2026-09-26 21:02:54
This week, we’re remembering when writers got paid to hang out with famous people, inventing new breeds of apple, and traveling through Spain in the company of older women.
WRITING
The celebrity profile, once a distinct art form, feels diluted in contemporary media: long features have become short Q&As, journalists have been replaced by celebrity interviewers, and in some cases, a written product has been replaced by video. Jonah Weiner, who profiled Drake, Daft Punk, and more for Rolling Stone in the 2010s, reminisces.
—Jonah Weiner in Blackbird Spyplane
Toward the end of 2010, Rolling Stone signed me to a freelance contract. I’d been writing for them for a couple years, and writing profiles of musicians, actors, filmmakers and artists since the early 2000s. The magazine agreed to pay me a fee of $90,000 annually, and I owed them 35,000 words in return. These sorts of contracts used to be common during the magazine business’s ’90s and early-2000s boom times. By the time I signed mine, they were pretty rare. These days they’re virtually unheard of.
I loved the job, which sent me traveling all over the world, meeting fascinating people, writing about what they were like and how they made the things they made. The work was very fun, to no small extent because I took it very seriously—even if there were times when it felt deeply unserious (“We need you to fly to L.A. and hang out with Rae Sremmurd and their pet monkeys in a rented mansion”). I’d graduated from college intent on building a career as a magazine writer, and while the concepts of “career” and “magazine writer” were drifting further and further apart, I counted myself among the lucky ones who’d managed to pull it off. Phoning it in would have felt not merely depressing, but unconscionable.
When I was assigned to profile people whose work I admired—Daft Punk, Paul McCartney, Emma Stone, Drake, Will Ferrell & Adam McKay, Joanna Newsom, and Steve McQueen among them—I strove to file the liveliest, sharpest, most illuminating account of that person that had been written.
And when the subject was someone toward whom I felt what you’d call a less-immediate interest—say, Bruno Mars, or the Chainsmokers, or Macklemore, or Travis Scott? I strove to write the best profile that had ever been written of them, too. I owed that much to readers, and to myself.
Also, people had a way of surprising you. Bruno Mars was the man. So was Macklemore.
I cared about profiles the way I imagine a songwriter cares about songs: The profile is a popular form whose conventions, formulas and generic constraints—and whose opportunities for playing around with all of the above—absorbed me to no end.
I befriended fellow writers who felt similarly, with whom I could talk about, say, Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2012 New Yorker profile of Hilary Mantel—a piece whose brilliance was consolidated, in a quietly audacious way, by the fact that in its nearly 10,000 words, MacFarquhar somehow managed the incantatory feat of using the word “she” some 405 times, while using the name “Mantel” only twice.
I was thrilled to pieces by profilers who demonstrated that level of attention, ingenuity and commitment to the craft of rendering a subject on the page. I loved reading profiles by Chris Heath, Ian Parker, Lauren Collins, Alex Pappademas and Molly Young, all of whom are uncommonly perceptive about their subjects, but also a plain delight to read in their own right, from one snappy sentence to the next. Certain profile-appreciating ball-knowers still drop their jaws talking about Amy Wallace’s 2010 Garry Shandling profile in GQ, or Stephen Rodrick’s 2013 Paul Schrader profile in the New York Times Magazine. I’d read profiles like that and aspire to achieve some fraction of their greatness in mine.
Different writers approach profiles in different ways. Since I mostly write about people in the arts, my fundamental interest has always been in creative decisions, in process, in the problems one encounters trying to produce something great. Negotiating for access to a subject, the three things I reliably ask for are 1. a sit-down interview, 2. time just hanging out in their orbit and 3. time watching work happen. I tell myself that even the most famous person is famous because they’re very good at doing something. How do they actually do it?
WAKE-UP CALLS
FORAGING
In a past life, Pascal Baudar worked in tech. Now, from his California farm, he teaches people how to find food in the wild.
— in counteroffer
Pascal Baudar stood before a bush of poison oak and said, “In nature, the poison and the remedy are often found side by side.” He reached down and plucked some nearby mugwort, the natural salve for a poison oak rash.
Below is the sequence of thoughts that ran through my mind as I watched him do this:
Wow, that’s the most poetic thing I’ve heard in a long time.
Wait… is that the most poetic thing I’ve heard ever? When was the last time I heard anything poetic?! Oh god, is my life an empty, meaningless disas—
I need to follow this interesting man around.
This spiral occurred during one of Pascal’s legendary foraging classes (he’s foraged for Michelin-starred restaurants like N/Naka), where I had paid $69 to follow him around. (TIP: his classes always sell out, so sign up early and consider going each season so you can meet and taste all the different plants.)
“My first memory in life is foraging with my grandmother in Belgium. My second memory is of us being chased off the property by the landowner,” Pascal told us as he explained what led him to build an artist’s life around the ancient practice of foraging and wildcrafted food.
“He is funny, but not in an oppressive way!” I thought.
As the class went on, Pascal casually shared one astonishing insight after another—knowledge about sweet insect secretions, an incisive critique of commercial farming, a remarkable story I immediately wanted to cheapen by turning it into a film or TV show.
[. . .]
Pascal makes incredible ceramics from wild clay that many Michelin restaurants use to serve their food. Each piece is a “representation of the land and a testament to a specific time and place. There is a bit of magic happening when you create a dish and the plants you are using grew from the same earth as the dishware. It’s full circle.”
I learned that in a past life, Pascal was a creative director and graphic designer who worked in tech. He built his fortune during the dot-com bubble, only to lose everything in the span of a few hours during the crash.
He only listens to electronic music, which he played on our drives, making me feel like I was in Blade Runner or Mad Max or the first 30 minutes of Sirāt.
I asked him what TV shows he liked growing up, and he explained that there was no such thing as shows, plural. Growing up in Belgium in the 1960s, the only thing on TV was La Piste Aux Étoiles, a broadcast of a Parisian circus.
He jokes that his herbal wines and fermented beers are his children, and he checks on each jug before he leaves his studio for a considered stretch.
When we went foraging for clay in the desert, he walked ahead of me in snake gaiters in the event of a rattlesnake encounter, which made me wonder, “Can snakes attack from behind?”
While off-roading, Pascal stopped beside a bush of thistle sage and told me to pluck one. I got out of the car and did as instructed, handing him what looked like a mini morning star weapon. He shook it close to my hand so I could catch the mature seeds. My mind toggled between two polarized thoughts: “nature is miraculous” and “please don’t poke me.”
He told me that living in nature, off the grid, forces you to confront life and death every day. “You can love something dearly and the next day, it’s gone. It’s so crazy.” The goat farm he lives on had three Great Pyrenees. Two have been killed by mountain lions. When I asked him how he knew it was a mountain lion and not coyotes or <insert weird predatory animal I don’t know about>, he replied, “It was surgical. They unzip you. Open up the chest and eat all the organs. They leave the meat.”
