2026-07-25 21:03:21
This week, we’re breaking teeth, writing books, and going on our own odysseys.
COPING
Ella Gray Hickman recounts the days after she lost her home in a fire through the bagels, candy, and frozen pizzas she consumed in the aftermath.
— in Ella Going Gray
I wake up in Rayne’s bed around 9:00am. Her room is always nice to wake up in. For some reason, the sun never feels jarring or intruding when it shines through her windows in the morning. My husband is calling me to come downstairs to let him in, the firefighters have asked him all the questions they needed to and let him pack up some essentials from the smoldering mess of our apartment. I feel a little guilty because I didn’t think to change out of my sooty pajamas when I collapsed into Rayne’s white sheets and I must assume they smell like smoke by now. It is hard for me to tell because everything smells like smoke to me and will for a few days.
Rayne was awake writing at 3:30am and the first person to pick up my call after the firefighters got us out. The restaurant we lived over, a mom and pop sushi place we loyally kept ordering from even after the health department briefly shut them down and our minor cockroach problem coincidentally went away, was, in that early morning hour, still on fire. My husband, Andrew, had wrangled the cat into his crate before the firefighters chopped their way up to our floor. On the street, he rubbed my back as I hacked black snot onto the sidewalk and then ushered me and the cat into a car to Rayne’s. Despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help feeling very romantic about it all. I was getting on him just a day before about never holding doors open for me. It’s not that I’m surprised by how good he is in a crisis nor how good he is to me in general, but I suddenly feel very aware of it. Sometimes in my head, he’s still 19.
Andrew, my knight in flannel pajama pants and a pair of Caterpillar construction boots some sympathetic Belgian raver gave him on their way to after-afters, arrives at Rayne’s with breakfast from Apollo Bagels, which is funny because we’ve never had them before and right now seems like an odd time to follow a staycation tourist-in-my-own-city impulse. Maybe he went because we’re never in Williamsburg this early or maybe it was because he spent all the early morning from about 4am onward waiting around for the fire chief to show up and say nothing, really, of substance and so the long line seemed less daunting. I can’t tell if the toasted bagel is burnt or if my mouth is burnt, but it crackles when I bite into it. The tomato is gorgeously tender, the thin ribbon of skin on the slices doesn’t even catch as I take a sloppy bite. The salt and acid tang of the tomato stings my tongue in odd spots like metal zaps, but the cream cheese is soothing. It isn’t the most generous layer of cream cheese I’ve ever had on a bagel, but the consistency is far more buttery and silky than I’m used to.
After breakfast, we load the cat and the go-bags into Andrew’s car and relocate to the apartment of our best New York friends from college. Gene and Maude have offered up their couch for the weekend. Once Alamo is settled with litter and food, Andrew takes me back to our place to survey the damage. We each gather a laundry bag of clothing to serve as our respective wardrobes for the foreseeable future and decide that opting for wash and fold is completely worth it. After we drop off our smokey clothes to the laundromat, I want to walk around alone for a little while to clear my head and I want to stress eat sugar. I make my way down Knickerbocker stopping into 99 cent stores to buy packs of socks and boxers and white tee shirts we can wear immediately. It begins raining harder and I realize I should have grabbed the umbrella Gene offered me, but that wouldn’t do anything to keep my slippers dry. I am still wearing the clothing I fled the apartment in: Christmas patterned pajama pants, a big tee shirt covered in paint splatter, and rubber bottomed felt clog slippers. I am soaked-through halfway back to Maude and Gene’s.
SEA LIFE
DOCUMENTARIES
After Flaco the owl escaped the Central Park Zoo, he became an overnight sensation. One filmmaker took it upon herself to document the moment.
— in Penny Lane Is My Real Name
In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked a famous question about consciousness: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Nagel chose the bat because, as a fellow mammal, we readily accept that it possesses consciousness, in the sense that it is like something to be a bat. A bat has subjective experience.
But he also chose the bat because it is so weird and alien to us—humans can’t echolocate, for example, or fly—that even if we knew every scientific fact about bat biology, we’d still lack access to what it actually feels like to be one. As Nagel put it, we can rely only on our own experience to provide “the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited.”
Every documentary begins with an impossible ambition: to understand what it is like to be someone—or something—other than yourself. Telling the truth about the experience of any other being is never easy. You never really know if you are getting it right. But at least with human subjects, you can ask them, “What is it like to be you?” You can ask them, “Did I get that right?”
There’s a reason so many people at Q&As will ask a documentarian, “What did [subject of film] think about the film?” They’re looking, in a way, for a fact-check on the whole enterprise of the filmmaker having tried to represent what it is like to be the subject.
With an animal protagonist, the mystery is even more irresolvable. There are no interviews, and no explanations. Just the best available scientific understanding, close observations of behavior, and ultimately, your own imagination.
