Hi, I’m Edith, and I’ve been publishing Drawing Links, an illustrated journal, since 2019. I’ve chronicled getting married, having children, and searching for purpose, although I feel like it’s best when it’s not really about anything. Before this, I was a staff writer at The Cut, and before that (skipping back a bit), I worked at The Hairpin, the women’s website I founded.
I’m also a longtime Substack reader—my profile tells me I subscribe to 99 newsletters, 17 of which are paid subscriptions. I think a few of those are comped, but I don’t remember anymore. Here are just a few current favorites!
HEALING
Diary comics (not mine)
For anyone interested in diary comics (which IMO should be everyone!), Vanessa Davis is a master. The master? Every post of hers is great, but I love unreasonably handsome guys, so I’ll pick this one as a teaser.
In 2024, Evan Goldfine listened to every Bach composition and chronicled it in A Year of Bach, complete with audio clips. I loved reading it even more than I enjoy listening to Bach, aka LTB (and I like LTB!). Evan is still LTB (and occasionally complaining about NYT Games), and the other day he described a recent experience at Carnegie Hall.
Víkingur Ólafsson, in his March piano recital at Carnegie Hall, requested no applause between long works of Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven. He set an absurdly high bar of holding 3,000 people’s attention without any release. Between pieces, his body never quite rested—he just paused in suspension for a moment and began anew. [. . .]
Víkingur creates a sense of space like no other living pianist. He is synesthetic, and he reports experiencing the key of E as green. (He sported a sage velvet jacket at the show.) There was almost something of dewed grass in the performance, he and Beethoven both alluding to fragility and renewal. Notes and their overtones rang and reverberated through the centuries and the uninterrupted hour.
Plenty of sturm und drang follow in the theme’s variations, each pointing inevitably toward a peaceful recapitulation. After about 80 minutes in shared, focused silence, we started to sense the first shimmers of our pending reentry to the unceasing noises of 57th Street (and of our private minds). But in those final moments, the hall remained as one consciousness distributed among thousands of bodies.
And then, from the first-tier fancy seats, in the second measure of the returned theme, came a familiar sensory shock. The ringer was set to loud, of course—the tune went something like this:
I regularly save Allie Jones’s celebrity gossip posts for “rainy” moments. Alternately, they might be the posts I open the most quickly. It’s pure candy. When she sold Gossip Time hats, I bought one immediately.
I have been following Pete Davidson’s relationship with Elsie Hewitt with some interest, as the two had a baby together in December, three days before I gave birth to my second. Given my familiarity with this particular baby timeline, my suspicion is that Hewitt was pregnant or just about to be when Davidson started rolling out their relationship in the tabloids at the end of last March. (Sources insisted to Page Six at the time that Hewitt, a model and influencer with one million followers on Instagram, was a “non-celebrity” and thus “different” from the parade of famous women Davidson had dated in the past.) Now, both of our babies are hitting the four-month sleep regression, and Davidson and Hewitt’s relationship is reportedly hitting the skids. Makes sense!
Terrell Johnson writes about running, although there’s a lot of running-adjacent and non-adjacent content too. Because, really, what isn’t about running? In my opinion, The Half Marathoner is a must-read for anyone interested in running and the people who do it (it also inspired my dream of traveling the world to run half-marathons). He interviews “regular” runners every week or so, and I loved this bit from a recent interview because it reminded me exactly of how I started.
What have you learned about yourself from your running journey? Is there anything that’s changed about you since you started?
I’ve learned that people run for all kinds of reasons, but I run for my mental health. I run to be outside. Everything else is nice to have: good gear, good company, etc., but I don’t need anything except that time alone.
I’ve learned that it’s okay to do things seasonally. I can still call myself a runner even in the summer when I refuse to run in the 90-plus degree heat of D.C. I used to have such strict ideas about what made someone an athlete or a runner, and now I know that it’s more about a mindset than anything else. Every time I see someone running on the roads as I drive by, I am clapping for them in my head. I cheer for everyone.
A couple of years ago, I signed up for a running retreat in Alaska. I didn’t know anyone on the retreat, but I wanted to see Alaska, and I wanted to do some trail running. Our group ran and walked at such a diverse range of paces, and it was the first time I really gave myself permission to not go all out every time.
I ran a 10K, and then the next day I felt like I wanted to walk to the glacier lake instead of running it. The person I was with felt like she wanted to run. We high-fived, and then went at our own paces. On the way back from the lake, I felt like running, so I caught up with another couple in our group.
I loved getting to know them through this run. I learned that I can really listen to what I want and need in the moment, and that giving it to myself is the right thing to do.
I only recently followed this author, Sara Szal, but I enjoyed the first post of hers I came across (below). She’s also currently microdosing psilocybin.
Progesterone decline affects sleep architecture and stress recovery. A fatigued nervous system does not easily enter the parasympathetic state required for full arousal. The sleep data is directly relevant: women in perimenopause who experience disrupted sleep are also experiencing disrupted recovery of the autonomic baseline that makes sustained arousal possible.
Orgasmic capacity is generally maintained with aging, but the intensity of orgasm may diminish due to decreased pelvic floor muscle tension and reduced uterine contractions during climax.
The opportunity is important to consider. Women in perimenopause and post-menopause who understand their anatomy and advocate for adequate arousal time report higher sexual satisfaction than younger women—not lower. The research on sexual satisfaction across the lifespan shows satisfaction peaks in the fifth and sixth decades for women who have the knowledge and the partners.
“The Debutante” by David Seidner, shared by Martin Lerma. Seidner spent the ’90s tracking down descendants of aristocrats painted by John Singer Sargent and photographed them in similar style.
READING
Book insider stuff and beyond
I’m currently reading Emma Straub’s (excellent) new novel, American Fantasy, which is partly about boy bands and which I was compelled to buy after Missive No. 1 of her supremely charming book tour travelogue. My favorite missive, though, was No. 2, when New Kid on the Block Joey McIntyre came to a tour event. I cried. (Should this be fodder for a romance novel!?)
You ever write a novel about a boyband and then befriend your favorite member of a boyband and then he comes to your book event in a sweatshirt from your bookstore and calls you his therapist in answer to someone else’s question????????? Just me? I think in this photo, I am saying, what is life, and he is saying, it’s just friendship, my bro, let’s not overthink this. Joe Mac showed, everybody, he showed.
ESPN commentator and six-time Grand Slam doubles champion Rennae Stubbs is now on Substack. Her Stubbsy Snippets will delve into tennis strategy and what to expect in major tennis action, like accurately predicting what might take Jannik Sinner down at the French Open.
has launched its homepage on Substack, where Ashtyn Butuso and Daniel-Yaw Miller will be curating “the amazing stories, posts, and narratives in sports—the things we are all talking about in our group chats, happy hours, and cookouts.”. Simultaneously, they’re launching OffBallFC, a soccer-focused news and opinion site, in the lead-up to the World Cup.
