or realistic, view descended on the assets of concern.

Dwarkesh: I think this is so downstream of whether AI continues to improve at a rapid clip. If you could actually run the most productive human minds on a B200 (Nvidia’s B200 GPU), then we’re obviously massively underinvesting. I think the revenues from the application layer so far are less informative than raw predictions about progress in AI capabilities themselves.

Jack: Agreed on this—the amount of progress in capabilities in recent years has been deeply surprising and has led to massive growth in utilization of AI. In the future, there could be further step-change increases in model capabilities, and these could have extremely significant effects on the economy.

What the market gets wrong

Patrick: Where does value accrue in the AI supply chain? How is this different from recent or historical technological advances? Who do you think the market is most wrong about right now?

Michael: Well, value accrues, historically, in all industries, to those with a durable competitive advantage manifesting as either pricing power or an untouchable cost or distribution advantage.

It is not clear that the spending here will lead to that.

Warren Buffett owned a department store in the late 1960s. When the department store across the street put an escalator in, he had to, too. In the end, neither benefited from that expensive project. No durable margin improvement or cost improvement, and both were in the same exact spot. That is how most AI implementation will play out.

This is why trillions of dollars of spending with no clear path to utilization by the real economy is so concerning. Most will not benefit, because their competitors will benefit to the same extent, and neither will have a competitive advantage because of it.

I think the market is most wrong about the two poster children for AI: Nvidia and Palantir. These are two of the luckiest companies. They adapted well, but they are lucky because when this all started, neither had designed a product for AI. But they are getting used as such.

Nvidia’s advantage is not durable. SLMs and ASICs are the future for most use cases in AI. They will be backward-compatible with CUDA [Nvidia’s parallel computing platform and programming model] if at all necessary. Nvidia is the power-hungry, dirty solution holding the fort until the competition comes in with a completely different approach.

Palantir’s CEO compared me to [bad actors] because of an imagined billion-dollar bet against his company. That is not a confident CEO. He’s marketing as hard as he can to keep this going, but it will slip. There are virtually no earnings after stock-based compensation.

Dwarkesh: It remains to be seen whether AI labs can achieve a durable competitive advantage from recursive self-improvement-type effects. But if Jack is right and AI developers should already be seeing huge productivity gains, then why are things more competitive now than ever? Either this kind of internal “dogfooding” cannot sustain a competitive advantage or the productivity gains from AI are smaller than they appear.

If it does turn out to be the case that (1) nobody across the AI stack can make crazy profits and (2) AI still turns out to be a big deal, then obviously the value accrues to the customer. Which, to my ears, sounds great.

Michael: In the escalator example, the only value accrued to the customer. This is how it always goes if no monopoly rents can be charged by the producers or providers.

What would change their minds

Patrick: What 2026 headline—technological or financial—would surprise you and cause you to recalibrate your overall views on AI progress or valuation? Retrospectively, what was the biggest surprise or recalibration to date?

Michael: The biggest surprise that would cause me to recalibrate would be autonomous AI agents displacing millions of jobs at the biggest companies. This would shock me but would not necessarily help me understand where the durable advantage is. That Buffett escalator example again.

Another would be application-layer revenue hitting $500 billion or more because of a proliferation of killer apps.

Right now, we will see one of two things: either Nvidia’s chips last five to six years and people therefore need less of them, or they last two to three years and the hyperscalers’ earnings will collapse and private credit will get destroyed.

Retrospectively, the biggest surprises to date are:

1. Google wasn’t leading the whole way—the eight authors of Attention Is All You Need were all Google employees; they had Search, Gmail, Android, and even the LLM and the chips, but they fumbled it and gave an opening to competitors with far less going for them. Google playing catch-up to a startup in AI: that is mind-blowing.

2. ChatGPT—a chatbot kicked off a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure race. It’s like someone built a prototype robot and every business in the world started investing for a robot future.

3. Nvidia has maintained dominance this far into the inference era. I expected ASICs and SLMs to be dominant by now, and that we would have moved well beyond prompt engineering. Perhaps the Nvidia infatuation actually held players back. Or anticompetitive behavior at Nvidia did.