This is the challenge I found myself facing when an owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and immediately became the most captivating protagonist I’ve ever encountered in real life. This owl, who had lived in captivity his whole life, was now suddenly free. He had begun writing his own story. My job became to try, however imperfectly, to tell it.
What is it like to be an owl? The question announced itself to anyone who saw him on the sidewalk near the Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue.
But we weren’t just asking it about owls in general—we were asking it about Flaco. An individual, with his own personal history, his own individual temperament, and his own subjective experience. That’s the invitation at the heart of Wild Inside: to get to know one extraordinary individual, on an extraordinary quest… who just happens to be an owl.
That said, the first step in avoiding the mistake of anthropomorphism is remembering Flaco is, in fact, not a human but an owl. One must try to understand the owl’s world: his umwelt. This wonderfully German word refers to the distinct perceptual reality of a species, deriving from their unique biological abilities.
And so, I asked embarrassingly basic questions of esteemed scientists over many months as I learned about owl biology. I was delighted to learn that owls, with their forward-facing eyes fixed inside their sockets and their long-range vision, probably see the world not so differently from a birder with binoculars glued to the face. This parallel vision became a visual motif throughout Wild Inside… especially because it so often seemed Flaco was watching us as much as we were watching him.
MAGIC
FILM REVIEW
E.K. Carlisle got the hottest ticket in town—a spot at a screening of The Odyssey—but argues that the plot feels eerily similar to the director’s past work.
— in E. K. C-mail
Nolan, renowned for high-concept sci-fi and action films such as Interstellar and The Dark Knight, is one of the few modern filmmakers that can reliably drum up packed cinemas whatever he puts out. Oppenheimer, his last feature chronicling the life and times of the guy who built the nuclear bomb, was 180 minutes of boring political machinations and Cillian Murphy looking stressed. It still earned nearly $1 billion worldwide.
The Odyssey will no doubt achieve similar success. As a former student of ancient history, I was interested to see how Big Chris would adapt Homer’s lengthy ancient Greek poem for a modern audience. It hasn’t hurt that he’s roped in an all-star cast: Matt Damon as the wandering warrior Odysseus, and Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland as his patient wife and son waiting for him back home.
I had doubts about how well Nolan’s brooding, clinical style of filmmaking would gel the chaotic, colourful world of ancient epic, and I was justified in having them. His preference for high-contrast neutrals creates scenescapes that are expansive and expensive, but dry. We’ve known for years now that our idea of the classical world as one of white statues and gleaming marble temples is completely inaccurate. Ancient cities would have been full of vibrancy, from the painted icons in shrines to intricate wall paintings. Even going back to the Minoan civilization on Bronze Age Crete we find fragments of art that reflect a playfulness and eclecticism that is nowhere to be found in Nolan’s dusty vision of the Mediterranean.
This cultural levity is mirrored in the Homeric poems: although they contain sombre episodes (Achilles brutalising Hector’s corpse, Odysseus losing all his men, Agamemnon sacrificing his own daughter to ensure safe passage of his ships), there’s also many ridiculous moments that can only be described as camp. The oafish cyclops Odysseus encounters also keeps sheep and makes cheese. Circe turns Odysseus’s men into squeaking little pigs. The famous episode of the Trojan horse is unbelievably absurd and borderline comic. You’re telling me Odysseus’s cunning plan is to build a huge equine structure and stuff it with soldiers, and for some reason the Trojans are stupid enough to accept it as a gift, and the subsequent ambush is enough to end a ten year conflict? Have a day off!
But Christopher Nolan re-enacts the episode with a characteristic po-face. The only time that drops is during the Circe scenes: here, he doesn’t lean into humour, but horror, with the soldiers’ transformation into pigs rendered in genuinely grotesque fashion, to the point where I began to wonder if Robert Eggers had suddenly seized directorial control.
CANINES
ACCIDENTS
Parvati Shallow has been on several seasons of Survivor, where she’s faced every kind of challenge. Still, having an emergency in front of her daughter was new territory.
— in The Queendom
“Mommy, did you die?” My daughter’s voice rang out in the blackness.
I felt the cold concrete on my left cheek before I opened my eyes. My tongue brushed against my front tooth and felt a jagged edge.
“No,” I hurried to answer her, with my face still on the ground, my body sprawled out on the gritty cement.
What happened? I was so disoriented.
Opening my eyes, I searched in the dark for my daughter. She was standing about ten feet behind me by a wooden beam. Why was she so far away? My thoughts swirled inside my head while I grasped at understanding my predicament. My mouth tasted of blood and dirt.
Okay. I know some things.
What happened: We were under the Santa Monica pier. We’d been rollerskating. I was holding my daughter’s hand and we’d fallen down. My knee had popped and I’d felt lightheaded. I was scared I’d really fucked up my knee. Would I even be able to walk?