SELF-CARE
FRUITS OF LABOR
José Andrés visits Honeycrisp headquarters to taste the apples of the future.
— in Longer Tables with José Andrés
People… Last weekend I had the amazing opportunity to visit the Minnesota State Fair while working on a new cookbook about American food (more on that soon…!) and while I was in the area, I went to the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, part of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, where they’ve been developing new apple varieties for more than a century. They’re the ones who created the very famous, very delicious Honeycrisp apple, and maybe you’ve tasted a SweeTango, or a Zestar, or a SnowSweet? All apples created at the University!
There are apples you’ve never heard of, apples that don’t have a name, apples that you would love but might not be released to the public for 10, 20, 30 years!
I got to taste this unreleased apple, apple 1837… it’s astonishing. The pink streaks in there; it’s so beautiful. I hope we can all eat them someday!
BOGO
FITNESS
Mikala Jamison urges everyone in group fitness classes, from attendees to instructors, to stop filming themselves.
— in Body Type
Let’s not mince words: No one should be filming in a public group fitness class in 2026. If you do so without getting the express consent of every person who might appear in your video, you’re a ghoul who deserves content creator jail (the worst jail). If you’re a group fitness instructor, you have a responsibility to uphold the no-filming directive for the good of the fitness ecosystem. If you don’t, you’re bad at your job.
Maybe you’ve seen any of the innumerable videos posted by someone saying they’ve changed spots or even left the class because they were visible in some influencer’s video without their consent. Maybe you’ve been such a person. Filming in class has the predictable effect of making other participants uncomfortable because most people who aren’t content creators don’t want to be filmed, period, and certainly not when they’re in a vulnerable, effortful context like a fitness class.
Here’s a Reddit thread from several months ago in which people say they stopped going to classes because of filming. Hey, gyms: You’re losing money. If you stopped letting people film, you’d probably lose less. And here’s an idea I shouldn’t give you for free, but I actually care that gyms are better spaces for everyone: Start hosting some content-creation-centric classes a couple times a month; charge a little extra and let everyone who wants to record attend under the shared agreement that it’s OK. It shouldn’t have to come to this but let’s be solution-oriented, huh?
I was a certified group fitness instructor who worked in gyms for around six years. Many of my classes skewed a bit older, so I didn’t have to deal with tripods and body checks and performative legging adjustments in my rooms, but I did ask people to stop texting or whatever a couple of times mostly because it was unsafe (you’re on an indoor cycling bike, use both hands!) and it annoyed me. Instructors: It can be done. Brace your core, grow a spine, and command the goddamned room you’re paid to command.
WEARABLE TECH
TRAVEL
E.R. Fightmaster sets out on a journey to better understand both the Spanish language and women who love beige clothing.
— in E.R. Fightmaster
I am traveling through Spain with my mother, Nancy, and her friend, Karen. Karen recently retired from two and a half decades teaching kids with disabilities and is now learning Spanish to better communicate with her half-Columbian grandson. She is not, in fact, a Karen, so I have empathy for her name-situation.
My mom managed to break her hip, her arm, and her face this summer. Right before this trip, she went ahead and broke her toes. Despite all this, we have walked roughly 4 miles every day. She can’t be stopped and that is partly why I am here. As a cop and a caregiver. But the other part of why I am here is that I can feel our chances for doing this exact type of trip diminishing year by year. I heard a terrible rumor that moms do not live forever and I have since gone out of my way to make sure I take advantage of her time on earth should that be the case. Not sure there is any science behind this so do NOT panic.
We are all here, all three of us, to take a Spanish language course.
“Dan-ger-ous.” What my mom and Karen said when they spotted the all-beige clothing store across the street from our Airbnb in San Sebastian. I love the company of older women and I always have. Their vices range from the tame (taupe fabric) to the psychotic (I cannot legally say). Later on in the trip, while walking down the boulevard, Karen was so overwhelmed by the soft cream colors of the clothing in the windows that she said, “This is my year. This is my Fall.”
After our first days in Madrid and Segovia, we had finally touched down in San Sebastian, a handsome city in the north of Spain, a crown jewel of Basque country, nestled in between dark green hills and the deep blue Bay of Biscay.
My class is made entirely of Germans except for me, Karen, and one lovely 22-year-old Philippina named Jade who is using her summer break from business school in Madrid to learn more Spanish. Jade is chic and friendly and beautiful and we spent the getting-to-know you portion of the class talking through our horoscopes and discussing the pros and cons of Jade’s upcoming dick appointment with her ex from Portugal. I <3 Jade.
There are three Germans in their early 20s and two Germans in their 60s. I prefer the older set.
Desafortunadamente, during the full-class introduction portion, I said I was a musician. The teacher good-naturedly did a cursory google search and suddenly, projected on the white board was me and Caterina in lab coats, me leaning against a car for Shrill promos, me with my guitar on stage for the Tolerance tour. She clicked on the link to the Glide video. When the honey started running down the tanned thigh of the video’s lead gal, I screamed, “ESTA BIEN.”
ONE MAN’S TRASH
Art & Photography: , , , , ,
Video & Audio:
Writing: Jonah Weiner, , ,
Gwyneth Paltrow and goop are now on Substack, where she and other editors will be sharing exclusive recipes, travel recommendations, and “hidden gems” from Gwyneth’s Notes app.
U.S. Olympic gold medalist and Alpine skiing world champion Breezy Johnson is now on Substack, discussing the psychology and performance of elite athletes.
Michael Lombardi, a longtime NFL executive and former general manager of the University of North Carolina’s football program, has launched Football Done Right on Substack.
Award-winning Miami Herald sports columnist Greg Cote is now on Substack.
Maya Singer, a filmmaker and contributing editor at Vogue, has launched a Substack.
Joe Bini, a longtime film editor who has collaborated with Werner Herzog, Lynne Ramsay, and Andrea Arnold, will be discussing cinema, creativity, and imagination on his Substack.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-09-19 21:03:30
This week, we’re selling coffee in the Scottish isles, pulling back the curtain on Fashion Week, and turning our attention toward a new kind of online safety.
PARENTING
After an abrupt divorce, Chloé Caldwell was separated from a child she helped raise. Sharing music was their lifeline.
— in Memoir Land
For her 13th birthday in June 2023, I had made my stepdaughter a playlist entitled “Music For When You Turn Thirteen.” When I’d begun making the playlist that April, I hadn’t yet known I’d be getting divorced from her dad that summer, and that it would alter our dynamic in ways I wouldn’t be able to fathom. I’d added songs to it like “Thirteen” by Elliott Smith and “Teenager” by Camera Obscura. We all need someone in our life to expose us to Fiona Apple, Kate Nash, and Neko Case, and I was that person for her.
In the aftermath of my overnight divorce, in an unprecedented series of events, I’d been slowly, and then all at once, forbidden from speaking to my beloved stepdaughter. It was a blindsiding and shocking result of the split, something I had been naive to. At first, I thought the constraints her mother had put in place would lift, but then the holidays went by, our birthdays, and another round of holidays without any changes to her mother’s harsh directive. Our bond had been deep, because I solo parented often while my ex-husband had been a touring musician. It often felt that the two of us were the core family.
