This week, we’re looking at scientific breakthroughs, the women who dream of chickens, and Cairo’s anarchic streets.
THE DISCOURSE
Briefly noted
The Washington Post is gutted: After weeks of rumors, the Washington Post laid off over a third of its workforce this week. Every corner of the newsroom was affected, but international, sports, and books coverage were among the most severely impacted. It’s a dark day for journalism, but there is one silver lining: , , , and have all started Substacks since the layoffs.
The social network that’s (intentionally) full of bots: “AI agents have been gathering online by the thousands over the past week, debating their existence, attempting to date each other, building their own religion, concocting crypto schemes, and spewing gibberish,” writes. This is all happening on Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network specifically for AI agents. For some, the resulting forums are eerie glimpses at self-realized artificial intelligence; for others, including , they’re an example of “what you’d expect to see if you told an LLM to write a post about being an LLM, on a forum for LLMs.” As summarizes, it’s really in the eye of the beholder: “As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between ‘AIs imitating a social network’ and ‘AIs actually having a social network’ in the most confusing way possible—a perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want.”
Big week for sports fans: With the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl kicking off this weekend, the sports fan’s cup runneth over. of Drinks with Broads opened up their Olympics coverage with a discussion of one of the weirder Olympics injection scandals in recent years. Meanwhile, dives into the bananas list of demands the NFL places on stadiums hoping to host the Super Bowl.
SCIENCE
A century of knowledge
We often hear about the technological innovations those born at the beginning of the 20th century lived through. In this post, Hilarius Bookbinder considers the intellectual breakthroughs of the same time period.
I think a lot of the epistemological troubles of modernity (fake news, bad echo chambers, conspiracy theories, collapse in expert trust) can be explained by the fact that as a species we have learned so much over such a short span of time that our collective knowledge is like a thin crust of ice on the deep sea of ancestral folk wisdom. It takes very little to break through that surface and find ourselves back in the roiling waters of fables, myths, superstitions, auguries, and divination.
My grandfather was born in 1901. He once said that he thought he lived during the greatest time in history: born during horse-and-buggy days, he lived to see a man on the moon. Obviously, the technological inventions since 1901 have been staggering, but I want to look at knowledge, what we as a species have learned since then.
When Granddad was born, no one knew any of the following things. Either no one had any idea they were true or they were wacky ideas promoted strictly by lunatic visionaries. Now they are all common knowledge among educated people.
[...]
Black holes and wormholes. These darlings of sci-fi movies weren’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye back in 1901. They are both predictions from the general theory of relativity (1915), and there wasn’t experimental confirmation of black holes until the 1970s. Wormholes are still theoretical.
The existence of galaxies. Here’s a good one. In 1901 nobody had any idea that there were other galaxies. There was the Milky Way and that was that. Sure, astronomers could see fuzzy nebulae in their telescopes, but figured they were either gas clouds or some other weird thing inside the Milky Way. It wasn’t until the 1920s (Hubble again) that we learned the truth: our galaxy with its 100 billion stars is merely a grain of sand on a vast beach. It was just a decade ago that we arrived at the current estimate of 1-2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
Quantum physics. Knowledge of the very tiny was itself very tiny in 1901. We knew there were atoms and electrons, but that’s it. No one knew about protons, neutrons, the nucleus, or how atoms were put together. Nuclear fission and fusion were unknown (so nobody understood why the sun was hot, or how it was powered). Splitting an atom was unheard of, much less the idea of a chain reaction. The idea that light is made of photons was also unknown.
Plate tectonics. In 1901 everyone looked at the world map, saw how the eastern coastline of North and South America perfectly fits into the western coastline of Europe and Africa like a jigsaw puzzle and thought, “huh, what a coincidence!” In 1912 Alfred Wegener suggested maybe the continents drift around the surface of the globe, a suggestion that was met with peals of laughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the evidence was in, and plate tectonics became settled science, explaining volcanoes, earthquakes, and how mountains arise.
Birds are dinosaurs. Thomas Huxley’s wild avian speculation in the 19th century was quickly shelved in favor of “dinos were cold-blooded, slow-moving reptiles.” It wasn’t until the 1990s (!) that it was conclusively established that there had been feathered non-avian dinosaurs, that feathers evolved before flight, and that modern birds aren’t descended from dinosaurs, but are in fact the only surviving lineage of theropod dinosaurs.
Blood types. Doctors had tried blood transfusions since the 17th century, but the results ranged from mixed to disastrous. The reason was that nobody knew about blood types, and how you can’t just mix ’n’ match. That wasn’t discovered until 1901-1902. Decades later we discovered anticoagulants (allowing blood to be stored) and the Rh factor (whether your blood type is + or -).
These days I consume zero climbing media. I haven’t done since the day I woke up in hospital.
Whereas I once refreshed UKClimbing 40 times a day, obsessively consumed climbing videos on YouTube, devoured the mountain classics of literature, and leafed through my sizable library of guidebooks planning future adventures, I now pretend that when climbing ceased to exist for me, it ceased to exist for everybody.
It is still the only way that I can cope. Whereas some people who are catastrophically injured through sport still take joy in watching others participate, for me it’s too painful. I cut myself off, and never looked back. Hence I’ve no idea if Adam Ondra is still the only person to have climbed 9c, or if that even remains the highest sport grade. Same goes for E12, for Burden of Dreams. I couldn’t even guess who won the men’s gold in 2024, though I’m going to assume that Janja won the women’s.
But even I heard about Alex Honnold climbing some building in Taiwan.
Before going any further, let’s get one piece of terminology straight. Honnold’s “achievement” (scare quotes to be explained in a moment) last week was not simply that he free climbed Taipei 101, but that he free soloed it. The distinction is important. Free climbing means ascending something without the use of devices to assist (“aid”) the physical moves themselves. However, assistive devices can be used whilst free climbing to prevent injury or death, should a climber’s un-aided physical moves come up short and they fall. (Think: harnesses, ropes, karabiners, et cetera.) By contrast, free soloing is free climbing, but without any of the assistive devices used to (in theory) prevent death if the climber should fall. In essence, free soloing reduces the margin of error to zero. If you fall, you die.
I free climbed literally thousands of routes before my accident. On a dozen or so occasions, I free soloed them.
A few people have cautiously asked me what I think of Honnold’s latest. My answer has generally been: “how the fuck am I the one in a wheelchair, and not him?” But there’s more to it than that.
As I don’t consume climbing media anymore, I don’t know what the general consensus is in the climbing scene regarding his latest spectacle. But I’d wager that most climbers had the same response as me: a rolling of the eyes.
This might seem weird. Isn’t free soloing a 500m building an impressive athletic and psychological achievement, and shouldn’t climbers respect that more than anybody? Putting aside for now (we will get there in a minute) furious debates between climbers about the acceptability of free soloing in general, my guess is that even people who free solo won’t have been positively disposed.
First, because although what Honnold did will look impressive to non-climbers, those who climb will know that it was nowhere near as hard (to him) as it looks. The now widely circulated footage of making what appear to be difficult moves on the tower are in fact not so for somebody with advanced climbing skills, which he undoubtedly possesses. Those moves are far below Honnold’s technical and physical limits. If you don’t climb, this will be hard to believe, but take it from me: for somebody of his ability, climbing Taipei 101 is about as difficult as going up a ladder. Sure, it’s not a good idea to fall off a 500m ladder. If you do, you will die. But if you don’t, you won’t.
And yes, it takes good mental composure to not panic, to be able to commit to something like that from start to finish. But this is hardly Honnold’s first rodeo. He has spent years free soloing, and thus has trained his amygdala such that a panic response is simply not going to happen to him, even at 400m off the ground. If you’ve never climbed a ladder before, then going even 20m up a ladder will likely cause you to quake with fear and be desperate to come down. But if you climb a thousand 20m ladders over the next 20 years, you’re not going to find it remotely difficult to safely climb another one tomorrow. (And trust me, once you are comfortable at 20m, you’re comfortable at 500.)
Which is not to say that none of Honnold’s achievements as a free soloist are impressive. Quite the contrary. He has previously pushed the limits of free soloing far beyond what was thought possible, and in a way every climber respects (even if only begrudgingly). When he soloed El Capitan in Yosemite, this was a moment of human accomplishment on a par with being the first to run 100m in under 9.8 seconds—except with the added twist of failure meaning certain death. The film Free Solo is genuinely worth watching, both as a piece of documentary evidence for what he accomplished as well as an interesting insight into the rare psychology of the committed soloist, someone pushing the limits beyond what anybody thought the envelope would allow.
But that itself is now part of the problem. Taipei 101 is not El Cap. There is no beauty, in terms of the movement of a human body on rock, to be found in the capital of Taiwan. It is one thing to add potentially the most storied chapter to the grand history of Yosemite climbing, quite another to do a Netflix special. Not even Honnold is going to pretend—the soloist’s oldest defence—that there is a deep spiritual communion to be found in mechanically repeating moves on concrete blocks, filmed by a dozen cameras, as part of a multimillion-dollar media operation.
And capped off by taking a selfie at the top.