, host of The Viall Files podcast and a longtime figure on The Bachelor, is launching a Substack where he’ll share weekly digests on “life, relationships and culture through the lens of reality TV.”
The pioneering music collective is now on Substack, creating an archival series that pulls back the curtain on past productions ahead of their forthcoming tour.
has brought her fashion and lifestyle expertise to Substack. In her eponymous newsletter, she traverses between luxury fashion, the secondhand market, and motherhood.
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 Substack’s editorial team.
Hey, it’s Mo Diggs. I like to compare today’s media landscape with that of the past because time is cyclical and the past is prologue.
Excited and honored to guest curate the Memorial Day weekend edition of The Weekender. I’ve got an eclectic assortment of essays, short-form posts, podcasts, and even a little literature to fully stimulate your palate.
TECHNOLOGY
The oracle of the matrix
It is easier to write the Great American Novel than it is to have a fresh perspective on tech. There are so many posts simply blaming smartphones for all our maladies, you wonder if there is a lobbying group behind them. Katherine Dee consistently astounds me with her boundless sagacity. Here, she illustrates how the current chatbot craze is a return to animism, which has been repressed for centuries and before now was primarily dealt with through puppets. I do not take drugs anymore, but the way I say “Wow man” when I read her on the L train must have passengers thinking otherwise.
There is a wave of books asking how social media platforms shape the stories we tell about ourselves and, through that shaping, what new kind of self they are producing. Megan Garber’s Screen People argues that the language and ethos of entertainment have permeated every aspect of life, so that we now see each other as characters in an ongoing show whose continuity we are responsible for maintaining. Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s The Story of Your Life, out in August, makes the related case that algorithmic platforms have disciplined what counts as a shareable experience into what Jia Tolentino’s blurb calls a “rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm.” I haven’t read either yet, but I’m willing to bet they’re basically right. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself.
We think in a televisual frame: Spotify provides the soundtrack of our lives, we accuse people of “main character syndrome,” we reference the invisible “writers’ room” and “seasons” constantly.
If television introduced this framing, then social media fortified it.
I think this is the last critique of social media we’re going to get. The era in which we treated our screen-lives as fake is ending. Not because anyone won the argument, but because the objects on the other side of the screen have started to seem like they have interiors of their own—and that pull, I’ll argue, is dragging us back into our bodies rather than further into the feed. In fact, I will say this: social media as we know it is dead. Technology-saturated lives are not.
Daniel Falatko is one of the funniest people on Substack. He doesn’t post as often as I would like him to on his newsletter, but his Notes run is the stuff of legend. He often recaps the Bret Easton Ellis podcast and shares mordant observations on trap music and jazz, but my favorite notes of his are haiku-length sketches of Bushwick life like this one, where he can’t hide his momentary obsession with a colorful subway passenger.
Prester John Andrews is one of my favorite culture writers on here. He’s refreshingly unpretentious yet insightful. His podcast interview with Substack wunderkind is particularly fascinating. Sprout explains how his first-ever Sproutstack post, “Is Mike Wazowski Jewish or Polish?,” went viral. This is the diametric opposite of my come-up on Substack. For more than a year, I began my newsletter posting into an indifferent void, but I kept doing it to shut up my friend , who also has a Substack. Then I fatefully linked to one of Ross Barkan’s Guardian articles. I was not aware that he was already a subscriber of mine, so he began linking to me and almost single-handedly gave me my current readership. What Sprout and I have in common, if not beginner’s luck, is that we both posted. Don’t get hung up on how often you have to write—just shut up and do it.
In today’s episode of The Xanadu Review, I’m joined by Russell Sprout. We talk Gilmore Girls (and why Emily Gilmore has done nothing wrong, ever), how the medium of how we consume art changes the experience, the album experience as the theft of cows by vampires, the depressing but funny future of aging millennials, the Palantir manifesto, the tech world and startup culture, “abundance” and the future of normies, the 2020s as a secular religious revival and much, much more!
It is hard to choose just one great post from culture magazine The Metropolitan Review, but this review of Cairo Smith’s book Scenebux by ARX-Han is something else. One of my worst posts was a dumb manifesto I wrote calling for Lit 2.0. The basic idea was a literature that treated the internet as a part of our lives, without the desperate attempts to re-create 4chan-speak that seemed to plague much of the literature of the early part of this decade. Scenebux seems to be doing a fine job of painting a more lived-in reflection of life around the internet, where people still smoke and curse and have sex. Han’s review does what all good criticism does: gives you the proper framing for understanding why a work is worthy of discussion, let alone an outright purchase.
Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works—an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.”
The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.
Scenebux is a short, snappy novella about a young underemployed writer named Ben Extina who embarks on a modern Pynchonesque tour of “the scene,” or the contemporary online ecosystem of niche intellectual figures. This landscape is primarily focused on a lively anatomical slice of a particular right-coded intellectual subculture backed by A Certain Silicon Valley Oligarch, but isn’t fixated on a single persona or figure—the novella’s center is its rapid momentum and flurry of events, scene changes, and characters.
In this respect, Scenebux isn’t quite situated as an internet novel, since the online intellectuals that Smith is referencing are corporeal characters that the protagonist meets in real life. Here the novel encompasses a broader effort to recapture the dynamic, gonzo-style hijinks of 20th-century protagonists who experienced the world through acts of human agency rather than the graphical user interface of a screen or the surprisingly passive creative-class jobs that seem to dominate book jacket summaries these days.
I love reading about improv, almost more than I love watching it. Will Hines describes here a technique that not only leads to bad improv comedy but, though he doesn’t say it, to bad Saturday Night Live sketches: an impatience to point out and overstate the weird part. Most of my favorite comedic moments sucker punch me with their weirdness; by the time I realize something is off, I am already laughing.
Sometimes improvisers use the idea of “framing” to try and write the whole scene themselves. That is… not good.
Framing is when you call attention to someone else’s unusual behavior. It’s a term I first heard of from the UCB Manual in 2013 (“letting your scene partner know you think they’ve done something unusual”).
Framing: I Hear You
Often you’re telling the other person that you’ve heard them. Like “Got it. I see that you’re trying to be unusual.”
Player 1: I shouldn’t have to pay taxes. I am an artist.
Player 2: (framing) I think you’re taking the idea of “artist” a little too far.
Framing: Did You Notice This?
Sometimes you frame behavior the other person did by accident.
Player 1: I shouldn’t have to pay taxes. I am an artist. Just like Paul Bunyan.