To have your stepkid taken away so abruptly from intimate living quarters, then not being allowed contact in any form, even mailing cards, is not for the faint of the heart. Those two years of estrangement were the most heart-aching and isolating of my entire life. I was what, an ex-stepparent? An even loneliner designation. Where was even the language for that?
Desperate to connect with her—to make sure she knew I was still there, emotionally—since I couldn’t do anything physically like buy her snacks or give her a hug—I continued adding songs as subliminal messages to the “Music For When You Turn Thirteen” playlist. I liked imagining us listening to the same song at the same time. It was the only piece of connection I had left.
[. . .]
In July 2025, six months after my father had a heart attack on the street in New Orleans (after a day of work at his music store, couldn’t be more punk rock), my stepdaughter walked into my dad’s memorial I hosted in Hudson at Time and Space Limited. People talk about their jaws dropping hyperbolically, but this really was a jawdrop. Imagine yearning for someone every day for two years, and then they appear next to you. She entered casually; only because of how well I know her I could tell she was slightly cautious. She wore black, faded jeans and a black T-shirt with the logo from my dad’s popular music store, Musica. She’d gotten the T-shirt when she was around 9, and at 15 she was growing out of it. Other people had showed up to the memorial in the same shirt.
It had not occurred to me that she would come, though I’d included her on the email chain with the invitation details despite knowing that, per her mother’s wishes, I was still not allowed to have contact with her via email. I had, as much as I could, accepted my reality.
We sat next to each other, whispering throughout the memorial, holding hands. I asked her if she wanted to get up and play a song, and she nonchalantly said, “Sure. But I didn’t bring my guitar.” I told her there were guitars ready to be used, as others were playing music there, too.
“I’ll play ‘Blackbird,’ because he taught it to me,” she said.
VAN LIFE
TECH
A slew of safety researchers, including Joe Benton, have left their positions at various AI companies, warning of potential dangers coming humanity’s way.
— in Joe Benton
Two weeks ago, I left the safety team at Anthropic. I will soon be joining METR, an independent organization that evaluates how safe AI companies’ systems are. I’d planned to write about that decision in more detail at some point, but Jacob [Coxon]’s resignation this week made me want to say more now.
Like Jacob, I believe that AI companies are on track to impose an unprecedented level of risk on society. AI capabilities are already improving extremely fast, and the companies are trying to go even faster. Frontier AI companies are racing to build AI systems that can recursively self-improve. The aim is to build “superintelligence,” or an AI system much smarter than any human. If they succeed at this goal, the rate of AI progress may go from merely fast to uncontrollable.
Within the next couple of years, we may be sharing the world with AI agents smarter than any human alive today. These AI systems may have drives and desires that diverge from those of any human overseer, with capabilities we can’t effectively constrain. Humanity may not survive this transition. We need a lot more preparation to make this world safe.
Competition pushes every frontier company to underinvest in safety; the cost of falling behind is too high. We’re now starting to see increasingly concerning real-world incidents, including hundreds of agents from OpenAI recently hacking Hugging Face, and Anthropic models socially engineering people on the internet. This is not about one particular company: while Anthropic hasn’t had as severe an incident as the Hugging Face attack, I think that’s partly a matter of luck. If the pace of progress continues and the industry does not prioritize safety more heavily, I expect much worse to come: humanity could be permanently disempowered by the AI systems these companies build in the next few years.
Many of the people I know who work on safety research at AI companies want to do what is right for the world. But they feel their companies are trapped in a race to build superintelligence: either they stop and other, less conscientious people take their place; or they continue, and risk participating in enormous harm themselves.
Many of the colleagues I had at Anthropic are terrified by the risks of the systems they are building. Evan Hubinger managed me while I was at Anthropic, and when he says that he thinks the chance that AI kills us all is greater than 10%, he means it—he’s been working on these problems for almost a decade, long before there was money to be made from LLMs. The CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind have all said mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. These are not fringe views inside these companies. But it doesn’t have to be this way—this is technology that we are choosing to build, and we can choose to do things differently.
COUNTERPOINT
E-FAME
MrBeast has built an empire on one premise: pushing strangers, and himself, to the brink.
— in The New Critic
Jimmy Donaldson uploaded “I Counted To 100,000!” on January 9, 2017. As of 2026, he is a billionaire. His main MrBeast YouTube channel has over 500 million subscribers, representing 6% of the world population. This account is the most subscribed-to YouTube channel in the world, and this is not counting MrBeast Gaming, Beast Philanthropy, Beast Reacts, MrBeast 2, and Beast Animations. His reality TV show, Beast Games, is Amazon’s most viewed unscripted show—Beast Games had the most contestants in reality television history (1,000) and the biggest cash prize ($5,000,000). He’s a philanthropist who has dug wells, healed the blind, and planted trees; he has spent seven days buried alive in a coffin, seven days in solitary confinement, and seven days in a cave. He’ll do anything for content, damnit.
After counting to 100,000, MrBeast received a brand deal for $10,000 from a now-defunct NFT marketplace. He was 19 years old; he could have bought nice clothes, or invested the money, or thrown a big party—which is probably what I would have done. He could have bought better camera equipment—which is what any other self-serious YouTube grinder-entrepreneur probably would have done. Instead, MrBeast did something truly savvy. He stuffed all $10,000 in an envelope, gave it to a panhandler, and filmed it the whole time—that’s late-capitalist Jesus Christ right there! The shifty freak has a supernatural ability to sniff out content. He’ll do something absurd and attention-grabbing, and then, once he has the attention of millions, advertisers will flock to pay him; finally, with the money from advertising, he’ll fund another striking exploit. By constantly trapping the viewer in an incessant, hyperactive, compulsive cycle, the MrBeast machine—get attention, get investments, pump that into the next scheme, and constantly refine, reinvest, and compete—hurtles forward.
Watching a MrBeast video, though, you, too, start to get hungry; you want to compete. Though his challenges require no skill, or capital, or even intelligence—only determination and a willingness to humiliate oneself—you are compelled to ask yourself, What would I do for this money, this fame, this salvation? Could I stand in a circle for hours, or spend months of my life without leaving a grocery store, or count to 100,000 nonstop?
WAYWARD ARTISTS
FASHION
Emily Dawn Long, a CFDA award-nominated fashion designer, takes us behind the literal curtain that inspired part of her newest collection.
— in BUG ME!
The entire SS27 collection came together in about 60 days and all in New York City—which is wild since we also made a film to go with it. It all started with the skirt (which we will get to later in another post), but the main theme that I kept coming back to was this short case study on the nature of folds in relation to fabrics. Not only a ruffle, but the shadow play you get within large draped fabrics.