Dwarkesh: Biggest surprises to me would be:

• 2026 cumulative AI lab revenues are below $40 billion or above $200 billion. It would imply that things have significantly sped up or slowed down compared to what I would have expected.

• Continual learning is solved. Not in the way that GPT-3 “solved” in-context learning, but in the way that GPT-5.2 is actually almost human-like in its ability to understand from context. If working with a model is like replicating a skilled employee that’s been working with you for six months rather than getting their labor on the first hour of their job, I think that constitutes a huge unlock in AI capabilities.

• Since 2020, my timelines to AGI have narrowed considerably—the scaling results have made it hard to place much probability on “completely wrong track, wait until end of century.” At the same time, there is a core of human-like learning missing that a true AGI must have. I now expect something like 5 to 15 years. If progress deviates significantly from that trend line in either direction, I’ll update.

Jack: If “scaling hits a wall,” that would be truly surprising and would have very significant implications for both the underlying research paradigm as well as the broader AI economy. Obviously, the infrastructure buildout, including the immense investments in facilities for training future AI models, suggests that people are betting otherwise.

One other thing I’d find surprising is if there was a combination of a technological breakthrough that improved the efficiency of distributed training, and some set of actors that put together enough computers to train a very powerful system. If this happened, it would suggest you can not only have open-weight models but also a form of open model development where it doesn’t take a vast singular entity (e.g. a company) to train a frontier model. This would alter the political economy of AI and have extremely non-trivial policy implications, especially around the proliferation of frontier capabilities. Epoch has a nice analysis of distributed training that people may want to refer to.

How they actually use LLMs

Patrick: What was your last professionally significant interaction with an LLM? File off the serial numbers, if need be. How did you relate to the LLM in that interaction?

Michael: I use Claude to produce all my charts and tables now. I will find the source material, but I spend no time on creating or designing a professional table, chart, or visual. I still don’t trust the numbers and need to check them, but that creative aspect is in the past for me. Relatedly, I will use Claude in particular to find source material, as so much source material these days is not simply at the SEC or in a mainstream report.

Patrick: I think people outside of finance do not understand how many billions of dollars have been spent having some of the best-paid, best-educated people in the world employed as Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel specialists. There is still value in that, for the time being, and perhaps the shibboleth value of pivot tables and VLOOKUP() will endure longer than they do, but my presentation at the Bank of England also used LLMs for all the charts. It feels almost bizarre that we once asked humans to spend hours carefully adjusting them.

Dwarkesh: They are now my personal one-on-one tutors. I’ve actually tried to hire human tutors for different subjects I’m trying to prep for, and I’ve found the latency and speed of LLMs to just make for a qualitatively much better experience. I’m getting the digital equivalent of people being willing to pay huge premiums for Waymo over Uber. It inclines me to think that the human premium for many jobs will not only not be high, but in fact be negative.

Michael: On that point, many point to trade careers as an AI-proof choice. Given how much I can now do in electrical work and other areas around the house just with Claude at my side, I am not so sure. If I’m middle class and am facing an $800 plumber or electrician call, I might just use Claude. I love that I can take a picture and figure out everything I need to do to fix it.

Risk, power, and how to shape the future

Patrick: The spectrum of views on AI risk among relatively informed people runs the gamut from “it could cause some unpleasantness on social media” to “it would be a shame if China beat the U.S. on a very useful emerging technology with potential military applications” to “downside risks include the literal end of everything dear to humanity.” What most keeps you up at night? Separately, if you had five minutes with senior policymakers, what new allocation of attention and resources would you suggest?

Jack: The main thing I worry about is whether people succeed at “building AI that builds AI”—fully closing the loop on AI R&D (sometimes called recursively self-improving AI). To be clear, I assign essentially zero likelihood to there being recursively self-improving AI systems on the planet in January 2026, but we do see extremely early signs of AI getting better at doing components of AI research, ranging from kernel development to autonomously fine-tuning open-weight models.