I mean, he’s not even the first person to free solo tall buildings. Alain Robert has been doing it for years, usually illegally, and without making money from it. Where is his Netflix cash-in?
In other words, my predominant response to Alex Honnold’s latest media acclaim is that I’m still a punk rock kid at heart: fucking sell-out.
I am a Millennial white woman and yet, I say this bravely, I do not want chickens.
I want many things. A calm nervous system. An abundant bank account. Taylor Russell’s coats. But chickens? No.
Many of my friends want them. Many Millennial white women want them. Women I know personally. Women I know spiritually. Kristin Cavallari has chickens. Hilary Duff has chickens. Amanda Seyfried? Chickens. Women with blowouts and impeccable contouring are waking up at dawn to collect eggs before their Pilates classes, like they’re in a Perry-free version of Big Little Lies, executive produced by Goop.
Why? What are the chickens saying? Why are the chickens here? Is this about eggs, or something else? A lifestyle thesis disguised as poultry? Because no one actually wants to care for an animal that screams, attacks you with its beak, and can be taken out by a stiff breeze.
Perhaps chickens feel less like a pet and more like an announcement: I HAVE SPACE NOW. Physical space. Emotional space. Acreage. A mudroom.
Chickens imply land. You don’t get chickens unless you’ve graduated from “apartment person” to “someone who casually says ‘the property.’” You don’t get chickens unless someone in your home knows their way around a hammer, a latch and a ramp (for the dramatic chickens). You don’t get chickens unless you are committing to a life of many omelettes.
It is all a Free People ad. To be fair, the image on the right looks nice. Is it AI? :(
The aesthetic argument, of course, is airtight. Chickens pair beautifully with a DÔEN dress. You can imagine yourself drifting through your yard at golden hour, hem grazing calf, hair in a loose, morally superior braid, whispering affirmations to a Rhode Island Red. The fantasy is powerful: no screens. Just you and your flock, living off the land. You’re baking sourdough while your chicken friend looks on approvingly: ah yes, good, she thinks, this will go nicely with a breakfast sandwich. You’ve taken a guitar. Not because you play, but because it makes sense. There’s shelving with a lot of bobbins and even more homemade jams. The bobbins and jams are as abundant as the domestic fowl. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? Need I bring up shiplap?
Never mind that chicken caretaking is, by all accounts, bureaucratic labor involving mites, fencing disputes, and the devastation of discovering that something called a “hawk” exists. The fantasy does not include any of that. The fantasy includes speckled eggs in a ceramic bowl. Overalls.
So I decided to investigate.
Again, not because I want chickens but because the chickens want me. They’re circling. They’re symbolic. A feathered milestone. And I thought it was my duty, as a woman still emotionally renting and more interested in a lymphatic drainage massage than livestock, to look this thing in the eye and ask the only question that matters: what is this all about?
There’s that gabe k-s quote that goes, “There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living.”
By that measure, the opposite of suicide is to spend a few days walking and driving the streets of Cairo.
⁂
True, it can feel like self-murder. Cairo has more than 23 million people and no traffic lights. Getting anywhere demands submitting to an unruly accumulation of motion and believing unwaveringly in the ancient concept of going with the flow. It’s very somatic. It made me feel bodily, that I had a presence. It gave shape to me insofar as I became a construction of a thing competing for space with other constructed things. It also made me feel totally irrelevant and trivial. There was a unique spectrum within me and across which I felt myself being thrust toward the extreme ends of: flesh-based conception on one side and disembodiment on the other.
⁂
And where was my mind? Speculating about what it would be like for a bus to run me over and make me flat and, because the vehicles are so one after the other, to squash me several times before anyone stopped, until what was left of me could be used to paint walls, until there was only a granular paste a passerby might skid on and pull their groin.
⁂
It’s no news by now that Cairo’s congestion rivals the world’s great clusterfucks—Delhi, Lagos, Manila. Without a coherent authority, everyone does what they want. I like the self-regulating anarchy. I find it relaxing, even when it feels like it could crush me at any second. What stresses me out is the world of policies and litigation.
Such interconnectedness means individual choices matter. A heedless insistence on one’s own priority disrupts the harmony of the whole. And so there’s a real sense of society in the ceaseless tightening and loosening of the knot, the communal negotiation of space. It can be ruthless, but there are small mercies everywhere. Now and then, a hand lifts briefly from a steering wheel to signal that you may merge.
⁂
As for “living like a local,” infused with exhaust and coated in road smut is perhaps the most authentic way to be in Cairo, an experience shared by almost everyone who lives here. You get used to the scratch in your throat.
⁂
An inventory of things in transit, noted over 13 minutes at Ramses Square:
Cars, taxis, minibuses, public buses, tourist buses, delivery vans, pickup trucks, dump trucks, cement mixers, fuel tankers, water trucks, garbage trucks, tow trucks, road rollers, cranes in transit, police cars, police vans, armored police vehicles, military trucks, ambulances, fire engines, motorcycles, scooters, tuk-tuks, motorized rickshaws, bicycles, handcarts, pushcarts, produce carts, wheelbarrows, mule carts, pedestrians, street vendors on foot, men carrying trays, children weaving through traffic, mechanics rolling tires, people pushing stalled cars, refrigerators on carts, mattresses strapped to bicycles, gas canisters on trolleys, rolling crates, rolling plastic barrels, rollerbladers, dogs, stray shopping carts.
⁂
It really is another world. Of course we all know the “we” and “us” of contemporary culture writing refers to a rather narrow Western milieu, but the boundless vastness of humanity to be observed on Cairo’s streets makes it seem like that whole referred-to audience could fit into a single backyard in Williamsburg.
Flaubert wrote, “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” But it was more like I saw what a tiny world occupied me.
has launched. Reese Witherspoon’s first post describes it as “a cozy corner of the internet where we can actually talk about the books we love and pick up even more reads along the way.”
Actress and model has joined Substack, kicking things off with a personal essay about her relationship to religion, God, and morality.
The Washington Post’s former book critic has turned Substack into his new home, where he “intend[s] to keep nattering on about books, authors, and our imperiled literary culture.”
Comedian and actor has joined Substack to “try to lower your cortisol and bring a little bit of joy to the world or at least your inbox.”
Harvard Law professor and author has joined Substack, where he’ll be sharing “what you might call actionable wisdom: thoughts that you can put to use in your own life, that you can discuss with the people who matter to you, and that you can translate into feeling more connected, balanced, and engaged in your own life.”
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.
This week, we’re waking in the dark, perusing old issues of Esquire, and getting lost in Yonville.
MORNING PEOPLE
How to wake up, according to bakers
For those struggling with winter mornings, Cake Zine consulted the experts: bakers who wake at 3 a.m.—some “with actual hatred” in their hearts—and somehow make it work.
“I’m jolted awake by the sound of radar—all the Apple alarms are an assault on the senses, so might as well call a spade a spade. I emerge from bed with actual hatred in my heart. I am not a morning person.
The only thing that softens the blow is this ridiculous fuzzy pink sweater I’ve started calling my snuggie. I keep it on the bedside so it’s the first thing I reach for. Then I listen to early-aughts rock music (Three Doors Down) on my walk to work to try and feel some semblance of aliveness (lol). Most mornings it’s still brutally dark, but once in a while, depending on the season, I catch a sunrise. I like to smile at the other people on their way to work. I try to remember that we’re doing something together, bringing the city to life.”
Morgan Knight, pastry chef and owner at Saint Street Cakes
“Because most of our bakes don’t require proofing, and cakes are baked the day before, I’m usually up for work around 6 a.m! The thing that keeps me up and ready for the day is using my Brick—it’s a device that disables social media on my phone to avoid the morning doom scroll. Staying off of my phone in the morning helps me be present and intentional.
Oh, and I’ll usually make a fruit smoothie to trick myself into feeling like it’s warm out, especially on cold days.”
Kaitlyn Wong, pastry chef at Ouma Brooklyn
“I recently got back into the early-morning baker life at the end of last year when I started the pastry program at Ouma in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. It’s been almost 3 years since I’ve had the (dis)pleasure of waking up that early—I’d be lying if I didn’t say it never gets easier! It’s funny when people constantly assume that because I’m a pastry chef I’m “used to” the early hours … no! I realize I sound very aggro, and I know it’s what I signed up for, but waking up early will never not suck!
If bringing fresh pastries to Prospect Lefferts Gardens means waking up at the crack of dawn, I’ll do it—just not with a smile or any cheerful enthusiasm. I do have a few tricks up my sleeve that seem to help make the agony of waking up early a little less agonizing: no caffeine after 10 a.m., asleep by 9 p.m., and just one alarm to wake me up and a second one to yell at me to get out of bed.
Biking to work is my usual mode of transportation, and I swear that there’s something about the frigid 5 a.m. air hitting your face that really wakes you up! But it would be disingenuous of me to not admit that I supplement with the occasional Uber (I’ve been Ubering a lot these days…). My partner Jordan and I both get up early for work and sometimes it aligns and we can wake up a little earlier and have a coffee together. Those mornings are always nice.”
Kyla Tang, baker at Plumcot
“The playlist I choose to listen to on the morning commute completely sets my mood for the day. This one always gets me going in the morning.