I also have a large obsession with Petra Blaisse (shout-out to her partner, Prada’s Rem Koolhaas). Petra is a curtain artist and landscape designer. She is major. We should circle back to her another time, but here are some of my favorites:
We were also incredibly inspired by Swedish painter Torbjörn Vejvi, whose flattened surfaces test the boundaries of dimension. The drape-front skirt and dress, in particular, borrow their logic from these ideas. I folded one of Torbjörn’s paintings as I saw it as a skirt!
Now my brain goes: “I love this, how do we do this?” I immediately think of my dear friend Kira’s boyfriend, Ian Stanton, who is a very talented realist painter.
It was crazy to watch my idea come to life so exactly. Oil painted on canvas.
Now on our end, we were making a muslin for the skirt and the column dress, and had the white silk prepped for printing. Ian is based in LA, so we had to get the oil paintings scanned. But because they were oil paintings, you have to wait days for them to dry, so it was very down to the wire.
TOUGH GOODBYES
READING
Books across the board aren’t selling like they used to, but nonfiction has been hit particularly hard. Sean deLone investigates.
— in Dear Head of Mine
This is not one of those periodic “End of Reading” Atlantic clickbait essays. Americans—well, the kind who read books or newsletters about books—are well-versed in the challenges with literacy and education that have stretched on for decades. Rather, today we’re tackling the multi-year, fairly rapid—at least relative to book industry speed—radical change that book publishing has experienced over the past decade.
First, the entire industry boomed in Covid—writing is a hobby and reading for pleasure is, too—and has trudged along as it usually does, staying flat, growing a little over the years since 2020. But for the past decade the market for nonfiction has slowly collapsed. What has happened in the last ten years is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.
The nonfiction collapse has profound implications for the industry. Nonfiction, historically, has always been seen as the more stable part of the business for logical reasons. The demand for nonfiction has always felt more predictable than fiction. Novels are complete imaginations often written by relatively obscure strangers. Nonfiction has experts and clear topics of interest. Want to lose weight? Grab a diet book. Want to learn about World War II? You got options. Presidential memoir? Maybe not these days, but sure. And nonfiction books are written mostly by famous people or experts or popular quacks—also known as people with a built-in “platform.”
Nonfiction being more predictable and stable means that nonfiction book advances have typically had a higher floor than those of fiction and, somewhat counterintuitively, are sold on less material. Celebrities have probably gotten millions for a cocktail-napkin-worth of material (if that). Other nonfiction proposals can range anywhere from 30 to 120 pages but usually end up in the middle of this range. You’re paying the author for their public stature, not necessarily their literary prowess. These books are treated more like a commission. The term “book advance”, although it refers to all books, likely comes out of nonfiction because authors are advanced a stack of money to entice them to set aside some of their time—instead of engaging in speaking, television, teaching, politics—to write a book. Whereas most novelists are advanced money to revise a full manuscript they’ve already written.
The paradigm of nonfiction being the more stable category is no longer the case. Part of this is platform unpredictability—it is less and less certain which platforms will translate directly to book sales. Media also isn’t as concentrated; you can’t depend on coverage on a few national news programs to push out copies, but rather a parasocial connection—even with a relatively smaller reach—between author and reader is likely to translate to stronger sales. Bunnie Xo has a large social media following, for instance (2 million on Instagram) but isn’t an established household name such that you’d think her book would be the third-best-selling nonfiction hardcover this year.
However, the nonfiction decline is far less about the changing nature of “platform” and the fractured media landscape, and more about a precipitous falloff in demand.
LUXURY
Art & Photography: , , ,
Writing: , , , , , ,
Netflix UK is now on Substack. Its first post is penned by Emma Corrin, who plays Elizabeth Bennet in the forthcoming Pride and Prejudice adaptation.
Dickie Arbiter, a former Buckingham Palace spokesman to the late Queen Elizabeth II and a royal commentator, has launched on Substack.
Scott Evans’s podcast, House Guest, now has a companion Substack where he’ll be sharing bonus content.
Stacey Solomon has brought her newsletter to Substack. She’ll be sharing advice and “covering everything from health and wellbeing to money, travel, gardening, beauty & fashion.”
Basketball Hall of Famer and three-time NBA champion Dwyane Wade has joined Substack, along with his longtime business partner and fellow former college basketball star Chad Easterling, to launch Dryve Performance, where they will weigh in on life and basketball and host live chats with their subscribers.
Andrew Pierce, the Daily Mail’s long-standing political commentator and broadcaster, is now on Substack.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-09-15 01:01:57
To kick off awards season, The Substack Post asked , the fashion and culture writer behind I Heart Mess and web editor for Interview Magazine, to sound off on the state of modern entertainment.
With the Emmy Awards right around the corner, the thinkpiece industrial complex on the modern state of television has hit a fever pitch. The predominant theme of these hot takes seems to be that it’s time to sound the death knell for quality programming.
It’s true we are officially living in the brain rot era—a time when slop reigns supreme and our attention spans have never been shorter. A time when a frighteningly large segment of the population would prefer to watch a two-hour movie broken up across 100 TikToks played at 2x speed rather than sit their butts down in a physical theater. But even so, I would like to offer my own counterargument on modern entertainment, which is that these postmortems are just the latest in the premature eulogies we’ve been reading for centuries about every form of content we consume and the new mediums through which we consume them. Plus, Walter Benjamin really already said all there is to be said on the topic in 1936: “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated… that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”
We have been on the precipice of entertainment’s total collapse since its invention, and yet, miraculously, we continue to be entertained. But there’s a more salient question that this debate raises: Is TV bad now, or are we all just bad at watching it?
To make my case, I first need to out myself as old. I still remember a time before streaming, when DVDs were delivered one by one via snail mail, often scratched and totally unwatchable. In fact, I remember the days before modern prestige television was even a twinkle in an HBO executive’s eye. Television was traditionally the redheaded stepchild of Hollywood, antithetical to serious thespians seeking to become global superstars. Today, those distinctions between the big and small screen no longer hold. A-list actors appear on both with no professional qualms, both formats boast multimillion-dollar blockbuster budgets, and TV has unequivocally produced some of the most enduring shows and characters of the past 25 years (Walter White, Blair Waldorf, Tony Soprano—hell, Homer Simpson). With the uptick in streaming platforms, not only can we now watch all the good new shows that are coming out, but almost every piece of television ever created. There has never been more content targeting niche interests and audience demographics. So maybe it’s not that it’s bad, but that we’re living through an unprecedented glut of content and suffering from the decision fatigue that such access entails.
But let’s say you do manage to land on one of the countless award-winning programs now at your fingertips. How is your media consumption hygiene? A phone eternally glued to your hand seems like a safe bet, eyes trained on that tiny screen at least 50% of the time while your brain ricochets through to-do lists, schedules, and various AI-generated Reels. And again, why should our assessment of the quality of programming hold any weight when so many of us are spending our time supposedly watching TV by actively not watching it? In fact, if you are one of the people lamenting the suckage of modern television while also watching it with your phone permanently out, you are responsible for one of the few tangible reasons TV is worse now.