If this stuff keeps getting better and you end up building an AI system that can build itself, then AI development would speed up very dramatically and probably become harder for people to understand. This would pose a range of significant policy issues and would also likely lead to an unprecedented step change in the economic activity of the world, attributable to AI systems.

Put another way, if I had five minutes with a policymaker, I’d basically say to them, “Self-improving AI sounds like science fiction, but there’s nothing in the technology that says it’s impossible, and if it happened it’d be a huge deal and you should pay attention to it. You should demand transparency from AI companies about exactly what they’re seeing here, and make sure you have third parties you trust who can test out AI systems for these properties.”

Michael: Jack, I imagine you have policymakers’ ears, and I hope they listen.

AI as it stands right now does not worry me much at all, as far as risks to humanity. I think chatbots have the potential to make people dumber—doctors that use them too much start to forget their actual innate medical knowledge. That is not good, but not catastrophic.

The catastrophic worries involving AGI or artificial superintelligence (ASI) are not too worrying to me. I grew up in the Cold War, and the world could blow up at any minute. We had school drills for that. I played soccer with helicopters dropping Malathion over all of us. And I saw Terminator over 30 years ago. Red Dawn seemed possible. I figure humans will adapt.

If I had the ear of senior policymakers, I would ask them to take a trillion dollars (since trillions just get thrown around like millions now) and bypass all the protests and regulations and dot the whole country with small nuclear reactors, while also building a brand-new, state-of-the-art grid for everyone. Do this as soon as possible and secure it all from attack with the latest physical and cybersecurity; maybe even create a special Nuclear Defense Force that protects each facility, funded federally.

This is the only hope of getting enough power to keep up with China, and it is the only hope we have as a country to grow enough to ultimately pay off our debt and guarantee long-term security, by not letting power be a limiting factor on our innovation.

Jack: Strongly agree on the energy part (though we might have a different subjective worry level about the other stuff!). AI will play a meaningful role in the economy, and it fundamentally depends on underlying infrastructure to deliver it efficiently and cheaply to businesses and consumers—analogous to how, in the past, countries have decided to do large-scale electrification, road building, sewer building, etc. (massive capital expenditure projects!). We need to urgently do the same for energy.

I also think large-scale AI data centers are very useful test customers for novel energy technologies, and am particularly excited to see the fusion (pun intended!) of AI energy demand and nuclear technologies in the future. More broadly, I think “economic security is national security,” so making sure we have the infrastructure in place to build out the AI economy will have knock-on positive effects on our industrial base and overall robustness.

More on the participants:

• is a former hedge fund manager and writer who publishes investment analysis and market commentary on his Substack, . He is best known for predicting the subprime mortgage crisis, as depicted in The Big Short, and has more recently voiced skepticism about AI-driven market exuberance.

• is the co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic, where he works on AI safety, governance, and the societal implications of frontier models. He also writes Import AI, a long-running newsletter analyzing advances in artificial intelligence, state power, and technological risk.

• is the founder and host of the , where he interviews leading thinkers on AI, economics, and scientific progress. He also publishes essays and interviews on his Substack, focusing on long-term technological trajectories, AI alignment, and civilizational risk.

• is a writer and software entrepreneur best known for his newsletter Bits About Money, where he explains finance, markets, and institutions. He also hosts the Complex Systems podcast and has previously worked in tech and payments, including at Stripe.

  

This week, we’re questioning the calendar, curing hangovers, and finding the art in sports.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Why do we celebrate the new year in January?

Spring is universally understood to be the season of new beginnings. So why do we celebrate the new year in the depths of winter? Romanticon and Samara trace the long, contentious history of the Gregorian calendar.

Happy New Year?

— and in Romanticon

The wheel of the year is the rise and fall of a human life. The year is born on the vernal equinox as the first flowers bloom and the birds return. It grows and copulates and dances through the spring, celebrates its bounteous zenith at the summer solstice, becomes masterful and wise in autumn, then turns inward in preparation for its transition to winter. On the longest night of the year, the darkest of the dark, the year blows out its last candle and dies.

