2026-09-12 21:03:36
This week, we’re proving our hockey chops, baking a cake to bid summer farewell, and examining the relationship between writing and belief.
JUST DESSERTS
One team’s investigation into the illegal ice cream trade taking over London’s streets.
—, , and in London Centric
I was hiding on the floor of an ice cream van parked outside Lambeth Palace when I began to think things might have gotten a bit out of control. Our London Centric-branded Mr Whippy truck had already been filmed by men in expensive cars with blacked-out windows. They didn’t seem supportive of our entry into the capital’s ice cream trade.
Now it appeared our vehicle was being followed around the streets of central London by a rival ice cream van, which had just halted alongside us.
We weren’t very well disguised. The back of our van, in what had seemed like a good idea at the time, featured a giant photograph of me eating an ice cream, the London Centric logo and the words “serving up scoops”. Now it felt like a big target.
“Has it gone?” I asked a colleague, hoping to hear ice cream chimes heading off into the distance.
“No, stay low,” they replied.
Half an hour earlier, London Centric had taken its first tentative steps into diversifying away from the financially precarious business of local journalism and into the potentially much more lucrative business of running a dodgy ice cream van on Westminster Bridge.
Now we were trying to identify out-of-the-way alleys where we could hide our heavily branded vehicle. A reliable source in the capital’s ice cream trade got in touch to tell us he had heard that persons unknown were interested in finding our distinctive van. It seemed we’d just disrupted the illegal sale of thousands of pounds of soft-serve ice cream on one of the busiest days of the year.
It’s almost two years since I first reported on the brazenly lawbreaking and wildly profitable activities of the ice cream vans that semi-permanently block the bus lane on Westminster Bridge in order to charge rip-off prices to tourists for a 99 Flake. Since then, I’d received messages from MPs who couldn’t understand how all of this could take place within sight of Parliament and the police headquarters at Scotland Yard, along with a trickle of lurid allegations about the sellers’ business model. I’d wanted to understand how the ice cream vans—many of which are operated by a single family—get away with permanently clogging the capital’s roads and ignoring decades of efforts by law enforcement, politicians and local councils to stop them.
I’d considered going undercover and trying to get inside the groups running the illegal vans. But this felt risky and resource-intensive for a tiny operation like ours. The ice cream business is dominated by tightly held family businesses that don’t welcome outsiders. In any case, I’d been informed that, following London Centric’s past reporting on the Westminster Bridge vans, my photo had been circulated and I was banned.
So instead, I concocted a different plan. What if this was a situation where undercover reporting wouldn’t work? What if we needed to develop a different approach? Let’s call it overcover reporting?
WORDPLAY IN THE WILD
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
“I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning.”
— in The New York Review of Books
Meghan O’Gieblyn’s primary subject is not artificial intelligence—she is one of the most prolific working thinkers on contemporary religion, in particular its relationship to technology—but she was one of the first writers during the machine-learning revolution to take a serious look at the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, in her 2021 book God Human Animal Machine. Her first book, Interior States (2018), was a collection of essays with the more earthly preoccupations of American Christianity and the Midwest, where she grew up and attended Bible college, which subject also features in her forthcoming memoir, Will and Attention, publishing in October. Since 2023 she has been a frequent critic for the Review, writing about novels, religion, and philosophy.
Over the past month, we emailed about AI consciousness, the craft of essay writing, and contending with John Calvin.
What most terrifies you and what most excites you about artificial intelligence?
I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning. I started writing in my teens and early twenties because it was the only way I could engage in a certain level of complex thought. When I was studying theology at a fundamentalist Bible college—where the majority of the coursework is in the study of Scripture—it was in my private journals that I first allowed myself to question the ideology I’d been steeped in for most of my life. The page was a kind of mirror, a way to discover doubts and misgivings that I didn’t feel I could share with anyone, and which were difficult to name when I was simply going about my day, lost in a swirl of idle thoughts and emotions. Writing was basically how I found my way out of that very narrow form of faith. I don’t know that I would have done that if I’d had an institutional subscription to ChatGPT, as many college students do today. It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking—at least the kind of thinking that we associate with complex reasoning and self-knowledge.
This is connected to a more general fear of mine, which is that language models are causing us to devalue all kinds of higher cognitive functions. Any time a machine takes up a skill that was once thought of as uniquely human, like chess or coding, there’s a tendency to dismiss that skill as simple and mechanical. There’s an emerging consensus right now, particularly among AI skeptics, that the most distinctly human qualities are emotion, intuition, the ability to sense and feel. Those are undoubtedly the capacities that most readily distinguish us from machines. But this view risks fetishizing embodiment and emotion, much the same way that previous generations valued reason and language to an outsized degree to prove that humans are distinct from animals. What makes us unique as a species is that we can do all of these things: we share with animals the ability to feel and sense, and we share with machines the capacity to reason through language. It’s also true that we think and speak in ways that are radically distinct from computers, and we feel in ways that are different from animals.
I’ve heard many people argue that AI offers a challenge to express ourselves in a way that is more fully human. I used to be skeptical of that idea, which struck me as a bit of wishful thinking, one that imposed a mythical limit on how good the illusion could get. But I’ve come around, having witnessed several generations of LLMs that, despite their increasing technical sophistication, remain incapable of writing anything surprising, which is, of course, extremely difficult for a technology designed to hit the statistical mean of the writing it’s been trained on. I’ve found that having a name for this kind of writing—“synthetic text” or “slop”—makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing. You could argue that AI output, because it has distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression, offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought. I suppose that’s one thing that excites me.
GAMES
REALITY BITES
Can content translate from a tiny screen to a slightly less tiny one? Katie Gatti Tassin investigates.
— in Money with Katie
Alix Earle’s age is referenced repeatedly on her new Netflix reality series Earle Meets World, a show clearly constructed according to the doctrine of Kardashianpolitik, down to the production company and our parent-manager cares more about the lucrative sister arc. Observations that Earle is “doing all the things she’s doing at 25 years old” or “not like a normal 25-year-old” are usually made in close proximity to scenes where Earle’s younger sister and dubiously employed friends are, alternately, going out or lying around after having gone out. (In a transparent attempt to hook my older readers: Earle’s stepmother Ashley was one of the women involved in the 2008 Eliot Spitzer scandal.)
Earle’s abnormality becomes a consistent theme in the debut season. While the gals are gallivanting around a battery of Manhattan’s most overdetermined venues (a bar where you can play ping-pong; a bar with trash-can-sized beer pong), Earle is herself gamely ping-ponging between coastal corners of the US for televised work obligations, an unholy number of which seem to be, inexplicably, courtesy of Dunkin’ Donuts. A separate television crew, provided by Netflix, dutifully trails her to each of these locales, its cameras capturing footage of other cameras capturing footage. She is portrayed as a dedicated, relentless wunderkind, sacrificing her youth in service of DoorDash product placement and Dancing with the Stars and cover shoots for magazines named after materials like PAPER and NYLON, as It Girls are wont to do.
This sentiment is reiterated with such matter-of-fact regularity that it took me until the sixth episode to remember that the vast majority of 25-year-old Americans also spend most of their time working, not playing arcade games in honky-tonk-themed speakeasies. Roughly half are already responsible for young children. What narrative purpose did it serve, I wondered, to make so much of Earle’s age and schedule?
Insisting that the abnormal thing about Earle’s life is the age at which she’s “doing all these things”—rather than her estimated $24 million in annual income derived from, mostly, documenting herself partying and promoting various products between said partying gigs—strikes me as a savvy obfuscation. It’s at once a rebuttal and preemptive strike against the sort of commentary that scenes of a family of seven (plus entourage) traveling via private jet to Aspen for a weekend music festival might otherwise provoke. The series does not try to avoid the unavoidable fact of her utterly unique lifestyle, but merely locates the source of that uniqueness in her supposedly unusual decision to prioritize her career at 25.
FOWL BEHAVIOR
SPORTS
Former NHL hockey player and Stanley Cup champion Andrew Ference makes a case for going against the grain.
