This week, we’re rewriting Dostoevsky, remembering Tom Stoppard, building community, and time-traveling back to the days of bulky iMacs and AIM.
THE DISCOURSE
This week on Substack
And the Pantone color of the year is. . . white. Pantone released its annual color choice for 2026: Cloud Dancer, a “billowy white.” For some, the color is a “comfort neutral” or a “blank canvas,” exactly what we need as we face a new, likely turbulent year. For others, the lack-of-color color is everything from boring to a recession indicator to a subtle reminder of the Sydney Sweeney “good genes” controversy. Hard to say whether Cloud Dancer is being received any better than 2025’s Mocha Mousse (though, to be fair, people have worn a lot of brown this year).
The $140,000 poverty line: Substackers are debating what it costs to raise a family in the United States. In his Substack and for The Free Press, financial executive Michael W. Green took aim at the federal poverty calculation. Adjusting for modern expenses, he argues, the poverty line for a family of four should be raised from about $32,000 a year to about $140,000. Some have pushed back, including economist Noah Smith, who wrote a post in Noahpinion arguing that the idea was “very silly.” In The Purse, Lindsey Stanberry and Alicia Adamczyk took a practical approach, examining a few real families making that much and describing their lifestyle.
Spotify Wrapped is here. The “listening age” was an especially savvy addition this year, judging by the number of 20- and 30-somethings sharing their geriatric stats. Meanwhile, Substacker created his own version specifically for Substack publishers. Go forth and wrap!
TRENDS
Community in motion
Patrick Kho reports on a new vision for third spaces—those gathering spaces beyond the workplace and the home. This new version is less a physical space where communities might (or might not) interact, and more intentional collectives that are “people first, space second.”
Athena is among several young people creating what I call “traveling third spaces”: new communities that are people-first, space-second. Traveling third spaces are not physically fixed; they move across cafes, malls, restaurants, and host various programming for a singular community in a particular city. And they exist around the world—in London, a community of the name One House Social Club brings people together in “London’s Best Spots”; in New York, a traveling dinner series called (get this) 3rd Space gathers creatives and entrepreneurs for three-course meals around the city.
The traveling third space recognizes that public spaces are not a guarantor of belonging; they are merely a base upon which people form connections and bond over shared interests.
Ivana Duong, a graphic designer, is engaging in similar work. She’s the creative producer of Critical Mass, a collective/community with regular, twice-monthly meetups for creatives in Hong Kong.
“Once you graduate college and settle more into having a more adult lifestyle, it’s harder to find community,” Ivana says. “With Critical Mass, we niched down particularly to artists and creatives because that’s what the team’s familiar with.”
Critical Mass’ recurring meetup (named “House Party”) is held at Heath Mall every other Wednesday. The draw, Ivana says, is just for a “low-stakes hangout.” Spontaneity is a key part of their programming: people can intersperse in and out at any given time and hang out. It’s also completely free. The collective regularly hosts workshops around zine-making, tattoo design, and logos-making on Figma—activities which continue to attract people with a creative sensibility. (Full disclosure: I’m actively involved in Critical Mass’ programming, and can attest to this firsthand.)
Having a group of creative people in one place “sets a theme” and so “allows for a certain audience to gather” in a way that just going to the park or a cafe might not. At a Critical Mass House Party, you already have common ground with people, as opposed to just, say, approaching someone at a bar. “It establishes beyond the basic need of a place to relax [after work],” says Ivana. “Like, oh, creatives are here!”
No, not Tom Stoppard, too! In the verbal slop of modern culture, the loss of his flashing, ambidextrous wit and his playful erudition is a literary blow especially hard to bear. His writing was the enemy of the turgid absolutes that blight our contemporary discourse. He once said: “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”
I have been obsessed with the great Tom since our first meeting, when I was sixteen. He was then the rising—or, rather, the already blazing—thirty-one-year-old star of British theatre. The blaze had been ignited by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which burst from a humble venue at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and wound up at the National Theatre in 1967. When asked later, in New York, what the play was about, he replied, “It’s about to make me very rich.” And it did.
In 1969, Tom showed up at my childhood home in Buckinghamshire to see my film producer father, George Brown, about the possibility of bringing his most recent play, The Real Inspector Hound, to the screen. He lived only twenty minutes away, and eventually bought a country manor nearby for a new life with his second wife, Miriam, a glamorous TV doctor. They became, in a way, the first media power couple, until Tom blew up his marriage in 1990 for one of his leading ladies, Felicity Kendal. (Cf. Charlotte, the wife in The Real Thing, his play about marital infidelity: “There are no commitments, only bargains.”)
He turned up that day at our home, I recall, wearing black and yellow patent shoes, flared velvet trousers, and a trailing student scarf. He chain-smoked as if sipping through a straw. The whole camp look was set off by that sardonic but measured voice and the exotic way he emphasized his ‘r’s. When Tom uttered words like “meretricious” or “rancorous,” the liquid consonants rolled off his tongue with languorous precision. He probably had one of the three most voluptuous mouths of the mid-20th century; the other two were possessed by his friend Mick Jagger and the late Martin Amis. I was mesmerized (though, as an awed teenager, ignored) by a playwright who was also, to all appearances, a rock star.
Tom later became a treasured friend and, five decades later, I still find The Real Inspector Hound the most screamingly funny work in the entire Stoppard oeuvre. Hound is so simple, yet so ingenious in its cavorting concept of a play within a play, centered on two pretentious theatre critics, the lofty Birdboot and the embittered second string, Moon, who get pulled into the country house murder-mystery they have come to review. The play opens with a dead body onstage that remains there for the entire performance, ignored by all the characters, who seem not to notice that it’s a leading clue. The housekeeper, Mrs. Drudge, answers the phone in such Mousetrappish stage-direction lingo as, “Hallo, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early Spring?”