This pattern, the story of the Vegetation Deity rising and falling, is the ancient framework for the rites of the year. The drama of a human life unfolds in the annual cycle of the seasons. As the constellations twirl above us, so too the repeating myths of the year’s rituals tell the story of human life. In a sense, it’s a way to transcend the cruel joke of age: our wisdom increases as our strength decreases. By acknowledging and celebrating the passage of the seasons, we can grow wiser every autumn and be rejuvenated every spring. We rise and fall like the seasons; someday we will fall and not rise again, but someone else will, our children and grandchildren and the next generation, and so the big wheel keeps on turning.

Within this cycle, the spring equinox is the time of birth and new life. So why do we celebrate New Year’s in the dead of winter?

January is not a time for beginnings. It is not a time for initiative or turning over a new leaf. It’s not even an enjoyable time to have a party. Too dark, too cold. This is the time to hibernate, not change a damn thing, stay the course, survive, eat stew, snuggle, sleep.

But this particular calendar, a relatively recent imposition on human existence, seems to be here to stay.

Like nearly all ancient calendars, the first Roman calendar started on the spring equinox (approximately 21 March). The first four months of the Roman calendar were named after gods (Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius) and the next six were numbered (Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December). This ten-month calendar, which Romans attributed to their legendary founder Romulus, comprised a year of 304 days.

The 61-day gap in the dead of winter had no name. The days were not marked, and the world was dead; in fact, it belonged to the dead. The Romans are known for ancestor veneration, which was indeed an important part of their communal life, but there was a precautionary element to it as well. They lived in terror of the vengeful ghosts they deemed responsible for pestilence, death, ruined crops, and drought. These spirits had to be appeased, so the 61 unnamed days of winter were proffered as their time of dominion. During this calendric lacuna, Romans sacrificed goats and dogs, cleaned their houses with salt, and lit bonfires in the dark wintry streets. Especially penitent ones ran through the flames to purify themselves. Nude Luperci priests whipped spectators.

Roman king Numa Pompilius (715-673 BCE) apparently did not fear the wrath of the hungry ghosts and decided to end all this moribund nonsense. He added two more months to the calendar: Ianuarius (after Janus, god of beginnings) and Februarius (‘to cleanse by sacrifice,’ a small nod to the fearful rituals of the nameless winter days). His calendar had 355 days, and January was now its start.

Absolutely everyone ignored this. They continued celebrating the New Year on the vernal equinox as they always had. For the next six hundred years.

In those six hundred years, however, Rome had expanded to span the Italian peninsula, the Mediterranean basin, and much of the Middle East. Running a republic and collecting taxes required a calendar with dates that recurred on an annual basis.

The lunar calendar of Numa Pompilius with its scanty 355 days fell out of sync with our actual 365-day solar year, resulting in all sorts of agricultural complications. Planting usually occurred around the vernal equinox, but the calendar had drifted away until the equinox fell in mid-May, which now had no relevance to the agricultural year. The calendar was an unreliable mess.

Julius Caesar decided to fix this.

Keep reading

PAINTING

PANACEAS

A philosophy of hangovers

Hopefully your New Year’s hangover has faded by now, but Jack Hanson’s advice should do you well throughout 2026.

Cold New Light

— in Phantom Heresy

The best hangover cure I’ve ever heard of is one I’ve never been in a position to take. It comes from my father. If memory serves (I texted him asking only for permission to share, not a restatement of the procedure), it consists of, first, arriving at work around 5 a.m., that is, on time, a crucial step in alleviating what Kingsley Amis, the greatest writer of the gueule de bois, called the ‘metaphysical’ hangover, which he defined as, “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future.” Second, have that work be marine construction, specifically on a barge that travels slowly up and down the salt rivers of Cape Cod. Once the barge is underway, you should tie a long line around your waist, secure the other end to a stern cleat, and, having leapt into the cool water, allow yourself to be towed, floating in the gently churning foam of the vessel’s wake, all the way to the job site. In his telling, you emerge feeling as fresh as if you’d gone to bed at a sensible hour with a glass of warm milk.

