The counterculture may have a reputation for open-mindedness, but that doesn’t always translate to a willingness to be captured on camera. But with Michelle Lhooq—a psychedelics and rave journalist investigating how counterculture is evolving—as our guide, doors started opening. We found ourselves welcomed to a “puppet rave” at an undisclosed location in downtown Los Angeles. But there was a catch: we’d have to act like we were part of the performance.
So we arrived early at a warehouse on which a sign read “Café Los Angelitos,” though it didn’t look like a café. People dressed in various renditions of crisp white shirts bustled around setting up instruments, running sound checks, and assembling the makeshift bar. The show was being put on by Poncili Creación, a Puerto Rican art collective known for its puppetry and performance art. One of the twin brothers behind Poncili sat our crew down and explained that we’d need to pretend we were running a restaurant out of the warehouse, and that we were there making a documentary about Michelle because we loved her so much. Easy enough.
As guests began arriving, we tried to get a sense of the crowd. L.A. art scene people, Michelle guessed. Dave exchanged contact information with a fellow owner of a Bolex film camera. Some guests went to the bar and ordered the “weed whacker,” a shot of tequila accompanied by a slap in the face with a leaf of romaine lettuce.
The show started. The twins got onstage—a garage door with a ramp into the warehouse—and started running around and shouting in a made-up language before stripping down to their underwear. And then the promised puppets appeared. But these weren’t puppets like we’d ever seen them: they were making strange sounds, caressing audience members, and being pulled from nearly every human orifice. We were, frankly, a little befuddled. And perhaps a little relieved when the dancing finally began.
For Michelle, events like this represent something more than a simple challenge to conventionality. “I think that raving is a kind of wisdom that lodges itself into your soul,” she told us, “and it’s up to you whether you choose to carry that forward or if you just think of it as purely a bubble of escapism.”
This week, we’re speedboating through a war zone, stalking a swan, crowning a cinnamon gum champion, and shelling peas.
JOURNALISM
Into the Strait
This story of an anonymous Citrini analyst who sailed the Strait of Hormuz in the name of investment research has to be read to be believed. “Analyst #3 decided—against the counsel of an Omani border agent, the implicit counsel of God, and the extremely explicit counsel of two Coast Guard officers holding assault rifles—that he was going to the center of the most consequential waterway on earth, during a live war, in a speedboat with no GPS, captained by a man he met three hours ago at a port inlet by pulling out a wad of cash.”
Dubai is still, in many ways, Dubai—Cipriani is still popping (albeit less popping than pre-crisis), all bellinis and meringue—but as you drive toward the border with Oman the veneer peels off in stages. American soldiers where there used to be nothing, empty roads where there used to be traffic, and then a rickety desert crossing in the middle of nowhere that looks like it was built to process livestock and has been repurposed for humans.
I made the mistake of snapping a picture—so sleep-deprived I was just holding my phone up, very obviously, as if I were a tourist at a scenic overlook rather than a restricted military border zone. The guard stared at me with the expression of a man trying to decide whether the person in front of him is a threat or simply an idiot. “Did you just… take a picture?”
The UAE side had been fine—stamp, back in the car. The Omani side was not. I got directed into what I can only describe as the worst desert DMV on Earth: four Pakistanis drinking tea barefoot, running back and forth between windows with the efficiency of people who’ve been doing this for decades and would very much like to continue doing it without incident. I’m standing there in a snapback and American Apparel sweatpants. Everyone ahead of me sailed through—stamp, gone. I handed over my Western passport and the two guards looked at it, looked at each other with the kind of wordless communication that is never good for the person being looked at, and one of them said, wait one sec.
Ten minutes later a man came downstairs who starkly contrasted everyone else at the crossing—traditional Omani hat, pristine dress, the kind of person who smells expensive and speaks perfect English and is clearly operating several levels above the guys stamping passports. “Nice to meet you.” He pulled me into a back room with tea and began asking questions with the unhurried patience of someone who already knows most of the answers and is mainly interested in watching you try to construct the ones he doesn’t.
He asked for the names of my parents. Where they’re from. Where I work. Then, delivered with the same pleasant tone: “You understand the rules here against photography, journalism, and intelligence gathering.” He asked about allegiances, the war, Israel. I told him I love everyone and I’m a tourist. He asked about my religion.
“Are you Shia or Sunni? What kind of Muslim are you?
“A bad one. I had three drinks two hours ago.”
He made me sign the pledge—a formal prohibition against reporting, photography, and information gathering, with full legal consequences—and watched me actually read it, which seemed to make him more suspicious rather than less, because apparently the expected behavior when presented with a legal document at a desert checkpoint is to just sign it, and the fact that I was reading it suggested I was the kind of person who thought carefully about what he was agreeing to.
Then he said he’d look through my bags and asked if there was anything constituting recording equipment. The gimbal I could explain away. The Ray-Bans are sunglasses. But the microphone kit—furry windscreen, professional recording setup—that would end the trip before it started.
He opened the Pelican case. Cigars on top. I offered him one. He took it, nodded with what I interpreted as genuine appreciation, lifted one layer of sweatpants, and closed the case.
Jack Mankiewicz fell in love with New York’s Mandarin duck years ago. With a new exotic visitor in town, he sets out once more, hoping to feel that magic again—even if his knees are worse now.
I woke up last week with a pretzel hangover and an unaccountable shooting pain in my knee. Stretching it out didn’t work, so I grabbed my phone and read some horrifying tweets about the war, Jake Paul, and Jake Paul’s opinion about the war. For some reason, that wasn’t making me feel better either, but then a text message came in from my friend Emily: Happy for you Jack.
It was a link to an article—Behold NYC’s First-Ever Trumpeter Swan. I read it in gleeful disbelief. A swan had landed in the East River—not just any swan, but a Trumpeter Swan, a bird that, according to the Trumpeter Swan Society, had never been seen in New York City. Had I heard of the Trumpeter Swan before that moment? No. Did I have a deadline that day? Yes. But as I learned more—largest native waterfowl in North America! Call like a honking bugle! Canadian!—I made other plans.
I checked R/NycBirds, saw that the swan had last been spotted in North Williamsburg, and decided that the best course of action was to walk through Brooklyn Bridge Park and take the ferry there from Dumbo. I packed my binoculars and my remaining pretzels into a bag and walked out the door.
It was a stunningly gorgeous day, the first really good one after a punishing winter of blizzards and arctic freezes and streets lined with dirty piles of snow full of dog shit and losing lottery tickets. But that had all melted away. Today we were all winners.
I walked through the park, listening to the sounds of the birds in the trees and looking out at the Financial District glistening across the river. I was overcome with that feeling that I had not experienced in years—the sense that the city is a present, that it has been gift-wrapped for you and all that’s left is to tear open the paper and see what’s inside. As I was busy feeling this feeling I bumped into a small child on a scooter and knocked him over. But he was fine. The good omens were piling up.
