2026-05-09 21:02:31
This week, we’re traveling nowhere, subverting expectations, cringing at the Met, and cataloging Stormtroopers.
A wide-ranging essay on why travel has lost its allure for young Westerners. Grant David Crawford starts in his own classroom, where students have stopped arguing about travel ethics, and casts back—through Rousseau, the Romantics, the Beats, the backpackers, and Bourdain—toward a question about what we are without the “elsewhere” we used to believe in.
— in Fugitive Margins
For the past seven or eight years I’ve taught a course on the ethics and politics of travel. The syllabus opens with a Huffington Post article by David Sze called “The Myth of Authentic Travel,” an unflashy piece that takes apart the idea that there is some “real” Thailand ducking and hiding behind the touristed one, some uncontaminated village waiting at the end of the forgotten trail if the traveler is patient, open, or adventurous enough to find it. Sze argues, correctly, that authenticity is a story the tourist tells about herself, not a property of the place she visits. It’s a clean little essay, and it works as a doorway into the harder topics that follow: colonialism, essentialism, the long shadow of the noble savage. I used to lead with it because students could easily sink their teeth into it and it reliably started arguments.
It doesn’t anymore.
I first noticed about two years ago. The class would read Sze, and where students used to push back (where they used to defend their gap year in Cambodia, or accuse Sze of being too cynical, or stage long debates about building wells in South America and ethical itineraries and whether it was possible to travel “right”), there was now a polite quiet. A few shy hands here and there. Still some carefully crafted comments. These are not less intelligent students than the ones who came before them. They are, by every measure I can take over the course of about fifteen weeks, just as ethical, just as curious, just as serious.
What has changed is something subtler. The question itself has lost its hold on them. They have moved past the argument by losing interest in its stakes.
Now, to be clear, the reasons a classroom goes quiet are many these days. The Sze article is over a decade old at this point and some of its references may read as dated. Humanities participation has declined across the board in recent years for reasons that have nothing to do with travel ethics. Students are also more cautious in seminar settings generally, particularly on topics a critical professor might be primed to push back on. Any of these could explain the change in the room without requiring a generational shift in anything deeper. The silence is not what this essay is going to argue from. It is what made me start asking the question and interrogating my own preheld beliefs. The classroom is the place I noticed. It is not the place from which I am drawing my conclusions.
Regardless, their silence has stayed with me now for some time and I’ve been trying to understand what it means.
I think it means more than the obvious thing.
So, here is the obvious thing: travel is getting harder.
Borders are tightening. Visa regimes are firming up after a long thaw. Inflation has hollowed out the middle-class travel budget. Migration crises have re-politicized the question of who gets to cross which line. Whole regions that were on every backpacker’s loop fifteen years ago, parts of the Middle East, North Africa, swaths of Southeast Asia, have become harder, costlier, or “unsafer” to move through. The unipolar post–Cold War world that produced cheap, frictionless Western travel is closing, and my students live inside the closing whether or not they read the news. They live inside it through their parents’ expressed worries about safety abroad. They live inside it through the steady thinning of international students on American campuses (new international enrollment fell 17 percent this fall alone, the largest non-pandemic decline on record), subtracting the most reliable cosmopolitan experience that an American undergraduate could once have without leaving the country. They live inside it through a felt economic reality that ranks internships above gap years, debt servicing above wandering, professional credentialing above the year of finding oneself in Cambodia.
The world has reorganized itself around them, and they have absorbed the reorganization without having to be told about it.
But that absorption via the obvious thing doesn’t quite reach the silence in the room. Students who can’t afford to travel still tend to want to travel, and to argue about how it should be done. The disengagement I’ve been watching is not economic.
It strikes me as a loss of belief.
Before sharing her cover of Elliott Smith’s “Twilight,” surfaced this clip of him on a morning TV show from the ’90s:
Regard, how this room full of pretty people, perfectly willing to participate in the low-vibrational farce on which this show was supposed to rest, allow the awesome force of Smith’s sincerity to re-awaken each and every one of them. Apart from the unbelievably hot woman sitting next to him, who knew it already.
And be sure to give her haunting rendition of “Twilight” a listen:
Why is it so hard for AI to write a great poem? Nabeel S. Qureshi works through the question, arriving first at a quality LLMs are particularly ill-suited to: great art subverts your expectations.
— in Nabeel S. Qureshi
Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising.
One can explain this using the predictive processing model of the brain. As we are scanning a text, our brain is constructing the meaning and predicting the next several words. Where there is no surprise—where something is perfectly predictable, or fits some pattern that we know—our brain registers only dullness. When our expectations are violated in a way that’s satisfying to resolve, we get pleasure and novelty.
The essayist Henrik Karlsson cites the sentence “an interesting and exciting finding” as an example of bad prose, because:
“the word ‘exciting’ is sort of implicated by the word ‘interesting’. They are not synonyms, but if I had blanked ‘exciting’ and asked you, or a language model, to fill it in, ‘exciting’ would have a high probability. So it is not adding all that much information—the reader already has that adjective implicitly in their head.”
Compare the famous passage from Macbeth, where both of the bolded words are famously surprising:
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.Hence, too, the story of the writing professor who would give his students a copy of the below stanza from Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” with many words blanked out, and ask them to guess those words, and claimed that nobody had ever gotten “hothouse” or “uniquely”:
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept For miles inland, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped And rose…The value of surprise is more obvious in visual art. In his four-volume work The Nature of Order, the architect Christopher Alexander gives this example from a Fra Angelico painting [above].
Alexander asks us to cover up the black stripe on the priest’s robes and the door, and imagine we were the painter:
Imagine some moment before the black of the door and priest’s robe had been painted, but when everything else is more or less already there...You can see what I mean by putting your hand over the picture, so as not to see the black parts. Do you see that the picture loses much of its haunting character...can you see how immensely surprising it is?
— Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 4, p. 133
The surprise principle operates in other ways, too. We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might. This too is a kind of surprise, sometimes called defamiliarization. This is a favorite technique of Tolstoy’s, who often takes a normal action that we are all familiar with, and describes it the way an alien might. Thus he describes a person being whipped as “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor…” and so on, deconstructing the action without ever using the word “whipping.” This makes you feel the action much more viscerally than if he had just used the word to summarize it.
These are all familiar points to lovers of art. But the surprise principle operates at even deeper levels, below even our conscious perception.
Mørning traces the Met Gala’s descent into self-parody.
— in
As a teen, the Met Gala was like my Christmas. I’d stay up until silly hours of the night because of the time difference in London, watching the looks roll in and reviewing them on my Twitter account of a few hundred followers. My personal highlights were 2018 and 2019: Catholicism and Camp, which brought us iconic moments like Rihanna as the fashion pope and Billy Porter carried on a throne by 6 hunky men. But in hindsight, fashion’s old guard was cringing already. Tom Ford lamented how it had turned into a “costume party”, saying: “It used to just be very chic people wearing very beautiful clothes going to an exhibition about the 18th century. You didn’t have to look like the 18th century.”
