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.
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.
Cormac vs. Claude: The New York Times shared a quiz asking readers to identify passages from human writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, and Hilary Mantel, against AI-written passages on similar themes. Substackers were unimpressed: writes that given the ongoing piracy issues of LLMs, the quiz is an “exercise in humiliating the writers featured,” while counters the idea that these quizzes measure what they claim to. And takes apart a McCarthy sentence to show that what the quiz describes as ungrammatical or “clunky” writing is actually a thoughtfully stylized representation of how the novel’s characters speak.
HOLLYWOOD
That’s all, folks
As the film industry gussies up for its biggest night of the year, Dara Resnik reflects on the changing industry and what happens when Hollywood, the industry, becomes estranged from Hollywood, the place.
After a certain number of cocktails (I’ll let you guess the over/under), several of my friends have recently turned to me at separate dinners, and sighed, exasperated: “It’s over, isn’t it?” They mean Hollywood. And by Hollywood, they mean the glamorous place and the world-famous business that grew in her womb. The bad news is that the answer is yes. The good news is that the answer is also no.
Before the pandemic, I advised film and television writers—students and professionals—from all over the world to move to Los Angeles. That’s where the money was. That’s where the majority of the exciting jobs were. Even growing up in New York City, the Center of Planet Earth (yes, I said it), it was clear to me that if I wanted to write, produce, and/or direct tentpole films or network television, I had to move to LA. Let’s be clear: I really didn’t want to. I had a rent-controlled apartment on 86th and Broadway. I was writing for magazines. I was living a lovely version of an Upper West Side life I coveted as a kid, but I knew if I was gonna Make It, I needed to be in Hollywood.
And I was right. Every wave of young people that moved here in a given year was essentially a college graduating “class.” The people who moved here in ’99, or ’02, or ’06 and on and on, all knew each other in some way. You’d be drinking beer in some stranger’s S’lake backyard one night and realize their roommate was the guy who had the UTA desk next to your best friend, and now he’s an agent, or the young CE you were meeting with was the assistant you used to talk to on the phone all the time when you were a PA. We rose the ranks together, because while jobs out here have always been coveted, there were just enough of them, and we brought each other up alongside us. Vacating a desk in Disney development for a promotion? You knew that girl who’d just left Barry Josephson’s company (uh-huh) would be excited to take it. Need to quit that agency mailroom gig? No problem, the network of “classmates” you arrived with had your back and there was always, within months, a gig around the corner. And while the cost of living was high, it wasn’t nearly as high as it was in the City That Never Sleeps.
On the crew side, if you wanted to learn camera, you could start as a 2nd AC, and climb the ladder the same way. And if you got “stuck” on a rung, either as a mid-level executive, or in a crew position that wasn’t the above-the-line gig you dreamed of, you could still make a living, buy a house, get healthcare for your family, send kids to college on the salary. And the perks were enormous. Sure, maybe you’d be making the same amount of money as a middle school teacher, but you got to be on a studio lot, attend premieres, get paid for being creative in some way. You grew in an ecosystem that was creating one of America’s biggest, most lucrative exports: film and television.
I wish I could explain to my most recent graduate students how thrilling it used to be on a studio lot. How alive it was with movement and sound and creativity. From 2001-2008, I mostly worked at Warner Bros. (first as an intern for Mimi Leder, then for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, then Pushing Daisies). Lunch was a trip. At one commissary table, a legendary TV director, at another, a background extra for ER on a break, eating Poquito Mas with a fake nail sticking out of his chest. Around the corner, wardrobe for The West Wing rolling by, around the next, two janitors gossiping in the Stars Hollow gazebo. Everyone was part of something bigger than themselves. While yes, the assholes still thrived because welcome to humanity, the feeling of being part of a creative community was pervasive. You couldn’t help but look wide-eyed at your colleagues sometimes and go, “Guys, we’re really DOING IT!”
Sadly, anyone paying attention is finally admitting that has changed. Production has fled. There are fewer buyers, fewer development jobs. The studio lots are devoid of life. I recently had an in-person meeting at the Universal Studios lot, which is huge, and when I inevitably got lost, as I always have, I looked around to ask someone, ANYONE for directions, and I think I literally heard crickets. I was alone. It was eerie. Of course, there are a few productions here and there. But it’s not like it was. And it never will be again. Things change.
“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
―Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
Before they were called “Town Hall” meetings, they were called “All Hands.” At some point HR made us change the name because “not everyone has hands.” Believe all 60 of us had both hands but anyway, the point was to get the whole marketing team in a room once a quarter to exchange personality test results and pretend to know what EBITDA means, pretend we control such profitability metrics through Pinterest ads.
In advance of each Town Hall, leadership would pick a few people for these “get to know the team” panels. The questions were personal, and yet everyone’s answers always circled back to work. The host would ask, “Who’s on your Spotify Wrapped this year?” and some middle manager would gush, “Like alllll classical because it helps me focus!” SHUT THE FUCK UP. JUST SAY TAYLOR SWIFT AND WALK THOSE DUSTY ROTHYS BACK TO YOUR CUBICLE.