I stood on top of the ferry, tingling with anticipation as the Brooklyn Bridge receded behind me, and I saw the majestic swan flying through my mind’s eye. The mist from the river swept across my face, and the years started sliding out from under me. I was no longer in my thirties. I was a 25-year-old in a world full of adventure and possibility. I was an explorer, with undiscovered lands glimmering in the distance. I was still on my dad’s health insurance. I felt buoyant, carbonated, young.
I stepped onto the pier, and immediately saw a big white bird lazily circling in the water. One look at the crowd told me it couldn’t be the swan I had spent the morning dreaming of. People sat on benches drinking Spindrift and businessmen in suits blew clouds of strawberry vape smoke into the air. There was none of the electric atmosphere that had trailed the Mandarin Duck. Nobody gave a shit about this bird.
He must be farther upriver, I thought. That’s good. I had steeled myself for this. A real journey. But before I could turn to find the real swan, the boring one floated towards me. This couldn’t be him. That’d be too easy. I googled Trumpeter Swan just to be sure and was faced with the damning piece of evidence. He had a black beak.
The Mandarin Duck had plumage that made you feel like you were hallucinating. Neon Purple, Burnt Orange, and Emerald, all shining from within as if he’d been painted by Vermeer. This swan had a black beak. Regular swans have orange beaks and this one’s was black. That was it. What the fuck?
“Okay, he’s still a swan. He’s still beautiful. This is amazing,” I lied to myself. But I had seen swans before. This didn’t feel much different. And then I remembered that in his very name could be the answer to my numbness—this was a “Trumpeter” swan after all, with a voice so famous that E.B. White wrote a damn book about it. How could I judge him without hearing his call? So I waited. And waited. And waited. The only sound I heard was the frantic zipping and unzipping of a finance bro’s vest as he nervously recited his boss’s Cava order back into the phone.
I looked across the water, and at two women on the opposite railing wearing all the trademark garb of the birder—beige vests, bucket hats, and much bigger binoculars than mine. This was what I needed to remind myself of what I was seeing. The validation of the bird community. This wasn’t supposed to be a superficial experience. I wasn’t there for looks. This was a once-in-a-lifetime moment, the first instance of the Trumpeter Swan in New York City. Surely these more experienced birders would not take that for granted. But I was nervous.
This is probably a good time to admit that when it comes to birding, as with other areas in my life, like eating fiber and parallel parking, I am a complete dilettante. I love the sensational birds, but I rarely put in the work to learn anything about the others. I’ll show up for the Super Bowl, but I’m never there for the regular season. The few times I’ve engaged serious birders by mentioning my love for the Mandarin Duck, they look at me like I’m wearing a Nirvana shirt and have only heard Smells Like Teen Spirit.
I sidled over to them, trying to be inconspicuous, not wanting to reveal my status as an interloper, a thief of valor within the bird community. The two women were having a hushed conversation, which I assumed was about the sheen of the swan’s feathers or migration patterns. I leaned in to eavesdrop.
“The Triads pretty much ruled Hong Kong during the ’80s. But my friend in the embassy told me they’re making a comeback.”
“Oh wow, I didn’t know that.”
I was confused. We were standing there, staring at a bird of seemingly mythical rarity, and these supposed enthusiasts were talking about Chinese gangs. Did anybody give a shit about what was going on here?
Clear to me now how I could be
So careless as to throw you away—
I simply, blindly chose to remain
The thing for which you fell: a boy
Needful to say, I failed to rise
To the occasion of a dawn
So early, fiery, bare, full-on
I pulled the sheets up, closed my eyes
Decades later, I lower my head
Over a crib; and God knows what
Stellar sparks would fly and shoot
If our strange children ever met
I blame my love for artificial cinnamon flavoring on Northwest Iowa Tours.
My dad, a high school band director, spent his summers driving charter buses full of retirees to exotic places like Mt. Rushmore or Winnipeg. We needed the money—and sometimes, he got to take the family along.
I owe many things to that tour bus company, including my love for Midwest roadside attractions (old people have to stop to use the bathroom a lot). How many other 10-year-olds got to spend their summer vacation visiting the De Klomp Wooden Shoe Factory in Holland, Michigan?
But my fondest memories were of the cinnamon candies dad kept in his driving briefcase. Sometimes, they were Fire Jolly Ranchers. Often, sticks of Big Red chewing gum. The important thing was that they burned. When you’re piloting a 20-ton land frigate full of senior citizens, it is helpful to stay alert.
This unfortunately meant that I was not allowed to consume them on tour. They were business candies. It would have been like stealing the balancing pole from a tightrope walker. But at the end of every trip, dad would come home in his mint-green company oxford and matching polyester necktie and slide that briefcase under the daybed, where he assumed it was secure.
This is when I would strike.
In my mind, I was judicious—never taking so many that he’d notice they were missing. In reality, I think I left the wrappers behind, making it come off less like a heist than a threat. Try staying awake on I-35 now, old man.
My dad, it must be said, was using all that cinnamaldehyde for its intended purpose. Cinnamon is not a flavor for aesthetes. It is a flavor for dopamine chasers and chronic smokers—for people inured to subtlety, who need to be jostled just to feel. The highest achievement of a cinnamon candy is giving your taste buds a lingering chemical burn. It is, you will be unsurprised to hear, my favorite flavor.
It also seems to be dying out. The Cinnamon Fire Jolly Ranchers were discontinued in 2022. Gum manufacturers Orbit and Extra both dropped their cinnamon flavors within the last few years, and Mars Inc., which owns both, did not respond to my request for comment about why. (This is a predictable consequence of asking to interview people for a newsletter called “Haterade.” If I could do it over again, I’d call the newsletter something like “Brand Lover,” or “The Business-Friendly Times.”)
The Google Trends graph for “cinnamon gum” has been flat for 20 years, save a single spike in June 2025, when the New York Times crossword featured the clue “Brand of cinnamon-flavored chewing gum.” It’s a bad sign for Big Red that so many people had to Google the answer.
I’ve been doing my part. In an accidental (but loving) homage to my father, I’ve started chewing a pack of cinnamon gum a day whenever I’m on deadline, a habit that seems somehow more depraved and weak-willed than simply chain-smoking cigarettes. Until recently, I haven’t even been brand-loyal. I tend to buy whatever’s at the grocery store, knowing that I’m going to rip through it like a vulture with a carcass.
But with artificial cinnamon fading from the shelves, I figured it was time to take a more methodical approach—to harness my weak consumer power for the greatest preservational good.
It was time to mint a winner in the Cinnamon Gum Olympics.
Spring peas—the kind that you’ll thumb from their pods—ought to be treated like a different species from the frozen kind. They’re less uniform in size and flavor, ranging from ladybug- to peanut-sized; from candy-sweet to vegetal. They’re poppably taut—never having suffered the rupture of their cell walls in freezing—and excellent eaten raw or barely cooked.