Player 2: (framing) Wasn’t Paul Bunyan a lumberjack? Also fictional?
Player 1: (changing now because of the frame) I consider lumberjacks to be artists. I long to be a lumberjack. I also long to be fictional.
Ted Hope has been a tireless advocate for filmmakers on Substack with his ambitious NonDē (for “non-dependent”) film movement. I was first introduced to this movement by Alex Rollins Berg, whose newsletter Underexposed is a must-read for any film buff. This post breaks down the rise and fall not of a particular movie star, but the entire concept of movie stars. Thrilling though it might be to root for their demise, Berg suggests how they might be our unlikely allies in the fight against corporate conglomerates and Big Tech.
For more than fifty years, the first Monday in May has belonged to the Met Gala. It was former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland who, in the 1970s, transformed the charity dinner into an extravagant pageant of fashion and celebrity, a torch Anna Wintour carries to this day.
That flame flickered earlier this month when several A-listers—including Meryl Streep, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, and Taraji P. Henson—shunned the event.
In truth, enthusiasm for the Met Gala has been thinning for some while. Many blame the intrusion of influencers in recent years. Others have pointed to mounting discomfort with the optics: a shameless circus of wealth, made more conspicuous this year by honorary ringleader Jeff Bezos, whose status as a tax-averse centibillionaire rendered the evening a tasty vessel for broader cultural resentment.
The backlash reflects not just the Gala’s fading luster but the crumbling architecture of celebrity itself. In the first quarter of the 21st century, Hollywood star power has been steadily marked down. The rise of IP, the flattening force of streaming, the deluge of preening, jabbering TikTok celebrities, and now the threat of AI have chipped the marbled plinths of our idols down to nubs. Once, they loomed large above us; now they flicker on our phone screens, at the mercy of our giant thumbs.
There are good reasons to welcome this decline. Predators have been toppled. Toxic behavior has been exposed. Performative virtue signaling has fallen blissfully silent.
And yet the film industry depends on the perceived market value of recognizable actors to finance movies—particularly original, challenging, artistically ambitious movies that directors like yours truly are fighting to make.
Alexander Sorondo has a wonderful profile of Robert Moses and LBJ biographer Robert Caro on his Substack, big reader bad grades. Those posts are paywalled, but his affecting, lyrical sketches of life working in a Miami grocery store are surprisingly free to read. The post here focuses on an employee with a learning disability who gets away with not working as a result of his condition. Sorondo’s radical empathy has the reader commiserate with the exasperated staff while also rooting for the holy fool who bites produce and puts it back on the shelves.
Our new hire at the grocery store appears to have a learning disability. He is egoless and polite. To say that he’s “innocent” feels condescending, but the word comes to mind a lot because he’s making everyone furious at the fact that he doesn’t do anything. Just starts a task and then wanders off. In the break room, eating lunch, people trade lockjawed whispers about how he comes back here every ten or fifteen minutes, opens his locker, lifts his shirt to just above his nipples and applies deodorant, then spritzes himself with cologne, then opens the fridge and scans the shelves. There’s a can of whipped cream with STAFF scrawled across the label in Sharpie. He tips his head back and shoots a jet into his mouth from two or three inches high and then puts it back and returns to work, except that “work” in this case means walking laps around the store saying “Hi How Are You” to everybody and improvising tasks that he does not complete.
It seems like he is knowingly doing nothing, like he’s well-practiced at performing busyness without getting anything done; and yet if you put it in those terms (“practiced,” “performing”) it sounds insidious.
The just launched on Substack, opening its vault with liner notes, oral histories, deep dives into artifacts, and behind-the-scenes stories from the museum’s staff and inductees.
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 Substack’s editorial team.
In the quote replies of the latest video posted by Twitter user @Criterion—which features Mad Men star Jon Hamm thoughtfully waxing poetic about rare independent films—you’ll find some of the most hellish thirst tweeting this side of the Pittdom. Sprinkled between comments on the quality of his choices (favorable) or the odd Mad Men reference are solicitations that range from the evergreen “can I say something” to the far more opaque “now pull your d*ck out.”
I thought this was a classy party, I briefly, bemusedly thought aloud on my inaugural scroll. Then I scrolled a little farther and came across the tweet that proved otherwise: “we’re not supposed to call this goon bait??”
Yeah. The Criterion Closet is goon bait now. Or maybe it always has been?
It is, for the record, absolutely insane that something as austere and tame as the Criterion Closet has become so synonymous with abject goonery. It was the Letterboxd Four Favorites before Letterboxd was a thing you heard namedropped in prestige TV shows; a genius brand of marketing in its own right, if not a little nicher. Criterion has been preserving hard-to-find films—from international auteurs to old Hollywood restorations and, recently, acclaimed streaming originals—for over 30 years now. They house their film inventory in a closet at their headquarters in New York, and for the past 15 years they’ve invited filmmakers or standup comedians or podcasters into said closet to pilfer ultra 4K Blu-rays and box sets in the guise of promoting their latest project. I can’t stress how brilliant this marketing is, truly, even if there’s no way it’s all that profitable and it’s known exclusively to a certain brand of chronically online movie nerd. Two Americas, and all that. But for that America, the Criterion Closet is essentially Hot Ones. And I do mean that in every way that matters.
I kid you not—you can find thirst tweets attached to nearly every Criterion Closet vid. Every man over the age of 35 who steps into this hallowed crawl space can get it. Jason Bateman slutted it up in a plain black tee, as did Oscar Isaac, whose own trip to the closet coincided rather serendipitously with the writing of this dispatch. He also cleaned that thing out with a level of greed I’ve not witnessed since Barry Jenkins’ closet visit. The Cut famously named Ben Affleck the “most charming guy in the Criterion Closet,” which I’m not positive I agree with but hey, it’s all subjective. There’s a “hit the towers” energy in the way Nick Offerman’s visit absolutely shattered my TL. Diego Calva even flashed us in the closet! The slut!
Men on the geriatric side of the Hottie Spectrum get plenty of love, too: there’s something about those soft fluorescent lights, the compulsion to speak passionately and articulately about film, that just makes everyone in the Criterion Closet automatically really hot. John Slattery got some polite “still would”s in reaction to his visit. Tracy Letts strolled in, confidently said, “I already have all these movies,” and was rewarded with a handful of suggestive gifs. I found myself doing a little mental “hear me out” watching Guillermo del Toro’s mobile closet picks. Other crushes I already had, like Alden Ehrenreich, got even hotter—like, infinitely hotter? Deliriously hotter?—upon visiting Criterion. Even Bob Odenkirk, whose trip to the closet dropped in tandem with Hamm’s, got a bit of love in the QRTs. Maybe Bob Odenkirk has always had lusters, but I certainly never would have known that had it not been for Criterion.
