2026-07-11 21:01:59
This week, we’re quitting our jobs, making peace with where we call home, and tagging along for the NBA summer league.
CITY LIFE
A life in New York is one filled with extremes. Yes, there are the skyscrapers, the parks, the sense of things mattering, the magic of it all, but there are also the rats, the traffic, the high rent, and the stench of the subway in summer. Few are the moments of in-between. Julia Harrison digs into the meat of city living and why she chooses to stay.
— in orzo bimbo
At my transfer at 34th someone spits on my skirt and calls me a cunt. At home, I throw the skirt in a hamper with two soaking wet rags that I used to mediate our freezer leak.
Nothing was hard in the actual sense, but miserable things were often happening; tolerable through will, through Checking Privilege. Tar splattered on my foot while I walked Evie’s long-haired dachshund, Mignonette. I was groped on the subway platform at Bergen St. on my way to work: 9:30am, broad daylight. I said “sheesh” and walked farther down the platform.
Other factors: the cluster of baby roaches dead in the kitchen, a bookshelf in the vestibule too heavy to bring up the stairs myself, 13 days off Lexapro, no studio apartments under $2,100.
I had become haunted by the simplest question: What did I care about? The sense of wanting more that had plagued my twenties had now collapsed and become very much the opposite: I wanted less.
If I was staying here, in New York, and being brutally honest with myself: I cared about being in rooms of influence, I cared about being the influence. I cared about being close to minds and bodies and outfits and brands that were determining the actions of other minds and bodies and outfits and brands. Plainly: I cared about being recognized and validated. Which was legacy, I suppose, though really it was identity marketing, selling your personality, losing your personality by selling it.
I saw an old woman hobbling up the Bergen St. steps, two seconds per stair. I never wanted to be her. I watched parents drag their toddlers and their scooters out of ornate double entry doors on the forested streets in Cobble Hill. They looked exhausted. I didn’t want to be them either. I didn’t want to carry a stroller down the Bryant Park subway stairs. I didn’t want to afford my rent through tech consulting. I felt it was too late to pick something else—that what was now was forever.
[. . .]
Around the Oculus, I often saw families visiting New York, all sharing their iced lattes and laughing at something together. I would catch myself wishing for a brief minute to have grown up with a big-teethed Tory Burch mother and a bald, Episcopalian father with a tee-ball coaching hobby. I wished for a state school education, a chubby golfing boyfriend, an insurance sales job; a life where I enjoy Nashville and visit my college roommate in New York once a year. I believe in the multiplicity of man—surely she, too, suffers what I suffer—but I did secretly think her life was easier: Julia with highlights, Julia with Bala ankle weights, Julia with a family group chat that sent pictures of their golden retriever to numerous heart reactions.
I felt less curious and more self-conscious. I felt completely unfunny. I felt very poor.
POETRY
THERAPIES
After years of battling anxiety and depression, Nick Catucci says he’d rather “do planks in jeans than get therapy.” Sometimes it takes getting physical.
— in RiffPost
I spent the second half of my 20s in a digital media job, starting work from home at 8 a.m., moving to the office until 7 p.m., shuttling back home for a quick nap and takeout, then writing freelance articles from 10 til midnight or later. My waking hours were spent sunk into a couch or slouching at a desk, and my diet was largely carbs and alcohol. I was driven by fear, anxiety, and ambition (and alcohol). When my lower back first seized up—while I was pulling a cooler out of a Ford Explorer at Storm King—I had no idea why it was happening. But I knew I had to do something. I started seeing a chiropractor.
A few years later, I was flattened by depression (and alcohol). I couldn’t admit that I was depressed (or an alcoholic). But I knew I had to do something. I started seeing a psychoanalyst on the Upper West Side. I had a big new job and didn’t want anyone to know I was getting therapy, so I scheduled my appointments for 7 a.m. I can still hear the white noise machines in his hallway, sending needles into my hungover brain. He wore those pants that zip off at the knees.
I’m not saying chiropractic and psychoanalysis are quackery (although I’m not saying chiropractic isn’t quackery). But in retrospect—as my depression, drinking, and physical health worsened—it’s insane that I thought some spinal manipulation and a quest into my unconscious were the emergency interventions I needed. What I later realized, as I tried more chiropractors and other therapy while sober, is that I was not asking for help, but to be fixed. Popped back into place. Steered into solutions.
[. . .]
Talk therapy did always afford me some relief—it was an outlet, and it gave me a sense that I was working on myself. Whether it was real or just some kind of placebo effect, chiropractors also usually provided some relief. I would feel less tense after a visit, and secure in the sense that I was doing something. But seeing therapists never lessened my anxiety, and seeing chiropractors never prevented me from throwing my back out again.
Finally, a friend around my age explained to me how he had banished his back pain for good: He saw a physical therapist. I got a doctor to refer me to physical therapy, where I learned some stretches and exercises to improve my core strength. That was over 10 years ago; I’ve done the exercises pretty consistently and have not been laid out since. It turns out that I was just weak from sitting on my ass too much.
[. . .]
The ultimate paradox for me is that I have spent much of my life inside my head without seeing what was so obvious about my mental and physical health: I worried too much, I worked too much, I drank too much, and I never paid attention to what my body was telling me. I needed other people to help show me this, but it wasn’t my therapists who did. It was my GP, my wife, the writer of a New Yorker article about the death of Joan Didion’s daughter, countless people in “the rooms,” and a sports therapist who showed me how my right foot skews outward, creating tension up my leg and into my glute, which unaddressed, will eventually trigger the muscles in my lower back.
FREEDOM
SPORTS
Miller Kopp is uploading a journal entry each day while in the throes of the NBA summer league.
— in Miller Kopp
I never thought I’d be able to walk out of an NBA(ish) practice and head home to see my parents and dogs.
We got to the gym at around 8:30am, lifted, hooped, recovered, and I also got my combine measurements:
6’6” barefoot (I’m sticking with 6’7” when people ask)
6’9” wingspan
***forgot my standing reach***
223lbs
7.5% bodyfat
43 inch max vert
8.5 inch (hand length)
9.70 inch (hand width)
Those numbers are cool or whatever, but what really matters is what happens on the court, in the weight room, off the court. Stuff you can control.
I can’t control my wingspan or my hand width, but, boy, can I control my effort on the court. I can control my mind to be sharp as a tack; to execute on both ends of the floor. I can control my voice and how loud I communicate to my teammates.
That’s my mentality, because I’m in the business of controlling what I can control and living with the rest.
Day #2 is always the toughest on the body. As a team you aren’t yet in the “tone it down” phase because there’s still a few days until the first game.
I really tested the conditioning. The shots I missed were short, which is a sign that my legs might have been a little tired OR that I just didn’t shoot my full shot. Maybe one, maybe both, I don’t know, but it is what it is.
The team I was grouped with today did not win a ton of games in the live segments, but I did notice a shift in respect. It feels like after a day of competing, talking, playing, you can kinda feel the heightened level of respect from other players. I feel like that’s earned through just absolutely competing. Guys talking trash and not backing down, sometimes barking back, playing super physical, making your presence felt.
What I learned/saw/felt/experienced/thought:
Taking charges honestly feels great. 1000x team morale boost.
It’s better to screw up on the side of aggression and full commitment than screw up by second guessing.
Having a good warm-up routine and cooldown is always worth the extra 10-15 minutes.
Do what you do best and live or die on that. For me, that’s shooting the rock and competing my balls off.
Starting the day reading the Bible always makes my days better. I wake up 30 minutes earlier than I normally would just to give myself enough time to read and write the Bible without being rushed. The 30 minutes of sleep I miss is totally worth it.
Playing well is a double-edged sword. It is a penny dropped in the confidence bank but can also be a penny dropped in the expectation bank. Don’t let the expectation to repeat a great performance or great day hinder your ability to compete freely. Gotta be aware of trying to live up to past performances or unfair expectations.
ART
WRITING
AI is here—on our televisions, in our magazines, and in our very own workflows. T.M. Brown questions what role large language models should have, if any, in a writer’s world.
— in Is It Supposed To Look Like That?
Sometimes, I think we as writers overestimate how much people care about the quality of writing outside of specific venues like fiction, criticism, and narrative journalism. But the balance of written words produced in the world are not valued for their quality, but rather for their existence. White papers, product copy, SEO blog posts—these are all hypercommercialized pieces of writing meant to serve one specific end purpose: buy this and not that. This is writing as a product and a large portion of that taxonomy is, also, already being created by writers using LLMs. The same, to Joe [Weisenthal]’s point, will start happening to the little quotidian notes we have to send back and forth as part of daily life, the confirmation emails, the thank you notes, the scheduling and rescheduling. I cannot imagine using AI to do any of that, but I also think that a whole mass of people would rather click a button to tell their colleague they’re running 5 minutes late or cancel a reservation at a restaurant. Writing is extremely important to me; that does not mean it is important to everyone.
A few years ago, someone from a creative agency emailed me asking if I had any bandwidth to take on writing a white paper on some extremely esoteric technical topic for a major technology company. I had no idea what the hell any of the materials they sent over said, so obviously I told them of course I could do it and when did they need it by. Two weeks they said, which was a slightly tighter timeline than I usually like so I asked for $20,000. They said yes immediately which annoyingly told me I could have asked for more. But the lack of hassle was always its own blessing.
The best part about this corporate work is that it never needed to be that good and everyone understood that. The people at the agency knew it, the tech company knew it, I knew it. I just needed to make it easy enough so that non-technical executives could read it and understand, like, 60% of the topic. The agency handed me some more background materials: PowerPoints, speeches, PDFs. I think the paper I wrote was about edge computing or something, but I honestly couldn’t tell you anything about it at this point.