Here was classic, joyful absurdity, devoid of the political confrontation then in vogue in the work of playwrights such as Howard Brenton and David Edgar. “I get deeply embarrassed by the statements and postures of ‘committed theatre,’” Stoppard told an interviewer in 1973. “I’ve never felt that art is important. That’s been my secret guilt.” It’s extraordinary to think that none of Tom’s plays would be staged at the Royal Court Theatre until Rock ’n’ Roll, in 2006. There was a feeling among advocates of committed theatre that Tom was little more than a “university wit”—pretty rich considering that, by choice, he never went to college. Who needed Oxford or Cambridge when you could satisfy your passion for finding things out by shoe-leather reporting? For a time, he held down the job of motoring correspondent for the Western Daily Press, even though he couldn’t drive. (“I used to review the upholstery,” he explained.) Unburdened by a degree, Stoppard spent the rest of his life in a kind of autodidactic frenzy, risking one deep dive after another into subjects as varied as linguistic philosophy, landscape gardening, and nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries. But not once did he drown in solemnity.
Vāneçka has begun transposing Dostoyevsky’s classic Notes from Underground into a modern context, translating the text faithfully while updating it to a contemporary setting. In so doing, he brings out the original’s comedy, eschewing the “archaic translations” that “completely bury its manic, self-contradictory energy.”
I’m a sick man. . . I’m a spiteful man. Unattractive man I am. I think I have depression. Although I don’t understand anything about my condition and don’t know whether I have it at all. I’m not in therapy and never been to therapy, though I respect psychology and have read Freud. Besides, I constantly self-diagnose; well, at least enough to respect the profession (I’m smart enough not to self-diagnose, but also educated enough to self-diagnose). Nah, I won’t go to therapy out of spite. You won’t understand it. But I do understand. I obviously can’t explain to you for whom exactly things are worse because of my spite; I know perfectly well that I’m not hurting therapists by not going to therapy; I know better than anyone that I’m only fucking myself over with all this and nobody else. But still, if I don’t go to therapy, it’s out of spite. I’m depressed, so let me get even more depressed!
I’ve been living like that for a while—maybe twenty years. Now I’m forty. I used to work, now I don’t. I was a toxic IT support guy. I was rude and took pleasure in it. I mean, I didn’t steal company equipment, so I had to compensate myself somehow. (Bad joke; but I won’t delete it. I wrote it thinking it was witty, but now that I see I just wanted to show off pathetically—I’m deliberately leaving it in!) When users would come to my desk with their tickets, I’d grind my teeth at them and feel inexorable pleasure when I managed to upset someone. Almost always managed to. Mostly they were all timid types: you know—users. But among the self-important ones there was some middle manager I especially couldn’t stand. He refused to submit and kept stubbornly following up on tickets. I had a war with him over his tickets for a year and a half. I finally broke him. He stopped following up. Though this happened when I was younger. But do you know, dear readers, what the main point of my spite was? The whole thing, the nastiest thing, was that every minute, even in moments of my strongest bile, I shamefully realised that I was not only not spiteful, but not even a bitter person, that I was just barking at shadows for nothing and amusing myself with it. I’m foaming at my mouth, but bring me some little treat—a cup of coffee or whatnot—and I’ll calm down. I’ll even feel touched, though afterwards I’ll grind my teeth at myself and suffer from insomnia for months. That’s just my way.
I lied to you above, lied that I was a toxic IT guy. Lied out of spite. I was just messing around with the users and that one guy, but in reality I could never be mean to anyone. I was constantly aware of many, many other feelings opposite to that. I felt them swarming in me, these opposite feelings. I knew they’d been swarming in me my whole life and trying to get out, but I wouldn’t let them, I didn’t, never did. They tortured me to the point of shame, brought me to convulsions and—I was completely fed up with them! Don’t you reckon, dear readers, that I’m repenting something before you now, that I’m asking your forgiveness for something? . . . I’m sure that you do reckon. . . But anyway, I assure you, I don’t care even if you do. . .
Last week, I went to a party at my friend’s parents’ house, and her lime green iMac from high school had been taken out of storage and placed on a side table in one of the rooms. Long since functional, it sat on display like a sculpture and got a lot of attention. Not just an iconic piece of Y2K-era industrial design and a perfect visual emblem of an idealized pre-9/11 culture, the iMac G3 is also a powerful source of personal nostalgia for older millennials, evoking a phase of youth as reliably as the AOL Instant Messenger pings and chimes that would issue from its speakers nonstop. Before computers flattened into two-dimensional screens and effectively disappeared, when they still possessed some awkward heft, this was about as good as they ever looked.
That was my second encounter with a candy-colored early-’00s iMac in the last two weeks. An identical one appeared in a play called “Initiative” I’d just seen, currently showing at the Public Theater for another week, which takes place over four years of high school between 2000 and 2004. The play is a coming-of-age story about a group of friends who live in suburban California and bond over an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons game that runs the course of their high school years. The play was excellent (and five hours long), but what initially interested me about it was the choice to set it in the early ’00s, not just because I’ve been paying attention to how aging millennials like myself are reflecting upon our own past and narrativizing it but because those years remain a surprisingly under-historicized era—now as far in the past as the ’70s were in 2001, yet somehow not feeling all that distant or entirely separate from the present, the way prior decades did (in contrast, the ’80s already felt quite dated in the ’90s). The lime green iMac and similar props, along with constant AOL Instant Messenger usage and occasional references to background events like 9/11, thus perform an important function in the play: Without those details, the setting might pass for contemporary. The mall attire that the suburban teenage characters wear, for example, represents the early ’00s but has also returned in various forms in the years since, and still does. You don’t have to look too hard to find “Y2K fashion” or cargo pants today.
“Initiative” is not specifically about the internet, but it captures the technology’s rapidly growing role in early-’00s social life. The specific time period it portrays, between the summers of 2000 and 2004, bookended by misplaced Y2K anxiety and the arrival of Facebook, was solidly the AOL Instant Messenger era: AIM was released in 1997, peaked in 2001, and declined more rapidly after 2005, losing ground to SMS texting and social media. Early in the play, one character’s younger brother helps him download it, telling him that “AIM isn’t nerdy, it’s just a way to talk to people online.” The play is peppered with such amusing reminders of what it felt like to be figuring out the internet, before it was all so obvious (“message boards aren’t real life!”), and the janky early-’00s internet forms a backdrop for the characters’ similarly awkward adolescence: simultaneous spoken AIM conversations overlapping with in-person dialogue, case-sensitive usernames with underscores projected onto the walls of the set, Goatse links spelled out verbally by a character.