My favorite thing to do with them is nothing. I like to eat them on the way home from the farmers market like a bag of M&Ms, or put them in a bowl on the kitchen table for people to do the same. The moment they’re picked, their sugars start turning to starch, which is why they’re incomparably sweet when they’re fresh (and why you should eat them as soon as they’re yours).
You could use them in any recipe that calls for frozen peas, but I tend not to. You need to buy and pod such a volume to equal a bagful (a pound of pods gives you about a cup of peas). I prefer to use them sparingly and show them off.
How to choose your peas:
It’s usually a case of stuffing handfuls of pods into a bag rather than selecting individual ones, but avoid any that look dry, have white patches, or bloated areas. Their peas will be woolly and less sweet than greener, more evenly sized ones.
How to prep them:
Communally, outdoors. Hold a pod in one hand and pierce its seam with the thumb of the other. Run your thumb down the inside, pushing the peas into a bowl. If the peas are especially young, they won’t all line up on one side when you open the pod, so run your thumb down both sides. Save the pods to infuse stock (especially if you’re making Risi e Bisi Orzo or pea soup).
How to use them raw:
Raw peas belong in any spring salad with salty cheese, or alongside prosciutto or salami for a snack. If you’re putting them in a salad, dress them first before you layer them with other ingredients: season them in a bowl with salt, lemon juice, and olive oil. Roll them around and taste to get the seasoning right before tossing through leaves or anything else.
How to cook them:
Cook spring peas in unsalted water at a rollicking boil. After a minute or two, when they start to surface, taste a couple of the larger ones. There is a moment—I can’t tell you exactly when—that they go from tasting good to particularly good, possibly sweeter than when they were raw. Keep eating until you taste that transition, then add a handful of mint leaves, count to ten, and drain. Dress the peas immediately with plenty of olive oil or butter and flaky salt, so they take on the fat and don’t shrivel too much. Roll them around so they’re all coated. Eat a bowl plain, or spoon onto a plate with fish, chicken, pork, or lamb.
A few ideas for your peas…
Raw pea and gem cups
Click the leaves off a few heads of baby gem and lay them on a platter. Sliver a few handfuls of snap peas and put them in a bowl with your raw, podded peas. Dress with lots of lemon juice, salt, and olive oil. Tear mint leaves into the bowl and stir; taste for seasoning. Spoon the raw peas and snaps into the gem cups. Grate over lots of ricotta salata and grind over some black pepper. Drizzle over more olive oil. Pick up the pea-filled lettuces and eat like tacos.
Pea tabbouleh
Boil your spring peas as above and drizzle with lots of olive oil. Let them cool. Chop lots (and lots) of Italian parsley and mint and add to the peas. Squeeze in lemon juice, stir, and adjust with salt and more lemon. Eat with a spoon.
A side of minty potatoes and peas
Bring fingerlings up to a simmer from cold in salted water. After 15 minutes, poke one with a fork to check it’s cooked. When the fingerlings are crushable, add the peas to the water. When they rise, taste, and add a handful of mint leaves when the peas are sweet. Count to ten and drain. Use a whisk or a potato masher to break the potatoes and some of the peas. Drizzle with lots of olive oil and toss. Finish with lemon zest and black pepper, and eat. Especially good with fish.
A meal of baked potato with peas and bacon bits
Bake a potato. Snip up rashers of bacon and fry to lardons. Tear the potato open using two forks, and butter and salt both sides. Boil your peas and spoon them into the potato; sprinkle with the crispy bacon. This is very good with pea shoots (dressed with lemon juice and olive oil) on top.
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.
Welcome to the third season of Someone on Film (FKA Substack on Film1). A year in, we’ve shared stories from all sorts of writers and creators—including Lloyd Kahn, the nonagenarian pioneer of the green building movement; former Vogue editor Plum Sykes; children’s book authors and illustrators Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen; and many others. For our latest season, we decided to visit Substackers who call Los Angeles home.
LA is a city of creative strivers, and we tried to capture that ambition from several angles: a TV-showrunner-slash-illustrator, an underground club raver, a veteran entertainment journalist, a lifestyle creator with millions of followers, and a touring comedian. We shot it all on 16mm film, as usual, working with Director of Photography Jack Duffy, sound recordists Kenneth Orozco and Adrian Arteaga, and with our very own behind the second camera and in the editing booth.
First up, we visited , who you might know as the creator of Tuca & Bertie and the production designer of BoJack Horseman. She’s currently working on a book called I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, and she let us invade her (very nice) lair to take a look at the pages. We traded imaginary horses for real ones when Lisa brought us to the stables, where we met her horse, Juniper.
We’ve renamed the series from Substack on Film to Someone on Film. The films are really about the people in them, not about Substack itself—and the name should reflect that.
The marketers deciding your taste: Musician dug into the work of Chaotic Good Projects, “a digital marketing agency that promises to create virality by, among other things, manufacturing hundreds of fake fan accounts for musicians.” Unsurprisingly, many of their clients are pop stars and major commercial successes. “But the roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect (and, apologies to the internet sensations, including people I consider to be genuinely great musicians). Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.” Tellingly, since Eliza’s post went up, Chaotic Good has pulled down some of the more incriminating sections from their website. Many readers are disappointed but not necessarily surprised: “That artists and labels believe they need to create fake accounts to have any chance of getting traction in a tough algorithm-controlled marketplace is another race to the bottom.”
LOVE STORY
Withholding
August Lamm on falling for a man whose last name she doesn’t know.
I’m on a patio, drinking seltzer, at the worst party of the summer. It’s my party. None of the guests know each other, few of them want to. The conversation is scattered introductions, biographical facts, and observations about the backyard. I am sitting in a hammock to appear relaxed. The sky is light. The sun will never set. There is no music or booze to save us.
When Robin arrives, I maneuver out of the hammock too quickly and land on all fours. I stand and walk toward him, brushing dirt off my knees.
“I’m so glad you came,” I whisper. “One minute,” I call to my guests, who look on with mounting panic as I enter the house.
I lead Robin upstairs to my bedroom, where I sit down on the bed and begin to cry. I can’t name a single thing that has happened to Robin in the past year, but I still know him better than anyone. Or I know so little that I can imagine the rest.
“It’s a disaster,” I say.
“It’s fine,” he says without conviction.
“I wasn’t ready for this,” I say, trying to smile. “A party. It’s too soon.”
He sits down next to me. Through the open window I hear snatches of forced conversation, long pauses, no laughter. My dad died a month ago. Robin’s dad died a decade ago. This is why I invited him. I am too consumed with grief to wonder if this is fair. Our legs are touching and it’s unclear who’s responsible.
“Do you ever think about us?” I say.
“We’ve tried this before,” Robin says, which isn’t a no.
We met on a park bench in London. He had coffee in the corners of his mouth even though it was late afternoon. He invited me to a magazine launch. I said yes because I wanted to meet writers, to become one.
The magazine was Catholic. Everyone at the launch was Catholic, including him. They had posh accents and advanced degrees, which made Catholicism seem more like an academic distinction than a faith. I was curious and asked a lot of questions.