Work like this was my living for a long time. I would have to learn something quickly and then write about it from a place of at least passable fluency for a general audience. I did not consider that work part of my creative oeuvre, and in fact made significant efforts to partition it from how I wrote for newspapers and magazines.
Now that I don’t have to do it anymore, I wonder if that commercial writing should be treated the same as, say, this blog? Is all writing real writing?
CANINES
QUITTING TIME
When does the safer path become the riskier one? Danielle considers what it takes to leave a steady job and bet on herself.
—danielle in raw & feral
My passion is sparking delight through the absurd and bringing people together with creative scheming. But that has not been my job for the last four years. My job has been Data Monkey in Big Tech.
For a while I’ve lived a bit of a double life (like Hannah Montana or Batman, one might say). Tricking 3 million people into believing in an evil fake polycule, running a strip show for charity, making men oil up and fight each other… then logging into work to sit in meetings and write SQL queries.
Separating my passions from what financially supports my life was ideal for a while. In my personal projects, I didn’t have to follow anyone’s directives, worry about monetization, or corporately sterilize my ideas. I could create schemes that were purely me.
But at the same time, in building this rich outer world, working a corporate job has felt increasingly disconnected from my identity. I wasn’t achieving what I wanted in either, stagnating because I was trying to hold onto both. And the more I believed that other paths were possible, the more I felt my soul rotting in corporate America.
At some point, I have to take the blonde wig off and sing, or whatever (I didn’t actually watch Hannah Montana).
But it’s never that simple. I’m a chronic over-analyzer and will imagine every possible scenario, mostly worst-case scenarios, so I can “prepare.” I spent most of Autumn wandering around to different parks to lie in the grass and parse the existential thoughts whirling around my mind, transmutating so much angst to ink that it filled two spiral-bound journals that I sniped from work.
I feel I’m constantly seeking the approval of some omnipotent force, which surely was originally represented by my mom, but has contorted into some amorphous, omnipresent being. And my tendency to be extremely hard on myself helps me excel in execution once I’ve decided on a target, but struggle to take that leap of faith in the first place.
And you really need a good dollop of delusion to embark on an unconventional path.
It takes a certain degree of believing you’re exceptional, which I don’t really subscribe to. My own self-assuredness is too capricious, waxes and wanes with the tides, to stake my certainty on.
But what I have become confident in is that most people are not even within eyesight of what they are capable of. So even if I do not have some innate exceptionality, just having the audacity to try puts you miles ahead. And I’ve seen this in most of the projects I’ve done. Nothing is that technically difficult, nothing is prohibitively expensive. I’ve had dozens of projects that’ve gone viral from just ~$10s worth of flyers and tape.
In my existential processing, I’ve rationalized that I do actively want to reduce my risk aversion, as I know it’s holding me back, and every major risk I’ve taken has paid off in spades. Even further, stagnation and ennui have become an even greater risk in my current stage of life. I have the savings to support myself for a year or so. Risk-taking will only become harder. One day I’ll have a mortgage and back pain. Life’s too short to be a floating corpse on the lazy river in my 20s.
TECH
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Writing: , , , , , danielle
Naomi Klein, the bestselling author of Doppelganger, This Changes Everything, and On Fire, is now on Substack.
Sanaa Lathan has launched her Substack, where she’ll be “exploring the practical, the scientific, the mystical, and the deeply human.”
Erik Singer, a linguist and the dialect coach who worked with Austin Butler on Elvis, is on Substack writing all about accents.
The documentarian, journalist, filmmaker, and producer, Dan Taberski, is on Substack. He’ll be sharing snapshots of his works in progress and bonus hobby content, like quilts and tapestries he makes from secondhand clothing.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-07-04 21:02:13
This week, we’re picking unexpected books, renewing creative vows, and contending with unfinished projects.
MUSIC
Through the act of creation, Maggie Rogers has embarked on a journey of rediscovery.
— in Maggie Rogers
Everything before 2020, I remember in a straight line. Everything after, I remember as a spiral. This strange post-covid non-linearity. I’m back in my studio again after six years. Just me and my laptop and my synths and my piano. My hair is long and curled by ocean water again. The summer sun has brought my freckles to the surface. For the first time in a long time, I look the same as I did then, in the before. And it feels nearly the same. Like I could fold together two pieces of paper and they’d make a complete image, the middle disappearing altogether.
It’s a strange full circle moment. I feel somewhere between lost and reborn. Writing and writing and writing. Tinkering with songs. Clarifying the vision and going over it once again. Dropbox folders within Dropbox folders. Different versions of the same thing with the hope that one arrangement shift might crack the code.
But I’m trying. Stepping away from the drawing board, turning around, going back again. Asking myself to be brave. Re-learning real, honest vulnerability after ten years in the public eye. I want to say something true. I want to make something urgent and essential. I want to make something that makes me feel.
That’s the music update. It had been a while, so I felt I owed you one. “Owe” is a funny word, but you are very much with me, both within the work and alongside me, on this journey. I’ve written…so many songs. The weight of them is piling up within my arms. I carry them around with me everywhere I go. And I think I’ve got a few more to write. Being a great writer is also being a great editor.
There are mood boards. I’ll show you one day. For the first time ever, there have been multiple titles (This is usually the thing that I have first—even before the music—it sticks, and it doesn’t change. But this album, instead, has been ever-evolving and I’m allowing space for that.) A friend said to me recently, “This album has a birthday.” That was helpful to hear. A sense of pre-destination. The work we create is always creating us. I am renewing my artistic vows. I am choosing to have faith.
VINTAGE SCENTS
LITERATURE
William T. Vollmann is a prolific, award-winning writer. He also happens to be dying. Alexander Sorondo traveled across the country to interview Vollmann about his magnum opus.
“I’ll be dead very soon.”
He doesn’t have a cell phone or use the internet so it takes a week to get the answer but finally his publicist comes back with a politely breathless email confirming that, yes, if I can make it out to Sacramento next week William T. Vollmann will meet me at 9 a.m., June 23, at a small coffee shop that’s been built into an unsuspecting structure and then from there we can walk to his studio, hang out til around noonish.
It’s June 15th.
I start reading his new novel, A Table for Fortune. It comes out in August. It’s 3,096 pages. Calling around, preparing the article, I mention to sources that I’ll be flying out and interviewing Vollmann. A source implores me to read as much as I can. Says they saw someone talking with Vollmann, pretending to’ve read the whole book, but then got outed. I ask if Vollmann was angry. They wouldn’t say angry, no…more like “visibly upset.”
I read faster.
[. . .]
“Chemo mind” keeps him in a fog. The cancer causes pain such that he can hardly sleep. “Last night I got about an hour.” When he finally got up he had to take an opioid, which makes him “fuzzy.” All of this is compounded by the medical marijuana that’s proven a great help but leaves him kinda fried. “I couldn’t believe, after a couple weeks in Cuba, how much sharper I was, mentally, because all I had was my opioids.”
Hence he’s not tangled in any big fiction project right now. For nearly 40 years he’s been working simultaneously on each volume of a sprawling septology, Seven Dreams. It tells the history of the North American continent. Volume Five, The Dying Grass, came out in 2015. Reviews were glowing. The Washington Post called it “the reading experience of a lifetime.”
But every book since then has been a problem: too many pages, too many fonts, the title’s controversial, there’s too much math; releasing a two-volume art book in 2022, with a pair of understaffed indie publishers, Vollmann kept getting galleys sent back with typos throughout, shoddy production quality on the photos, publication running a year behind schedule. He doesn’t have the time for it anymore. He’s working on two short books right now: one’s a long personal essay, the other one’s literary criticism. Straightforward stuff. There’s no mention of fiction.
“Do you feel any pressure to finish Seven Dreams?”
“I’m not gonna touch it.” Resigned and certain. He says finishing even one of the two remaining volumes would likely take “more time than I have left.” Plus the fights it’ll prompt with his publishers. “About a quarter of the last one is completed, and then much less of the other one.”
“I don’t want it to come out looking like a piece of crap so,” he flaps a hand, hits a thigh, “just forget it.”
He shows me a wall with a long art sequence called “CUNT,” with a collection of other paintings beside it: nudes and studies, bodies warped and accurate, writhing or posing. The display is a proud one. He seems happy to show me.
Above the paintings there’s a shelf with a row of framed photos. Artful black and white from reporting trips around the world. Vollmann himself in drag as “Dolores.” A Black soldier. A woman cradling one child on her hip while holding the hand of another. His daughter Lisa in a school photo, smiling.
The illness didn’t feel like much of an obstacle in his Cuba trip, though he did worry about getting detained someplace, his opioids stolen.
In 2024, Granta was planning to send Vollmann to Tajikistan.
“That’s when my cancer came back.”
OUT OF OFFICE
SELF-ACCEPTANCE
The discourse around what we do for ourselves and what we do for public consumption has reached a fever pitch. Viktoriia Vasileva considers that both journeys might actually yield similar results.
— in Vik’s Busy Corner
I am in the Union Square Barnes & Noble, hunting for a new puzzle piece to add to my SS26 persona. I decided I will avoid the books that are marketed directly to girls like me: a writer in her 20s quits her corporate girlboss dreams to do something crazy (move to London, work at a restaurant, let a questionable guy treat her badly).
I try on the classics—my brain has been starving for vocab that hasn’t been infected by the internet. I insert myself in between self-serious young men in a wild assortment of shorts in Music, Film, and History. It dawns on me: what about that book about English football hooligans (Among the Thugs) that’s been in my Goodreads forever? I picture myself holding up a cover with a bold Brit chewing on a cig at a classy French bistro in the summer. I hear myself work it into a convo with a guy who looks British but is born and raised in New York as he takes a sip of cold beer. I feel the energy on the other end of a work call shift when they see a quote from a rancid ’80s football fan on my screen. Yea, that’s perfect. I beeline to Sports.