Now I’m sure you’re asking, “but what about the women?” Or alternatively, “what about the Black people?” Great questions—and here is where that aforementioned “nearly” comes into play.
Never have I been so abruptly reminded of Criterion’s target audience as I have been while poring through their closet videos. What Criterion does for older men, for crushes you might be a little bit ashamed to reveal out loud, is a modern phenomenon. It does not do the same for anyone who isn’t old and a man (or white and/or eligible for Latin Lover status). Charli XCX was in there; I can’t say it really moved the needle. Zoë Kravitz and Channing Tatum did the rare couples Criterion vid just weeks before calling off their engagement—the equivalent of giving a dog (me!) chocolate before putting it down—but their joint slay barely registered on the bisexual Richter scale. Lucy Liu reminded us all of her status as the baddest b*tch alive and was rewarded only with a smattering of sincere “she’s so cool”s. Same for Nia DaCosta. Same for Margaret Qualley, who apparently is someone that people kind of objectify? In an arthouse-y way?
Walk into a Walmart and you’ll find over half a dozen ways to buy regular Coca-Cola: you can buy 12 oz cans, 16 oz bottles, 20 oz bottles, and 2-liter bottles. The cans come in 12-packs and 24-packs, and that’s before we’ve touched Diet Coke or Coke Zero.
Each of those is what retailers call a “stock-keeping unit” (SKU), each of which has to be treated by the inventory system as a distinct product.
An average Target carries around 80,000 SKUs, while a typical Costco carries only 4,000 SKUs, a 95% smaller catalog despite Costco’s retail locations being physically larger than Target’s by around 18%. Costco has more items in their warehouse but less variety. They just identify the most popular SKUs and sell more of them.
Target tries to have “a little something for everyone,” and that imposes costs on the business. If a SKU is obscure or unpopular enough, it might never get bought, winding up as “dead inventory.”
When you have 10 varieties of ketchup, maybe you never manage to find a buyer for the last two bottles of the least-popular kind. Even if it does eventually sell, it might sit on the shelf for a long time before someone buys it.
Costco avoids this problem by selling fewer kinds of ketchup (and fewer varieties of everything else, too). There are fewer “unpopular items” that spend time languishing on the shelf.
This “fewer SKUs” approach has many other benefits for Costco:
Costco’s “No Touch Policy”
Fewer SKUs means lower operational and labor costs.
Much of Target’s labor cost is paying employees to stock shelves. Look at this photo of a Target employee physically bending over to place an item on the shelf:
I can report from my experience as a young Target employee that this process is as laborious and inefficient as it looks. Note the brown corrugated cardboard boxes next to the employee: those are the boxes that the product came in. After he’s done shelving the product, he will need to flatten the cardboard and dispose of it.
Costco’s more efficient restocking method has a name: the “no touch” policy, where products are placed directly on the sales floor without being unpacked. You’ve probably seen this before: an employee drives a forklift out to the sales floor, drops off a pallet, maybe takes an empty pallet back with them, and heads back without ever disembarking from their forklift.
There’s no Costco employee who has to “arrange the merchandise on the shelf” to make it look nice, because there aren’t shelves within reach of the customer.
Why can’t Target use this same high-efficiency method? They have more SKUs.
Because Target has “a little something for everyone,” most Target SKUs don’t occupy a whole pallet, which is why you might need to have an employee make a trip to stock 6 more bottles of Habanero Ketchup.
But having fewer SKUs is also great for financial reasons, too:
Faster inventory turnover means fewer costs
Because Costco only stocks popular SKUs, their inventory moves faster. (Think about what is implied when we say a product is “flying off the shelves”: it’s literally spending less time sitting on the shelf!)
Shelf time is costly: the retailer has to pay rent, utilities, security, and all the other overhead that comes with maintaining the physical space a product occupies. A product that sits on the shelf for 15 days before being sold is far more costly than an item that gets bought within 2 days of hitting the shelf.
Target, with 20 times as many SKUs, carries far more slow-moving inventory that lingers for weeks before anyone buys it.
Let’s start with the obvious: the art itself, and where it goes. This is the curator’s domain.
Curators shape the overall vision, meaning, and experience of a show. The selection and placement of works tells the story they want to tell, signaling relationships, relevance, and narrative within a collection of work. Art placement happens early, in close collaboration with the living artist and exhibition designer (hey, that’s me!), right at the very start of the planning process.
Curators either are, or become, deep experts in the work being shown. Hearing them talk through an exhibition is breathtaking. Curators speak about art like old friends, with intimacy, precision, and affection. I have to actively stop myself from gawking every time.
Floor Plan & Traffic Flow
The floor plan is a collaboration between the curator, living artist, and the exhibition designer, and it typically happens in tandem with art placement in the early design of a show.
Circulation, sight lines, and the highlighting of key objects are all mission-critical conversations. You want visitors to move through a show naturally and intuitively. You want them to be comfortable, curious, and never confused or claustrophobic. Nobody wants to feel crammed while contemplating a Picasso or feel lost in a hallway when there’s a Rothko around the corner.
The Art Handlers
Yes, there is an entire profession of art handling. And no, I cannot do it. When I first started working at a museum, a few friends excitedly asked this. Lolz, absolutely not—the liability alone!
Art handlers have a highly specialized skill set. They wear gloves, unpack pieces with extraordinary tenderness, are fluent in reading art manuals (yes, some individual works come with entire manuals dedicated to their installation), and install each work with a precision and care that is genuinely beautiful to watch.
Wall Color
I’d be willing to bet you can’t tell me the wall color of the last exhibition you visited. And I’d also bet that your experience would have been substantially different if it had been painted another shade.
The era of the all-white modernist cube is fading (for the most part!). Wall color is a powerful tool in setting the atmosphere of a show. It’s subtle but transformative. Think of it like a wine pairing: the color is chosen to complement the work on display. Wall colors can also function as wayfinding, guiding visitors through different areas without a single sign.
Wall color decisions involve the curators, the artist (if living), the exhibition designers, and sometimes the graphic designers. Every curator and exhibition designer I know has a favorite color to use in a show (mine is purple, because I am, unabashedly, a regal girly). I’ve also heard a rumor that the Met does not like to use green paint, but you did not hear that from me!
, the Cambridge-trained historian, author, and broadcaster, has launched a Substack. Her work finds the dark, human stories hiding inside history’s most iconic images—in a recent post on the girl at the center of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, she writes that “that beautiful dress was a uniform, that palace was a gilded prison.”
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 Substack’s editorial team.
