This week, we’re injecting fun back into the writing process, discarding outdated personal opinions, and watching Adele (the singer) become a Dell (the computer).
THE ARTIST’S WAY
“In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun”
Julie Andrews (as Mary Poppins, of course) sang it first, but Monica Heisey is putting it in writing.
i have never felt very comfortable with the stance, held by some writers, that writing as an undertaking is both very difficult and emotionally intolerable. while i understand there is plenty about being alone with your thoughts, sharing your ideas in public, and attempting to take something from inside your mind and bring it into the physical realm that is uncomfortable, it is not difficult like digging a ditch. it is not intolerable like having your heart broken, or even like having a sunburn. when people say things like “writing is torture,” i often think, if you really feel this way, why not do something else?
i encountered this line of thinking so frequently in the early days of my career that it occasionally caused me to doubt myself. i loved writing. i couldn’t believe i got to do it for a living, and found it, often, actively fun. did this mean i was doing it wrong, somehow? was there a more arduous and therefore more correct method that would lead me to create stronger work? if suffering for one’s art provided no special benefit, why were writers i admired constantly tweeting or appearing on panels to say their working life was hellish and exhausting?
to this day there is a little voice in the back of my mind that pops up once in a while to suggest i am shirking “real work” by enjoying myself. i was immensely soothed to see ali smith, an objectively wonderful writer with a prolific output, call herself “immensely lazy” in an interview at the hay festival, holding a beer and suggesting she doesn’t really work until she has a deadline and a paycheque scheduled, adding that she “does basically nothing until she has to” and considers staring into space an important part of the creative process. there, i thought watching it, is someone who is enjoying their working life.
this is not to say that i do not have bad days, or that i am immune from complex feelings about, in particular, the “putting it out into the world” part of writing. in the last week of editing my most recent novel i dreamt every night about dying or being murdered or murdering someone else. one night i physically felt the tip of my nose touch the lid of my own coffin as it closed over me. it was not, let’s say, “chill.” but the actual writing, in the day, sat up in bed and combing through pages, killing only my darlings, was almost pure pleasure.
so! four paragraphs of bragging about how i loooove to work and have sooo much fun doing it… this is insufferable, you are probably thinking. i hope this bitch gets back into her own coffin and stays there! give me a minute. i have tips.
outline, then follow your nose
working in tv has trained me to outline very intensely, which was at first annoying and time consuming but which i have now come to realize means i have done most of the difficult work (figuring out what to say, rather than how, which is the fun part) by the time i sit down to properly write, and crucially allows me to jump around in the draft without damaging its structure. once i have my outline, i write everything on it that seems the most fun first, depending on my mood, the weather, the amount of time available on a given day. there are inevitably less exciting parts of every draft to write—depressing bits, events based painfully on real emotional experiences, interstitial passages that tell the reader how much time has passed, etc—but if you’ve accumulated enough scenes you are proud of, you’ll be pleased to connect them with the less interesting work.
A Lady Gaga concert, four flights, and a day on set filming a documentary: Brendon Holder’s vocal cords have taken a beating. Now, at the urging of his ENT and speech therapist, he’s tuning his chatter to a new volume.
I lost my voice two months ago and had to go on severe vocal rest. I “served” some of it back in Toronto, and I’m only just getting back to normal. The ear, nose, and throat doctor shoved a camera scope down my right nostril and confirmed that I have a polyp on my right vocal cord. When I saw him over a month ago, he told me that I must reduce speaking immediately to avoid surgical intervention. The doctor prescribes me weekly sessions with a speech therapist and commands me to avoid smoking (lol), fried foods (nice try), sending voice notes (devastating), and soda, the latter of which I hold out on for three whole weeks.
As of today, I have had five sessions with the speech therapist in a small white office at the southern tip of Manhattan. She records my progress through a headset microphone that makes me feel like a pop star whenever I wear it. In our sessions over the last five weeks, I practice making “vvvv” and “mmm” sounds. I blow bubbles from a straw into a small cup of water and practice “speaking towards the front of my face.” I feel like a toddler, or an alien learning to be a human. Miraculously, it works.
We discover that I lost my voice after a series of unfortunate events. The inciting incident was Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem Ball” at Madison Square Garden, where I sang along (loudly). This was followed by a quartet of long flights shortly after: a 36-hour trip to Los Angeles to meet with a podcast host, followed by a dry-aired flight to Tokyo to film a documentary. It is my speech therapist’s theory that on those flights, I became a victim of the altitude’s dehydration, which only made my voice hoarser.
During that period when I unknowingly ruptured my vocal cords, I never once stopped talking, making conversation everywhere I went, both small and tall.
Once on vocal rest, my talks become smaller. Brevity is a virtue. I’m not supposed to speak louder when someone interrupts me, and, in the beginning, I find this incredibly frustrating. There are times when I forget that I’m supposed to be reducing my vocal load: in a heated debate over dinner, when my favourite song plays at a Yebba concert, during the carols of a wedding. Most injuries are music-related, I realize. It’s hard to be quiet in a city as loud as New York, but soon I become used to it. Soon, I even enjoy it.
I pull someone in close to speak to them, not wanting to compete with the background chatter of a restaurant or the loud music of a party. It becomes more challenging in groups when I can’t project my voice to the masses. I worry that people will think I’m being exclusionary as I direct my short bursts of conversation to one person and not a group, a small-talk faux pas.
But there’s something refined, even sensual, about speaking softly and not adjusting your volume to what is around you.
I’ve been doing cover art for over fifty years. More than two thousand covers, by my last count. I’ve painted for Baen, Bantam, Tor, Del Rey, Scholastic. I spent seven years as a matte artist at Disney. I’ve done space operas, military science fiction, horror, fantasy, kids’ series. I painted the Heroes in Hell series. I painted the Honor Harrington run. But the thing I am most remembered for is the Animorphs covers.
My students at Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts don’t believe me when I tell them I did the covers. Adults go wide-eyed at conventions. Even though the editions with my covers are long out of print, Animorphs is still around. I am surprised by the continuing presence of those covers as internet memes.
Sometime around 2012, someone on Tumblr photoshopped one of my covers to show the rapper Pitbull transforming into a pit bull. It got reblogged tens of thousands of times in a week. Then someone made Adele morphing into a Dell computer. Then it was everywhere.
I am continually amazed by this. The specific way they became famous is not a way I could have planned. The generation that grew up with them reached the age where you make jokes about your childhood at exactly the moment when the internet rewarded that kind of joke.
The format is simple. Start with a person, then transformation, then animal.
Anyone can replicate it with the cover design as a template. The pun structure, Pitbull into a pit bull, Adele into a Dell, maps perfectly onto what the covers already do. Little did I know that I would spend time creating a format specific enough that strangers could repurpose it for jokes. That is not what I was trying to do, but I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a form of success.
The teen idol has a tragic legacy. She’s a famous child, working while her peers are befriending one another and developing identities in small containers. Her container is big, bigger than the stage or the television screen. Her container is the industry, the internet, the world. Normal children are unlucky enough to shoulder the burden of their parents’ expectations, but she is gifted the responsibility of considering the fans, those reaching creatures that supposedly give much more than they take. Though they sure seem to take a lot. The famous child is generating income that is solely dependent on the maintenance of a personal brand while that brand goes through puberty and changes in immeasurable ways—physically, hormonally, psychologically, and spiritually. The famous child is debated about, decided upon.
When I was young, I was obsessed with a Marina and the Diamonds song called “Teen Idle.” It’s about being a teenager and wanting to be adored and also wanting to die, because being depressed is sometimes the closest we get to embodied living, and because death is what happens to girls who are adored too much. At twelve, I understood every word and sang along with fervor: “FEELING SUPER SUPER SUPER SUICIDAL!”