I remember the last Town Hall I attended before changing teams. We broke for lunch which was, invariably, a taco bar for gringos on SSRIs. Then it was panel time.
Donna Livingston perched upon a stool in her signature glam. Her long, shiny red hair in loose curls; Disney princess eyes with 100 coats of mascara; berry lip. She embodied the bygone elegance of mid-tier city office life, the kind of woman who called a shirt a “blouse” and pants “slacks.” That day she wore black slacks and a deep-pink-hued blouse. I thought to myself, Donna loves a jewel tone. Gotta respect a woman who knows what looks good on her. I’d only ever seen Donna in sapphire and emerald and this shade of pink; it was the color of love refracting off the edges of a ruby.
Donna worked remotely from DC. We were all used to admiring her through a screen, her dedication to Getting Ready every day to work from home. Always warm, always smiling. To see her up there on the panel reminded me that those intangibles like “grace” and “poise” can’t be fully apprehended via Microsoft Teams. Real-life Donna was just so… lovely. That’s the word. Lovely.
At one point, the panelists were asked about their dream jobs. Everyone got fidgety because what on earth would you do if not write website copy for B2B telecom?
They passed Donna the mic and she turned the color of her shirt.
“I would be a figure skater,“ she confessed, her voice shaky and girlish. “My girls skate and it’s the biggest part of our lives.”
Everybody loved Donna, and that was the first time most of us got a glimpse into her personal life. I must have been in a million meetings with her and she never once mentioned this thing that colored a sterile conference room with charm and wonder and truth. And then it clicked for me: that Donna’s glam might be an extension of her passion for skating. It can be a lovely thing, to look the part; it crystallizes your image in the hearts and minds of everyone who meets you.
On January 29, 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a US Army helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington D.C. It was a small flight, 64 people between the crew and passengers, 28 of them returning from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships training camp in Wichita, Kansas. Donna Livingston died alongside her husband Peter and their daughters, Olympic hopefuls Everly, 14, and Alydia, 11, who were known online as The Ice Skating Sisters.
I was working from home when my friend called and broke the news. “The whole office is a mess. Everyone’s crying and leaving for the day,” she said. Meanwhile, our friend Sarah had just taken a job under Donna. Sarah was in California for a conference where Donna was to meet her when she returned from Wichita. She was texting with Donna just before she boarded Flight 5342, wished her safe travels and everything.
What are the odds of knowing someone who dies in a 64-person plane crash? I was too catatonic for statistics but just responsive and incredulous enough to watch the video footage over and over and over. The helicopter looks like it’s being pulled directly into the plane by some invisible force, something bigger and more sinister than human error. The aircrafts collide into a magnificent ball of fire suspended in the night sky. I just kept thinking, they were almost home.
Sachin traces the arc from 3D-printed crapjects to vibe-coded slop and proposes a more sustainable way to think about what all this building actually produces.
Whenever a new technology arrives, the impulse is to treat it as something that has never existed before. A clean break from everything that came prior. I catch myself doing this with vibe coding constantly, and I see it everywhere around me. But the most useful lens for understanding a new phenomenon is almost never the phenomenon itself. You want something adjacent, close enough to share structural similarities but removed enough to see clearly. It’s on the lookout for something like this that I started reading more about the Maker Movement of ~2005-2015.
The Maker Movement was the spiritual predecessor to vibe coding. The parallels are hard to miss. Vibe coding has slop. The Maker Movement had crapjects, a term the community coined for 3D-printed objects that served no purpose beyond proving you could extrude plastic into a shape. The Claude Code of that era was a $200 printer from Monoprice and a breadboard.
The scene around making produced what were probably the first internet-native network intellectuals. Chris Anderson (who wrote the widely-read piece about the long tail) left his editor-in-chief role at Wired to start a robotics company called 3D Robotics. Cory Doctorow wrote Makers, a sci-fi novel based around characters who are hacking hardware and business models to survive in a world where everything is falling apart. These were people who gained influence by participating visibly in a making culture and writing about what it meant.
A lot of the intellectual energy of the AI era orbits around AGI: when it arrives, what it’ll do to jobs, whether it will be aligned. The Maker Movement had its own gravitational center, and it was the idea that making physical things with your hands could produce an internal transformation. You would become more creative, more entrepreneurial, more self-reliant. The object you made mattered less than what the act of making did to you.
In 2018, the media scholar Fred Turner published a paper that put this ideology under a microscope. His argument was that the Maker Movement had reinvented the theology of the Western Frontier for the digital age.
The specifics of seventeenth-century Puritanism are obviously gone. Nobody at a Maker Faire was talking about predestination. But Turner traced the literary forms and the millenarian structure—the belief that a great transformation is coming, and that individual discipline will determine who makes it through. In the Maker narrative, the American landscape is economically barren. Jobs have disappeared. Institutions have failed you. And in this wilderness, the lone individual searches inside themselves for signs of the entrepreneurial spirit, the creative spark, evidence that they are among the elect who will build their way to salvation.