“We don’t follow it to the letter,” a man told me, one arm around his girlfriend’s shoulders.
“There’s room for interpretation,” she confirmed.
Not everyone agreed. “You definitely can’t have sex before marriage,” they said, scanning the room. “Who here told you otherwise?”
I went home alone. The next morning, I called Robin. We got coffee and talked about God. I explained how whenever I missed a bus or train, I imagine I’ve narrowly avoided some horrible fate. Robin was listening so intently that I wanted to say, “I’m not serious,” even though I was.
We began seeing each other once a week. He didn’t live in the city. During his visits, I felt certain that I could possess him if I wanted. I just had to say the word. But during his absences, he was impossible to get ahold of, too busy to make plans, too tired to talk.
“Just get on a train,” I said. “We’ll do something nice.”
“I can’t,” he replied. “I just can’t.”
“I’ll come to you.” But how could I do that? He hadn’t told me the name of his town.
He also hadn’t told me his last name. He was a professional writer, he explained. He didn’t want me to see that side of him, not until we knew each other better.
His work was out there, somewhere, consumed and interpreted, printed and posted and shared. It haunted me. The internet was vast. I tried looking up his first name, his university, his religion. I tried every possible search term, but without his last name, nothing came up.
One night, walking home from a pub, I stopped on a square of sidewalk and told him, “I’m not moving until you tell me your last name.”
“Come on,” he said wearily, as if embarrassed on my behalf. A minute passed in silence. I stepped out of the square and we continued walking.
Great writing has no expiration date. For our first “From the Archives” post, we’re sharing Marian Bull’s 2023 ode to the chore that waits on the other side of dinner: the dishes.
The end point of cooking is not eating; it is cleaning.
We dream, we plan, we crave, we shop, we chop, we fry, we simmer, we garnish, we serve. And then we eat, sometimes alone and sometimes not, and when the eating is done, a mess remains, record of our pleasure. We must put spices back on their racks, the halved butter stick back in the fridge before it pools on the counter. We must transfer braised greens and ladlefuls of curry into containers that will keep them from spoiling. We must hem and haw over whether cake goes in the fridge or stays on the table, to stare at us for breakfast. We must collect all the surfaces and vessels we have dirtied, and turn them clean again. This is not a result of the cooking process, but the final leg of it.
Sometimes—and I’ve come to dislike this, though I know I’ve done it in the past—a recipe will end with a one-word instructive sentence: “Eat.” They almost never end with phrases like Eat, and then when you’re done, store the rice separate from the soup, or else it will become a big brothless glump. Or, Be sure to soak plates immediately, else you’ll be scrubbing against gnarly pools of congealed yolk. It’s obvious why recipes omit this bit: it would make them too depressing. People read recipes for inspiration and reassurance, not for a glaring reminder of chores.
At most, a recipe’s headnote might nod towards the idea of mess. This often appears in the assurance of “Yes, this recipe asks you to use three pans, but it’s worth it,” or the inverse assurance of “instead of leaving you with three pots to clean, this recipe does all the work in one.” How you might clean those pots, however, is rarely mentioned. The author assumes you can take it from here. Surely your mother taught you?
🍽️
Six years ago I was still working at GQ, chatting with a coworker about his new apartment, about the drudgery of keeping one’s space tidy. I shared a little hack I’d created for myself. Sometimes when I don’t feel like doing the dishes, I’ll set a timer for 8 minutes, and tell myself that when it goes off, I can stop. But I never do. I’m either done or I keep going, it always works. He stared his buffoonishly handsome face at me, warping it into a scowl of judgment, neck tugged back in a reflex of disgust. How many dishes are piling up in your sink?
I felt a brief flash of shame, rescued by indignance. Of course, I thought. This man is rarely feeding himself. He was always going on dates, four or five a week. His dishes did not accrue. The memory appears to me intermittently, that shame blooming anew: the implication that I am always making a mess, that nobody taught me right. Growing up, my father did the dishes alone, rinsing them diligently before lining them up neatly in our suburban dishwasher.
Only now am I remembering that my coworker had, a year prior to our conversation, worked on a story about how to throw a dinner party successfully. The sort of GQ primer that helps men feel competent, I’ve written them too. This one instructed readers to leave the dishes for the morning. Just go to sleep, it said blithely. When I first read this it shocked me, forced my neck back in that same gulp of disgust. Absolutely not.
🍽️
A longer-ago coworker, a brilliant home cook, had an almost militant dinner party cleaning strategy. She hosted lavish feasts—this phrase not an exaggeration—in her studio apartment, and would not let a single guest do the dishes, not even her best and oldest and most generous friends. Tiny apartments without Maytags require specific dish-cleaning strategies, and this one was no different: there were a few inches of counter space, if I remember correctly, and a butcher block. When everyone left, tramping wine-soaked down narrow flights of stairs, she would put on a cassette tape of the Smiths and blast it while doing dishes to her personal specifications, lining everything up just so.
I admired this not just because of the competence it communicated, but because it was a reflection of one cook’s finely honed tastes. Not only did she believe in always buying the nice butter, or architecting obscurely themed meals, but she knew exactly how she liked to do the dishes. I had always wanted to become a person with such strong convictions and such clean plates.
Consider this a musical palate cleanser after that exposé on Chaotic Good: Emily White surveys “the wide-ranging, deeply human and often surprising taste of college radio DJs right now.”
At WVAU, we called this the rack: a black wire shelf stacked with promo CDs curated by the music staff, with mini reviews and recommended if you like (“RIYL”) tags lovingly taped onto jewel cases. Sometimes I’d play a song on air for the first time based solely on those notes!
“Our music directors have been writing comments on the records and CDs since the seventies,” Marcus Rothera, general manager of Boston College’s WZBC told me last year. “It’s like an analog Internet comment section.”
I surveyed 80+ DJs in 2025 who say student interest in college radio has surged in recent years, driven by algorithm fatigue, analog nostalgia and a desire for “third spaces.” The New York Times followed with a fantastic profile of KXLU, capturing college radio’s “unpredictability, uniqueness and random brilliance.”
In search of some fresh music recommendations, I asked college radio stations across North America to share their favorite albums of 2026 so far. Many new releases are now submitted and reviewed digitally, so I asked Dusty Henry of KEXP and Another Thought to illustrate the picks.
This isn’t an official chart. It’s a snapshot of the wide-ranging, deeply human and often surprising taste of college radio DJs right now, in no particular order.
Enjoy digging through the stacks. College radio, forever <3
Deep shoegaze distortion coupled with vulnerable, echoing lyrics, Segmentation can piece together the heel-wounded parts of any listener with its heavy sound. The album transcends its mainstream counterparts, taking you on a journey with swirling liminal riffs. An alternative album for an alternative station: Segmentation is the debut album of Heel, who are also active members at Texas A&M’s KANM Student Radio.
Favorite Tracks: “Through Me,” “August,” and “Waste.”