This kamikaze impulse is part and parcel of being a teenage girl, that maniacal high of wanting what you want so badly that you must also imagine yourself destroying every piece of it. Coincidentally, and unfortunately, this is also how we feel about the teen idol herself.
I think Olivia Rodrigo is awesome. The music is undeniably, consistently great, and Olivia’s attitude towards the process of creation is one of the most heartening perspectives in the industry right now. She’s a self-described fangirl who embraces all the best aspects of loving something, which is to say that she makes an effort to be a part of, and therefore enrich, the thing itself. I imagine that it would be easy to become wildly famous and immediately distracted by the access, the money, the shoes; Olivia has great shoes, but she also utilizes the better parts of such ascendancy by collaborating with her idols and taking her work seriously enough to merit putting herself in conversation with them.
In a music culture of self-flagellating individualism, algorithmic wars of attrition, and watered-down trend cycle regurgitation, Olivia stands apart by having clear references and being unafraid to reference them. She plays the game, but has her terms; in her most recent album cycle, she prioritized live debuts over the increasingly popular, endless waterfall release of singles, trying to chance the streaming algorithm. A clear believer in art as work, she’s collaborated with several artists across mediums over the course of her most recent campaign and prioritized a cohesive visual language above a one-off viral moment.
Olivia Rodrigo is completely special on her own accord, unique in a way that is irresistible to young teen fans and established music critics alike. And she is also a fascinating composite of the women who came before her, women who macheted through the jungle that is our mad culture. I realize that I have a problem with narrative, with wanting bad things to lead to good things, and for an inevitable conclusion to arrive and make all the pain ultimately worth it. But it’s hard not to look at the arc of Olivia’s career and see the women who made it possible, women who struggled against the tide so as to make space for a teen idol to finally survive intact.
debuts having to be good. witnessing the debut is quite literally gathering around a sapling, puzzled at its blatant infancy. how odd to expect anything remotely complete from an artist just beginning to give themselves permission to create. voice and perspective are earned. we should give artists the time to earn them.
olives. they’re delightful little pebbles of umami. i was merely a tasteless freak.
productivity. you are not a machine whose value depends on output. you are a person. living is the point, not figuring out how much you contribute to your country’s GDP.
addison rae. i’m charmed by her grit, her hunger. striving looks good on women, especially ones who know how to resourcefully turn infamy to their advantage. she surprised me. her take on taste being a privilege set off a lightbulb for me. i’m rooting for her.
the idea that art saves lives. i think people save themselves. all we do is reflect our audience back at themselves. we cannot conjure up from within you a strength that you do not already possess.
men in arsenal jerseys. if you can support the same team for eleven years, there’s a hidden emotional strength within you i would love to test the limits of.
the beach. i have always hated sand, but i have of late been daydreaming of our shores and lido beach and somali mermaids and pearls. perhaps i don’t hate beaches. perhaps i only hate the ones away from home.
revisiting work. you are not the same person you were a year ago. there are a thousand versions of every film, every book, every album. it cannot be a waste of time to see what new thing reveals itself to you. it’s perhaps the critic in me but give yourself permission to change your mind.
, an actor, writer, and filmmaker who has worked on projects like Reservation Dogs, Backspot, Marvel’s Echo, and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, is now on Substack, exploring “creativity & style, queerness & identity, Indigeneity & family, love, sex, grief and the ways we try to make sense of our messy-ass lives.”
, a singer, songwriter, and member of the band Westlife, is now writing and podcasting about music, soccer, and family on Substack.
Journalists Jason Langendorf, Eric Raskin, David Greisman, Bill Dettloff, and more have come together to launch The Good Fight. The new publication has resurrected the former ESPN/Grantland Ring Theory podcast and is using long-form video to tell boxing stories from across the world.
, an interior designer, author, and the founder of House Nine Design, has launched No Place Like Home. It will feature essays about her “wonderfully chaotic life” as well as “educational content, curated edits, and the insider interiors thinking” she shares with her clients.
, a lexicographer, etymologist, author, and resident word expert on Channel 4’s long-running quiz show Countdown, is now on Substack.
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Technically, it was my first New York Times bestseller, but more crucially it was the first time I was tasked to write a book without any idea of how to go about it. I had written several celebrity profiles by then. I had been on tour with Rihanna for seven days with a caravan of other journalists, but nothing had quite prepared me for sliding into the fiefdom of a rap personality as they were blowing up.
If you’ll remember, this was when DJ Khaled, whose name is Khaled Khaled, had gone stupendously viral on Snapchat for getting lost at sea on jet skis at night. It was a harrowing yet heartwarming ordeal and all the while, lit only by the glow of his phone, he narrated the events through a series of reassuring platitudes. The key is not to panic. The key is to make it. The ocean is real. The key is never give up. It’s not easy to win.
He’d already had wins. Most notably, the colossus All I Do Is Win, as well as eight studio albums, but this is the moment where America noticed him. The morning shows wanted him. Ellen. Martha Stewart. He’d become a household name and knew it, and everything he said caught fire. He churned out content like an influencer in a clout house, shining his light on his workouts, his brief stint with veganism, his chef, the stone lion in his yard, his partner, his lotion, his cronies, his cars and, occasionally, his biographer.
As Khaled’s star was rising, the book deals inevitably arrived and my name quickly made the short list. Years later I’d find out how much Khaled made on the deal, and while that figure is not my business to share, what I can say is that I was offered about $25ishK and had six weeks to turn it in. It felt doable. I could sense the momentum and had always been a fast writer. They put me up in the St. Regis for three nights and I knew that if I could get even two hours with him every day, I would have enough for a business book of aphorisms that would not only chronicle his origin story but give color to his life.
The long and short is that it was classic rap shit and he ignored me for all three days as I skulked around his house. I eventually elbowed my way onto his tour bus so I could get time with him on his way to Atlanta. At this stage of his life DJ Khaled was afraid of flying and this ended up being a gift. I interviewed his partner Nicole, his right hand Kiko, his photographer and videographer Ivan, as well as many of his friends. I still have Fat Joe’s number in my phone from that time and both Cool and Dre’s. I also have Big Boi from Outkast’s number in my phone, but that was from something else.
The longer, longer story is that I observed DJ Khaled for about 8 or 9 days total, this trip and later when he came to New York. I blended into the decor, threading my way through the crowds that clamored towards him like fast zombies for “fan luv,” I overheard his conversations, he was constantly calling people, and learned who this man was beyond the phrases.
Mostly I watched DJ Khaled, obstinately sitting in his sight line like a begrudging, plotting cat with my notebook and recorder. On day five of him not speaking to me, I decided I’d invoice him directly for more money since he was eating into my deadline. I’d seen how dedicated he was in securing the bag and wanted his attention. “I’m raising my rate,” I said. “I’m going to invoice Patty” (his childhood friend who also ran operations at the time).
He told me, and I’ll never forget this, that he had a special, tailor-made key for me:
“Are you an artist?” He asked me. I was startled by this sudden pop quiz and hesitated. “Of course you’re an artist,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hired you if you weren’t an artist. But if you’re an artist, don’t talk about money before you make the art,” he advised. “Make the art, then secure the bag.”
My spiritual director once asked me to do my best to differentiate between experiences that felt real and experiences that were actually true. It was wise counsel, though almost impossible to apply in the moment. During the experience itself, there is no clean distance from which to evaluate it. There is simply the reality of the experience: the opening of the senses, the cosmic feeling, the sense that all humanity is interrelated, the feeling that you have finally seen what has always been there. It is difficult to describe, partly because experiences like this are almost by definition ineffable. It doesn’t emerge as a logical argument to be handed across the table, which is why throughout the ages most have often reached for poetry.