Turner’s observation extends well beyond 3D printers. You can trace this same pattern through almost every hobbyist technology scene of the past fifty years. Homebrew computer clubs in the 1970s. Punk zines in the 1980s. The early web in the 1990s. Each one developed a community of practice—what Brian Eno would call a “scenius”—where people played with tools that the mainstream considered toys. Each one generated its own salvation narrative: master this tool, transform yourself, become the kind of person who builds the future.
And each one operated with a useful kind of slack. The tools were unproductive on purpose. Nobody expected your Arduino project to ship to customers. Nobody expected your homebrew computer to compete with IBM. The whole point was that you had permission to fuck around, and the finding-out happened gradually, through play, over years. This is where the old Silicon Valley adage comes from: “What smart people do on the weekends, everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”
The 19th-century Japanese master artist Kawanabe Kyōsai is well known for imaginative and satirical visions carried out in energetic, free brushwork. Between political caricatures, animals, ghosts, and acrobats, his scenes favour movement and lightness. It’s no surprise that he often painted birds.
What better subjects to express liberation and motion? Kyōsai’s soaring eagles, ravens, and songbirds share their substance with moving, changing water and buoyant leaves. Their bodies are as free and flexible as the wind. Air passes through their feathers.
Furthest from this lightness among birds is the ostrich—three hundred pounds and fully grounded. Though they share a class, an ostrich would never fit into a Kyōsai picture like a raven or an eagle does.
This is a thick and gawky animal, strutting on heavy legs, with feathers like hair draping thickly over the bulky body and spraying out at the tail. Up the curve of the neck, there are long black eyelashes, big black eyes, and big black nostrils set into a squat beak. Besides the beak and feathers, not much about the ostrich really looks birdlike at all. They have wings, of course, but these are instrumental in running, not flying.
“In some points it resembles a bird, in others a quadruped,” Aristotle wrote of the ostrich in the 4th-century B.C.E. biological study Parts of Animals. He could make no clear sense of what he observed: feathers and hair, two bird legs and a quadruped’s size, wings and no flight. In his taxonomy of animals, the ostrich was ultimately neither avian nor beast. It was classifiable only as “intermediate”. Indeed, many languages reflect a hybrid view of the ostrich: the Greek term strouthokámilos, the Persian shotormorq, the Turkish devekuşu, and the Chinese tuóniǎo each describe a “camel-bird.”
Though post-Aristotle Jewish and Islamic scholars viewed the ostrich unambiguously as a bird, it was clearly not like other birds. It ate strange things; it built unusual nests; most pressingly, it didn’t fly. In Job 39:13-17, God speaks: “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly / But are her wings and pinions like the kindly stork’s?” The stork has wings that, as biology professor Joel Duff reads, “are beautiful and enable flight.” Not the ostrich.
We on foot have always coveted the wide space of the sky, and the natural ease with which birds navigate it. A bird seems to be a light and free spirit, unconfined by its nature. The caging of a bird is a serious cruelty, and doves soar at weddings. A winged human is nothing less than an angel.
(Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended’st, / And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee) / Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating
—Walt Whitman (To the Man-of-War-Bird)
“The human fascination with flight seems to be associated with our desire for the pure transcendence of art,” writes poet Rosemarie Corlett. Leonardo da Vinci, who worked obsessively at building a flying machine, loved birds; he used to buy them at the market so that he could set them free. Wilbur Wright, of the brothers who finally saw the dream of aviation through, wrote:
The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.
The musician has launched her Substack: “Part-creative outlet, part-self indulgence, part-community connective tissue: this site is a place for me to document, hypothesize, criticize, vent, narrate, and wring out the excess thought-liquid swooshing around my own personal existential aquarium.”
, the former chief leader writer and columnist at The Observer, has joined Substack, where the center-left journalist will “ask the difficult questions the left too often avoids, from a nuanced and researched vantage.”
The team behind Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film has launched a Substack, sharing the trailer and promising insider access to the movie.
Universal Music has launched a Substack dedicated to celebrating ’s music, “where we revisit the stories behind the songs, the collaborators who helped bring them to life and the cultural legacy that still ripples through a new generation of artists.”
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.
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My feet barely fit on the car console, which is fine because my feet are tiny (brag!). I’m tall enough to have my chest up through the sunroof. Even though we’re driving well below the 20 MPH speed limit, I feel the wind push my hair past my ears, and I imagine myself like the happiest, most well loved family dog. Eyes closed and mouth open, whipping my head back and forth in slow motion.
I close my eyes and raise my hands above my head and scream as loud as I can, louder than the song blasting from the car below me.
I feel drunk, but I’m sober
I’m young, and I’m underpaid
I’m 6 years old. My dad and I are 22 minutes late to my Saturday morning soccer game. 22 minutes late means the game has already started. Not that it matters to my dad and me. I have no concept of time. I am a child. All I know is that we are having a boocoobango good time.