André Leon Talley similarly felt that 2019’s Camp Gala had gone “off the rails”: “If you go from being a chandelier that lights up and change somewhere in the hallway to a hamburger, then I think you’ve lost the plot.” Sorry, Katy Perry, but according to Ford and Talley, it was at this moment when the Gala became cringe and redefined by such pleas for attention.
Fast forward to now, and Demna Gvasalia agrees, revealing to the New York Times last November, with a laugh, that he neither cares or knows if people still get excited about this ‘cringe’ event. While there’s a lot of things to criticise the fashion designer for, he always keeps his finger on the pulse.
So how did we get here? In 2015, Rihanna’s yellow Guo Pei cape catapulted the Gala to pop culture notoriety for a new generation and demonstrated the power of viral fashion. After that, everyone wanted to have their Rihanna moment. Though as the stunts got bigger, from Zendaya’s literal Cinderella moment to Tems’ view-blocking Oscars dress, public opinion was starting to turn.
However, as a child of the fashion brainrot era, I was always of the opinion that the crazier, the better. Raised on theatrical clips of old McQueen and Mugler shows, my brain demands drama. A beautifully tailored jacket or a cleanly cut dress does nothing for me. Saturated by constant images but removed from the tactile qualities of clothing, I need fashion that will smack me in the face, like Coperni’s spray-on dress with Bella Hadid.
But what looks good on the feed may not be so chic in real life. Remember when Tyla had to be carried up the Met steps in her (otherwise stunning) sands of time look? Or when Lana Del Rey’s headdress was fighting with Kim K’s face?
We, the online fashion fans, didn’t help things. In the late 2010s, I was part of the chorus, alongside influencers like Haute Le Mode, who criticised celebrities for not dressing on-theme or providing a big enough moment (see below). Like clockwork, every year High Fashion Twitter dragged guests who didn’t try hard enough with their outfit. Looking back on this era now, it was also when Drag Race went mainstream, which probably rubbed off on our appetites for avant-garde looks and gag-worthy outfit reveals.
The try-hard fatigue came to a boiling point with red carpet fashion more broadly, with film press tours and their anything-but-subtle method dressing. Wicked took promotion to new levels of annoyance, while Marty Supreme and Wuthering Heights made it clear that everything is a choreographed media opportunity. Thus, we’re now seeing celebrities like Odessa A’Zion being praised for not having a stylist at all.
Adam Starr talks to Rafael Pavon, who has 730 Imperial Stormtroopers, a custom 3D-modeling pipeline, and a theory about why a faceless character with no backstory became one of the most reproduced toys in history.
— in My Collection Of
What do you collect?
Rafael: Everything related to the Imperial Stormtrooper helmet design from 1977: toys, memorabilia, objects, and things inspired by it.
How did it begin?
Rafael: By accident, which is probably how most collections begin. For years, I was just someone who liked that helmet. I’d spot one in a shop or a market and grab it without thinking too much about it. Then one afternoon in December 2015, while wandering around Covent Garden before watching The Force Awakens on opening day, I walked into a comic book store called Orbital Comics and picked up a loose original Kenner Stormtrooper for £7. I got home, put it on the shelf, and realised I already had about twenty of them. That was the moment it went from a habit to a real problem.
What’s the first thing you remember collecting?
Rafael: I wouldn’t call it collecting at the time, but my uncle ran a toy shop in Madrid in the early eighties. I was a kid, and Star Wars figures were basically the most exciting objects in the known universe. Two of them survived. They’re items 475 and 476 in the archive now, two battered little 3.75-inch Kenner Stormtroopers that I assumed were long gone until they turned up at my cousin’s place decades later.
What first inspired your love of collecting?
Rafael: It’s less about collecting and more about a question I can’t let go of. The Stormtrooper breaks every rule of what a memorable character is supposed to be. No face, no name, no backstory, almost no lines. And yet somehow it sits alongside Spider-Man and Barbie as one of the most reproduced toys in history. Kids pick it over the heroes. Artists across every discipline keep coming back to that helmet. Jony Ive said it influenced the iPod and AirPods. It’s shown up in LEGO, Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Mr Potato Head, on toothbrushes, shampoo bottles and keyrings, even on beer labels. So, at some point, I stopped thinking of this as a toy collection and started thinking of it as anthropological research. There’s a hidden message somewhere in people’s fixation with that helmet, and I haven’t cracked it yet. That’s what keeps me going.
Where do you usually find the things you collect?
Rafael: Everywhere, which is part of the problem. I’ve tracked down pieces in London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Santiago de Chile, Ciudad de México, Madrid, and Los Angeles. When I want to look for really special items or art toys, I love places like Toy Tokyo and myplasticheart in New York. And probably my favourite place in the world for Star Wars toys is the Persa Franklin in Santiago de Chile, a massive street market full of unexpected troopers.
How far have you gone to add to the collection?
Rafael: It kind of became a thing to fly to a city knowing there’s a trooper somewhere waiting for me. I once took a train during a snowstorm just to visit the Imperial Castle Toy Store in Pawling, NY, 2 hours north of NYC. In terms of effort, building a database, creating a custom photo app to capture them all, a pipeline to turn them into 3D models, and designing a website display is definitely the furthest I’ve been for the collection
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Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, and Billie Jean King have brought their sports podcast, , to Substack. Here, they’re bringing together their community, and “every week we will bring you more behind the scenes info on our podcasts, the games we’re excited about watching, and more of, well, us.”
, the actress, writer, and director best known for Pen15, has launched a Substack where she’ll be reconciling her drive to “retain pieces of the past, including old ways of writing with pen and paper, or sometimes filming stuff on camcorders, using paper encyclopedias…”
Parisian It Girl, ex-journalist, and brand founder has launched a Substack where she’ll be writing about the things she loves: “fashion, beauty, home decor, cooking, and the encounters that inspire.”
Italian fashion journalist has relaunched her Substack, where she discusses “work, personal style, how the internet has changed the pace of everything.”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Substack’s editorial team.
2026-05-02 21:03:14
This week, we’re buying nothing, hunting goblins, photographing puddles, and contemplating the tragic irony of Mark Zuckerberg.
Emma Stephenson on her vow not to buy anything in 2025, dodging The Emails, “cute” commodities, and learning to “surf the urge.”
— in
I spent 2025 buying nothing. Or, that was the idea. I didn’t starve, or anything like that. I had credit card debt, which really meant I had shame. I wanted to get rid of it.
Clothes were the main culprit. Clothes filled with possibility and women-be-shoppin’ dread. Since the pandemic (so the story goes), my online shopping habit had become compulsive. I became weak against The Emails. You know the ones. The braindead want colonizing your inbox. I spent money I didn’t have, mostly at a slick outfit known as The Reformation (no relation to Martin Luther). The Emails promised I could turn myself skinny and mysterious with the swish of a silk skirt and the secret of it costing $200.
It felt good to tell people about this ambitious year of shopping abstinence. Every Wow, good for you and Couldn’t be me felt better than the last.