The tunnel was black as midnight but just beyond it the sun was blazing bright, making it hard for my eyes to adjust. I remembered sitting on the ground for a bit to stabilize, but my head just kept spinning. Beyond me, people were buzzing through the tunnel on motorized scooters, their screams echoing off the walls and corners.
This was hell.
Before I found myself belly down on the boardwalk, I’d been sitting up, trying to ground myself. I’d been aware of my daughter watching me, her eyes heavy with worry. An urgent energy pulsing off her tiny body, waiting for me—willing me—to stand up.
[. . .]
Now that I had a grasp on the sequence of events I’d just experienced, I had another thought, one that struck me with horror—did I lose a tooth?
Oh my God.
I’d played five seasons of Survivor and had competed as an amateur boxer. I’d sliced my thumb with a machete on Survivor Cook Islands, gotten a fat lip on Survivor Micronesia, and broken my wrist in a quad bike accident while hosting a travel show, but I had NEVER. Lost. A. Tooth.
Sound the alarm!!
All of a sudden, this was a very real emergency, and my head was back on my shoulders right where it belonged.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said assertively to my daughter. She was scooping up my skates which had rolled away when I fell. I watched her face soften in relief when she heard my strong voice, but her eyes still looked worried.
“I’m okay. We have to get out of this tunnel,” I said again to reassure her.
A minute later, we were out in the brightest sunshine under an expansive cloudless blue sky. Hallelujah. We’d been resurrected.
Plopping down on the sand, I called my dentist to make an emergency appointment. They scheduled me for 9am the next day. Then I called my emergency contact.
COWORKING
THE PROCESS
Tyler McCall divulges what she’s learned while working on her debut book.
— in Voted Most Talkative
Whenever I tell someone that I sold a novel, the most common response I get—by a lot—is some variation of, “I could never write a book!”
To that, I say: Not with that attitude!
In all seriousness, I get why books are intimidating. Staring at a blank document and knowing you need to come up with somewhere between 75,000-95,000 words to fill it is like standing at the bottom of a mountain and knowing you gotta make it to the top. And that’s provided you have an idea for a book in the first place!
Having chatted with author friends of mine, I know that every writer has a different approach to turning that blank document into a shiny novel for people to read, so I can’t tell you exactly how to write a book. Finding your process is part of the fun, imo! But I can tell you how I wrote a book and maybe de-mystify that process a little bit, in case you’ve got an idea rumbling around inside your head.
First, my credentials, in case you don’t know me: Hi, my name is Tyler McCall, and my debut novel PEOPLE LIKE YOU comes out in spring 2027! Soon I’ll have a cover and a preorder link and all that fun stuff, but until then, you can follow me over on Goodreads to stay updated.
For some, the very concept of coming up with an idea for a novel is foreign, and I get it. I definitely couldn’t open up a blank document and force myself to come up with ideas. Explaining the way I get ideas for stories actually makes me sound a bit nuts, I think, because the way it has always happened is that I’ll be in the middle of something—showering, reading, out on a walk—and a scene or a bit of dialogue will pop into my head. The characters are already there and they’re real, even if they’re still pretty fuzzy to me.
That’s what happened with PEOPLE LIKE YOU. The initial idea came to me in 2022; it’s funny, actually, how specifically I can remember the moment it happened, because it was January and I was at my in-laws for a delayed Christmas celebration. It was late at night, I was reading because I couldn’t sleep, and the image of Jacob and Charlotte—my two main characters—arguing in a private library sprung into my head fully formed. I could see their dynamic so clearly, that even while they were at odds with each other, they wanted each other desperately. (I really can’t wait until the book is out so I can discuss which scene this is!)
Whenever I have a scene pop into my head that I find interesting, I try to imagine those characters in a few different scenarios. If I can’t put together maybe another five to ten snippets, it usually dies (or, if I like the scene enough, gets absorbed into a different story). But usually, while I’m pulling on those threads, a fuller picture starts to come together and that’s when I know I’m cooking.
ART
Art & Photography: , , , ,
Writing: , , , , ,
, the creative director at Balenciaga, is now on Substack. His first post is an inside look into the making of the fashion house’s most recent couture collection.
Author and speaker is now on Substack, where he’ll be sharing life lessons and philosophy.
Internet fixture Henry Smith has published his first Substack post, an exploration into the phrase “of course.”
The San Francisco Chronicle’s former sports columnist, Scott Ostler, is now on Substack.
Hunter Harris, a Team USA luge athlete, is documenting his journey as a hopeful for the 2030 Winter Olympics 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 New York office.
2026-07-22 00:02:33
It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet.