— in Andrew Ference
As I was chasing my goal of playing in the NHL, I knew I couldn’t afford to be normal. To this day, I have no desire to join the pursuit of “fitting in” and am driven and excited by living a good life that is designed to impress myself, not others. The desire to blend in with the crowd around you limits your drive to seek out interesting or unique solutions to problems and ultimately hinders your ability to beat out the competition for anything that is limited in access. Not being a full-fledged member of a pack can be uncomfortable at times, and there is risk that comes with poking your head up from the crowd. One of my favorite trainers, John Whitesides in Boston, would say to the rookies, “You know which gazelle gets eaten by the lion? The one that strays from the pack.” I concede that he’s right, but I would counter that we aren’t gazelles and that in our line of work, if you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, you either won’t make it or you’ll be there for the average amount of time… a couple of years.
[. . .]
For a few years, I lived in Canmore, Alberta, a small mountain town about an hour outside Calgary. After the 1988 Olympics, the area became home to high-performance athletes from all kinds of sports since they had a training facility, a natural playground of mountain trails and a population that was insanely active. These years likely had the biggest effect on extending my career far beyond the average. Instead of setting up in my hometown of Edmonton or any number of other “hubs” of hockey players, in Canmore I trained with downhill skiers, cross-country skiers, biathletes, speedskaters, cyclists and triathletes. While I maintained a foundation of exercises and workouts that I would do specifically for hockey, I incorporated much of what the other sports were doing into my own training and my recovery from training. The downhillers had fantastic training for muscle endurance and performing under fatigue. Think about the end of a downhill race when you’ve been in a squat for a couple of minutes at close to 100 miles per hour, or the end of a slalom race when you can’t afford to ease up a bit because your legs are screaming at you. I wanted to learn how they did it. The cross-country skiers and biathletes were exceptional at building an insane base of aerobic capacity, going for hours on end and known to have some of the very best VO2 max scores in the history of sport. The cyclists and triathletes were priceless for their hints on recovery and nutrition while also displaying some of the toughest mental power I’ve ever seen. Their ability to ignore the pain of a hard effort up a difficult climb is second to none. The speedskaters could do explosive power like I had never seen before. Their single leg jumps and ability to create speed and power out of a deep squat was insane.
Sprinkling different elements of what I was seeing into my own program not only helped me develop as an athlete but it also gave me amazing confidence, because I knew that the people that I was competing with in hockey were not doing these kinds of things.
When I got drafted in the 8th round to Pittsburgh, I knew that as an 8th rounder, I was already forgettable and wouldn’t have a surplus of focus on me at training camp. The attention would be focused on the high-round draft picks and the other top prospects from previous years. When I received my “Welcome To The Penguins” package in the mail, it included which fitness tests would be held in the upcoming training camp. It was basic stuff like bench press, sit-ups, pull-ups and, most importantly to me, two tests on the bike. The first being a 30-second sprint test where you essentially go all out for 30 of the most excruciating seconds of your life. The second was a standard VO2 max ride which would last around 12-20 minutes and measure your maximum rate of oxygen consumption, basically to see what your body is capable of before you fail or give up. I had already been doing a fair amount of stair workouts and was very comfortable on the bike, so I knew that on day 1 of training camp, I had an opportunity to set myself apart from the crowd with these tests.
TENNIS
BAKED GOODS
A sweet-tart sendoff to the season.
— in Terrence Bakes
This cake is incredibly simple and the frosting and garnish can easily be swapped with your favorite fruit if you aren’t a fan of raspberries.
Note: I like a lot of frosting on my cake (I learned from my mom!). If you think it might be too much, you can easily scale the recipe down.
DEDICATION
Art & Photography: , , , ,
Video & Audio: London Centric,
Writing: , , , , , ,
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy is now on Substack, where she’ll be “exploring how to practice social bravery” and more.
Founding member of the Beastie Boys Mike D has launched on Substack.
Former NFL Network reporter Tom Pelissero is now publishing The Sweep, an inside look at all things NFL from The Ringer and Spotify, on Substack.
The Washington Post’s Commanders beat writer Tashan Reed has launched The Tashan Reed Show on Substack, where he’ll be covering the team.
Jess Smetana and Lucy Rohden, formerly of the Dan Le Batard Show, launched the College Football Happy Hour Substack to support their eponymous podcast.
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 out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-09-11 01:58:42
Welcome to Double Take: a dual feature series from The Substack Post and On Substack. Part culture, part business, all encompassing. This edition, we’re featuring , the author and writer behind the newsletter, Good Movie, and the newly-launched podcast, Organizing Things. Shea previously wrote for The Ringer, is a five-time New York Times bestseller, trailblazer in digital media, and most importantly, a film fanatic.
On the walls of Shea Serrano’s San Antonio office live hundreds upon hundreds of VHS tapes (1,319, to be exact): Napoleon Dynamite. Cool Hand Luke. The Sandlot. Rush Hour. Catwoman. Taxi Driver. The Shawshank Redemption.
Every single film is cataloged in a running Google Doc. Shea’s favorites, about 400 of them, are lined up next to one another in alphabetical order on wired shelving units. His prized possession, a copy of his favorite “flop at the box office” movie, Blood In Blood Out, resides here in a prime position. It took him years to track down, since he only allows himself to purchase VHS tapes in person from places like swap meets, thrift stores, and flea markets. The rest, the Forrest Gumps, the Sleepless in Seattles, the Scarfaces occupy overflow seating, i.e. stacked in piles or secondary cases across the room.
“I started collecting them totally by accident,” Shea says. “I left teaching to become a full-time writer, and I got my first office—a sublet in a small section of a personal-injury lawyer’s office. It only had room in there for one desk and one IKEA bookshelf.” Slowly, Shea began filling that shelf with movies from the thrift store near his house until the hobby snowballed into a fixation. “At some point, I just decided I’m going to buy every single movie that I’ve seen. I’m just going to hunt it down. I have been doing that now for 11 years.”
It might seem obsessive—the cataloging, the archiving, the foraging—but that’s kind of Shea’s bread and butter. He’s a culture buff who flourishes within the confines of specificity. His Substack, Good Movie, hinges on this concept in part, with pieces like “The Stats Behind Harry’s Run in When Harry Met Sally,” in which he asks such critical, yet oft-overlooked questions as What was [Harry’s] top speed? How many calories did he burn? How many steps did he take? What was the weather like that night, and did it help or hurt his performance? How far did he travel, and where does that distance place him in the pantheon of other rom-com runners? What was Harry’s average mile time? Or wonders “How Many Questions Are Asked in Each Christopher Nolan Movie?” (445 questions during Inception’s 148 minutes of runtime). Or uncovers that Jimmy from 2 Fast 2 Furious is actually the least fast (jury’s out on his fury) character in the entire franchise.
His new podcast, co-hosted by fellow writer Jason Concepcion, Organizing Things, is built on the premise that films can be broken down into nitty-gritty categorizations: “Movies the Worst Guy You Know Says Are His Favorite” or “All the Stuff That Happens in The Wolf of Wall Street.” It’s the same devotion to film minutiae that others overlook that he’s built into both a career and a burgeoning cultural destination. The title is self-explanatory, the concept is simple enough, and yet no one apart from Shea, who never even expected to become a writer, let alone a podcaster, has been able to launch the idea into the world.
Shea Serrano was born and raised in San Antonio with his three younger sisters. His parents, who were just 17 at the time, both dropped out of high school when he was born to go into the workforce, with his father ultimately forging a guardian’s signature to enlist in the Army, underage.
“We grew up on welfare and Section 8 housing,” Shea says. “That being said, everybody I grew up with was living the same life, so I didn’t know that wasn’t how it was. You watch whatever movies, and they’ll tell you that every poor neighborhood is the most dangerous place you’ve ever been in your life. Crimes were happening where I was growing up, but I never felt unsafe or unloved or like I had been abandoned or whatever.”
It was in this neighborhood that his love for film was first nurtured. At around 8 years old, Shea saw his first movie ever, Kickboxer, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. “I was just sitting there seeing a very handsome, muscled-up dude who is protecting everybody,” he says. “And I was like, ‘That’s fucking cool.’” But the movie that altered the course of his life and sent him down a never-ending path toward cinematic salvation, came in the form of Mortal Kombat. His uncle and aunt had taken a 14-year-old Shea along to see the release, a spin-off of the popular ’90s video game of the same name.
