It’s a bold title, I know. But there’s little doubt that the media is in crisis. Even as it seems that more news is being consumed than ever, it hardly feels like we’re getting smarter. Mad kings rule the media economy and reap the rewards. News organizations are doing mass layoffs. Impartial reporting is out; jestergooning is in.
But I believe there’s reason to hope. I’ve seen what can happen when publishers take ownership and audiences directly support the work they believe in. I’ve seen a new media market grow from nothing and watched once-struggling writers find financial security. I’ve seen them build new institutions, giving rise to a generation of fresh voices. And I’ve seen audiences vote for the culture they want to see, funding the voices and perspectives they value—leading to more than 5 million paid subscriptions on this platform alone.
So I’m capturing this pivotal time in the pages of a book.
How to Save the Media is about this era of transition, where old gatekeepers give way to new opportunities and direct relationships reign supreme. It’s about an emerging ecosystem where success doesn’t have to depend on who you know or how well you cater to an algorithm. It shows a way to recover from the collapse of traditional media, and escape the deranging effects of the attention economy.
This book tackles the biggest questions facing the media and society, from how to protect the free press to how to resist a robot uprising, taking readers into rooms with some of the biggest media power players of our time, including berserk billionaires and heroic hacks. I’ll blend insider access with outsider perspective, drawing on my history in media and tech across two decades and three continents, from scrabbling freelance journalist to co-founder of Substack. You’ll see how we got here and where we’re going next—from the temple to the garden.
How to Save the Media will be published by Authors Equity, a new publishing company that practices what this book preaches: authors retain full ownership of their work and receive the majority of the sales revenue. The cover art is by my exceptional colleague Joro Chen.
Pre-orders are available now. They matter more than many people realize; they’re what determine whether a book breaks through and reaches a wider audience. So consider pre-ordering if you believe in a different future for media: one where creators own their work, audiences help shape the culture they want to thrive, and power flows to people rather than platforms. This is about saving the media—but also about making it better than it’s ever been.
This week, we’re rating conspiracy theories, getting stuck in 16th-century traffic, and exploring the AI enthusiasm gap between China and the U.S.
THE DISCOURSE
Briefly noted
In Pursuit brings former U.S. presidents to Substack: In honor of America’s 250th anniversary, the bipartisan group More Perfect has launched a new essay series penned by American public figures and scholars. First up: shared his thoughts on another George W., praising Washington for his humility and wisdom in voluntarily stepping away from power—praise that some have read as a veiled rebuke to the current administration. has many more essays on the docket, including those by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Chief Justice John Roberts, former first ladies, and other leading historians and public figures.
The Kennedys are, yet again, having a moment: RFK Jr. is doing ads with Kid Rock, and Ryan Murphy’s new series about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy is on screens across the country. Meanwhile, Max Nussenbaum revisits the family’s starring role in America’s greatest art form: conspiracy theories.
Forget jazz, Broadway, comics, or hip-hop—in my book, conspiracy theories are the true Great American Art Form. This country was practically built for them: start with a deep-seated distrust of authority, stir in the Protestant idea of unmediated access to individual truth, and top with the First Amendment to let it all bloom in public.
You could even say the United States itself was founded on a conspiracy theory: the Founding Fathers wove a tale of powerful elites (King George) secretly plotting against ordinary people (the colonists) to advance a villainous scheme (subjugate them through oppressive taxation and military control). As with many conspiracy theories, there’s a kernel of truth to this story—but the reality is that what the founders interpreted (or spun) as a deliberate plot against them was really just a patchwork of clumsy, improvised policies from a disorganized British government.
If conspiracy theories are the Great American Art Form, there’s no question as to which is the canonical work of art—our Kind of Blue, West Side Story, Superman, and Illmatic all rolled into one: the theories surrounding the 1963 assassination of our third-best president named “John,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The belief that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone is the country’s most widely believed conspiracy theory—if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory—sustained across generations and deeply woven into American cultural memory through countless books, movies, and TV shows.
In fact, we even have the Kennedy assassination to thank for the term “conspiracy theory” entering widespread use in the first place: as revealed by a declassified 1967 document, the CIA encouraged the use of the then-obscure phrase as a pejorative term to discredit critics of the official narrative.
In his book Reclaiming History, Manson prosecutor and best-selling true crime author Vincent Bugliosi cites 44 different organizations and 214 specific individuals who have been accused of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy, including the Nazis, the Teamsters, the French OAS, Watergate plotter E. Howard Hunt, and Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician. Needless to say, this review will not manage to investigate all of them. The limits of time, space, and human sanity will sadly constrain me to just ten of the most well-known conspiracy theories, which I will evaluate both for plausibility and—far more importantly—for entertainment value.
Thomas was born around 1514, and he testified at the age of 70 in 1584 about some property issues. Over this time, he would have felt keenly the traffic explosion that characterised sixteenth-century England. The term itself took on association in Thomas’s youth with the ever-expanding commercial movement of goods, coming to stand in for all sorts of kinetic trade. Shakespeare even borrows it to refer to dramatic action itself, setting up “the two hours’ traffic of our stage” (Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, l.12). This was the age of traffic, both in the global and colonial expansion of merchandising and in our more modern sense of a glut of people and vehicles on the move. As the cynical philosopher Apemanthus in Timon of Athens puts it, chiding a merchant, “Traffic’s thy god”! (1.1.239).
All this had me wondering (as I often do) quite what it would be like for the average player or playgoer to commute in the 1580s or 1590s: how did Shakespeare make it from his home off Bishopsgate Street to the Theatre or Curtain in Shoreditch, or to Stratford-upon-Avon? How did individuals travel from Southwark south of the river up north or west? Could Shakespeare ride a horse? (Almost certainly, but how did this come about?)
Was horse-riding like learning to drive at 17? Did you borrow your parents’ nag for the odd journey? Who taught you to ride and was there a formalised “mode”? Plenty of clues exist for more elite riders. Horse-riding manuals and fashionable continental riding styles proliferated across this period. But what about, say, a journeyman shoemaker? A farm labourer? The son of a glover?
As our Shoreditch carter looked on at a playhouse being built next door, he saw (perhaps not coincidentally) his own work in the carrying trade change rapidly. The historian Joan Thirsk points out that the average horse rider on a road in 1500 was almost certainly a gentry figure; by 1600, it was most likely someone of lower middle social status or below going about their business. In just 100 years, horse-riding became democratised; it became “blue-collared.”
Much of this was driven by a growing economy and a rapidly growing population. (And a growing gentility about travel: why drive when you can be driven?) Horses were needed for all sorts of workaday functions (and also for war preparedness over a century of regular geopolitical instability... topical echoes abound). London felt expansion most sharply, more or less doubling in size (to 200,000 residents) in the twenty years from 1580 to 1600. These factors shaped the playing industry, too. There are no crowds without traffic.
Afra on why Chinese society—from art-house filmmakers to hundreds of millions of Spring Festival Gala viewers—is broadly optimistic about AI, while Americans remain conflicted, if not outright hostile.
It’s Chinese New Year, and my timeline is dominated by two names: Jia Zhangke and Unitree.
Jia Zhangke, the 55-year-old director whose melancholic, unhurried gaze at ordinary Chinese life has long mesmerized Western cinephiles—turns out to be, of all things, very AI-pilled. This is not an obvious move for a filmmaker whose greatest works are elegies for what Chinese modernization has destroyed. But during this holiday, he publicly praised Seedance, ByteDance’s AI video generation tool, and then released a short film made entirely with it. The film is a conversation between two selves: the plain, conservative Jia, thermos flask in hand, and a younger, healthier, optimistic “AI Jia,” debating the nature of filmmaking. In the final scene, the two Jia Zhangkes stand on the shore of the ice-choked Yellow River, a landscape he has returned to across decades of work in Shanxi province, watching fireworks climb into the sky. The palette is his own: subdued long shots, blue-gray hills receding into the distance. The dual selves wish each other a happy new year. The artist has metabolized the technology into something unmistakably his.
The other story is Unitree.
This is the second year the company’s robots have performed at the Spring Festival Gala, an event that functions as something like the Super Bowl fused with a state address, held annually. I consider the Gala an ultimate “mid-curve” aesthetic, a cultural common denominator. This year’s gala was aggressively AI-maxi. The Unitree G1 humanoid robots performed kung fu, parkour, street dance, and weapons routines with nunchucks and staffs—clips that ricocheted through Western AI communities within hours; many joked “we are cooked”. For a robotics company locked in brutal domestic competition, a Gala slot is a coronation. Meanwhile, the gala itself served as a showcase for Seedance at scale: the segment “Blessing of the Flower God” summoned twelve ancient poets, each reciting verse to honor a flower of their birth month, with AI-generated imagery blended near-seamlessly into the live stage. Later I learned that Seedance had contributed backgrounds, transitions, and generated sequences to at least three other performances. The whole production felt less like a variety show than a national stress test of ByteDance’s compute architecture.
When my partner and I were watching the Gala last night, he said it felt too tech-infused—it reminded him of The Jetsons, the 1960s cartoon with its relentless, cheerful obsession with a technological utopia. I think he’s underselling it. What I see in China right now is closer to Victorian Britain: a society exuding moral seriousness and deep belief in modernization and technological uplift.
What connects these stories is what they reveal about disposition. The Chinese society, from a world-renowned auteur to the hundreds of millions watching the Gala, is broadly, strikingly optimistic about AI. The reflexive existential dread so pervasive in Western discourse is largely absent.
I remember I spent some time browsing Unitree’s Xiaohongshu account to see how the company addresses the Chinese public, especially about anxiety about job displacement. Turns out, there’s nearly none. The feed is wall-to-wall spectacle: humanoid robots and robot dogs performing in extreme weather, doing impressive gymnastics. The comment sections, meanwhile, are a gathering place for the self-deprecating humor of Chinese internet users. Young people ask: When can I ride the robot dog to buy groceries? When will you release a robot nanny? (Since they aren’t getting married or having children.) And, inevitably: “We need robots for elderly care, it’s urgent, please Boss Wang (means Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree), speed up production so the robots can look after us in old age.”