Mania does not always feel like madness from the inside. Sometimes it feels like transcendence. I have had experiences like this before, and looking back, I can say that at least one of them does not seem authentic to me anymore, while another one still does. I realize how strange that may sound. How do I get to decide that? What does authentic even mean in this context? What does it mean for something to be real?
I do not have a clean answer, and I am increasingly suspicious of anyone who does. Each person has to wrestle with that question from within his or her own tradition, experience, community, and conscience. For me, I answer from within Christianity. Did God reveal something real and true to me? Was it from God? Did it draw me toward love? Did it humble me? Did it endure? Did it form something good in me after the intensity faded?
The last question has become especially important, because time has become one of the only tools I trust. I cannot always discern an experience while I am inside of it, but I can sometimes see what it produces after the fact. I can see whether it still rings true months later, whether it leaves an imprint on my soul that helps me live better, whether it makes me more compassionate, patient, honest, and connected to God and other people.
The first experience I think of had all the marks of religious intensity. There was an opening of the senses, a cosmic connection, euphoria, grandeur, and a special mission from God. Everything seemed to speak to me, and at the time it was Disney movies. I was convinced there were messages everywhere. I abandoned an incredible opportunity for my family because I believed I was supposed to start what I thought could become the next Charles Xavier school for the gifted. Even writing that sentence is painful because it sounds absurd from a distance, but at the time it was charged with meaning. It felt coherent. It felt beautiful. It felt like God was doing something extraordinary and I had finally understood my role in it.
I do not look back on that season only with embarrassment. That would be too easy, and it would not be entirely honest. It was one of the most euphoric seasons of my entire life. There is one night I still think about often. I was sitting in the back of my truck under the stars at 3 a.m., overwhelmed by my closeness with God and what I thought he was doing. My face almost hurt from smiling. I felt held by the universe. I felt chosen. I felt alive in a way that depression makes almost impossible to imagine. When everything is gray and heavy, when my body feels like concrete and God feels distant or silent, I remember that night and ache for it. I want the stars and the smile and the nearness back.
Modern life is essentially slinging the thought “Am I reading enough?” on an unending hamster wheel in perpetuity. John Paul Brammer offers a prognosis, and potential cure, for literary rumination.
You’ve probably heard this, or said it yourself: “I’d love to read more, but I can’t.” I can’t focus. I can’t sit still. My mind wanders. “I can’t crack it.” People who want to read more are aware of the tender goodness inside literature, but the barrier is too stubborn. They’ve become too weak to pierce the skin. Or so they think.
If you’re hoping for an easy trick to bypass this obstacle entirely, I’m sorry to disappoint. There is, or at least there was for me, a mandatory effort on this front. But as with breaking into anything, it’s useful to find the weak points. It was while probing that I found my way in. The sweet spot wasn’t attention, really, but something closely related to it.
Curiosity is a child. It’s greedy and unpredictable and has two modes. It’s either in frantic activity, or it’s dead asleep. When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away. A child curious about the taste of dirt will find their way to dirt. The whole of the child’s spirit will narrow toward dirt. The child will slip through any gap in the pen. The strictest parents know there’s always a gap. “No” means nothing.
When I consider the attention crisis as a curiosity crisis, some things become clearer. For argument’s sake, embrace some hypothetical good news: our faculty of attention isn’t shrinking after all. We’re as capable of sustained attention as any of our forerunners, including the French ones in voluminous powdered wigs who attended the grand salons and kept vast personal libraries. The problem, in that case, would be misapplication.
It’s no coincidence the internet is holding our attention with ever more colorful, infantilizing distractions. Take those AI-generated videos of anthropomorphic fruit. Sugary. Bright. The strawberry cheats on the banana with the pineapple. And then what? The strawberry gets pregnant and gives birth to a pineapple. The banana is present. And then what? The only thing that distinguishes this from entertainment for babies is its lewdness and lack of a perfunctory moral lesson. If prayer makes the Catholic more like a saint, then pure attention, spent like this, makes us more like crass, immoral babies. Attention here is only the price. The thing that’s spent. The child stole the credit card.
You’ve experienced curiosity at full bore. You’ve lost hours to true crime on YouTube, surfaced from a show at three in the morning, tracked a fight between strangers on the internet down to the last granular detail. There’s something juvenile about this, isn’t there? Helplessness in the face of an urge. It’s like eating ice cream with your hands. Eat. Eat. Eat. This is pure attention, and we spend a great deal of time in it. It’s dissociative and pleasurable. It can be abused.
The parent’s power is discipline and discernment. Nothing, I’m sorry to say, will make vegetables taste like ice cream. But you can live in such a way that the tongue’s relationship to sugar changes. People trying to get back into reading sometimes reach for the densest, most impressive novel, then bow out believing they’re too stupid to access it. Intelligence isn’t the culprit, but palate.
Where to start? By living the life you live, you already have books and authors in your periphery, names that recur. Answer them.
In the last couple of years, I’ve made a big switch in my attitude towards spending. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to know I don’t have a long path ahead of me. When I first retired, I would look at the money in my bank and divide it by the number of years I expected to live and ask, “Will it last?”
My mantra now: “Don’t be an idiot, do it while you can.” I want to create memories with my family and friends while I’m healthy — traveling, hiking, going to restaurants.
What you like to splurge on:
My biggest splurge is that I’ve remained in my extremely large, expensive apartment alone.
What you skimp on happily:
At this point in my life, I’m not going to do a major renovations to my apartment. My kitchen cabinet doors don’t all close. I don’t have central AC. I’ve thought about redoing these things but then I ask myself: “Is that really going to make me happier?” Screw it. When I sell, they’ll do it.
Money advice you’d give other women:
I can’t emphasize this enough: Married women and couples living together must know what’s going on with their money. You should know what’s exactly in all of your accounts.
I’ve been shocked by a couple of cases of divorce or widowhood where women have been really screwed by their partner. I know of a young couple who is divorcing right now and to her surprise he owes $600,000.
Retiring in New York City:
I have been incredibly fortunate to have saved enough to have a good retirement. Being retired in New York is wonderful. You go outside and even if you don’t meet someone, you are reminded that there is life out there.
Now that her charade of accountability at the Summer House reunion is over, we can get into the nitty-gritty. There are still dozens of questions for Amanda Batula, questions that she completely ignored or did not answer, and a few follow-ups she wasn’t asked. West agrees that he’s an incorrigible womanizer when pressed, but Amanda enjoys a victim narrative at the reunion, perhaps for the benefit of Kyle, who still loves her. (Of course he wants to think of her as manipulated and isolated! That’s the wife we’re watching him try to reconcile with this season on In the City!)
The most satisfying moment of the reunion, for me, was a question from Mia: “Amanda and West, did you honestly just come forward because there was so much speculation? Or were you guys going to continue to lie to us?” Now that’s a question I want answered. In the best-case scenario, what was the plan here? When were they going to share this with their friends, let alone the rest of the world? Amanda wakes from her slumber to give one answer that sounds real: “To be so honest, in that moment [we] came forward because of the speculation, because there were a lot of things I was still trying to understand and figure out, including the Meija situation,” she says. Mia again: “So it had nothing to do with, like, hurting your friendship with Ciara? It had to do with figuring out if West was actually exclusive with Meija?”
My group chat is still buzzing with questions left outstanding after the reunion’s final part aired. (A great comment from Meg Zukin, after Amanda said that she’s only been in a bubble thinking about herself: “We know!”) I treated this like an assignment: what would I have asked Amanda?
If you weren’t thinking about the potential (and likely) fallout from this relationship—in your friendship with Ciara, in your breakup with Kyle, in the larger friend group—what were you thinking about?
What did you think when you saw West leaving thirst comments under Ciara’s IG posts weeks before you announced your relationship?