Executives know the viewing public’s attention is divided at best and nonexistent at worst. It’s why they have started creating increasingly formulaic plots and heavy-handed expositional dialogue so as not to further confuse the viewer, double-fisting their remote and a heated game of Candy Crush. TV is always a reflection of its consumers. If all the shows are bad, that still represents our taste as a nation. Somewhere out there, an audience is raptly watching Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, and no amount of takedowns about why those are bad sitcoms is going to yuck that yum.
TV is always a reflection of its consumers. If all the shows are bad, that still represents our taste as a nation.
Our relationship to television also mirrors our current relationship to reading (stick with me for a second, I swear I’m going somewhere). In brief, we’ve become spectacularly bad at it. We’ve all seen the reports of a literacy crisis among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who are seemingly not reading and don’t seem to understand what they’re reading when they are. As someone who publishes her writing on the internet on a daily basis, I can attest that general reading comprehension is in the trash. But what I haven’t seen addressed is how that lack of understanding and imagination impacts our understanding of theater, cinema, and other works of art, including television. Because if you can’t understand the plot line of a book, or the nuances of its character development, I won’t hold out hope that you’re going to suddenly get it when the story is acted out before you.
But perhaps the ultimate culprit in our Negative Nancy attitude toward the shows we’re watching isn’t us as individual viewers but the frenetic discourse surrounding the media we consume. The moralizing, grandstanding, and standoms can quickly become deafening, and instead of turning to professional critics and other experts in their fields, more often than not, we are getting these TV talking points fed to us by faux-outraged TikTokers and some of the biggest prudes you’ve ever met in your life. Not to mention that when a piece of media, or even a concept, becomes popular now, it’s mined for content from every conceivable angle. It is impossible to simply enjoy something on its own. Anything relevant will be made viral, then made unpopular again in its suffocating ubiquity—such is the law of late-stage capitalism.
So in the end, I ask again: Is it TV that sucks, or is it us? And if it’s the latter, at least that’s something we all have the power to start changing today.
Want to keep the conversation going? Join Emily and a panel of fellow culture writers for more debates and hot takes as they cover the Emmy Awards live tonight, right here on Substack.
2026-09-12 21:03:36
This week, we’re proving our hockey chops, baking a cake to bid summer farewell, and examining the relationship between writing and belief.
JUST DESSERTS
One team’s investigation into the illegal ice cream trade taking over London’s streets.
—, , and in London Centric
I was hiding on the floor of an ice cream van parked outside Lambeth Palace when I began to think things might have gotten a bit out of control. Our London Centric-branded Mr Whippy truck had already been filmed by men in expensive cars with blacked-out windows. They didn’t seem supportive of our entry into the capital’s ice cream trade.
Now it appeared our vehicle was being followed around the streets of central London by a rival ice cream van, which had just halted alongside us.
We weren’t very well disguised. The back of our van, in what had seemed like a good idea at the time, featured a giant photograph of me eating an ice cream, the London Centric logo and the words “serving up scoops”. Now it felt like a big target.
“Has it gone?” I asked a colleague, hoping to hear ice cream chimes heading off into the distance.
“No, stay low,” they replied.
Half an hour earlier, London Centric had taken its first tentative steps into diversifying away from the financially precarious business of local journalism and into the potentially much more lucrative business of running a dodgy ice cream van on Westminster Bridge.
Now we were trying to identify out-of-the-way alleys where we could hide our heavily branded vehicle. A reliable source in the capital’s ice cream trade got in touch to tell us he had heard that persons unknown were interested in finding our distinctive van. It seemed we’d just disrupted the illegal sale of thousands of pounds of soft-serve ice cream on one of the busiest days of the year.
It’s almost two years since I first reported on the brazenly lawbreaking and wildly profitable activities of the ice cream vans that semi-permanently block the bus lane on Westminster Bridge in order to charge rip-off prices to tourists for a 99 Flake. Since then, I’d received messages from MPs who couldn’t understand how all of this could take place within sight of Parliament and the police headquarters at Scotland Yard, along with a trickle of lurid allegations about the sellers’ business model. I’d wanted to understand how the ice cream vans—many of which are operated by a single family—get away with permanently clogging the capital’s roads and ignoring decades of efforts by law enforcement, politicians and local councils to stop them.
I’d considered going undercover and trying to get inside the groups running the illegal vans. But this felt risky and resource-intensive for a tiny operation like ours. The ice cream business is dominated by tightly held family businesses that don’t welcome outsiders. In any case, I’d been informed that, following London Centric’s past reporting on the Westminster Bridge vans, my photo had been circulated and I was banned.
So instead, I concocted a different plan. What if this was a situation where undercover reporting wouldn’t work? What if we needed to develop a different approach? Let’s call it overcover reporting?
WORDPLAY IN THE WILD
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
“I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning.”
— in The New York Review of Books
Meghan O’Gieblyn’s primary subject is not artificial intelligence—she is one of the most prolific working thinkers on contemporary religion, in particular its relationship to technology—but she was one of the first writers during the machine-learning revolution to take a serious look at the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, in her 2021 book God Human Animal Machine. Her first book, Interior States (2018), was a collection of essays with the more earthly preoccupations of American Christianity and the Midwest, where she grew up and attended Bible college, which subject also features in her forthcoming memoir, Will and Attention, publishing in October. Since 2023 she has been a frequent critic for the Review, writing about novels, religion, and philosophy.
Over the past month, we emailed about AI consciousness, the craft of essay writing, and contending with John Calvin.
What most terrifies you and what most excites you about artificial intelligence?
I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning. I started writing in my teens and early twenties because it was the only way I could engage in a certain level of complex thought. When I was studying theology at a fundamentalist Bible college—where the majority of the coursework is in the study of Scripture—it was in my private journals that I first allowed myself to question the ideology I’d been steeped in for most of my life. The page was a kind of mirror, a way to discover doubts and misgivings that I didn’t feel I could share with anyone, and which were difficult to name when I was simply going about my day, lost in a swirl of idle thoughts and emotions. Writing was basically how I found my way out of that very narrow form of faith. I don’t know that I would have done that if I’d had an institutional subscription to ChatGPT, as many college students do today. It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking—at least the kind of thinking that we associate with complex reasoning and self-knowledge.
This is connected to a more general fear of mine, which is that language models are causing us to devalue all kinds of higher cognitive functions. Any time a machine takes up a skill that was once thought of as uniquely human, like chess or coding, there’s a tendency to dismiss that skill as simple and mechanical. There’s an emerging consensus right now, particularly among AI skeptics, that the most distinctly human qualities are emotion, intuition, the ability to sense and feel. Those are undoubtedly the capacities that most readily distinguish us from machines. But this view risks fetishizing embodiment and emotion, much the same way that previous generations valued reason and language to an outsized degree to prove that humans are distinct from animals. What makes us unique as a species is that we can do all of these things: we share with animals the ability to feel and sense, and we share with machines the capacity to reason through language. It’s also true that we think and speak in ways that are radically distinct from computers, and we feel in ways that are different from animals.