Set this against the posture of Jia Zhangke’s rough American counterparts. On a recent Joe Rogan episode, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon discussed AI filmmaking with open contempt. AI output is “shitty,” Affleck argued, because it regresses to the mean by nature—and when AI becomes ubiquitous, “people will actually value real things made by real people even more.” Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association has accused Seedance of “unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale,” and Disney has alleged that ByteDance effectively packaged a pirated library of its characters into the tool. The resistance is creative, institutional, legal, and corporate—arriving from all directions at once.
Can we find an American Jia Zhangke? And if one existed, would they survive the anti-AI public siege? Where American AI optimism does exist, it is confined almost entirely to Silicon Valley—the OpenClaw frenzy, the collective Claude Code psychosis, and if you reach back a bit, the 3-year-old “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a self-enclosed declaration that humanity ought to ride the technological trajectory forward, though who “we” are and why we “ought to” remain thoroughly unexamined. What you see is a cultishly bullish tech elite producing manifestos that fail to persuade the rest of the country, set against a China where the public, the government, and the tech industry are broadly synchronized.
Why such different orientations? It would be easy—and cheesy—to credit propaganda alone, as when Palmer Luckey declared that China’s most powerful weapon is “their ability to control people’s minds through the media.” China’s online discourse is heavily constrained, and voices that sound anything like Western liberal humanism or degrowth are unlikely to survive moderation. But this explanation is too thin to hold. Decades of lived experience have taught Chinese society an empirical lesson: technology makes life tangibly better. I once wrote about my Shandong grandmother, now in her eighties, who once walked five hours to buy a clock so her children could get to school on time. Today her Xiaomi phone has given her an online shopping addiction, and delivery drones fly above her apartment. For many in China, industrialization compressed and bent time itself—and AI simply looks like the next turn of a wheel that has only ever spun forward.
From “a small collection of Soviet match boxes,” shared by Virginia Pili
FICTION
After the fall
Michael McSweeney’s short story imagines Boston after an invasion: a skeleton newspaper crew, a seed convoy through occupied Massachusetts, and three women with rifles blocking the road.
Eight months after the invasion failed, our newspaper had electricity again. Someone in the Army’s logistics division owed my editor-in-chief a favor and in exchange for some promised puff pieces they agreed to connect the building with our sole working printer to the fragile power grid. The printer was a tiny machine, a by-now ancient letterpress kept in a storeroom we affectionately dubbed the museum, but it fed two dozen one-page news prints an hour into our grateful, ink-stained hands. Before this we published the paper by hand, with whatever we had on hand. The shreds of cardboard boxes, old envelopes pilfered from Post Offices, or the blank pages of legal orders we found in a backroom at the municipal court. With power, we approached something more consistent, and now we could work at night. We estimated an official circulation of about 500, an amount we considered a small miracle, though we told ourselves we easily reached half of Boston. People devoured our editions at the ration stations set up in the rubble of the Common and the worksite at the Waterfront where soldiers and civilians were lifting one of the invaders’ landing craft out of the harbor. I even sketched the landing craft, a dark and wart-pocked spear-point, and got it printed in the morning edition.
Let it be said that humanity will never lose its curiosity. Nor will true journalists lose their desire to feed that curiosity, to create and deliver the news. The invasion had shattered the public internet, though a source once told me a few satellites up there still worked, and all the easy links between people were gone with it. Everyone, myself included, kept reaching for our pockets to connect, to feel the hive mind, to feel happy or angry or sad together. We intended to rebuild these connections through the stories people told us. Meteoric terrors descending from the sky. Family members dragged away. Lakes and rivers drained down to fish bones. I interviewed a woman who shot her husband rather than see him bleed to death after an invader sliced through the door he was barricading and severed his arm. I interviewed a fifteen-year-old boy who dragged his unconscious grandfather into a swamp and hid for a week, surviving on scalding rainwater and tree bark. We printed everything. I believed everything.
One day I got a tip about a shipment of seeds and fertilizer out to Western Massachusetts. I grew up in Fallston and felt the pull of home, so after two day-ration bribes I was allowed to ride in one of the trucks. We crawled out of Boston along Route 2 and as we slalomed around ruined cars I gazed out at the broken skyline, the Prudential Building cut in half at the heart. I wanted to see it rebuilt but I knew it wouldn’t or shouldn’t be. It will go back into Boston. Devoured and reused for something new, something more, because no place is ever the same after war.
The convoy picked up speed through Concord. Unbound by the stoplights thrown and tarnished in the trees. We drove past bombed-out Emerson Hospital where my uncle was once held against his will, screaming about enemies none of us could see. Burnt-out ambulances crowded the entrance ramp. I stole the manifest from the glove compartment: seeds for corn, tomatoes and asparagus. Germs to feed the thousands who remained.
Three women with rifles blocked the way through Athol. The trucks stopped and for a while there was no movement. One of the women fired a flare and took a few steps forward. The driver of the first truck got out and approached her. I leaned out the window and watched the woman’s face grow proud and agitated as she spoke. The driver took his baseball cap off and wiped the sweat from his bald head. He turned, saw me watching, threw an angry look and jerked his head. I sat back in my seat and scribbled my surroundings: an exit ramp a hundred yards away, yellow grass and yellow trees, the speck of a hawk in the cloudy sky. Finally the driver walked back and the second driver joined him. I heard the cargo door open, hang and slam. Then the first driver walked back around, two crates stacked in his arms. The second driver climbed back beside me. They need some help, he told me. Looks like a robbery, I told him. They need some help, he repeated, and then he said, They need help and they’re taking it.
The writer has started I’m Glad You’re Here, a Substack where he reflects “on the journey through cPTSD, the discovery of Autism, the pursuit of peace.”
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Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is finally out, so let’s get into it. To discuss, we invited film, culture, and literary critics , , and to jump into a Google doc. moderated the conversation, as our panelists dove into the questions plaguing this adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel: Are Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi believable as Cathy and Heathcliff? Did the movie need that opening scene? And what’s the deal with the eggs?
Readers beware: spoilers ahead.
Fennell opens Wuthering Heights with a man being hanged while visibly aroused, and the crowd descends into something orgiastic. Provocation or statement of intent?
Elissa Suh: I read that, at some point, this scene had the condemned [man] ejaculating mid-execution. That certainly would’ve been saying something. Without that bit, I thought the opening was missing something. Sex + Death is such a rich subtheme in the source text and in Gothic literature, but it’s all rather superficial in the film.
Radhika Jones: I thought about it mostly in terms of the crowd’s reaction, and the sense we get of collective barbarism. In the novel, Heathcliff tends to be the one referred to as “savage.” For me, the takeaway of the opening scene is that, actually, everybody implicated in this scene is savage. Whether that’s a fair indictment is another question, but it did level the playing field.
Mina Le: Interesting. Do you feel, then, that Heathcliff’s position in the story is compromised?
Radhika Jones: I did find it hard to parse how he’s supposed to function in the family onscreen. Cathy names him as a brother. He’s loyal to her. Yes, Earnshaw calls him a servant, but it all felt a little muddled, because he doesn’t really seem all that different from them.
Elissa Suh: I caught the barbarism of the crowd in the opening, but that idea didn’t seem to carry through to the rest of the film—at all!—to me.
Radhika Jones: Yes, I agree! Which was a pity.
Eliza Brooke: Agreed that the barbarism of the hanging scene should have bled into the rest of the film. I also wish there had been more Charli xcx needle drops throughout! While it feels like Emerald Fennell was being a bit of an edgelord with the opening sequence, I thought the use of Charli’s pop soundtrack elevated it. It really ratcheted up the feeling of grinding dread amid all that sex and death. Grinding dread: very Wuthering Heights!
Mina Le: Also, they don’t reference the hanging bit ever again … other than to toy with Catherine thinking that Heathcliff has come back.
Radhika Jones: The other striking thing about it to me was just how many people were there, and this is a novel with barely any named characters. But we cut from there to Cathy and Nelly running across the moors, and then the prevailing mood is emptiness. So it’s a contrast that doesn’t really go anywhere, unfortunately.
The cellophane gown, the unrestrained courtship rituals—did the anachronisms feel like they were in service of something, or more like aesthetic moodboarding?
Eliza Brooke: As far as the costuming and production design is concerned, I didn’t mind the anachronistic flourishes until the iridescent cellophane gown showed up after Cathy’s marriage to Edgar Linton (and a parade of similarly anachronistic fabrics followed). It was a jarring visual transition that seemed like it should indicate a shift in the narrative, but ultimately, I wasn’t sure what point Fennell was trying to make. Was she saying something about the Lintons and their wealth? Their innate ridiculousness? Their detachment from the wildness that surrounds their home? It felt a bit like flashy costuming for flashy costuming’s sake. And I say that as someone who loves a big look!
Mina Le: Yeah, the cellophane stood out quite a lot. But I wish there were fewer costumes overall. They were beautiful, but Margot went through what felt like 40 in an hour, and it was difficult for any of them to make an impact.
Elissa Suh: Honestly, the costumes and set design—and the hair, don’t forget the hair!—were the most (only) rewarding parts of the film for me. I clung to them. Each one outdid the next. My mind needed something to focus on, and so I actually appreciated the parade. I wonder what the final gown count was.
Radhika Jones: For me, the parade of dresses was a laugh-out-loud moment, sort of cathartic. Honestly, from the moment the character of Isabella was introduced, I felt like there was another parallel film happening, which was a little weirder (high bar, but still!) and more surreal. It wasn’t consistent, though, which made it hard to follow.
Eliza Brooke: I completely agree that Isabella was in a different film—and one that I would really like to watch! I thought Alison Oliver was an absolute delight and a high point of the movie. Obsessed with her weird dolls, her baby voice, and, frankly, her sexual self-knowledge.