When you say “sorry” to Ciara, are you apologizing for lying to her, or for having feelings for her ex?
Even though I don’t buy this part of the story at all: what did you do the day after West told you he had feelings for you?
Did you expect the cast to press West on his relationship with Meija?
West agreed with Andy that it seems dangerous to be in a relationship with someone with very clear commitment issues. What makes you certain that, despite embarrassing Ciara, Meija, and himself, he won’t embarrass you?
Did West detail his private conversations with Kyle about your marriage to you?
, an engine for “independent and unfiltered journalism written by some of the UK’s leading reporters” has launched on Substack.
Alex Cooper has launched an offshoot of the Unwell universe on Substack. will be publishing two volumes of essays, deep dives, and pop culture commentary every month. The first issue included contributions from writers like , , and .
DC is now on Substack, where it’s rolling out pieces from the perspectives of the characters in the upcoming Supergirl movie.
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s office in New York City.
After perhaps my 9,000th time seeing someone describe medieval marginalia as ‘doodles’ or the product of ‘boredom’, I thought it might be nice to put together a brief guide to some of the themes and ideas that recur in the margins of manuscripts, hopefully helping to showcase the fact that these drawings were usually anything but ‘random’! In fact, far more interestingly, these little characters and scenes were part of a complex and visually dense world rooted in religion, pop culture, humor, and folklore.
Illuminated manuscripts were essentially always written first and illustrated second in the late Middle Ages. The scribes would add their writing to unbound, empty pages, working carefully around blank fields where painted miniatures and initials would later be added by a separate artist or artists. We do not know exactly what sort of education these artists would have obtained. However, they almost certainly would have had a degree of literacy in their native tongue and a familiarity with the scriptures they were illustrating, even if this did not extend to a firm grasp of written Latin.
Understanding this is crucial for pushing back on the idea of medieval marginalia as ‘random’, since it opens up the possibility of considering marginal drawings in relation to the rest of the page and manuscript as a whole—crucial context that is often neglected when we encounter marginalia as isolated snippets online. Artists were not simply filling in blank voids but adding adornment to a canvas already rich with meaning imparted by the scribe. Thus, the first step to understanding a piece of marginalia should always be to trace it back to its source, if possible. Have a look through the entire work and see what themes and images recur.
Works like the 13th-century English prayerbook known as the Rutland Psalter show extensive evidence of the marginal artists playing on specific words and lines from the scriptures featured on the same page. I highly recommend Betsy Chunko Dominguez’ fantastic paper “Playing on Timbrels: The Margins of the Rutland Psalter” for a more complete exposition, but I will go over a couple examples here.
In the lower margin of folio 11r of the Psalter, two men seem to be engaged in a fierce struggle, with one of them apparently trying to rip off the other’s ear. Moving their eyes back up to the start of the opposite page, a reader would have been greeted by the following line from Psalm 5:
Verba mea auribus percipe Domine intellege clamorem meum.
Give ear, O Lord, to my words, understand my cry.
Thus, our marginal brawl becomes a clever pun on the notion of ‘giving ear’—perhaps a way of making the text more engaging and memorable for its reader.
On folio 87v, the artist has extended the letter p from the word conspectu in Psalm 86 (85 in the Vulgate) into an arrow fired from the bow of one monster into the rear end of another.
Conspectu means ‘to behold’ or ‘to consider’, and the famous medieval scholar Michael Camille connected the arrow’s placement to the notion of gaze as a type of visual penetration.
Backrooms, a new horror movie directed by a 20-year-old that just bulldozed the box office with an $81 million debut, is based on a viral social media idea: not a video game, not a character, not a product. The trades will tell you that it is based on a YouTube series also directed by the 20-year-old, Kane Parsons, but that’s only part of the story. The idea of “backrooms” started on 4chan, where people would post pictures of empty rooms, usually inspired by vague discussions of abandoned capitalist spaces and the liminality they conjure, and make up stories about them. This was right before COVID, whose mandated social alienation enabled media domination by short-form video, and computer-generated videos of abandoned rooms would go viral on TikTok, the platform where people now call the color wheel “color theory” and say it’s “amazing.”
But an important, primal text here is, in fact, a video game: Five Nights at Freddy’s. The first-person horror game ushered in a new era of social media content about video games, where players and viewers became indistinguishable. Where the commonplace, boomer-legible stand-in for “video game player who is way too into video game lore” was no longer a sad adult but a normal child. “Creepypasta” is now, fully, a mainstream aesthetic movement. I’m sure video game scholars will have differing perspectives, but, in overly reductive terms, that is my oral historiographic conclusion based on my research and lived experience: there is Before Freddy and After Freddy.
Freddy’s is jumpscare-based and set in an abandoned, fictional stand-in for Chuck E. Cheese. It is really high-concept and simple—a game for children—but lent itself well to retroactive lore-writing and social commentary. Despite the undercurrent of creepy, haunted animatronics, it is also basically spatial horror: your avatar is a security guard who has to explore and tinker with the abandoned space, which in sequels balloons to include rivers and theme park rides.
The popularity of Freddy’s, in tandem with Minecraft, the COVID-era ubiquity of the Nintendo Switch, and pandemic-enabled video creation, is the ecosystem wherein “backrooms” was forged as an aesthetic object of the commons. My point is that Backrooms is as much a “prestige horror” movie, a fake characteristic, as it is a kids’ movie, a real characteristic. The latter comes from its clear roots in Creepypasta junk. The former comes from its distribution, with A24 providing glossy promotion, championing an underdog 20-year-old YouTuber-director. But don’t get it twisted: Backrooms is trashy, disposable, intellectually offensive junk.
Few might know this fun fact, but paths towards your own ankle monitor are not one but plenty, and not all of them involve an unwavering commitment to a life of crime. Different models help authorities with different tasks. Some are meant to police alcohol consumption after a DUI. Others are used during criminal pretrial supervision when there’s a risk of absconding. Some enforce curfews during parole. Others are used during immigration proceedings to ensure the wearer doesn’t disappear into the country and live happily ever after as an undocumented fugitive.
To the untrained eye, however, the device itself—an updated scarlet letter in the form of a black plastic box attached to a rubber strap—looks exactly the same regardless of purpose. Absent context, the wearer could be anyone from a serial killer to a foreign nun with visa problems.
Once you’ve completed the hard part—executing the choices that led to your current circumstances—you are presented with two options. You can cover it up, or you can leave it visible.
Both choices are wrong.
You’re either flaunting it or hiding it. You’re either insufficiently remorseful or performing remorse manipulatively. Reprehensible either way.
Redemption is wonderful in theory. But in practice, redemption is apparently just deeply offensive, and surviving humiliating circumstances a little too well becomes its own kind of crime.
The public says it wants accountability, but what it actually wants is permanence. Permanent guilt, permanent silence and permanent shame. An identity frozen in its most unflattering moment and preserved until the end of time in a quick Google search result. A life sentence of public humiliation, after which you’re expected to die as the version they decided on.
I’d love to argue that most of what I’ve managed to accomplish has happened in spite of my past, not because of it. Life is already hard enough under normal circumstances, and even though I’m all for sprinkling in a healthy amount of adversity here and there, adding years of legal obstacles rarely improves the experience.
At what point, exactly, does someone stop being defined exclusively by their worst decision? Is it immediately following release from custody, the way we restore someone’s right to vote and possess money but not necessarily their right to possess dignity? Or maybe at some point in the future, like your right to own a firearm? Or is the answer Never? Because saying “well, you shouldn’t have committed a crime in the first place” means that punishment doesn’t end when the sentence does.
Well, it took nearly four months, but we made it. Shortly before leaving for the airport last week, I turned that final dastardly page in Moby Dick and felt bliss, exhaustion, a fleeting jolt of total cultural superiority, as well as the kind of Pavlovian sleepiness that comes from having ended most nights in this calendar year with at least a couple of pages of Melville’s finest.