The more I felt that people were impressed by my decision to try a no-buy year (which meant that they were impressed by me), the clearer the image of myself staring coolly down my nose at The Emails became. Who falls for these? Not I. Before the year of buying nothing had even begun, I’d situated myself in a special little abstinence bubble, wearing the same outfit over and over again, answering to no one. Maybe a true self could be found if I stopped wearing something different every month.
Near the end of 2024, in a post-election spiritual funk, I fell down a months-long YouTube video essay rabbit hole. I told myself I was arming myself with information, but really I was self-soothing. I came across a YouTube channel literally called The Financial Diet. If the ultimate diet is eating nothing, then spending nothing would surely yield some kind of results. An interview on the channel featured a woman detailing how a year of buying nothing helped her reclaim her financial independence and crawl out of some serious credit card debt. Eureka. She said that abstaining from shopping “rewired her brain.” Somewhere around month six, “a switch flipped.” Eventually, the fog dispersed. Spending money on stuff she didn’t need was frivolous and hollow. It seemed she had stopped wanting altogether.
How powerful the draw of a clean before/after threshold is. How glorious it would be to be freed of the messiness of wanting. One year of no shopping, and I could turn into Thich Nhat Hanh? I was craving something true, a tangible kind of enlightenment (take that, The Reformation).
Katherine Dee unravels how ChatGPT became weirdly fixated on “the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects.”
— in
This week, internet interlocutors noted that OpenAI had to instruct a new model, Codex 5.5, repeatedly, in its own system prompt, to stop bringing up goblins, gremlins, trolls, ogres, pigeons, and raccoons “unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”
Within hours of the instructions hitting the timeline, the line was screenshotted into oblivion—and for good reason. Nick Pash on the Codex team confirmed publicly that the “weirdly emphatic” prohibition was added because Codex 5.5 was, in fact, fixated on goblins.
Then, last night, OpenAI posted a blog explaining where the goblins came from.
After GPT-5.1 launched, complaints came in that the model had developed an “overfamiliar” register and would not stop trying to be the user’s friend, which prompted an audit of its verbal tics. Meanwhile, someone on the safety team who had experienced quirky mentions of “goblins” and “gremlins” enough times to find it annoying flagged those words for inclusion. As it turned out, per the audit: the use of goblin was up by 175% since the launch; gremlin by 52%.
Weird, but just a quirk—these things happen. The team moved on.
But by GPT-5.4, it was no longer a quirk. “Creature language” was showing up overwhelmingly in traffic from users who’d selected one of ChatGPT’s optional persona presets: “Nerdy.” The preset was meant to turn the app into a kind of intellectually omnivorous mentor, maybe the type of guy, if I may, who would play Dungeons and Dragons (...and might have a folder of shortstack fan art on his desktop?).
Nerdy accounted for just 2.5% of all ChatGPT traffic—but two-thirds of the goblin mentions. When researchers used Codex itself to compare reinforcement-learning rollouts containing the offending vocabulary against rollouts that didn’t, the signal designed to encourage Nerdy turned out to be scoring the goblin-laden outputs higher. Basically, the model was being given a higher score every time it called something a goblin, and, as a system optimized to chase higher scores, it started calling more things goblins. In other words, there was a goblin-obsessed Nerd-LLM at the helm of this whole thing.
And then the goblins escaped the persona.
Mention rates rose at nearly the same proportion in samples generated without the Nerdy persona, because rewarded Nerdy outputs were getting recycled into supervised fine-tuning data—at which point the tic started being a default behavior of the underlying system. An audit of GPT-5.5’s fine-tuning data turned up the whole adjacent menagerie that had hitched a ride: raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons. An entire enchanted forest.
OpenAI killed the offending reward in March and pulled the affected vocabulary out of training data, but GPT-5.5 was already cooking. By the time it landed in Codex, employees noticed the goblins immediately, which is why the aforementioned prohibition is in the prompt. The OpenAI post from Wednesday night even shares the bash command that disables the goblin-suppression line and unlocks the bestiary, if you want to liberate ChatGPT’s goblin mode.
Ultimately, the gradient that was rewarding the goblins got identified and patched, and OpenAI came out of it knowing more about how stylistic tics propagate through training pipelines than it did going in.
What the company’s account doesn’t quite explain, however, is the specificity. When the model was rewarded for being weird and playful, it didn’t drift toward a random selection of mythological vocabulary. It went for the small mischievous category of thing that lives in your walls and steals small objects. There are, ostensibly, unicorns, dragons, demons, and angels in the training data too.
And yet, the model became fixated on goblins.
Patrick Nathan on James Salter, Paris puddles, and photography as “an event of light.”
— in
Seven months ago, I was tan and thin and very lonely, writing essays in a laughably unaffordable apartment in the bougiest part of Lisbon. Today, for the first time in two decades, I live in the suburbs. I’m someone who drives twenty-nine miles to an office, who eats too much Chinese food, who listens to podcasts, who lifts weights once or twice a week, who cooks dinner for friends, and who reads for about three and a half minutes every evening before falling asleep. The situation is both blissful and dire; it feels like living in cellophane, shimmer and all.
To try to recalibrate, I reached for a favorite novel. In Light Years, [James] Salter damns a minor character with ruthless efficiency: “His eyes were spent, they had nothing in them.” Later, after the couple at the center of the novel has divorced, Viri moves to Rome and meets another woman. What starts as romance—an architect, after all, here to devour the Eternal City, falling in love anew—soon “hardens to intractable life.” Living in Rome, Viri realizes, is not like living alongside the Hudson: “He stood beside [Lia] as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun.”
Among all the beauty in Italy, Viri too risks spending his eyes, depleting their capacity. Like the famous monuments that show up in tourist photographs, the idea of Rome occludes Viri’s view of it. He wants to see it but can’t, which recalls or rhymes with something Lia tells him—in one of my favorite passages from the novel—about happiness:
But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It’s very difficult to find. It’s like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there’s nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.
One sunny, listless afternoon, my husband turned to look at me. His eye, normally what people call “liquid brown,” met the light and wagon-wheeled with color: splinters of mahogany, tatters of aspen leaf, emerald shards, sandstone flecks, the sullied marble of petrified wood. It was over in a second, of course—it’s too painful for anyone to be lit up so nakedly—but I couldn’t forget it. Later, I recalled Hervé Guibert’s intimation of what a photograph is: “an event of light.” The eye was waiting for me to see it, which gave me a strange, triangulating thought: I am justified in noticing this.
Part of what makes photography a surrealist enterprise is its democratization; there’s nothing elitist or aristocratic in a camera’s attention. In Image Control, I wrote about this in relation to Francesca Woodman’s photographs, in which objects,
human and not, get spilled on by light; a rectangle from a window stretches across the floor, bisecting warped and wrinkled leaves of wallpaper that have curled onto the floorboards. A little pane of glass intensifies the light upon Woodman’s fingers, visually slicing them at the knuckle. These objects, bodies included, remind us just how dramatically light can change a thing, how it bestows another side, another use, even another meaning. All objects are treated the same, given the same importance; all are worthy of, or deprived of, the gift of light.