Oh, and I never leave the house without a hot drink (hot water with ginger and dried red dates).”
Dallas King, executive pastry chef at Lost Bread Co.
“I wake up at 2 a.m. on the weekends and pick out an outfit in the dark so I don’t wake up my partner. I chug a pre-workout shake, brush my teeth, moisturize, and walk 30 minutes to work to get there by 3 a.m. I think the walk really helps me wake up and get ready to immediately start working (the walk is great podcast listening time, too).
I usually like to have a really consistent routine in the mornings: I let myself snooze once, always, then bolt straight out of bed. The key is good sleep and immediate caffeination.
I’ve seen bakers belittle themselves for not getting enough sleep before an early shift, but that couldn’t be me. Just be easy on yourself and have some coffee (there is a recurring theme here). Go slow as you reasonably can but don’t be sloppy. Watch the clock obsessively. Budget in a nap for ASAP after work and move on.”
Lilli Maren, freelance baker in New York
“No matter how early my day starts, I always carve out 15 minutes for puzzles. I call this ‘bringing my brain up to temp.’ I also have a vintage lamp in this cosy corner of my apartment, and it gives the softest light. I snuggle up here with some Kenken and a cup of extra strong black coffee and it sorts me right out. I know you’re not supposed to drink coffee before 10 a.m. or whatever, but at 5 a.m. it tastes extra naughty and extra delicious!”
Gabrielle Weems, freelance baker in New York
“I work evenings now, but I used to think about getting out earlier than everyone. Enjoying the sunshine and (kind of) quiet afternoons while everyone else is still at work. Still having a nice chunk of my day ahead of me to do whatever I want with it.
It’s difficult, but getting up earlier helps me allow myself a slow morning. Warm, dim lighting and starting my mornings with jazz is a lovely motivator. As well as fresh chamomile tea. It alleviates a lot of my nerves and stress.”
Kelly Mencin, pastry chef and owner at Radio Bakery
“Ohhhfff—the winters are hard! Honestly, I try to go to bed as early as I can so that I can get at least 8 hours of sleep. Unfortunately, for a 3 a.m. start, that’s 7 p.m.
Waking up knowing that I got 8 hours of sleep makes it more bearable, I guess? Maybe it’s a placebo effect, but I tell myself that, yes, I got adequate sleep and, yes, I will be fine.
I also don’t wake up from a jarring alarm. I installed HUE lights in my apartment that gradually turn on over a 10-minute time frame. Waking up to light feels more natural and doesn’t make me as cranky as a loud alarm would.
Once I’m out the door with the thought of a warm Earl Grey tea awaiting me at work, it makes it pretty easy.”
I found this on a stoop and took it home because I’ll basically take any old periodicals home so long as they don’t smell too bad. The early nineteen-eighties aren’t my favorite era for magazines; legacy titles like Esquire were still really secure with their core demographic, and the narrowly tailored, scotch + luxury hifi lifestyle they depict can be a little alienating. Anyhow, I constantly think about tossing it out but I’ve always found this issue sufficiently bizarre to keep around, at least until I made time to read the cover story about something called “Father Love.” It sounds a little sinister, all this talk of “profound pain” and “exquisite joy.” And then there’s the photo of the little girl.
One of the things about leafing through old magazines or newspapers is seeing writers test out ideas, feelings, modalities that would become more accepted (or passe, or forbidden) over time. Anthony Brandt’s essay is basically an exploration of what it means to be a father when you maybe don’t feel up to the task. In his editor’s note, Phillip Moffitt describes this as the “postponing generation,” with many young men deciding to lock down their professional lives/Truly Understand Themselves before embarking on parenthood. “I hope that our culture is establishing a lasting pattern for itself and other societies: first grow up yourself, and only then think about taking responsibility for creating other lives.” Enter Brandt’s reflections on “the joy and the pain” of fatherhood, offered to readers as “Esquire’s gift to new parents.”
What does it mean to grow up? There’s a specific kind of nineties guy who was deeply shaped by reading Sassy (ditto Maxim), and it wasn’t until I was much older that I understood how reading, say, Details or The Face or Giant Robot truly shaped my sense of who I wanted to be. And reading Brandt’s essay is particularly interesting when looking at the world one might hope to grow into. Esquire was and remains a magazine devoted to Man at His Best, trafficking in a kind of urbane sophistication expressed through manners and taste, expertise in liquor or sports cars or neckties, curiosity about “Gucci pour homme cologne.” There are stories about great mountaintop getaways, a lot of ads for booze featuring weirdly curvaceous, mildly erotic ice cubes—the kinds of ads I remember studying in junior high in a unit on “subliminal advertising.”
[. . .]
I can imagine reading the November 1982 Esquire in order to figure out how to be a man and feeling utterly baffled. There’s a long article about borderline personality disorder which opens with a description of how hot the patient is: “Until you saw her arms, she looked like somebody you’d date, or want to. Black hair falling straight to her waist and clear pale skin made her look Irish, which she wasn’t, and her eyes were intelligent and green … Her face was something. If you met her at a party at the Harvard Club or on the beach at the Hamptons you’d be stricken.” Pretty disturbing!
Maybe I’m not someone who is interested in BPD, and I’m just here to figure out how to use up my disposable income. Should I be drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream, Old Grand Dad Kentucky Bourbon, Drambuie, Boodles British gin, Courvoisier, Pinch 12 Year Old Scotch, Martell Cognac, Grand Marnier, Johnnie Walker Black Label, Remy Martin, J&B, Grand Old Parr De Luxe Blended Scotch Whiskey, or Jack Daniel’s? Am I a cardigan-wearer? Should I be slightly taller? Someone who uses words like “queeb?”
If a foreign friend asks me this, I think of standard answers first. Eating sushi, stopping by convenience stores, visiting shrines, soaking in hot springs. These are all essential experiences in Japan.
But I might add one more thing: “It’s interesting to look at the traffic mirrors on the street.”
Japanese traffic mirrors are unique because of where they are placed. At the entrance of residential areas, narrow T-junctions, sharp curves, and parking lot exits—you can find orange traffic mirrors everywhere. A huge number of mirrors are installed all over the country.
In shrines or old towns, some mirrors have wood-grain frames instead of orange. You can enjoy these small variations.
I think what is reflected in those mirrors is very “Japanese.” In Japan’s narrow streets, pedestrians, bicycles, and cars naturally mix. You can see fragments of daily life reflected there. The same life exists both inside and outside the mirror.
I don’t drive often, but when I am behind the wheel, I don’t trust these mirrors 100%. This is because they have blind spots and you can misjudge distances. I remember learning this at driving school, so I think this is a common understanding in Japan.
Still, these mirrors continue to be installed. Maybe it is because of the Japanese mindset of trying to avoid risk as much as possible.
If you have a chance to walk in Japan, please take a moment to look into a traffic mirror on the street. You will see a layered view of this country that is not in any travel guide.
When I was right out of college, in an attempt to improve my French, or maybe to convince myself I spoke it, I read Madame Bovary in the original. I honestly don’t know how. Here’s a typical passage, in Francis Steegmuller’s translation, a description of the approach to the fateful village of Yonville:
At the foot of the hill the road crosses the Rieule on a bridge, and then, becoming an avenue planted with young aspens, leads in a straight line to the first outlying houses. These are surrounded by hedges, and their yards are full of scattered outbuildings—cider presses, carriage houses and distilling sheds standing here and there under thick trees with ladders and poles leaning against their trunks and scythes hooked over their branches. The thatched roofs hide the top third or so of the low windows like fur caps pulled down over eyes, and each windowpane, thick and convex, has a bull’s-eye in its center like the bottom of a bottle.
All these physical descriptions: I can barely understand it in English. I’m sure that as I read in French, I remembered that in high school we’d been assigned one of Flaubert’s tales, Un Coeur Simple, and all of us, even the straight-A French-nerd suckups, heartily despised it. It was nothing but aspens and alders and fringed lampshades and different types of cloth and carriage. Flaubert is for fluent speakers.
My French isn’t much better than it was 20 years ago, so this time I read the book the real way, in English, and actually understood it. My god, what a book. My first time reading it I was just grateful I understood the plot and that part about the torn-up letter fluttering out of the carriage window like butterflies. This time I was really shaken. I’m still recovering. I’m not sure I’ve managed to leave that village with the thatched roofs and the cider presses and the fields around filled with bullrushes and oat stalks with little bell-shaped flowers.
Yonville at first reminded me a little of Springfield, in The Simpsons. A self-contained world with a cast of recurring characters who all have their little quirks and manias and catchphrases. Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, the garrulous Homais, and the rest of the characters we see around town have that toylike, cartoonish limitedness—spiritually, they only have four fingers, you could say. But where Springfield is basically benevolent, Yonville is—Hell. Is it Hell? No, not exactly. That would be too easy. Bovary is not dark comedy. Charles really loves Emma, a fact that both redeems human beings and makes the story tragic and terrible. The whole thing is so pitiless. We’re spared nothing. There’s a streak of sadism in Flaubert, in the way that great movie directors are sadistic. He knows how to turn the screw to get the maximum out of every scene, more than you would have thought possible, without ever turning maudlin or trashy. Emma’s death scene, for example. When Emma dies, her agony is terrible, but it has something inhuman about it, there’s no moral quality to it, it might almost be an animal dying. She is neither more nor less sympathetic than she’s ever been. But Charles’s pain makes us suffer.