My dad, on the other hand, has complete and utter disregard for the concept of time. A real “don’t tell me what to do” attitude when it comes to man-made rules of the universe. The skill of punctuality has simply passed him by. Life instead imbued him with an evil yet charming sense of humor, pants that never fit, and a personality his coworkers called “bulldoggish.”
I’m tired, but I’m working, YEAH AH
No Dixon family vacation was complete without full-body sweats, a few “god damnits,” and having to turn around and head back to the house because someone (my dad) left their wallet at home. The same wallet that was sitting on the edge of the counter by the coffeepot. The wallet that my mom asked 6 different times if my dad had remembered to grab. The wallet that my dad directly looked at and said, “It’s right here in my hand, Charlotte, where the hell else would it be!”
Multiple reasons led to my parents’ divorce, but I’d like to bet that being married to the human version of the iceberg that sank the Titanic was at the top of my mom’s list.
I care, but I’m restless
I’m here, but I’m really gone
I’m wrong, and I’m sorry, baby
My voice carries the “Baby!!” out so it tumbles into the next lyric. I am singing with the kind of vitriol only a woman scorned can produce. I am 6 years old.
Recess had been completely obliterated two weeks earlier when Harrison, a blond boy with blue eyes who fit perfectly into my fantasy in which he was the 4th Hanson brother and I was the 5th, asked for the wooden painted heart pin back that he had given me during cursive class. “I don’t have it anymore,” I lied, gripping it tightly in my hand, about to mount the monkey bars. I wanted to be high up so I could look down on him. “You’re lying,” he said. “And YOU’RE a bastard!” I yelled.
Kidding, I didn’t yell that. I didn’t even know the word bastard. I was a child. I was 6 years old.
I don’t think anything exemplifies the Y2K thirst for magic better than the music of Enya, an Irish New Age Pop icon who lives in a castle. Her music offered listeners an escape from the ’90s and ’00s into a vaguely medieval Elsewhere made of rolling fields and enormous fogbanks. (McCoy notes that Enya’s album shot “to the highest [charts] position she had ever occupied” immediately after 9/11.) Although detractors called her songs “uplifting nonsense concealing the most cynically calculated mood music in the history of (Middle) Earth,” when Peter Jackson needed a voice to close out The Fellowship of the Ring, he knew exactly who to call.
Because Lord of the Rings has had such a profound impact on all the fantasy media that’s come after it, Enya’s harps and choirs have been melted into the soup. It’s not Celtic-inspired or Irish, it’s fantasy. But whether it’s music or names or folklore, when “Celtic” becomes the default, what do we do when we need to populate the rest of the fantasy world? Someone needs to be the foreigner to your main kingdom. Worldbuilding is hard, so writers often just borrow real-world stereotypes to serve as a shorthand for the “other.” See that kingdom over there with the curved swords and the veiled princesses and the sand? That’s pretty exotic, right? Well, there you go, that’s the Other.
Thankfully, it’s considered a bit gauche these days to play into Orientalist stereotypes. Ireland, on the other hand, feels a bit safer. As Ellen Jacob (Elle Literacy) tells me, “Compared to most post-colonial places—like India or the Caribbean—we’re in a much better position. We’re in Europe, we’re white, we’re quite wealthy.” Added to that, many American writers can trace distant Irish heritage. Still, this doesn’t stop writers from making some really unusual choices in their portrayal of the fantasy Irish analogues.
The book that made me fall down this whole rabbit hole to begin with was Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief, centring a fiddle-playing, green-eyed, copper-haired thief named Kinch Na Shannack. Kinch is Galtic, meaning he’s from a race of people who drink whiskey, farm tubers, live near peat bogs, and speak with a “handsome brogue” that makes them say “cork and kark almost the same”. His people were forced to mass-migrate west “what with the old Famine”, and if you haven’t guessed which culture the Galts are based on yet, I’ll give you one more clue: Buehlman, an American, self-narrates the entire audiobook in an Irish accent.
If the default fantasy mode is Celtic, and the Othered Foreigner People are, on top of that, Celt-coded, you get what scholar Andrea R. Cox calls a “Celtic double exposure”. Celtic cultures provide both the genre’s background texture and its exotic outsider. What that’s going to give you, of course, are a bunch of stereotypes that range from indulging in the odd potato to being physiologically different to the other humans in your fantasy world.
In the midst of the dustup between Anthropic, OpenAI, and the U.S. Department of War, Benn Stancil digs into the “banality of surveillance” and why, despite online tracking going back years, AI heralds a new era in digital privacy concerns.
Prior to working in Silicon Valley, I assumed that data was secure because it was obfuscated by impressive cryptography and stored in buildings that were guarded by tall fences. And I assumed that what we did on the internet was private—and people’s ability to draw any inferences from what we did was difficult—because “surveillance” required complex technologies that could detect faint patterns in millions of disparate signals. Yes, Target might be able to figure out if someone is pregnant before their father could, but that took years of careful observation and sophisticated science. It took well-trained humans working with well-trained models, years in the making.