Is this performative? Of course, I am intrigued by the premise: an outsider, whose curiosity wins over survival instincts, throws himself into the world of drunk and reckless lads to figure out the cause of the horrifying violence and chaos they bring everywhere they go. Getting piss drunk and beat up for a story? Real journalism! But the game day decision to drop twenty bucks on admittedly subpar writing rather than some Steinbeck was made because I thought it’d be unexpected for a kind of snobby young woman, like me, to randomly know a lot about the gross ’80s football mob.
Be authentic. Be you. Well, this is me, and my brain is full of tiny, hyperspecific fragments of a life I want to live, a person I dream of being, the people I want to surround myself with, and they don’t always match my reality. Now that I am getting into doors I dreamt about when I started writing this newsletter, both socially and professionally, I feel the pressure to impress. I want to be a clever writer and a smooth conversationalist. I want to look more put together and interesting. I want my ideas to be simple and precise. But I also don’t want to feel like I have to try hard for any of it.
My working theory is that the key to having “effortless” swag, “genius” ideas, and a “dream” career is less about strategy and moodboards, and more about an open and curious mind and arranging your life in a way that brings you to the right people and places intuitively. The same crowd that rolls their eyes at the bros who shop Bode compliment my The Row-presenting loafers that I came across in Spain, guided by a paparazzi photo of Harry Styles I had imprinted in my brain, even though both of us are performing, just for a different crowd and with a different level of precision and mystic.
I am getting back into the habit of making up stupid side quests and picking up weird little hobbies because of course, that’s what makes life fun, but also because it gives me an arsenal of stories, connections, and skills necessary to entertain interesting people and opportunities. I respect the hustle and discipline it takes to send a daily newsletter or post three videos a week and I understand the value of visibility and status these things can get you, but I also know that isn’t how I want to spend my time and I am feeling more confident I can figure out a different way to make my thoughts and ideas visible. Instead of replicating what cool or successful people do in hopes of becoming one of them, I try to imagine what I would do with my time and money if I were 10 percent cooler and more successful, and then I go do it.
TIME TRAVEL
FILM CRITICISM
Tom Barrie saw Steven Spielberg’s most recent film. He’s not impressed.
— in The Chimera
Longtime Spielberg fans will recognise the premise of the film, which is essentially the same as that in War of the Worlds, E.T., A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, hell, even Jurassic Park: how, the film asks, would humanity react to encountering great and possibly otherworldly scientific power? And how might we confront or use that power?
[. . .]
It’s not a bad premise, really. Several of the ingredients here lifted from the well-stocked sci-fi larder, including crop circles and astral projection, offer really good potential for set-piece moments and visuals. There are likewise a handful of excellent action sequences, albeit spoiled by [Josh] O’Connor being forced to exclaim “Oh, gahd, oh, whaht am I doing, oh gahd” over and over again in a sort of sub-Marvel attempt at comedy as he e.g. hijacks one of those massive American SUVs with the blacked-out windows and drives it straight through a rickety clapboard house. There was certainly potential.
The CGI animals were a problem, though. Deer have always been a problem for people tasked with animating them—they have to be light on their feet while still very heavy animals, and studios seem unable to rig their CGI models in the right balance—while the cardinal, raccoon and other beasties that appear in front of Kellner and Fairchild throughout the film also reside firmly in the Hallmark Channel uncanny valley.
The film is also way too slow. Scenes drag. But, more than anything else, it was David Koepp’s script that was the problem. Koepp is a longtime collaborator of Spielberg’s, and while the latter came up with the initial 50-page story, Koepp himself put it down at length on paper (or, apparently, on iPad).
Maybe I noticed this more because I watched the film with closed captions in an accessible screening, but it is absolutely heaving with clunky expositionary dialogue. Ironically, given the captions, there’s so much plot and characterisation spoken aloud in Disclosure Day that it would have been more suitable for a screening for the blind than the deaf: just so many questions in so many rooms. For at least the first hour of this film, everyone tells everyone else every detail of their life story in every scene. When I looked back at my handwritten notes I found I had written and underlined, several times, the phrase “Exposition Day”.
I don’t want to spoil the whole premise beyond the first 30-odd minutes of Disclosure Day’s 145, so allow me to give a handful of examples from within the main characters’ backstories. In the film’s very first scene, Kellner and Jane flee from the goons in a stolen car while he desperately tries to call an ally. “These are satellite burner phones, we only use them once,” O’Connor breathlessly explains to her—and the audience, who presumably can’t be trusted to fill that information in themselves.
FASHION
ADVICE
Naomi Kanakia has always wanted to be a great writer but ignored some critical advice when she was starting out. Hindsight is evidently 20/20.
— in Woman of Letters
One of the most common pieces of advice for aspiring writers is: “You should read a few issues of a journal before sending them any of your work.”
Like most writers, I ignored this advice, and I submitted quite frequently to journals that I’d never read.
In my defense, when I started submitting, I was writing science fiction short stories, and I was quite familiar with the field. I had been reading year’s-best anthologies for years. I usually read the prize-winning stories. I often bought breakout story collections. I had read slush for a magazine (Strange Horizons), and I’d participated in various workshops. So I had a sense of what the field wanted.
But it was still a mistake to not regularly read any of the sci-fi journals. It’s not that I didn’t try to read them. I’d often get up a head of steam and say, “I am going to start reading [such and such journal] every month.” But then I’d read a few stories, and I wouldn’t like them, so I’d give up.
However, that’s no excuse, since I could’ve just skipped the stories I didn’t like. But, at the time, I felt even the best stories in these journals were unlikely to be better than the greatest stories of the past. In fact, I thought that even the current year’s prize-winning stories usually weren’t as good as the greatest stories of the past.
I did allow that some living writers were truly great—Ted Chiang, Maureen McHugh, Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Greg Egan, and a few others—but these were all writers from the generation above me. I did not attempt to see potential greatness in my peers.
Clearly, I was protecting my self-image. I wanted to be a great writer, and if I’d allowed myself to see that other people were doing something worthwhile, then I would’ve been assailed by a lot of doubts about my own abilities.
At the time, I honestly imagined I’d be a breakout era-defining writer, and that I’d somehow stand alone, and I’d have no peers. Which is absurd! Ted Chiang started publishing around the same time as Kelly Link did, and in some of the same journals. They are certainly peers (to each other). Even if I’d been my generation’s Ted Chiang, I would’ve had a peer.
And I did have a peer group of writers who broke into the top journals at roughly the same time as me: Vylar Kaftan, Aliette de Bodard, Tina Conolly, Caroline Yoachim, Leah Cypess, and a few dozen others. I encountered these writers in various fora, and I connected with them on Facebook, and I met them sometimes at conventions. We were certainly friendly, and I still have fond memories of most of these writers.
But I never went the extra step and attempted to evaluate their work to figure out which of them I truly respected as writers. And that’s something I regret now, because if there had been a writer in this group that I really admired, then it would’ve been very easy to tell them so, easy to start emailing them, and easy to learn from them.
As a writer, I often felt like I was trying to enter various clubs that didn’t want me. But at any given time, there’s always a club that you don’t need to enter: a club that you already belong to. The club comprises your peers—the people who are publishing in the same journals that you’re publishing in. Amongst that group, there ought to be a few people whom you respect. If there’s not, then it means you’re publishing in journals that are bad, and you should really start submitting to different journals.
INQUIRIES
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Joshua Taylor Bassett, an artist, Times bestseller, and Emmy Award–winning actor, is now on Substack, where he’ll be sharing “philosophy, poetry, and songs in the form of essays.”
Versha Sharma, a journalist and editor who most recently served as editor in chief of Teen Vogue, has launched on Substack.
Longtime Miami sports columnist Dave Hyde has joined Substack after leaving the Sun Sentinel. He’ll be focused on analyzing “the biggest stories in South Florida sports.”
Outsiding, a program hosted by and that celebrates “nature, gardens, and the joy that being outside brings,” have brought their podcast and bonus content to Substack.
Former MLB pitcher Ryan Sherriff is now on Substack, where he’ll be writing about baseball, his career, and “what happens when it’s over.”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-06-27 21:03:04
This week, we’re writing obituaries on our own terms, taking leaps of faith, and learning from betrayal.
REMEMBRANCE
After losing a loved one, some people want to say what they think might sound right. Others just want to say what they know feels right.
— in i hate these people
I am on a rage-walk from Rose Avenue to downtown Blacksburg. The Huckleberry Trail smells like honeysuckle and walnut. The birds are louder than I have heard in some time. The sky glows hot like God spilled a cup of lava over the hills. And I have just learned that my uncle used Claude to write my Nana’s obituary.
In years past, I would have surely used this opportunity to ruin a family function or get blackout and fire off some incoherent text messages. I will refrain from that for now, not because I find the use of generative AI in this (especially this, good god, man!) or any context defensible, but because my Nana’s soul is sturdier than that. She does not need my protecting.
But the thing about words after somebody dies is that they are not for the person who is dead. They’re for us, the living. This is not to say that the practice of remembrance is a futile endeavor. It’s how humans connect, keep going, make it all hurt a little less. There is great progress in death. When someone dies, and it hurts, it also means that you were born, that you are alive, that there is this great big web of humans that had to exist for thousands of years through wars, plagues, famines, and great migrations for you to exist. Better yet, the pain means that there are feelings in you, and that they are worth expressing.
So, I say all this now, knowing damn well that it is for me, knowing damn well that I am alive.