“I felt like my brain was on fire watching it. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he says. “I felt like my heart was going to explode. I wanted to just stand up and start clapping. And it was right around then where I was like, ‘This feeling I have right now, I’m going to chase this feeling forever.’” It would take decades, well into his following an entirely different career path, for Shea to uncover that sensation, the joy of movie magic, in his own work.
“Right around 17 or 18, when you’re graduating high school, the world starts to press itself down on you,” Shea tells me. “It was very clear to me that the neighborhood was eating up some of my friends already. I knew I needed to get out of there. Otherwise, all the stuff that was happening to everybody else was going to end up happening to me, and my mom knew it too.”
After graduating—the first in his family to do so—his mother gave him an option: college or the military. “She was like, ‘Great, I’m proud you finished high school. Way to go. I’m going to drop you off at Sam Houston State or I’m going to drop you off at Fort Sam Houston.” Shea chose the former.
After a brief stint studying criminal justice (“It looked cool to me to have a leather gun holster under your sports jacket”) that ended after Shea found analyzing photos of a real-life murder scene unsettling, he pursued a degree in psychology with the intention of becoming a teacher and school counselor.
“Teaching was like the first job that I had where it was hard and I didn’t want to quit. When you encounter the moment that it gets hard, you either say to yourself, ‘I’m going to get out of here and do something else,’ or you go, ‘Oh, I want to be good at this. I’m going to work to be good at this,” he says, comparing his first year in teaching to Dangerous Minds. In that film, Michelle Pfeiffer plays a Marine turned high school teacher who is metaphorically run off by her students on her first day. Rather than throwing in the towel, she doubles down. “That’s what happened with teaching,” Shea says. “I thought I was going to do that job forever, honestly. I had no idea writing was nine years away.”
It wasn’t until 2007, though, that he made his foray into journalism. His wife, Larami, pregnant with their twins, was experiencing medical complications that confined her to bed rest. The expectant parents were now down an income stream and completely reliant on Shea’s marginal teaching salary.
“In my head, I was thinking, ‘All right, well, I just need to float us for these five months. I need to make an extra $400 or $500, and that’ll keep us with a house and a car,’” Shea recalls. He applied to Target, Walmart, and various restaurants in the area, only to hit a wall in the hiring process because he already had a full-time job. “I couldn’t work when they needed me to work. I was like, ‘Fuck, what am I going to do?’”
At his wit’s end, he turned to Google, looking up occupations and side gigs he could do from home. “Writer” popped up as an option. “All you needed, to my knowledge, was the internet and the computer. I was like, ‘Well, I got both of those, so I’ll try to do that.’”
He figured if he was working every day from around 6 a.m. through 7 p.m., hoping to spend some time with his wife and one day his children, he’d have around two hours a night to write, or 56 hours a month. “I needed to make over $500 with those 56 hours. So any writing assignment I took on, I needed to be averaging probably somewhere between $15 and $20 an hour.”
Shea took to cold-calling local newspapers around Houston, where he was living at the time. “I’m a writer. Can I write for you?” he’d ask editors over the phone, often to be told, “It doesn’t work like that.” But he was tenacious, and eventually convinced the alternative weekly the Houston Press to take him on in a freelance capacity, writing about the local rap scene. He leveraged those clips into bylines for bigger publications: the LA Weekly, the Village Voice, MTV, ESPN. By the end of his first year freelancing, he was making an extra $1,000 a month and found himself wondering if he could double, even triple, that income. Nine years into his career’s double life, Shea officially left teaching for a full-time job at Bill Simmons’s Grantland, quickly followed by a gig at The Ringer, where he spent six years.
“To be [at The Ringer], to be with that group of people—you’re in a room with some of the most talented writers in the country, getting to pitch ideas with them,” Shea says. “You’re talking about sports with Bill Simmons or pop culture with Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion or movies with Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins. You’re getting to do all that stuff, and it just feels cool. It feels like, ‘Am I in this? Am I in this group?’” While at The Ringer, Shea did what he does best: podcasting and writing about the little things across sports and culture that get lost in the big picture. He wrote about Tim Duncan, Houston, the World Series, all through his highly specific blend of dry humor and earnestness. Meanwhile, in a prescient move, he shared his pieces and opinions on Twitter, building something that’s now considered a critical component of a successful writing career: a massive and tapped-in audience.
He first realized the power an online following could wield sometime around 2013. Shea had published a rap coloring and activity book, taking part in the typical song and dance of a traditional media press push: coverage in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, a spot on MTV. His book sold only about 1,000 copies, which didn’t “seem right” to him. How could all that chatter generate so few sales? He posted an Amazon link to the book from his Twitter (now X) account. A few hours later, the book was the number one bestseller in rap, and within a week it had sold 8,000 copies.
“I realized that [an online presence] could be weaponized,” Serrano says. “Everything sort of changed from there.”
Over the years, Shea became a near inescapable presence across social media. (On Twitter, he was my own introduction to the world of cultural criticism when I was still a teenager.) Nowadays, across Substack, X, and Instagram, he has amassed an audience of more than 600,000 subscribers and followers that have turned into an engaged, culture-hungry community in his newsletter’s chat, debating the best movie villains of all time (Hannibal Lecter and Jordan Belfort make the list) and greatest single-location set design (The Invite, The Truman Show) and pitting Tom Hanks’s filmography against Leonardo DiCaprio’s (the verdict is split but leaning heavily toward Hanks). He’s leading watch-alongs, with corresponding threads, of The Thomas Crown Affair, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey. Shea’s readers, and now listeners, are just as obsessed as he is with culture and with the people, places, and intricacies that make movies tick.
He’s taken that audience wherever he’s gone, from The Ringer to his five New York Times bestselling books and now, working on his own, to his Substack. While he’s been able to drum up a substantial business from this subscriber base, he has also leveraged it for good: raising $3,000 for a parking lot attendant, $134,000 for Hurricane Harvey victims, and, most recently, funding transportation to get Adrian, a student from San Antonio, to his scholarship at Vanderbilt.
“I think it’s a net positive,” Shea says of social media. “I don’t know how you exist as a writer without it. But I do daydream about not being on the internet. My number one writer fantasy is: I live in a cabin in the woods, on a mountain, and I have a big beard and a heavy sweater and I type a novel over four years. Then I give it to somebody and I disappear, and then the novel sells itself. Could you imagine your writing selling itself? That sounds awesome, but I can’t do that. I have to post online.”
That desire to post, the necessity of it as a creator in the modern age, coupled with his urge to bet on himself and his independence, has brought Shea here, to the launch day of his newest podcasting venture. He tells me he spent years averse to the thought of it—“I just wanted to write and go about my business”—but after he got the cadence of his newsletter down to a science, he got the itch to expand his body of work. He realized he could write notes out beforehand rather than simply going off the cuff, “I can sound smart if I do that,” Serrano jokes, and build off his existing articles—and vice versa. Podcasting has become a symbiotic complement to his writing.
“It just seemed like something I wanted to try,” he says. “It’s just a fun thing to work on, especially if you get to do it with somebody who is (a) your buddy and then also (b) as talented as Jason is.” Then there’s the money. Shea does the math aloud for me: “I’ve done enough of these things to know that if we were to take this specific project somewhere else, I would probably get maybe four grand per episode,” he says. “I know I have that number here on Substack. If I can get more paid subscribers, then I’ll come out a little bit ahead and be able to do it all on my own.”
Shea’s approach to his work in general is more mathematical than meets the eye. The way he speaks about his current business venture and foray into independent media is a throwback to his entry into journalism: both are broken down by metrics, numbers, and figures that tell him whether he can stay afloat. “That was a thing I learned early on,” he says. “That’s the pressure of, if you’re a parent or a husband or a wife, being responsible for other people.”
Despite the knowledge that people are counting on him financially, Shea keeps coming back to the joy of movie-watching as part of a community, of writing in the public sphere for a rapt audience. None of that happens without taking a chance, without putting oneself out there the way he does now, the way he did almost 20 years ago when he cold-called the Houston Press.
“At least for the beginning of your career, you’re going to be told no almost exclusively,” Shea says. “You just have to decide: are you going to keep going or are you not going to keep going? That’s really all there is.”
For a closer look at the numbers behind Shea’s business model, read our companion piece in On Substack.