[. . .]
I found myself pondering Madame Bovary darkly for days after I’d finished it. One of the easier reflections about it is about aspens and alders and the craziness of calling Flaubert’s style “realism.” First of all, what’s reality? It doesn’t exist. Even atoms aren’t real. More importantly, Flaubert’s version of the world, in which mediocrity is so avid, a living thing, a pervasive, almost demonic force, in which people live in a realm of superficiality, fakery, and imitation, within a cloud of vanity and futility: this is clearly, like, a little tendentious. That is to say, it’s hyperreal, a vision. What does it have to do with “reality”?
This vision sticks with me. After I finished the book, I found I had started to think of “Yonville” as a term describing all the things that happen to irritate me about daily life and the city I live in, which I could now see as an expression of some essential property of life: the blooming of falsity and mediocrity, its incredible robustness and tendency to thrive. On the subway, for example. That recording that says “This is an MTA accessible station. The elevator is at the rear of the platform” grates the ear because the woman reading the message pronounces the simple words in a stilted, pretentious way, not the way she speaks but the way she thinks it’s supposed to sound. (“Yonville,” I mutter to myself.) And the subway ads, which I’m used to ignoring, now have a new quality. Though advertising different products, they seem identical: loud pitches from the crassest of salesmen, all declaring that happiness is purchasable.
, the adventurer and TV host, has launched a Substack. In his first post, he offers the lessons he’s learned from surviving in the wilderness and in business.
and have brought their podcast to Substack. “explores media and pop culture alongside politics and technology, seeking to explore each generation’s view of topical subjects while exploring the overlap between them.”
For our French speakers, journalist, broadcaster, and author has joined Substack, where she’ll be sharing analysis of politics, pop culture, and society.
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.
After a long and contentious battle, ownership of TikTok has officially changed hands in the U.S., and is now overseen by a consortium of American investors rather than the Chinese Communist Party. In just a matter of days, censorship on the platform seems more prevalent than ever, with users reporting account suppressions and the throttling of political posts, including those about the recent ICE shootings in Minnesota. The new CEO of TikTok is promoting an expansive definition of hate speech; he recently declared, “There is no finish line to moderating hate speech.”
This latest TikTok debacle further highlights a non-negotiable truth for writers, creators, publishers, and artists: If you don’t own your relationship with your audience, someone else can decide whether or not you’re able to reach them. That’s true regardless of the platform. But you can take the power back.
The best insurance against censorship and cultural coercion is to build direct relationships. Creators can cultivate mailing lists that they own and control. Audiences can support creators directly, not just with a fleeting tap on a timeline, but with direct investment into what they’re building. Platforms can set conditions that honor artist ownership. This is about more than just sticking it to The Man. It’s about creative dignity and self-respect. It’s about the present and future of media and culture.
When a platform is built on direct relationships backed by subscriptions, it must serve creators. When its business depends on creators thriving from direct audience support, it must do everything it can to protect and nurture those relationships. That is, of course, the platform we at Substack are trying to build. We believe this model shows the way out of this current media bind, helping creators and their audiences escape servitude in the attention economy and instead perform as active agents in shaping culture.
Platforms shouldn’t own people; people should own platforms.
No one should wait for the next social media crisis to take their destinies into their own hands. Do it now. Start a mailing list. Support the creators you love directly. And tell everyone to stop giving so much of their lives to apps that exploit them and their attention. Something better is already here.
Perhaps there are frontiers of digital addiction we have yet to reach. Maybe one day we’ll all have Neuralinks that beam Instagram Reels directly into our primary visual cortex, and then reading will really be toast.
Maybe. But it has proven very difficult to artificially satisfy even the most basic human pleasures. Who wants a birthday cake made with aspartame? Who would rather have a tanning bed than a sunny day? Who prefers to watch bots play chess? You can view high-res images of the Mona Lisa anytime you want, and yet people will still pay to fly to Paris and shove through crowds just to get a glimpse of the real thing.
I think there is a deep truth here: human desires are complex and multidimensional, and this makes them both hard to quench and hard to hack. That tinge of discontent that haunts even the happiest people, that bottomless hunger for more even among plenty—those are evolutionary defense mechanisms. If we were easier to please, we wouldn’t have made it this far. We would have gorged ourselves to death as soon as we figured out how to cultivate sugarcane.
That’s why I doubt the core assumption of the “death of reading” hypothesis. The theory heavily implies that people who would once have been avid readers are now glassy-eyed doomscrollers because that is, in fact, what they always wanted to be. They never appreciated the life of the mind. They were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along. The unspoken assumption is that most humans, other than a few rare intellectuals, have a hierarchy of needs that looks like this:
I don’t buy this. Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.
Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.
That’s actually where I agree with the worrywarts of the written word: all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.
According to one theory, that’s why writing originated: to pin facts in place. At first, those facts were things like “Hirin owes Mushin four bushels of wheat,” but once you realize that knowledge can be hardened and preserved by encoding it in little squiggles, you unlock a whole new realm of logic and reasoning.
That’s why there’s no replacement for text, and there never will be. Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.
That doesn’t mean every piece of prose is wonderful, just that it can be. And when it reaches those heights, it commands a power that nothing else can possess.
I didn’t always believe this. I was persuaded on this point recently when I met an audio editor named Julia Barton, who was writing a book about the history of radio. I thought that was funny—shouldn’t the history of radio be told as a podcast?
No, she said, because in the long run, books are all that matter. Podcasts, films, and TikToks are good at attracting ears and eyes, but in the realm of ideas, they punch below their weight. Thoughts only stick around when you print them out and bind them in cardboard.
I think Barton’s thesis is right. At the center of every long-lived movement, you will always find a book. Every major religion has its holy text, of course, but there is also no communism without the Communist Manifesto, no environmentalism without Silent Spring, no American Revolution without Common Sense. This remains true even in our supposed post-literate meltdown—just look at Abundance, which inspired the creation of a congressional caucus. That happened not because of Abundance the Podcast or Abundance the 7-Part YouTube Series but because of Abundance the book.
A somewhat diminished readership can somewhat diminish the power of text in culture, but it’s a mistake to think that words only exercise influence over you when you behold those words firsthand. I’m reminded of Meryl Streep’s monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, when Anne Hathaway scoffs at two seemingly identical belts and Streep schools her:
...it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.
What’s true in the world of fashion is also true in the world of ideas. Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence—it places you at their mercy. This is easy to miss. It may seem like ignorance is always overpowering knowledge, that the people who kick things down are triumphing over the people who build things up. That’s because kicking down is fast and loud, while building up is slow and quiet. But that is precisely why the builders ultimately prevail. The kickers get bored and wander off, while the builders return and start again.
As prediction markets blur the line between gambling and forecasting, Andrew Truong interviews an Oscars betting expert on reading narratives, calculating odds, and turning a profit.
Thanks for chatting with me about the wild and wonderful world of betting on—sorry, predicting—the Oscars.
Predicting, yes. It is legal if it’s a prediction market. We’re not betting. We’re not gamblers here!
No, it is gambling, but in the way the stock market is gambling. I think the line conceptually and maybe morally is pretty blurry. And it’s really just about the regulatory structure. The way I think they justify it is they say, “We’re just a tool to aggregate information.”
When did you first get into Oscars betting?
I had gotten good at the usual Oscars pool, like when you go to an Oscars party and everyone makes their picks. Around 2018 it came up in conversation with a friend of a friend who runs an underground poker ring. That’s like his full-time job, he’s had [a certain former NBA star] show up to his games.
He was like, “Dude, if you’re actually good at predicting the Oscars, like let’s put some money down. I know a bookie.” It was just me picking what I think is going to win, and then him making sure the odds were worth betting on. We weren’t going to bet on anything where a film was an 80-90% favorite.
The first year we did this was for the ceremony in 2020. This was the Parasite year and I got super lucky. We did not bet on every category, but the ones we did, we got all of them right.
A lot of people heard us brag about it, so the next year, we got a big group together to put a lot of money down. And I do terribly, like really terribly. I got everything wrong except for Frances McDormand in Best Actress. But that won us all of our money back and we just broke even.
After that, I started getting more visibility into how the oddsmaking worked and would place flyer bets. We wouldn’t just bet on things that I thought were going to win but things that were mispriced.
And how did you do last year?
My group put down a total of $15,000 across 12 categories. Our adjusted odds were around 61% and we hit on 87%, so we outperformed our odds. We made about a 50% margin.
So your profit was $7,500.
Exactly. I just pick things and then people just pony up money. We’re a bit like a venture capital firm. I prepped a spreadsheet for every single category and wrote down my takes. Some people make their own bets on the side based on that.
What makes Oscars betting more appealing compared to sports?
Right now, you don’t have to be super sophisticated. You don’t need a mathematical model to have an edge. It’s about narrative, and that is a much harder thing to mathematically measure. You need to understand trends and tones.