What I remember of my Nana is her heart, her mind, her smile, her hands, the way she’d pull a weed or waddle out to the porch with a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of BLTs, that she was always the last person at the dinner table, that her favorite jokes were ones about white horses in mud, that she’d pluck a blacksnake off the pillars on the porch without hesitation and set it free in the pines with a smile, how she’d bust a U-turn on I-81 to get a better look at a red-tailed hawk, how she’d pull up a river rock and snatch a crawdad from behind with fingers like talons, the way she’d sneak up on Papa and yank out one of his leg hairs while he was sleeping, how she’d quell his rage with a stern face, that she figured humans were at their best when they were caring for one another and preserving that world which so graciously allowed them to exist, that home was everything, that it was “Big Rock Candy Mountain” before bed and NPR and Folgers in the morning, that the best way to solve anything was to sit and talk, that she always had a bag of apple slices on her, how she’d kneel in the bow of a canoe while she pointed out big rocks in the rapids, that she always wished we’d stay a little longer, that she’d stand in the driveway and wave until the car disappeared, that she was singing “Country Roads” till she died.
TINY FURNITURE
ISLAND LIFE
When big-city living lost its allure, the rural Pacific Northwest called to her.
— , in conversation with Blakely Spoor, in Health Gossip
Where did you move from, and why?
I was freshly graduated from college in Nashville, Tennessee, with no idea where to go next. All I knew was that I couldn’t see myself moving to New York City, where 90% of my peers were headed. I decided to spend the summer at my family’s cabin in the San Juan Islands. It turned out that the place I had escaped to in an effort to “figure my life out” was the place where my life began to take root.
How did you ultimately make the decision to move?
Coming here happened easily, and staying here happened unexpectedly. I grew up spending a few weeks every summer of my life on this island. My mom spent every summer of her life coming here with her siblings as well. It is a place that has always felt like “home” in that it was familiar, etched in my blood and my bones. But I never expected to actually live there, especially in my mid-20s. It was supposed to be my perching spot, but a few weeks turned into a few months, which turned into many, many months. And here I still was.
One morning after a chat with my neighbors asking when I would be headed off-island next, to which I responded that I didn’t have any current plans to, I thought to myself, “Oh, so I live here now.”
What were your expectations going in? How did reality compare?
Living here is rural living, most definitely, but it is remote rural living. Its remoteness—no grocery store, no gas station, no hardware store, no ferry, no public access—has always been a part of its appeal for my family and me. It requires a generous amount of forethought, of which I am blessed and cursed to have in excess. What I anticipated being a challenge, however, was the isolation. During the off-season, the island population withers down to under 50 full-time residents, and the majority of them are at least 30 years my senior. There also aren’t any natural-wine bars or specialty coffee shops to enjoy in the company of girl friends. And lord knows, I was very, very single at the time that I moved out there.
Through many baked-good drop-offs, I befriended my elderly neighbors. Living in such a remote place necessitates a genuine companionship with your neighbors. They are your lifeline when there is a big windstorm, if a king tide brings water lapping at your front door, or when your heat goes out. It has become one of the biggest joys of my life to spend time with them, to learn from them, and to care for them, and them for me.
ANCIENT AFFECTION
MARKETING
Last week, Snap made its bid for wearable technology, to unsavory public reception. Camille Moore breaks down what she thinks went wrong.
—Camille Moore in Branding With Benefits
On June 16th, Evan Spiegel walked on stage at the Augmented World Expo to unveil Snap’s new Specs, a $2,195 wearable computer he called the post-smartphone era. By the time the keynote ended, Snap had lost more than a billion dollars in market cap, the stock was down 10 percent, and the internet had decided the glasses looked like solar eclipse viewers.
The product failure is the surface. The real story is the value gap, and it is the most important brand lesson of the year.
The Numbers That Made The Rejection Inevitable
Snap charged $2,195 for a pair of AR glasses with a 4-hour battery and a 136-gram frame. That is six times more than Ray-Ban Meta, which sells for $350 and has moved over 2 million units since its launch in September 2023. Meta now commands 76 percent of global smart glasses shipments. Snap launched into the same category at six times the price, with no story to justify the gap, and the market did what markets do when the math does not math…they tanked the stock.
On the day of the launch, stock analysts split immediately. Rosenblatt kept Neutral with a $6.40 price target. B. Riley moved to Buy at $10, calling Specs a potentially transformative product but noting the high initial pricing may limit early adoption. Behind both ratings is the same uncertainty, i.e., nobody can articulate who this product is for or why they would pay this price for it, including the people who are supposed to be selling it.
Why The Market Rejected It
Spiegel pitched Specs the way founders pitch pre-product startups, on the promise of where computing is going rather than what the product does for the customer today. He called the device more than a decade of development, framed it as the next computing platform, and positioned Snap as the company that defines the post-iPhone era.
That works when you are raising a Series B. It does not work when you are asking a consumer to spend $2,195 on something they have to wear on their face in public. The vision-led pitch has a ceiling, and that ceiling is the moment the product becomes real, and you don’t have value tied to the product. From that moment forward, the story has to be about the customer’s life, not the founder’s vision, and Snap could not answer the only question that mattered… What does this do for me today, and why should I care?
ARTS AND CRAFTS
FASHION
Barbara de Vries helped revive Calvin Klein in the ’90s. All it purportedly took to oust her was a single jealous coworker. Over three decades later, de Vries reveals excerpts from the journal she kept then, as well as advice for aspiring creatives.
— and in 1 Granary
What was your brief when you arrived?
For me, it was perfect timing, but I was also perfect timing for him. He gave me complete freedom to basically do what he had asked me to do: revive what was then Calvin Klein Sport. Very quickly, we realised it was a stupid name and a stupid placement in the department store. It was hanging with Liz Claiborne and those kinds of lines—not even Bridge lines, more like what they called “Missy” lines. Awful. Donna [Karan] was doing great with DKNY, so we realised we had to position it next to her, and that was a big influence.
So it was a clean slate. I didn’t have to walk in anybody’s footsteps. I just had to do what I did best. I could combine everything I’d done up to that point, and it worked. It worked with my team, but I also think it worked because Kate [Moss] came along at exactly the right time. What we did was create the collections, and they inspired all the other elements.
When I was reading the journal, it wasn’t completely clear what had created the tension around your exit. What happened?
I had endometriosis at the time, so I went away to have a procedure. In the middle of recuperating, I got a phone call from Calvin’s assistant asking if there was a helicopter pad anywhere near here. I showed you the woods here [on an earlier call], and I just laughed and said, “Why does he need to land a helicopter?” But he wanted to come to me in a hurry. I said, “No, I’m back next week. I’ll see you next week.” That was a bit of a flag that something was going on. I didn’t know what it was.
Before that, sometime in June, my head designer, Elaine, and I had this great idea to do a CK sneaker, because sneakers were huge at the time. So we said, let’s do it, I took the idea to Calvin, and he thought it was brilliant. Literally a day later, Barb Warner, who headed up the licensing department, came storming into my office, screaming at me. “How dare you go behind my back? Do you know who I am?” I think at that moment she decided she was going to get rid of me.
She had Calvin’s ear, she was friends with him. By the time the fashion show styling happened, she was sitting next to Calvin, where I usually sat. I was completely blindsided by it. I had no idea that people could even be like that. It was something you read about, but I didn’t really think about it. Also, we were too much of an island to know any of the gossip or any of the stuff that was going on within the company. That was intentional, but it worked against us in the end.
MOVIE REVIEWS
MEMORY LANE
When Ali Royals was six years old, her parents tasked her with deciding where to go to kindergarten. In the end, it was one water-wicking garment that won her over.
— in Permanent Record
I was an only child for six years and my parents acted accordingly for each one of them, treating me not as an infant or a toddler, but as some semblance of an equal, a 3-foot-tall adult deemed responsible enough to make her own decisions. The most notable decision with which I was personally entrusted: where I would attend school. There was no shortage of options in the walkable radius of my childhood home in Baltimore: co-ed options at Calvert, Park, or Friends, all girls at Roland Park or Bryn Mawr.
I only ever remember touring Calvert—run as tightly and glamorously as a glossy New England boarding school, covering kindergarten through eighth grade, the kind of institution that has its own specific script of handwriting that all children must learn and reproduce to perfection.
My dad remembers it too. “The tour finished and you said ‘Tour’s not over. I want to see some classrooms. I need to see the library.’” He’ll laugh the story out over a glass of wine when, every so often, the subject of my childhood precocity finds itself broached.
The tour guide allegedly obliged my request, showing me the classrooms for kindergarteners (or, as they call kindergarten at a school such as this, “Pilot”), as well as the middle school library. I remember this little magnetic lamp with a carousel of horses you could arrange however you pleased. And I was pleased alright. It was so close to home I could’ve walked the path to school with my eyes closed—something my best friend’s brother would do a few years later; eyes open, he walked his 7-year-old self home in a bout of defiance after getting sent out to the hall for causing trouble.
But then there was McDonogh—far outside that 2-mile circumference, a whopping 30-minute drive away, a former school for orphan boys situated on 800 acres of farmland in Owings Mills, Maryland. I have no memory of the tour itself except for one incredibly influential promise: all incoming kindergarteners would receive their very own rain poncho.
I was transfixed by the possibility of becoming a first-time poncho owner. It radicalized me into a single-issue voter. Other schools had just about everything—proximity, friends I already knew, particular penmanship—but they didn’t have rain ponchos. So that was that. I told my parents I wanted to go to McDonogh. They honored my decision. And so I went, for 13 years, kindergarten through 12th grade, all catalyzed by a singular poncho: orange and plasticky, perennially crinkled, a tiny eagle wearing a poncho of its own emblazoned on the front.