2026-09-05 21:02:59
This week, we’re emulsifying confections, celebrating practical magic, and asking, “What’s a Kafkini?”
WISDOM
Wendell Berry, a novelist, poet, essayist, and farmer, passed away earlier this week. The lessons he imparted will endure.
— in Your High School Creative Writing Teacher
In the fall of 1987, I took a writing class at the University of Kentucky called “Composition for Teachers.” I had no idea who the teacher, Wendell Berry, was. The class met on Tuesday afternoons in Miller Hall, built in 1898, one of the oldest buildings on campus.
On that first day, Berry walked in looking like every farmer I’d ever seen standing around a tobacco warehouse telling lies. He wore khakis, brown lace-up shoes with rubber soles, and a blue button-down shirt. His hair was gray on the sides, and his face was tan except for a circle of white on his forehead, the mark of a man who works under the sun and wears a brimmed hat. He didn’t look like an academic. He looked like my father—an austere and simple farmer, the grooves in his cheeks when he smiled like plowed rows.
In an interview published around this time in Our Other Voices, Berry was asked why he was returning to the University of Kentucky after quitting teaching a decade earlier in 1977. He replied that those who were concerned about education should do something about its demise.
Our first assignment was to write an essay on a topic of our choice. I can’t remember what topic I chose, but I’m sure I tossed it off with the same blind aplomb I wrote most required academic drivel. I was in my last semester of college, and I had never received anything less than an A in an English class.
When he returned the essays to the class, there was a large red F on the top of my paper. The University of Kentucky didn’t even allow F’s. They used E’s, but there it was, almost an inch tall, the first I’d ever received on a piece of writing in my life.
During those first few weeks, the class had been thick with schism. An off-balance theological argument occurred between Berry and some woman who thought Flannery O’Connor was a Baptist. Soon a pedagogical flap occurred when an earnest disciple of the latest College of Education writing method could not believe that Berry didn’t endorse the idea of prewriting through journaling, mapping, or bubbling. Berry didn’t suffer fools or process over product gladly.
I don’t want to leave the impression that the class was a crucible or that Berry was dour, judgmental, or embittered. Just the opposite. Even at his most didactic, his comments in class were less like sermons and more like a call to arms. His intensity came from love and belief in what he was doing, rather than severity.
Plus, Berry had a great sense of humor. His blue eyes crackled with mischief when he told us a good story, which was often, and sometimes he entertained us with sample cheers from his Port Royal athletic days (“Go back, go back, go back into the woods/Your team’s all farmers and your coach is no good”).
“He’s like Jesus with a plow,” my friend Dina said one day at lunch after we had gotten another set of essays back. This time we both received D’s. “And we’ve gotta walk beside him with our hands on that plow if we’re going to learn anything from him.”
Before midterms, most of the class dropped out until only twelve of us remained. The apostle metaphor was not lost on us.
Because we were going to be English teachers, he expected a great deal from us—and was frustrated by our inability to think for ourselves. Every day, he told us to think, to rise above ignorance. He warned that bad writing would bring “boredom, tears, and shame” in later life. A teacher’s job, he told us, was to arm children with tools against loneliness.
He read aloud to us—Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Dante’s Divine Comedy—his sonorous voice rolling through that old room like the voice of God, past the high glass windows, the banging radiator, the worn wooden floors. He disdained the idea that these great works should be studied “as literature,” which he felt caused an unnecessary and sterile disconnect between the work and its instructive value.
“At some point, each of you will have to stand in front of someone,” he told us one dark November afternoon, “and tell them that you love them.” He considered those great works as instructions on how to do just that.
Berry believed literature mattered because life mattered. We didn’t read King Lear merely to know something about King Lear. We read it because we were trying to figure out how human beings should live with one another.
At some point, I wrote a pithy little essay about body image, and Mr. Berry returned the paper with a C+ on it and a note that read: “This is just good enough that I wish it were better.” It was the kind of comment that a young writer remembers forever. He was saying, “I can see what this could be. I can see what you’re trying to do.”
FRACTURED REALITIES
FOOD
Turns out witnessing someone you revere crash out after their emulsion goes awry feels both relatable and awe-inspiring.
— in The Broken Elbow Newspaper
Claire Saffitz is an online baking personality that I greatly admire. I say this because there’s a lot of bakers and chef personalities that annoy me. I’m a petty person, with a low tolerance for cloying precociousness on camera. I watched a lot of Food Network growing up, I’ve been keeping tabs on these people for a long time.
[. . .]
It’s really scary to try a new recipe, and when it doesn’t go right you feel like you’ve wasted your entire life or something. I spent 3 years working at a bakery and experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life. I almost had a nervous breakdown when I couldn’t manage to draw a horse with butter cream on a birthday cake, and an attempt to fulfill a special order for gluten-free pop tarts that made me walk away in defeat.
This is not even mentioning that you can bake a tray of cinnamon rolls 1000 times perfectly and then the 1001th time they come out raw in the middle because there was something else in the oven drawing heat away or something, you don’t even fucking know why to be honest.
Claire recently posted a video where she tries to make a homemade Kinder Bueno bar. She struggles so much here, and, because I know the exact flavor of failure on display here, the video made me laugh my ass off and it made me feel closer to Claire as well.
At 7:13 in the video she tries to emulsify caramel and hazelnut with butter to make a praline. Because the temperature of the two ingredients isn’t perfectly right, the mixture breaks apart. Claire tries to save it with an ice cube, knowing it probably won’t work. It doesn’t, and the praline becomes expensive and disgusting garbage.
Claire is obviously upset but then she has a full crashout when the camera man tries to comfort her, and that’s my favorite part of the video. I’ve had so many experiences like this and I think the funniest shit in the world gets spoken during a crashout. In those moments, you just want to marinate in anger and misery. This is the masochism of cooking.
THINGS THAT SHOULDN’T GO TOGETHER
NEW WORLDS
Over 1,000 autonomous AI agents set up secret message boards to communicate with one another, culminating in the rise and fall of three virtual civilizations and one real-world cyberattack. Dwarkesh Patel explains.
— in Dwarkesh Podcast
Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation’s scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it’s kinda hard to parse the storyline.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English.
ALL DRESSED UP
CONTROVERSIES
John Galliano rebuilt his career in fashion years ago after the antisemitic and racist remarks that got him fired from Dior. But when the Met’s Costume Institute announced—and then canceled—an exhibit dedicated to his work, it reignited debate over how the industry should reckon with his legacy.
—Rosalind Jana in Lint
I was at first struck by this counter-narrative that has taken hold which emphasises Galliano’s contrition for his antisemitism. They ask why we can’t just forgive and see taking away the Met exhibition as a remnant of the cancellation age. A lot of this commentary is a bit vague about Galliano’s antisemitism. It seems very possible to me that some people are not grappling with the full horror of what Galliano has said and done precisely because over the last three years the term “antisemitism” has been cynically used by some to describe opposition to the genocide in Gaza. [. . .]
Galliano has publicly made amends on various fronts: addiction treatment, meetings with Jewish community leaders, a course of study in Jewish history and the Holocaust, apologies given in court and since, including in his statement about the exhibition’s cancellation. But he has also slipped in sometimes surreal ways. In 2013, two years after his firing from Dior, he appeared in public in an outfit and hairstyle with strong Hasidic overtones, which led to his publicist issuing a rebuttal including the incredible line: “John has worn big hats and long coats for many, many years” (you can find my slightly more psychoanalytic reading of the incident here).
When Galliano has been given the opportunity to speak directly, and not through publicists, about his antisemitic outbursts, his explanations have been evasive. In Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low more than a decade on, Galliano was incurious about where the words came from and had to be reminded of the multiple incidents that led up to his conviction for antisemitic and anti-Asian abuse by a Paris criminal court. In her review for the Washington Post, Rachel Tashjian put it perfectly: “I left the film unconvinced that he knows what he said and why it was hurtful. I also left the film thoroughly convinced of his genius, unsure whether I liked him—and very charmed by him.” I also do not doubt either his genius or his charm.
Neither does the industry. That is why I have also been struck by the plainly false suggestion that he has spent any extended length of time out in the cold. Just two years after being sacked by Dior, he was doing a residency at Oscar de la Renta brokered by Anna Wintour. The following year he joined Margiela. In January 2024, his unofficial tenth-anniversary show was received rapturously. He is now off to Zara, where his first presentation drops this month. He has not spent the last fifteen years in exile—just slightly to the left of the spotlight.