If only. On an internet where everything is tracked—and man, everything is tracked—surveillance does not require a Ph.D., or even any particularly advanced math. It just requires a junior analyst with 24 hours of free time. Because the real fences around the data we all leave behind—and the real protections of our privacy—are neither tall nor covered in barbed wire. They are simply fences that are annoying to climb. We are not hidden, on the internet; mostly, people are just too uninterested to bother looking for us.
Everyone already knows what happened: The United States Department of War wanted to use Claude. Anthropic wanted them to use Claude, but with restrictions. The two sides could not agree; the negotiations broke down; the negotiations turned into outright hostilities; the hostilities became very public. The Atlantic reports on part of what went wrong:
Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life.
When we hear stories about “mass surveillance” and “artificial intelligence” and the “CIA,” it is tempting to imagine systems of unfathomable reach and sophistication. It is tempting to worry about shadowy government agencies using AI to hack into our phones and turn them into sonar transmitters. It is tempting to see the Greco—a million sensors and cameras feeding into a machine that “doesn’t think, but reasons”:
It reads every permutation in every wager in every seat in the entire casino, hand by hand. It’s wired into floor security cameras that measure pupil dilation, and determine if a win is legitimate or expected. It gathers biofeedback—players’ heart rates, body temperatures. It measures, on a second-by-second basis, whether the standard variations of gaming algorithms are holding or are being manipulated. The data is analyzed in real time, in a field of exabytes.
For better or for worse, reality is almost certainly much more mundane. Nobody wants to use AI to bug our phones, or to build a sprawling nerve system to track our vitals, because our phones are already bugged. Everything we do on them is recorded a dozen times over, by our wireless carriers, by the websites we visit and the apps we use, by the vendors and ad networks those companies are sending their data to, and in the marketplaces that sell that data. We built the eyes of the Greco decades ago.
But that data has remained relatively secure—or maybe more precisely, its potential energy has remained relatively buried—largely because it’s tedious to work with. It’s messy; it’s scattered across different sources and in different formats; combining it together is a pain, and most of us are simply not interesting enough to investigate. Data analysts who work at shadowy government agencies have lives too, and they do not want to write 595-line SQL queries either.
But AI doesn’t mind. And that’s the boring danger of what happens next: Not of AI becoming a superintelligent Sherlock Holmes finding impossible patterns in its enormous mind palace, but of it being a million monkeys at a million typewriters, doing the grunt work no person wanted to do. Because when prying questions are a prompt away—rather than 24 hours of work away—who wouldn’t get tempted to pry?
“The lost art of button cards,” shared by Ella Wiznia
RELATIONSHIPS
Just in case
Lily Montasser on her five marriage pacts, and what their prevalence says about how we date now. “When the options are endless, choosing one person can start to feel less like romance and more like closing a hundred tabs you’re not ready to lose.”
I have five marriage pacts. You know, the “if we’re both still single by forty let’s just do the damn thing” deal you make with friends who you wish you were attracted to.
They are as follows:
MILES · 33 · Salt Lake City · Marriage Date: “When we’re forty” · Status: Open
My first pact is with Miles, my best friend in college. He was the first person I met when I stepped onto campus, and remains one of my closest friends to this day. One night outside of a party in junior year, we agreed that if we were both single by forty we would buy a big plot of land in Northern California and call it a day, sleeping with other people if necessary. We solidified the deal with a spit handshake.
Next is Chase. Chase and I matched on Raya in 2021, and after a few clumsy dates, our relationship evolved into a flirtatious friendship that included him being my unofficial business consultant and me taking over his lease when he moved to Miami. On a drunken night outside a bar at 3am, we agreed to meet at a church in Vegas in two years and get married if we were both single. A Google Calendar invite was sent. As the date approached, Chase requested a one-year extension.
I recently ran into a mutual friend who informed me that Chase was considering proposing to his current girlfriend. I texted him a screenshot of our cancelled standing reservation. To which he replied “Damn. Report as spam ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
WHIT · 45 · New York City · “Start a Family” Date: N/A · Status: Open
Next is Whit, who I was in an emotionally serious yet technically unofficial relationship with. After several months of on-and-off-again emotional entanglement, Whit proposed we start a family—have children and all live together in a big beautiful brownstone he would pay for. When I asked, “Well, would we, like, date?” He confidently said: “No.” I told him I’d think about it.
FLETCHER · 45 · New York City · Marriage Date: 12/31/2029 · Status: Open
Then there’s Fletcher. Fletcher and I are not terribly close friends nor have we ever had a romantic encounter. He’s a two degrees of separation friend, but I’m always happy to be in his company whenever he comes around. He’s conventionally attractive, tall, muscular, and absolutely hilarious. One night at a house party, Fletcher and I found each other on the couch, lamenting our most recent romantic flops. We agreed to get married if we’re both single in five years. We high-fived and created a Google Calendar invite for Dec 31, 2029.