This week, we’re traveling nowhere, subverting expectations, cringing at the Met, and cataloging Stormtroopers.
PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL
The travel bug extinction
A wide-ranging essay on why travel has lost its allure for young Westerners. Grant David Crawford starts in his own classroom, where students have stopped arguing about travel ethics, and casts back—through Rousseau, the Romantics, the Beats, the backpackers, and Bourdain—toward a question about what we are without the “elsewhere” we used to believe in.
For the past seven or eight years I’ve taught a course on the ethics and politics of travel. The syllabus opens with a Huffington Post article by David Sze called “The Myth of Authentic Travel,” an unflashy piece that takes apart the idea that there is some “real” Thailand ducking and hiding behind the touristed one, some uncontaminated village waiting at the end of the forgotten trail if the traveler is patient, open, or adventurous enough to find it. Sze argues, correctly, that authenticity is a story the tourist tells about herself, not a property of the place she visits. It’s a clean little essay, and it works as a doorway into the harder topics that follow: colonialism, essentialism, the long shadow of the noble savage. I used to lead with it because students could easily sink their teeth into it and it reliably started arguments.
It doesn’t anymore.
I first noticed about two years ago. The class would read Sze, and where students used to push back (where they used to defend their gap year in Cambodia, or accuse Sze of being too cynical, or stage long debates about building wells in South America and ethical itineraries and whether it was possible to travel “right”), there was now a polite quiet. A few shy hands here and there. Still some carefully crafted comments. These are not less intelligent students than the ones who came before them. They are, by every measure I can take over the course of about fifteen weeks, just as ethical, just as curious, just as serious.
What has changed is something subtler. The question itself has lost its hold on them. They have moved past the argument by losing interest in its stakes.
Now, to be clear, the reasons a classroom goes quiet are many these days. The Sze article is over a decade old at this point and some of its references may read as dated. Humanities participation has declined across the board in recent years for reasons that have nothing to do with travel ethics. Students are also more cautious in seminar settings generally, particularly on topics a critical professor might be primed to push back on. Any of these could explain the change in the room without requiring a generational shift in anything deeper. The silence is not what this essay is going to argue from. It is what made me start asking the question and interrogating my own preheld beliefs. The classroom is the place I noticed. It is not the place from which I am drawing my conclusions.
Regardless, their silence has stayed with me now for some time and I’ve been trying to understand what it means.
I think it means more than the obvious thing.
So, here is the obvious thing: travel is getting harder.
Borders are tightening. Visa regimes are firming up after a long thaw. Inflation has hollowed out the middle-class travel budget. Migration crises have re-politicized the question of who gets to cross which line. Whole regions that were on every backpacker’s loop fifteen years ago, parts of the Middle East, North Africa, swaths of Southeast Asia, have become harder, costlier, or “unsafer” to move through. The unipolar post–Cold War world that produced cheap, frictionless Western travel is closing, and my students live inside the closing whether or not they read the news. They live inside it through their parents’ expressed worries about safety abroad. They live inside it through the steady thinning of international students on American campuses (new international enrollment fell 17 percent this fall alone, the largest non-pandemic decline on record), subtracting the most reliable cosmopolitan experience that an American undergraduate could once have without leaving the country. They live inside it through a felt economic reality that ranks internships above gap years, debt servicing above wandering, professional credentialing above the year of finding oneself in Cambodia.
The world has reorganized itself around them, and they have absorbed the reorganization without having to be told about it.
But that absorption via the obvious thing doesn’t quite reach the silence in the room. Students who can’t afford to travel still tend to want to travel, and to argue about how it should be done. The disengagement I’ve been watching is not economic.
Before sharing her cover of Elliott Smith’s “Twilight,” surfaced this clip of him on a morning TV show from the ’90s:
Regard, how this room full of pretty people, perfectly willing to participate in the low-vibrational farce on which this show was supposed to rest, allow the awesome force of Smith’s sincerity to re-awaken each and every one of them. Apart from the unbelievably hot woman sitting next to him, who knew it already.
And be sure to give her haunting rendition of “Twilight” a listen:
Why is it so hard for AI to write a great poem? Nabeel S. Qureshi works through the question, arriving first at a quality LLMs are particularly ill-suited to: great art subverts your expectations.
Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising.
One can explain this using the predictive processing model of the brain. As we are scanning a text, our brain is constructing the meaning and predicting the next several words. Where there is no surprise—where something is perfectly predictable, or fits some pattern that we know—our brain registers only dullness. When our expectations are violated in a way that’s satisfying to resolve, we get pleasure and novelty.
The essayist Henrik Karlsson cites the sentence “an interesting and exciting finding” as an example of bad prose, because:
“the word ‘exciting’ is sort of implicated by the word ‘interesting’. They are not synonyms, but if I had blanked ‘exciting’ and asked you, or a language model, to fill it in, ‘exciting’ would have a high probability. So it is not adding all that much information—the reader already has that adjective implicitly in their head.”
Compare the famous passage from Macbeth, where both of the bolded words are famously surprising:
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
Hence, too, the story of the writing professor who would give his students a copy of the below stanza from Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” with many words blanked out, and ask them to guess those words, and claimed that nobody had ever gotten “hothouse” or “uniquely”:
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose…
The value of surprise is more obvious in visual art. In his four-volume work The Nature of Order, the architect Christopher Alexander gives this example from a Fra Angelico painting [above].
Alexander asks us to cover up the black stripe on the priest’s robes and the door, and imagine we were the painter:
Imagine some moment before the black of the door and priest’s robe had been painted, but when everything else is more or less already there...You can see what I mean by putting your hand over the picture, so as not to see the black parts. Do you see that the picture loses much of its haunting character...can you see how immensely surprising it is?
— Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 4, p. 133
The surprise principle operates in other ways, too. We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might. This too is a kind of surprise, sometimes called defamiliarization. This is a favorite technique of Tolstoy’s, who often takes a normal action that we are all familiar with, and describes it the way an alien might. Thus he describes a person being whipped as “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor…” and so on, deconstructing the action without ever using the word “whipping.” This makes you feel the action much more viscerally than if he had just used the word to summarize it.
These are all familiar points to lovers of art. But the surprise principle operates at even deeper levels, below even our conscious perception.
As a teen, the Met Gala was like my Christmas. I’d stay up until silly hours of the night because of the time difference in London, watching the looks roll in and reviewing them on my Twitter account of a few hundred followers. My personal highlights were 2018 and 2019: Catholicism and Camp, which brought us iconic moments like Rihanna as the fashion pope and Billy Porter carried on a throne by 6 hunky men. But in hindsight, fashion’s old guard was cringing already. Tom Ford lamented how it had turned into a “costume party”, saying: “It used to just be very chic people wearing very beautiful clothes going to an exhibition about the 18th century. You didn’t have to look like the 18th century.”