Still of Alison Oliver as Isabella, shared by Rose Gallagher
Radhika Jones: Yes, this! I kept thinking: what parallel-universe movie is she performing this role in, because I’d like to see that! Fennell is good with that lighter touch. Isabella’s Romeo and Juliet monologue was pitch-perfect. And it did more to explain her character than any amount of ribbons (although the ribbons were fun).
Mina Le: I think maybe Fennell was trying to replicate Josh O’Connor and Tanya Reynolds’s characters in Emma with Isabella—that sort of weird and off-kilter side character. But it didn’t make sense for this particular movie … and Isabella has quite a lot of substance in the book, too, that she lost here.
Eliza Brooke: Isabella was giving Emma (2020) for suuure!
Mina Le: I can definitely see the humor in the ostentatiousness. Maybe my issue was that the film didn’t seem to take itself seriously. Tonally, I was getting whiplash. I mean, this story is pretty tragic, but the confectionery production design is very reminiscent of ’60s-’70s medieval-revival love stories.
Elissa Suh: It’s hard for me to determine whether the costuming really achieved anything meaningful, because the film overall is muddled and caught between wanting to be subversive while also sticking to traditional conventions of romance—and then failing to really deliver on either.
Did Robbie and Elordi actually become Cathy and Heathcliff for you? Was their chemistry convincing?
Mina Le: Though I think that Robbie and Elordi are great and talented actors, the casting inaccuracy really pulled me out of it. I couldn’t believe them in these roles, unfortunately. Especially when the actors who played Edgar and Isabella more so represented who Heathcliff and Cathy were in my mind, so I kept getting distracted by that loss whenever they came onscreen.
Elissa Suh: Margot was not always credible to me, even though she tries. She seems a bit too old—no ageism—to play someone going through their first love. I mean, isn’t part of the appeal of Margot Robbie as an actor the way she seems like she was just born a mature woman? Like, this is why we were all in collective shock in 2013 when we found out she was only 20-something years old and playing Leo’s wife in TheWolf of Wall Street.
I felt like sometimes Cathy—or Robbie as Cathy—was too coy or “modern” in giving a winking kind of performance, but then other times not. Going back to what Mina said earlier, this is definitely part of the tonal whiplash that undermines the film.
Eliza Brooke: I agree that Margot Robbie doesn’t read as someone who would spy a pair of people getting it on and be shocked by that. I struggled to see either of them as the book’s Cathy and Heathcliff simply because … those characters are not Cathy and Heathcliff! [Elordi’s] Heathcliff in particular bears no resemblance to the vindictive, abusive character in the book. In the movie, he’s noble and loyal as a child, and he’s passionate and devoted as a grown man. People keep calling him a “brute,” and Cathy claims he has a “wicked temper,” but he’s basically a decent guy. I think Fennell has to have it that way in order for him to remain a blameless, gorgeous heartthrob—and in order for Cathy to deserve him, she also has to be less of an asshole than she is in the book.
Radhika Jones: Exactly. Heathcliff is truly abusive in the book, as much as we might like to forget it.
Mina Le: In the film, Heathcliff kept referring to himself as “cruel” and “savage”—that was just before the Isabella-in-chains scene, too—but besides his self-declarations, there really were no traces of that? He’s totally a sweetie.
Eliza Brooke: Yes! On the BDSM bit—when he marries Isabella in the book, he’s unbelievably cruel to her, and she’s utterly miserable for it. In the movie, his “cruelty” translates to giving her what she wants, sexually speaking. Including chaining her up like a dog.
Mina Le: Another way that Fennell unfortunately strays from the meaning of the novel for the purpose of sex and shock value.
Radhika Jones: I couldn’t think of them as Cathy and Heathcliff. I’m not a reader who visualizes characters, so it wasn’t like they contrasted with specific actors I would have wanted. But the relationship diverges so much from the text that I just thought of them as playing other roles. Elordi in particular seemed like a very gentle Heathcliff. It’s a gentleness that worked so well as the creature in Frankenstein, but here it seemed at odds with the story.
Mina Le: Even his pivot to “sadism” in the second half of the film felt off to me. It didn’t seem aligned with how he developed Heathcliff up to that point. I get that there’s a time jump, but something about it was still unsatisfying to me.
I also think Elordi’s Heathcliff is Byronic-hero coded, which is sort of the antithesis of who the character is supposed to be. Wuthering Heights is supposed to be an inversion of the romances of the time.
Elissa Suh: I also want to say that any potential lack of chemistry is due to the writing and the way the movie unfolds. Elordi and Robbie are talented, but for me, the problem starts at the beginning with the child actors (no shade to Owen Cooper and Charlotte Mellington, who are just doing their job). The scenes of earlier life were pretty rote, doing the heavy lifting to ground the romance. We know Cathy and Heathcliff are going to fall in love because we understand the conventions of romance, even if we have never read Brontë. It was like Emerald was operating mechanically with the scenes of their childhood, telling rather than showing us how to feel. This dully-formed character investment carries through to the end of the film for me, so anything between Cathy and Heathcliff later on could only be believed to a certain extent.
Radhika Jones: The scene when I most believed in all of it was Cathy’s declaration to Nelly that she would marry Linton because she thought it might help raise Heathcliff up. I believed in that moment that she cared about Heathcliff. It was less about the chemistry between the two of them onscreen together, and more about her own conception of how love might direct her life.
Eliza Brooke: Speaking of Nelly … should we talk about how that character changed? I found it fascinating that, by making Heathcliff and Cathy into star-crossed lovers who aren’t all that terrible, Fennell had to turn someone else into the story’s villain. And Nelly was that guy.
Radhika Jones: I went back to the book to look at that scene specifically, in her narration of it to Lockwood (in the frame story that’s not in the film). And Nelly does see Heathcliff outside, and she does keep that from Cathy. But in the book, she’s not in a position to control events the way she does in the film, especially at the end. And she’s not set up with a resentful backstory (it’s mentioned early in the film that she’s a bastard child, right? So she’s not just a servant, she’s also an outcast). In the book, she meddles, but she’s not vindictive—or at least, if she is, it’s all mixed up in her unreliable narration and gives the reader something productive to consider.
Eliza Brooke: Exactly. In the book, when Nelly fails to intervene after Heathcliff overhears Cathy saying that marrying him would “degrade her” (and runs off before her confession of love), it doesn’t seem like she’s trying to punish them. She’s more of a neutral third-party observer. In the movie version, Nelly acts with much more intent.
Elissa Suh: A person of color who is the help/(hand)maid. How revolutionary. What a disservice to Hong Chau.
Eliza Brooke: Yep!
Mina Le: Ironically, I felt that Edgar’s casting (a brown man to represent this character who’s extremely noble) really took away from the important class/racial commentary present in the book (because Elordi’s Heathcliff is white). And in normal circumstances, I would be fine with Hong Chau’s casting (she also did amazing as Nelly), but considering this was totally “colorblind,” it felt like subliminal biases were present. Especially because neither Edgar nor Nelly gets character development that I felt was substantive enough.
Eliza Brooke: I agree with this. When the two actors of color are playing the villain and the cuck, it reads as subliminal bias.
Radhika Jones: Hong Chau was so good, I almost wished she had more power. She was incredibly convincing. She reminded me visually of the handmaids in Vermeer paintings, who ferry letters back and forth surreptitiously between lovers. That moment when the camera pulls back and you see all the black and white tile and she’s there with Cathy. I wished there were more quiet moments like that, where, as a viewer, you could sit with the dynamics between two characters and really ponder them. So I was extra-annoyed when her character became more of a cartoon gatekeeper and villain at the end.
I was surprised by how tame the actual sex was in this, compared to Saltburn. Maybe that says something about me? Did the eroticism here live up to anyone’s expectations based on the marketing?
Mina Le: So what did y’all think of all those eggs?
Radhika Jones: Is it a sign of the times (their times? our times?) that I immediately thought, what a waste of eggs! Eggs are expensive!
Eliza Brooke: I was feeling bad about the lack of washing machines, personally.
Mina Le: You know Nelly was pissed.
Elissa Suh: There’s a certain level of salaciousness one has come to expect from an Emerald Fennell movie, and that is woefully absent here.
Mina Le: I literally thought Heathcliff was going to hump Cathy’s corpse at the end of the film because of all she put me through with Saltburn, and weirdly? Disappointed that nothing happened.
Elissa Suh: I was waiting for that too! Part of me wonders if Emerald had entertained that thought and was stopped by the studio?
Eliza Brooke: Yes! Maybe she felt like she couldn’t have two grave-humping scenes in back-to-back movies? (Relatedly, I was shocked, upon recent re-read, to realize that nobody actually humps a corpse in the book. I could have sworn that happened.)
Elissa Suh: And it would have been more earned here, too.
Radhika Jones: I had really been hoping Fennell would film a scene that’s in the book in which Heathcliff has Cathy’s coffin dug up and opened, 13 years after her death. He checks her out, notes that she hasn’t started decomposing yet and still looks great, then convinces the sexton to leave a side of her coffin open so he can eventually be buried next to her, with a side of his coffin open, so their bodies can merge for eternity.
Eliza Brooke: That would have been a stronger ending. Missed opportunity!
Elissa Suh: Close enough to corpse-humping for me.
Mina Le: Yeah, and honestly, would’ve done more to show how messed-up their relationship actually was. I think flashing back to them as children made it feel too “happily ever after” and overly sentimental, considering how much destruction they caused.
Radhika Jones: I love that Brontë goes there. Honestly, when the source text is so extreme, it doesn’t leave much room to maneuver. To Fennell’s credit, a lot of the language that seems over-the-top comes from the novel. But the onscreen sex was, in my opinion, not as credible in the parameters she set. In the fake-parallel-Isabella movie that we’re writing together, yes!
Elissa Suh: In general, the sex scenes were few and far between, and the ones we did see seemed like pure clickbait, engineered for Instagram. The BDSM lite—if you can even call it that—with Isabella? That’s it? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this movie could’ve benefited from the edgelord tendencies of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman.