SCHMEAR SHAM
Art & Photography: , , , , ,
Writing: , , Blakely Spoor, , , ,
Diane Rehm, a radio executive and broadcaster for nearly 50 years, is on Substack and releasing perks for paid subscribers, like access to exclusive interviews and an open chat forum.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-06-20 21:02:45
This week, we’re injecting fun back into the writing process, discarding outdated personal opinions, and watching Adele (the singer) become a Dell (the computer).
THE ARTIST’S WAY
Julie Andrews (as Mary Poppins, of course) sang it first, but Monica Heisey is putting it in writing.
— in WORK/LIFE
i have never felt very comfortable with the stance, held by some writers, that writing as an undertaking is both very difficult and emotionally intolerable. while i understand there is plenty about being alone with your thoughts, sharing your ideas in public, and attempting to take something from inside your mind and bring it into the physical realm that is uncomfortable, it is not difficult like digging a ditch. it is not intolerable like having your heart broken, or even like having a sunburn. when people say things like “writing is torture,” i often think, if you really feel this way, why not do something else?
i encountered this line of thinking so frequently in the early days of my career that it occasionally caused me to doubt myself. i loved writing. i couldn’t believe i got to do it for a living, and found it, often, actively fun. did this mean i was doing it wrong, somehow? was there a more arduous and therefore more correct method that would lead me to create stronger work? if suffering for one’s art provided no special benefit, why were writers i admired constantly tweeting or appearing on panels to say their working life was hellish and exhausting?
to this day there is a little voice in the back of my mind that pops up once in a while to suggest i am shirking “real work” by enjoying myself. i was immensely soothed to see ali smith, an objectively wonderful writer with a prolific output, call herself “immensely lazy” in an interview at the hay festival, holding a beer and suggesting she doesn’t really work until she has a deadline and a paycheque scheduled, adding that she “does basically nothing until she has to” and considers staring into space an important part of the creative process. there, i thought watching it, is someone who is enjoying their working life.
this is not to say that i do not have bad days, or that i am immune from complex feelings about, in particular, the “putting it out into the world” part of writing. in the last week of editing my most recent novel i dreamt every night about dying or being murdered or murdering someone else. one night i physically felt the tip of my nose touch the lid of my own coffin as it closed over me. it was not, let’s say, “chill.” but the actual writing, in the day, sat up in bed and combing through pages, killing only my darlings, was almost pure pleasure.
so! four paragraphs of bragging about how i loooove to work and have sooo much fun doing it… this is insufferable, you are probably thinking. i hope this bitch gets back into her own coffin and stays there! give me a minute. i have tips.
outline, then follow your nose
working in tv has trained me to outline very intensely, which was at first annoying and time consuming but which i have now come to realize means i have done most of the difficult work (figuring out what to say, rather than how, which is the fun part) by the time i sit down to properly write, and crucially allows me to jump around in the draft without damaging its structure. once i have my outline, i write everything on it that seems the most fun first, depending on my mood, the weather, the amount of time available on a given day. there are inevitably less exciting parts of every draft to write—depressing bits, events based painfully on real emotional experiences, interstitial passages that tell the reader how much time has passed, etc—but if you’ve accumulated enough scenes you are proud of, you’ll be pleased to connect them with the less interesting work.
FLORALS
REHABILITATION
A Lady Gaga concert, four flights, and a day on set filming a documentary: Brendon Holder’s vocal cords have taken a beating. Now, at the urging of his ENT and speech therapist, he’s tuning his chatter to a new volume.
— in Loosey
I lost my voice two months ago and had to go on severe vocal rest. I “served” some of it back in Toronto, and I’m only just getting back to normal. The ear, nose, and throat doctor shoved a camera scope down my right nostril and confirmed that I have a polyp on my right vocal cord. When I saw him over a month ago, he told me that I must reduce speaking immediately to avoid surgical intervention. The doctor prescribes me weekly sessions with a speech therapist and commands me to avoid smoking (lol), fried foods (nice try), sending voice notes (devastating), and soda, the latter of which I hold out on for three whole weeks.
As of today, I have had five sessions with the speech therapist in a small white office at the southern tip of Manhattan. She records my progress through a headset microphone that makes me feel like a pop star whenever I wear it. In our sessions over the last five weeks, I practice making “vvvv” and “mmm” sounds. I blow bubbles from a straw into a small cup of water and practice “speaking towards the front of my face.” I feel like a toddler, or an alien learning to be a human. Miraculously, it works.
We discover that I lost my voice after a series of unfortunate events. The inciting incident was Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem Ball” at Madison Square Garden, where I sang along (loudly). This was followed by a quartet of long flights shortly after: a 36-hour trip to Los Angeles to meet with a podcast host, followed by a dry-aired flight to Tokyo to film a documentary. It is my speech therapist’s theory that on those flights, I became a victim of the altitude’s dehydration, which only made my voice hoarser.
During that period when I unknowingly ruptured my vocal cords, I never once stopped talking, making conversation everywhere I went, both small and tall.
Once on vocal rest, my talks become smaller. Brevity is a virtue. I’m not supposed to speak louder when someone interrupts me, and, in the beginning, I find this incredibly frustrating. There are times when I forget that I’m supposed to be reducing my vocal load: in a heated debate over dinner, when my favourite song plays at a Yebba concert, during the carols of a wedding. Most injuries are music-related, I realize. It’s hard to be quiet in a city as loud as New York, but soon I become used to it. Soon, I even enjoy it.
I pull someone in close to speak to them, not wanting to compete with the background chatter of a restaurant or the loud music of a party. It becomes more challenging in groups when I can’t project my voice to the masses. I worry that people will think I’m being exclusionary as I direct my short bursts of conversation to one person and not a group, a small-talk faux pas.
But there’s something refined, even sensual, about speaking softly and not adjusting your volume to what is around you.
TECH
ILLUSTRATION
An artist’s accidental role in one of the internet’s most enduring memes.
— in My Adventures as an Illustrator
I’ve been doing cover art for over fifty years. More than two thousand covers, by my last count. I’ve painted for Baen, Bantam, Tor, Del Rey, Scholastic. I spent seven years as a matte artist at Disney. I’ve done space operas, military science fiction, horror, fantasy, kids’ series. I painted the Heroes in Hell series. I painted the Honor Harrington run. But the thing I am most remembered for is the Animorphs covers.
My students at Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts don’t believe me when I tell them I did the covers. Adults go wide-eyed at conventions. Even though the editions with my covers are long out of print, Animorphs is still around. I am surprised by the continuing presence of those covers as internet memes.
Sometime around 2012, someone on Tumblr photoshopped one of my covers to show the rapper Pitbull transforming into a pit bull. It got reblogged tens of thousands of times in a week. Then someone made Adele morphing into a Dell computer. Then it was everywhere.
I am continually amazed by this. The specific way they became famous is not a way I could have planned. The generation that grew up with them reached the age where you make jokes about your childhood at exactly the moment when the internet rewarded that kind of joke.
The format is simple. Start with a person, then transformation, then animal.
Anyone can replicate it with the cover design as a template. The pun structure, Pitbull into a pit bull, Adele into a Dell, maps perfectly onto what the covers already do. Little did I know that I would spend time creating a format specific enough that strangers could repurpose it for jokes. That is not what I was trying to do, but I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a form of success.
ATHLETIC DRIP
CULTURAL CRITICISM
Eliza McLamb, a musician herself, examines what it means to be a teen girl in the spotlight.
— in words from eliza
The teen idol has a tragic legacy. She’s a famous child, working while her peers are befriending one another and developing identities in small containers. Her container is big, bigger than the stage or the television screen. Her container is the industry, the internet, the world. Normal children are unlucky enough to shoulder the burden of their parents’ expectations, but she is gifted the responsibility of considering the fans, those reaching creatures that supposedly give much more than they take. Though they sure seem to take a lot. The famous child is generating income that is solely dependent on the maintenance of a personal brand while that brand goes through puberty and changes in immeasurable ways—physically, hormonally, psychologically, and spiritually. The famous child is debated about, decided upon.
When I was young, I was obsessed with a Marina and the Diamonds song called “Teen Idle.” It’s about being a teenager and wanting to be adored and also wanting to die, because being depressed is sometimes the closest we get to embodied living, and because death is what happens to girls who are adored too much. At twelve, I understood every word and sang along with fervor: “FEELING SUPER SUPER SUPER SUICIDAL!”
This kamikaze impulse is part and parcel of being a teenage girl, that maniacal high of wanting what you want so badly that you must also imagine yourself destroying every piece of it. Coincidentally, and unfortunately, this is also how we feel about the teen idol herself.
I think Olivia Rodrigo is awesome. The music is undeniably, consistently great, and Olivia’s attitude towards the process of creation is one of the most heartening perspectives in the industry right now. She’s a self-described fangirl who embraces all the best aspects of loving something, which is to say that she makes an effort to be a part of, and therefore enrich, the thing itself. I imagine that it would be easy to become wildly famous and immediately distracted by the access, the money, the shoes; Olivia has great shoes, but she also utilizes the better parts of such ascendancy by collaborating with her idols and taking her work seriously enough to merit putting herself in conversation with them.
In a music culture of self-flagellating individualism, algorithmic wars of attrition, and watered-down trend cycle regurgitation, Olivia stands apart by having clear references and being unafraid to reference them. She plays the game, but has her terms; in her most recent album cycle, she prioritized live debuts over the increasingly popular, endless waterfall release of singles, trying to chance the streaming algorithm. A clear believer in art as work, she’s collaborated with several artists across mediums over the course of her most recent campaign and prioritized a cohesive visual language above a one-off viral moment.