If anything, objects of great, undisputed beauty—cathedrals and paintings, the art nouveau Metropolitain signs in Paris, crates of produce in French markets, the Palace at Sintra, St. Mark’s—can easily occlude or disrupt the event of light; instead of objects, they become subjects. They reframe the photograph as a document or as evidence, which is largely the imperialist project of Instagram: I was here, I saw this, I took this, it’s mine.
Let me tell you a secret about the most beautiful city in the world. Paris is wet. Even in summer it rains often, and the cobblestone streets and sidewalks funnel it, channel it, entrap it; it sits cupped there, handful after handful held out to you on every block. The Haussmann buildings sit shrunken in it, creased and off kilter. Light trembles at each diagonal corner; at night, the Place Pigalle is a black pool of incandescent eels. I have a hard time believing that Impressionism would have happened without all this water, not to mention the city’s long lineage of street photography. Puddles literally invite reflection, and in thousands of paintings and photographs we see Paris looking at itself, thinking about itself. It’s an intimate way of looking at a city, as if on every corner we catch it in this moment of self regard, and that is what makes Paris’s beauty feel so personal—as opposed to monumental. Like Salter’s girls at communion, its face is forever upturned, ready for light.
Alexander Kaplan, who relates to Mark Zuckerberg more than he’d like to, on what The Social Network shares with Oedipus Rex.
— in
If you’ve never seen the first five minutes of The Social Network, you’re missing out.
I don’t think you can fully understand this scene without understanding the different types of irony.
There’s verbal irony: that’s the one everybody knows. There’s also dramatic irony, in which the audience possesses knowledge the characters lack. And then there’s tragic irony. It’s very similar to dramatic irony, but here the lack of information itself is the cause of the tragic event. To turn Hitchcock’s example into tragic irony, imagine the bomb only goes off if a character says, “I’m certain there’s no bomb in here.” There’s also cosmic irony and romantic irony and a dozen nuanced variations on all of the above, but tragic irony is what we’re interested in today.
The best example—and we’ll get to The Social Network soon, I swear—is the story of Oedipus. You know how it goes. King Laius and Queen Jocasta, struggling with infertility, consult the Oracle at Delphi, who proclaims King Laius will one day be murdered by his son. (Whomp, whomp, whomp, waaaaaaaaa.) Soon enough Queen Jocasta gives birth, and, in a vain attempt to save himself, King Laius orders his son to be abandoned on a mountainside (an apparently common practice in ancient Greece). But the servant, less of a sociopath than the king, can’t go through with it, so he passes the baby to a shepherd who passes the baby to a shepherd who passes the baby to the King and Queen of Corinth. They raise it as their own, and, after reaching maturity, Oedipus visits the Oracle himself. She tells him he will murder his father and have sex with his mother, and soon enough he does, since he’s misinformed about who they actually are. Years later a plague of infertility strikes Thebes and the Oracle—who by this point is giving off real “Ain’t-I-a-stinker?” vibes—says it will only end when the man who murdered King Laius is brought to justice. Oedipus takes on the challenge and unknowingly vows vengeance upon himself. Yikes.
What I love about this is how King Laius, in trying to avoid his fate, sets in motion the events that ensure his fate. There’s something perversely satisfying about the structure. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine of infanticide, murder, and incest.
So finally—finally—we can get back to those first five minutes of The Social Network.
You know, I once told a group of students I loved this movie and they burst out laughing. None of them had seen it, I’m a nerdy enough guy, and they thought I saw myself as Mark Zuckerberg on some sort of hero’s journey. But the thing is—and please don’t take this out of context—I do relate to the Mark Zuckerberg of this movie.
You see, we both have an inferiority complex.
That psychological detail underpins every scene, every action, every line of dialogue: Mark has no self-esteem, so he needs external validation, so he is desperate—just achingly, sweatily, desperately desperate—to become one of the beautiful people. That explains his obsession with getting into a final club, and it explains everything else. Just look at the opening lines:
MARK: Do you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?
ERICA: That can’t possibly be true.
MARK: It is.
ERICA: What would account for that?
MARK: Well, first, an awful lot of people live in China, but … here’s my question: how do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SATs?
The insecurity, the need to “distinguish yourself,” the humble-bragging: it’s all there.
The movie doesn’t explain where this personality defect comes from, which is for the best: I don’t need some cheesy scene of ten-year-old Mark getting ignored by a distant father. It’s just who he is. In fact, the movie doesn’t even explain why Mark wants to achieve his goals. There’s a generic “fame and fortune” angle, but it’s obviously an afterthought:
ERICA: Is it true that [the final clubs] send a bus around to pick up girls who want to party with the next Fed chairman?
MARK: So you can see why it’s so important to get in.
Jesus, Mark. The correct response—to your girlfriend—is, “Gross, right?” And yet, Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be the next Fed chairman or to party with hot girls. He wants external validation. Go back to 2:58 and listen to how Jesse Eisenberg delivers this next exchange: you can tell he really means it when he says he wants to get into the clubs “Because they’re exclusive”—which is about as close to circular reasoning as you can get—before unconvincingly tacking on the reasons a sane person might give.
MARK: I’m just saying I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs.
ERICA: Why?
MARK: Because they’re exclusive. And fun. And they lead to a better life.
And the thing that really hurts—the bitter icing on this pathetic cake—is that Mark could be one of the beautiful people if he didn’t want to be one of the beautiful people. They look at him and see a needy little go-getter who never learned you aren’t supposed to be so obvious about things. It breaks my heart. Zuckerberg is an asshole, and it breaks my heart all the same.
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, the Chicago chef and co-owner of the Alinea Group, has started a Substack. In his first post, he questions the next step of a successful restaurant: “do you become a museum of yourself, honoring the past with reverence and precision, or do you start again?”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
2026-04-28 00:30:12
Jacqueline Novak let us into her world immediately. The comedian may have her own Netflix special, but she was still disarmingly candid. When we told her we’d arrived and were looking for parking, she responded:
Alas, we missed the crying. Jacqueline led us around her building to a patio cluttered with furniture, tools, and a stray remote control, saying she had intentionally left the place as-is, and that maybe she could clean up for us on camera—a bid for realism and vulnerability that felt especially refreshing in Hollywood. She proceeded to give us a tour of every inch of the patio, which wound up being a tour of her mind too.
Tune in next week for the final installment of Someone on Film, Los Angeles.
2026-04-25 21:02:39
This week, we’re contemplating the literary bona fides of Reddit, raising a glass, putting a premium on humanity, and recovering on an Amish farm.
Isaac Kolding makes the case that the most-read short fiction of our era is on Reddit, where millions of readers weigh in on “Am I the Asshole” posts—stories of dubious truth, all “about middle-class manners.”
— in
The prestigious short story—the sort of thing published in Ploughshares or The New Yorker—is not particularly popular these days. But this doesn’t mean that short fiction itself is not a major source of pleasure for many millions of people. “Short stories” is a much broader category than “literary fiction short stories,” so we must look outside of the relatively marginal high-literary world if we want to know how large audiences—audiences much larger than the readership of every existing literary magazine put together, as far as I can tell—want to be pleased by the written word.