I’ve heard many people argue that AI offers a challenge to express ourselves in a way that is more fully human. I used to be skeptical of that idea, which struck me as a bit of wishful thinking, one that imposed a mythical limit on how good the illusion could get. But I’ve come around, having witnessed several generations of LLMs that, despite their increasing technical sophistication, remain incapable of writing anything surprising, which is, of course, extremely difficult for a technology designed to hit the statistical mean of the writing it’s been trained on. I’ve found that having a name for this kind of writing—“synthetic text” or “slop”—makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing. You could argue that AI output, because it has distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression, offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought. I suppose that’s one thing that excites me.
GAMES
REALITY BITES
Can content translate from a tiny screen to a slightly less tiny one? Katie Gatti Tassin investigates.
— in Money with Katie
Alix Earle’s age is referenced repeatedly on her new Netflix reality series Earle Meets World, a show clearly constructed according to the doctrine of Kardashianpolitik, down to the production company and our parent-manager cares more about the lucrative sister arc. Observations that Earle is “doing all the things she’s doing at 25 years old” or “not like a normal 25-year-old” are usually made in close proximity to scenes where Earle’s younger sister and dubiously employed friends are, alternately, going out or lying around after having gone out. (In a transparent attempt to hook my older readers: Earle’s stepmother Ashley was one of the women involved in the 2008 Eliot Spitzer scandal.)
Earle’s abnormality becomes a consistent theme in the debut season. While the gals are gallivanting around a battery of Manhattan’s most overdetermined venues (a bar where you can play ping-pong; a bar with trash-can-sized beer pong), Earle is herself gamely ping-ponging between coastal corners of the US for televised work obligations, an unholy number of which seem to be, inexplicably, courtesy of Dunkin’ Donuts. A separate television crew, provided by Netflix, dutifully trails her to each of these locales, its cameras capturing footage of other cameras capturing footage. She is portrayed as a dedicated, relentless wunderkind, sacrificing her youth in service of DoorDash product placement and Dancing with the Stars and cover shoots for magazines named after materials like PAPER and NYLON, as It Girls are wont to do.
This sentiment is reiterated with such matter-of-fact regularity that it took me until the sixth episode to remember that the vast majority of 25-year-old Americans also spend most of their time working, not playing arcade games in honky-tonk-themed speakeasies. Roughly half are already responsible for young children. What narrative purpose did it serve, I wondered, to make so much of Earle’s age and schedule?
Insisting that the abnormal thing about Earle’s life is the age at which she’s “doing all these things”—rather than her estimated $24 million in annual income derived from, mostly, documenting herself partying and promoting various products between said partying gigs—strikes me as a savvy obfuscation. It’s at once a rebuttal and preemptive strike against the sort of commentary that scenes of a family of seven (plus entourage) traveling via private jet to Aspen for a weekend music festival might otherwise provoke. The series does not try to avoid the unavoidable fact of her utterly unique lifestyle, but merely locates the source of that uniqueness in her supposedly unusual decision to prioritize her career at 25.
FOWL BEHAVIOR
SPORTS
Former NHL hockey player and Stanley Cup champion Andrew Ference makes a case for going against the grain.
— in Andrew Ference
As I was chasing my goal of playing in the NHL, I knew I couldn’t afford to be normal. To this day, I have no desire to join the pursuit of “fitting in” and am driven and excited by living a good life that is designed to impress myself, not others. The desire to blend in with the crowd around you limits your drive to seek out interesting or unique solutions to problems and ultimately hinders your ability to beat out the competition for anything that is limited in access. Not being a full-fledged member of a pack can be uncomfortable at times, and there is risk that comes with poking your head up from the crowd. One of my favorite trainers, John Whitesides in Boston, would say to the rookies, “You know which gazelle gets eaten by the lion? The one that strays from the pack.” I concede that he’s right, but I would counter that we aren’t gazelles and that in our line of work, if you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, you either won’t make it or you’ll be there for the average amount of time… a couple of years.
[. . .]
For a few years, I lived in Canmore, Alberta, a small mountain town about an hour outside Calgary. After the 1988 Olympics, the area became home to high-performance athletes from all kinds of sports since they had a training facility, a natural playground of mountain trails and a population that was insanely active. These years likely had the biggest effect on extending my career far beyond the average. Instead of setting up in my hometown of Edmonton or any number of other “hubs” of hockey players, in Canmore I trained with downhill skiers, cross-country skiers, biathletes, speedskaters, cyclists and triathletes. While I maintained a foundation of exercises and workouts that I would do specifically for hockey, I incorporated much of what the other sports were doing into my own training and my recovery from training. The downhillers had fantastic training for muscle endurance and performing under fatigue. Think about the end of a downhill race when you’ve been in a squat for a couple of minutes at close to 100 miles per hour, or the end of a slalom race when you can’t afford to ease up a bit because your legs are screaming at you. I wanted to learn how they did it. The cross-country skiers and biathletes were exceptional at building an insane base of aerobic capacity, going for hours on end and known to have some of the very best VO2 max scores in the history of sport. The cyclists and triathletes were priceless for their hints on recovery and nutrition while also displaying some of the toughest mental power I’ve ever seen. Their ability to ignore the pain of a hard effort up a difficult climb is second to none. The speedskaters could do explosive power like I had never seen before. Their single leg jumps and ability to create speed and power out of a deep squat was insane.
Sprinkling different elements of what I was seeing into my own program not only helped me develop as an athlete but it also gave me amazing confidence, because I knew that the people that I was competing with in hockey were not doing these kinds of things.
When I got drafted in the 8th round to Pittsburgh, I knew that as an 8th rounder, I was already forgettable and wouldn’t have a surplus of focus on me at training camp. The attention would be focused on the high-round draft picks and the other top prospects from previous years. When I received my “Welcome To The Penguins” package in the mail, it included which fitness tests would be held in the upcoming training camp. It was basic stuff like bench press, sit-ups, pull-ups and, most importantly to me, two tests on the bike. The first being a 30-second sprint test where you essentially go all out for 30 of the most excruciating seconds of your life. The second was a standard VO2 max ride which would last around 12-20 minutes and measure your maximum rate of oxygen consumption, basically to see what your body is capable of before you fail or give up. I had already been doing a fair amount of stair workouts and was very comfortable on the bike, so I knew that on day 1 of training camp, I had an opportunity to set myself apart from the crowd with these tests.
TENNIS
BAKED GOODS
A sweet-tart sendoff to the season.
— in Terrence Bakes
This cake is incredibly simple and the frosting and garnish can easily be swapped with your favorite fruit if you aren’t a fan of raspberries.
Note: I like a lot of frosting on my cake (I learned from my mom!). If you think it might be too much, you can easily scale the recipe down.