Was it worth it? Absolutely yes, though I now think endurance for endurance’s sake should never be the prevailing motivation. (You are, after all, talking about someone who read the Bible twice in high school—partially so she could see if there were any loopholes no one was talking about, but mostly for the flex.) While I was somewhat prepared for the amazing figurative language, the meticulous whaling knowledge, the (less enjoyable) old-timey sailor rants, I wasn’t at all prepared for how funny and downright sarcastic the writing could be.
And while I do not plan to ever reread all that again, I did want to commit to memory (and maybe save you 3.5 months of your life with) a list of my favorite zingers, with page numbers included if you end up ordering the same edition (which I do recommend even though it is too fucking big to take anywhere with you… hmm… there’s a metaphor in that…). Bolding is my own; imagine I’m underlining it with a pencil to show you amidst a shared bout of literary ecstasies. Anyway, I salute you, Mr. Melville. I am also absolutely certain that you would have loved Twitter.
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? (p.4)
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? (5)
And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable inflection that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (6) (“The two orchard thieves”!! What a way to reference the reference.)
But as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. (7) (Really, the whole first chapter is just perfect.)
I can’t stress enough how much fun it is to go outside each morning without my phone. Isn’t it a thing that deaf people see better? Or blind people taste more? The idea that when one of the senses is cut off, the others are heightened? If I’m talking out of my ass it wouldn’t be the first time. I swear I read that somewhere once. That’s what being outside without my phone feels like; I’ve cut off my nose and now my eyes can see clearer, my ears can hear louder. There’s nowhere to look but at the world around me, nothing to see except for everything.
Being outside is level 1. Going into an establishment is level 2. Making eyes with a man in said establishment? Level 3. I walked into Joe Coffee (which is lowkey one of my opps but we can discuss that another time) and ordered a cortado (randomly my new go-to as of last week) and made my way off to the side to wait for my drink. Usually at this point I’d be scrolling, chatting, waking my brain up with reels, like a bowl full of spaghetti to the face. Today, I was looking around me curiously like a baby on the subway, eyes wide in a stroller. My first time in this coffee shop without a phone. Googoo literal gaga.
And then a gay guy walked in. And I watched it happen. We locked eyes. He ordered an iced coffee, black. He turned and looked at me. I whispered a faint smile, even though he wasn’t my type (dark grey-ish hair and grumpy-looking, probably mid-30s). Again, this is where I’d go back to my phone, to my reels, to a video of a girl eating a dot cake. I stayed in the coffee shop with Grumpy and he kept looking at me. He got his iced coffee before I got my cortado and made his way over to where I was standing near the condiment station.
He gave me a look like aren’t you gonna say something? No, dude, get your Splenda and go. I wanted to say, “Hello. We aren’t getting married. I’m here without my phone and I made eye contact with you because I’m re-learning how to be on Earth after spending many, many years on Planet Reels. Enjoy your coffee.”
Book Gossip, New York Magazine‘s biweekly newsletter about “what the literati are really thinking” written by Jasmine Vojdani, will begin publishing on Substack. The latest letter featured an interview with Ann Patchett, a survey on how literary magazine editors are screening submissions for AI, and a scene report from Allie Rowbottom’s book launch.
Longtime ESPN sports columnist, author, and sports documentary producer Howard Bryant has joined Substack to share his insights about stories “located at the intersection of sports and society.”
Togethxr—the women’s sports content collective co-founded by Olympians Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, and Sue Bird—has launched a Substack. Their publication, Yeah, I Said It, will weigh in on pressing issues in women’s sports and cover signature events in depth, including the softball Women’s College World Series.
Fergal Keane, an Emmy- and BAFTA-winning BBC war correspondent, has left his post after 37 years to launch his own Substack, where he’ll cover international politics and keep a diary of his travels.
Georgia Davies, a musician in The Last Dinner Party, has joined Substack. The Hunger and the Road will serve as “part travelogue, part food diary, part confessional.”
Kilian Jornet, a professional ultramarathoner, trail runner, and ski mountaineer who has scaled Mount Everest twice in one week without supplemental oxygen, has launched a Substack. His first piece is about returning to the mountain marathon Zegama and competing on an unresponsive knee.
Jonny Mulyk, a chef who once ran a restaurant specializing in pasta, is now on Substack. He’ll be sending out new, weekly recipes to his 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 Danya Issawi out of Substack’s office in New York City.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
Hi, I’m Edith, and I’ve been publishing Drawing Links, an illustrated journal, since 2019. I’ve chronicled getting married, having children, and searching for purpose, although I feel like it’s best when it’s not really about anything. Before this, I was a staff writer at The Cut, and before that (skipping back a bit), I worked at The Hairpin, the women’s website I founded.
I’m also a longtime Substack reader—my profile tells me I subscribe to 99 newsletters, 17 of which are paid subscriptions. I think a few of those are comped, but I don’t remember anymore. Here are just a few current favorites!
HEALING
Diary comics (not mine)
For anyone interested in diary comics (which IMO should be everyone!), Vanessa Davis is a master. The master? Every post of hers is great, but I love unreasonably handsome guys, so I’ll pick this one as a teaser.
In 2024, Evan Goldfine listened to every Bach composition and chronicled it in A Year of Bach, complete with audio clips. I loved reading it even more than I enjoy listening to Bach, aka LTB (and I like LTB!). Evan is still LTB (and occasionally complaining about NYT Games), and the other day he described a recent experience at Carnegie Hall.
Víkingur Ólafsson, in his March piano recital at Carnegie Hall, requested no applause between long works of Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven. He set an absurdly high bar of holding 3,000 people’s attention without any release. Between pieces, his body never quite rested—he just paused in suspension for a moment and began anew. [. . .]
Víkingur creates a sense of space like no other living pianist. He is synesthetic, and he reports experiencing the key of E as green. (He sported a sage velvet jacket at the show.) There was almost something of dewed grass in the performance, he and Beethoven both alluding to fragility and renewal. Notes and their overtones rang and reverberated through the centuries and the uninterrupted hour.
Plenty of sturm und drang follow in the theme’s variations, each pointing inevitably toward a peaceful recapitulation. After about 80 minutes in shared, focused silence, we started to sense the first shimmers of our pending reentry to the unceasing noises of 57th Street (and of our private minds). But in those final moments, the hall remained as one consciousness distributed among thousands of bodies.
And then, from the first-tier fancy seats, in the second measure of the returned theme, came a familiar sensory shock. The ringer was set to loud, of course—the tune went something like this:
I regularly save Allie Jones’s celebrity gossip posts for “rainy” moments. Alternately, they might be the posts I open the most quickly. It’s pure candy. When she sold Gossip Time hats, I bought one immediately.
I have been following Pete Davidson’s relationship with Elsie Hewitt with some interest, as the two had a baby together in December, three days before I gave birth to my second. Given my familiarity with this particular baby timeline, my suspicion is that Hewitt was pregnant or just about to be when Davidson started rolling out their relationship in the tabloids at the end of last March. (Sources insisted to Page Six at the time that Hewitt, a model and influencer with one million followers on Instagram, was a “non-celebrity” and thus “different” from the parade of famous women Davidson had dated in the past.) Now, both of our babies are hitting the four-month sleep regression, and Davidson and Hewitt’s relationship is reportedly hitting the skids. Makes sense!
Terrell Johnson writes about running, although there’s a lot of running-adjacent and non-adjacent content too. Because, really, what isn’t about running? In my opinion, The Half Marathoner is a must-read for anyone interested in running and the people who do it (it also inspired my dream of traveling the world to run half-marathons). He interviews “regular” runners every week or so, and I loved this bit from a recent interview because it reminded me exactly of how I started.