The literary genres that maintain their popularity now are not the sort of thing that most literature professors would want to spend much time on: science fiction stories, fanfiction, and litRPGs, for example. But if I had to choose the most popular kind of short story today, I would choose that old Reddit chestnut, the “am I the asshole?” (AITA) post. For the uninitiated, the genre works like this: the original poster (OP) describes a scenario in their life where they have been accused of treating someone else poorly. They appeal to their audience of readers, who render a verdict on whether this person is the “asshole” in the situation.
Reading AITA posts is something like reading the penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century. It is a mass-market product that reveals the preferences of large reading audiences. There are multiple AITA-style subreddits (/r/AmITheAsshole, /r/AITAH, /r/AmITheJerk, and more) that have millions of weekly visitors; it seems clear to me that AITA posts are at least a significant representation of the kind of stories that people want to read.
You may object to my designating AITA posts as “short stories.” Aren’t some of these stories true? Almost certainly, yes, although it’s just as obvious that many are false. If these stories were avowedly fictive, they wouldn’t be nearly as popular. They get a special zing from the fact that they might be true, and the attempt on the part of commenters to identify and condemn fiction is one of the key pleasures of consuming this sort of fiction. For any reasonably skeptical reader, the AITA story exists in a limbo between fact and fiction.
But I still think it makes sense to consider them short stories. They are avowedly not journalistic, and they’re all about middle-class manners, one of prose fiction’s most enduring themes. And anyway, the line between fiction (invented, not-true) and nonfiction (discovered, true) has never been that solid. In the early nineteenth century, the word “novel” was quite capacious; the Irish priest Edward Mangin, writing in 1808, said, “The word novel is a generical term; of which romances, histories, memoirs, letters, tales, lives [biographies], and adventures are the species.” Readers often believed that the novels they read were literally true. From nineteenth-century novels to reality television to autofiction to films that claim to be “Based on a True Story,” imaginative works have long given themselves a little extra juice by being, or pretending to be, at least partially real. AITA posts are a part of this long, sometimes-august tradition of chicanery, hoaxing, foolery, and lies (and, every once in a while, truths). Regardless of their truth-value, they are stories, and they can be analyzed like stories. So that’s what I’ve done.
Hannah Williams on sober influencers as the new teetotalers: “the starched black dress replaced by seal-smooth athleisure, the sarsaparilla turned to matcha latte.”
— in
I love alcohol. I love the taste of it, I love the way it makes me feel. Not all alcohol, of course, and not all times, but nevertheless I love it in many forms: a pint of lager in a beer garden on a summer’s day, hands slick and cool with condensation; a glass of orange wine the colour of bruised apricots at the wine shop after work on a Friday. A nightcap of Benedictine at my parents’ house. Cheap sangria on holiday, staining my teeth. Alcohol, in varying quantities, has been the accompaniment to many of my fondest memories, spent with friends and family and partners. I rarely drink on my own; for me, it is almost entirely a social joy, practised in pubs and dive bars and Spanish bodegas and sat by the beach and crowded tight around friends’ kitchen tables.
It seems odd, though, to declare that you love it. To do so seems to signal that your relationship with it is worrying, that you rely on it, perhaps, or that you like it a little too much. That you can’t stop, that you’re an alcoholic. A cottage industry around this idea has gained traction in the last couple of years, propagated by the snapping fingers and snake-charmer sway of front-facing video influencers, as well as by a glut of articles that scold our English drinking habits, that extol sobriety and tut at those who choose to let the devil’s nectar pass their lips. These often have a specific tone, a hybrid of poor-dears paternalism (they know not what they do!) and haughty moralism.
This isn’t a phenomenon that exists only online: while sales of alcohol-free beers have surged, alcohol consumption in Britain is at a record low. Obviously, there may be other factors for this, shifting demographics, religious abstentions. But anecdotally, several of my friends have recently told me they’re quitting drinking altogether, or for an indeterminate period of time; though I have friends who were alcoholics and are now sober, the latest set have never had a problem with it.
There are many reasons, of course, why people might want to give up booze. And there are many people for whom drinking is wholly negative, a form of self-harm that can and does lead only to ruin. But it’s striking to me how often I now see anti-drinking sentiment, and that it comes at this specific societal moment: one of relentless self-optimisation and purity, and one where the boundary between the online and offline worlds has disintegrated.
Recently, I was served an extremely popular video about what makes someone an alcoholic. The video is captioned “everything I would tell you about alcoholism and addiction if I wasn’t afraid to hurt your feelings”, and its author (star? producer?), the “sober influencer”, is Neva Coleman. She is flawlessly made-up, expensively blonde, injected and whitened and polished in a way that used to be reserved for flagship TV anchors and is now an essential part of appearing on a phone screen.
[...]
There is a whiff of the old temperance movement about the sober influencing, albeit dressed up in the consumerist decadence of 2026, the starched black dress replaced by seal-smooth athleisure, the sarsaparilla turned to matcha latte. Drinking is not productive. It is money spent without clear return. And there is something in it of the uncontrollable, of the imperfect, of wine-rimed lips and voices a little too loud.
Why Starbucks is rolling back automation, why an Armani suit costs what it does, and what both might tell us about the post-AI economy.
— in
Starbucks is a huge company (market cap of $112 billion) that sells one of the most standardized products in the modern economy. Making a cup of coffee or even one of the fancy specialty drinks is very easy to mechanize and reproduce. If the entire economy is soon to be automated, with labor being replaced with increasingly more sophisticated capital, Starbucks should be a canary in the coal mine—the technology for removing labor from its stores and replacing it with automated capital has been around for years. Over the past few years, Starbucks has done exactly that: in efforts to increase thin margins, management has automated more and more of the coffee-making business and instituted tightly mechanized processes for delivering it to customers. But instead of increasing automation, the opposite has happened. After trying to streamline the store experience with fewer workers and more automation, the company concluded that this had been a mistake. CEO Brian Niccol said that “handwritten notes on cups’’, ceramic cups, and “the return of great seats’’ had led more customers to “sit and stay in our cafes’’, showing that “small details and hospitality drive satisfaction.’’ More baristas are being hired per store and automation is being rolled back.
Economics is the study of decision-making under constraints, i.e., scarcity. If advanced AI brings material abundance—if machines can produce many if not all forms of human production at very low marginal cost—does economics become irrelevant? No, we will still have scarcity, but the kind of scarcity that matters will change. Ultimately the answer to any question about the future economics of advanced AI begins with identifying what becomes scarce. After answering that question, the rest of the analysis is pretty straightforward. In this essay I’m going to explore what becomes scarce when automation can replicate many if not all human production, and what that may mean for the types of jobs that emerge.