I rarely think about AIM today, despite the huge role it played in my life as a teenager. And when I saw the lime green iMacs, I realized I never think about those anymore either. Napster endures in memory as an inflection point for media consumption and the music industry. But overall, that era will increasingly seem like a transitional phase, more difficult to place as time passes and history is divided into two parts, before and after the internet. September 11 was the ultimate historical event, meanwhile, occurring right in the middle of all this, during AIM’s peak year of usage. Perhaps 9/11 has drawn all the air out of the room, dominating our memory of that time so completely that it’s hard to see anything that didn’t align with the seriousness it dictated. Any work of fiction set around that time must carefully measure its proximity to that event or risk being somehow “about” 9/11—a problem that ’80s and ’90s period pieces rarely face.
The migration of culture into digital space has surely made the recent past feel more ahistorical. In that sense, the early ’00s were the end of something as well as the beginning of something else. It’s not that any less happened then but that more of what did happen resists straightforward depiction. The challenge of portraying online activity in film and TV has always fascinated me, because it raises uncomfortable questions about how we use that technology as well as how storytelling works. Showing a screen on another screen usually feels like the worst solution to the problem. Another option is to set the story in a time or place where screens don’t exist. There is an archaic but persistent idea that any drama worth portraying happens in real life, not on a screen, but that is probably just a holdover from when screens were one-way channels of static, pre-packaged entertainment, not portals to a dynamic environment where a lot does happen. People like to point out that screens never appear in our dreams, suggesting that deep down we all long to get off our phones, but as I’ve wondered before, maybe it’s just that the dream is the screen, our phones framing our reality so comprehensively that we already think we live inside of them.Keep reading
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Recently launched
, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has joined Substack. As he says, “Communication is changing, and I want to be a part of that. People have a right to know how decisions that affect them are taken and why. That’s why I’m now on Substack.”
also joined Substack this week. The former Vice President’s welcome video echoes Keir Starmer’s message: “I think it’s so important to be where people are, and speak with people where they are, and that includes online and here on Substack.”
has joined Substack, launching as “a book club, but for magazine articles.” Each week the editors will share a New Yorker story for free, for readers to enjoy and discuss.
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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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This week, we’re analyzing home-screen metaphors, considering suffering and God vis-à-vis Peanuts, and learning to write grammatically correct greeting cards.
THE DISCOURSE
This week on Substack
The bubble popper: , the investor and hedge fund manager best known for recognizing and profiting off the subprime mortgage crisis (as detailed in The Big Short), joined Substack with a bang. In his first post, he argues that the AI market displays all the classic hallmarks of a bubble. It prompted a swift reaction: Nvidia sent a memo to Wall Street refuting his points, but Burry’s second post pokes yet further holes in their assertions.
The Nuzzi-Lizza saga continues: For those following the political and media scandal surrounding Olivia Nuzzi and , the bombshells haven’t stopped dropping. This week Lizza released Part 2: She Did It Again and Part 3: Catch and Kill. Come for the firsthand account from Lizza, stay for ’s characteristically incisive review of the whole ordeal. As Kate Lindsay puts it, “Watching a breakup get rehashed back and forth through New York Times profiles and book excerpts and lore drops on Substack has me thinking we might be in a promising era of media after all.”
TECH
Home screen
Adam Aleksic on the ways the digital realm mimics the domestic, while offering only an illusion of privacy and control.
The wooden stairs in my childhood home had a creaky step. I can still vividly picture the way it groaned under pressure. It was such a loud, incriminating sound that I would usually hop over it on my midnight runs to the kitchen. Otherwise, I would wake the entire house.
It takes an incredibly intimate familiarity to develop that kind of habit. Once you really start knowing a place, you develop your own navigational idiosyncrasies like that. My roommate says he would always grab the railing in a particular way when walking upstairs in his childhood home.
I also see myself developing unique behaviors in the digital space. Only I have the motor memory to immediately open the notes app on my phone. A stranger would have to look for it, but my fingers subconsciously understand where to go. Much like with my childhood home, I have an embodied knowledge of my home screen.
That phrase—“home screen”—has been on my mind recently. The language of the smartphone invites you to think of it as a house. You can “choose your wallpaper,” just like with a real house; you can “lock” your phone like a front door. The metaphor is that this is a private refuge from the outside world. It is a tiny dwelling in your pocket, which you can customize like an actual dwelling to affirm your identity. In doing so, you “tame” the technology, making it feel natural in your everyday life.
The phone, like your house, is a focal point. Everything revolves around it. When you need comfort in the physical world, you go back to the home; in the digital world, you go back to your home screen. There is something calming about a deeply personal environment. It provides a grounding presence which we can retreat to.
A computer, meanwhile, remains more functional. Phrases like “desktop” and “taskbar” create a metaphor that this is a workstation; you have “trash” and “files.” Of course, there are still work-like aspects to the phone and home-like aspects to the computer, but the phone takes on a far more domestic role in our lives. It is not a utility: it is an extension of self.
In his book The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues that our intimate spaces are deeply intertwined with our imagination and sense of being. When you curl up in a comfortable nook in your home, for example, your consciousness is gathered inward. You have control over this small space, in contrast to the wild, turbulent outdoors. You can focus attention differently in miniature.
As I move between apps on my phone, I notice a vague emotion that I am entering different rooms, each with its own character. The settings app is the basement; the dating apps are the bedroom. No matter where I go, though, there is that coziness of being in a nook. This is my corner of the world; I am free to do what I want. I can let my mind relax, for I am safe and secure from the vast, terrifying world.
Of course, phones only give us the illusion of privacy and control. If apps are rooms, then every room in your house has someone peeking through the blinds. And you might be able to customize your experience to some degree, but automatic updates are a reminder that you don’t really have agency over your cute little space.
Schulz wrote and drew Peanuts for nearly a half century—and, while it’s widely agreed that his creative peak was from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the singular sensibility, ruthless brilliance, and empathy that characterized his work was present from the beginning to the end. Schulz’s 50-year run has been called “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being”; it is too rich and varied a body of work to be encapsulated in a single strip. When I think of Peanuts, among many other things, I think of . . .