What have you learned about yourself from your running journey? Is there anything that’s changed about you since you started?
I’ve learned that people run for all kinds of reasons, but I run for my mental health. I run to be outside. Everything else is nice to have: good gear, good company, etc., but I don’t need anything except that time alone.
I’ve learned that it’s okay to do things seasonally. I can still call myself a runner even in the summer when I refuse to run in the 90-plus degree heat of D.C. I used to have such strict ideas about what made someone an athlete or a runner, and now I know that it’s more about a mindset than anything else. Every time I see someone running on the roads as I drive by, I am clapping for them in my head. I cheer for everyone.
A couple of years ago, I signed up for a running retreat in Alaska. I didn’t know anyone on the retreat, but I wanted to see Alaska, and I wanted to do some trail running. Our group ran and walked at such a diverse range of paces, and it was the first time I really gave myself permission to not go all out every time.
I ran a 10K, and then the next day I felt like I wanted to walk to the glacier lake instead of running it. The person I was with felt like she wanted to run. We high-fived, and then went at our own paces. On the way back from the lake, I felt like running, so I caught up with another couple in our group.
I loved getting to know them through this run. I learned that I can really listen to what I want and need in the moment, and that giving it to myself is the right thing to do.
I only recently followed this author, Sara Szal, but I enjoyed the first post of hers I came across (below). She’s also currently microdosing psilocybin.
Progesterone decline affects sleep architecture and stress recovery. A fatigued nervous system does not easily enter the parasympathetic state required for full arousal. The sleep data is directly relevant: women in perimenopause who experience disrupted sleep are also experiencing disrupted recovery of the autonomic baseline that makes sustained arousal possible.
Orgasmic capacity is generally maintained with aging, but the intensity of orgasm may diminish due to decreased pelvic floor muscle tension and reduced uterine contractions during climax.
The opportunity is important to consider. Women in perimenopause and post-menopause who understand their anatomy and advocate for adequate arousal time report higher sexual satisfaction than younger women—not lower. The research on sexual satisfaction across the lifespan shows satisfaction peaks in the fifth and sixth decades for women who have the knowledge and the partners.
“The Debutante” by David Seidner, shared by Martin Lerma. Seidner spent the ’90s tracking down descendants of aristocrats painted by John Singer Sargent and photographed them in similar style.
READING
Book insider stuff and beyond
I’m currently reading Emma Straub’s (excellent) new novel, American Fantasy, which is partly about boy bands and which I was compelled to buy after Missive No. 1 of her supremely charming book tour travelogue. My favorite missive, though, was No. 2, when New Kid on the Block Joey McIntyre came to a tour event. I cried. (Should this be fodder for a romance novel!?)
You ever write a novel about a boyband and then befriend your favorite member of a boyband and then he comes to your book event in a sweatshirt from your bookstore and calls you his therapist in answer to someone else’s question????????? Just me? I think in this photo, I am saying, what is life, and he is saying, it’s just friendship, my bro, let’s not overthink this. Joe Mac showed, everybody, he showed.
ESPN commentator and six-time Grand Slam doubles champion Rennae Stubbs is now on Substack. Her Stubbsy Snippets will delve into tennis strategy and what to expect in major tennis action, like accurately predicting what might take Jannik Sinner down at the French Open.
has launched its homepage on Substack, where Ashtyn Butuso and Daniel-Yaw Miller will be curating “the amazing stories, posts, and narratives in sports—the things we are all talking about in our group chats, happy hours, and cookouts.”. Simultaneously, they’re launching OffBallFC, a soccer-focused news and opinion site, in the lead-up to the World Cup.
, host of The Viall Files podcast and a longtime figure on The Bachelor, is launching a Substack where he’ll share weekly digests on “life, relationships and culture through the lens of reality TV.”
The pioneering music collective is now on Substack, creating an archival series that pulls back the curtain on past productions ahead of their forthcoming tour.
has brought her fashion and lifestyle expertise to Substack. In her eponymous newsletter, she traverses between luxury fashion, the secondhand market, and motherhood.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Substack’s editorial team.
Hey, it’s Mo Diggs. I like to compare today’s media landscape with that of the past because time is cyclical and the past is prologue.
Excited and honored to guest curate the Memorial Day weekend edition of The Weekender. I’ve got an eclectic assortment of essays, short-form posts, podcasts, and even a little literature to fully stimulate your palate.
TECHNOLOGY
The oracle of the matrix
It is easier to write the Great American Novel than it is to have a fresh perspective on tech. There are so many posts simply blaming smartphones for all our maladies, you wonder if there is a lobbying group behind them. Katherine Dee consistently astounds me with her boundless sagacity. Here, she illustrates how the current chatbot craze is a return to animism, which has been repressed for centuries and before now was primarily dealt with through puppets. I do not take drugs anymore, but the way I say “Wow man” when I read her on the L train must have passengers thinking otherwise.
There is a wave of books asking how social media platforms shape the stories we tell about ourselves and, through that shaping, what new kind of self they are producing. Megan Garber’s Screen People argues that the language and ethos of entertainment have permeated every aspect of life, so that we now see each other as characters in an ongoing show whose continuity we are responsible for maintaining. Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s The Story of Your Life, out in August, makes the related case that algorithmic platforms have disciplined what counts as a shareable experience into what Jia Tolentino’s blurb calls a “rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm.” I haven’t read either yet, but I’m willing to bet they’re basically right. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself.
We think in a televisual frame: Spotify provides the soundtrack of our lives, we accuse people of “main character syndrome,” we reference the invisible “writers’ room” and “seasons” constantly.
If television introduced this framing, then social media fortified it.
I think this is the last critique of social media we’re going to get. The era in which we treated our screen-lives as fake is ending. Not because anyone won the argument, but because the objects on the other side of the screen have started to seem like they have interiors of their own—and that pull, I’ll argue, is dragging us back into our bodies rather than further into the feed. In fact, I will say this: social media as we know it is dead. Technology-saturated lives are not.
Daniel Falatko is one of the funniest people on Substack. He doesn’t post as often as I would like him to on his newsletter, but his Notes run is the stuff of legend. He often recaps the Bret Easton Ellis podcast and shares mordant observations on trap music and jazz, but my favorite notes of his are haiku-length sketches of Bushwick life like this one, where he can’t hide his momentary obsession with a colorful subway passenger.
Prester John Andrews is one of my favorite culture writers on here. He’s refreshingly unpretentious yet insightful. His podcast interview with Substack wunderkind is particularly fascinating. Sprout explains how his first-ever Sproutstack post, “Is Mike Wazowski Jewish or Polish?,” went viral. This is the diametric opposite of my come-up on Substack. For more than a year, I began my newsletter posting into an indifferent void, but I kept doing it to shut up my friend , who also has a Substack. Then I fatefully linked to one of Ross Barkan’s Guardian articles. I was not aware that he was already a subscriber of mine, so he began linking to me and almost single-handedly gave me my current readership. What Sprout and I have in common, if not beginner’s luck, is that we both posted. Don’t get hung up on how often you have to write—just shut up and do it.
In today’s episode of The Xanadu Review, I’m joined by Russell Sprout. We talk Gilmore Girls (and why Emily Gilmore has done nothing wrong, ever), how the medium of how we consume art changes the experience, the album experience as the theft of cows by vampires, the depressing but funny future of aging millennials, the Palantir manifesto, the tech world and startup culture, “abundance” and the future of normies, the 2020s as a secular religious revival and much, much more!