Before industrialization, it was difficult to separate a product from the person who made it. The weaver who made your shirt, the baker who made your bread: you personally knew them, and their skill and reputation were tied to the product that they sold. Economic transactions had a distinct social component that was innately linked to the consumption experience. The industrial production process changed this by breaking craft into standardized, repeatable steps. Performed by workers based on predetermined and regularized steps, capitalism produced something new: the commodity form, in which a product’s value lies in the product itself, detached from whoever made it. A table is a table, a phone is a phone. The screen that you’re reading this essay on was designed in one country, manufactured in another, using components from around the world. But none of this matters for the experience of buying and using the device.
Marx described this process in intentionally loaded language. The commodity form, he argued, was built on exploitation: the ability to pay workers less than the value of what they produce. They were able to do this because the capitalist production process was based on alienation: severing workers from the product of their labor, from the process of making it, and ultimately from each other. What had once been a person’s craft became abstract “labor power,’’ a factor of production to be bought and sold like raw materials. Marx saw this as capitalism’s deepest pathology. But to economists, and to the world writ large, the commodity form was an engine of extraordinary prosperity. If production was no longer tied to specific people, it could be disaggregated, reorganized, shipped across oceans, and scaled in ways that turned few resources into vast riches. Both things were true at once: the commodity form created enormous wealth and prosperity, but it made the human behind any specific product invisible, and ultimately, replaceable.
This is most people’s mental model of what AI will do to the economy. If a machine can produce anything a human can, write the brief, generate the image, compose the song, determine the diagnosis from a radiology scan, then the human will be replaced across all facets of production and jobs will simply disappear. Labor will be replaced with capital. David Autor and Neil Thompson push back on this in an important recent paper. They argue that AI won’t simply eliminate jobs; it will reshape the economic value of human expertise. Their framework distinguishes between expert and inexpert tasks within any given occupation. When automation removes the simpler tasks (as accounting software did for bookkeeping clerks), the remaining work becomes more specialized, wages rise, and fewer workers qualify. When it removes the harder tasks (as inventory management systems did for warehouse workers), the job becomes more accessible, employment expands, and wages fall. Same technology, opposite labor market outcomes, depending on which part of the job gets automated.
But Autor and Thompson also consider a starker possibility: that AI advances to the point where human expertise loses its economic value altogether. Under this scenario, AI will eliminate labor scarcity and produce what Herbert Simon once called “intolerable abundance.’’ Automation of production will no longer involve managing a workforce transition, for which we have prior episodes of automation to rely on. We will need tools to maintain social organization, income distribution, and democratic stability without the labor market that has historically held these together.
I want to consider a different scenario, one where automation can replicate human production and the commodities that it produces (a big if!!!) but human labor does not disappear. How could this be the case? A lot of analysis takes the economy as a given: there is a set of jobs and a set of goods/services produced by the economy. If the same set of goods/services can be produced by cheaper machines, then these machines replace humans and the jobs disappear. But the economics of structural change, combined with deep-seated features of human preferences, suggests something different: as people get richer, they don’t just want more commodities. They want things that aren’t commodities in the standard sense of the word. The social aspects of products such as the relationships, the status, and exclusivity—what René Girard called the mimetic properties of desire—become much more relevant once people’s basic needs are satisfied. And the demand for these properties will bring the human element back into the production process and, with it, the jobs.
Lily Montasser talks to a bartender whose path to working in “one of the priciest hotel lobby bars in New York” runs through a house fire, an Amish community, and the “fuck you money” of Aspen.
— in
AARON: I love New York. But working in Aspen, to be honest, kind of ruined me. I’ve been to forty-three countries. I’ve worked in eight. I think about Aspen almost every day of my life.
LILY: Wait, why? The beauty?
AARON: Aspen is white money.
LILY: Oh!
AARON: Aspen is American white money. People don’t give a shit about how much their food is, they don’t care, they will spend it to have fun. It’s fuck you money. I couldn’t get enough of it. I was like, this is where I belong.
LILY: I’m curious what about that resonated with you?
AARON: That’s so interesting. Why does it resonate? I grew up with nothing. I’m not a bougie person. I don’t wear designer brands. Maybe it’s because I got a taste of something I’m not used to. It’s so intriguing to me because I would never spend fifteen grand to spray a bottle of Ace of Spades. I’ve watched that happen, and to me it’s disgusting. But it’s also like, how? How do you do this?
LILY: Ha, makes sense. The bar you work at now in New York is definitely “fuck you money” too, no? That place is insane. I felt like when I got there, we locked eyes, and I was like, we’re the only sane people in this room.
AARON: No, straight up.
LILY: So how did you get into bartending? Let’s hear your story.
AARON: I was born to Middle Eastern immigrants. The area I grew up in on the East Coast was predominantly black. It was pretty hood. I came from a very religious household. I was just the black sheep. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be a badass, this bad boy.
LILY: Where do you think that rebellion stemmed from, do you know?
AARON: When something is pushed on you, coming from a religious background, you’re more curious. When someone tells you no, you’re like, well, why? I was a volunteer firefighter for four years. I loved it. Every aspect of helping people. Seeing all this crazy stuff. Saving people. I had this Superman complex. But I got injured pretty badly. I got caught in a house fire.
LILY: What?
AARON: Yeah, I have third-degree burns on both my legs.
LILY: Was your suit on?
AARON: I didn’t have my suit on. That was that Superman complex. As a volunteer, you’re supposed to fall back and watch the guys do their thing. I just wanted to save someone so bad.
LILY: That’s kind of metaphorical in a way.
AARON: Right?
LILY: That’s what you get for trying to be a hero.
AARON: Yeah, so it changed my life. I felt like I wasn’t going to recover. They made me feel pretty bad. They said I might not walk.
LILY: Wow. How old were you?
AARON: Twenty-one. The human body is so fragile and at the same time so unbelievably resilient. So I recovered. After that, there’s this Amish community program where you live with them for weeks at a time—
LILY: Sorry, what? You went to live with the Amish?
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Tennis star has launched a Substack to accompany her new podcast, . Here, she’ll “share essays reflecting on the breakthroughs and setbacks that have shaped my views of success and failure, notes on why each woman who sits down with me in the studio is Pretty Tough in their own right, and live Q&As that give you a glimpse into my thinking around health and wellness, business, fitness, self-improvement, discipline, and more.”
, the host of The Big Picture podcast and frequent contributor to The Rewatchables podcast, has launched , “a newsletter about movies, Hollywood, filmmaking, the state of the art, physical media, stardom, paranoia, joy, and how we see what we’re seeing.”
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.
2026-04-21 00:00:08
Every week, Anna Sitar picks a color to wear, grabs a film camera, and goes for a run. She shares photos and a prompt she calls “Happy Headspace” with her virtual run club on Substack, in hopes that it will make their own runs a little more fun. These rituals have turned her TikTok following—now 11.6 million strong—into a community.
Anna hadn’t planned on becoming a TikTok star. But while getting her master’s in film and TV production, she and her classmates started experimenting with ways of documenting their lives that would actually resonate with an audience. It worked.