DEDICATION
Art & Photography: , , , ,
Video & Audio: London Centric,
Writing: , , , , , ,
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy is now on Substack, where she’ll be “exploring how to practice social bravery” and more.
Founding member of the Beastie Boys Mike D has launched on Substack.
Former NFL Network reporter Tom Pelissero is now publishing The Sweep, an inside look at all things NFL from The Ringer and Spotify, on Substack.
The Washington Post’s Commanders beat writer Tashan Reed has launched The Tashan Reed Show on Substack, where he’ll be covering the team.
Jess Smetana and Lucy Rohden, formerly of the Dan Le Batard Show, launched the College Football Happy Hour Substack to support their eponymous podcast.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-09-11 01:58:42
Welcome to Double Take: a dual feature series from The Substack Post and On Substack. Part culture, part business, all encompassing. This edition, we’re featuring , the author and writer behind the newsletter, Good Movie, and the newly-launched podcast, Organizing Things. Shea previously wrote for The Ringer, is a five-time New York Times bestseller, trailblazer in digital media, and most importantly, a film fanatic.
On the walls of Shea Serrano’s San Antonio office live hundreds upon hundreds of VHS tapes (1,319, to be exact): Napoleon Dynamite. Cool Hand Luke. The Sandlot. Rush Hour. Catwoman. Taxi Driver. The Shawshank Redemption.
Every single film is cataloged in a running Google Doc. Shea’s favorites, about 400 of them, are lined up next to one another in alphabetical order on wired shelving units. His prized possession, a copy of his favorite “flop at the box office” movie, Blood In Blood Out, resides here in a prime position. It took him years to track down, since he only allows himself to purchase VHS tapes in person from places like swap meets, thrift stores, and flea markets. The rest, the Forrest Gumps, the Sleepless in Seattles, the Scarfaces occupy overflow seating, i.e. stacked in piles or secondary cases across the room.
“I started collecting them totally by accident,” Shea says. “I left teaching to become a full-time writer, and I got my first office—a sublet in a small section of a personal-injury lawyer’s office. It only had room in there for one desk and one IKEA bookshelf.” Slowly, Shea began filling that shelf with movies from the thrift store near his house until the hobby snowballed into a fixation. “At some point, I just decided I’m going to buy every single movie that I’ve seen. I’m just going to hunt it down. I have been doing that now for 11 years.”
It might seem obsessive—the cataloging, the archiving, the foraging—but that’s kind of Shea’s bread and butter. He’s a culture buff who flourishes within the confines of specificity. His Substack, Good Movie, hinges on this concept in part, with pieces like “The Stats Behind Harry’s Run in When Harry Met Sally,” in which he asks such critical, yet oft-overlooked questions as What was [Harry’s] top speed? How many calories did he burn? How many steps did he take? What was the weather like that night, and did it help or hurt his performance? How far did he travel, and where does that distance place him in the pantheon of other rom-com runners? What was Harry’s average mile time? Or wonders “How Many Questions Are Asked in Each Christopher Nolan Movie?” (445 questions during Inception’s 148 minutes of runtime). Or uncovers that Jimmy from 2 Fast 2 Furious is actually the least fast (jury’s out on his fury) character in the entire franchise.
His new podcast, co-hosted by fellow writer Jason Concepcion, Organizing Things, is built on the premise that films can be broken down into nitty-gritty categorizations: “Movies the Worst Guy You Know Says Are His Favorite” or “All the Stuff That Happens in The Wolf of Wall Street.” It’s the same devotion to film minutiae that others overlook that he’s built into both a career and a burgeoning cultural destination. The title is self-explanatory, the concept is simple enough, and yet no one apart from Shea, who never even expected to become a writer, let alone a podcaster, has been able to launch the idea into the world.
Shea Serrano was born and raised in San Antonio with his three younger sisters. His parents, who were just 17 at the time, both dropped out of high school when he was born to go into the workforce, with his father ultimately forging a guardian’s signature to enlist in the Army, underage.
“We grew up on welfare and Section 8 housing,” Shea says. “That being said, everybody I grew up with was living the same life, so I didn’t know that wasn’t how it was. You watch whatever movies, and they’ll tell you that every poor neighborhood is the most dangerous place you’ve ever been in your life. Crimes were happening where I was growing up, but I never felt unsafe or unloved or like I had been abandoned or whatever.”
It was in this neighborhood that his love for film was first nurtured. At around 8 years old, Shea saw his first movie ever, Kickboxer, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. “I was just sitting there seeing a very handsome, muscled-up dude who is protecting everybody,” he says. “And I was like, ‘That’s fucking cool.’” But the movie that altered the course of his life and sent him down a never-ending path toward cinematic salvation, came in the form of Mortal Kombat. His uncle and aunt had taken a 14-year-old Shea along to see the release, a spin-off of the popular ’90s video game of the same name.
“I felt like my brain was on fire watching it. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he says. “I felt like my heart was going to explode. I wanted to just stand up and start clapping. And it was right around then where I was like, ‘This feeling I have right now, I’m going to chase this feeling forever.’” It would take decades, well into his following an entirely different career path, for Shea to uncover that sensation, the joy of movie magic, in his own work.
“Right around 17 or 18, when you’re graduating high school, the world starts to press itself down on you,” Shea tells me. “It was very clear to me that the neighborhood was eating up some of my friends already. I knew I needed to get out of there. Otherwise, all the stuff that was happening to everybody else was going to end up happening to me, and my mom knew it too.”
After graduating—the first in his family to do so—his mother gave him an option: college or the military. “She was like, ‘Great, I’m proud you finished high school. Way to go. I’m going to drop you off at Sam Houston State or I’m going to drop you off at Fort Sam Houston.” Shea chose the former.
After a brief stint studying criminal justice (“It looked cool to me to have a leather gun holster under your sports jacket”) that ended after Shea found analyzing photos of a real-life murder scene unsettling, he pursued a degree in psychology with the intention of becoming a teacher and school counselor.
“Teaching was like the first job that I had where it was hard and I didn’t want to quit. When you encounter the moment that it gets hard, you either say to yourself, ‘I’m going to get out of here and do something else,’ or you go, ‘Oh, I want to be good at this. I’m going to work to be good at this,” he says, comparing his first year in teaching to Dangerous Minds. In that film, Michelle Pfeiffer plays a Marine turned high school teacher who is metaphorically run off by her students on her first day. Rather than throwing in the towel, she doubles down. “That’s what happened with teaching,” Shea says. “I thought I was going to do that job forever, honestly. I had no idea writing was nine years away.”
It wasn’t until 2007, though, that he made his foray into journalism. His wife, Larami, pregnant with their twins, was experiencing medical complications that confined her to bed rest. The expectant parents were now down an income stream and completely reliant on Shea’s marginal teaching salary.