It is hard to choose just one great post from culture magazine The Metropolitan Review, but this review of Cairo Smith’s book Scenebux by ARX-Han is something else. One of my worst posts was a dumb manifesto I wrote calling for Lit 2.0. The basic idea was a literature that treated the internet as a part of our lives, without the desperate attempts to re-create 4chan-speak that seemed to plague much of the literature of the early part of this decade. Scenebux seems to be doing a fine job of painting a more lived-in reflection of life around the internet, where people still smoke and curse and have sex. Han’s review does what all good criticism does: gives you the proper framing for understanding why a work is worthy of discussion, let alone an outright purchase.
Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works—an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.”
The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.
Scenebux is a short, snappy novella about a young underemployed writer named Ben Extina who embarks on a modern Pynchonesque tour of “the scene,” or the contemporary online ecosystem of niche intellectual figures. This landscape is primarily focused on a lively anatomical slice of a particular right-coded intellectual subculture backed by A Certain Silicon Valley Oligarch, but isn’t fixated on a single persona or figure—the novella’s center is its rapid momentum and flurry of events, scene changes, and characters.
In this respect, Scenebux isn’t quite situated as an internet novel, since the online intellectuals that Smith is referencing are corporeal characters that the protagonist meets in real life. Here the novel encompasses a broader effort to recapture the dynamic, gonzo-style hijinks of 20th-century protagonists who experienced the world through acts of human agency rather than the graphical user interface of a screen or the surprisingly passive creative-class jobs that seem to dominate book jacket summaries these days.
I love reading about improv, almost more than I love watching it. Will Hines describes here a technique that not only leads to bad improv comedy but, though he doesn’t say it, to bad Saturday Night Live sketches: an impatience to point out and overstate the weird part. Most of my favorite comedic moments sucker punch me with their weirdness; by the time I realize something is off, I am already laughing.
Sometimes improvisers use the idea of “framing” to try and write the whole scene themselves. That is… not good.
Framing is when you call attention to someone else’s unusual behavior. It’s a term I first heard of from the UCB Manual in 2013 (“letting your scene partner know you think they’ve done something unusual”).
Framing: I Hear You
Often you’re telling the other person that you’ve heard them. Like “Got it. I see that you’re trying to be unusual.”
Player 1: I shouldn’t have to pay taxes. I am an artist.
Player 2: (framing) I think you’re taking the idea of “artist” a little too far.
Framing: Did You Notice This?
Sometimes you frame behavior the other person did by accident.
Player 1: I shouldn’t have to pay taxes. I am an artist. Just like Paul Bunyan.
Player 2: (framing) Wasn’t Paul Bunyan a lumberjack? Also fictional?
Player 1: (changing now because of the frame) I consider lumberjacks to be artists. I long to be a lumberjack. I also long to be fictional.
Ted Hope has been a tireless advocate for filmmakers on Substack with his ambitious NonDē (for “non-dependent”) film movement. I was first introduced to this movement by Alex Rollins Berg, whose newsletter Underexposed is a must-read for any film buff. This post breaks down the rise and fall not of a particular movie star, but the entire concept of movie stars. Thrilling though it might be to root for their demise, Berg suggests how they might be our unlikely allies in the fight against corporate conglomerates and Big Tech.
For more than fifty years, the first Monday in May has belonged to the Met Gala. It was former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland who, in the 1970s, transformed the charity dinner into an extravagant pageant of fashion and celebrity, a torch Anna Wintour carries to this day.
That flame flickered earlier this month when several A-listers—including Meryl Streep, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, and Taraji P. Henson—shunned the event.
In truth, enthusiasm for the Met Gala has been thinning for some while. Many blame the intrusion of influencers in recent years. Others have pointed to mounting discomfort with the optics: a shameless circus of wealth, made more conspicuous this year by honorary ringleader Jeff Bezos, whose status as a tax-averse centibillionaire rendered the evening a tasty vessel for broader cultural resentment.
The backlash reflects not just the Gala’s fading luster but the crumbling architecture of celebrity itself. In the first quarter of the 21st century, Hollywood star power has been steadily marked down. The rise of IP, the flattening force of streaming, the deluge of preening, jabbering TikTok celebrities, and now the threat of AI have chipped the marbled plinths of our idols down to nubs. Once, they loomed large above us; now they flicker on our phone screens, at the mercy of our giant thumbs.
There are good reasons to welcome this decline. Predators have been toppled. Toxic behavior has been exposed. Performative virtue signaling has fallen blissfully silent.
And yet the film industry depends on the perceived market value of recognizable actors to finance movies—particularly original, challenging, artistically ambitious movies that directors like yours truly are fighting to make.
Alexander Sorondo has a wonderful profile of Robert Moses and LBJ biographer Robert Caro on his Substack, big reader bad grades. Those posts are paywalled, but his affecting, lyrical sketches of life working in a Miami grocery store are surprisingly free to read. The post here focuses on an employee with a learning disability who gets away with not working as a result of his condition. Sorondo’s radical empathy has the reader commiserate with the exasperated staff while also rooting for the holy fool who bites produce and puts it back on the shelves.
Our new hire at the grocery store appears to have a learning disability. He is egoless and polite. To say that he’s “innocent” feels condescending, but the word comes to mind a lot because he’s making everyone furious at the fact that he doesn’t do anything. Just starts a task and then wanders off. In the break room, eating lunch, people trade lockjawed whispers about how he comes back here every ten or fifteen minutes, opens his locker, lifts his shirt to just above his nipples and applies deodorant, then spritzes himself with cologne, then opens the fridge and scans the shelves. There’s a can of whipped cream with STAFF scrawled across the label in Sharpie. He tips his head back and shoots a jet into his mouth from two or three inches high and then puts it back and returns to work, except that “work” in this case means walking laps around the store saying “Hi How Are You” to everybody and improvising tasks that he does not complete.
It seems like he is knowingly doing nothing, like he’s well-practiced at performing busyness without getting anything done; and yet if you put it in those terms (“practiced,” “performing”) it sounds insidious.
The just launched on Substack, opening its vault with liner notes, oral histories, deep dives into artifacts, and behind-the-scenes stories from the museum’s staff and inductees.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Substack’s editorial team.
In the quote replies of the latest video posted by Twitter user @Criterion—which features Mad Men star Jon Hamm thoughtfully waxing poetic about rare independent films—you’ll find some of the most hellish thirst tweeting this side of the Pittdom. Sprinkled between comments on the quality of his choices (favorable) or the odd Mad Men reference are solicitations that range from the evergreen “can I say something” to the far more opaque “now pull your d*ck out.”
I thought this was a classy party, I briefly, bemusedly thought aloud on my inaugural scroll. Then I scrolled a little farther and came across the tweet that proved otherwise: “we’re not supposed to call this goon bait??”
Yeah. The Criterion Closet is goon bait now. Or maybe it always has been?
It is, for the record, absolutely insane that something as austere and tame as the Criterion Closet has become so synonymous with abject goonery. It was the Letterboxd Four Favorites before Letterboxd was a thing you heard namedropped in prestige TV shows; a genius brand of marketing in its own right, if not a little nicher. Criterion has been preserving hard-to-find films—from international auteurs to old Hollywood restorations and, recently, acclaimed streaming originals—for over 30 years now. They house their film inventory in a closet at their headquarters in New York, and for the past 15 years they’ve invited filmmakers or standup comedians or podcasters into said closet to pilfer ultra 4K Blu-rays and box sets in the guise of promoting their latest project. I can’t stress how brilliant this marketing is, truly, even if there’s no way it’s all that profitable and it’s known exclusively to a certain brand of chronically online movie nerd. Two Americas, and all that. But for that America, the Criterion Closet is essentially Hot Ones. And I do mean that in every way that matters.