This is less true on Substack, and we aim to keep it that way. As a first step, we’re launching a feature with Pangram in the Substack app today. Going forward, you’ll be able to scan text to see how much of it was likely written by hand or with AI assistance. More on that in a moment, but first let me explain why this matters.
There is an increasing share of text on social media that is generated by AI—as much as 40% on some platforms, according to Pangram’s estimate. This is a big change. Many people complain their feeds are filled with soulless slop. Others don’t yet realize when they are reading something written by no one.
The core problem is not people using AI, or the quality of its output. Not everything made with AI is slop, and not all slop is made with AI. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That’s Claudefishing.
Here’s how Freddie deBoer put it:
I access human-made art because I know there’s a human behind it and that’s what I’m looking for, other humans, showing me in art what they hide in their selves. Fooling me in that process is just a con.
We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of what we do: building an economic engine for culture. That means helping real people, who think, feel, observe, argue, experiment, consider, struggle, exhort, and care, to make money doing work they believe in. The network is based on trust between people, and that’s why it works.
When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.
This is an emerging space, and we don’t claim to have all the answers. But one thing we do know is that we don’t want to wait until your Substack app turns into LinkedIn before we start to learn and make progress. So to start, we’re launching some new tools that we hope will increase transparency and give us a basis to ask for your feedback.
We’re partnering with Pangram, the leading AI-detection tool. You’ll be able to scan notes, replies, comments, and posts to see an estimate of how much of the text was written by hand or with AI assistance. This will work on text longer than 100 words, published from today on, and will show an analysis only to those who request it.
Note that Pangram can only detect whether AI was used to make the text, not whether great human care went into creating it, nor whether AI tools were used as a source. It is not perfect, but independent research suggests that it detects AI-generated text with a high degree of accuracy. We believe it is beneficial for people to have access to tools like this to help make their own judgments.
We’re also introducing tools for creators, including the ability to add a “How I make this” statement where you can explain your process and set expectations for readers. You can run Pangram on your drafts prior to publication, as well as report and remove any scans on your own work that you believe are mistaken.
These features are available now on web and iOS and will be coming to Android soon. This is just a starting point. Depending on feedback and interest, we are considering tools that will:
Let you set preferences around AI content for your own community in your Reply Rules
Give creators more ways to express the individual value they offer, whether through human writing or thoughtful AI use
Give readers the option to set preferences about what gets recommended to them
Continue to improve our systems that fight spam, bots, and scams of all kinds as AI accelerates these problems
We’re not against people using AI to assist their work, and we think people should be free to choose which tools they use to express themselves. Some on the platform are human-writing maximalists, others are publicly exploring the frontier of using AI tools while sweating the details to make work they stand behind. We use AI all the time at Substack to write software, do research, and build product features like clipping, translations, and more.
But people should know what they’re getting. For example, you might be fine reading someone’s sharp analysis in which they leaned heavily on AI to present their findings but only want to spend time engaging with replies written by a human hand. Either way, you should have a choice in the matter.
We’re all entering this strange new world together, and we can think of no better way to figure out the new tools and new social norms we need than open debate. We want to hear from you: How can Substack help support valuable human creation in the age of AI? When is AI use Claudefishing? When is it great?
Human perspective is the essential ingredient of culture, and this will be true no matter how powerful AI becomes. In fact, the more you expect these tools to keep improving, the more important it is to understand the provenance of what you read. Claude has a lot to offer! But when I want Claude’s opinion, I’ll ask Claude.
2026-07-18 21:02:27
This week, we’re asking questions about sales on BookTok, what happens next for Phoebe Gates, and dads with disposable income.
MUSIC
An investigation into the morality of background sound.
—Jonah and Erin in Blackbird Spyplane
Can music be evil? I never really thought about it until a few years ago, when I listened to an interview with Nick Cave during which he asserted that it cannot—“that music in itself has a moral dimension. That it’s essentially good. That it works to improve matters.”
Cave argued that this is true of music even at its most hateful, violent, inflammatory, abject, nihilistic, etc.—true, for instance, of the misanthropic music he himself made early in his career. Starting out, he explained, he’d sought the “transcendent impulse in chaos.” He’d been “a drug-addicted young guy” with a “jaundiced, contemptuous view of humanity,” and although this view was “extreme,” it was “also the way a lot of young people see the world, and in many ways, from their perspective, quite rightly so.” Jaundiced and contemptuous music, Cave said, contains the same “potential for doing good” as any other kind.
I think back to this interview whenever I encounter music that seems saturated with malevolent energy. Filosofem by the Norwegian neo-Nazi black-metal band Burzum… “Happy” by Pharrell Williams… brat by Charli xcx … I hear music like this and I wonder if, in its foul and airless vision of the human soul, it counts as evil. But I return to Cave’s absolutist stance, that there is a radical, salutary potential in the act of making and listening to music, and that even the most antisocial, insipid, cynical, narcissistic, and otherwise evil-seeming music is, for that reason, good at its root.