André Leon Talley similarly felt that 2019’s Camp Gala had gone “off the rails”: “If you go from being a chandelier that lights up and change somewhere in the hallway to a hamburger, then I think you’ve lost the plot.” Sorry, Katy Perry, but according to Ford and Talley, it was at this moment when the Gala became cringe and redefined by such pleas for attention.
Fast forward to now, and Demna Gvasalia agrees, revealing to the New York Times last November, with a laugh, that he neither cares or knows if people still get excited about this ‘cringe’ event. While there’s a lot of things to criticise the fashion designer for, he always keeps his finger on the pulse.
So how did we get here? In 2015, Rihanna’s yellow Guo Pei cape catapulted the Gala to pop culture notoriety for a new generation and demonstrated the power of viral fashion. After that, everyone wanted to have their Rihanna moment. Though as the stunts got bigger, from Zendaya’s literal Cinderella moment to Tems’ view-blocking Oscars dress, public opinion was starting to turn.
However, as a child of the fashion brainrot era, I was always of the opinion that the crazier, the better. Raised on theatrical clips of old McQueen and Mugler shows, my brain demands drama. A beautifully tailored jacket or a cleanly cut dress does nothing for me. Saturated by constant images but removed from the tactile qualities of clothing, I need fashion that will smack me in the face, like Coperni’s spray-on dress with Bella Hadid.
But what looks good on the feed may not be so chic in real life. Remember when Tyla had to be carried up the Met steps in her (otherwise stunning) sands of time look? Or when Lana Del Rey’s headdress was fighting with Kim K’s face?
We, the online fashion fans, didn’t help things. In the late 2010s, I was part of the chorus, alongside influencers like Haute Le Mode, who criticised celebrities for not dressing on-theme or providing a big enough moment (see below). Like clockwork, every year High Fashion Twitter dragged guests who didn’t try hard enough with their outfit. Looking back on this era now, it was also when Drag Race went mainstream, which probably rubbed off on our appetites for avant-garde looks and gag-worthy outfit reveals.
The try-hard fatigue came to a boiling point with red carpet fashion more broadly, with film press tours and their anything-but-subtle method dressing. Wicked took promotion to new levels of annoyance, while Marty Supreme and Wuthering Heights made it clear that everything is a choreographed media opportunity. Thus, we’re now seeing celebrities like Odessa A’Zion being praised for not having a stylist at all.
Adam Starr talks to Rafael Pavon, who has 730 Imperial Stormtroopers, a custom 3D-modeling pipeline, and a theory about why a faceless character with no backstory became one of the most reproduced toys in history.
Rafael: Everything related to the Imperial Stormtrooper helmet design from 1977: toys, memorabilia, objects, and things inspired by it.
How did it begin?
Rafael: By accident, which is probably how most collections begin. For years, I was just someone who liked that helmet. I’d spot one in a shop or a market and grab it without thinking too much about it. Then one afternoon in December 2015, while wandering around Covent Garden before watching The Force Awakens on opening day, I walked into a comic book store called Orbital Comics and picked up a loose original Kenner Stormtrooper for £7. I got home, put it on the shelf, and realised I already had about twenty of them. That was the moment it went from a habit to a real problem.
What’s the first thing you remember collecting?
Rafael: I wouldn’t call it collecting at the time, but my uncle ran a toy shop in Madrid in the early eighties. I was a kid, and Star Wars figures were basically the most exciting objects in the known universe. Two of them survived. They’re items 475 and 476 in the archive now, two battered little 3.75-inch Kenner Stormtroopers that I assumed were long gone until they turned up at my cousin’s place decades later.
What first inspired your love of collecting?
Rafael: It’s less about collecting and more about a question I can’t let go of. The Stormtrooper breaks every rule of what a memorable character is supposed to be. No face, no name, no backstory, almost no lines. And yet somehow it sits alongside Spider-Man and Barbie as one of the most reproduced toys in history. Kids pick it over the heroes. Artists across every discipline keep coming back to that helmet. Jony Ive said it influenced the iPod and AirPods. It’s shown up in LEGO, Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Mr Potato Head, on toothbrushes, shampoo bottles and keyrings, even on beer labels. So, at some point, I stopped thinking of this as a toy collection and started thinking of it as anthropological research. There’s a hidden message somewhere in people’s fixation with that helmet, and I haven’t cracked it yet. That’s what keeps me going.
Where do you usually find the things you collect?
Rafael: Everywhere, which is part of the problem. I’ve tracked down pieces in London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Santiago de Chile, Ciudad de México, Madrid, and Los Angeles. When I want to look for really special items or art toys, I love places like Toy Tokyo and myplasticheart in New York. And probably my favourite place in the world for Star Wars toys is the Persa Franklin in Santiago de Chile, a massive street market full of unexpected troopers.
How far have you gone to add to the collection?
Rafael: It kind of became a thing to fly to a city knowing there’s a trooper somewhere waiting for me. I once took a train during a snowstorm just to visit the Imperial Castle Toy Store in Pawling, NY, 2 hours north of NYC. In terms of effort, building a database, creating a custom photo app to capture them all, a pipeline to turn them into 3D models, and designing a website display is definitely the furthest I’ve been for the collection
Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, and Billie Jean King have brought their sports podcast, , to Substack. Here, they’re bringing together their community, and “every week we will bring you more behind the scenes info on our podcasts, the games we’re excited about watching, and more of, well, us.”
, the actress, writer, and director best known for Pen15, has launched a Substack where she’ll be reconciling her drive to “retain pieces of the past, including old ways of writing with pen and paper, or sometimes filming stuff on camcorders, using paper encyclopedias…”
Parisian It Girl, ex-journalist, and brand founder has launched a Substack where she’ll be writing about the things she loves: “fashion, beauty, home decor, cooking, and the encounters that inspire.”
Italian fashion journalist has relaunched her Substack, where she discusses “work, personal style, how the internet has changed the pace of everything.”
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 Substack’s editorial team.
I spent 2025 buying nothing. Or, that was the idea. I didn’t starve, or anything like that. I had credit card debt, which really meant I had shame. I wanted to get rid of it.
Clothes were the main culprit. Clothes filled with possibility and women-be-shoppin’ dread. Since the pandemic (so the story goes), my online shopping habit had become compulsive. I became weak against The Emails. You know the ones. The braindead want colonizing your inbox. I spent money I didn’t have, mostly at a slick outfit known as The Reformation (no relation to Martin Luther). The Emails promised I could turn myself skinny and mysterious with the swish of a silk skirt and the secret of it costing $200.