Eliza Brooke: Absolutely. If you’re going to show us two freaks in love … show us two freaks in love.
Mina Le: I wasn’t even sure how much of the BDSM was actually happening between Heath and Isabella, versus overdramatized in her letters to stoke Cathy’s jealousy. Even when Isabella’s yapping with her collar, it’s with the context that Cathy is supposed to stop by.
Elissa Suh: True. It’s all just a show. The peak of provocation from this movie, it seems, was Elordi’s tongue wagging in people’s ears.
Fennell skips the second half of the novel, which dives into the trauma Heathcliff and Cathy’s love inflicts on their offspring. Do you think it’s the right choice to focus on the love story versus the full, intergenerational tragedy of the book? Does the audience lose anything significant?
Eliza Brooke: We definitely lose something for it! I get why filmmakers avoid the portion of the book that takes place after Cathy’s death, especially when that would mean benching your biggest star. However: what’s so incredible about the book is how Brontë weaves a story about an inescapable cycle of familial abuse that makes monsters out of each progressive generation (until it doesn’t!). I wish that spirit had broken through in this movie, just because it’s so well done in the book. But that wasn’t the love story Fennell wanted to tell.
Mina Le: Yes, on that last point, I think if these adaptations that focus on the first half are still able to weave in the themes of the book and stay true to the heart of it, I don’t mind them axing off the time jumps and Cathy II and Linton Heathcliff (the fact that they all have the same names is insane, thanks, Ms. Brontë), because I understand it can be more difficult to structure for film.
Radhika Jones: It’s understandable that any filmmaker would do it, but the revenge part of the novel only comes to some sort of resolution at the end. So in this case, with the focus on the first half, you get Heathcliff trying to exact revenge, but it doesn’t really pay off. In the novel, he goes after Edgar Linton, long after Cathy is dead, to get his hands on the property. That has huge implications in terms of his obsession with gaining power over the people who scorned him. Here, his revenge motivation is more muddled. He’s mad at Cathy for making a mistake. That doesn’t seem like enough to drive his bad behavior.
Elissa Suh: The motivation was indeed thin to me, who hasn’t read the Brontë. So if you’re not going to go into the depths of character and theme, then you should at least go all out with the sex and kink or what-have-you. Literally anything.
Mina Le: Honestly, in this version I think they downplayed Heathcliff’s childhood abuse quite a lot, so it’s probably better that Fennell didn’t try to tackle the second half. It wouldn’t feel realistic for this Heathcliff to hold so many grudges.
Eliza Brooke: 100%! This version of Heathcliff would not abuse his own son like that.
Elissa Suh: Not having read the book, I can’t speak to specifics, but I think it’s the filmmaker’s right to focus on what they want; but they should have a good reason for doing it. All said and done, this did not amount to much beyond your typical romance with Gothic undertones—I don’t think it’s particularly memorable, and from what you’ve all said, a much more interesting story was originally there. You are all really making me want to read the book.
Radhika Jones: Heathcliff is deeply unhinged in the book (some of it justified, some not), such that if you made a literal BBC-style miniseries, à la 1994 Pride and Prejudice, people would be like, “This is insane, it couldn’t possibly have been written in 1847.”
Elissa Suh: This is the kind of TV we desperately need.
Radhika Jones: Right? Clearly there’s an audience for it!
Wait, there is a BBC miniseries from 2009! OK, I know what my next watch is.
Elissa Suh: Just put that on HBO instead of BBC, and voilà.
Mina Le: Maybe the bright side of this adaptation is that it will spur more interest in Wuthering Heights in general, so we can get the adaptation we want.
Radhika Jones: Now I’m wondering if there’s a Clueless-type adaptation that is fully contemporary but gets the themes and story contours exactly right.
Eliza Brooke: Oh, that’s a great question and idea. The tough thing about adapting Wuthering Heights in a way that’s true to the story is that it will be extremely grim. But I think that contemporary viewers have enough of an appetite for misery that it would work out fine.
Radhika Jones: Let’s pitch it! I think part of the fun of a closer adaptation would be casting the two generations.
Fennell has said she wanted to make the Wuthering Heights she imagined when she first read the book at 14. Is that a legitimate approach to adaptation—prioritizing the feeling a book gave you over what the book actually says? Should Fennell have just made an original film instead?
Elissa Suh: That’s an approach for sure, but maybe not a good one. If that was her M.O., then she succeeded—but it still doesn’t make it a good movie. Also, sidenote: I think that adapting the feeling or sensibility of a book (albeit not rooted in nostalgia) and translating that mood to the screen is a legitimate approach. There’s a bit of film theory on that, where André Bazin says, “literal translations are not the faithful ones.”
Radhika Jones: I wrote in my opening book club piece about Wuthering Heights that increasingly I think it’s a middle-aged book. We meet Heathcliff in the novel when he’s around 38. He’s seen a lot, he’s endured and occasioned a lot of tragic events. He’s a hollow man.
So on the one hand, I think Fennell captures the book you read when you’re 14 (or anyway, the book she read), where all you notice is this doomed, passionate connection between two young people. But the book itself is not merely about that. That said, filmmakers absolutely get to make the films they want. And you can tell in the script that the language of Wuthering Heights, that is part of that doomed love story, means a lot to her.
Mina Le: I think there is a way to adapt something based on how you read it as a child, but that has to somehow be acknowledged and present in the way you tell the story. Not that this is an Oscar-winning idea, but I feel like if it were framed as a 14-year-old girl reading the book, and it went in and out of the story, then that could be a way to show this very specific interpretation that is also sort of wrong. Rob Reiner did this with ThePrincess Bride (though I haven’t read the book, so maybe there is book-reading-ception in the book). Or with Stand by Me, when the main character is later depicted writing his memoir at his desk.
Eliza Brooke: Oh, I like that idea. And it would be a little nod to the framing device in the book, with Nelly narrating the story to Heathcliff’s new tenant.
If I were adapting the book that I remember reading in high school, there would be 100% more grave-fucking.
Elissa Suh: Emily Brontë would’ve wanted it that way.
Eliza Brooke: I feel like the story that Fennell actually wanted to tell was Romeo and Juliet? As discussed above, there’s a reference to the play right there in the script. Or rather, maybe Fennell wanted to make a version of Romeo and Juliet in the sweeping atmosphere of Wuthering Heights.
Radhika Jones: I think this is why Isabella’s Romeo and Juliet moment was so satisfying to me. It was an addition to the story and dialogue that felt thematically valuable, not gratuitous.
Elissa Suh: The Baz Luhrmann one? That one has a great sense of play, which is missing here. I think there’s a world where she could’ve managed that in Wuthering Heights (I mean, the quotations!) despite the dark material.
Eliza Brooke: Speaking of Baz, he and Fennell share a lot of DNA in terms of their over-the-top aesthetics (and willingness to let the aesthetics do the heavy lifting for them). I wonder how much of an inspiration he is for her.
Mina Le: Okay, guys—I think we’re done!
Radhika Jones: Most fun in a Google doc ever?
Elissa Suh: This was so fun! Hope to see you all outside of a Google doc too, one day.
Mina Le: Yes—we need to get together to pitch our Wuthering Heights adaptation series to HBO.
Elissa Suh: Substack Productions!
More on the participants:
is a culture writer and film critic whose work has appeared in Vogue, Eater, New York Magazine, and MUBI. Her Substack, Moviepudding, pairs reviews of films and food.
is a writer, editor, and book critic. The former editor in chief of Vanity Fair, she is currently running a book club on her Substack. They’re currently reading Wuthering Heights, naturally.
is a culture, entertainment, and fashion journalist. Her Substack features interviews alongside essays on film and fashion.
is a writer, actress, and video essayist. Her Substack, , analyzes fashion, film, and internet culture.
It’s Valentine’s Day and everyone’s making questionable decisions—about love, about peptides, about couches, and about eating a mystery gummy and then wandering into the woods.
Is AI coming for our jobs? redux: An AI startup founder’s viral essay on X sparked the latest round of discussions on whether AI is coming for white-collar work. talks through “The Doomsday Scenario for AI and Jobs,” while pushed back on the idea that AI is soon to replace humans—largely due to the bottlenecks that humans themselves present.
DESIRES
Consumerism vs. spiritualism
A weed-induced crisis in the woods leads to a spiritual reckoning with what we actually want.
Years ago, I got really into CBD oil. It was the kind you squirt directly into your mouth like a horse supplement. I don’t remember the brand, because I didn’t buy it for myself. Someone at work handed it to me one day and said they couldn’t stand the minty taste. “Don’t you love mint? Want to give it a try?” I thought it was sweet at the time. I now realize it was also their way of saying, “You look pretty tired.”
But I didn’t get mad, because it worked! I slept. I relaxed. I became briefly evangelical and annoying about CBD in a way that now warrants a sincere apology.
When I ran out of that liquid gold, I bought some gummies. I popped what I thought was a CBD gummy, and an hour later I felt afraid of heights while just looking out the window. My heart was racing and I was convinced I was having a heart attack.
So I checked the packaging: THC. Actual weed.
The important context here is that I hadn’t done drugs in a very long time. High school me was a rebel who loved the devil’s herb, but something in my adult nervous system rejected it entirely. It didn’t make me feel relaxed. It made an already overly introspective person feel like I went forty matryoshka dolls deep into my skull and discovered something cosmically wrong.
I wasn’t happy about being high. After a lot of heavy breathing, I decided the only solution was to walk aimlessly into the woods like a sick animal preparing for death. Twenty minutes later, I was staring at mossy rocks imagining what photo would end up on my missing persons report.
This was extremely dramatic considering I was about 0.02 miles from a Dunkin’ Donuts, and if my brain wasn’t operating at 400% fear capacity I probably could’ve heard traffic nearby.
But instead of stumbling to Dunkin’, I sat down and opened a meditation book on my phone (a very on-brand choice for someone having a weed-induced crisis in the woods).