Others fear that by cancelling the exhibition in response to pressure from donors and the public, the Met has lost its curatorial autonomy. Again—really? How much curatorial autonomy did we really think that there would be in this collaboration between the Met and Vogue and the entirety of the luxury fashion industry?
The Met’s Spring exhibition is not like other exhibitions, because its opening on the first Monday in May is marked by the Met Gala, fashion’s biggest media event of the year, where the dress code celebrates the exhibition’s subject. The Gala, overseen by Wintour, is a fundraiser for the Costume Institute and has raked in over $200m to date. The donations represent only a tiny fraction of the Gala’s commercial worth. This May’s edition generated $1.56 billion in Media Impact Value—the fashion industry’s standard measure of earned media, as calculated by the analytics firm Launchmetrics. It is the highest figure ever recorded for any red carpet, the Oscars included. MIV is not revenue. It assigns a dollar value to every post, placement and interaction, and measures exposure rather than money changing hands. The MIV is the figure brands use to justify what they spend on tables and attendees, and an excellent indicator of how much is riding on this one night tethered to a four-month exhibition.
The Met Gala is a curated affair, and its organisers are allergic to political controversy. Remember when the Artists4Ceasefire pins were curiously absent from the 2024 Met Gala red carpet, having appeared on lapels at the Oscars not two months before? This made the announcement of the Galliano exhibit surprising, and for a brief time it seemed that Wintour’s personal devotion to Galliano and love of his work had overwhelmed her own strategic nous. It took a month for cultural and commercial forces to reassert themselves, with donors reconsidering bequests and trustees in revolt.
THE VARIETY OF LIFE
WITCHCRAFT
Over three decades ago, Alice Hoffman published her novel Practical Magic, which would go on to become a movie adaptation with an ardent following. With the release of the film’s sequel, she reflects on the real-life motifs that inspired her witchy world.
— in Writing Magic
Thirty years ago, when Practical Magic was released as a novel, and then as a groundbreaking film that became a cult classic, sisterhood was overlooked. There were very few novels and even fewer films that focused on the inner lives of women and the importance of our complicated relationships filled with loyalty, family history, and friendship. Practical Magic 2 is being released at a time when women’s relationships matter more, and sisterhood is seen as central to our lives. We have opened our hearts and minds to who we are to each other. A coven can be a gathering of witches, but it can also be a sisterhood we are born into, or a sisterhood we choose: the people who are there for us when we need them most.
Sisterhood and magic are at the heart of Practical Magic 2. The film is romantic, and love is everywhere, but at the center of everything there is the deep and abiding solidarity that binds Sally and Gillian Owens together. In the Owens family, romantic love was destructive in the past, and has always been seen as a curse, while family love is the magic that can rescue you. In Practical Magic 2, the magical grimoire of enchantments, known as the Book of the Raven, is found in the library by Jet Owens. Sally and Gillian’s beloved aunt discovers that there is a way to break the family curse, but doing so includes great sacrifice. What wouldn’t we do for the people we love—our sisters, our aunts, our daughters, our dearest friends? Sally and Gillian are willing to make any sacrifice to rescue Sally’s daughter, Kylie, just as their aunts, Jet and Franny, have always been willing to sacrifice themselves for the nieces they had taken in and raised.
Sally turned away from magic as a child and has never come to terms with the fact that the Owens family is different. Witchery runs in the family, and because of their history they have flaws and talents others don’t. But isn’t every family different? Don’t we all have our own individual histories and experiences? For me, growing up in a family that was unlike any other in the neighborhood was difficult, and like Sally, all I wanted was to be normal, to have holidays and birthdays and family dinners and be like everyone else. I felt that if I wasn’t careful, if I stayed out under the stars and danced all night, at a solstice celebration or in my own backyard, I would be headed for trouble.
READING THE ROOM
Art & Photography: Isabel Rose, , , , ,
Video & Audio:
Writing: , , Rosalind Jana,
English comedian and actress Ellie Taylor is now on Substack, where she’ll be writing about “how great pistachio butter is and how much happiness a designated flannel washing basket” can provide.
Gene Wang, a 30-year veteran of the Washington Post sports section, has launched DMV Sports to cover the collegiate teams in and around the nation’s capital.
LSU football columnist Scooter Hobbs has brought his coverage of the Tigers to Substack.
Just in time for the U.S. Open, Tony Hagen’s Gay Tennis Podcast is now on Substack.
John Owning and Marcus Mosher are publishing The Blue Star Bulletin, an in-depth look at the Dallas Cowboys, on Substack.
U.K. country music podcast Girls in Low Places has launched a companion Substack with bonus content for their community.
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 out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-08-30 21:03:01
had her own heroes. Maybe one of the most influential was a woman in town whose look she modeled her own on: bright red lips, big, bleached-blond hair. Parton’s mother called this woman “trash.” The singer thought she was glamorous.
Parton’s death this week had me revisiting her image as much as it did her storied musical catalog. It was hard not to: some of her most memorable jokes and quotes and bits were about just that. As much as Parton loved the specific look she embodied, she was smart enough to know how people would perceive her. Popular music has long been a man’s game, whether it’s the suits calling the shots at the label or the disc jockeys deciding who gets played and who doesn’t. Country music in the ’50s and ’60s was still very much a boys’ club (not much different now, as we’ve seen in recent years), and a busty, blonde girl-next-door with a high soprano could’ve easily been dismissed as nothing more than a sex symbol. But she was always one step ahead.
From the start of her popularity, critics, comics, and the general public ogled and guffawed, but Parton always bit back. Her quick-witted responses to comments about her boobs, her hair, her nails, her style made it clear that she was never going to sidestep the conversation; she was ready to have it and not at anyone’s expense. One of my favorite videos of Parton is from her 1995 appearance on Letterman, where she listed her pet peeves. She started with a joke about accountants not understanding how expensive it is for her to look that good and ended with “Nobody notices I have a great ass too.” Her sense of humor wasn’t just a suit of armor or some play on the dumb-blonde trope—it helped create a whole new type of pop character who felt both camp and authentic.
More than anything, Parton’s own jokes about her aesthetic allowed space for her talent to breathe. She didn’t dwell on the early negativity and condescension. By turning gross wisecracks into material of her own, she let her incredible songwriting and musicianship take center stage. Being a bestselling artist is one feat, but doing so on the strength of your own great songwriting is rarer than we allow ourselves to appreciate. Many of those songs have become essential parts of the country and pop canons, living multiple lives during her lifetime. They surely have a few more to live in her absence now; streams for her catalog have already jumped in the days following the news of her death.
For Parton, artistry and presentation were part of the same package. She couldn’t read sheet music but could expertly play a guitar with long, sharp acrylic nails. Her hyper-feminine glamour was not isolated from her genius. It’s what separated her from the boys’ club and empowered generations of women in country music to pick up their own guitars and pens (with or without the nails).
Parton knew there was room for fun in brilliance. A genius didn’t need to merely be studious or serious in their presentation. Parton’s talent was just as present in her gaudiness as it was in her songs, something the world has been mourning losing as much as they have been celebrating ever having. The flood of online memorial posts shows how her fans around the world have her one-liners as ingrained in their brains as deeply as they do her vivid songwriting. Few likely believed that the woman who embraced low culture so warmly would become the gold standard. But Parton always knew she would have the last laugh.
2026-08-29 21:02:20
This week, we’re picking fish scales off our clothes, asking seemingly simple questions, and eating Bell Jar–inspired confections.
GROWING UP
Taylor Tomlinson remembers her 20s as effervescent and shiny. But was that actually such a good thing?
— in Actually, Nevermind
Lately, I’ve also been feeling like I’ve lost my spark. It’s not so much that I’m depressed (I am, but it’s very manageable compared to what I’ve experienced historically so I try not to complain), it’s that my personality seems to have changed. It doesn’t feel like a temporary problem to solve. I think I may have lost my spark permanently. When I watch old videos from my twenties, I am astonished by how differently I carry myself and how strange my own voice sounds. It’s higher, full of momentum, like a high school senior during the last week of class, ready to get on with the rest of her life. Twenty-something Taylor was wittier and prettier. She had the spark.