, the independent fashion, culture, and arts magazine, has launched a Substack. Every week, they’ll “share a different story selected by our editors and send it straight to your inbox.”
French oenophiles will no doubt be pleased to see on the platform. The Le Figaro wine critic and lifestyle journalist will be sharing her favorite restaurants, hotels, and, yes, wine.
—a self-described “former child star, current human”—has joined Substack, where she’s sharing dispatches “for all those who grew up and still haven’t figured out what that means.”
Chefs Jack Croft and Will Murray have launched , a newsletter where they’ll share recipes, “getting into the ‘why’ and ‘how’, upgrading your palate so you understand when to add a pinch of salt or a squeeze of lemon, as well as giving you a behind-the-scenes view of what it looks like running one of the busiest restaurants in London.”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
This week, we’re terraforming the desert, sniffing Oreos, and attempting to capture a person’s essence in a photograph.
THE DISCOURSE
Briefly noted
Citrini moves markets: Despite a caveat at the top of The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis by and that what followed was an imagined scenario, many in the tech and finance sectors viewed the doomer vision of AI-driven economic collapse as if it were news from the future. And the market took notice: the post was cited as a reason the stock market plunged earlier this week. described it as a “brilliant, gut-wrenching approach” to predicting AI futures, while described it as “just a scary bedtime story.” Regardless of the accuracy of the narrative itself, it’s hard not to notice when a work of speculative fiction can move very real markets (and inspire financial firms to publish rebuttals).
Anthropic vs the Pentagon: The federal government and the AI company Anthropic clashed this week over the company’s hard limits on the use of its technology for mass surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons without human oversight. As of Friday evening, the Trump administration seemed ready to make good on its threat to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which would bar government contractors from using its products and could, per , be fatal to the company’s business. Employees at OpenAI and Google have signed open letters urging their own leaders to back Anthropic and commit to the same stances. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s hippy history and its tech present collided on Hippy Hill, where a “Peace Claude” rally took place.
CBK dominates fashion discourse (again): Ryan Murphy’s show chronicling the love story of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has led to a new generation’s obsession with her ’90s minimalism. writes about CBK’s discernment as the real reason behind her enduring popularity, while reports that a “CBK tax” on vintage basics has hit eBay and lists the (many) brands trying to capitalize on the moment. reminds us that CBK’s consistent sense of style reflects the fact that she spent only a few years in the public eye before her tragic death. And for those ready to move on from CBK but perhaps not from the ’90s, has a broad list of icons to pick from, including Margaret Thatcher, Al Gore, and Geraldo Rivera.
PORTRAITURE
On photography
Dina Litovsky on the ethics of portrait photography, and why making someone look good isn’t the same as making a good photograph.
During any portrait session, my mind engages in a constant negotiation between the sitter’s preferred version of themselves and my own interpretation of them. The balance is not symmetrical, because no matter how formidable the person in front of me, the photographer always has more power. Every decision, from what to emphasize or conceal to what expression to tease out, adds up to a representation that is outside the subject’s control. This delicate dance comes with a sense of responsibility to ensure that the final portrait is, at the very least, non-manipulative. What makes the process trickier is that no matter who my subject is, my secret desire is that they, if not love, at least don’t hate the final portrait. That is often a tall order.
While [Michael] Heizer laid out his terms up front, many other subjects are less forthright and leave the photographer with more room for interpretation and guesswork. To find the subject’s baseline, I like to ask the person if there are any portraits of them that they love. This gives me a reference point for how they see themselves at their best. In most cases, the image that I’m shown, regardless of the age or sex of the subject, is an idealized representation, but one that is rarely interesting as a photograph. The exercise reveals that while it’s easy to appreciate the artistic merits of someone else’s portrait, when it comes to your own likeness, what matters most is whether the image is flattering.
This is where the struggle comes in. One of my hidden photography superpowers has always been understanding how a person likes to be perceived and what their best angles are. I can make people look good, but that doesn’t necessarily add up to a portrait that goes beyond the superficial and holds enough tension to make it interesting. There are requests that I honor, whether it’s avoiding the “bad side” or concealing sensitive areas like a bald patch. But when it comes to framing and emotion, I often end up at odds with the subject, and the tighter their control over their self-presentation, the more I want to break through that facade and catch them outside their comfort zone.
There are two genres where the complex calculations of how to best represent the subject are reduced to extreme dead ends—celebrity and political portraiture. Celebrity portraits most often cater to the subject (and their PR), with the intention to flatter and beautify the individual. The portraits employ soft light, neutral expressions, fan-blown hair, heroic poses, and airbrushing to achieve the desired effect. The portraits are pleasing to the eye but forgettable, because a pandering representation will always lack the necessary bite to cut through the noise.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is political portraiture, which carries an expectation that a photographer should be critical and harsh when working with an unpopular politician. A few years ago, a magazine put a controversial Republican on the cover with unforgiving light beams that exaggerated the facial pores and made the skin texture look like a volcanic field. I was no more a fan of the politician than most readers of the publication, but I thought the choice of the photo was unethical. Besides taking advantage of the trust between the sitter and the photographer, such an approach, relying on technical cheap shots, lacks the depth and complexity necessary for the image to survive past the immediate cultural moment.