Last year you switched from a traditional bookie to betting on Kalshi. What was the reason?
There were two reasons. One is that the odds were better for us. Kalshi is more volatile than underground betting, but that means more opportunity to be had.
And then, two, it was easier. We didn’t have to worry about pooling money together to clear a minimum bet with a bookie. That was a big thing. With Kalshi, we actually have the opposite problem. Once you start putting in enough money, you’re demonstrably changing the odds.
That was something I was looking at, the total market volume. Best Picture has almost $4 million in play, but International Feature only has around $30,000. If I put $1,000 into that category, it’s going to move the odds dramatically.
That’s actually why I’m not putting more money into International Feature. The amount I wanted to put in would have moved the odds to a point where I didn’t want to be in anymore. That didn’t happen with a bookie, where the lines were fixed. It doesn’t happen in sports betting either, because the volume is so high that no single bettor can really move the line.
It’s the opposite of the stock market. In the stock market, it’s better to have a big position because you can start to influence the company. Here, it doesn’t pay to be a big fish in a small market.
Unless you start holding Academy members hostage.
We don’t need to go into market manipulation. I’d encourage anyone who believes in a big Oscars-rigging conspiracy to do some research into how the voting and auditing actually work. I’m not a truther.
What’s your starting point with making your predictions?
I have a set of heuristics that I follow, a set of Oscars truths. One of my heuristics, and I think this is what people get wrong more than they get right, is that there’s usually a narrative for the night. These awards are not isolated events, there’s correlation. It’s Pennsylvania and Ohio in the presidential election. That being said, every category does exist on a spectrum. Something like Best Director is probably the best example of correlation with Best Picture.
But there are other categories—the technical ones more than others—where there isn’t a correlation. Sound is a great example of this. Does it matter how good the movie was? Not at all. Does it matter how good the sound was? A lot.
I think about Suicide Squad winning the Best Makeup Oscar. People were a little confused and I was like, “Well, they’re not awarding the best movie with makeup. It’s the best makeup in a movie.”
Great example. There’s a difference between predicting what Academy voters like and what they are going to judge as a better-crafted movie, especially in branch-specific categories. And that’s a core part of my philosophy, to watch the movies and separate the two.
Do you look up or calculate any stats, or are you mostly going on instinct?
Both. I’ve looked at the numbers over the last 10-15 years. Most of the time—and I think this is true even in sports—you want cases where the eye test matches the numbers. You don’t want to be led purely by the data, and you don’t want to be led purely by the eye test.
This is probably the hottest take of my heuristics: I don’t think the Oscars reward bad movies. There was an era where they were more likely to. But if you look at the Best Picture winners over the last 10 to 15 years, I’d actually be hard pressed to say any of them were bad. I’m not saying they pick the best movie every year, but they’re not picking something that’s poorly made. They have better taste than that.
I think that started around 2015, after Oscars So White. When they expanded the Academy and made it less of an old boys’ club, that’s when it started to correlate more with actual excellence. Who knew that by diversifying your voting population, you actually end up with better results, right?
Somehow I mentioned to my hairdresser that I was a poet, perhaps to justify my split ends, or my lack of plans for Friday night. My hairdresser told me that he cut the hair of ‘a poet, Mr Prynne’. Did I know Mr Prynne’s poetry?
I said I did.
My hairdresser asked me if I was ‘a poet like Mr Prynne’.
I said that Mr Prynne was a renowned and distinguished poet, and that I was not. That Mr Prynne had probably published about 50 books of poetry, and that I had not.
At this point my neck was strained backwards over the washbasin and my head was being sluiced with water.
I told the ceiling that in fact I had published zero books of poetry.
How many? said my hairdresser.
None, I said.
My head was thoroughly scrubbed now, and I was led back to the stylist’s chair. My hairdresser asked me to describe Mr Prynne’s poetry. I opened my mouth.
He asked me to keep my head straight, because my asymmetric cut risked becoming symmetric.
I said that Mr Prynne’s poetry was hard to describe.
It’s quite experimental, I said.
What does that mean? he asked me.
I tried to think of what I knew about mid-century poetry movements and the relationship between the Cambridge School and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.
My face stared back at me from the light-rimmed mirror. It was the face of someone realising they knew nothing about any poetry later than Des Imagistes.
My hairdresser snipped swiftly around my head. Hair fell asymmetrically around me.
Fragments, I said. Mr Prynne’s work is fragmented.
To either side of me were other people being snipped at. It was central Cambridge. No doubt they were all professors. Probably ninety percent of them had written books on the British Poetry Revival. One of them at least was clearly the world expert on Deleuze. They had all stopped reading Take a Break and were listening to me fail to know about poetry.
Fragmented? said my hairdresser.
Yes, I said. His work is fragmented, self-reflective and metaphorically asymmetric.
And your own poetry? prompted my hairdresser.
Isn’t, I said, and asked him about styling mousse.
I had the same conversation at three-month intervals until my hairdresser retired to a beach in Italy.
Since then, I have grown my hair long, and do my best to avoid discussing poetry.
Jenka Gurfinkel on Heated Rivalry as anti-dystopian art: a queer hockey romance offering pleasure, mutuality, and joy in a media landscape saturated with violence.
As I sit down to write this, the first episode of the show Heated Rivalry has been out in North America and Australia for less than 2 months. The 6th and final episode has been out only 3 weeks. In that time the show has amassed over 600 million minutes of streaming on HBO alone, increasing, in a “highly unusual” growth curve, 10x since its debut. The show has just premiered in the UK 3 days ago, and it is already a pirated hit worldwide, including in Russia and China, where it is not only unavailable but, due to its LGBTQ subject matter, banned.
The stunning, astronomical rise of Heated Rivalry has found us all trying to answer the question Vanity Fair poses: “Why can’t we stop talking about Heated Rivalry”? Why has this seemingly niche show with a modest budget and virtually no promotion, produced for Canadian streaming service Crave, with just 4 million subscribers, led by a cast of unknowns, about an autistic half-Asian and a traumatized Russian involved in a secret love affair, based on a queer hockey romance book series, taken over the world? How did this happen? Who is this pair of neophytes no one had heard of a month prior, suddenly presenting at the Golden Globes? WTF is going on?
Sure, it’s a faithful adaptation of a best-selling book series with a fan base already built in. Yes, it dutifully adheres to the conventions of the Romance genre, and romance will never let you down when it comes to a happy ending. It appeals to gay men and queer people for a myriad of reasons. It appeals to straight women, and women generally, for a myriad of reasons. It even appeals to straight men. (To paraphrase an Instagram reel that I saw floating by, “Hollander and Rozanov are your buddies. And you’re always happy for your buddies to get laid. And if they’re getting laid with each other, great!”) Obviously, the chemistry between the actors is unrivaled, and the standom they’ve inspired is at a boy-band fever pitch. The film-craft is absolutely superb, sending the last two episodes of the first season to #12 and #13 on IMDB’s list of top TV episodes of all time (again, the show hasn’t been out 2 months). On and on and on. There are many reasons to be enamored with this piece of visual storytelling media.
So I would like to add one more reason to the mix.
It’s because Heated Rivalry is Anti-Dystopia art.
The 21st-century entertainment landscape is filled with dystopian fantasies that inure people to violence, brutality, and trauma. In the parlance of our time, any one of these can be appended with the postfix “-porn” to efficiently communicate the ubiquity and banality of these kinds of explicit visuals within the culture. Dystopian movies and TV shows have transcended mere entertainment and become cultural shorthand. We refer to real-life events in the frame of reference of The Hunger Games or Squid Games or Mad Max or The Handmaid’s Tale. Reality has become Black Mirror. Dystopia’s vernacular of dehumanization, desensitization, and cruelty, especially towards women, seeps into everything. From comedy (the jarringly gratuitous gun violence ostensibly played for laughs in The Out-Laws), to fantasy (the pornographically lurid murder montage of one woman stabbing, choking, slicing the throat of another over and over in Wheel of Time)—to action (the glorified dissociation in Lioness), to drama (the grimy bleakness of Euphoria). Even superhero movies, which draw an obviously younger audience, expose viewers to hyper-real terrorism spectacles from the destruction of cities on par with 9/11 to the destruction of half of all life in the universe with the snap of a finger. Deeply disturbing and inhumane narratives and visuals in the guise of entertainment are constantly streaming into our eyeballs like we are all living in A Clockwork Orange. Dystopia as cultural shorthand strikes again.
Heated Rivalry might not be science fiction, but it, too, is a fantasy set in a speculative universe: in that universe, the captain of a major league hockey team publicly comes out, setting in motion a cascade of events that diverge from our current reality in which, out of thousands of players, there are currently zero openly gay or bi men actively competing in any of the major North American sports leagues.
As it ascends to the status of global phenomenon, creating an entire new cultural shorthand and lexicon along the way, Heated Rivalry offers a cinematic universe that references our own but casts an alternate vision of a world that’s possible—a world of pleasure, mutuality, humanness, intimacy, creativity, and joy.
Former Vanity Fair editor has started a Substack, where she’ll be “writing about the books that are on my mind, on my nightstand, and popping up in the culture.” First up: Wuthering Heights, just in time for the Emerald Fennell adaptation coming out next month.