It felt good to tell people about this ambitious year of shopping abstinence. Every Wow, good for you and Couldn’t be me felt better than the last.
The more I felt that people were impressed by my decision to try a no-buy year (which meant that they were impressed by me), the clearer the image of myself staring coolly down my nose at The Emails became. Who falls for these? Not I. Before the year of buying nothing had even begun, I’d situated myself in a special little abstinence bubble, wearing the same outfit over and over again, answering to no one. Maybe a true self could be found if I stopped wearing something different every month.
Near the end of 2024, in a post-election spiritual funk, I fell down a months-long YouTube video essay rabbit hole. I told myself I was arming myself with information, but really I was self-soothing. I came across a YouTube channel literally called The Financial Diet. If the ultimate diet is eating nothing, then spending nothing would surely yield some kind of results. An interview on the channel featured a woman detailing how a year of buying nothing helped her reclaim her financial independence and crawl out of some serious credit card debt. Eureka. She said that abstaining from shopping “rewired her brain.” Somewhere around month six, “a switch flipped.” Eventually, the fog dispersed. Spending money on stuff she didn’t need was frivolous and hollow. It seemed she had stopped wanting altogether.
How powerful the draw of a clean before/after threshold is. How glorious it would be to be freed of the messiness of wanting. One year of no shopping, and I could turn into Thich Nhat Hanh? I was craving something true, a tangible kind of enlightenment (take that, The Reformation).
“Cathedral sunlight in a car park,” shared by Henry Oliver
TECHNOLOGY
Goblin mode
Katherine Dee unravels how ChatGPT became weirdly fixated on “the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects.”
This week, internet interlocutors noted that OpenAI had to instruct a new model, Codex 5.5, repeatedly, in its own system prompt, to stop bringing up goblins, gremlins, trolls, ogres, pigeons, and raccoons “unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”
Within hours of the instructions hitting the timeline, the line was screenshotted into oblivion—and for good reason. Nick Pash on the Codex team confirmed publicly that the “weirdly emphatic” prohibition was added because Codex 5.5 was, in fact, fixated on goblins.
Then, last night, OpenAI posted a blog explaining where the goblins came from.
After GPT-5.1 launched, complaints came in that the model had developed an “overfamiliar” register and would not stop trying to be the user’s friend, which prompted an audit of its verbal tics. Meanwhile, someone on the safety team who had experienced quirky mentions of “goblins” and “gremlins” enough times to find it annoying flagged those words for inclusion. As it turned out, per the audit: the use of goblin was up by 175% since the launch; gremlin by 52%.
Weird, but just a quirk—these things happen. The team moved on.
But by GPT-5.4, it was no longer a quirk. “Creature language” was showing up overwhelmingly in traffic from users who’d selected one of ChatGPT’s optional persona presets: “Nerdy.” The preset was meant to turn the app into a kind of intellectually omnivorous mentor, maybe the type of guy, if I may, who would play Dungeons and Dragons (...and might have a folder of shortstack fan art on his desktop?).
Nerdy accounted for just 2.5% of all ChatGPT traffic—but two-thirds of the goblin mentions. When researchers used Codex itself to compare reinforcement-learning rollouts containing the offending vocabulary against rollouts that didn’t, the signal designed to encourage Nerdy turned out to be scoring the goblin-laden outputs higher. Basically, the model was being given a higher score every time it called something a goblin, and, as a system optimized to chase higher scores, it started calling more things goblins. In other words, there was a goblin-obsessed Nerd-LLM at the helm of this whole thing.
And then the goblins escaped the persona.
Mention rates rose at nearly the same proportion in samples generated without the Nerdy persona, because rewarded Nerdy outputs were getting recycled into supervised fine-tuning data—at which point the tic started being a default behavior of the underlying system. An audit of GPT-5.5’s fine-tuning data turned up the whole adjacent menagerie that had hitched a ride: raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons. An entire enchanted forest.
OpenAI killed the offending reward in March and pulled the affected vocabulary out of training data, but GPT-5.5 was already cooking. By the time it landed in Codex, employees noticed the goblins immediately, which is why the aforementioned prohibition is in the prompt. The OpenAI post from Wednesday night even shares the bash command that disables the goblin-suppression line and unlocks the bestiary, if you want to liberate ChatGPT’s goblin mode.
Ultimately, the gradient that was rewarding the goblins got identified and patched, and OpenAI came out of it knowing more about how stylistic tics propagate through training pipelines than it did going in.
What the company’s account doesn’t quite explain, however, is the specificity. When the model was rewarded for being weird and playful, it didn’t drift toward a random selection of mythological vocabulary. It went for the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects. There are, ostensibly, unicorns, dragons, demons, and angels in the training data too.
Seven months ago, I was tan and thin and very lonely, writing essays in a laughably unaffordable apartment in the bougiest part of Lisbon. Today, for the first time in two decades, I live in the suburbs. I’m someone who drives twenty-nine miles to an office, who eats too much Chinese food, who listens to podcasts, who lifts weights once or twice a week, who cooks dinner for friends, and who reads for about three and a half minutes every evening before falling asleep. The situation is both blissful and dire; it feels like living in cellophane, shimmer and all.
To try to recalibrate, I reached for a favorite novel. In Light Years, [James] Salter damns a minor character with ruthless efficiency: “His eyes were spent, they had nothing in them.” Later, after the couple at the center of the novel has divorced, Viri moves to Rome and meets another woman. What starts as romance—an architect, after all, here to devour the Eternal City, falling in love anew—soon “hardens to intractable life.” Living in Rome, Viri realizes, is not like living alongside the Hudson: “He stood beside [Lia] as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun.”
Among all the beauty in Italy, Viri too risks spending his eyes, depleting their capacity. Like the famous monuments that show up in tourist photographs, the idea of Rome occludes Viri’s view of it. He wants to see it but can’t, which recalls or rhymes with something Lia tells him—in one of my favorite passages from the novel—about happiness:
But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It’s very difficult to find. It’s like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there’s nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.
One sunny, listless afternoon, my husband turned to look at me. His eye, normally what people call “liquid brown,” met the light and wagon-wheeled with color: splinters of mahogany, tatters of aspen leaf, emerald shards, sandstone flecks, the sullied marble of petrified wood. It was over in a second, of course—it’s too painful for anyone to be lit up so nakedly—but I couldn’t forget it. Later, I recalled Hervé Guibert’s intimation of what a photograph is: “an event of light.” The eye was waiting for me to see it, which gave me a strange, triangulating thought: I am justified in noticing this.