Snoopy’s fantasy life;
Charlie Brown haplessly seeking psychiatric help from Lucy, and even more haplessly trying to kick Lucy’s football;
Peppermint Patty consistently pulling D-minuses, and Charlie Brown regularly getting his socks and various other articles of clothing knocked off him by line drives in one losing baseball game after another; and
various unrequited loves (Sally adores Linus, who crushes on Miss Othmar; Lucy is fascinated with Schroeder; and both Peppermint Patty and Marcie are sweet on Charlie Brown, who, of course, is infatuated with the Little Red-Haired Girl).
I also think of allusions to and quotations from various literary sources: Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. Above all, the Bible, most often quoted by Linus, though it’s also referenced by Lucy, Charlie Brown, Sally, and even Snoopy.
The Bible has a lot to say about evil and suffering, of course, and suffering is a major theme in Peanuts. All of the bulleted themes above include disappointment, hardship, and suffering. Even in Snoopy’s fantasy life, the World War I Flying Ace often had the worse of his encounters with the Red Baron, and the World Famous Writer’s literary efforts were generally rebuffed by publishers.
Unsurprisingly, Schulz repeatedly referenced the book of Job, which is all about the problem of evil. (He also turned more than once to Ecclesiastes.) The Sunday strip below, from September 1967, embraces Schulz’s preoccupations with baseball, suffering and loss, theology, and the Bible, particularly the book of Job; I know of no one Peanuts strip that sums up more of Schulz’s sensibility than this.
The titans of the ’90s rom-com—the household names who held the title of “America’s Sweetheart” at various points during the era—each had their signature thing. A Meg Ryan character, for example, was gonna be perky, and kind of fussy, and seem like she read a lot of books. A Sandra Bullock character was often lonely, surprisingly goofy, and the most likely to join a game of flag football. A Drew Barrymore character would inevitably be painfully earnest and also possibly a little bit high.
Julia Roberts’s thing—apart from The Smile, and The Hair, and The Laugh—was that her characters were not like the other girls. Whereas other rom-com heroines of the time were cuddly and and effectively sexless, you could count on a Julia Roberts lead to be emotionally evasive and have a sex life that featured as an active plot point in the movie (if not the entire plot itself). And no movie better exemplifies that than My Best Friend’s Wedding.
In My Best Friend’s Wedding, Roberts plays Jules Potter, a 27-year-old food critic who gets an unexpected call from her best friend, Michael (played by Dermot Mulroney): Michael, a sports journalist who’s carried a torch for Julie since they briefly dated in college, is getting married. Hearing the news makes Jules realize that, actually, she’s in love with him, and so now she has no choice but to fly to Chicago and win back her man who isn’t actually her man (all while unexpectedly serving as maid of honor to Michael’s college-age fiancée). It’s a classic, very Katharine Hepburn-coded screwball premise. And if another rom-com star had the leading role—Renee Zellweger, perhaps—everything would’ve been different.
Jules would’ve been a good-hearted magazine columnist who went by her full name (Julianne). Michael would’ve been an emotionally stunted playboy who needed to realize that the woman of his dreams was actually the one who’d been standing in front of him for years. And his fiancée would’ve been an uptight career woman who might’ve been sexy and powerful but couldn’t make him laugh the way Julianne did.
But Jules isn’t a Zellweger character. Or an anyone-else character. She’s a Julia Roberts character. And that means things are gonna [get] riled up.
’Tis the season to, if you’re writing “’Tis the season,” which you should absolutely not do, not in a headline, not in a lede, not in a caption, not in the cover tagline for your Xmas-themed rom-com novel, remember that if you want to write a correct “’Tis the season” you need to figure out how to type a correct word-opening apostrophe rather than, as will happen if you simply start banging away at your keyboard keys willy-nilly, a single open quotation mark.
That is, what you want is not
‘Tis
but
’Tis
There are any number of methods to accomplish this jaunty apostrophe, but the method I use, because it’s easiest for me to recall and execute, is to type x’Tis and then delete the x, leaving me with a pretty and correct ’Tis.
Both easy and peasy, yes?
’Tis also the season to remind yourself how to properly address holiday cards being dispatched to families, which is to say, ’tis also the season to remember how to pluralize family names.
Many surnames can be pluralized with the typical pluralizing s, so that Smith becomes Smiths (The Smiths!), Brown becomes Browns (The Browns!), Jackson becomes Jacksons (The Jacksons!), etc.
Do of course remember that the rule you learned back in elementary school about how to pluralize generic words ending in y (e.g., party → parties) does not apply here, and the plural of, for instance, Kennedy is not Kennedies but Kennedys.
So far, so good?
Moving on to s- or z-ending surnames, your holiday card making its way to a number of people named Jones is addressed to the Joneses, that bunch of people called Collins are the Collinses, a bevy of people yclept Hernandez are the Hernandezes, etc.
Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are, of course, the Marches, because “Marchs” would be weird-looking.
You got this.
Beyond that, if you’re consumed with anxiety in attempting to pluralize a name that seems to defy pluralization by any logical or aesthetically pleasing means, do of course remember that you can always address M. et Mme. Molyneux and the rest of Molyneux clan as:
’s Substack, , is already moving markets. Subscribe to get his “analytical efforts and projections for stocks, markets, and bubbles, often with an eye to history and its remarkably timeless patterns.”
Chef and creator has started , promising “creative flavor mash-ups made simple enough for even you to cook.”
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Last weekend, gathered 33 amateur bakers for a pie competition at Stissing House, her historic restaurant in Pine Plains, New York. The judging panel was a who’s who of food writers and experts: Substackers , , , , , and ; Stissing House pastry chef Rebecca Ellis; New Yorker food critic Hannah Goldfield; New York Times food editor Emily Weinstein; chef Ignacio Mattos; cookbook authors Claire Saffitz and Dan Pelosi; novelist and food lover Katie Kitamura; and—crucially—the woman who “wrote the book on pies”: Martha Stewart.
We sent a film crew to capture every bit of the chaotic, joyful afternoon. Below, you’ll find the winning pie’s recipe, in case you’re still hunting for the perfect Thanksgiving dessert.
Salted Maple Bourbon Pie
By Nikki Freihofer
This pie is a pancake breakfast that grew up, put on a cashmere sweater, and decided to do boozy brunch instead. It’s sweet and custardy and cozy, the kind of thing people take one bite of and immediately start plotting their second. Use the good maple syrup, seriously. A darker, deeper one makes all the difference (I’m partial to a Hudson Valley variety aged in bourbon barrels). And don’t be shy with the salt.