Fashion brand has launched A Need to Know Basis, where the founders—both named Veronica—will be sharing “hacks, secrets, shortcuts, inspiration—to make our lives, and your lives—chicer and easier.”
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.
On Tuesday mornings, I go to a dance fitness class for older people at a community center on Minnetonka Boulevard. I thought I was signing up for zumba and gave myself a figurative pat on the back. “This is hot stuff,” I thought. “Everyone will be impressed that at my age I’m doing zumba.” I still don’t know what it is, but apparently it’s not what I do on Tuesday mornings.
What I do is Cuban cha cha and Dominican bachata with an occasional Brazilian samba thrown in. I’ve never been to any of those places, but I’ve been to West 83rd Street, so I know what Afro-Caribbean music sounds like, and it flows in my bloodstream even if the blood itself is more sluggish than it used to be. My blood is, in fact, called upon to show up at the lab for testing at regular intervals. It keeps its appointments, but reluctantly. I get the feeling my blood would prefer to be out on the dance floor.
The first few times I tried out the moves, I couldn’t remember anything about the right foot stepping forward or the left foot stepping back, let alone the turn. At 80, learning dance routines is a cognitive challenge. The steps aren’t intrinsically difficult to execute, but muscle memory does not serve. My feet are recalcitrant. And it all happens so fast.
After maybe ten classes, during which I felt clumsy, hopeless, possibly in the early stages of dementia, I got the message. It’s not about the steps, it’s about the music. The teacher tries to find songs that are fast enough to release the potential for joy this music carries around with it like corn kernels waiting to pop, but not so fast that we are all gasping for air.
I’m partial to Bette Midler’s “Mambo Italiana.” Just the fact that this song exists reminds me of the racy cocktail of Jewish, Italian, Afro-Latino culture on the street in New York in the ’50s and brings an enormous smile to my face. All of a sudden, I’m dancing like the music is blasting out of a transistor radio on a fire escape outside a bodega on Columbus Avenue, and we’re young and sexy again. It’s all in the hips.
I like the fact that we dance without partners, by ourselves, for ourselves. On rare occasions, a man will wander in, but mainly this is a room full of seasoned women who are allowing themselves the pleasure of getting into their own bodies. Truth be told, I never really learned how to dance with a partner. Something in me resists the whole leader/follower thing.
The rock and roll that came a decade and a half after the cha cha was always an exercise in narcissism. Even with someone opposite, more often than not another girl, I was always preoccupied with my own outrage, my own abandon. But this dancing, this barrio, this Little Havana has the advantage of a fixed structure and a repetitive rhythm that delivers me. It’s a blueprint. Tito Puente is already in the room just waiting for me to join him.
I don’t have to make it up as I go along. Latin dance occupies a sweet spot between the horror of the rec hall at summer camp, waiting for some scrawny twelve-year-old Bobby or Mikey to ask me, and the raucous freeform mayhem that followed once the plug was pulled by the Stones. I can wake up feeling grouchy, but the music doesn’t take no for an answer. It is irresistible and will release those endorphins even if I put up a show of resistance.
I still don’t know how the Latinas do it in high heels. I’m an old lady in loose-fitting pants and tennis shoes, but after the first few bars, I’m channelling Rita Moreno and Chita Rivera. I have red lips and long eyelashes, dangly earrings and a tight skirt. This might be the closest I’ve ever come to inhabiting the girl nature that I’ve always held at arm’s length.
I grew up in the 1970s, when hand-held electronic calculators became affordable and popular. I asked my parents to get me one for Christmas in 1976, when I was 12, and they obliged. I remember “testing” that first calculator: Did it know how much seven times seven was? Could it accurately determine my favorite baseball players’ batting averages? If I subtracted my birth year from the current year, would it correctly show my age? Seeing the calculator get all of these things right was very satisfying, and the clickety-clack of the keyboard was even better. I was very happy with my present. (Learning about “BOOBIES” would come later.)
I don’t know what happened to that long-ago calculator, but my memories of it were rekindled in late October by a listing in a weekly newsletter devoted to offbeat events and activities around New York City:
The Calcuphile: An Attempt at a Pop-Up Calculator Museum
Sunday, October 26th, 11am-4pm
Step into the gritty underbelly of computing history at our Pop-Up Calculator Museum—uncover the raw history of these clunky mechanical beasts that fueled the tech revolution. (A calculator wrote that description.) Come see over 100 calculators focusing on the pre-1980s era that is so experiential: the tactile nature, the sound of the keys, the weight and feel in our hands, and the joys of math. It puts a lot of modern transitions into perspective, given the changes in computing, technology, and life in general since then. Come solve all your problems—math problems, that is. Mathematicians will be on site for counseling.
And then it listed a location in Brooklyn.
I loved the idea of celebrating vintage calculators, and the listing’s playful language seemed to indicate a creative intelligence at work. So on the appointed day, my friend Janet and I went to check out the museum, which turned out to be a tent set up on the curb of a residential block. Standing outside the tent were two guys who appeared to be running the show.
[. . .]
I wanted to learn more about [Rahul] Saggar and his calculator fixation, so I asked if we could set up an interview at his Brooklyn home. He agreed, and a few weeks later I arrived at his apartment, where he had dozens of calculators spread out on his living room floor for me to see (but no longer had the white tape on his glasses or any other performative stylistic cues)...
IC: Do you recall when you got your first calculator?
Saggar: It was probably my dad’s, and we would use it for school. But then when we were required to buy one for high school, I got my own.
IC: Do you still have it?
Saggar: Yeah.
IC: So you saved it, even though you weren’t already a collector at that point. Why did you do that? Are you just the kind of person who saves things?
Saggar: Yeah, I think I am.
IC: Have you collected other things?
Saggar: When I was a kid, I had a pencil collection, which is still in my room at my parents’ house in Ohio—thousands of pencils. They had to put limitations on my daily pencil buying in elementary school, because I would save up my lunch money and buy out all the pencils and then there were no pencils left for any of the other kids.
I also had childhood collections of stuff like bottle caps, bugs—until my mom found out. Thinking about all of that reminds me of how I felt that some things were alive or maybe had a soul, so discarding them would not be nice. I still kind of believe that.
IC: How many of the calculators in your collection are from that period in the ’90s when co-workers were just giving them to you?
Saggar: A few dozen, probably not even 40.
IC: And when did you start seeking out additional calculators on eBay, at flea markets, or wherever?
Saggar: Not until maybe 2014, 2015. Maybe a bit earlier.
IC: Oh—that’s a big gap! What got you back into it?
Saggar: I have a friend who’s a winemaker. They were cleaning something out at his winery and they found this amazing old Singer calculator, with its original case and everything. That thing’s amazing. So that got me back into it.
Also, around that same time, I went to a party at a big industrial loft space, and they had this museum-style display of some clunky old thing. It looked like a calculator, but I wasn’t even sure what it was. And when I saw that, I thought, “This thing is so beautiful, and the way it’s presented is so beautiful—I want to do that too.”
IC: So that’s when it sort of clicked in your head that you wanted to build out the collection and display it?
Saggar: Yeah.
IC: How did you go about acquiring more of them?
Saggar: So, my parents have a flea market—
IC: This explains so much!
Saggar: It’s sort of a neighborhood garage sale, like a block long. It usually happens around Labor Day, and I would go back and help my mom out, because she’s always trying to get rid of stuff. And then I’d just wander around and ask everyone, “Do you have any calculators?” I asked this one lady, and she’s like, “Well, I have a Burroughs adding machine. My mother used to work for Bell Labs.” I think she let me have it for $10.
It’s important to understand New California cuisine—i.e. the style of the French Laundry—as a reaction.
As a society develops, agriculture gets increasingly mechanized. This has a tremendous amount of benefit on net, but ingredient quality certainly suffers. Fruits and vegetables become larger. Meats become softer. The flavor of everything becomes somewhat muted. This process happened in America, in Europe, in Japan, in China… everywhere. The intensity differs between societies and where you are on the development curve. Modernity is a trade that everyone should want to make, but it’s not a completely costless one: as Dawei (Steph’s Dad) sometimes wistfully reminisces, “If only we had modern restaurants with those ingredients…”
The food of Alice Waters and that whole movement was (and is) an attempt to chase that concept: a modern restaurant, with those ingredients. Thomas Keller can impress Americans with ‘extremely high quality chicken, executed simply but well’, because many Americans have never tasted a chicken that tastes like chicken. And I mean, a heritage breed, with good feed, given some space to roam? It’s a beautiful thing. No one should be ashamed for loving the French Laundry.
But a little like the Provence that Waters fell in love with in the ’60s, China today is at an earlier point on the development curve. And that means that you can find chicken that tastes like chicken in China… and you don’t have to go to one of the most expensive restaurants in the country for the privilege. You simply drive outside of the city—sometimes not even all that far!—and go to a nongjiale (农家乐).
Alternatively called nongzhuang (农庄), these are small restaurants that run out of village houses. They’re generally family-run, use high-quality ingredients, with some uncle whipping up simple, traditional dishes whipped up over a (at times, even wood-powered) wok. If you’re getting something like an entire free-range chicken, it’s still not going to be cheap, but it’ll be approachable.