The meditation was meant for moments when you feel inadequate, fearful, or closed off. I was told that instead of trying to fix myself or make the feeling disappear, I should imagine giving away the most pleasing and beautiful gifts I could think of—they could even be parts of myself that I loved. Not exactly the most calming advice for someone freaking out and lost in the woods.
But I closed my eyes. I started thinking about everything I had personally wanted in the last 48 hours. I was deep in heated negotiations over the price of a cardigan on Poshmark. There was a lamp I’d been debating buying.
And then I read what these Buddhists were offering and realized… they were not messing around. While I’m haggling over resale listings, they’re offering jeweled mountains, perfumed oils, incense clouds, celestial bathing chambers, golden lotus lamps. Entire beautiful and peaceful universes imagined just to be given away, and I’m stuck on a button-down shirt.
“A bathing chamber excellently fragrant,
With floors of crystal, radiant and clear,
With graceful pillars shimmering with gems,
All hung about with gleaming canopies of pearls…”
The imagery went on and on in its abundance. If I wasn’t high, I probably would’ve taken it as a sign to level up my material desires. Missoni towels. A face-sculpting massage. A new perfume. But when I imagined offering those things to someone I actually loved—or offering them to the world—they suddenly felt small.
We had a symposium on Christmas Eve. Technically it was Christmas Day. We’d all had dinner and then gone to Midnight Mass and then gone to a piano bar we all knew in Midtown East. The people who go to a piano bar at two in the morning on Christmas are as riotously lonely as you’d expect. A man in a fur coat held the door for us. The pianist sang “Jesus Freaks” and “Tradition.” We ordered garlic bread and got onto the subject of love.
One of us made the case that “falling in love” was not only unnecessary, when it came to one’s life partner, but actively undesirable. This was just controversial enough to keep us arguing past last call.
I took the side of the romantics. Whether this was out of habit or principle or stubbornness, I’m not sure. If there was ever a year for one to decry romantic impetuousness it is the year of one’s divorce, but I’ve never dropped a cause for being lost.
We all weighed in. We came to no conclusions. Some of us saw each other eighteen hours later for Chinese food and kept debating, even though the person who’d tossed the gauntlet was no longer there, and then I spent a month trying to work out what I thought.
We were drunk, and didn’t define our terms, and probably all enjoyed playing into our expected roles more than we enjoyed narrowing down the precise limitations of our disagreement, but the rough contours of the proposition, edited in the service of an interesting essay, are these:
Falling in love, understood as an erotic vulnerability, or a stronger form of infatuation (but distinguished, let’s say, from sexual attraction), is a bad idea because:
a) it makes you crazy;
b) it makes you make ill-advised decisions about who to marry, and
c) is likely to be more a result of your own projections and idealizations about the other person, downstream of your own projections and idealizations about yourself, and the kind of relationship a person like you should be in, and the fantasy of the other person playing that role, than it is about the kind of actual mutuality and engagement with true otherness that lasting, real, agapic love requires.
Points granted. C) is, I think, the most compelling.
You should probably do it anyway.
No doubt we shouldn’t marry most people we fall in love with. But even sober, even granting the necessity for social order and the begetting of children, even granting that “falling in love” is primarily about the interplay of illusions and not whole human beings, I still think it’s no less worth doing than any other form of artistic creation.
It’s only by falling in love that we learn to be ourselves in the first place. I can’t think of a more foundational requirement, for a partner, than the person with whom you act out the illusion of who you think you are.
I have been in love a handful of times in my life. Fewer, maybe, than you’d think if you knew me. With the benefit of hindsight I’ve imagined I was in love more times than I actually was, which is to say that I experienced a)-c), and made myself insufferable in the process. But the distinction between “intense physical attraction” and “idiotic infatuation” and “truly falling in love” can be made in hindsight only. Falling in love is less about how you feel (or make your exasperated friends feel) in the moment than about who you become afterwards.
The times in my life I have actually been in love, by the definition I’m proposing here, I have become somebody else. However the fantasy started, whenever the pas des deux began, whatever pattern of call-and-response led me to imagine that life as the counterpart to, say, a cast-mate in a high school Shakespeare play or an antiquarian book dealer over a decade my senior was the apotheosis of my entire narrative identity, what I ended up left with, after it was all over, was the recognition that my entire narrative identity was completely wrong. Each imagined endpoint—this settles the story of who I am—turned out to be a place where my sense of self began.
If anything, falling in love signifies, to me, those relationships in which I have so completely absorbed into myself the person I fell in love with, that I can only say that after them I became someone else, and that the someone else in question more closely resembled the person with whom I was in love than the person I fancied myself to be. But the illusion of someone else as the answer—always, like a witch’s prophecy, right, just never in the way I expected—was what snared me. It was what made me willing—the way Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah makes me willing; the way Four Quartets makes me willing; the way an all-night dance party makes me willing—to gamble on a version of myself, and lose. The experience of falling in love for me has always been the experience of good art. Something you recognize snares you; something you don’t keeps you there.
On a very different side of the internet from Laura Reilly’s High Touch, a similar conversation about the lengths we’ll go to for our looks is taking place: this week, 20-year-old looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular broke through to mainstream attention. Sean Monahan reports on the history of this mogging, jestergooning cohort.
Looksmaxxing isn’t so new. Neither is the term mogging that’s risen to prominence with it. Both are downstream of the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) subculture that has been receiving media coverage since the Rolling Stone contributing editor Neil Strauss wrote a New York Times bestseller on the subject in 2005: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.
Looksmaxxing and mogging (or being the Alpha Male Of the Group) were both born in the cauldron of PUA forums roughly a decade ago. I first came in contact with the terms via Doomscroll’s Josh Citarella. (He also introduced me to the concept of mewing—a tongue posture technique used to align the face and reshape the jawline.)
But a decade ago, moral panic was directed at the rise of fillers, Botox, and other injectables among young women, inspired by influencer culture, especially the Kardashian-Jenner clan. I distinctly remember being at a party where a twentysomething Angeleno was bragging to anyone who would listen that Kim Kardashian had been copying her face.
Today, this has become so common as to be passé. We chortle at Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s “MAGA face.” Plastic surgeons on TikTok play guess-the-age-of-this-face, as 20-year-old girls now have the faces of 35-year-olds.
Looksmaxxing, like Instagram face before it, is powered by the popularity of a new class of drugs: peptides. Introduced to the American public under the banner of GLP-1s—weight-loss drugs like Ozempic (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide)—a whole class of unregulated grey-market “Chinese peptides” address all manner of ailments and hedonistic desires. There are peptides for energy and peptides for hair loss. There are peptides for collagen production and peptides for muscle growth.
At cocktail bars, people in Los Angeles casually recommend their peptide dealers, if only as an opportunity to brag about the celebrities their dealer services.
There may be risks. Clavicular may report being infertile at 20. But the body has replaced the garment as the fixation of fashion. Or as Rick Owens put it:
“Working out is modern couture. No outfit is going to make you look or feel as good as having a fit body. Buy less clothing and go to the gym instead.”
Looksmaxxing is the avant-garde of style inasmuch as style is the art of self-presentation and appearance.
“It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual perversion, rampant classism”
Miriam’s tale of falling for a school-aged toff feels like a love story from a different era, complete with wooing by Chaucer comparisons and Gertrude Stein poems.
Philip was one of a handful of men left on earth who still played court tennis. Last I heard from him, he was trying to gain membership to the Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, which to this day prohibits women. One of his friends, who had slept with over fifty sorority girls, had already gotten him into the New York Athletic Club. My own experience of tennis began and ended in India, where the boys grew so tired of coaching me, I had to run laps around the dirt court.
We met through the university’s literary society, which was the sort of institution you’d describe if you needed to evoke trivial decline, the way one complains about an art film where everyone is ugly. The library was named after William Henry Harrison, the only American president who died after only forty days in office. At his inauguration, he refused to heed the warnings of the cold; he was overzealous and spoke too long. In the secret society offices there were scale models of warships, Latin tomes, and, inexplicably, a naked portrait of Ayn Rand. A taxidermy enthusiast once set a lobster loose in the halls, leaving us with a mysterious stench and the game of finding its carcass. The building was named after his great-uncle, who died during the First World War. During its remodeling, Philip would regularly inquire after his ancestor’s missing portrait, and the fact that it was eventually mounted near the gender-neutral bathroom sent him into paroxysms of anguish.
I was in attendance when the society was deliberating whether to admit him; I can’t recall whether I voted yea or nay. I remember resolving to stay away from him; men that handsome could never amount to any good. He wore loafers without socks and crossed his legs so that the hem of his Bon Marché trousers settled high above the ankle. Typical upper-class British thrift ensured his haircuts were always too severe.
Philip soon found I was the only person at Penn charmed by his knowledge of Napoleon and the Risorgimento. He’d read thirty books on Napoleon, who was great, I was told, because he was both the law’s architect and its exception. That summer we visited Les Invalides twice, both times wearing paper bicornes. On our first date, I read him Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso”—
‘If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon.’ ...
It was just as well that, upon first reading, the poem sounds like nonsense—I do not think we were paying attention to the words.
When I visited my aunt in Manhattan, she told me to stay far away from him. She’d met plenty such men at Cambridge and then Oxford. It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual perversion, rampant classism. I tried to break up with him, but folded when he started to cry. He told me he loved me eleven days after our first meeting, which marked the end of any resistance on my part.
At the beginning, he was one of Chaucer’s verray parfit gentil knyghts; he always knew what to say. Instead of a couch, I had two sofa chairs bought for $25 each at the Goodwill; he swooped in graciously and said all it meant was that I was ‘a dynamic woman of discourse’ and ‘not someone who wastes her time lounging.’ A Lawrence of Arabia type, he wore a keffiyeh in Jordan when he went to teach English at a refugee camp on his gap year, and spent all day playing cricket with boys on the street when his family visited India for a wedding. Wooed as I was by his Conservative Party membership card and talk of “polemical sweet nothings,” he became my Lawrence of Philadelphia, pointing out timeless beauty amidst urban decay, such as the scalloped Ghibelline crenelations of Penn’s football field, which cast curling shadows over all the future Wall Street tycoons.
is here. In the editors’ first post, aptly titled “I Read It for the Articles,” they revisit the magazine’s illustrious literary history. They’ll be continuing that legacy here, with a selection from their archives along with “new fiction and nonfiction alike from some of our favorite established and up-and-coming writers today.”