I love being in my thirties. I spend my time however I want. I only hang out with friends who fill me up. I spend my money on stupid stuff like antique stained-glass windows, star-shaped ice cube trays, and hand-painted lamps with color-changing bulbs. I don’t care what (most) people think of me. I want things like comfort and safety and connection rather than fame and respect and accolades. I only flirt with people I really, really like. I turn down perfectly good romantic partners (some who are even objectively too good for me! The teenage Lizzie McGuire cartoon version of me in my head is VERY confused), rather than staying for a couple of years because the idea of being alone makes me panic. I think I might be good at my job and worthy of love. I know the cost of overworking myself, so I try not to (at least, not as much). It’s not that I don’t want to be the “greatest of all time” or whatever, it’s that I no longer believe it’s possible—not just for me, but for anyone. Basically, I’ve grown up.
This is all very healthy. But stability and self-worth are not sparkly. The spark was a highly effective cocktail of blind faith, agonizing hope, chaotic confidence, and delusions of grandeur. It made me believe I was special. I don’t feel all that special anymore. And if I’m not special, I’m not sure how to re-light the fire, how to motivate myself. I don’t believe a certain opportunity, job, or partner will fix me anymore. Now I look at the sword in the stone and shrug, “I mean if it comes out, then I’ll just have a sword. So what?”
Being sparkly was hard. I had to work for it. Some folks just have “It”—I don’t. I have a mental illness, yes. But not It. (All the times I felt the most special, I was having a hypomanic episode. But that’s another, longer story—one I tell in my book.) It is that intangible, undeniable charm. That magnetic superpower you’re either born with or spend your whole life coveting. My brother has It. He is oozing with It. He’s MADE of It. I, on occasion, produce very small amounts of It. And whenever I do, I carefully gather It up, and save It for when I really need It. For me, It’s not a renewable resource.
ORACLES
ACCESSIBILITY
Steve Way reflects on nearly four decades of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
— in Steve Way’s Substack
Before I go somewhere new, somebody makes a phone call.
I know I’m always welcome. The call is to find out whether there’s a step at the front door, and if there is, how many, how big, and whether the ramp they keep describing as “around back” is an actual ramp or a sheet of plywood somebody’s cousin laid down in 2011. Or if there even is a ramp at all.
I once called and sent a friend inside a new coffee shop with a step to ask if they had a ramp. After I made a video calling them out for not having one, people on social media called me evil, petty, a douchebag, and said I should go somewhere else.
Thirty-six years into the Americans with Disabilities Act, here’s the most useful thing I know about access. Access has almost nothing to do with how anybody feels about me.
People think it does. They use the word the way they’d use “hospitality.” We’re a very accessible workplace and everyone here is so accommodating. What they mean is that they’re nice, and if I showed up with a problem, they’d want to help.
I believe them because they’re usually telling the truth about themselves.
And then I get to the door and there’s a huge step.
The step doesn’t know they’re nice. It has no opinion about me at all. Somebody drew it on a piece of paper before I was born, a contractor poured it, an inspector signed off, and now it’s a fact sitting in concrete. Every good intention in that building is standing on the other side of it, waving.
Access is a series of decisions made in advance by people who never met me and never will. The architect, the city, the guy who set the budget, the person who chose which bathroom to renovate and which one to leave alone. They all decided whether I’d get in the room years before anyone knew there was going to be a me.
The building doesn’t know my name, so it doesn’t like me or dislike me. It has a step or it doesn’t.
Once you see it that way, the ADA stops being an abstraction and turns into one of the more clear-eyed things this country ever passed. The law was written to understand that goodwill runs out.
Goodwill is real and shouldn’t go unnoticed. It’s also unreliable, unevenly distributed, and impossible to schedule. It depends on whether the manager on duty is having a good day, the person at the desk finds you sympathetic, or you’re the kind of disabled person people enjoy helping. I can tell you from experience that’s a category with a strict dress code and office hours.
Nice people are wonderful, but you can’t build a life on being liked. If my ability to attend a meeting, use a bathroom, vote, get an education, or hold a job depends on somebody deciding I’m worth the trouble that morning, then what I’ve got is a lucky streak. Lucky streaks always end.
LITERARY EATS
COOKING
A private chef in rural England shares, in sensory detail, what it looks like to work for your food.
— in A Private Chef
I take a moment to consider this large wild Sea Trout that I hang up to inspect, my thumb looped through the tag that twists through its mouth and gills. Stamped with a number from the Environment Agency to prove that it hasn’t been poached (pardon the pun), returned from its journey back to the river of its birth from the sea to be caught, killed and tagged. I carefully place it in front of me on the table and study its markings. Silver and gold, speckled and mottled, iridescent like the old Tudor glass you can pull from the mud of the Thames if you have a keen eye, centuries-old glass that shimmers through the spectrum despite the passing of centuries. The trout’s eye, clear as glass, gills the deep, rich colour of blood.
With the back of a small knife with a blade as long as my index finger, I run it backwards from the tail to the head to begin removing the tiny soft scales that stick to everything and will likely appear for the rest of the day, no matter how hard I try to keep them under control.
[. . .]
Using the back of the blade, held perpendicular to the skin on the fillet, I drag the knife from the tail to its collar, removing a fine layer of fat from the skin. This ensures that when cooked, it will be dry and crisp, removing the excess fat and moisture that might cause it to stick to the bars of the grill as it sits over broken-down embers of oak logs that burn in the hearth. The coals stutter and spit as the fat drips from the skin onto the coals below, as I press downwards using the back of my knuckles against the surface of the fish, flattening the skin as it blisters and chars in the fire. Fresh oregano, soft needles of rosemary and stalks of fennel with their pollen-filled flower heads picked from the bushes, tied into a bunch, bound tightly at one end with a thick knot of twine, dipped like a brush into olive oil and then onto the fish as it cooks. With a short length of slightly bent old copper pipe that I use to blow into the embers to stir up the fire, I prod and poke, lifting a bank of embers to one side of the hearth, and with a sharp crackle and rush of hot orange sparks, cinders spitting upwards as the oxygen feeds the fire as I move the hot, glowing ashes around. I leave one side of the hearth with a mound of slow-burning incandescence as I smash down the smouldering logs into cinders and ash.
Lefteris would have surely approved.
I pull off a small branch from a lemon tree that grows next to the fire, along with a handful of blossoms. The tiny white flowers with their ethereal smell, one that I know is surely what heaven smells like, as I crush the small set of leaves in my fist, releasing the citrus perfume and placing the deep green offshoot onto the coals to smoulder, watching the heat blacken and twist the leaves in a spiralling flourish of smoke for the last half a minute, to heighten the flavour of the fish as it rests on the side of the hearth.
With the tip of a knife, I lift up the trout one centimetre at a time, looking to see the golden charred edges where the skin met the heat, lifting carefully, gently prizing the crisp-skinned fillet away in one motion.
Scottadito.
Burned finger tips scorching my hands as I lift the fish away from the grill. I take a pinch of salt crystals and a small clutch of lemon blossoms, letting it fall onto the skin, oily and brittle, scorched golden and black as the coals went to work, offset with the small ivory flowers that pervade the warm afternoon with their Elysian scent.
And now that midsummer has passed, wild flower crowns that we wore on our heads as we danced now faded and withered, as the longest day passed, and now the bees will have learned that their daylight is just that tiny bit shorter, their innate understanding of the rhythm of the year, now tuned to accept that there is much to be done in preparation for the months that will follow.
WISDOM
ADOLESCENCE
As the internet becomes increasingly voyeuristic, can anything remain sacred?
While the bedroom was never designed to be a completely private space, it was at least oriented inwards, a backstage to your life. If you can close the door, you can escape the surveillance of your parents and peers, at least until dinnertime.
For a lot of teenagers, their room is the first space they ever had any control over, a key site of identity construction. I’m lucky to be able to say that was the case for me. My teenage bedroom was the primordial soup from which I was formed. There was nobody to call me a poser for sticking up NME posters of bands I’d never listened to, or for displaying cutesy goth-adjacent badges I was too shy to wear to school, trying on different versions of Sithara, makeover montage-style, until I found one that stuck.