RIYL: Narrow Head, Trauma Ray, Starflyer 59, grungegaze, Gregg Araki films, limerence, wildflower honey, driving in Texas at night, skateparks, the sound of frogs croaking at the lake after sundown, cyberpunk
Bouncy, down-to-earth love songs. The Mirror, fittingly introspective, feels both chronological and retrospective, distinctly Meek, yet totally relatable in its romantic storytelling.
Favorite tracks: Gasoline (1), Can I Mend It? (3), Worms (8)
RIYL: Big Thief (of course), acoustic guitar, lavender marriages, if Licorice Pizza is your favorite movie.
—Ella Hegarty, Filet of the Day, WCFM, Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts)
Memphis rapper and producer Gavin Mays continues his foray into the digitally scarred, sample-heavy, and increasingly abstract annals of internet-born hip-hop with EVEN COLDER SPRING. Featuring his signature philosophically inclined stream-of-consciousness lyricism and lo-fi, often drumless production style. A great atmospheric and heady record which continues Mays’ legacy of being one of the most interesting forces in underground hip-hop.
Favorite Tracks: Even Colder Spring – Parts 1 & 2, The Élan Vital, Tribeca, Concrete Masks, Closing Door
RIYL: cLOUDDEAD, Armand Hammer, SpaceGhostPurrp, walking around the city at 3am after you left the party
—DJ Nick (Nick Staudacher), Sonic Valhalla, WCBN, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
This post from Emily Wilson and Jamie Feldmar on the wave of “landrace heritage grains” taking over bakeries in L.A. and N.Y. is a great read to whet your appetite for Easter pastries.
Citrus, grapes, nuts: these are the crops synonymous with California agriculture. Avocados, dairy, and lettuces, too. But amber waves of grain? That is, traditionally speaking, a Midwestern thing.
But California has never been bound by tradition, which is why, about 12 years ago, a group of Kern County farmers decided to experiment with growing more whole grains. And not just any whole grains—ancient, heritage breed varieties like Red Fife and Sonora wheat that flourish in Tehachapi, a low mountain valley halfway between Bakersfield and Fresno, that would eventually become the cause célèbre of dozens of L.A.’s best bakers, pastry chefs, brewers, and distillers.
The undertaking, appropriately dubbed the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project, is a joint effort between Alex Weiser of Weiser Family Farms and biologist-turned-grower Sherry Mandell, an incredibly well-connected ball of energy who is largely responsible for getting the grains to said chefs and bakers. With encouragement from L.A.’s own Japanese food luminary Sonoko Sakai and seeds donated by heirloom-grain evangelist Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, what started as a two-acre experiment has expanded to nearly 400 and resulted in Tehachapi-grown grains getting name-checked on menus from Providence to Petitgrain.
Growing landrace heritage grains is good for the planet: they’re drought-tolerant, with unique root systems that spread deep into the earth, functioning as a carbon sink and conditioning the soil between plantings of other crops. It’s also good for the diner: “We grow it because it’s delicious, and it’s delicious because of the way we grow it,” says Mandell. “Even if you only add 15%-30% of a heritage grain or flour to your product, it makes a huge difference,” she says. “You can tell just from looking at it. And once you taste it, it’s life-changing, because that grain becomes a part of the flavor profile itself,” she says, describing items made with whole grains as “deeper” and “more luxurious.”
2,500 miles northeast in America’s other cultural capital, a similarly spirited local whole grain renaissance is underway, led by Brooklyn Granary & Mill, a bakery and mill opened last year by Patrick Shaw-Kitch, a grain whiz and the former head baker at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, alongside his wife, Laura Huss. From their facility on Huntington Street, just off the Gowanus Canal, they stone-mill whole grains such as spelt, buckwheat, rye, einkorn, and various strains of wheat—grown on regenerative farms across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic—for use in pastries and bread at their on-site bakery and for an impressive roster of wholesale clients, including the restaurants Gramercy Tavern and Borgo and bakeries like Elbow Bread and Diljān.
Part of the impetus for Brooklyn Granary & Mill was the 2021 closure of Union Square Greenmarket’s GrowNYC Grainstand, which served as the hub for local, whole grains in New York City; professional and home bakers could purchase regionally grown grains and flour and learn how each variety performs. Furthermore, New York City lacked a milling operation that could supply bakers and chefs with flour milled to order, and just-milled flour means more nutrients, more texture, and more flavor.
Whole grains are perishable in a way many people don’t realize. Once a grain’s seed is cracked, its natural oils are exposed to air and begin to oxidize, eventually going rancid. This means grains are at peak aroma and flavor right after milling, when those oils are still intact. Processed white flour, by contrast, has the bran and germ removed entirely—and it’s precisely those elements that give a grain its color, character, and fat and, with it, most of its flavor.
Accordingly, working with local, freshly milled whole-grain flours requires a certain level of skill and patience. “You usually have to adjust your hydration with whole wheat flours … they’re typically thirstier,” says Navil Rivera, worker-owner at Proof Bakery in Los Angeles, who also notes that gluten levels can vary, so using a mix of whole wheat with AP or a high-gluten flour can help create a more balanced product. But the extra effort is very much worth it: “You’re replacing an ingredient that adds nothing other than structure to the mix with something that adds everything,” says Karen DeMasco, the longtime pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern in New York.
The Real Madrid goalkeeper has started , where he shares his thoughts on “how professional athletes think about money, ownership, and long-term positioning. What I see happening in the sports business right now that excites me, and what I think is overrated. Where I’m investing, what I’m learning, and what I got wrong.”
In Magazine’s new Substack, The Obsessions Index, “monthly guest editors present the cultural oddities and gems that have been lost in time or unfairly overlooked – the books, objects, b-sides + rarities and outsider art you never knew you needed – as well as a keyhole into their own creative processes.”
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.
This week, we’re tracking folk songs, counting bank tellers, studying astrophysics in a gulag, and taking our eyes off the screen.
MUSIC
Rising sun
Who wrote “House of the Rising Sun”? James Taylor Foreman follows the song from New Orleans through the American South, a region that seems to exist 45 minutes outside every major city.
When I lived in California and I told people I grew up in Louisiana, most of the time they would say, “Oh, like New Orleans!” and then tell me they would love to visit one day.
I smile and nod, happy we have a touchstone, but think, No, not like New Orleans, actually. Los Angeles feels closer to New Orleans than where I grew up. But that would start a conversation that ended with glassy eyes, so I go ahead and let them think I’m a NOLA boy.
When I was growing up, though, New Orleans didn’t feel like it was down the road. It felt like the end of the road; about as far away as you could get. It was both the center of the world, being the biggest city in my state, and also the very edge: a liminal zone full of voodoo dream totems and pushy mediums in layers of purple linen. You went there to get drunker than your parents ever need to know about or hear a fortune about a future wife who lives across a body of water with two sons from a previous marriage.