, “a new type of journalism from the Pacific Northwest,” has joined Substack. It may be a new magazine, but the writers “make journalism the old way: through public records requests, long interviews, source-building, institutional knowledge, archival research and picking up the damn phone.”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
This week, we’re looking at scientific breakthroughs, the women who dream of chickens, and Cairo’s anarchic streets.
THE DISCOURSE
Briefly noted
The Washington Post is gutted: After weeks of rumors, the Washington Post laid off over a third of its workforce this week. Every corner of the newsroom was affected, but international, sports, and books coverage were among the most severely impacted. It’s a dark day for journalism, but there is one silver lining: , , , and have all started Substacks since the layoffs.
The social network that’s (intentionally) full of bots: “AI agents have been gathering online by the thousands over the past week, debating their existence, attempting to date each other, building their own religion, concocting crypto schemes, and spewing gibberish,” writes. This is all happening on Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network specifically for AI agents. For some, the resulting forums are eerie glimpses at self-realized artificial intelligence; for others, including , they’re an example of “what you’d expect to see if you told an LLM to write a post about being an LLM, on a forum for LLMs.” As summarizes, it’s really in the eye of the beholder: “As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between ‘AIs imitating a social network’ and ‘AIs actually having a social network’ in the most confusing way possible—a perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want.”
Big week for sports fans: With the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl kicking off this weekend, the sports fan’s cup runneth over. of Drinks with Broads opened up their Olympics coverage with a discussion of one of the weirder Olympics injection scandals in recent years. Meanwhile, dives into the bananas list of demands the NFL places on stadiums hoping to host the Super Bowl.
SCIENCE
A century of knowledge
We often hear about the technological innovations those born at the beginning of the 20th century lived through. In this post, Hilarius Bookbinder considers the intellectual breakthroughs of the same time period.
I think a lot of the epistemological troubles of modernity (fake news, bad echo chambers, conspiracy theories, collapse in expert trust) can be explained by the fact that as a species we have learned so much over such a short span of time that our collective knowledge is like a thin crust of ice on the deep sea of ancestral folk wisdom. It takes very little to break through that surface and find ourselves back in the roiling waters of fables, myths, superstitions, auguries, and divination.
My grandfather was born in 1901. He once said that he thought he lived during the greatest time in history: born during horse-and-buggy days, he lived to see a man on the moon. Obviously, the technological inventions since 1901 have been staggering, but I want to look at knowledge, what we as a species have learned since then.
When Granddad was born, no one knew any of the following things. Either no one had any idea they were true or they were wacky ideas promoted strictly by lunatic visionaries. Now they are all common knowledge among educated people.
[...]
Black holes and wormholes. These darlings of sci-fi movies weren’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye back in 1901. They are both predictions from the general theory of relativity (1915), and there wasn’t experimental confirmation of black holes until the 1970s. Wormholes are still theoretical.
The existence of galaxies. Here’s a good one. In 1901 nobody had any idea that there were other galaxies. There was the Milky Way and that was that. Sure, astronomers could see fuzzy nebulae in their telescopes, but figured they were either gas clouds or some other weird thing inside the Milky Way. It wasn’t until the 1920s (Hubble again) that we learned the truth: our galaxy with its 100 billion stars is merely a grain of sand on a vast beach. It was just a decade ago that we arrived at the current estimate of 1-2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
Quantum physics. Knowledge of the very tiny was itself very tiny in 1901. We knew there were atoms and electrons, but that’s it. No one knew about protons, neutrons, the nucleus, or how atoms were put together. Nuclear fission and fusion were unknown (so nobody understood why the sun was hot, or how it was powered). Splitting an atom was unheard of, much less the idea of a chain reaction. The idea that light is made of photons was also unknown.
Plate tectonics. In 1901 everyone looked at the world map, saw how the eastern coastline of North and South America perfectly fits into the western coastline of Europe and Africa like a jigsaw puzzle and thought, “huh, what a coincidence!” In 1912 Alfred Wegener suggested maybe the continents drift around the surface of the globe, a suggestion that was met with peals of laughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the evidence was in, and plate tectonics became settled science, explaining volcanoes, earthquakes, and how mountains arise.
Birds are dinosaurs. Thomas Huxley’s wild avian speculation in the 19th century was quickly shelved in favor of “dinos were cold-blooded, slow-moving reptiles.” It wasn’t until the 1990s (!) that it was conclusively established that there had been feathered non-avian dinosaurs, that feathers evolved before flight, and that modern birds aren’t descended from dinosaurs, but are in fact the only surviving lineage of theropod dinosaurs.
Blood types. Doctors had tried blood transfusions since the 17th century, but the results ranged from mixed to disastrous. The reason was that nobody knew about blood types, and how you can’t just mix ’n’ match. That wasn’t discovered until 1901-1902. Decades later we discovered anticoagulants (allowing blood to be stored) and the Rh factor (whether your blood type is + or -).
These days I consume zero climbing media. I haven’t done since the day I woke up in hospital.
Whereas I once refreshed UKClimbing 40 times a day, obsessively consumed climbing videos on YouTube, devoured the mountain classics of literature, and leafed through my sizable library of guidebooks planning future adventures, I now pretend that when climbing ceased to exist for me, it ceased to exist for everybody.
It is still the only way that I can cope. Whereas some people who are catastrophically injured through sport still take joy in watching others participate, for me it’s too painful. I cut myself off, and never looked back. Hence I’ve no idea if Adam Ondra is still the only person to have climbed 9c, or if that even remains the highest sport grade. Same goes for E12, for Burden of Dreams. I couldn’t even guess who won the men’s gold in 2024, though I’m going to assume that Janja won the women’s.
But even I heard about Alex Honnold climbing some building in Taiwan.
Before going any further, let’s get one piece of terminology straight. Honnold’s “achievement” (scare quotes to be explained in a moment) last week was not simply that he free climbed Taipei 101, but that he free soloed it. The distinction is important. Free climbing means ascending something without the use of devices to assist (“aid”) the physical moves themselves. However, assistive devices can be used whilst free climbing to prevent injury or death, should a climber’s un-aided physical moves come up short and they fall. (Think: harnesses, ropes, karabiners, et cetera.) By contrast, free soloing is free climbing, but without any of the assistive devices used to (in theory) prevent death if the climber should fall. In essence, free soloing reduces the margin of error to zero. If you fall, you die.
I free climbed literally thousands of routes before my accident. On a dozen or so occasions, I free soloed them.
A few people have cautiously asked me what I think of Honnold’s latest. My answer has generally been: “how the fuck am I the one in a wheelchair, and not him?” But there’s more to it than that.
As I don’t consume climbing media anymore, I don’t know what the general consensus is in the climbing scene regarding his latest spectacle. But I’d wager that most climbers had the same response as me: a rolling of the eyes.
This might seem weird. Isn’t free soloing a 500m building an impressive athletic and psychological achievement, and shouldn’t climbers respect that more than anybody? Putting aside for now (we will get there in a minute) furious debates between climbers about the acceptability of free soloing in general, my guess is that even people who free solo won’t have been positively disposed.
First, because although what Honnold did will look impressive to non-climbers, those who climb will know that it was nowhere near as hard (to him) as it looks. The now widely circulated footage of making what appear to be difficult moves on the tower are in fact not so for somebody with advanced climbing skills, which he undoubtedly possesses. Those moves are far below Honnold’s technical and physical limits. If you don’t climb, this will be hard to believe, but take it from me: for somebody of his ability, climbing Taipei 101 is about as difficult as going up a ladder. Sure, it’s not a good idea to fall off a 500m ladder. If you do, you will die. But if you don’t, you won’t.
And yes, it takes good mental composure to not panic, to be able to commit to something like that from start to finish. But this is hardly Honnold’s first rodeo. He has spent years free soloing, and thus has trained his amygdala such that a panic response is simply not going to happen to him, even at 400m off the ground. If you’ve never climbed a ladder before, then going even 20m up a ladder will likely cause you to quake with fear and be desperate to come down. But if you climb a thousand 20m ladders over the next 20 years, you’re not going to find it remotely difficult to safely climb another one tomorrow. (And trust me, once you are comfortable at 20m, you’re comfortable at 500.)
Which is not to say that none of Honnold’s achievements as a free soloist are impressive. Quite the contrary. He has previously pushed the limits of free soloing far beyond what was thought possible, and in a way every climber respects (even if only begrudgingly). When he soloed El Capitan in Yosemite, this was a moment of human accomplishment on a par with being the first to run 100m in under 9.8 seconds—except with the added twist of failure meaning certain death. The film Free Solo is genuinely worth watching, both as a piece of documentary evidence for what he accomplished as well as an interesting insight into the rare psychology of the committed soloist, someone pushing the limits beyond what anybody thought the envelope would allow.
But that itself is now part of the problem. Taipei 101 is not El Cap. There is no beauty, in terms of the movement of a human body on rock, to be found in the capital of Taiwan. It is one thing to add potentially the most storied chapter to the grand history of Yosemite climbing, quite another to do a Netflix special. Not even Honnold is going to pretend—the soloist’s oldest defence—that there is a deep spiritual communion to be found in mechanically repeating moves on concrete blocks, filmed by a dozen cameras, as part of a multimillion-dollar media operation.
And capped off by taking a selfie at the top.
I mean, he’s not even the first person to free solo tall buildings. Alain Robert has been doing it for years, usually illegally, and without making money from it. Where is his Netflix cash-in?
In other words, my predominant response to Alex Honnold’s latest media acclaim is that I’m still a punk rock kid at heart: fucking sell-out.
I am a Millennial white woman and yet, I say this bravely, I do not want chickens.