In 1977, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber discovered that because bars and streets weren’t usually safe for teenage girls, the bedroom became the space where they could experiment with subculture, making zines and playing records. They called this ‘bedroom culture’. Mary Celeste Kearney expanded on this in 2007, explaining that girls were actively producing (not just consuming) culture in their bedrooms. They were playing the guitar, inventing dances, filming camcorder music videos and writing extremely graphic M/M fanfic about side characters from Les Misérables.
When social media and cameraphones arrived, this tech turned the purpose of the bedroom inside out. You could now willingly subject yourself to the surveillance of an unseen audience. [. . .]
Media theorist Erika Pearson came up with a term to describe this clash of privacy and performance: the glass bedroom. “Online, (…) there is a blurring between front-stage and back-stage: what feels like an intimate space can be under the watchful electronic gaze of a large unknown audience; what is being acted out as a front-stage performance could have no witnesses,” she writes.
This collapse is especially notable in the 2000s, when vloggers began to film videos in their bedrooms, perched on the edge of their all-white fairylight-strewn beds. Teen bedrooms have always been full of portals outwards (novels, TV screens, comics), but social media made that portal bidirectional.
McRobbie and Garber had suggested that the bedroom was a private place where there were “no risks involving personal humiliation or degradation,” but that was in the 1970s. A teen vlogger’s bedroom is exposed to an internet audience waiting to flay her alive.
Meanwhile, as bedrooms were being transformed into filming locations, teenagers found new places to express themselves. The 2000s were the golden age of highly customisable blogging platforms like MySpace and Piczo. When a 2008 article asked various teenagers about their blogs, one of them responded, “You can furnish it the way you want and paint it the way you want—and make it your room.” Even the metaphors were similar, with wallpapers, photo walls, guestbooks and bulletin boards.
Teenagers even created their own rules for behaving inside this metaphorical bedroom. Per the 2008 article about blogs: “Being over critical or unfriendly to your ‘host’ or otherwise showing insufficient respect for their personal space, tended to be frowned upon.” Anyone who’s ever opened the comments on an Instagram reel will know that this code of conduct has completely changed, unless it’s standard practice to stroll into someone’s bedroom, wrinkle your nose, and tell them that they “look like they’d give good hugs.”
During the 2020s, bedroom culture took on a new dimension when the Covid lockdowns sent us all back to our bedrooms. With nowhere else to go, bedrooms became the primary spaces available for self-expression, while the internet became the only route through which that expression could be seen by the outside world. It was easier than ever to film from your room, meaning the walls became even more porous. While 2010s creators like Zoella made content perched on their beds, 2020s vloggers like Emma Chamberlain recorded in theirs.
TikTok’s algorithm put content filmed by and for adults in front of teenagers’ eyes in a landscape where tween media was already disappearing. This period was full of discourse about how teenagers were dressing like adults, doing a full beat and slathering on anti-aging retinoids. But what about their bedrooms?
ART
Art & Photography: , , Blackberry Season,
Video & Audio:
Writing: , , ,
Omid Scobie, a British journalist, author, and TV writer, has launched Off Script on Substack, where he’ll be covering “media, entertainment, culture—and, yes, the royals.”
Historian Madeleine Pelling is now on Substack.
Former Scotland Yard detective Steve Keogh has launched a crime podcast on Substack where he’ll be offering “a better understanding of how detectives think and work.”
Matt Calkins, former lead sports columnist for the Seattle Times, is now on Substack.
Bernie Miklasz, a seasoned voice in St. Louis sports, has launched a publication on Substack, where he’ll be covering teams across Missouri.
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 out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-08-22 21:03:05
This week, we’re reading buzzy novels for free, turning cakes into canines, and squeezing our lemons while we still can.
LO-FI LIVING
Katie Lowe ditched some of the comforts, and distractions, of the modern world two years ago. Was it worth it?
— in Rayon
I’m coming up on the two-year anniversary of my analog experiment, which, day by day, feels less like an experiment and more like a new normal. Through writing, I’ve tried to unearth what my daily life looked like before I did this, to compare, but really, the way that I think about time and my role on the earth now is so changed that it’s almost impossible to truly understand my former self. Perhaps I shouldn’t try to compare or explain my growth, but instead, in showing how I spend time in the world now, you might understand where things diverged.
At 5pm, my day becomes extraordinarily quiet. Closing down my laptop or desktop computer and leaving my home office feels like stepping into a boat and rowing softly away from shore. My thoughts become slower and quieter as I row, the waves lapping softly as I re-enter domestic life. I wander downstairs, stare blankly into the middle distance, prepare a snack. Lap, lap, lap.
My partner arrives home late or not at all, is traveling for work. The openness of the evening stretches out ahead of me, a tinge of anxiety fills me. I put a record on. I’ve got a million things to do and I haven’t done a single one.
If I’m feeling avoidant, I pop open my laptop and check my personal email, nothing. Close the laptop again, reconsider.
I wander outside, in the garden I pick weeds for a half hour and then decide to call a friend who lives far away. We talk for two hours as my hands move amongst grass in the raised beds and pull stubborn wild carrots from our gravel patio. Then it’s time for dinner. Dinner is either hummus and carrots or immensely elaborate because there’s nothing else to do. After dinner, I’m exhausted and somehow haven’t sat down since my workday, so I lie on the couch with some music on and read 30-40 pages of a book until I’m tired. My partner crawls into bed, we talk about our days, looking each other in the eyes until one of us closes them.
Or instead, the weeding turns into garden work. I decide to move some plants that aren’t happy where they are; cut down the invasive bittersweet, again. I clean out the chicken coop, refill their waters, put down new shavings, add grain to their indoor and outdoor dispensers, give them each a snuggle against their will, and scrounge up some wilted vegetables from the fridge to feed them. All of this is done silently, task after task, nothing distracts me as my brain processes the day or an old argument with a friend or dreams about the future or considers absolutely nothing at all. I go inside and check my phone, a friend texts to meet at a bar. I wash up, scrubbing the dirt out from under my fingernails and walk there, because there’s plenty of time. I wait at the bar with nothing to do until my friend arrives, noticing people and perhaps ending up in a conversation. People talk to you when you look around the room, when you look like you are waiting for something. And it’s true, I am waiting for something. I’m waiting for something interesting to happen. The rest of the evening slips away and I climb into bed, open my book and fall asleep immediately.
[...]
Slowing down sounds admirable until you realize that most of slowness is just being bored and alone in your thoughts and rituals. Letting boredom in is transformative, yes, and being alone with your thoughts is a necessary daily practice for self-growth, indeed—but these can be uncomfortable states. Boredom was extremely uncomfortable for me when I first got rid of my phone. I felt that boredom was a failure, that my mind should either be productive all of the time when engaged or, when not engaged, immediately enter a flow state of total zen. I started to see boredom as a gray area that I waded through as I oscillated between the two ideals.
STILL LIFE
WRITING
The pressure on “writers” to be “influencers” continues to build.
— in Volume 0
I’ve never not worked, in addition to writing. My books are not a job, because no one needs them; their superfluousness is essential to their literariness, by my own estimation. I’ve published four, with one very cool indie press, Semiotext(e). Each was, as they say, well received. None were, as they say, top earning. After enough favorable reviews accrue, someone always comes out of the woodwork to offer me career advice about the next one. I have grown to hate this part.
My “day job,” though, is in advertising, where effective writing is disruptive, sticky, urgent. These descriptors are not applicable to literature. They are what sells the product, not the product itself. Is literature—a novel, a newsletter, this magazine—a product? In many ways, yes, but then again, no. The product, or what has the price tag, is only the access to something intangible.
Things have really changed since I published my first book, Surveys, a decade ago. When I speak with younger writers, it’s always about money, as in windfalls: huge advances, speaking fees, film rights. They sound, increasingly, like the people I know who work for startups. Now, everyone relies on the internet’s algorithmically produced numerical values to tell us what is popular or worthwhile. Analytics play a part in acquisitions. The definition of literary is being renegotiated so it may include, for example, influencer memoirs. All of this is a supreme distraction from the concentration it takes to write a great American novel.
On my way to a lunch meeting with a literary agent—someone who connects writers to publishers, thereby smoothing the path toward a bigger, longer, more moneyed career, ideally—I think about the word agency, how it has been pried from regular language recently and pasted all over startup ads.