10 tablespoons (1 ¼ sticks) salted Irish butter, melted and cooled a bit
1 cup high quality dark maple syrup (I like Tree Juice brand Bourbon Barrel Aged)
130g light brown sugar
14g fine yellow cornmeal plus 19g medium grind yellow cornmeal (This is me being extra… you can use all fine or medium cornmeal and the pie will be lovely, promise. It’s about 1/4c total cornmeal in that case)
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt (Yes, more salt on top of salted butter – it can take it)
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 large egg yolk, at room temperature
3/4 cup heavy cream, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
3 tablespoons bourbon (Bulleit or nicer, if you fancy)
Maldon salt (to garnish)
For the crust:
270g AP flour
3 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks (226g) salad Irish butter, very cold
Ice water + a few tablespoons vodka
For the vanilla mascarpone whip:
2 tablespoons mascarpone
1c heavy cream
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
A few teaspoons powered sugar
Instructions
To make the crust:
Whisk flour, sugar, and salt in medium bowl
Cut each stick of butter into 4 equal pieces (twice lengthwise and once across) and add to bowl, toss to coat. Turn bowl out onto clean countertop.
Roll butter out into long flat strips, laminating the butter into the flour mixture with rolling pin, scraping surface and rolling pin as needed with bench scraper
Once the dough starts to form long, thin sheets, use a bench scraper to pile into a loose shaggy mound and drizzle exactly 6 TBSP ice water over. It won’t seem like enough!! It IS enough!
Roll out several times and fold top and bottom into the center like an envelope, re-rolling/laminating and folding until dough holds together well and looks fairly uniform (about 5 rolls)
Form into a disc with a diameter of approximately 5-6 inches and wrap with plastic wrap
Rest in refrigerator overnight
Roll out rested dough into a circle 16” wide for a 9” pie and transfer to pie plate. There will be lots of overhang but that’s what gets you a gorgeous crimp. Roll the overhang onto itself and crimp away.
Freeze until solid (overnight is best)
Blind bake at 425°F for 25min (lined with tin foil and pie weights) and let cool
To make the custard:
Preheat your oven to 350°F.
In a medium bowl, combine the melted butter and maple syrup – give ’em a good hearty whisking together. Whisk in the brown sugar, cornmeal, and kosher salt.
In another medium bowl, whisk together the cream, eggs, egg yolk, and vanilla.
Slowly pour the egg mixture into the maple mixture and whisk just until combined. Add the bourbon and mix until just combined.
Place the blind-baked shell on a baking sheet and brush the edge with another beaten egg. Pour the filling into the pie shell until it reaches the bottom of the crimps.
Transfer the baking sheet to the oven and bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour, until the edges are puffed and the center jiggles only slightly when shaken. It will continue to set as it cools.
Remove the baking sheet from the oven and transfer the pie to a wire rack to cool for 4 to 6 hours. Once fully cooled and at room temperature, sprinkle generously with flaky Maldon sea salt.
To make the whipped cream:
Add mascarpone, heavy cream, powdered sugar, salt, and vanilla bean paste to a medium bowl and whisk gently until soft peaks form.
This week, we’re starting fresh, preparing to cook a “giant monster,” visiting the optometrist, and living in chaos.
THE DISCOURSE
This week on Substack
The Nuzzi-Lizza files: Former New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi has a new book chronicling her illicit relationship with R.F.K. Jr. during his 2024 presidential run. As glowing coverage of Nuzzi took over the New York Times and an excerpt of the book landed in Vanity Fair—prompting some to criticize her prose as “like a cross between Rupi Kaur and Chiara Ferragni”—Ryan Lizza, a veteran journalist and Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé, dropped his own shocking twist on the story. (Make sure you read to the last sentence.)
The thing about landscapes is they wait. They have nothing but time. A mountain range doesn’t care if you show up next Tuesday or never again. It was here before you, and it will be here after. There’s no accountability in geology.
This is probably why I keep choosing them. Still lifes are needy, you’re always racing against rot. Portraits require diplomacy; after three wrong chins, you’re apologizing for the very shape of someone’s jaw. But a landscape? A landscape asks nothing. It doesn’t even ask to be finished.
I want to stay a beginner forever. Once you develop a style, it develops you back: clingy, possessive, calling at odd hours, showing up uninvited, shedding on the furniture. A style wants commitment. It wants you to mean it. It starts correcting you mid-stroke, whispering: that’s not what we do anymore. It has opinions about paper quality. It knows which colors are yours. It begins to narrow the world into things that fit and things that don’t. Eventually, you’re not making art anymore, you’re just maintaining a personality.
You become hostage to your own alleged vision. So I keep resetting: new influence, new technique, new beginner’s luck.
I’m taking notes unseriously. Wayne Thiebaud’s California fields, all geometry and impossible color. Agnes Martin’s grids. Cézanne’s mountain. Hockney’s Yorkshire landscapes. David Milne in his Canadian cabin, painting snow.
What I’m actually doing is buying colored pencils.
This week, Americans are preparing for their annual turkey-centric feast. In Pax Culinaria, Peter Giuliano shares the New World bonafides of each of the traditional foods on a Thanksgiving table. First up: the bird “with beautiful plumage and an ugly face.”
In what is now Central Mexico, the ancient Olmec people became familiar with an exceptionally large jungle bird with beautiful plumage and an ugly face. They domesticated the bird, using it for eggs, meat, and gorgeous feathers for ceremonial decoration. Later, the Aztec called the fowl huehxōlōtl, meaning “Giant Monster,” an appropriate name if you’ve ever encountered a turkey face-to-face. Indigenous people all over Mesoamerica used turkeys ceremonially—sacrificing and feasting on the birds as offerings of thanks for a bountiful harvest, wearing its feathers in beautiful headdresses, and making statues and carvings. The Aztec even had a horrifying god Chalchiuhtotolin, representing disease and plague, who took the form of a huge, horrifying turkey. Statues and other relics taking the form of the turkey are found all over Mexico, symbolizing the great importance of the bird to the culinary and religious landscape of these ancient civilizations.