So, no, it’s not that Chinese chefs “can’t appreciate the pure taste of roast chicken”. It’s that if you’re going to a restaurant famed for being The Best In America, you’re going to expect something… more… than an American nongjiale with fancy plating. It’s going to be extremely unimpressive, because you can already get good chicken in China, right?
Layer in the cultural and economic power differential between the two countries—that you’re socially expected to be wowed—and I could imagine even being a bit miffed: “I can literally turn chicken into tofu, but it’s Thomas Keller that’s rich and world-famous, for… roasting a chicken? Go down into the mountains, and Yi peasants can roast you a chicken…”
Many Millennials were first introduced to urban planning through SimCity, a remarkably realistic city-building game complete with municipal budgets, zoning ordinances, and utilities. But there’s one aspect of city planning the creators were forced to fudge.
“We were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world,” SimCity creator Stone Librande admitted in an interview. “Our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.”
Stone’s interviewer joked that if the parking facilities in SimCity were rendered at their actual size the game would’ve become “SimParkingLot.” It would be a funny quip if it didn’t describe the cityscape most Americans inhabit every day.
Sunset Road intersects Las Vegas Boulevard at the bitter end of the Strip. This is where the ersatz fantasy world of Las Vegas meets the workaday reality of Clark County, Nevada. There are no Parisian shopping arcades or Roman fora on Sunset Road. This is America. Every store, every warehouse, every apartment complex is surrounded by a moat of parking.
Getting to the building from the sidewalk requires a journey across the blazing asphalt, and a delicate negotiation with the well-armored Rogues and Renegades rolling in and out. Along the boulevards of Clark County, it can look as if the overarching urban design guideline was a petulant toddler yelling, “More parking!” In fact, here and in nearly every American city, there are very specific prescriptions for how much parking different types of development require.
To see how Clark County’s built environment became, in effect, a parked environment, consult planning code section 30.60.030. These regulations require places of worship and adult theater cabarets to have 10 spaces per thousand square feet. Bowling alleys must have four and a half spaces per lane, and mini golf courses need three spaces per hole.
When it comes to office buildings, Clark County follows the “golden rule” of four spaces per thousand square feet that has become standard for suburban office parks around the country. A typical parking spot in a lot, including the space necessary to pull in and out, takes up about 300 square feet. That means the gold standard for office development in America is a campus with more square footage dedicated to parking than to offices. But at least spaces per square feet is a comprehensible metric.
In 2002, UCLA economist and parking policy expert Donald Shoup surveyed parking requirements across the country and found more than 662 land use or institution types and 216 distinct metrics for calculating parking requirements. Those metrics include the number of fuel nozzles, drying racks, or nuns in a given establishment.
Funeral parlors in different cities are the subject of more than 30 different metrics for determining “parking requirements for the afterlife,” accounting, variously, for the number of seats, chapels, and hearses.
These rules can also have mortal consequences for the living. Arlington, Texas, requires bars and nightclubs to provide 14 off-street parking spots for every 1,000 square feet. That means these alcohol-fueled businesses must dedicate at least four times more space to parking than they do to partying. Y’all drive safe now.
These very precise numbers imply that parking requirements are the product of rigorous scientific research. In reality, parking requirements are “little more than a collective hunch,” Shoup writes.
Many cities pull their parking requirements from other jurisdictions, which may or may not have based them on real data, creating a repeating cycle of ignorance. When they are the product of actual empirical study, parking minimums are typically set to reflect the highest possible parking demand, like a church on Easter Sunday, or a big box store on Black Friday.
In other cases, parking requirements serve as a de facto zoning ordinance intended to shape what kinds of development are welcome, where. Arlington’s super-sized parking requirements for bars discourage the creation of drinking establishments, or at the very least ensure that they can never cluster in anything resembling a walkable nightlife district, since each one must be isolated in its parking cocoon.
“Parking is probably the most extensive infrastructure that we have, yet we have almost zero vision of how much of it there really is,” Mikhail Chester, a professor of environmental engineering at Arizona State University, told me.
The actress, activist, and fitness legend has launched , a Substack where the 88-year-old will, she says, “focus mostly on health, mental as well as physical, on well-being in general, and other ideas that have helped me make the most of my elder years.”
The journalist, author, and filmmaker has launched , where subscribers will, he says, “be getting my attempts to use words, reason, and science to trap reality like birds in an entanglement net, to be delivered to your doorstep.”
, the businessman and former CEO of Renault, has launched , where he’ll “go deeper into the lessons, frameworks and thinking from 40 years of leadership” and share his boardroom insights directly with subscribers.
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.
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The tour began in the basement, under the earth, where I could feel the thrum of London Tube lines. Here, massive generators hummed in readiness, kept at a just-so temperature so they might start more quickly if needed. Beneath my feet, deeper still, sealed in concrete, lay reservoirs of diesel fuel the size of swimming pools. Enough to run the entire facility for two weeks. They wait unused. They are redundant, only in the case of a UK-wide grid outage. My tour guide seemed proud as he rattled off numbers relating to capacity, wattage, and voltage.
We travelled upward by staircase and lift and wound our way through a labyrinth of corridors, atriums, canteens, offices, and eventually into the server halls themselves. I was shown around sealed chambers where GPU racks stood in ordered rows, their blinking lights creating constellations of green, red, and amber. It was a liminal space of compute density and void space. The temperature shifted dramatically as we moved between zones. From the sharp heat radiating from the machines to the arctic chill of the cooling aisles, where the air conditioning fought its battle against entropy.
My tour guide, leaning on a GPU rack, talked about uncertainty and redundancy, backup coolers, backup heaters, backup generators, backup backups.
Overhead, cable trays held thousands of wires, rivers of power cables as thick as your forearm, fibre optics all bundled and colour-coded. Pipes and vents ran along the ceilings and walls. The aesthetic lurched between industrial, concrete, rebar, metal grating, and the corporate stretches of beige carpet that absorbed sound and fluorescent lighting that radiated a sickly yellow.
As I was led around, aware that if I were abandoned, I might never find my way out, I thought about my art and my PhD.
My area of study focuses on Cornish folklore, its oral traditions and how it reacted to the county’s industrialisation. Cornish mines bred their own spirits. The knockers, a tribe of fairies (or ghosts, depending on who you ask) similar to Kobolds, Dwarves, or the Welsh Coblynau, tapped in the darkness, warning miners of danger or leading them to rich veins of ore or cursing them should miners disrespect them. They are the main case study of my thesis, as they can uniquely help us explore the dichotomy between the industrial and the enchanted.
Unlike other folkloric creatures whose origins are blurry, contested, or completely lost to time, the knockers emerged at a specific time, the early 1800s, with the beginning of deep mining in Cornwall, when depleting surface tin and the discovery of lower deposits of copper led Cornish miners deeper underground.
Here was an industrial environment and a magical one, occupying the same space. Foucault would describe this as a heterotopic space. Knockers make a perfect case study because they challenge the trope of modernity being in opposition to magic. They weren’t holdovers from a pre-industrial past. They were born exactly at the time of the Industrial Revolution, when the Cornish mines were arguably among the most technologically advanced places on earth.
Through this lens, one could say that a knocker might recognise something familiar in a data centre’s environment. Both are vast industrial complexes built above and below ground. Both are the pinnacle of their respective periods’ technology.
Folklore arises from people working (often at laborious or repetitive tasks) in proximity, in particular environments that contain danger/uncertainty/unforeseeable failure. A mine, a fishing boat, an agricultural community. Places where bad weather, bad luck, or bad judgment could mean life or death, wealth or poverty. In these spaces, stories emerge, are shared, and are iterated upon. The knocker emerged from the collective anxiety and hope of miners working in the dark.
A data centre, then, has many of the same elements as those of magical environments. It’s certainly a particular environment, filled with its own rituals and vocabularies. There’s uncertainty, too: all that redundancy exists precisely because failure, unearned, often random failure, is always an anxiety. Milliseconds of latency make headline news. Downtime is a catastrophe. The conditions seem perfect for stories to emerge and for new digital spirits to appear.
However, a data centre lacks a critical component.
I was struck, as I was guided through one maze before being led into a different building and another maze, by how empty it all was.
The storm at last passed. The chittering of birds and the heat of the risen sun aroused McGill.
He came out of the groove he’d curled up into the night before, so narrow he twisted his body in an ungodly posture. The scarred, furrowed skin of the south side of the mountain warding off danger for him.
The night before, Gilman’s henchmen lost track of him, their horses frightened by the cracking dome above them. It would take them at least two days before they track him down, McGill surmised.
He yawned, then shivered. The melting snow burning off a little ways behind him.
To the left below, a thicket of woodland spread green and billowing.
To the right, a spire of smoke ascended gingerly into the blue raw sky; under it, a housefarm stood stubborn to snow or fire, inviting. A clutch of furry, ginger Highland cows grazing heedless not fifty meters out.
He felt hungry and wild with life.
If death was upon him, inevitable; then he’d take another woman’s soul first.
“Have you ever played a song on repeat when you were crashing out?”