Obviously, there are some preconditions here that most of us cannot meet. Except for the very strongest and vainest among us, this is a cure that can only be taken in summertime. It will also require you trusting your knot-tying skills even in your diminished state, as well as some particularly tolerant coworkers. And, of course, you’ll have to have a job that, I’d imagine, not terribly many people are willing or able to get.

But there is a lot to learn here, both for the morning after and for life. It requires getting up and doing what you planned on doing. (Lest I sound too much like a rise-and-grinder, I want to emphasize that this is not a moral accomplishment—Descartes invented his coordinates system by lying in bed until noon and watching a fly on his ceiling—but a practical necessity. Most of us assume that if we feel bad, we’ll feel better if we stay in bed or, at the most, remove ourselves directly to the couch. In instances of real illness, this is probably true, but in cases of self-made or self-perpetuating diminishment, be it a hangover or persistent anxiety, getting up and out will do you much better than hanging around. It’s an awful fact of life, but it’s true.)

It also requires paying attention to how you feel and how you want to feel, not what you’ve done to get that way. Dwelling on the latter is the nastiest part of any hangover, and a cure like this one compels a mindset that you can adopt in any unpropitious circumstances, namely: when you feel terrible, accept that you feel terrible and do what you can to fix it. The time for adjudicating the wisdom of the choices you made to make you feel that way, if it ever comes, is not now. Again, I’m not advocating for any kind of moralism here—or amoralism, which is simply moralism when scared of its own shadow—but a principled adherence to the rule over and against the turbulence of the exception. Incidentally, if the brief academic fad of experimental philosophy were of any value at all (it’s not), it might be worth including hangover remedies in a study of Aristotle’s ethics.

It would also lend some support to the Philosopher’s poetics, particularly the cathartic effect of tragedy. Chances are, if you’re currently in rough shape, you won’t be at work, but at home, wondering what to do. Amis heartily recommends reading and music, and even “going off and gazing at some painting, building or bit of statuary,” with the intention of a bit of ritualized emotional processing. “The structure,” he writes, “of…hangover reading and hangover listening, rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.” I would add that it’s best not to go for anything that depicts something you might have directly experienced yourself, especially recently—breakups, death of a parent, career failures, etc.—as this may send you down precisely the spiral you’re hoping to avoid. Choose instead the big picture, existential, unavoidable stuff, which gives you the best of both worlds: the comfort of distance and the perspective of relative scale.

Keep reading

PORTRAIT

POETRY

Bliss, four ways

Four Varieties of Bliss

— in

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

1.

I watch your eyelids flutter with the spirit
of song, beauty of your own making makes you
cry at times, or laugh and run around. Both
extremes stand on either side of the illusory
chasm, appearing as emptiness to naked eyes.
In fact, even that void is full. I’ve spoken of all
this before, and you even listened to me say it.
Now, you are not listening, and I do not speak.
You are singing, and I am writing down thoughts
as they occur to me, one after another, intervening
as little as possible, except for when I travel down
blind alleys, mercifully yet to occur in this instance.
It all just keeps going forward, as if it has no choice.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

2.

            From alchemic morning shame
Can you detect a soupçon of God & his infinite
            Love, infinite scorn, et cetera?
All else being equal, time halts and possibility is
            Completely lost, likewise keys
Snap off in the little silver mouth that comes
            Out of black plastic leather.
My skin pruned overnight. I laid in the rice
            Field of divine intervention,
Lo & behold, the world turns again. What does that
            Tell you, actually, forget it.
I don’t want to know what the psychic says.
            There is a direct line to the Holy
Spirit, unbroken, from my forehead it appears to be
            A single antenna, novel organ
For which there is no name. It would be the word
            To end all words. Keep quiet, please.

Keep reading

ART

The art of the game

You’ve no doubt seen countdowns of the best albums, films, books, and more from 2025. But have you seen the best sports-art pairings of the year?

The Best of 2025, No. 20-1

— in ArtButMakeItSports

Keep reading

IN MEMORIAM

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: , , ,

Video & Audio:

Writing: , , ,

Recently launched

Rapper and singer has joined Substack, and spent the new year “sipping champagne and catching up on saved Substacks like a real bitch.” Stars: they’re just like us.