The sweet spot between celebrity and political extremes is where most powerful portraits exist. Viewers are more perceptive than we sometimes give them credit for, and a portrait that’s too flattering or too grotesque won’t land the same way as a more nuanced representation. An insightful portrait reflects the sitter’s personality through clues, colors, and positioning, rather than the brute force of technical decisions.
Anna Dorn and Crissy Milazzo interviewed writer Emily Gould’s 10-year-old son to get the lowdown on Gen Alpha’s perfume preferences. Read on for some excellent mom shade, a review of perfumes that smell like Oreos, and the age-old question: does this smell good, or am I just hungry?
Do you remember the first fragrance you ever smelled? What was it?
Well, my mom used to really just dive into bottles of perfume (not anymore, she has learned how much she should put on now), and when I was much younger, whenever she would be going to a party or a formal occasion she would have perfume on, and a lot of it, too. The only one I can remember that she wore before recent years was a strong sweet-and-sour plum perfume, which she reminded me the name of which was Umé by Keiko Mecheri, which smells great but not in the amount my mom wore, which would never fail to make my nose hurt with how much she wore.
What is your favorite fragrance right now?
Phlur Vanilla Skin. I really like the strong-at-first, smooth vanilla, or even Oreo (as people have told me) scent, because Oreos are peak.
What does your mom smell like?
My mom wears a great-smelling apple pie-scented perfume called Angels’ Share, and she wears Replica “By the Fireplace” perfume, and they both smell great and she finally knows how much to put on.
You live in Brooklyn: what does it smell like?
Just kidding (kinda), but it can smell good, like passing by someone with great perfume, or it can smell absolutely disgusting, such as being on any train station in all of Brooklyn, nobody’s safe.
Do your friends at school like to wear fragrance? If so, what do they wear?
I don’t really know tbh. One of my friends is always like “What’s the point of wearing deodorant or perfume, we’re just 10” (I mean that’s one friend), but when we’re playing sports or having PE, you will not catch more than 1 person within a 3-foot radius of him.
On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.
CITY PLANNING
London Bridge, Arizona
In an ode to idealized cities, Naomi Xu Elegant looks at the “kooky midcentury American businessman” who bought the London Bridge, shipped it to the Arizona desert, and built a Disneyfied English village around it.
Only about 60,000 people live in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, one of four towns in the southwest founded by Robert P. McCulloch, a land developer, oil, gas and geothermal energy speculator, and purveyor of lawnmowers, garden tractors, car, boat and airplane engines, and, in 1949, the world’s first one-man chainsaw.
McCulloch was a man of gorgeously midcentury dreams. He founded and ran six eponymous companies before he died in 1977. With the money he inherited from his father and made from his own superchargers, motor engines, oil exploration, and real estate deals, McCulloch produced a working prototype of a steam-powered coupé (1953), manufactured a fleet of two-seat gyrocopters (a strange cousin of the heli) that he hoped would one day sit in every driveway beside the family car (1969), and launched a passenger airline to ferry prospective residents to the various cities he was spawning in the desert (1970). His California home appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in 1956, billed as a “push-button paradise” of futuristic contraptions: rotating sunbeds, self-heating barbecues, automatic whiskey dispensers, and buttons for drawing curtains and turning on the lights.
The doohickey house was located in Palm Springs, about three hours’ drive from Lake Havasu City. McCulloch purchased the land for the city after flying his prop plane over near the border of California and Arizona, scouting for opportunity, and spotting Havasu Lake (actually a reservoir) in the middle of the desert. He enlisted C.V. Wood, the chief designer of Disneyland in Anaheim—which had opened 15 years earlier, in 1955—to design a new town.
Lake Havasu City is the site of McCulloch’s most famous shenanigan: in 1968, he purchased the London Bridge from the City of London. McCulloch did not, as is often repeated, believe he was buying the more distinctive Tower Bridge, nor is his exploit the origin of the phrase “I have a bridge to sell you.” The man knew what he was doing!
The bridge, too weak to support the increasingly heavy vehicles of the modern world, was sinking into the Thames. Rather than demolishing it to build a new one, the city government thought to save some money by seeing if anyone would want to buy it. McCulloch did.
Slab by slab, he had 10,000 tons of 19th-century granite shipped from the UK to an unpopulated patch of desert in Arizona, where he did not even have a river for the bridge to cross.