That slightly hokey and wispy spookiness of the Crescent City solidified into downright dread the day I heard that my brother died in a house in New Orleans. He was working as a line cook someplace and trying to recover from his heroin addiction. So, naturally, the radio hit “House of the Rising Sun,” which is set in a sort of mythical New Orleans, began to stick out of the background chatter of chain restaurants. I am the young brother that the singer warns to not “do what I have done.”
I always assumed The Animals (the version you probably know) wrote the song. But no. Bob Dylan? No. Woody Guthrie? No. How about Lead Belly, plucked out of Louisiana’s Angola prison by a record exec? Still no.
Who wrote The Rising Sun?
I can tell you the short answer is nobody knows. The more entertaining answer, and probably also a true one, is that nobody wrote it. It emerged like a singing ghost from the hills, through the thousands of mouths of Southern and Appalachian folk singers, long before we had radio, recording machines, or even trains started striping the woods.
My first job out of college was a traveling salesman, selling software to hospitals all across the country, mostly in the South and Northeast. I went to Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and even so far north as Illinois. Being from a small Southern town, I was surprised to find that the “South” wasn’t just the place below the Mason-Dixon line. You just had to drive about 45 minutes from any major city, and suddenly people were huntin’ and talkin’ with a drawl.
I drove to many places like these, sometimes with “House of the Rising Sun” playing (I especially liked the Alt-J version at the time), thinking about what this country was like before Walmart and a McDonald’s lined every interstate. Because of that universal backlit plastic signage, we can be fooled to think we all live the same sort of lives. But if you do ever drive a little further, which I sometimes did to find a certain rural hospital, a whole different universe opens up. An older one, and one that is probably fading from memory. You can still hear it, if you have the ear for it, through the haunted chords of that song, its first singers’ voices still echoing above the burning pines, the heat beneath its wings.
A few months ago, J. D. Vance, sitting vice president of the United States, gave an interview to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. During that interview, Vance and Douthat had an interesting exchange:
Douthat: How much do you worry about the potential downsides of AI? Not even on the apocalyptic scale, but on the scale of the way human beings respond to a sense of their own obsolescence? These kinds of things.
Vance: So, one, on the obsolescence point, I think the history of tech and innovation is that while it does cause job disruptions, it more often facilitates human productivity as opposed to replacing human workers. And the example I always give is the bank teller in the 1970s. There were very stark predictions of thousands, hundreds of thousands of bank tellers going out of a job. Poverty and commiseration.
What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work. More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy.
I tend to think that is how this innovation happens.
There are two interesting things about what Vance said, both relating to the example that he chose about bank tellers and ATMs.
The first thing is what it tells us about who J. D. Vance is. The bank teller story—how ATMs were predicted to increase bank teller unemployment, but in fact did not—isn’t a story you’ll hear from politicians; in fact, for a long time, Barack Obama would claim, incorrectly, that ATMs had decreased the number of bank tellers, in order to suggest that the elevated unemployment rate during his presidency was due to productivity gains from technology. I’ve never heard a politician cite the bank teller story before: but I have seen the bank teller story cited in a lot of blogs. I’ve seen it cited, for example, by Scott Alexander and Matt Yglesias and Freddie deBoer; and I’ve heard it, upstream of the humble bloggers, from such fine economists as Daron Acemoglu and David Autor. The story of how ATMs didn’t automate bank tellers is, indeed, something of a minor parable of the economics profession. You can see it encapsulated in this wonderful graph from the economist James Bessen:
So Vance’s choice of example tells us the same thing that his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience did, which is that J. D. Vance—however much he might like to hide it—really, really loves reading blogs.
But the other thing about the bank teller story that Vance cites is that it’s wrong. We do not, contrary to what Vance claims, have “more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created”: we in fact have far fewer. The story he tells Douthat might have been true in 2000 or 2005, but it hasn’t been true for years. Bank teller employment has fallen off a cliff. Here is a graph of bank teller employment since 2000:
So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.
But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?
A belly button mole named Boris, a college boyfriend killed on the West Side Highway, and an astrophysicist who spent a decade in the gulag convinced that time could power the stars.
My great-grandfather was a Russian Jew named Maurice, and when I was a kid, I really liked that I was a little bit Russian, but I didn’t like the name Maurice, so I named the mole in my belly button “Boris.” I’d show it off to everyone in middle school and tell them “this is the Russian part of me.”
Of course I never met Maurice, and I never had any desire to see Russia, but something in me has always tweaked in a beautiful way when I listen to traditional Russian music, and I like to think it’s Boris in my belly button rearing his head to listen. I miss it I need it I want to be inside it. Right now in my community orchestra we’re playing Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances.” It’s deeply Russian so therefore I love it to the point of hyperfixation: I’m listening to it all the time, in and out of rehearsal, and even when I’m not, it’s running in the background of my head. A conductor in Florida once called the second movement a “waltz for ghosts” but it may be more true to say all waltzes are for ghosts, simply because they are music and music itself is a ghost. You can’t touch it or see it but you can feel it and you can measure those feelings in vibrations and these vibrations continue after the music stops, echoing and reverberating, reminding you: remember me.
In addition to the ghost that lives in my belly button, there’s another ghost in my life. My college boyfriend would have turned thirty-six today. His death was thirteen years ago, plus twoish weeks. He died the year after college, hit by a car on the West Side Highway. I’ve honored his death every year. For the first five years, on the day of his death, I would go up to New York City to visit the site and see his friends and family. For the next five years, I decided I didn’t need to make that trip anymore—his friends and I had fallen out of touch—so I would take the day off work and walk around the Arlington National Cemetery instead, surrounded by thousands of surrogate graves. Now I live in Wisconsin and neither option is available to me, so I walk in the woods instead. To me this day is sacred; it feels like my duty to honor him once a year, not because I’m hung up on a former lover, but because here I am, living, while someone who once meant the world to me is not. Why should it be me alive and not him? Doesn’t this mean I have no choice but to feel happy and make the most of it? Usually, by thinking of the dead, I end the day feeling lucky and grateful to be alive. But this year was different. The doctors called me on the morning of the deathiversary with some bad news.
For complicated reasons, they told me they were putting me on two aggressive forms of antibiotics simultaneously. These medicines came with a slew of precautions. Don’t run or you’ll snap a tendon. Don’t eat dairy with dinner. Don’t drink alcohol, of course, but also no soda or caffeine either. Beware the sun: You’ll break out in boils!
So I called the day a bust and told myself that was fine. Life gets in the way. I was grumpy about not running and yearned for sunshine, but a multi-day storm moved in, and I couldn’t miss a sun that wasn’t there. It was good weather to stay inside and read Russian literature (which Boris occasionally commands of me). I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a detailed account of the brutality of the Soviet labor camp system. This is a good book to read when you’re sad. Sometimes it helps to read about things that are much sadder. Millions of people died. Millions more suffered intensely and had to live through it. At one point I wondered: what about menstruation? What would women do in those camps when they bled? But they were all so starved, there was no menstruation. Any possible terrible thing you can imagine is in this book, and worse. You put it down and realize life isn’t so bad.