European explorers encountering the Aztec huehxōlōtl brought it back to Europe, where it was confused with the peacock from India (in Spain it’s still called “pavo” from “peacock”). English speakers confused matters even further, thinking it came from Turkey (which was a generic name for Asia anyway). Regardless of what we call it, our feasting on Thanksgiving turkeys echoes the Aztec ritual sacrifice of the huehxōlōtl—Thanksgiving is about as close as we get to a harvest celebration. By the way, the Mexican word for turkey—guajolote—descends directly from huehxōlōtl.
I am obsessed with going to the optometrist. I find it to be an experience like no other, beguiling and thrilling at the same time. Perhaps, in an abstracted way, it could even be considered erotic. Ever since my eyes started failing me in the wake of my concussion, I have presented myself to the eye doctor with a misshapen childlike glee, one that’s a little too chipper towards the receptionists who cannot possibly understand what about my being there could so enthrall me.
It is not so much that I enjoy doctors (in the Munchausen’s sense or otherwise) or, as one might suspect, that my doctor is particularly attractive (though he does wear glasses, perhaps to circumvent accusations of conspiracy). No, for me the reason this is all so exciting is because a visit to the optometrist is distinct from all other modes of seeing and all other modes of being seen. If you haven’t been, and your insurance covers it, it may be worth faking blurry eyes just for the experience.
We are so used to the eye as a symbolic, moral, and metaphysical object—the eye as a technical challenge from art history, the eye as the window to the soul, the eye as an expression of beauty or character, the eye as the locus of narrative emotion: the quivering eye, the downcast eye, the searching eye. Then there is the eye as identification; one thinks of how, in Wagner, for example, the characters so often come to know either themselves or the Other by way of a gaze, especially into a body of water, a reflection. Meanwhile, a more nefarious ocular gesture can be found in the retina scanning stations now used by Customs and Border Patrol at airports around the country. This brings us, of course, to the eye as the symbology of nefariousness and surveillance, a notion that is perhaps most extensively explored not in 1984 but in the work of Lemony Snicket, wherein the eye forms the symbology of a mysterious and questionably benevolent secret society whose mission is nothing less than to reinterpret the world.
How loaded the language of the eye is! Whither Narcissus! Whither Oedipus! Whither Georges Bataille! The verb to see can simultaneously mean to locate, understand, interpret, acknowledge, identify, identify with. To look is also to probe, to search, to interrogate. We wrap our whole lives in seeing and being seen, especially we boring little writers who think it’s nontrivial to write sentences like “The verb to see can simultaneously mean. . .”
My working life as a critic is itself predicated on how well I can see in new and interesting ways, search for flaws and weaknesses, metaphors and historical precedents, and, more often than not, for times when the contractors working on very expensive architectural projects have been skimping on the job. Even the practice of criticism as a whole, when defined most magnanimously, is an education in ways of seeing.
That’s all well and good, but do you know who (besides my readers) would quickly tire of such platitudes? The optometrist.
After seeing a photo of an apartment in the midst of New York’s Times Square, Anne Kadet contrived to meet the man who lives there. Here, he describes the highs and lows of living in one of the most chaotic neighborhoods in America.
When Jake moved to the neighborhood on Election Day 2020, it was a Covid ghost town. The only people around were construction crews boarding up the storefronts in preparation for feared post-election riots.
Now, Times Square’s pedestrian counts are back up to nearly 400,000 a day. “And personally, I love it,” said Jake. “But I love weird experiences. The worst thing in the world, I think, is to be bored.”
“There’s news stories that shake the whole planet, and they’re a few blocks from me,” he said. “Just the other day, this woman went viral for chasing down Keanu Reeves . . . I watched it happen out my window, and then I saw it on TMZ.”
“I’ve had run-ins with huge celebrities out here,” he continued. “I’ve had conversations with homeless folks, I’ve met artists, the Naked Cowboy. I’ve met tourists, I’ve met pro athletes. Just about everybody comes to Times Square at some point in their life.”
He loves the street action —the pedicab drivers, showtime performers, Elmo characters, palm readers and ticket hawkers. “It’s oddly representative of a lot of New York,” he said. “There’s so many hustlers out there, so many people who have all figured out their grift.”
And he enjoys shooting the action with his camera of choice—a cheap Kodak 35mm disposable.
He even loves the commercialism. While most New Yorkers hate Times Square, he said, “the way I started to see it after living here for a while is like, all of the stuff that you love about New York, you need this here in order for all that to happen. You need all this tourism revenue, and you need all of this ad money that goes into these billboards—this is what allows you to have your quaint little neighborhood over there.”
But he does have a pet peeve: the black smoke wafting from the food carts. “That is probably the number two thing that bothers me most about being in Times Square,” he said.
“Is number one the slow walkers?” I guessed.
“No,” he said. “The number one is the song Empire State of Mind with Alicia Keyes and Jay-Z. If I had a genie and three wishes, one of my wishes would be to get rid of that song forever. It’s so overplayed around here.”
Writer and beauty editor has launched Godfrey’s Guide, a space where she’ll share “ONLY the good beauty products, plus opinions and advice on life, travel, style, decor, wellness, aging, food, and culture.”
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.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
For the final episode of Substack on Film: London, we had the honor of staying with writer Plum Sykes at her country house in the Cotswolds.
As a former Vogue editor, Plum is known for having exacting taste. And having read Plum’s post where she ranked her houseguests by the gifts they’d brought, I was a bit nervous. I was visiting her as a representative of Substack, after all, and I didn’t want to choose the wrong gift lest it reflect poorly on the company. After fruitlessly trying to find something unique, I settled on what felt boring, but respectable: Aesop soap and hand cream.
Dajiana and I arrived in the evening and were squired about town by Plum in her trusty Land Rover. After a lovely dinner out, we drove to the house and found her daughter, Tess, sitting at the kitchen table working on a sewing project. Plum gave us a tour before turning in for the night and strongly recommended that we take baths in our respective private tubs.
The next morning, we woke up early and followed Plum around as she went through her routine: picking an outfit, visiting Tim the farmer, tending to her horses, and working on her Substack, of course. In Plum’s world, there is a right way to do everything, and we spent the day absorbing her hard-earned knowledge. A couple weeks later, she wrote a post inspired by our time together, and I was deeply relieved to learn that my gift and behavior had passed muster.