The forecast called for rain—not ideal for a sunset shoot in L.A. But overcast weather on 16mm film has its own kind of beauty, so we stayed optimistic. As luck would have it, the rain held off and the sun peeked out just as we arrived. Anna emerged from her car in a bright red outfit, a nice contrast to the pale blue sky. We got to tag along on her weekly run, weaving through the crowds of Venice Beach while she talked about the joy of running a marathon, trying to be someone her younger self would look up to, and the importance of knowing when to turn off the camera and just be in the moment.
Tune in next week for another episode of Someone on Film.
2026-04-18 21:02:03
This week, we’re sailing on a “Chuck E. Cheese for sex,” advising the lovelorn, contemplating literacy, and admiring a parenthesis.
Camille Sojit Pejcha reports back from a swingers’ cruise in this NSFW, David Foster Wallace–by-way-of-Playboy piece.
— in
For months, my phone has been pitching me adults-only vacations, probably because it overhears me talking about reporting on sex parties and then about needing a vacation from reporting on sex parties. I’d been clicking away from these ads, mildly bemused, until one day, in late October, I woke up to a text from Playboy: Did I want to go on a swingers’ cruise called Temptation, and would these dates work? I’ve never said yes to anything so fast.
Billed as “a playground for grown-ups,” Temptation offers a city on the water: a fully chartered 13-story cruise ship where guests can enjoy everything from air-conditioned casinos and breakfast buffets to fuck machines. The goal? Create an all-inclusive fantasy for American adults, spiriting them away from their worries and toward international waters, where they’ll be free to indulge in a level of hedonistic pleasure-seeking absent in everyday life. One friend of mine—who I learn is a swinger only when I tell him about this story—aptly describes such experiences as a “Chuck E. Cheese for sex.” Mario Cruz, Temptation’s programming director, prefers “spring break for adults.”
Over his six years overseeing Temptation’s cruises, Cruz has played host to NFL players, lawyers, the presidents of major universities, and, if the rumors are to be believed, more than a few celebrities. “In their private time, they’re just humans,” he explains. “Everyone has a private life; they fantasize about these things. We just give them a space to turn that fantasy into reality.”
Before embarkation day, I’d expected being one of the only solo women on board would grant me the status of a minor celebrity. “People are going to be lining up to make you their unicorn,” my friends assured, predicting a profusion of threesome proposals. But at the Port of Miami, where I wait patiently in line to board the Norwegian Jewel, this is not the case. Instead, I spend the first hour and a half of my journey inching my luggage forward, surrounded by muscle-bound men with religious tattoos, Miami housewives with fake lashes and perfectly plumped lips, and tanned blondes lugging beach totes adorned with cheesy phrases like “Sea You Later.” Everyone is so grumpy that, for a minute, I even question if I’m in the right line.
I needn’t have worried. “When they’re waiting to board, they’re still in the outside world,” Cruz later tells me, describing the peculiar transformation that happens when people cross the ship’s threshold. The sea, I realize, is a liminal space, where the boundaries and norms of everyday life no longer apply. This is a metaphor, but also literally true: When at sea, the pool deck and balconies are clothing-optional, but everyone has to button up when the boat docks.
Now that we’re on board, everyone seems 10 times more outgoing, happy, and naked than they were before. And by the time I make my way to the Sapphire pool deck, I get the sense that I’m late to the party—one populated by 500 couples slathered in sunscreen and buoyed by the Black Eyed Peas blasting through the speakers. I haven’t been on a ship since a fifth-grade field trip, and the Norwegian Jewel, with its 16 restaurants and numerous swimming pools, is more than I was bargaining for.
Temptation charters the whole ship, hiring not only the Norwegian’s team but a group of sexologists, entertainers, and DJs to offer on-site activities ranging from workshops on anal pleasure to massage for sciatica.
In the coming days, there will be pamper parties and acupuncture, beer pong and belly dancing classes, body shots and sensual fitness sessions, and, in one case, a meet and greet that devolves into couples miming various sex positions. I will be lent prescription anti-nausea patches by not one but two different DJs, gifted peach-flavored lube, and offered a loofah with an elderly couple’s phone number Sharpie’d onto it—which, I later learn, is a common mode of communication for swingers in Florida’s retirement community.
But I don’t know any of this yet, and my first night on the ship, which also happens to be the eve of my 31st birthday, passes in a blur. By 7 p.m., I’m eating oxtail stew at a restaurant at the aft of the ship as Moe, a Floridian DJ who works for Temptation, explains the nuances of pickup artistry. “Think about it: You wouldn’t ask a fish how to catch a fish,” he says. “You ask a fisherman.” He pauses. “You’re the fish.”
It should come as no surprise that Lena Dunham is uniquely well-suited to counseling heartbroken 17-year-olds.
— in
Hi Lena! I feel a little silly putting this into the public void and you totally do not have to answer however since I am only 17 and therefore cannot DM anyone on substack and I feel the need to expand on what I submitted from your Instagram story, the public void it must be! My big query is about love - why do things we think are romantic turn out not to be? For context, I (a gay 17 year old boy) had a big crush on someone in my friendship group and was 1000% sure he liked me back based on his actions, words, etc. Anyway long story short I ended up asking this guy out and he said... no! I was upset, a little angry, but mostly confused. And while this is great material for my upcoming pop-rock debut album, I am left wondering how do you make sense of situations where something feels real and mutual and it turns out not to be? - and how do you trust yourself after that? p.s. ily and am SO excited for my signed copy of Famesick to arrive!
Signed, Giles
Giles! You had me at “I’m 17 and therefore cannot DM anyone on Substack.”
Firstly, I’m so sorry that your crush didn’t “go your way” as they say in Hollywood when we lose out on a job. It was really brave and noble of you to make your intentions clear, and to accept a “no” is also brave and noble. It hurts and yes, you’re allowed to be disappointed, mad even. But adulthood will involve many kinds of no’s, many shades and shadows and flavors of disappointment, and they’re not a bad thing to learn about early, to process and integrate and move past.
Because your life will also involve many “yeses.” You will be accepted to schools, jobs, parties and you will even fall in love. And when you do, you will know—really beyond a shadow of a doubt—how it’s different than these earlier experiences of nebulous romantic connection. I’m sure this guy you liked WAS sending you lots of green light go signals. I’m sure he was flirty and playful and really enjoyed your company, because you’re clearly very witty and I for one cannot wait for your pop rock debut (might I suggest the stage name “gileless”? Tell people the lack of capitalization is a choice. My choice). Why he was giving you all these vibes and then not actually down to date is mostly and usually not about you. Being seventeen is a hormonal torture chamber and all you do is get in your own way. I once liked a boy a LOT and we kissed during a free period and less than an hour later I stormed up to him and said “we can NEVER do that again” (we did, three years later and then five years after that, because what goes around really does come around—and he got his vengeance by asking me for taxi fare about seven minutes after I’d performed a fairly vulnerable sexual act for the first time). But why did I tell him to get lost, when I’d actually felt a frisson of something rare and pleasurable when he put his peach fuzz mustache on my previously untouched neck? Because the feelings were new, and therefore terrifying, and it felt like falling down a void. It felt like loss of control. It felt like changing in real time, and I wasn’t ready.