I do think it’s possible to affirm this essential goodness, however, while allowing for cases where music can be twisted to evil ends. And recently, I’ve been wondering whether one of my favorite genres—ambient music—is especially well-suited to evil purposes, albeit in a banal and sneaky way that has only become clear in the past few years.
LITERATURE
MONEY
Allison Raskin, who receives financial assistance from her father, examines what independence really means.
Last week, my husband went out of town for the first time since our son was born. For four (restless) nights, I slept in the house as the sole adult in charge of one baby and two dogs. I woke up each morning to cries, carefully administered my son’s medicine, fed the dogs and wrangled everyone for a poop-filled walk involving two leashes and a stroller before starting my workday. As I slowly shuffled down the sidewalk, I took stock of the life I have built for myself. I felt empowered and proud. Then a familiar doubt crept in.
Could I really claim these hallmarks of adulthood if the only thing making them possible is my father’s generosity? As I’ve shared before, my father pays for our childcare and owns our home where we live rent-free. This arrangement is what allowed us to afford having a child in Los Angeles on my income. If I didn’t have my dad’s help, our lives would be very different, and knowing this has made it hard for me to feel like a “proper adult.”
I’m realizing that deep in my soul, I have bought into the idea that financial independence is the cornerstone of adulthood. This icky part of me believes that everything else I do—writing books, coaching couples, parenting—doesn’t “count” as much as making a lot of money and not having to ask my family for help. I do not want to believe this. It goes against all my values and the reality of living in a capitalist society where making six figures in a major city doesn’t go very far. But the feeling of inferiority remains.
If this were simply a debate of logic, rather than emotion, it would be easy for me to stop placing a disproportionate amount of importance on my salary when judging my capability as an adult. There is simply too much evidence against the argument that income has anything to do with your maturity or intelligence. Think about all the brilliant people you know who are underpaid and all the total bozos that take in over a million dollars a year because they were born into the right family. The system is rigged. Boomers are not more wealthy than millennials because they are better at being adults. If anything, their lucky timing has allowed them to dodge the emotional development that financial instability has demanded of younger generations.
Sharing generational wealth isn’t even a modern phenomenon. For centuries, parents have been helping set their kids up for success with advantages like noble titles, trust funds and multi-generational housing. What is the point of amassing wealth in the first place if not to improve the life of your family? If I were in my father’s position, I would be doing the exact same thing for my child.
I know all of this and yet I still feel like I am playing dress-up.
ATHLETICS & ART
TECH
Phia, Phoebe Gates’s fashion-tech startup, has recently found itself in hot water after Bloomberg reported that the company was allegedly claiming sales it wasn’t responsible for. Sneha Rampalli, who thought about working there, looks at what’s going on.
— in Money Whispers
Phia is the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni. They called it the Google flights for fashion, a personal shopping assistant for the young woman who is hustling. Phoebe says, “she shops like a genius, but doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.”
But Ben Edelman, an independent researcher who has spent decades digging into deceptive practices in digital advertising, uncovered wild findings. Phia works as a browser extension, and it engaged in a practice called cookie stuffing.
When a user reaches the purchase phase, even if they had arrived at the retailer through their own search or through a completely different affiliate link, Phia’s extension would silently open a background tab, inject its own referral code, and then take credit for the sale.
Translate: Phia was claiming commissions on purchases it didn’t earn, taking credit for sales that other publishers drove.
This is a fundamental violation of rules in affiliate marketing. You are only paid commission if a user really clicks, that too for your own link, but Phia’s code was generating fake clicks.
Bloomberg tested this across more than 50 sites.
During one test, Bloomberg found that clicking on a link to Nordstrom from a Wirecutter article, “The Best 4th of July Deals Still Live,” triggered a background tab that replaced the Wirecutter affiliate link with Phia’s. The same behavior was observed when Bloomberg clicked on a Google ad from a different publisher’s website.
But when Phia released their statement, they just called it a “bug.”
“Within the last 24 hours, we were made aware that in a recent release our codebase was causing misattributions from a subset of users,” the spokesperson said. “As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue.”
While this is a serious financial crime, Phia is not the inventor of cookie stuffing.
I understand this space pretty well. Before Google and Money Whispers, I co-founded a social impact startup built on affiliate revenue. Early on, I realized the business model was very hard to accomplish. There were minimal returns per purchase, and it required massive volume. So when I saw that Honey was not only surviving but thriving, I was intrigued. Turns out four years later it is the subject of an ongoing class-action lawsuit for nearly identical practices. And one of Phia’s advisors was Honey’s president.