Part of what makes photography a surrealist enterprise is its democratization; there’s nothing elitist or aristocratic in a camera’s attention. In Image Control, I wrote about this in relation to Francesca Woodman’s photographs, in which objects,
human and not, get spilled on by light; a rectangle from a window stretches across the floor, bisecting warped and wrinkled leaves of wallpaper that have curled onto the floorboards. A little pane of glass intensifies the light upon Woodman’s fingers, visually slicing them at the knuckle. These objects, bodies included, remind us just how dramatically light can change a thing, how it bestows another side, another use, even another meaning. All objects are treated the same, given the same importance; all are worthy of, or deprived of, the gift of light.
If anything, objects of great, undisputed beauty—cathedrals and paintings, the art nouveau Metropolitain signs in Paris, crates of produce in French markets, the Palace at Sintra, St. Mark’s—can easily occlude or disrupt the event of light; instead of objects, they become subjects. They reframe the photograph as a document or as evidence, which is largely the imperialist project of Instagram: I was here, I saw this, I took this, it’s mine.
Let me tell you a secret about the most beautiful city in the world. Paris is wet. Even in summer it rains often, and the cobblestone streets and sidewalks funnel it, channel it, entrap it; it sits cupped there, handful after handful held out to you on every block. The Haussmann buildings sit shrunken in it, creased and off kilter. Light trembles at each diagonal corner; at night, the Place Pigalle is a black pool of incandescent eels. I have a hard time believing that Impressionism would have happened without all this water, not to mention the city’s long lineage of street photography. Puddles literally invite reflection, and in thousands of paintings and photographs we see Paris looking at itself, thinking about itself. It’s an intimate way of looking at a city, as if on every corner we catch it in this moment of self regard, and that is what makes Paris’s beauty feel so personal—as opposed to monumental. Like Salter’s girls at communion, its face is forever upturned, ready for light.
If you’ve never seen the first five minutes of The Social Network, you’re missing out.
I don’t think you can fully understand this scene without understanding the different types of irony.
There’s verbal irony: that’s the one everybody knows. There’s also dramatic irony, in which the audience possesses knowledge the characters lack. And then there’s tragic irony. It’s very similar to dramatic irony, but here the lack of information itself is the cause of the tragic event. To turn Hitchcock’s example into tragic irony, imagine the bomb only goes off if a character says, “I’m certain there’s no bomb in here.” There’s also cosmic irony and romantic irony and a dozen nuanced variations on all of the above, but tragic irony is what we’re interested in today.
The best example—and we’ll get to The Social Network soon, I swear—is the story of Oedipus. You know how it goes. King Laius and Queen Jocasta, struggling with infertility, consult the Oracle at Delphi, who proclaims King Laius will one day be murdered by his son. (Whomp, whomp, whomp, waaaaaaaaa.) Soon enough Queen Jocasta gives birth, and, in a vain attempt to save himself, King Laius orders his son to be abandoned on a mountainside (an apparently common practice in ancient Greece). But the servant, less of a sociopath than the king, can’t go through with it, so he passes the baby to a shepherd who passes the baby to a shepherd who passes the baby to the King and Queen of Corinth. They raise it as their own, and, after reaching maturity, Oedipus visits the Oracle himself. She tells him he will murder his father and have sex with his mother, and soon enough he does, since he’s misinformed about who they actually are. Years later a plague of infertility strikes Thebes and the Oracle—who by this point is giving off real “Ain’t-I-a-stinker?” vibes—says it will only end when the man who murdered King Laius is brought to justice. Oedipus takes on the challenge and unknowingly vows vengeance upon himself. Yikes.
What I love about this is how King Laius, in trying to avoid his fate, sets in motion the events that ensure his fate. There’s something perversely satisfying about the structure. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine of infanticide, murder, and incest.
So finally—finally—we can get back to those first five minutes of The Social Network.
You know, I once told a group of students I loved this movie and they burst out laughing. None of them had seen it, I’m a nerdy enough guy, and they thought I saw myself as Mark Zuckerberg on some sort of hero’s journey. But the thing is—and please don’t take this out of context—I do relate to the Mark Zuckerberg of this movie.
You see, we both have an inferiority complex.
That psychological detail underpins every scene, every action, every line of dialogue: Mark has no self-esteem, so he needs external validation, so he is desperate—just achingly, sweatily, desperately desperate—to become one of the beautiful people. That explains his obsession with getting into a final club, and it explains everything else. Just look at the opening lines:
MARK: Do you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?
ERICA: That can’t possibly be true.
MARK: It is.
ERICA: What would account for that?
MARK: Well, first, an awful lot of people live in China, but … here’s my question: how do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SATs?
The insecurity, the need to “distinguish yourself,” the humble-bragging: it’s all there.
The movie doesn’t explain where this personality defect comes from, which is for the best: I don’t need some cheesy scene of ten-year-old Mark getting ignored by a distant father. It’s just who he is. In fact, the movie doesn’t even explain why Mark wants to achieve his goals. There’s a generic “fame and fortune” angle, but it’s obviously an afterthought:
ERICA: Is it true that [the final clubs] send a bus around to pick up girls who want to party with the next Fed chairman?
MARK: So you can see why it’s so important to get in.
Jesus, Mark. The correct response—to your girlfriend—is, “Gross, right?” And yet, Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be the next Fed chairman or to party with hot girls. He wants external validation. Go back to 2:58 and listen to how Jesse Eisenberg delivers this next exchange: you can tell he really means it when he says he wants to get into the clubs “Because they’re exclusive”—which is about as close to circular reasoning as you can get—before unconvincingly tacking on the reasons a sane person might give.
MARK: I’m just saying I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs.
ERICA: Why?
MARK: Because they’re exclusive. And fun. And they lead to a better life.
And the thing that really hurts—the bitter icing on this pathetic cake—is that Mark could be one of the beautiful people if he didn’t want to be one of the beautiful people. They look at him and see a needy little go-getter who never learned you aren’t supposed to be so obvious about things. It breaks my heart. Zuckerberg is an asshole, and it breaks my heart all the same.
, the Chicago chef and co-owner of the Alinea Group, has started a Substack. In his first post, he questions the next step of a successful restaurant: “do you become a museum of yourself, honoring the past with reverence and precision, or do you start again?”
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 Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Jacqueline Novak let us into her world immediately. The comedian may have her own Netflix special, but she was still disarmingly candid. When we told her we’d arrived and were looking for parking, she responded:
Alas, we missed the crying. Jacqueline led us around her building to a patio cluttered with furniture, tools, and a stray remote control, saying she had intentionally left the place as-is, and that maybe she could clean up for us on camera—a bid for realism and vulnerability that felt especially refreshing in Hollywood. She proceeded to give us a tour of every inch of the patio, which wound up being a tour of her mind too.