The Gulag Archipelago tells many, many stories. One of these stories is of an astrophysicist named Nikolai Kozyrev. He worked at an observatory with a disgruntled grad student. For reasons unrecorded, this grad student accused everyone at the observatory of counterrevolutionary activities. Most of his colleagues died. But Kozyrev got off easy: he was sent to prison for ten years instead.
Kozyrev tried to continue his astrophysics work in isolation. But he was limited. He had no materials, no books, no ways to make experiments. He had only his thoughts and his memories. This was not enough. He was “blocked by forgotten figures,” Solzhenitsyn writes. So he prayed for help, and by a stroke of luck, he soon received a book called “A Course in Astrophysics.” (He received one book at random every ten days.) He memorized everything he could before the book was taken away, then continued theorizing the universe. Solzhenitsyn writes that he “saved himself only by thinking of the eternal and infinite: of the order of the Universe—and of its Supreme Spirit; of the stars; of their internal state; and what Time and the passing of Time really are.”
Yes, he thought about all these things. And he was wrong.
Kozyrev came up with an idea that time creates energy, a theory he called “causal mechanics.” He believed that time’s energy was so powerful that it created stars. Yet while he was trapped in a prison cell, scientists around the world were discovering nuclear fusion, the true engine of the stars. When he was released, he refused to believe that stars were powered by fusion, and continued promoting his causal mechanics theory instead. Time not only created stars, he believed, it could be manipulated to make matter disappear; a gyroscope, for instance, would be reduced in matter as it rotated because it absorbed energy from the flow of time. He also created a set of spiral mirrors that he said could concentrate time and allow whoever was inside them to access information from the distant past or future.
He also did good work, especially earlier in his career, about the heat balance and atmosphere of nearby planets. And he maybe saw a volcano on the moon. But no one took his causal-mechanics time-as-energy theory seriously. So ultimately he was marginalized.
Yet time does have energy. Ten years in a prison has a clear, degrading power. For many prisoners, ten years could turn into twenty at the drop of a hat, and the threat of such was sufficient to keep the rest in line. There were many atrocities in the camps, interrogations and starvation and hard work and so on, but the biggest foe was time itself. It makes sense one would reach the other side and see this enemy as powerful enough to charge the sun.
, the fashion features director at British Vogue, has started The Vault, a Substack where she’ll be sharing “the secrets I would tell you if we sat next to each other in the office.”
British writer, director, and television presenter has started a Substack where she’ll chronicle her love of “cats, cooking, caftans, books,” and more.
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.
Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To run away from home at seventeen and offer their services as a deckhand on a ship bound for the New World. To take a drag of a hand-rolled cigarette as they look out over their cattle herd, cowboy hat tipped to shade from the rising sun, tin cup of gritty black coffee in their hand. To build a Roman Castrum while on campaign in Gaul. To feel the sea spray against their beard as they prepare for raiding. To step foot on another celestial body.
Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To lead a cavalry charge into enemy ranks. To feed their bloodlust with the boiling anger inside of them. To stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their brothers in a shield wall. To defend the ramparts against the storming enemy. To use the violence inherent to them. To find themselves standing victorious on a battlefield scattered with bodies. To make a heroic last stand. To bleed out contentedly in a liminal place, knowing that they’ve successfully protected their family.
Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To be left alone. To fish in silence for a couple of hours, nothing but the sound of water lapping to keep them company. To reflect on their mistakes, and to forgive themselves. To remember their father and knowingly nod as they finally understand him. To devote themselves in their entirety to a project, and to finish that project with a feeling of deserved pride. To leave something behind.
Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To feel the contrast of their rough skin against their baby’s soft hand as it grips their finger. To face the terrifying responsibility of fatherhood and accept it. To smell their child’s hair as they sleep soundly in their arms. To blow raspberries on giggly tummies. To teach their son a skill and see him beam with pride as he does it by himself for the first time. To hear their child say “I love you” unprompted.
Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting: To wake up intertwined with a lover on a lazy Sunday morning, sun shining through the curtains. To bring her coffee in bed. To randomly run into the girl they met at a party a couple years earlier and have the courage to ask for her number this time. To fall deeply in love with their childhood next-door neighbor, decide to marry her at five years old, and stick to that plan for the rest of their life. To be unconditionally loved.
The internet is a freak show like the old circus. Step inside the tent; see the hermaphrodite, the bearded lady. Enjoy it, but never admit it. You weren’t there. You’d never go. You don’t know anything about it at all. And though much has changed since P.T. Barnum, there remains a serious, well-funded industry of promoters and managers and marketers whose income depends on their association with the physically deformed, mentally ill, and socially maladjusted. These people—famous for their ugliness, homelessness, binge-drinking, and public freakouts—are these days called “lolcows” by the internet; that is to say, they produce “lols” like a cow does milk—endlessly, or at least until they die.
The best-known among them must be WorldofTShirts—Joshua Block, to use his given name. Josh is an autistic, gangly twenty-something forced into a liver-shredding alcoholic stupor over the past half-decade by a series of noxious handlers. He has 4 million followers on TikTok. His account blew up during the pandemic, as he, still young and fresh-looking, posted videos of himself doing goofy dances and reviewing various boba teas. In 2021, a video of him screaming the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind” in Times Square amassed 27 million views. So, clever as he is, Josh did it again, and again, and again. Soon enough, he was on a Times Square billboard. Dixie D’Amelio followed him shortly thereafter.
Sometime after his original first surge in popularity, he takes a trip to Mexico. Josh drinks his first drink here, then chooses to have quite a few more. He loses his phone in an Uber. He turns 21 soon after, and with this Josh has had enough of boba tea. He now drinks liquor, as much as he can get. The songs persist, now sung drunkenly, and a manager enters the picture: Michael Quinn. The former owner of Feltman’s Hot Dogs, an oval-faced, barrel-chested, strangely tanned, heavily accented New Yorker, Quinn comes upon Josh’s budding fame and decides to grab a piece of it for himself. Armed with a compulsive need for attention and the money to secure it, he sets about dragging Josh and his roller backpack to the bars, restaurants, and pizza shops of New York City. Together, they have a goofy, silly time. But all is not well. You wouldn’t know it yet, but the man is becoming more erratic, his content more unhinged. Unsupervised by Quinn, Josh records himself licking the subway floor.
Around this time, Josh meets Jason Itzler, Jeffrey Epstein associate, Josh’s second manager, and the King of All Pimps. In the mid-aughts, Itzler became a sort of small-time New York celebrity as the owner/operator of the high-priced escort service New York Confidential. Sent to Rikers in 2005 for his operation of the company, he reemerged in 2008 as a bit player in the prostitution scandal that scuttled former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s political career. In 2011, he was identified as an occupant of the apartment where 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Julia Sumnicht overdosed on GHB. Now on Kick—which is where they send you once you’re banned by Twitch—he streams under the name Mr. Based. Flanked from behind by a gold statue of the Buddha, a human-size gnome, a replica sarcophagus, and a several-foot-tall Tony the Tiger, he now spends his nights like a dirtbag cam-girl: $50 to take a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, $200 to smoke a blunt, $300 to huff Galaxy Gas.