I want many things. A calm nervous system. An abundant bank account. Taylor Russell’s coats. But chickens? No.
Many of my friends want them. Many Millennial white women want them. Women I know personally. Women I know spiritually. Kristin Cavallari has chickens. Hilary Duff has chickens. Amanda Seyfried? Chickens. Women with blowouts and impeccable contouring are waking up at dawn to collect eggs before their Pilates classes, like they’re in a Perry-free version of Big Little Lies, executive produced by Goop.
Why? What are the chickens saying? Why are the chickens here? Is this about eggs, or something else? A lifestyle thesis disguised as poultry? Because no one actually wants to care for an animal that screams, attacks you with its beak, and can be taken out by a stiff breeze.
Perhaps chickens feel less like a pet and more like an announcement: I HAVE SPACE NOW. Physical space. Emotional space. Acreage. A mudroom.
Chickens imply land. You don’t get chickens unless you’ve graduated from “apartment person” to “someone who casually says ‘the property.’” You don’t get chickens unless someone in your home knows their way around a hammer, a latch and a ramp (for the dramatic chickens). You don’t get chickens unless you are committing to a life of many omelettes.
It is all a Free People ad. To be fair, the image on the right looks nice. Is it AI? :(
The aesthetic argument, of course, is airtight. Chickens pair beautifully with a DÔEN dress. You can imagine yourself drifting through your yard at golden hour, hem grazing calf, hair in a loose, morally superior braid, whispering affirmations to a Rhode Island Red. The fantasy is powerful: no screens. Just you and your flock, living off the land. You’re baking sourdough while your chicken friend looks on approvingly: ah yes, good, she thinks, this will go nicely with a breakfast sandwich. You’ve taken a guitar. Not because you play, but because it makes sense. There’s shelving with a lot of bobbins and even more homemade jams. The bobbins and jams are as abundant as the domestic fowl. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? Need I bring up shiplap?
Never mind that chicken caretaking is, by all accounts, bureaucratic labor involving mites, fencing disputes, and the devastation of discovering that something called a “hawk” exists. The fantasy does not include any of that. The fantasy includes speckled eggs in a ceramic bowl. Overalls.
So I decided to investigate.
Again, not because I want chickens but because the chickens want me. They’re circling. They’re symbolic. A feathered milestone. And I thought it was my duty, as a woman still emotionally renting and more interested in a lymphatic drainage massage than livestock, to look this thing in the eye and ask the only question that matters: what is this all about?
There’s that gabe k-s quote that goes, “There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living.”
By that measure, the opposite of suicide is to spend a few days walking and driving the streets of Cairo.
⁂
True, it can feel like self-murder. Cairo has more than 23 million people and no traffic lights. Getting anywhere demands submitting to an unruly accumulation of motion and believing unwaveringly in the ancient concept of going with the flow. It’s very somatic. It made me feel bodily, that I had a presence. It gave shape to me insofar as I became a construction of a thing competing for space with other constructed things. It also made me feel totally irrelevant and trivial. There was a unique spectrum within me and across which I felt myself being thrust toward the extreme ends of: flesh-based conception on one side and disembodiment on the other.
⁂
And where was my mind? Speculating about what it would be like for a bus to run me over and make me flat and, because the vehicles are so one after the other, to squash me several times before anyone stopped, until what was left of me could be used to paint walls, until there was only a granular paste a passerby might skid on and pull their groin.
⁂
It’s no news by now that Cairo’s congestion rivals the world’s great clusterfucks—Delhi, Lagos, Manila. Without a coherent authority, everyone does what they want. I like the self-regulating anarchy. I find it relaxing, even when it feels like it could crush me at any second. What stresses me out is the world of policies and litigation.
Such interconnectedness means individual choices matter. A heedless insistence on one’s own priority disrupts the harmony of the whole. And so there’s a real sense of society in the ceaseless tightening and loosening of the knot, the communal negotiation of space. It can be ruthless, but there are small mercies everywhere. Now and then, a hand lifts briefly from a steering wheel to signal that you may merge.
⁂
As for “living like a local,” infused with exhaust and coated in road smut is perhaps the most authentic way to be in Cairo, an experience shared by almost everyone who lives here. You get used to the scratch in your throat.
⁂
An inventory of things in transit, noted over 13 minutes at Ramses Square:
Cars, taxis, minibuses, public buses, tourist buses, delivery vans, pickup trucks, dump trucks, cement mixers, fuel tankers, water trucks, garbage trucks, tow trucks, road rollers, cranes in transit, police cars, police vans, armored police vehicles, military trucks, ambulances, fire engines, motorcycles, scooters, tuk-tuks, motorized rickshaws, bicycles, handcarts, pushcarts, produce carts, wheelbarrows, mule carts, pedestrians, street vendors on foot, men carrying trays, children weaving through traffic, mechanics rolling tires, people pushing stalled cars, refrigerators on carts, mattresses strapped to bicycles, gas canisters on trolleys, rolling crates, rolling plastic barrels, rollerbladers, dogs, stray shopping carts.
⁂
It really is another world. Of course we all know the “we” and “us” of contemporary culture writing refers to a rather narrow Western milieu, but the boundless vastness of humanity to be observed on Cairo’s streets makes it seem like that whole referred-to audience could fit into a single backyard in Williamsburg.
Flaubert wrote, “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” But it was more like I saw what a tiny world occupied me.
has launched. Reese Witherspoon’s first post describes it as “a cozy corner of the internet where we can actually talk about the books we love and pick up even more reads along the way.”
Actress and model has joined Substack, kicking things off with a personal essay about her relationship to religion, God, and morality.
The Washington Post’s former book critic has turned Substack into his new home, where he “intend[s] to keep nattering on about books, authors, and our imperiled literary culture.”
Comedian and actor has joined Substack to “try to lower your cortisol and bring a little bit of joy to the world or at least your inbox.”
Harvard Law professor and author has joined Substack, where he’ll be sharing “what you might call actionable wisdom: thoughts that you can put to use in your own life, that you can discuss with the people who matter to you, and that you can translate into feeling more connected, balanced, and engaged in your own life.”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
This week, we’re waking in the dark, perusing old issues of Esquire, and getting lost in Yonville.
MORNING PEOPLE
How to wake up, according to bakers
For those struggling with winter mornings, Cake Zine consulted the experts: bakers who wake at 3 a.m.—some “with actual hatred” in their hearts—and somehow make it work.
“I’m jolted awake by the sound of radar—all the Apple alarms are an assault on the senses, so might as well call a spade a spade. I emerge from bed with actual hatred in my heart. I am not a morning person.
The only thing that softens the blow is this ridiculous fuzzy pink sweater I’ve started calling my snuggie. I keep it on the bedside so it’s the first thing I reach for. Then I listen to early-aughts rock music (Three Doors Down) on my walk to work to try and feel some semblance of aliveness (lol). Most mornings it’s still brutally dark, but once in a while, depending on the season, I catch a sunrise. I like to smile at the other people on their way to work. I try to remember that we’re doing something together, bringing the city to life.”
Morgan Knight, pastry chef and owner at Saint Street Cakes
“Because most of our bakes don’t require proofing, and cakes are baked the day before, I’m usually up for work around 6 a.m! The thing that keeps me up and ready for the day is using my Brick—it’s a device that disables social media on my phone to avoid the morning doom scroll. Staying off of my phone in the morning helps me be present and intentional.
Oh, and I’ll usually make a fruit smoothie to trick myself into feeling like it’s warm out, especially on cold days.”
Kaitlyn Wong, pastry chef at Ouma Brooklyn
“I recently got back into the early-morning baker life at the end of last year when I started the pastry program at Ouma in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. It’s been almost 3 years since I’ve had the (dis)pleasure of waking up that early—I’d be lying if I didn’t say it never gets easier! It’s funny when people constantly assume that because I’m a pastry chef I’m “used to” the early hours … no! I realize I sound very aggro, and I know it’s what I signed up for, but waking up early will never not suck!
If bringing fresh pastries to Prospect Lefferts Gardens means waking up at the crack of dawn, I’ll do it—just not with a smile or any cheerful enthusiasm. I do have a few tricks up my sleeve that seem to help make the agony of waking up early a little less agonizing: no caffeine after 10 a.m., asleep by 9 p.m., and just one alarm to wake me up and a second one to yell at me to get out of bed.
Biking to work is my usual mode of transportation, and I swear that there’s something about the frigid 5 a.m. air hitting your face that really wakes you up! But it would be disingenuous of me to not admit that I supplement with the occasional Uber (I’ve been Ubering a lot these days…). My partner Jordan and I both get up early for work and sometimes it aligns and we can wake up a little earlier and have a coffee together. Those mornings are always nice.”
Kyla Tang, baker at Plumcot
“The playlist I choose to listen to on the morning commute completely sets my mood for the day. This one always gets me going in the morning.
Oh, and I never leave the house without a hot drink (hot water with ginger and dried red dates).”
Dallas King, executive pastry chef at Lost Bread Co.
“I wake up at 2 a.m. on the weekends and pick out an outfit in the dark so I don’t wake up my partner. I chug a pre-workout shake, brush my teeth, moisturize, and walk 30 minutes to work to get there by 3 a.m. I think the walk really helps me wake up and get ready to immediately start working (the walk is great podcast listening time, too).
I usually like to have a really consistent routine in the mornings: I let myself snooze once, always, then bolt straight out of bed. The key is good sleep and immediate caffeination.
I’ve seen bakers belittle themselves for not getting enough sleep before an early shift, but that couldn’t be me. Just be easy on yourself and have some coffee (there is a recurring theme here). Go slow as you reasonably can but don’t be sloppy. Watch the clock obsessively. Budget in a nap for ASAP after work and move on.”