I want to be careful here because I don’t know exactly what was known, when, and by whom, but I do believe the connection matters, because cookie stuffing isn’t some obscure technical glitch. It’s a known practice with a history of legal consequences.
BEAUTY
TRAVEL
Anne Byrn returns to Paris, searching for the same sense of magic she felt over 40 years ago while attending cooking school.
— in Between the Layers
WHY DO FRUIT PRESERVES taste better in Paris?
And is it possible to go back someplace that once meant something to you and experience that same wonder again?
These were two questions swirling around in my head in late May when I returned to Paris four decades after being a cooking school student there.
In the early ’80s, sensing the need for a more solid culinary foundation, I took a leave of absence from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and enrolled at La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine, at 34 Rue St. Dominique in Paris’s stately seventh arrondissement.
La Varenne had been founded in 1975 by British-American food writer and cooking teacher Anne Willan and was named in honor of Francois Pierre de la Varenne, the 17th-century author of the founding text of modern French cooking. Classes were taught by French chefs and translated simultaneously into English. I did not know it at the time, but La Varenne graduates would become the editors of food magazines, heads of food and beverage programs, famous chefs and cookbook authors, as well as leading caterers and cooking school teachers.
Julia Child was well connected to La Varenne and would appear out of nowhere at a lunch or Sunday brunch in someone’s nearby apartment. It was truly a pinch-me-to-make-sure-this-is-real kind of experience.
The way I finagled leaving a full-time job and hopping on a plane to Paris was to agree to write weekly for the newspaper while I was gone. This was before email or fax, so I wrote my columns longhand and put them in the mail.
Which might sound like an Eleanor Roosevelt way to live out Emily in Paris, but if it allowed me to be away and learn and grow, so be it. A small hiccup was that Delta Airlines lost my bags for a week. Other than that inconvenience, I lived in an apartment on Quai Voltaire along the Seine River, walked to class each morning like a Parisian, and traveled a bit around Europe after classes concluded.
Back then, I soaked in the small things I still love most about Paris—the morning greetings even when you don’t feel like talking—“bonjour madame” (you do feel better after you say it).
I remember fresh flowers on every corner and how people carried bouquets of flowers to give to other people. I remember thinking that the French dressed with such style and I needed to ditch the American white tennis shoes.
I skinned an eel, made my own croissants, perfected béarnaise, and tasted goat cheese for the first time. I took a weekend train trip to the Champagne region. I was in the same room with Julia Child and her co-author Simone (Simca) Beck. I bought my most favorite copper pans at the legendary cookware shop called E. Dehillerin.
COMICS
BOOKS
As readership fluctuates and social media platforms morph into new beasts, authors are trying to understand how to properly move the needle.
— in Renew with Amy Chan
Today I got the conversion report from the $10,000 TikTok influencer campaign I ran for the launch of UNSINGLE. Guess how many books it sold?
Three book sales.
Not three thousand. Three. That’s $3,333 per book, which makes each copy roughly the price of a used 2006 Honda Civic, except the Civic would have been more useful.
I’m sharing the full breakdown of what I spent, what converted, and what I’d do differently, because I spent a big chunk of my advance trying to give my second book momentum, and most of that money evaporated. If you’re launching a book, learn from my receipts instead of generating your own.
What Not to Do
1. The $10,000 TikTok influencer campaign
The pitch is seductive: creators with engaged audiences talk about your book, the algorithm does the rest. Here’s the thing. The content was good. This was the best video from my campaign, and I mean it when I say it’s genuinely well made: watch it here.
It just doesn’t convert. Views are not sales. People watch a 40-second video about your book the same way they watch a video about a raccoon eating grapes: entertained, moved even, and then they keep scrolling.
2. The $10,000 consulting / speaking gig agency
I paid another agency $10,000 to book speaking engagements in exchange for bulk book buys. They booked zero. Not “fewer than promised.” Zero. When I asked for a refund, they said they put in effort and that I was never guaranteed results. Um, what? After a lot of haggling, they finally refunded a portion of my fee.
3. The $24,000 PR retainer
I hired a PR agency for four months. To their credit, they landed me an hour segment on Tamron Hall, which was big. I got a big spike on Amazon the day it aired and it probably netted about 200 book sales. The Tamron Hall social team posted a few collaboration posts on their IG page, which got hundreds of thousands of views collectively (example of one here). While I can’t measure how many of those translated to sales, it was good reach and credibility.
FELINES
Art & Photography: , , , ,
Video & Audio: ,
Writing: , , , ,
The editors at Audible have launched Speak Easy, where they’ll be posting a biweekly podcast, listening recommendations, and short- and long-form essays.
Chef and London restaurateur Thomas Straker is now on Substack. He’ll be sharing the dishes he’s cooking at home, the restaurants he’s excited about, the ingredients he’s obsessed with, and the lessons he’s learned from years spent in professional kitchens.