Itzler, I’m sure, needed no advice worming his way into the life of a naïve twenty-something. Isolate. Manipulate. Make him reliant on you. The content became meaner, the fans more rabid, as Itzler established himself in Josh’s life. Gone was that silly and sweet stuff in Josh’s videos, replaced instead by an unrelenting drumbeat of triggers designed to make him go ape. Fans on the street, egged on by Itzler, would yell, “Put the fries in the bag.” “Fuck you, bitch!” Josh would yell back. Mostly, the two sat in Itzler’s opulent apartment, with Josh away from the camera and Itzler right up next to it, drinking until collapse, until Josh went limp. These streams, hard as they are to watch, function as something like a real-time account of Josh’s descent into hell. In a clip pretty neatly summarizing their dynamic, Josh huffs nitrous oxide from a balloon. He jerks and flails and suddenly stops, looking terrified. “I feel lightheaded,” he yells. Peeking over his shoulder, Itzler laughs and points his thumb toward Josh, a smile plastered on his lips. “Look at this guy,” he says. The clip has over 300,000 views.
In a collaboration, Susanne Helmert and Juliette Mansour took turns photographing objects that represented the philosophy of yin, and the other responded with one representing yang.
What the philosophy of Yin and Yang teaches us is that although they are opposing forces, they exist in relationship to one another. Balance is not created through sameness, but through interaction and transformation.
No matter what I photographed, there was never only Yin or only Yang to be found. And that’s what I ultimately found most interesting: keeping this philosophy in mind while photographing, or while looking at Juliette’s “replies,” made me sit longer with the images, thinking about them in terms of Yin and Yang.
“Yin-Yang is the idea that there is a duality to everything. But rather than this being some kind of oppositional or destructive conflict between two rivals, the Yin-Yang argues that there is a great harmony to be found in the contrast between things. The symbol does not feature a fully black side set against a fully white side. The white has a bit of black, and the black a bit of white. Contrast, yet harmony.”
Although we present the work as diptychs, we invite you to look at the images with this philosophy in mind. You may notice, as we did, that some of them can’t be assigned to one side as easily as others.
In which Am Rod reads the classic novelist at Disney, and finds the distance between a Parisian laundress’s downfall and a Florida vacation rental strangely short.
I recently visited Disney World with my boyfriend, our four-year-old daughter, his parents, his sister, her husband, and their children. The last time we did this trip, I read Therese Raquin by Émile Zola, which made me feel bruised and disgusting, as central Florida can make me feel with its humidity, broken infrastructure, and exposed toes. Confining bad sensations, negative thoughts, allows me to be a better mother, planning and packing, smiling and soothing, remembering to remove the rotting fruit from the backpack after bedtime.
I brought The Assommoir this time. In the foreword, Zola reprimands the scandalized bourgeoisie. It merely describes the society and squalor you have wrought! Don’t guillotine the messenger! It is difficult to not feel like I am in trouble while reading Zola.
The novel’s heroine, Gervaise Coupeau, suffers mightily for her dreams of owning and operating her own laundry business for Paris’s lower class. Earthly comforts, a deadbeat husband and a snake of an ex, keeping up with the Boches, bad luck and medical debt, and an ambitious passivity central to her character slowly erode the working class respectability Gervaise builds in the novel’s first half, until her death goes unnoticed for days and she is dropped in a pauper’s grave. Gervaise often repeats the sentiment, “I don’t want anythin’ special, you know, I don’t ask for much…” With each refrain, the narrator begs the question, Really, Gervaise? Sweet little Gervaise, smiling and planning and packing and soothing, did you not commit sins for your aspiration? Are you so blameless for the fall?
Our Florida vacation rental was in a community of many vacation homes, off the main drag where the movie The Florida Project was filmed. There waves the oversized stucco mermaid, a cross-eyed slattern, hanging from the side of a bootleg merch store, while you wait for a stoplight, controlled by someone who must be drunk or colorblind, to finally, mercifully turn green.
My daughter loved the pool most of all, climbing out, jumping in, climbing out, jumping in, over and over, out and in, up and down. There was a large screen enclosure around the pool to keep out gators. One morning, a red-shouldered hawk perched itself on the fence just beyond our screen to hunt the swamp on the other side.
Besides the alligators, the area reminds me of growing up in Southern California. Orlando is also in an Orange County; there are three approved tract models in the rental home community, which are somehow both enormous and cramped; there are billboards constantly reminding you that a conniving mouse is near; the traffic feels personal and vindictive; the bus stop is a lone bent pole sticking out of a patchy ditch by the box store parking lot; everyone has a pool that they take out a second mortgage to maintain.
I am not nostalgic. My older sister is, in some ways that have become stereotypical of a certain type of millennial. I don’t despise this about her, but I wonder. She reflects wistfully on our childhood, the television shows, the swim meets, the birthday dinners, her probably perfect attendance record in the tenth grade. I ditched, lied, and put myself in morally and physically compromising situations. She trusted our parents implicitly. I loved them.
The strongest memories I have are of family roadtrips, lying in the third row of the van with a damp cloth over my forehead, concentrating on a small, still point, and breathing slowly through my mouth so as not to vomit, while my dad puffed on a big fat cigar, the smoke from which the open car windows would suck out and blow back in my face.
Toward the end of a day at one of the Disney parks, I was feeling good. My daughter was happy and not sunburnt. I had packed the backpack impeccably: just enough toys and provisions to keep her amused in lines and at the table after eating her requisite four bites of lunch, a full change of clothes that we did not use but whose presence cosmically assured we would not need it, battery packs, sunscreen, hand sanitizer, rain ponchos, fruit. In my good mood, I suggested buying a round of beers. The Blue Moon on tap was dyed green for mysterious reasons having to do with James Cameron’s Avatar movie.
Our family set off in a stroller caravan toward the front of the park to find a nice place for a group photo. My boyfriend pushed our stroller. I sipped my green beer and smiled. For all the stink and crowds, it had been a pleasant day. I had not eaten dinner yet and the green Blue Moon was relaxing me. I raised my drink to an extended family of Castilians taking a picture in front of the fake banyan tree that serves as a centerpiece for the park. I felt my phone buzzing in my fanny pack and answered it. “Where did you go?” my boyfriend asked. I looked around and realized I had been walking alone for an unknown amount of time.
Singer-songwriter has launched her Substack, , with an essay exploring what it means to be an artist connecting with fans online.
Former U.S. Surgeon General has launched , “a new home for the stories I’ve found and the lessons I’m learning on the road.”
and co. have launched , a Substack that will “make you smarter about the forces moving markets, politics, and society.”
The British journalist and author has joined Substack, sharing political analysis of current events. First up: how war with Iran is impacting Keir Starmer’s premiership.
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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