That’s a wrap for this season of Substack on Film! You can get more Plum on her Substack. Let us know where we should go next, in the comments.
This week, we’re going to the movies, celebrating criticism, losing language, and debating monster ethnicities.
TRAVEL
Now playing
Matthew Frank spent two weeks driving cross-country to 58 independent theaters in 20 states, documenting a business battered by streaming, inflation, and pandemic aftershocks—and the determined people finding creative ways to keep the lights on.
It’s a cool October Friday night in Pagosa Springs, Colo., a working-class town of roughly 1,800 that’s proudly home to the world’s deepest hot springs. I’m nearing the end of day three of my two-week cross-country voyage, and with an hour to kill, I post up at a small bar, where several locals drink beers while watching a playoff baseball game on the corner TV.
The town itself is a beauty, with tall aspen trees overlooking the San Juan River on one side of the road and an old Western village—now transformed into a slightly more modern town, featuring Subway and Arby’s next to century-old local shops—on the other. There’s the Pagosa Hotel, which burned down, then was rebuilt in 1919; there’s Goodman’s, a fifth-generation family-owned department store that’s been in operation since 1899; and right next to it is the Liberty Theatre, a charming, old-school auditorium that has remained in business since 1919 and once housed a brothel in what are now the dark, gravelly bowels of the venue.
I’m in town as part of my quest to spend quality time at as many American movie theaters as I can, traveling by car from Los Angeles to New York to 20 states and 58 movie theaters. Guiding me through stop number 16 is Liberty manager Ann Sanders, a New Orleans native and soon-to-be great-grandmother who sports bright red hair and medium-size glasses. Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, Ann sold her multimillion-dollar wholesale and marketing company to a competitor. She subsequently moved West and eventually settled in Pagosa Springs, which she refers to as her “happy place.” In 2018, her best friend of nearly 50 years purchased the Liberty and entrusted Ann with managerial duties, which she spends her time on, including programming, advertising and overseeing the day-to-day operations of the 200-seat venue.
As a few customers begin to file in, Ann rushes to tend bar—a relatively new addition to the space. After Ann’s friend bought the theater, she began renovations, which took two years to complete. (There is no exact estimate on how much the renovations cost, but Ann points me to a hand-painted mural of the block behind the concession stand. Instead of “Liberty Theatre,” it reads “Money Pit.”) According to Liberty employees Teresa and Al, these renovations were sorely needed. As a memento, the bar area holds three of the old stiff wooden chairs, one of which has a small hole in the center, which is believed to be from a gunshot back in the 1920s.
The theater is now in quite an admirable condition. It still retains much of its old-school charm, with a sign reading “Movie Tickets 25¢” and a few framed black-and-white images of the theater lining the walls. However, the seats now have a little more plush to them. The floor used to be flat, such that you’d often be staring at the back of someone’s head—now it’s sloped. The ceiling is twice as high, no longer falling in, and has a sleek tin appearance.
The one thing that couldn’t be renovated out of the venue, though, were the ghosts. According to Ann’s psychic friend, they remain from the Prohibition-era bordello in the basement. While touring me through the premises, she briefly alludes to it: “We do have ghosts, by the way.” I laugh it off as a joke. But while talking with Teresa and Al as Ann tended bar, they bring it up just the same as she had: matter-of-factly, shrugging it off as a quirk of the building. I ask Teresa, who sometimes feels a little tinge on her skin when she goes downstairs, if she’s afraid of them. She shakes her head no. “They’re not evil spirits,” Teresa says. “They’re just quietly living their life like they normally do.”
That Friday night, there are likely more ghosts occupying the premises than moviegoers. As Ann and I sit in her dimly lit projection room, we overlook the eight people who have made it out for a showing of the Jennifer Lopez musical flop Kiss of the Spider Woman. Meanwhile, Ann regales me with stories of small-town theater management. Many are funny. When A Minecraft Movie opened at the Liberty, she hung signs all around town that read, “Disruptive Behavior Will Be Prosecuted.”
“Will be prosecuted?” I ask.
“Absolutely,” Ann replies. “We’re friends with the sheriff.”
Some stories are sad. The first week of last year’s Joker: Folie à Deux was so bad (only three people came one night), she had to lay off her staff and work everything herself.
But a lot of what she says is the type of wistful, cynical rhetoric I would begin to hear across the country, at every independent theater, multiplex and chain; urban, suburban and rural; managers, employees and patrons alike.
In an essay for Asterisk Magazine, Celine Nguyen examines the “social and economic conditions [that] helped produce great work in the 20th century” and considers what might be going wrong in the 21st. First up: the decline of criticism.
A few years ago, a lifelong interest in books led me to moonlight as a literary critic—waking up at 5 a.m. to draft book reviews, going to my day job as a software designer, and then editing in the evenings. As side projects go, it was one of the most financially unremunerative things I could have done. Intellectually, it was the most invigorating activity I could imagine.
Critics are often seen as peevish, elite aesthetes responsible for judging books as good or bad. But the reviews I admired most and sought to write eschewed simple star ratings. Instead, they examined books with more attention, insight, and generosity—situating them in a broader social and artistic context. “Criticism has some inextricable relationship with judgment,” the art professor Alex Kitnick observed, “but perhaps more importantly, it opens up a space for complexity.”
When I came across Chaim Gingold’s book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, I knew I had to write about it. For years, I had felt that good writing about software was thin on the ground. In most narratives, software was made by singular boy geniuses or oblivious villains. It was rarely portrayed as a creative act or a social pursuit involving teams of thinkers, makers, engineers, and designers.
By the time my review was published—a 3,500-word essay that drew connections between Building SimCity, Silicon Valley’s favorite anthropology book, Seeing Like a State, and a controversial city-building project in California—I had spent upwards of 40 hours on the review. I was gratified when I received an email from Gingold expressing his appreciation.
I began to think that the role of a critic is also a relational one: If someone has spent years of their life on a work, they deserve a serious, sustained response. Critics who write such reviews aren’t just offering something to the maker of a work but to the world. Look here, a critic says. Imagine what culture could be like—if there was more of, less of, a certain tendency towards, a turn away from, a movement that looked like: this.