Jules Zucker asked his followers the question above. “As expected, the answers were funny, devastating, and inspiring (sometimes all three). A lot of breakup stuff, of course. Some hard truths about jobs, a couple big life transitions, several unspeakable losses. At least two songs from the Muppets.” Here, he shares the full playlist.
Our ears can surprise us when we’re at our most vulnerable, and an unexpected song can become a catalyst for epiphany, a tool for self-flagellation, or a soothing tonic. These “crashout” songs are fascinating because they are often completely divorced from our usual taste, our auditory ego, our perception of ourselves as listeners. Something deep in our subconscious latches onto a song and uses it to heal—if that isn’t a testament to the strange power of music, what is?
[...]
SONG: “Bruised Orange” - John Prine
“There was a time in like 2023/2024 where every day everywhere I walked I was inexplicably frustrated at virtually everything around me, any inconvenience. Soon after, I got really into John Prine and would have ‘Bruised Orange’ just playing on repeat (either Prine’s version or Justin Vernon’s cover). All of Prine’s music has this effect for me, but ‘Bruised Orange’ does wonders at centering and grounding me. It’s a super great reminder to not let little things make you spiral or dig yourself into a depressive hole.”
SONG: “The One” - Kesha
“I listened to ‘The One’ from Kesha’s new album over and over for a month this summer when I was going through the most painful breakup of my life. It’s a joyful song about realizing that SHE’S ‘the one’ in her life, the one she’s been searching for all this time. I was trying to convince myself of the same, though I never fully believed it. One day in particular I played it on repeat while riding my bike around a cemetery and taking advantage of the solitude by belting it out.”
SONG: “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” from Lilo & Stitch
“For some reason, during my senior year at the University of Maryland (go Terps), I rediscovered ‘Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride’ from Lilo & Stitch. I’d loved the movie as a kid, but for some reason the song hadn’t stuck with me… until I heard it again as a 22-year-old. It instantly became a comfort song during those sad senioritis winters. After rehearsals with my sketch comedy group, I’d drive all the car-less members home and blast it at full volume—singing (maybe even screaming) at the top of my lungs. It was kind of a running bit, and it probably made me seem mildly unhinged, but everyone eventually joined in earnestly. I like to think it counts as a ‘happy crash out.’”
SONG: “Diving Woman” - Japanese Breakfast
“I play ‘Diving Woman’ by Japanese Breakfast every time I’m on a plane taking off (I hate flying and especially taking off, but despite the song’s name it is sooo soothing).”
SONG: “Sex” - The 1975
“I was 21 and studying abroad in England and met and fell deeply in love with a Moroccan girl who, unfortunately, had a long-distance boyfriend at the time. They were open, but she wouldn’t hook up with me because we had feelings for each other. For weeks we’d hang out in each other’s rooms without doing anything and it was some of the most intense yearning I’ve ever felt, and that’s when I came across ‘Sex.’ Lines like ‘And now we’re on the bed in my room / and I’m about to fill his shoes / but you say no.’ Truly was exactly what I was going through at the time. Anyway, after a few weeks we finally did hook up and had a very intense love affair for the last month of the semester. All while listening to ‘She’s got a boyfriend anyway.’”
SONG: “I Have a Dream” - ABBA
“August 2022. I’m house-sitting a beautiful little cottage in the middle of an orange grove. I’m going through a hard time with a relationship, all of my girlfriends are out of town, and I’m relishing my staycation. I decide to take a handful of mushrooms, I feel ready for a heavier dose than the micros I was used to. Confident I’m going to have a good trip, I decide to relax and watch a movie. The movie? Girl Interrupted. The mushrooms really kick in during the (spoiler alert) suicide scene. It comes to my attention that I can NOT handle what’s happening. I start to panic. I freak out. I FaceTime my girlfriends, who were all in Tahoe. I put on ‘I Have a Dream’ by ABBA. I replay the song over and over again. It’s the only thing keeping me tethered to earth. My girlfriends suggest I eat citrus because they heard it helps with mushroom highs. Perfect, I’m surprised by it. Come to find out, citrus intensifies the high. I walk in circles saying to myself, ‘I believe in angels.’ On my Spotify Wrapped that year it showed that I listened to that song 73 times in a row.”
“The secrets of my own story were hiding in those waves”
Joe Hagan digs into family history to unearth his origin story: a tale of nuclear radiation, Gulf Coast hurricanes, and a secret his parents kept hidden for decades.
When the first nuclear bomb in Nevada was detonated in 1951, my grandfather stood in the desert in Army fatigues with goggles to protect his eyes. He snapped a photograph of the mushroom cloud. In high school, I found that photo in a box of slides, lifting it to the light in awe.
We called him Poppy, but my mom and her sisters called him the Old Bastard. He wore a flattop and an olive-khaki leisure suit, and he smoked a pipe.
In 1957, Poppy moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, with his second wife, Madeline—my grandmother, an aspiring actress from a well-off family in Connecticut. They had met in Georgia while they were both married to other people. Poppy opened a lumberyard and helped raise Madeline’s three daughters.
Four years into the new marriage, Poppy developed both colon and testicular cancer, a gift from the nuclear radiation. The surgery made him impotent. He and Madeline became full-blown alcoholics, fighting bitterly. Poppy beat Madeline with a riding crop. The older daughters, Mary Lou and Lynn, got married and escaped.
That left my mom—a tomboy with funny teeth who rarely wore shoes and loved the Beatles—to live with two dysfunctional drunks. She met my father at a raucous party in Flour Bluff. He was enlisted in the Navy and stationed at the local air base. A skinny, red-haired kid from North Carolina, a year out of high school, he drove a 1965 Mustang and kept a Donald Takayama surfboard on the roof to impress girls at the local surf spot on Padre Island, Bob Hall Pier.
In 1969, when my parents first began dating, they’d walk to the end of Bob Hall Pier to catch the sunset, a first glimpse of life’s horizons. At night, phosphorescence sparkled in the crashing waves. Built in 1950 and named after local commissioner Robert Reid Hall, the pier had been destroyed by hurricanes in 1961 and 1967 but was rebuilt. Postcards advertised it as a tourist attraction: 1,200 feet of walkway and a pavilion that rented fishing poles for a dollar. It even lit up at night. Though the surfing was excellent during hurricane season, the pier was mainly a place for young people to park on the sand and drink beer. When my dad’s surfboard was stolen off his car in front of Poppy’s house on Dolphin Street, he never replaced it.
Surfing was destined to return to his life—when I took it up as a teenager. As it turned out, the secrets of my own story, as a child of the Gulf Coast, were hiding in those waves off Bob Hall Pier. But it would take years before I understood them.
Only a month into my parents’ courtship, my mom found her mother dead in the bedroom, asphyxiated on her own vomit. She ran out of the house screaming and collapsed on the lawn. Poppy started drinking more heavily, staring at Madeline’s portrait while listening to the theme song from Doctor Zhivago.
My dad was moonlighting at Poppy’s lumberyard when Hurricane Celia destroyed swaths of Corpus Christi in August 1970. (Bob Hall Pier, miraculously, was spared.) Poppy and my dad were boarding up the lumberyard when the winds came whipping in. That was the week I was conceived. When my mom found out she was pregnant, she left it to my dad to deliver the news to Poppy. Outweighing him by 100 pounds or more, Poppy threw my dad against a wall and threatened to jab his eyes out.
At 19, my mom was at sea. Unprepared for motherhood or marriage, she fled to her sister Mary Lou’s house and stopped taking my dad’s calls. A doctor suggested she have an abortion. Instead, it was decided she’d fly to Rhode Island to live with her sister Lynn and Lynn’s husband, Big Dave, who was also in the Navy, stationed at Quonset Point. My mom would have the baby in a military hospital and put the child up for adoption.
On April 30, 1971, the doctor took me from my mother and carried me down the hallway to a foster care ward. Under the law, my mom had 30 days to change her mind. She saw a psychiatrist in downtown Providence, where she began to hear herself think for the first time. Her mother had died. Her stepfather was a drunk. She was an unmarried mother to a child whom she’d just given up for adoption.
Two weeks later, she decided she’d made a terrible mistake and flew back to Texas to patch things up with my dad. They hadn’t seen each other in months and my dad had gone into a tailspin of heartbreak. She returned to Rhode Island to retrieve me a week before I was to be adopted. The first time my dad laid eyes on me was at the airport in Corpus Christi. I was six weeks old.
I didn’t learn this story until I called my Aunt Lynn to talk about her memories of Bob Hall Pier. “I never did understand why your daddy felt the need to keep it a secret,” she told me in her familiar twang. My parents, pained and embarrassed by their past, had changed the anniversary of their marriage and lied for decades.
Audrey Gelman, the founder of former coworking space The Wing, has launched a Substack. In , she’ll share her thinking about “design and hospitality as well as the books, places, and businesses which influence how we think about building [her new inn and store] The Six Bells.”
of Sonic Youth has joined Substack, sharing a list of his favorite albums alongside original essays and poems.
has joined Substack, posting on Notes that he’ll “use this as a mind dump, not unlike how I used to use Twitter.”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