The plan was to reassemble the bridge on dry ground, laying the arches over the sand dunes and then digging the sand out and rerouting a section of the Colorado River to run underneath it. After their permit to do this was denied, Wood, the Disney designer, pulled strings to get an audience with President Lyndon B. Johnson himself, whom he somehow convinced to let them build the bridge and carry out the minor terraforming work necessary for it to actually function as such.
It took three years and seven million dollars, thrice as much as it cost McCulloch to purchase all the land that would make up Lake Havasu City. It was an extravagant, delightful, ridiculous, and wholly unnecessary gimmick: what could be more American?
“Windows of the 7 train” by Cal Cole, shared by Everett Williams
MUSIC
Notes from the road
There’s a lot of beauty in Damien Jurado’s dispatch from the road: from the fall of snow to the feeling of history in a venue, from conversations about God with his brother to a live recording of “After Hours Mr. Rogers” by St. Yuma during a soundcheck.
We sailed across the frozen tundra of Wyoming yesterday, through high winds and snow. It was terrifying.
We got word of a pileup that had happened just the night before involving twenty semi-trucks and twelve cars. In total, there were two fatalities and countless injuries. The wait for ambulances must have felt like an eternity in the winter storm.
There is nothing—no civilization between towns. If you have ever driven on Interstate 80 between Utah and Colorado, you will know what I’m talking about. It’s almost haunting, no matter what the season.
The shows have been memorable. After Baker City, Oregon, we were on to Boise, Idaho. We played at a venue I’d never been to before: Shrine Social Club. It was beautiful.
You feel the history immediately when entering the building. Just beautiful. All wood. Chairs that have most likely been there since the opening line the outer parameters of the walls. I kept imagining the countless dances that took place there. Cigarette smoke ages a place—in a cool way. At times, I swear I could smell it still lingering.
My older brother, who lives in Boise, came out to the show. I have a strong bond with him—one that is spiritual. A devout Mormon whose belief is so real, so deep, that you feel its presence as you stand beside him. I’ve only known a few people like this. It goes without saying just how much I love and deeply admire him. He’s the real deal.
We talked for what felt like hours about Jesus and the beliefs pertaining to the Latter-day Saints Church. When he spoke, explaining the answers to my questions, I hung on his every word. When he gave pause while thinking about how to respond to something, it seemed to last an eternity.
He would sometimes pause mid-thought, staring into the atmosphere as if he were fishing or cloud-watching, and say, “You know what? That is a great question. I don’t have the answer to that right now. But if you give me some time to think more about it, and perhaps consult the scriptures, I will have an answer for you.”
I really respected that. Too many people pretend to know when they don’t. There is a certain beauty in not knowing the answers. It’s human.
I walked away challenged, as always after talking with him. I hope to see him again soon.
Hot off hosting Substack’s inaugural Spelling Bee, the writer, comedian, and actress has launched a Substack. In her first post, she asks that you think of it as an “ongoing performance art piece about… being irrelevant.”
has launched Principled Perspectives, where the global macro investor and writer will be sharing articles about “principles, tools, and what’s going on with life, work, economics, markets, politics, the changing world order, AI, the Big Cycle, and other such things.”
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It’s a bold title, I know. But there’s little doubt that the media is in crisis. Even as it seems that more news is being consumed than ever, it hardly feels like we’re getting smarter. Mad kings rule the media economy and reap the rewards. News organizations are doing mass layoffs. Impartial reporting is out; jestergooning is in.
But I believe there’s reason to hope. I’ve seen what can happen when publishers take ownership and audiences directly support the work they believe in. I’ve seen a new media market grow from nothing and watched once-struggling writers find financial security. I’ve seen them build new institutions, giving rise to a generation of fresh voices. And I’ve seen audiences vote for the culture they want to see, funding the voices and perspectives they value—leading to more than 5 million paid subscriptions on this platform alone.
So I’m capturing this pivotal time in the pages of a book.
How to Save the Media is about this era of transition, where old gatekeepers give way to new opportunities and direct relationships reign supreme. It’s about an emerging ecosystem where success doesn’t have to depend on who you know or how well you cater to an algorithm. It shows a way to recover from the collapse of traditional media, and escape the deranging effects of the attention economy.
This book tackles the biggest questions facing the media and society, from how to protect the free press to how to resist a robot uprising, taking readers into rooms with some of the biggest media power players of our time, including berserk billionaires and heroic hacks. I’ll blend insider access with outsider perspective, drawing on my history in media and tech across two decades and three continents, from scrabbling freelance journalist to co-founder of Substack. You’ll see how we got here and where we’re going next—from the temple to the garden.
How to Save the Media will be published by Authors Equity, a new publishing company that practices what this book preaches: authors retain full ownership of their work and receive the majority of the sales revenue. The cover art is by my exceptional colleague Joro Chen.
Pre-orders are available now. They matter more than many people realize; they’re what determine whether a book breaks through and reaches a wider audience. So consider pre-ordering if you believe in a different future for media: one where creators own their work, audiences help shape the culture they want to thrive, and power flows to people rather than platforms. This is about saving the media—but also about making it better than it’s ever been.