Critics need these idealistic, lofty reasons for what they do because the economics of the profession are disastrously bad. The Los Angeles Review of Books paid me $100 for my review; I’ve never gotten more than $600 from a publication. “As far as I can tell,” the journalist and critic Adam Morgan wrote in the September issue of World Literature Today, “there are only seven full-time book critics left in the United States.” If you’re reading a review of an art exhibition, album, or novel, the writer was likely paid less than minimum wage for their time. In this profession, other work (or other people) pay the rent. “The truth,” the critic and novelist Christine Smallwood writes, is that
People who do this quite insane and marginal thing of writing criticism do it because they have a passionate attachment to literature. There’s little money or power in it, and no fame. Writing book reviews today is a vocation, not a career.
But is the financial viability of criticism a problem for anyone except critics? For authors, perhaps: Fewer publications, with fewer full-time staff and less budget for freelancers, adds up to fewer reviews. This is bad news for debut novelists, who are pushed to be writers and social media experts to bring their work to an audience. And it’s bad news, I’d argue, if we care about cultural dynamism and artistic innovation.
It’s obvious that artistic movements need artists. My claim is that they also need critics. Critics help name, describe, and contextualize movements. They historicize artists—to reveal what is novel and innovative—and make a persuasive case for what work will be important in the future. Critics, in short, tell the story of how art and culture have changed over time, and how it’s changing now. And without a compelling story, culture stagnates and wanes.
Scrap fabric still life by Andrew Pierce Scott, shared by Ali LaBelle
MEMOIR
“An amnesic memoir”
After a traumatic brain injury, Judith Hannah Weiss lost her facility with language and, with it, her sense of self. Her essay for Oldster Magazine chronicles the process of rebuilding that self, word by word.
Imagine a crater 50 feet wide and 15 feet deep cracking open under your feet. Where would you be? Who would you be? Imagine something of similar scale cracking open in your head. This happened to me in 2006 when I was hit by a drunk with a truck.
My brain broke.
Words jammed in my ears if I heard them. Jammed in my throat if I tried to say them. Jammed and scrambled if I saw them. Words had been my job. My clients produced Oprah and Elmo and Martha and Elle, plus Vogue, The New Yorker, and Kermit the Frog, and I produced words for all of them.
Words took us on vacation, bought the car and powered it, dressed us up, took us out, paid tuition, planted trees. Then I couldn’t combine them, define them, align them, recall them, or take them to the bank. I was then 56, had planned to freelance for ten more years, and hadn’t planned on a drunk with a truck.
Imagine what it would be like to lose your best friend. Then try to imagine what it would be like to lose your best self. The first and second person who now overlapped as “me” had wholly different lives. The first person was a writer. The second person landed on a planet without a paragraph, I mean without a parachute, and was parked at a table in Brain Trauma with a bunch of other people who were pounding pegs in boards.
We were missing persons, missing the persons we used to be. Some of us were lawyers or teachers or street cleaners or Special Troops in conflict zones, which were once called wars. One guy made falafels. Some were parents. Some have parents. Some have toddlers. Some speak like toddlers. Or don’t speak. One guy was hit by a bus. One was hit by a bullet. Robin forgot the names of her kids. I couldn’t remember the names of my clients, or what I had ever done for them. I couldn’t remember my child’s first words or the scent of her hair.
Memory is what remains of everything we’ve ever seen or heard or learned or cared about. It is who we think we are. But it’s not what is in your head. It’s what you can find in your head. I took endless batteries of tests—not to measure what was lost, but to measure what remained. Sometimes the “bare minimum” was my maximum. I learned and forgot I’d been hit by a truck. I likely was told that a few hundred times.
I am a version of the person who wrote words before the truck. What would take the “first me” five minutes took “the new me” hours, so “we” learned to start preparing “me” long ahead of time.
I posted this note on our very own Substack Notes, and, by my standards, it did astronomical numbers:
Names have meaning, and some names display a clearly ethnic character. If you go to a bar in Dorchester, Boston or Bridgeport, Chicago, heavily Irish-American neighborhoods, on a Friday night and yell out for a “James Sullivan”, a dozen people will think you’re asking for them.
As Vast Ruddy correctly pointed out, the fact that both these characters have ethnic names was clearly a deliberate choice meant to make the audience have sympathy for them as “working-class everymen”. Their ethnic names are no accident. “James Patrick Sullivan” could only be Irish, but, as Owen points out:
Could Mike Wazowski be any ethnicity other than Jewish or Polish?
No.
The monsters live in an analog of an industrial town in the American northeast. If you were in the real-world equivalent of one of these places and you met a man named “Mike Wazowski”, you’d assume that this man’s family came over from somewhere in Eastern Europe sometime in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.
His name’s spelling helps us narrow the possibilities down further. The Slavic suffix pronounced “ski” indicates that a last name comes from an affiliation, often a place. For example, “Kievsky” would indicate a family origin in Kiev. The version of this suffix spelled S-K-I, more specifically, is the typical way to spell and say it for Polish names, with other areas using different spellings and sometimes different pronunciations.
This style of name is also found among Ashkenazi Jewish communities who lived in Polish-speaking areas. Jewish names are traditionally patronymic (e.g. “Michael ben David”, literally “Michael son of David”), but Austria, Russia, and the Holy Roman Empire legally mandated their Jews to adopt family names along local lines in the late 17th and early 19th century. Because of this, many Ashkenazi Jews have last names ending in -ski.
His first name, Michael, does not help us at all. This is a common first name for both Jews and Catholics, Catholicism being the dominant religious creed among Polish people. We must dig deeper.
It’s been a big week for Substack’s new arrivals. First up: joined Substack, sharing an essay about creativity, brat, and her album in collaboration with Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
has joined Substack, where she’s been sharing behind-the-scenes videos about her life onstage and the process of writing her first book.
has launched Wiser Than Me on Substack, a companion to the Wiser Than Me podcast. “Think: exclusive BTS content and bonus snippets, a place to connect with other listeners, and a few notes from me. Stick around, wise up!”
Actor, author, and activist and his partner, , have launched , “a community of people who want to explore important questions, figure out how to do some good in the world, and laugh along the way.”
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.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