Winston Churchill’s official literary estate will offer “unique access to Churchill’s prolific literary output” and “his vast collection of personal papers” on Substack.
Jordon Cox, aka The Coupon King, is on Substack with “deals, freebies, codes and tricks” for his readers.
Dr. Shefali, a clinical psychologist, has launched Raising Conscious Children, which will include “frameworks you can use with your family” along with reflections on raising children in the modern world.
Journalist and speaker Danae Mercer is now “exploring confidence, motherhood, beauty, ambition, and the stories that shape us” on Substack.
Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate and co-founder of Google DeepMind, has joined Substack and will be “trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality.”
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.
2026-07-17 00:02:11
The 2026 World Cup matches have been watched nearly 12 billion times worldwide thus far. It’s a moment that arrives only every four years, one that intertwines pride of country with pride of sport, aspiration with indignation, hope and heartbreak. And bolstering it all are the players, trying to stay afloat, if not thrive, under a wave of overwhelming pressure.
Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach know a bit about what that’s like. Foudy, who played on the U.S. national women’s team from 1988 to 2004, and Wambach, who joined from 2003 to 2015 and holds the second-highest record for international goals, have not only helped blaze a trail for women’s soccer but, between them, have participated in eight World Cups, clinching three championship titles for their country. On the pitch, they dealt with the kind of stress involved in elite competition—from proving their merit to processing regret.
Now they, alongside tennis legend Billie Jean King, co-host Welcome to the Party, a twice-weekly women’s-sports podcast here on Substack. The Post asked Foudy and Wambach to give us the inside scoop on what it’s like to play at the highest level, the euphoria that comes with winning and the devastation with losing, and how they managed all the chaos of performing on a world stage.
Julie: Well, you [Abby] may be different than me, but there was really no exploring, because with the Women’s World Cup, we didn’t have that many days in between games. The men’s is expanded a little bit more. We were playing every third or fourth day, and it gets to be a lot—so I would just shut it down, which is so unlike me, because I’m an explorer and adventurer. I want to go see everything, and I’m so curious, but you just couldn’t. Your body would not allow that.
I would spend a lot of time lying horizontal, watching the World Cup. Or if you’re at the Olympics, watching the Olympics.
Abby: Is that true? You would watch?
Julie: I’d shut down. I would gladly watch all the different games and whatever movies. Anything. But I did not want to expend any energy.
Abby: I did a lot of lying down and nothing. But I’m very, very, very good at doing nothing. Do you know this about me?
Julie: There was no Love Island to watch, however, back then.
Abby: No, but for World Cups, depending on what year we’re talking about, we would bring loads of DVDs to watch movies and to watch shows. And this is back in the day when every TV series had 40 episodes. It was wonderful. When you retired, Jules, we got a little bit more amenities when we would travel, so we would have team rooms where there would be video gaming consoles and places to hang out where we could all gather together. But I never watched any other World Cup games. You want to know the only time I watched a World Cup game? I watched Japan beat, I think it was Germany, in the 2011 Women’s World Cup. And I remember watching the end of that game, and I remember when Japan won—we had just beaten Japan—I remember looking at my mom, and I said, “We’re going to win the World Cup.” And I jinxed us. I’ll never forgive myself.
Julie: If you don’t follow the Women’s World Cup history like we do, [the U.S.] lost to Japan in the final in penalty kicks in 2011. However, I will say that was the year that Japan had been going through so much with the tsunami.
Abby: They deserved to win that game.
Julie: I played with Abby at the tail end of my career and the start of hers. We overlapped at the 2004 Olympics, and I knew that she had some superstitions, but not until we did an episode on these superstitions. She just kept saying, “And then, and then, and then I have this, and then I do this.”
Abby: I actually attribute it to it being a success meter, because every time I scored or did something well in a game, I would just repeat.
Julie: And she scored a lot of goals.
I did have one superstition with my high school team, because we had been winning, winning, winning, and winning—winning a lot. I had to wear the same underwear, which had teddy bears and soccer balls on it, every game, which was such a pain. Do not have that superstition, people. If you have a superstition, make it not underwear. Because sometimes you forget to wash the laundry that week, and then you’ve got to be like, “Oh god. I’ve got to do it in the sink, and I’ve got to dry it out.” It was bad. They were falling apart by my senior year. When we finally did lose, I burnt those underwear, and I was like, “Never again am I doing that superstition.”
Abby: Yes, there is external pressure. And one of the things that I had to keep reminding myself yesterday, after our U.S. men’s team lost, was that “Oh, you are not a player, Abby. You didn’t play.” This thing, them losing, is not negatively going to affect your life in any way. You are safe. I had to remind myself.
Julie: Because you’re bracing yourself for the aftermath of that?