Olivia Rodrigo is completely special on her own accord, unique in a way that is irresistible to young teen fans and established music critics alike. And she is also a fascinating composite of the women who came before her, women who macheted through the jungle that is our mad culture. I realize that I have a problem with narrative, with wanting bad things to lead to good things, and for an inevitable conclusion to arrive and make all the pain ultimately worth it. But it’s hard not to look at the arc of Olivia’s career and see the women who made it possible, women who struggled against the tide so as to make space for a teen idol to finally survive intact.
PAINTING
CH-CH-CHANGES
Humans are fickle creatures. Ayan Artan says that’s just fine.
— in rent free.
double denim.
debuts having to be good. witnessing the debut is quite literally gathering around a sapling, puzzled at its blatant infancy. how odd to expect anything remotely complete from an artist just beginning to give themselves permission to create. voice and perspective are earned. we should give artists the time to earn them.
olives. they’re delightful little pebbles of umami. i was merely a tasteless freak.
productivity. you are not a machine whose value depends on output. you are a person. living is the point, not figuring out how much you contribute to your country’s GDP.
addison rae. i’m charmed by her grit, her hunger. striving looks good on women, especially ones who know how to resourcefully turn infamy to their advantage. she surprised me. her take on taste being a privilege set off a lightbulb for me. i’m rooting for her.
the idea that art saves lives. i think people save themselves. all we do is reflect our audience back at themselves. we cannot conjure up from within you a strength that you do not already possess.
men in arsenal jerseys. if you can support the same team for eleven years, there’s a hidden emotional strength within you i would love to test the limits of.
the beach. i have always hated sand, but i have of late been daydreaming of our shores and lido beach and somali mermaids and pearls. perhaps i don’t hate beaches. perhaps i only hate the ones away from home.
revisiting work. you are not the same person you were a year ago. there are a thousand versions of every film, every book, every album. it cannot be a waste of time to see what new thing reveals itself to you. it’s perhaps the critic in me but give yourself permission to change your mind.
TREND-SPOTTING
Art & Photography: , , James, , ,
Writing: , , , ,
, an actor, writer, and filmmaker who has worked on projects like Reservation Dogs, Backspot, Marvel’s Echo, and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, is now on Substack, exploring “creativity & style, queerness & identity, Indigeneity & family, love, sex, grief and the ways we try to make sense of our messy-ass lives.”
, a singer, songwriter, and member of the band Westlife, is now writing and podcasting about music, soccer, and family on Substack.
Journalists Jason Langendorf, Eric Raskin, David Greisman, Bill Dettloff, and more have come together to launch The Good Fight. The new publication has resurrected the former ESPN/Grantland Ring Theory podcast and is using long-form video to tell boxing stories from across the world.
, an interior designer, author, and the founder of House Nine Design, has launched No Place Like Home. It will feature essays about her “wonderfully chaotic life” as well as “educational content, curated edits, and the insider interiors thinking” she shares with her clients.
, a lexicographer, etymologist, author, and resident word expert on Channel 4’s long-running quiz show Countdown, is now on Substack.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s office in New York City.
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2026-06-13 21:03:41
This week, we’re re-familiarizing ourselves with DJ Khaled, committing to curiosity, and splurging within reason.
RETROSPECTIVE
Mary H.K. Choi, whose new novel is out this week, reflects on the makings of her first bestselling book: DJ Khaled’s biography.
— in choitotheworld
Technically, it was my first New York Times bestseller, but more crucially it was the first time I was tasked to write a book without any idea of how to go about it. I had written several celebrity profiles by then. I had been on tour with Rihanna for seven days with a caravan of other journalists, but nothing had quite prepared me for sliding into the fiefdom of a rap personality as they were blowing up.
If you’ll remember, this was when DJ Khaled, whose name is Khaled Khaled, had gone stupendously viral on Snapchat for getting lost at sea on jet skis at night. It was a harrowing yet heartwarming ordeal and all the while, lit only by the glow of his phone, he narrated the events through a series of reassuring platitudes. The key is not to panic. The key is to make it. The ocean is real. The key is never give up. It’s not easy to win.
He’d already had wins. Most notably, the colossus All I Do Is Win, as well as eight studio albums, but this is the moment where America noticed him. The morning shows wanted him. Ellen. Martha Stewart. He’d become a household name and knew it, and everything he said caught fire. He churned out content like an influencer in a clout house, shining his light on his workouts, his brief stint with veganism, his chef, the stone lion in his yard, his partner, his lotion, his cronies, his cars and, occasionally, his biographer.
As Khaled’s star was rising, the book deals inevitably arrived and my name quickly made the short list. Years later I’d find out how much Khaled made on the deal, and while that figure is not my business to share, what I can say is that I was offered about $25ishK and had six weeks to turn it in. It felt doable. I could sense the momentum and had always been a fast writer. They put me up in the St. Regis for three nights and I knew that if I could get even two hours with him every day, I would have enough for a business book of aphorisms that would not only chronicle his origin story but give color to his life.
The long and short is that it was classic rap shit and he ignored me for all three days as I skulked around his house. I eventually elbowed my way onto his tour bus so I could get time with him on his way to Atlanta. At this stage of his life DJ Khaled was afraid of flying and this ended up being a gift. I interviewed his partner Nicole, his right hand Kiko, his photographer and videographer Ivan, as well as many of his friends. I still have Fat Joe’s number in my phone from that time and both Cool and Dre’s. I also have Big Boi from Outkast’s number in my phone, but that was from something else.
The longer, longer story is that I observed DJ Khaled for about 8 or 9 days total, this trip and later when he came to New York. I blended into the decor, threading my way through the crowds that clamored towards him like fast zombies for “fan luv,” I overheard his conversations, he was constantly calling people, and learned who this man was beyond the phrases.
Mostly I watched DJ Khaled, obstinately sitting in his sight line like a begrudging, plotting cat with my notebook and recorder. On day five of him not speaking to me, I decided I’d invoice him directly for more money since he was eating into my deadline. I’d seen how dedicated he was in securing the bag and wanted his attention. “I’m raising my rate,” I said. “I’m going to invoice Patty” (his childhood friend who also ran operations at the time).
He told me, and I’ll never forget this, that he had a special, tailor-made key for me:
“Are you an artist?” He asked me. I was startled by this sudden pop quiz and hesitated. “Of course you’re an artist,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hired you if you weren’t an artist. But if you’re an artist, don’t talk about money before you make the art,” he advised. “Make the art, then secure the bag.”
SUMMER SILVER
RELIGION
A candid, personal exploration into the zone where spirituality and mental health intersect.
— in Shifting Tides
My spiritual director once asked me to do my best to differentiate between experiences that felt real and experiences that were actually true. It was wise counsel, though almost impossible to apply in the moment. During the experience itself, there is no clean distance from which to evaluate it. There is simply the reality of the experience: the opening of the senses, the cosmic feeling, the sense that all humanity is interrelated, the feeling that you have finally seen what has always been there. It is difficult to describe, partly because experiences like this are almost by definition ineffable. It doesn’t emerge as a logical argument to be handed across the table, which is why throughout the ages most have often reached for poetry.
Mania does not always feel like madness from the inside. Sometimes it feels like transcendence. I have had experiences like this before, and looking back, I can say that at least one of them does not seem authentic to me anymore, while another one still does. I realize how strange that may sound. How do I get to decide that? What does authentic even mean in this context? What does it mean for something to be real?
I do not have a clean answer, and I am increasingly suspicious of anyone who does. Each person has to wrestle with that question from within his or her own tradition, experience, community, and conscience. For me, I answer from within Christianity. Did God reveal something real and true to me? Was it from God? Did it draw me toward love? Did it humble me? Did it endure? Did it form something good in me after the intensity faded?
The last question has become especially important, because time has become one of the only tools I trust. I cannot always discern an experience while I am inside of it, but I can sometimes see what it produces after the fact. I can see whether it still rings true months later, whether it leaves an imprint on my soul that helps me live better, whether it makes me more compassionate, patient, honest, and connected to God and other people.
The first experience I think of had all the marks of religious intensity. There was an opening of the senses, a cosmic connection, euphoria, grandeur, and a special mission from God. Everything seemed to speak to me, and at the time it was Disney movies. I was convinced there were messages everywhere. I abandoned an incredible opportunity for my family because I believed I was supposed to start what I thought could become the next Charles Xavier school for the gifted. Even writing that sentence is painful because it sounds absurd from a distance, but at the time it was charged with meaning. It felt coherent. It felt beautiful. It felt like God was doing something extraordinary and I had finally understood my role in it.
I do not look back on that season only with embarrassment. That would be too easy, and it would not be entirely honest. It was one of the most euphoric seasons of my entire life. There is one night I still think about often. I was sitting in the back of my truck under the stars at 3 a.m., overwhelmed by my closeness with God and what I thought he was doing. My face almost hurt from smiling. I felt held by the universe. I felt chosen. I felt alive in a way that depression makes almost impossible to imagine. When everything is gray and heavy, when my body feels like concrete and God feels distant or silent, I remember that night and ache for it. I want the stars and the smile and the nearness back.
MATTERS OF THE HEART
READING
Modern life is essentially slinging the thought “Am I reading enough?” on an unending hamster wheel in perpetuity. John Paul Brammer offers a prognosis, and potential cure, for literary rumination.
— in John Paul Brammer
You’ve probably heard this, or said it yourself: “I’d love to read more, but I can’t.” I can’t focus. I can’t sit still. My mind wanders. “I can’t crack it.” People who want to read more are aware of the tender goodness inside literature, but the barrier is too stubborn. They’ve become too weak to pierce the skin. Or so they think.