I kid you not—you can find thirst tweets attached to nearly every Criterion Closet vid. Every man over the age of 35 who steps into this hallowed crawl space can get it. Jason Bateman slutted it up in a plain black tee, as did Oscar Isaac, whose own trip to the closet coincided rather serendipitously with the writing of this dispatch. He also cleaned that thing out with a level of greed I’ve not witnessed since Barry Jenkins’ closet visit. The Cut famously named Ben Affleck the “most charming guy in the Criterion Closet,” which I’m not positive I agree with but hey, it’s all subjective. There’s a “hit the towers” energy in the way Nick Offerman’s visit absolutely shattered my TL. Diego Calva even flashed us in the closet! The slut!
Men on the geriatric side of the Hottie Spectrum get plenty of love, too: there’s something about those soft fluorescent lights, the compulsion to speak passionately and articulately about film, that just makes everyone in the Criterion Closet automatically really hot. John Slattery got some polite “still would”s in reaction to his visit. Tracy Letts strolled in, confidently said, “I already have all these movies,” and was rewarded with a handful of suggestive gifs. I found myself doing a little mental “hear me out” watching Guillermo del Toro’s mobile closet picks. Other crushes I already had, like Alden Ehrenreich, got even hotter—like, infinitely hotter? Deliriously hotter?—upon visiting Criterion. Even Bob Odenkirk, whose trip to the closet dropped in tandem with Hamm’s, got a bit of love in the QRTs. Maybe Bob Odenkirk has always had lusters, but I certainly never would have known that had it not been for Criterion.
Now I’m sure you’re asking, “but what about the women?” Or alternatively, “what about the Black people?” Great questions—and here is where that aforementioned “nearly” comes into play.
Never have I been so abruptly reminded of Criterion’s target audience as I have been while poring through their closet videos. What Criterion does for older men, for crushes you might be a little bit ashamed to reveal out loud, is a modern phenomenon. It does not do the same for anyone who isn’t old and a man (or white and/or eligible for Latin Lover status). Charli XCX was in there; I can’t say it really moved the needle. Zoë Kravitz and Channing Tatum did the rare couples Criterion vid just weeks before calling off their engagement—the equivalent of giving a dog (me!) chocolate before putting it down—but their joint slay barely registered on the bisexual Richter scale. Lucy Liu reminded us all of her status as the baddest b*tch alive and was rewarded only with a smattering of sincere “she’s so cool”s. Same for Nia DaCosta. Same for Margaret Qualley, who apparently is someone that people kind of objectify? In an arthouse-y way?
Walk into a Walmart and you’ll find over half a dozen ways to buy regular Coca-Cola: you can buy 12 oz cans, 16 oz bottles, 20 oz bottles, and 2-liter bottles. The cans come in 12-packs and 24-packs, and that’s before we’ve touched Diet Coke or Coke Zero.
Each of those is what retailers call a “stock-keeping unit” (SKU), each of which has to be treated by the inventory system as a distinct product.
An average Target carries around 80,000 SKUs, while a typical Costco carries only 4,000 SKUs, a 95% smaller catalog despite Costco’s retail locations being physically larger than Target’s by around 18%. Costco has more items in their warehouse but less variety. They just identify the most popular SKUs and sell more of them.
Target tries to have “a little something for everyone,” and that imposes costs on the business. If a SKU is obscure or unpopular enough, it might never get bought, winding up as “dead inventory.”
When you have 10 varieties of ketchup, maybe you never manage to find a buyer for the last two bottles of the least-popular kind. Even if it does eventually sell, it might sit on the shelf for a long time before someone buys it.
Costco avoids this problem by selling fewer kinds of ketchup (and fewer varieties of everything else, too). There are fewer “unpopular items” that spend time languishing on the shelf.
This “fewer SKUs” approach has many other benefits for Costco:
Costco’s “No Touch Policy”
Fewer SKUs means lower operational and labor costs.
Much of Target’s labor cost is paying employees to stock shelves. Look at this photo of a Target employee physically bending over to place an item on the shelf:
I can report from my experience as a young Target employee that this process is as laborious and inefficient as it looks. Note the brown corrugated cardboard boxes next to the employee: those are the boxes that the product came in. After he’s done shelving the product, he will need to flatten the cardboard and dispose of it.
Costco’s more efficient restocking method has a name: the “no touch” policy, where products are placed directly on the sales floor without being unpacked. You’ve probably seen this before: an employee drives a forklift out to the sales floor, drops off a pallet, maybe takes an empty pallet back with them, and heads back without ever disembarking from their forklift.
There’s no Costco employee who has to “arrange the merchandise on the shelf” to make it look nice, because there aren’t shelves within reach of the customer.
Why can’t Target use this same high-efficiency method? They have more SKUs.
Because Target has “a little something for everyone,” most Target SKUs don’t occupy a whole pallet, which is why you might need to have an employee make a trip to stock 6 more bottles of Habanero Ketchup.
But having fewer SKUs is also great for financial reasons, too:
Faster inventory turnover means fewer costs
Because Costco only stocks popular SKUs, their inventory moves faster. (Think about what is implied when we say a product is “flying off the shelves”: it’s literally spending less time sitting on the shelf!)
Shelf time is costly: the retailer has to pay rent, utilities, security, and all the other overhead that comes with maintaining the physical space a product occupies. A product that sits on the shelf for 15 days before being sold is far more costly than an item that gets bought within 2 days of hitting the shelf.
Target, with 20 times as many SKUs, carries far more slow-moving inventory that lingers for weeks before anyone buys it.
Let’s start with the obvious: the art itself, and where it goes. This is the curator’s domain.
Curators shape the overall vision, meaning, and experience of a show. The selection and placement of works tells the story they want to tell, signaling relationships, relevance, and narrative within a collection of work. Art placement happens early, in close collaboration with the living artist and exhibition designer (hey, that’s me!), right at the very start of the planning process.
Curators either are, or become, deep experts in the work being shown. Hearing them talk through an exhibition is breathtaking. Curators speak about art like old friends, with intimacy, precision, and affection. I have to actively stop myself from gawking every time.
Floor Plan & Traffic Flow
The floor plan is a collaboration between the curator, living artist, and the exhibition designer, and it typically happens in tandem with art placement in the early design of a show.
Circulation, sight lines, and the highlighting of key objects are all mission-critical conversations. You want visitors to move through a show naturally and intuitively. You want them to be comfortable, curious, and never confused or claustrophobic. Nobody wants to feel crammed while contemplating a Picasso or feel lost in a hallway when there’s a Rothko around the corner.
The Art Handlers
Yes, there is an entire profession of art handling. And no, I cannot do it. When I first started working at a museum, a few friends excitedly asked this. Lolz, absolutely not—the liability alone!
Art handlers have a highly specialized skill set. They wear gloves, unpack pieces with extraordinary tenderness, are fluent in reading art manuals (yes, some individual works come with entire manuals dedicated to their installation), and install each work with a precision and care that is genuinely beautiful to watch.
Wall Color
I’d be willing to bet you can’t tell me the wall color of the last exhibition you visited. And I’d also bet that your experience would have been substantially different if it had been painted another shade.
The era of the all-white modernist cube is fading (for the most part!). Wall color is a powerful tool in setting the atmosphere of a show. It’s subtle but transformative. Think of it like a wine pairing: the color is chosen to complement the work on display. Wall colors can also function as wayfinding, guiding visitors through different areas without a single sign.
Wall color decisions involve the curators, the artist (if living), the exhibition designers, and sometimes the graphic designers. Every curator and exhibition designer I know has a favorite color to use in a show (mine is purple, because I am, unabashedly, a regal girly). I’ve also heard a rumor that the Met does not like to use green paint, but you did not hear that from me!
, the Cambridge-trained historian, author, and broadcaster, has launched a Substack. Her work finds the dark, human stories hiding inside history’s most iconic images—in a recent post on the girl at the center of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, she writes that “that beautiful dress was a uniform, that palace was a gilded prison.”
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