Actor , best known for HBO’s High Maintenance, has started a Substack called . He describes it as “an attempt to understand how identities form, why we cling to them, and how hard it can be to grow out of something that once saved you—especially when other people love you for it.”

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.

The other day, I asked a friend what she wanted to let go of from this year. “Everything,” she said. “Complete self-erasure.” We laughed—at the absurdity of it, and at the thin, uncomfortable filament of truth running through the joke. How often we look back on a year with a prosecutorial eye, tallying what we didn’t finish, the habits we couldn’t break, the person we failed to become. By January, many of us are already exhausted by ourselves, and by the prospect of having to fix ourselves yet again.

I, too, have a tendency toward extremity. Over the years, I’ve subjected myself to all manner of New Year’s overhauls: I will seize the day. I will wake up at dawn to meditate. I will write 1,000 words by lunch. I will swear off sugar, start wearing sunscreen religiously, go to the gym three times a week, and never again sleep with my phone in my bedroom. By this time next year, I will have written a book and emerged calmer and fitter. Also morally superior. These resolutions were often launched simultaneously, as if sheer volume might improve my chances of seeing them through. I always began with zeal. I always burned out.

This all-or-nothing thinking is not a bug of resolutions; it’s the design. Resolutions are outcome-driven and binary: success or failure, repair or ruin. They rely on force and control to produce change. Unsurprisingly, they don’t work very well. Research suggests that most resolutions fail within a month—which means many of us spend the first weeks of the year not renewed but, at best, quietly chastened. At worst, like a complete and total failure.

When I was 24, I made a New Year’s resolution to run a half-marathon while in treatment for leukemia.

The logic, in my mind, was impeccable. A cancer survivor I’d read about in a magazine—a former professional athlete and reality TV star—had run the New York City Marathon shortly before entering the hospital for a second bone marrow transplant. He was a mythic figure in the cancer community, a cancer-lebrity, if you will. I thought, I want to be like him. I was two years into treatment, and unrecognizable to myself. I’d once planned to become a war correspondent, a life defined by motion and urgency; instead, I had spent the years since graduation in hospital rooms, watching my peers accelerate into adulthood.

I wanted the hero’s-journey arc I’d been promised: to emerge from the worst year of my life stronger, braver, somehow better for it. And so I did the sort of swift, deeply flawed math desperation excels at: he’d had two transplants and run 26 miles. I’d had one transplant, so surely I could manage 13.

I believed, naively, that I could simply decide I’m going to do this and that would be enough. What I failed to consider were several small but relevant facts. I was not a former professional athlete. I had never done any distance running. I had not even managed to complete the mandatory mile in high school gym class. I was still receiving maintenance chemotherapy and spending a good deal of my time horizontal.

None of this registered as disqualifying. As I saw it, I had done the only thing that mattered: I had resolved to do it, therefore it was to be. I had just survived a bone marrow transplant, had I not? I had been told, repeatedly, that I was so strong. Somewhere in this reasoning, I began to believe I might be even more prepared than the most determined of healthy marathon runners—confusing declaration with destiny, and wanting very badly for the two to be the same thing.

I jumped in with both feet. I registered for a benefit race, emailed friends and family asking for donations toward my fundraising goal, and signed up for a gym membership I could barely afford. I put a pair of fancy running shoes and a full set of thermal running gear on my credit card. When I put the whole outfit on and went out for my first jog, I asked my mom to take a photo—fist raised triumphantly—which I promptly posted. Announcing it publicly meant there was no way out.

I began to run-walk a single mile. Physically unprepared as I was, it might as well have been the half-marathon itself. I finished limpingly, wrecked with exhaustion. The next day, I hobbled around, wincing with every step. That weekend, I ended up in the emergency room with a hairline fracture in my foot.

My body had filed a formal complaint. The race was off. Case closed.