If you’re hoping for an easy trick to bypass this obstacle entirely, I’m sorry to disappoint. There is, or at least there was for me, a mandatory effort on this front. But as with breaking into anything, it’s useful to find the weak points. It was while probing that I found my way in. The sweet spot wasn’t attention, really, but something closely related to it.
Curiosity is a child. It’s greedy and unpredictable and has two modes. It’s either in frantic activity, or it’s dead asleep. When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away. A child curious about the taste of dirt will find their way to dirt. The whole of the child’s spirit will narrow toward dirt. The child will slip through any gap in the pen. The strictest parents know there’s always a gap. “No” means nothing.
When I consider the attention crisis as a curiosity crisis, some things become clearer. For argument’s sake, embrace some hypothetical good news: our faculty of attention isn’t shrinking after all. We’re as capable of sustained attention as any of our forerunners, including the French ones in voluminous powdered wigs who attended the grand salons and kept vast personal libraries. The problem, in that case, would be misapplication.
It’s no coincidence the internet is holding our attention with ever more colorful, infantilizing distractions. Take those AI-generated videos of anthropomorphic fruit. Sugary. Bright. The strawberry cheats on the banana with the pineapple. And then what? The strawberry gets pregnant and gives birth to a pineapple. The banana is present. And then what? The only thing that distinguishes this from entertainment for babies is its lewdness and lack of a perfunctory moral lesson. If prayer makes the Catholic more like a saint, then pure attention, spent like this, makes us more like crass, immoral babies. Attention here is only the price. The thing that’s spent. The child stole the credit card.
You’ve experienced curiosity at full bore. You’ve lost hours to true crime on YouTube, surfaced from a show at three in the morning, tracked a fight between strangers on the internet down to the last granular detail. There’s something juvenile about this, isn’t there? Helplessness in the face of an urge. It’s like eating ice cream with your hands. Eat. Eat. Eat. This is pure attention, and we spend a great deal of time in it. It’s dissociative and pleasurable. It can be abused.
The parent’s power is discipline and discernment. Nothing, I’m sorry to say, will make vegetables taste like ice cream. But you can live in such a way that the tongue’s relationship to sugar changes. People trying to get back into reading sometimes reach for the densest, most impressive novel, then bow out believing they’re too stupid to access it. Intelligence isn’t the culprit, but palate.
Where to start? By living the life you live, you already have books and authors in your periphery, names that recur. Answer them.
SOMETHING TO CONSIDER
CHA-CHING
A retiree dishes on the money management tactics, and regrets, that have carried her through life.
— in Phone a Friend
What you’re saving for right now:
In the last couple of years, I’ve made a big switch in my attitude towards spending. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to know I don’t have a long path ahead of me. When I first retired, I would look at the money in my bank and divide it by the number of years I expected to live and ask, “Will it last?”
My mantra now: “Don’t be an idiot, do it while you can.” I want to create memories with my family and friends while I’m healthy — traveling, hiking, going to restaurants.
What you like to splurge on:
My biggest splurge is that I’ve remained in my extremely large, expensive apartment alone.
What you skimp on happily:
At this point in my life, I’m not going to do a major renovations to my apartment. My kitchen cabinet doors don’t all close. I don’t have central AC. I’ve thought about redoing these things but then I ask myself: “Is that really going to make me happier?” Screw it. When I sell, they’ll do it.
Money advice you’d give other women:
I can’t emphasize this enough: Married women and couples living together must know what’s going on with their money. You should know what’s exactly in all of your accounts.
I’ve been shocked by a couple of cases of divorce or widowhood where women have been really screwed by their partner. I know of a young couple who is divorcing right now and to her surprise he owes $600,000.
Retiring in New York City:
I have been incredibly fortunate to have saved enough to have a good retirement. Being retired in New York is wonderful. You go outside and even if you don’t meet someone, you are reminded that there is life out there.
AIR MAIL
REALITY BITES
Hunter Harris posits an investigation into the inescapable Summer House drama swirling online.
— in Hung Up
Now that her charade of accountability at the Summer House reunion is over, we can get into the nitty-gritty. There are still dozens of questions for Amanda Batula, questions that she completely ignored or did not answer, and a few follow-ups she wasn’t asked. West agrees that he’s an incorrigible womanizer when pressed, but Amanda enjoys a victim narrative at the reunion, perhaps for the benefit of Kyle, who still loves her. (Of course he wants to think of her as manipulated and isolated! That’s the wife we’re watching him try to reconcile with this season on In the City!)
The most satisfying moment of the reunion, for me, was a question from Mia: “Amanda and West, did you honestly just come forward because there was so much speculation? Or were you guys going to continue to lie to us?” Now that’s a question I want answered. In the best-case scenario, what was the plan here? When were they going to share this with their friends, let alone the rest of the world? Amanda wakes from her slumber to give one answer that sounds real: “To be so honest, in that moment [we] came forward because of the speculation, because there were a lot of things I was still trying to understand and figure out, including the Meija situation,” she says. Mia again: “So it had nothing to do with, like, hurting your friendship with Ciara? It had to do with figuring out if West was actually exclusive with Meija?”
My group chat is still buzzing with questions left outstanding after the reunion’s final part aired. (A great comment from Meg Zukin, after Amanda said that she’s only been in a bubble thinking about herself: “We know!”) I treated this like an assignment: what would I have asked Amanda?
If you weren’t thinking about the potential (and likely) fallout from this relationship—in your friendship with Ciara, in your breakup with Kyle, in the larger friend group—what were you thinking about?
What did you think when you saw West leaving thirst comments under Ciara’s IG posts weeks before you announced your relationship?
When you say “sorry” to Ciara, are you apologizing for lying to her, or for having feelings for her ex?
Even though I don’t buy this part of the story at all: what did you do the day after West told you he had feelings for you?
Did you expect the cast to press West on his relationship with Meija?
West agreed with Andy that it seems dangerous to be in a relationship with someone with very clear commitment issues. What makes you certain that, despite embarrassing Ciara, Meija, and himself, he won’t embarrass you?
Did West detail his private conversations with Kyle about your marriage to you?
SPORTS
Art & Photography: Erika Lee Sears, Abigail Sandler, Tessa Perlow, Meecham Whitson Meriweather, Val Webb
Writing: Mary H.K. Choi, Shifting Tides, John Paul Brammer, Zach Zimmerman, Alexandra Nassif
, an engine for “independent and unfiltered journalism written by some of the UK’s leading reporters” has launched on Substack.
Alex Cooper has launched an offshoot of the Unwell universe on Substack. will be publishing two volumes of essays, deep dives, and pop culture commentary every month. The first issue included contributions from writers like , , and .
DC is now on Substack, where it’s rolling out pieces from the perspectives of the characters in the upcoming Supergirl movie.
Bestselling crime author and former Traitors contestant Harriet Tyce is now writing on Substack in Cat among the Pigeons.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s office in New York City.
2026-06-06 21:01:14
This week, we’re learning about weird medieval guys, making eye contact with strangers, and getting lost in the Backrooms.
ANCIENT TEXTS
A field guide to medieval art.
—weird medieval guys in weird medieval guys
After perhaps my 9,000th time seeing someone describe medieval marginalia as ‘doodles’ or the product of ‘boredom’, I thought it might be nice to put together a brief guide to some of the themes and ideas that recur in the margins of manuscripts, hopefully helping to showcase the fact that these drawings were usually anything but ‘random’! In fact, far more interestingly, these little characters and scenes were part of a complex and visually dense world rooted in religion, pop culture, humor, and folklore.
Illuminated manuscripts were essentially always written first and illustrated second in the late Middle Ages. The scribes would add their writing to unbound, empty pages, working carefully around blank fields where painted miniatures and initials would later be added by a separate artist or artists. We do not know exactly what sort of education these artists would have obtained. However, they almost certainly would have had a degree of literacy in their native tongue and a familiarity with the scriptures they were illustrating, even if this did not extend to a firm grasp of written Latin.
Understanding this is crucial for pushing back on the idea of medieval marginalia as ‘random’, since it opens up the possibility of considering marginal drawings in relation to the rest of the page and manuscript as a whole—crucial context that is often neglected when we encounter marginalia as isolated snippets online. Artists were not simply filling in blank voids but adding adornment to a canvas already rich with meaning imparted by the scribe. Thus, the first step to understanding a piece of marginalia should always be to trace it back to its source, if possible. Have a look through the entire work and see what themes and images recur.
Works like the 13th-century English prayerbook known as the Rutland Psalter show extensive evidence of the marginal artists playing on specific words and lines from the scriptures featured on the same page. I highly recommend Betsy Chunko Dominguez’ fantastic paper “Playing on Timbrels: The Margins of the Rutland Psalter” for a more complete exposition, but I will go over a couple examples here.
In the lower margin of folio 11r of the Psalter, two men seem to be engaged in a fierce struggle, with one of them apparently trying to rip off the other’s ear. Moving their eyes back up to the start of the opposite page, a reader would have been greeted by the following line from Psalm 5:
Verba mea auribus percipe Domine intellege clamorem meum.
Give ear, O Lord, to my words, understand my cry.
Thus, our marginal brawl becomes a clever pun on the notion of ‘giving ear’—perhaps a way of making the text more engaging and memorable for its reader.
On folio 87v, the artist has extended the letter p from the word conspectu in Psalm 86 (85 in the Vulgate) into an arrow fired from the bow of one monster into the rear end of another.
Conspectu means ‘to behold’ or ‘to consider’, and the famous medieval scholar Michael Camille connected the arrow’s placement to the notion of gaze as a type of visual penetration.