Abby: When I was playing, I was playing for my livelihood. I knew that if we won, if I scored goals, I knew that more would come for me and the life that I wanted.
Julie: To pay the bills. To pay rent.
Abby: Our women’s national team wasn’t paying us a ton of money, and so all the off-the-field endorsement deals really did matter. So I was playing for my life, and when we didn’t win world championships, I was devastated in a way that felt like maybe my life was over in a weird-not-true way. I knew my life wasn’t over, but it kind of was in some ways. There was a lot of that external pressure.
And how do we deal with it? That’s kind of the way that our women’s national team rolls. We want the pressure. That’s kind of our sweet spot. We train in those environments where our coaching staff always try to create the highest, most pressurized, intense moments in training so that when we experienced some of those similar moments in world championships and World Cups, it wouldn’t feel weird. We’d be like, “Oh yeah, this makes sense. This feels normal.”
What about you, Jules?
Julie: Of course you felt external pressure. I remember when we were hosting the World Cup in 1999—this is the World Cup where Brandi [Chastain] scores the winning penalty kick and takes her shirt off and gets naked—and I remember saying to Billie Jean King, who was a friend in the ’90s, that as we were going into that tournament, I was feeling a lot of pressure because we were the hosts, and we were trying to convince people—because this is before women’s soccer was really popular—that they should come to the games and that women’s soccer was a big deal. We were trying to set a standard for what a world event could look like on the global stage for women.
So there was a lot on the line. And I said to her, “What if we don’t do well and this tournament tanks?” And she’s like, “Foudy, pressure is a privilege.”
She was like, “Yeah, it’s a lot, but damn, you’ve done the work. Embrace it. Wrap your arms around it.” So our huge mantra during the World Cup was “Pressure is a privilege.” Our team was very joyful and loved to have fun and do pranks, and so we tried to strike this balance of keeping it loose yet understanding when you step on the field, it’s game time. I think we did a really good job of that, and we ended up winning the World Cup in 1999. Obviously that worked out fine for us. But this is pre–social media. I always say, thank god we didn’t play in the social-media era, ’cause that’s a whole different beast you have to deal with.
Julie: We call it post-Olympics, post–World Cup blues, and it’s real. And we talk to athletes about it all the time as they’re going into their first World Cup and Olympics. When you train that hard for so long and are so locked in—because it’s years of training; it’s a lifetime of training, honestly—[the blues] just hit you so hard that first time if you don’t know or aren’t expecting it. I’m sure this is the same for people going through a lot of big life events. You’re planning for a wedding or you’ve got this big event that you’ve been working on at work forever. We used to joke and call it trauma bonding, but there is some trauma bonding that happens around the fact that you spend so much energy and time focused on this one thing, that when it’s gone and that thing is no longer there, you feel like, “Well, what am I going to do with my life?”
And it is real. Winning or not winning, it didn’t matter. Even if you won, you feel this emptiness, especially when you’re playing on a team where you love these women. These are your sisters—this sisterhood that you develop, this bond, by essentially dedicating your life to something that matters so much—and it is really hard.
It is a gut punch in terms of how you deal with that mentally. When we lost the 2000 Olympics after we won the ’99 World Cup, and we lost in the final to Norway, it was a handball [call], and I’m still living with it. I still have cold sweats at night sometimes thinking about that handball in 2000 that was 26 years ago, y’all.
I just remember going through depression and struggling. I am not usually like that. I’m very even-keeled with emotions like that. It was hard, and I wish someone had said, “You’re going to be okay.”
Abby: That’s so interesting that it happened to you for both winning and losing, because for me, when we won, the blues were worse. When we won [the World Cup], I think that I gave myself the night to really celebrate, and then the next day I was just adrift. I felt adrift at sea. But when we lost, I was more laser-focused. The mountain just continued on. When the tournament is over, you just can’t process fast enough all that is going on.
Like, what you’re thinking about during the group-stage games, how you’re interacting with the performance of your personal self and then your team or your forward line or your midfield, the leaders or the new kids, or having the conversations with your coaches and trying to block out the noise, but of course some of that gets in. Trying to think about and dream about lifting the trophy at the end and whether you do or not, it’s impossible to process all of it as fast as it’s happening and as fast as you’re experiencing it and feeling it.
It is a wild couple of weeks post-tournament.
Julie: And you’re young and your frontal lobe isn’t even developed. You want me to handle all this? You’re asking too much of me.
Abby: I know. So I drank, that’s what I did. I drank a lot. Not anymore. I’m not subscribing to it. I think that I would have played much longer had I not chosen to do that.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can read, hear, and see more of Abby and Julie on their Substack, Welcome to the Party.
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
Art & Photography: , , , ,
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 episode drops, conversations about the show, and his favorite manifesto lines.
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.