I look back now on the whole ordeal as comically doomed from the start. At the time, it felt intimate—not just a failed resolution, but an indictment of my capacity for change. For a brief moment, the plan had lifted me out of myself. I had something to train for, something that made the future feel legible again. When it collapsed almost immediately, it didn’t just knock me back to where I’d started. It confirmed my worst fear: that wanting change was itself a liability, another way to set myself up for disappointment.

Eventually, I stopped making resolutions altogether. Not because I stopped wanting change—but because I stopped trying to become someone else. The desire to work on myself never went away. It simply lost its appetite for spectacle. And so, in place of resolutions, I turned toward ritual.

Rituals are gentler than resolutions. Where resolutions chase outcomes, rituals attend to process. Georgia O’Keeffe took a 30-minute walk each morning in the desert, often alone, believing the walking itself was where the work of painting began. Toni Morrison rose at 5, made her coffee, and waited for the sun to appear—or, as she put it, “watched the light come.” Ludwig van Beethoven, also a devotee of coffee, approached the ritual differently, counting out exactly 60 beans for each cup, the number he believed produced the perfect brew. None of this was about efficiency or output. It was about creating the conditions in which the work—and the self doing it—could come into being.

Rather than control, rituals are relational. They create atmosphere. They offer rhythm and containment. Where resolutions depend on willpower—a finite resource, especially in times of illness or uncertainty—rituals build scaffolding. They don’t ask us to muscle through. They anchor us in time, place, and meaning. Rituals are not impressive. That, I’ve come to believe, is one of their chief virtues. They don’t demand overnight transformation. They ask only that we return—to the canvas or the page, to the body, to ourselves—and see what shows up.

Over time, my rituals have taken many forms, some encompassing a day or a week, others a season. Whenever I reach the point in a workday where my brain begins to feel like a baked potato—soft, inert—I turn, every time, to the same 15-minute guided breathwork to reset. Over the summer, my first cup of coffee became a ritual: sitting in the hammock, cup in hand, no phone, no music, just five minutes in my own company before the day made its demands. During the pandemic, some friends and I ended each day with what we optimistically called “cold plunging”—skinny-dipping in a nearby swimming hole—until winter arrived and the water iced over, restoring our common sense.

Alongside these, I turn to another ritual that has shaped my life in subtler, more durable ways: a 30-day journaling project at the start of each year. Not forever. Not flawlessly. No page requirement, no rules, no obligation to sound wise or write well. Sometimes it’s three pages; sometimes it’s a single sentence or a closed-eye drawing of a giraffe. The only instruction is to show up, to take the lapses in stride, to keep going.

One of my great teachers in this manner of working is the designer and educator Michael Bierut, who originated what became known as the 100-Day Project. He didn’t create it as a challenge or a dare. It arose organically in the aftermath of September 11, when he, like many New Yorkers, felt unmoored. Each day for a year, he chose a single image from the newspaper and used it as the basis for a drawing—sometimes lingering on it for hours, other days finishing in a few strokes. “The practice had less to do with the output and more with getting myself in the proper frame of mind,” he told me. Later he refashioned this ritual for a graduate course and invited his students to do one small creative act that they could repeat for 100 days.

People often imagine such projects as feats of endurance, as something to white-knuckle their way through. He never thought of it like that. “If I’d woken up on January 1 facing the sheer cliff of a year’s worth of drawings, I probably would have gone back to bed,” he said. “I just thought, Why don’t I do this today? And then I did it again the next day.”

That’s how rituals work. They steady us. They open us up to possibility without demanding performance. They keep us from the all-or-nothing thinking—from what Michael Bierut described as the sensation of walking a tightrope, peril increasing with each step until you freeze, convinced you’ll never make it across.

That’s what ritual gives me now. Not a guarantee, not an outcome, not a transformation on a deadline, but a means of staying in motion without hardening, to keep my balance without gripping so tightly. In the pages of my journal, I can exist as my messiest, most unedited self. Within the simple container of 30 days, structure makes room for play.

There is no grand reinvention here—only the patient work of showing up, again and again, nudging myself millimeter by millimeter toward the person I’m becoming.