Lilli Maren, freelance baker in New York
“No matter how early my day starts, I always carve out 15 minutes for puzzles. I call this ‘bringing my brain up to temp.’ I also have a vintage lamp in this cosy corner of my apartment, and it gives the softest light. I snuggle up here with some Kenken and a cup of extra strong black coffee and it sorts me right out. I know you’re not supposed to drink coffee before 10 a.m. or whatever, but at 5 a.m. it tastes extra naughty and extra delicious!”
Gabrielle Weems, freelance baker in New York
“I work evenings now, but I used to think about getting out earlier than everyone. Enjoying the sunshine and (kind of) quiet afternoons while everyone else is still at work. Still having a nice chunk of my day ahead of me to do whatever I want with it.
It’s difficult, but getting up earlier helps me allow myself a slow morning. Warm, dim lighting and starting my mornings with jazz is a lovely motivator. As well as fresh chamomile tea. It alleviates a lot of my nerves and stress.”
Kelly Mencin, pastry chef and owner at Radio Bakery
“Ohhhfff—the winters are hard! Honestly, I try to go to bed as early as I can so that I can get at least 8 hours of sleep. Unfortunately, for a 3 a.m. start, that’s 7 p.m.
Waking up knowing that I got 8 hours of sleep makes it more bearable, I guess? Maybe it’s a placebo effect, but I tell myself that, yes, I got adequate sleep and, yes, I will be fine.
I also don’t wake up from a jarring alarm. I installed HUE lights in my apartment that gradually turn on over a 10-minute time frame. Waking up to light feels more natural and doesn’t make me as cranky as a loud alarm would.
Once I’m out the door with the thought of a warm Earl Grey tea awaiting me at work, it makes it pretty easy.”
I found this on a stoop and took it home because I’ll basically take any old periodicals home so long as they don’t smell too bad. The early nineteen-eighties aren’t my favorite era for magazines; legacy titles like Esquire were still really secure with their core demographic, and the narrowly tailored, scotch + luxury hifi lifestyle they depict can be a little alienating. Anyhow, I constantly think about tossing it out but I’ve always found this issue sufficiently bizarre to keep around, at least until I made time to read the cover story about something called “Father Love.” It sounds a little sinister, all this talk of “profound pain” and “exquisite joy.” And then there’s the photo of the little girl.
One of the things about leafing through old magazines or newspapers is seeing writers test out ideas, feelings, modalities that would become more accepted (or passe, or forbidden) over time. Anthony Brandt’s essay is basically an exploration of what it means to be a father when you maybe don’t feel up to the task. In his editor’s note, Phillip Moffitt describes this as the “postponing generation,” with many young men deciding to lock down their professional lives/Truly Understand Themselves before embarking on parenthood. “I hope that our culture is establishing a lasting pattern for itself and other societies: first grow up yourself, and only then think about taking responsibility for creating other lives.” Enter Brandt’s reflections on “the joy and the pain” of fatherhood, offered to readers as “Esquire’s gift to new parents.”
What does it mean to grow up? There’s a specific kind of nineties guy who was deeply shaped by reading Sassy (ditto Maxim), and it wasn’t until I was much older that I understood how reading, say, Details or The Face or Giant Robot truly shaped my sense of who I wanted to be. And reading Brandt’s essay is particularly interesting when looking at the world one might hope to grow into. Esquire was and remains a magazine devoted to Man at His Best, trafficking in a kind of urbane sophistication expressed through manners and taste, expertise in liquor or sports cars or neckties, curiosity about “Gucci pour homme cologne.” There are stories about great mountaintop getaways, a lot of ads for booze featuring weirdly curvaceous, mildly erotic ice cubes—the kinds of ads I remember studying in junior high in a unit on “subliminal advertising.”
[. . .]
I can imagine reading the November 1982 Esquire in order to figure out how to be a man and feeling utterly baffled. There’s a long article about borderline personality disorder which opens with a description of how hot the patient is: “Until you saw her arms, she looked like somebody you’d date, or want to. Black hair falling straight to her waist and clear pale skin made her look Irish, which she wasn’t, and her eyes were intelligent and green … Her face was something. If you met her at a party at the Harvard Club or on the beach at the Hamptons you’d be stricken.” Pretty disturbing!
Maybe I’m not someone who is interested in BPD, and I’m just here to figure out how to use up my disposable income. Should I be drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream, Old Grand Dad Kentucky Bourbon, Drambuie, Boodles British gin, Courvoisier, Pinch 12 Year Old Scotch, Martell Cognac, Grand Marnier, Johnnie Walker Black Label, Remy Martin, J&B, Grand Old Parr De Luxe Blended Scotch Whiskey, or Jack Daniel’s? Am I a cardigan-wearer? Should I be slightly taller? Someone who uses words like “queeb?”
If a foreign friend asks me this, I think of standard answers first. Eating sushi, stopping by convenience stores, visiting shrines, soaking in hot springs. These are all essential experiences in Japan.
But I might add one more thing: “It’s interesting to look at the traffic mirrors on the street.”
Japanese traffic mirrors are unique because of where they are placed. At the entrance of residential areas, narrow T-junctions, sharp curves, and parking lot exits—you can find orange traffic mirrors everywhere. A huge number of mirrors are installed all over the country.
In shrines or old towns, some mirrors have wood-grain frames instead of orange. You can enjoy these small variations.
I think what is reflected in those mirrors is very “Japanese.” In Japan’s narrow streets, pedestrians, bicycles, and cars naturally mix. You can see fragments of daily life reflected there. The same life exists both inside and outside the mirror.
I don’t drive often, but when I am behind the wheel, I don’t trust these mirrors 100%. This is because they have blind spots and you can misjudge distances. I remember learning this at driving school, so I think this is a common understanding in Japan.
Still, these mirrors continue to be installed. Maybe it is because of the Japanese mindset of trying to avoid risk as much as possible.
If you have a chance to walk in Japan, please take a moment to look into a traffic mirror on the street. You will see a layered view of this country that is not in any travel guide.
When I was right out of college, in an attempt to improve my French, or maybe to convince myself I spoke it, I read Madame Bovary in the original. I honestly don’t know how. Here’s a typical passage, in Francis Steegmuller’s translation, a description of the approach to the fateful village of Yonville:
At the foot of the hill the road crosses the Rieule on a bridge, and then, becoming an avenue planted with young aspens, leads in a straight line to the first outlying houses. These are surrounded by hedges, and their yards are full of scattered outbuildings—cider presses, carriage houses and distilling sheds standing here and there under thick trees with ladders and poles leaning against their trunks and scythes hooked over their branches. The thatched roofs hide the top third or so of the low windows like fur caps pulled down over eyes, and each windowpane, thick and convex, has a bull’s-eye in its center like the bottom of a bottle.
All these physical descriptions: I can barely understand it in English. I’m sure that as I read in French, I remembered that in high school we’d been assigned one of Flaubert’s tales, Un Coeur Simple, and all of us, even the straight-A French-nerd suckups, heartily despised it. It was nothing but aspens and alders and fringed lampshades and different types of cloth and carriage. Flaubert is for fluent speakers.
My French isn’t much better than it was 20 years ago, so this time I read the book the real way, in English, and actually understood it. My god, what a book. My first time reading it I was just grateful I understood the plot and that part about the torn-up letter fluttering out of the carriage window like butterflies. This time I was really shaken. I’m still recovering. I’m not sure I’ve managed to leave that village with the thatched roofs and the cider presses and the fields around filled with bullrushes and oat stalks with little bell-shaped flowers.
Yonville at first reminded me a little of Springfield, in The Simpsons. A self-contained world with a cast of recurring characters who all have their little quirks and manias and catchphrases. Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, the garrulous Homais, and the rest of the characters we see around town have that toylike, cartoonish limitedness—spiritually, they only have four fingers, you could say. But where Springfield is basically benevolent, Yonville is—Hell. Is it Hell? No, not exactly. That would be too easy. Bovary is not dark comedy. Charles really loves Emma, a fact that both redeems human beings and makes the story tragic and terrible. The whole thing is so pitiless. We’re spared nothing. There’s a streak of sadism in Flaubert, in the way that great movie directors are sadistic. He knows how to turn the screw to get the maximum out of every scene, more than you would have thought possible, without ever turning maudlin or trashy. Emma’s death scene, for example. When Emma dies, her agony is terrible, but it has something inhuman about it, there’s no moral quality to it, it might almost be an animal dying. She is neither more nor less sympathetic than she’s ever been. But Charles’s pain makes us suffer.
[. . .]
I found myself pondering Madame Bovary darkly for days after I’d finished it. One of the easier reflections about it is about aspens and alders and the craziness of calling Flaubert’s style “realism.” First of all, what’s reality? It doesn’t exist. Even atoms aren’t real. More importantly, Flaubert’s version of the world, in which mediocrity is so avid, a living thing, a pervasive, almost demonic force, in which people live in a realm of superficiality, fakery, and imitation, within a cloud of vanity and futility: this is clearly, like, a little tendentious. That is to say, it’s hyperreal, a vision. What does it have to do with “reality”?
This vision sticks with me. After I finished the book, I found I had started to think of “Yonville” as a term describing all the things that happen to irritate me about daily life and the city I live in, which I could now see as an expression of some essential property of life: the blooming of falsity and mediocrity, its incredible robustness and tendency to thrive. On the subway, for example. That recording that says “This is an MTA accessible station. The elevator is at the rear of the platform” grates the ear because the woman reading the message pronounces the simple words in a stilted, pretentious way, not the way she speaks but the way she thinks it’s supposed to sound. (“Yonville,” I mutter to myself.) And the subway ads, which I’m used to ignoring, now have a new quality. Though advertising different products, they seem identical: loud pitches from the crassest of salesmen, all declaring that happiness is purchasable.
, the adventurer and TV host, has launched a Substack. In his first post, he offers the lessons he’s learned from surviving in the wilderness and in business.
and have brought their podcast to Substack. “explores media and pop culture alongside politics and technology, seeking to explore each generation’s view of topical subjects while exploring the overlap between them.”
For our French speakers, journalist, broadcaster, and author has joined Substack, where she’ll be sharing analysis of politics, pop culture, and society.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