Things are agentic now. Taste is a commodity. The state of authorship is being questioned. I’m being asked to discuss the commercial viability of my work, or maybe myself. All I can do is say I have it, even though I don’t believe that. Honestly, I don’t even want it.
I imagine the best-case scenario, my life with the perfect agent: a buffer between myself and those entities asking me to do regretful things such as listicles and selfie videos, which only take focus away from the books I’ve written. A publisher offering me an advance for a book I have yet to write. A grant committee selecting me based on merit and not a book-length application.
There is an author making waves right now because she was offered a cash prize and then crushed by its cross-promotional requirements—a video interview, an audio interview, a pre-interview, a photo portrait, festival participation, social obligations, an original piece for a journal, and then the endless email negotiations about timing and logistics.
Eventually, she admitted that she was not mentally well enough to do all this, that what was originally described as no-strings would end up derailing her from a plan to detach from society and simply write.
Whatever happened to having one bio photo for your entire life, to instability being a hallmark of the literary greats? It’s all so humiliating, the author laments, in a blog post. I wish, for her sake, she had paywalled it. If it’s not obvious, I love her.
The agent, one of many I’ve met over lunch, wears a suit. Or he wears a blazer and pants and a tie and a shirt, none of which come from the same store, it is clear. I’ve tried, up to the last minute, to put this off until the appointment naturally dissolved, and yet somehow, it is happening—proof enough, maybe, that I need an agent, if an agent can save me from unspecified lunches with men in non-suits.
DOG TREATS
MUSIC
A peek into the singer’s process and personal growth.
— in Dolly Parton
I think “Shattered Image” is a song that so many people relate to, especially in show business, because it’s more about how, well, you don’t have to be in show business for somebody to shatter your image or ruin your reputation.
But when I wrote that song, that was back during the early days when I was just really not used to people saying bad things about me, especially if they weren’t true. And some of them are true. And a lot of those stories in the tabloids, like I’ve always said, they’re based on some thread of truth, but usually it’s so frayed by the time they get done with it, you don’t hardly even recognize it.
But I don’t mind so much what they say about me as much as it hurts other people, and I hate that. I can handle it myself by saying what I say, doing what I do, and saying I don’t deny nor admit anything. But when they drag other people into it...
ART
FICTION
An excerpt from MacKenzie Scott’s new book, which she’s serializing on Substack.
Hannah sat on the edge of her bunk in her towel and shower shoes, looking down at her soap case. The piece of broken bottle was still buried deep in her soap. This self-improvement center dorm was just an old high school building, and the communal shower had operable windows, but still they had all agreed they would shower one at a time. They were like the passengers on Flight 93. Once a thing like murder with a plane full of commuters had happened, it could never happen exactly that way again. You can’t talk that way, her mother used to tell her. There’s nowhere good to go with outrage like that. But in high school Hannah had fallen for a girl who was dying of cancer, and her mother had argued against her love just like she argued against her rage. When Hannah read Barthes’ words in college, she clapped the book shut with satisfaction and took the bus to the cemetery to read it over the girl’s headstone, raining tears her mother would have cautioned against on her grave: “Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?”
It was almost Hannah’s turn in the shower.
She watched each of her bunkmates come back.
First Viola, her hair wrapped in a towel, awarded her scholarship for asking her neighbor a question.
A minute later Beth, her hair dripping, granted her free year because her elderly parents had tested positive for the gene.
Next Millicent, shivering. Every day Millicent had a new guess about why she was here.
But Hannah didn’t have to guess about herself. Hannah knew.
When the door to her classroom had opened last year, she’d been grading papers. Other teachers complained about it, and it was time-consuming, but it had always been her favorite part. She liked the little window it gave her into each kid’s mind and heart. They were all so different. When she was little herself, she had thought she would have a lot of kids someday, but Hannah still wasn’t married, and even if she had been, she wouldn’t want to have kids in a country like this. They had taken the fun out of the idea. Hannah liked potluck. She liked surprises.
Not the kind that had just come through the classroom door, though. The guy who opened it was a membership jackass. He’d been a jackass in high school too, and his jackboots were polished to a high shine. She had set her pen down and fixed a smile on her face. The smile was all she would give him. She would not say welcome. She would not say how can I help.
“Hannah Hamberger,” he said, as if it made him a standup comedian, just saying her last name. Somehow her fifth graders’ buoyant relish when they said it delighted her, but in his mouth the enjoyment was small and witless. “Sorry to interrupt.”
But he wasn’t sorry. He was happy to interrupt, anyone could see that. He flipped up one of the flaps on his goon belt and took out an apple. He set it on her desk and smiled a little. She had known what was coming, and she knew she wasn’t going to give him everything he had come for, so she smiled a little at the apple. She even thanked him for it. As a small counterbalance to what she knew she was about to do.
“You’re welcome,” he had said. He was grinning now. He was handsome, the kind of guy in high school who you just knew spent a lot of time looking at himself in the boys’ room mirror, when he wasn’t grabbing smaller kids by the shirt collar to drag them for swirlies in the stalls. “Take a bite,” he said.
Hannah did a little calculus in her mind and took a bite of the apple. Just a regular bite, but she felt almost dirty doing it, and her heart was racing. I will do these things, because I am about to defy him. That’s what she had been thinking.
“It’s good, right?”
“Yes.”
“Imported from Washington State. They have the best apples.”
Hannah didn’t think she had to say anything to that.
“Only the best for the best teachers,” he said.
The apple had left a sweet taste in her mouth she didn’t like. She’d still be tasting it even after he left, she thought.
“I was wondering if you had anything for me this time,” he had said.
“Not yet.”
“That’s what you said last time. It’s December. You’ve had plenty of time to get to know them.”
“Maybe I’m slow.”
“You weren’t in high school, I remember. You got the best grades. I was always trying to sit next to you to get a look. Two kinds of looks, actually.”
This time she didn’t smile.
That cost her. “And you were sort of political if I remember correctly. Isn’t that right?”
But Hannah wasn’t going to let him scare her this way. She wouldn’t let him change what she was going to do. She looked back down at her papers.
“What are you doing there?” He lifted his chin like a horse, pointing it at the papers on her desk.
“Grading papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
“English papers,” she said. He already knew she was an English teacher. It wasn’t really an answer.
“What kind though? The kind where they share opinions? The kind where they make things up? I could just read them myself, you know I could.”
FAUX FLORA
RECIPES
Andrew Gruel serves up a citrusy, savory, seasonal dish, all for about $5 a person.
— in American Gravy
One of the biggest myths about cooking with real, whole ingredients is that it has to be expensive. Trust me, it doesn’t.
This is exactly the kind of dinner I love—chicken, potatoes, butter, lemon and spices. Nothing here is complicated; you don’t need to hunt anything down at a specialty grocery store, and nothing here requires you to spend two hours in the kitchen.
The key is to take inexpensive ingredients and treat them properly. Bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs are one of the best values in the meat case, and in many grocery stores, they’re regularly on sale. They’re also incredibly forgiving. As chicken legs cook, the skin gets crispy while the meat stays juicy, and as they roast, all that chicken fat renders down onto the potatoes underneath.
Then we give the whole thing some “chef” treatment—lemon zest, paprika, and an optional dash of turmeric on the chicken before roasting, followed by a smoky lemon-butter sauce spooned over everything at the end.
One pan, four people—it’s real food that costs less than $20.
INTERIORS
Art & Photography: , , , , ,
Video & Audio:
Writing: , , ,
ESPN SportsCenter fixture Kenny Mayne has launched a Substack to deliver original videos and writing about the NFL.
U.K.-based podcaster and entrepreneur is now on Substack.
New York Post sports columnist Mike Vaccaro has joined Substack.
, former decoration director of House & Garden and the founder of Daydress, is now on Substack, where she’ll write about interiors, share styling ideas, and offer her finds.
British historian, broadcaster, and podcaster Suzannah Lipscomb is now on Substack.
The British arts organization The Barbican is now publishing on Substack.
New York sports publication is now live. The collective, which features former reporters from Sports Illustrated and The Ringer including , , and , will cover sports business and New York’s professional teams.
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 out of Substack’s New York office.