BROWSING
FILM CRITICISM
Can internet lore translate to the big screen?
—Clare Frances in Famous and Beloved Newsletter
Backrooms, a new horror movie directed by a 20-year-old that just bulldozed the box office with an $81 million debut, is based on a viral social media idea: not a video game, not a character, not a product. The trades will tell you that it is based on a YouTube series also directed by the 20-year-old, Kane Parsons, but that’s only part of the story. The idea of “backrooms” started on 4chan, where people would post pictures of empty rooms, usually inspired by vague discussions of abandoned capitalist spaces and the liminality they conjure, and make up stories about them. This was right before COVID, whose mandated social alienation enabled media domination by short-form video, and computer-generated videos of abandoned rooms would go viral on TikTok, the platform where people now call the color wheel “color theory” and say it’s “amazing.”
But an important, primal text here is, in fact, a video game: Five Nights at Freddy’s. The first-person horror game ushered in a new era of social media content about video games, where players and viewers became indistinguishable. Where the commonplace, boomer-legible stand-in for “video game player who is way too into video game lore” was no longer a sad adult but a normal child. “Creepypasta” is now, fully, a mainstream aesthetic movement. I’m sure video game scholars will have differing perspectives, but, in overly reductive terms, that is my oral historiographic conclusion based on my research and lived experience: there is Before Freddy and After Freddy.
Freddy’s is jumpscare-based and set in an abandoned, fictional stand-in for Chuck E. Cheese. It is really high-concept and simple—a game for children—but lent itself well to retroactive lore-writing and social commentary. Despite the undercurrent of creepy, haunted animatronics, it is also basically spatial horror: your avatar is a security guard who has to explore and tinker with the abandoned space, which in sequels balloons to include rivers and theme park rides.
The popularity of Freddy’s, in tandem with Minecraft, the COVID-era ubiquity of the Nintendo Switch, and pandemic-enabled video creation, is the ecosystem wherein “backrooms” was forged as an aesthetic object of the commons. My point is that Backrooms is as much a “prestige horror” movie, a fake characteristic, as it is a kids’ movie, a real characteristic. The latter comes from its clear roots in Creepypasta junk. The former comes from its distribution, with A24 providing glossy promotion, championing an underdog 20-year-old YouTuber-director. But don’t get it twisted: Backrooms is trashy, disposable, intellectually offensive junk.
MATTERS OF THE HEART
APPEALS
Anna Delvey makes a case for reinvention.
—Anna Delvey in The Delvey Report
Few might know this fun fact, but paths towards your own ankle monitor are not one but plenty, and not all of them involve an unwavering commitment to a life of crime. Different models help authorities with different tasks. Some are meant to police alcohol consumption after a DUI. Others are used during criminal pretrial supervision when there’s a risk of absconding. Some enforce curfews during parole. Others are used during immigration proceedings to ensure the wearer doesn’t disappear into the country and live happily ever after as an undocumented fugitive.
To the untrained eye, however, the device itself—an updated scarlet letter in the form of a black plastic box attached to a rubber strap—looks exactly the same regardless of purpose. Absent context, the wearer could be anyone from a serial killer to a foreign nun with visa problems.
Once you’ve completed the hard part—executing the choices that led to your current circumstances—you are presented with two options. You can cover it up, or you can leave it visible.
Both choices are wrong.
You’re either flaunting it or hiding it. You’re either insufficiently remorseful or performing remorse manipulatively. Reprehensible either way.
Redemption is wonderful in theory. But in practice, redemption is apparently just deeply offensive, and surviving humiliating circumstances a little too well becomes its own kind of crime.
The public says it wants accountability, but what it actually wants is permanence. Permanent guilt, permanent silence and permanent shame. An identity frozen in its most unflattering moment and preserved until the end of time in a quick Google search result. A life sentence of public humiliation, after which you’re expected to die as the version they decided on.
I’d love to argue that most of what I’ve managed to accomplish has happened in spite of my past, not because of it. Life is already hard enough under normal circumstances, and even though I’m all for sprinkling in a healthy amount of adversity here and there, adding years of legal obstacles rarely improves the experience.
At what point, exactly, does someone stop being defined exclusively by their worst decision? Is it immediately following release from custody, the way we restore someone’s right to vote and possess money but not necessarily their right to possess dignity? Or maybe at some point in the future, like your right to own a firearm? Or is the answer Never? Because saying “well, you shouldn’t have committed a crime in the first place” means that punishment doesn’t end when the sentence does.
AGED BEEF
REQUIRED READING
For those of us who need to be reminded that “Mephistophelian” is an adjective.
—Delia Cai in Deez Links
Well, it took nearly four months, but we made it. Shortly before leaving for the airport last week, I turned that final dastardly page in Moby Dick and felt bliss, exhaustion, a fleeting jolt of total cultural superiority, as well as the kind of Pavlovian sleepiness that comes from having ended most nights in this calendar year with at least a couple of pages of Melville’s finest.
Was it worth it? Absolutely yes, though I now think endurance for endurance’s sake should never be the prevailing motivation. (You are, after all, talking about someone who read the Bible twice in high school—partially so she could see if there were any loopholes no one was talking about, but mostly for the flex.) While I was somewhat prepared for the amazing figurative language, the meticulous whaling knowledge, the (less enjoyable) old-timey sailor rants, I wasn’t at all prepared for how funny and downright sarcastic the writing could be.
And while I do not plan to ever reread all that again, I did want to commit to memory (and maybe save you 3.5 months of your life with) a list of my favorite zingers, with page numbers included if you end up ordering the same edition (which I do recommend even though it is too fucking big to take anywhere with you… hmm… there’s a metaphor in that…). Bolding is my own; imagine I’m underlining it with a pencil to show you amidst a shared bout of literary ecstasies. Anyway, I salute you, Mr. Melville. I am also absolutely certain that you would have loved Twitter.
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? (p.4)
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? (5)
And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable inflection that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (6) (“The two orchard thieves”!! What a way to reference the reference.)
But as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. (7) (Really, the whole first chapter is just perfect.)
INTERIORS
MISSED CONNECTIONS
Harry Hill discovers that spending mornings away from your phone could mean an uptick in awkward eye contact.
—Harry Hill in Stuff
I can’t stress enough how much fun it is to go outside each morning without my phone. Isn’t it a thing that deaf people see better? Or blind people taste more? The idea that when one of the senses is cut off, the others are heightened? If I’m talking out of my ass it wouldn’t be the first time. I swear I read that somewhere once. That’s what being outside without my phone feels like; I’ve cut off my nose and now my eyes can see clearer, my ears can hear louder. There’s nowhere to look but at the world around me, nothing to see except for everything.
Being outside is level 1. Going into an establishment is level 2. Making eyes with a man in said establishment? Level 3. I walked into Joe Coffee (which is lowkey one of my opps but we can discuss that another time) and ordered a cortado (randomly my new go-to as of last week) and made my way off to the side to wait for my drink. Usually at this point I’d be scrolling, chatting, waking my brain up with reels, like a bowl full of spaghetti to the face. Today, I was looking around me curiously like a baby on the subway, eyes wide in a stroller. My first time in this coffee shop without a phone. Googoo literal gaga.
And then a gay guy walked in. And I watched it happen. We locked eyes. He ordered an iced coffee, black. He turned and looked at me. I whispered a faint smile, even though he wasn’t my type (dark grey-ish hair and grumpy-looking, probably mid-30s). Again, this is where I’d go back to my phone, to my reels, to a video of a girl eating a dot cake. I stayed in the coffee shop with Grumpy and he kept looking at me. He got his iced coffee before I got my cortado and made his way over to where I was standing near the condiment station.
He gave me a look like aren’t you gonna say something? No, dude, get your Splenda and go. I wanted to say, “Hello. We aren’t getting married. I’m here without my phone and I made eye contact with you because I’m re-learning how to be on Earth after spending many, many years on Planet Reels. Enjoy your coffee.”
SELF-REFLECTION
Art & Photography: Sydney Hirsch, Abby Nierman, Mariola Rosario, Catherine Lacey, Everett Williams, Kathleen Schmidt
Writing: Clare Frances, weird medieval guys, Anna Delvey, Delia Cai, Harry Hill
Book Gossip, New York Magazine‘s biweekly newsletter about “what the literati are really thinking” written by Jasmine Vojdani, will begin publishing on Substack. The latest letter featured an interview with Ann Patchett, a survey on how literary magazine editors are screening submissions for AI, and a scene report from Allie Rowbottom’s book launch.
Longtime ESPN sports columnist, author, and sports documentary producer Howard Bryant has joined Substack to share his insights about stories “located at the intersection of sports and society.”
Togethxr—the women’s sports content collective co-founded by Olympians Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, and Sue Bird—has launched a Substack. Their publication, Yeah, I Said It, will weigh in on pressing issues in women’s sports and cover signature events in depth, including the softball Women’s College World Series.
Fergal Keane, an Emmy- and BAFTA-winning BBC war correspondent, has left his post after 37 years to launch his own Substack, where he’ll cover international politics and keep a diary of his travels.
Georgia Davies, a musician in The Last Dinner Party, has joined Substack. The Hunger and the Road will serve as “part travelogue, part food diary, part confessional.”
Kilian Jornet, a professional ultramarathoner, trail runner, and ski mountaineer who has scaled Mount Everest twice in one week without supplemental oxygen, has launched a Substack. His first piece is about returning to the mountain marathon Zegama and competing on an unresponsive knee.
Jonny Mulyk, a chef who once ran a restaurant specializing in pasta, is now on Substack. He’ll be sending out new, weekly recipes to his subscribers.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Danya Issawi out of Substack’s office in New York City.
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