But you are going to encounter many people who are ready—some you will meet with all the force of two magnets snapping together in a science demo. Some you will confuse and maybe even hurt, just like this boy confused and hurt you. You may leave them heartbroken and never even know it. And some will last for an hour at a party and give you a pep in your step for the next month. You sound like a curious, engaged person, and curious and engaged people draw experiences, dynamics, dare I say energy, toward them. Pump this song if you need a reminder.
You asked how you trust yourself after this false start and the answer is that in love, it’s all we’ve got. I remember the first time I kissed my husband—we’d been holding hands for a charged thirty minutes—he took a moment to really kiss me back. And for that moment, some old dread shot through me like bad drugs: “he’s repulsed, he’s horrified, I read it all wrong.” But he’s just sort of a lizard boy, and he moves with reptilian calm, and after a beat he was there, right with me, letting me know we were feeling the same thing.
And very soon, you and someone else will feel the same thing. It will probably be the wildest and most intoxicating thing you’ve ever experienced, and it will also have moments of conflict and confusion. Listen. Be open. And also trust yourself if you feel you’re not being treated like the precious little faberge egg you—and all of us—are. As long as you stay connected to that essential instinct we all have, but so often beat out of ourselves, you’ll know when to stay, you’ll know when to go, you’ll know when to lean in for the kiss.
Sam Kriss on the unexpected ways reading reshapes the brain, and what a post-literate future might look like.
— in
In 1931, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria traveled to the foothills of the Alai Mountains, in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, to find out how the locals thought. He was trying to prove the theory that ‘mental processes are social and historical in origin’: that not just the content of our thoughts, but the way we think, is determined by the kind of society we live in. The society he found in the Alais was very different to his own. In the dry hills, illiterate pastoralists kept cattle; in the isolated green valleys jeweling the hillsides, illiterate peasants grew cotton. For centuries, essentially no one here had been able to read or write. But that was changing. When Luria arrived, the Soviet government was busy forcing herders and peasants into new, regimented collective farms, where large numbers of rural people were being taught, for the first time, to read. He spent the next year among these people, bothering them with a series of annoying tests.
What Luria found was that just a few years of basic literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects. In one of his early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures. Complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles drawn with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group the shapes together. Even if they didn’t have any training in geometry, nearly half of the peasants who’d learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically: squares with other squares, circles with other circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all; they related them to objects.
One subject, Khamid, a 24-year-old woman from an isolated village, insisted that nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle. ‘That should go by itself. That’s the Moon.’ When Luria tried to suggest that she group a square and a rectangle, she refused. ‘That’s a glass and that’s a drinking-bowl, they can’t be put together.’ Other subjects described the shapes as tents, bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.
When sorting objects, collective farm workers put a saw with a hammer, because they’re both tools, while peasants put a saw with a log. ‘The log has to be here too! If we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.’ Luria tried presenting them with syllogisms. ‘In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?’ Every single person who had received any literacy education at all, even the ones Luria described as ‘barely literate,’ could easily answer. But people who hadn’t been exposed to the written word simply refused.
They consistently explained that since they’d never been to Novaya Zemlya, they couldn’t say what kind of bears they had there. One middle-aged villager called Rustam said that ‘If there was someone who had a great deal of experience and had been everywhere, he would do well to answer the question.’ Eventually, after repeated prodding, he said that while he’d never personally been to Siberia, ‘Tadzhibai-aka who died last year was there. He said that there were bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.’ Others, like thirty-seven-year-old Abdulrakhim, grew angry. ‘I’ve never seen one and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything!’
The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’
Luria took pains to point out that these people weren’t remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make ‘excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them.’ But they lived in an incredibly conservative world, with its walls closed tight around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories, where you can talk confidently about invisible bears and measure distances even when they’re going the wrong way. But what we think of as politics seems to depend on this stuff, and revolutionary politics in particular. The lived experience of poverty or oppression isn’t enough; you need to be able to situate your own life in terms of something bigger, and imagine an entirely separate way of living that doesn’t currently exist. In 1919, launching the Soviet mass literacy program, Lenin had declared that ‘without literacy, there can be no politics. There can only be rumours, gossip, and prejudice.’ Any transformative politics is, in some sense, the art of solving a problem even when it isn’t so.
David Hockney, it turns out, is no fan of abstract paintings. In his new show, he includes a Rothko-esque canvas above a table: “‘I did that,’ explains Hockney, ‘because they made a book of Rothko’s paintings and when you see a whole book … Well, Francis Bacon said when he committed suicide, ‘I’m surprised it took so long.”’ Here, Carter Ratcliff considers the supposed meaninglessness of abstract art.
— in
Whenever I puzzle at length about the meaning of abstraction I return to a moment when I was standing in a grade school cafeteria looking up at a blackboard. I was in kindergarten and still figuring out the function of things like parentheses. On the blackboard a left-hand parenthesis curved across its large surface. I could see how it framed a list of menu items. More than that, I saw how beautiful it was. This judgment was not the upshot of a detached formal analysis. I had sensed the grace and confidence of the gesture that produced the parenthesis. Its beauty brought to mind the idea of a graceful person—or our neighbor’s Irish Setter, whose inveterate leaping and twirling was wonderfully elegant. She didn’t just look beautiful. She had a beautiful, if frantic, way of being,
When we perceive creatures, objects, textures, spaces, and light we do not merely register facts. Our perceptions imbue the perceived thing with feelings, qualities, meanings. And this happens even when we can’t name what we are seeing or hearing or touching. Incapable of experiencing anything neutrally, we live in a world saturated with significance. So, if you let it happen, the interplay of form, color, and pictorial light in a maroon Rothko will draw you into a current of strong feelings and vast but elusive meanings. It may even persuade you that the human condition is timelessly tragic, especially if you have a personality as saturnine as Rothko’s. If not, the painting’s effect on you will be different. Only if you are dogmatically opposed to abstraction will you say that it has no effect and is therefore meaningless.
I don’t know why Hockney thinks abstraction is empty. I do know that the landscape paintings in his Serpentine North exhibition do not rely on subject matter for their value, as charming as his trees and hedgerows and half-timbered houses are. It is true that over the past century critics and curators have often favored abstraction over representation, a fact of art-world life that troubles Hockney. It’s also true that his paintings generate their deepest value from something they share with abstractions: the emotionally and intellectually lively relationships between their pictorial elements. For abstraction and representation are not utterly different from one another. They are different ways of realizing the same set of pictorial possibilities.
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Soccer star has launched a Substack, where she’ll reflect on her retirement from professional sports and use the space “to write, to take photos, to fight for the people and communities I love. I want to show you how deeply I want to belong to this world alongside all of you.”
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Former New Statesman journalist has partnered with to launch , a new publication for progressive ideas and debate. There, they’ll be “addressing questions including how the centre left reinvents itself in an age of populism, how the UK escapes its post-2008 economic stagnation, how Britain rebuilds relations with the EU and how we harness AI for the common good.”
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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.