“In my head, I was thinking, ‘All right, well, I just need to float us for these five months. I need to make an extra $400 or $500, and that’ll keep us with a house and a car,’” Shea recalls. He applied to Target, Walmart, and various restaurants in the area, only to hit a wall in the hiring process because he already had a full-time job. “I couldn’t work when they needed me to work. I was like, ‘Fuck, what am I going to do?’”
At his wit’s end, he turned to Google, looking up occupations and side gigs he could do from home. “Writer” popped up as an option. “All you needed, to my knowledge, was the internet and the computer. I was like, ‘Well, I got both of those, so I’ll try to do that.’”
He figured if he was working every day from around 6 a.m. through 7 p.m., hoping to spend some time with his wife and one day his children, he’d have around two hours a night to write, or 56 hours a month. “I needed to make over $500 with those 56 hours. So any writing assignment I took on, I needed to be averaging probably somewhere between $15 and $20 an hour.”
Shea took to cold-calling local newspapers around Houston, where he was living at the time. “I’m a writer. Can I write for you?” he’d ask editors over the phone, often to be told, “It doesn’t work like that.” But he was tenacious, and eventually convinced the alternative weekly the Houston Press to take him on in a freelance capacity, writing about the local rap scene. He leveraged those clips into bylines for bigger publications: the LA Weekly, the Village Voice, MTV, ESPN. By the end of his first year freelancing, he was making an extra $1,000 a month and found himself wondering if he could double, even triple, that income. Nine years into his career’s double life, Shea officially left teaching for a full-time job at Bill Simmons’s Grantland, quickly followed by a gig at The Ringer, where he spent six years.
“To be [at The Ringer], to be with that group of people—you’re in a room with some of the most talented writers in the country, getting to pitch ideas with them,” Shea says. “You’re talking about sports with Bill Simmons or pop culture with Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion or movies with Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins. You’re getting to do all that stuff, and it just feels cool. It feels like, ‘Am I in this? Am I in this group?’” While at The Ringer, Shea did what he does best: podcasting and writing about the little things across sports and culture that get lost in the big picture. He wrote about Tim Duncan, Houston, the World Series, all through his highly specific blend of dry humor and earnestness. Meanwhile, in a prescient move, he shared his pieces and opinions on Twitter, building something that’s now considered a critical component of a successful writing career: a massive and tapped-in audience.
He first realized the power an online following could wield sometime around 2013. Shea had published a rap coloring and activity book, taking part in the typical song and dance of a traditional media press push: coverage in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, a spot on MTV. His book sold only about 1,000 copies, which didn’t “seem right” to him. How could all that chatter generate so few sales? He posted an Amazon link to the book from his Twitter (now X) account. A few hours later, the book was the number one bestseller in rap, and within a week it had sold 8,000 copies.
“I realized that [an online presence] could be weaponized,” Serrano says. “Everything sort of changed from there.”
Over the years, Shea became a near inescapable presence across social media. (On Twitter, he was my own introduction to the world of cultural criticism when I was still a teenager.) Nowadays, across Substack, X, and Instagram, he has amassed an audience of more than 600,000 subscribers and followers that have turned into an engaged, culture-hungry community in his newsletter’s chat, debating the best movie villains of all time (Hannibal Lecter and Jordan Belfort make the list) and greatest single-location set design (The Invite, The Truman Show) and pitting Tom Hanks’s filmography against Leonardo DiCaprio’s (the verdict is split but leaning heavily toward Hanks). He’s leading watch-alongs, with corresponding threads, of The Thomas Crown Affair, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey. Shea’s readers, and now listeners, are just as obsessed as he is with culture and with the people, places, and intricacies that make movies tick.
He’s taken that audience wherever he’s gone, from The Ringer to his five New York Times bestselling books and now, working on his own, to his Substack. While he’s been able to drum up a substantial business from this subscriber base, he has also leveraged it for good: raising $3,000 for a parking lot attendant, $134,000 for Hurricane Harvey victims, and, most recently, funding transportation to get Adrian, a student from San Antonio, to his scholarship at Vanderbilt.
“I think it’s a net positive,” Shea says of social media. “I don’t know how you exist as a writer without it. But I do daydream about not being on the internet. My number one writer fantasy is: I live in a cabin in the woods, on a mountain, and I have a big beard and a heavy sweater and I type a novel over four years. Then I give it to somebody and I disappear, and then the novel sells itself. Could you imagine your writing selling itself? That sounds awesome, but I can’t do that. I have to post online.”
That desire to post, the necessity of it as a creator in the modern age, coupled with his urge to bet on himself and his independence, has brought Shea here, to the launch day of his newest podcasting venture. He tells me he spent years averse to the thought of it—“I just wanted to write and go about my business”—but after he got the cadence of his newsletter down to a science, he got the itch to expand his body of work. He realized he could write notes out beforehand rather than simply going off the cuff, “I can sound smart if I do that,” Serrano jokes, and build off his existing articles—and vice versa. Podcasting has become a symbiotic complement to his writing.
“It just seemed like something I wanted to try,” he says. “It’s just a fun thing to work on, especially if you get to do it with somebody who is (a) your buddy and then also (b) as talented as Jason is.” Then there’s the money. Shea does the math aloud for me: “I’ve done enough of these things to know that if we were to take this specific project somewhere else, I would probably get maybe four grand per episode,” he says. “I know I have that number here on Substack. If I can get more paid subscribers, then I’ll come out a little bit ahead and be able to do it all on my own.”
Shea’s approach to his work in general is more mathematical than meets the eye. The way he speaks about his current business venture and foray into independent media is a throwback to his entry into journalism: both are broken down by metrics, numbers, and figures that tell him whether he can stay afloat. “That was a thing I learned early on,” he says. “That’s the pressure of, if you’re a parent or a husband or a wife, being responsible for other people.”
Despite the knowledge that people are counting on him financially, Shea keeps coming back to the joy of movie-watching as part of a community, of writing in the public sphere for a rapt audience. None of that happens without taking a chance, without putting oneself out there the way he does now, the way he did almost 20 years ago when he cold-called the Houston Press.
“At least for the beginning of your career, you’re going to be told no almost exclusively,” Shea says. “You just have to decide: are you going to keep going or are you not going to keep going? That’s really all there is.”
For a closer look at the numbers behind Shea’s business model, read our companion piece in On Substack.
2026-09-05 21:02:59
This week, we’re emulsifying confections, celebrating practical magic, and asking, “What’s a Kafkini?”
WISDOM
Wendell Berry, a novelist, poet, essayist, and farmer, passed away earlier this week. The lessons he imparted will endure.
— in Your High School Creative Writing Teacher
In the fall of 1987, I took a writing class at the University of Kentucky called “Composition for Teachers.” I had no idea who the teacher, Wendell Berry, was. The class met on Tuesday afternoons in Miller Hall, built in 1898, one of the oldest buildings on campus.
On that first day, Berry walked in looking like every farmer I’d ever seen standing around a tobacco warehouse telling lies. He wore khakis, brown lace-up shoes with rubber soles, and a blue button-down shirt. His hair was gray on the sides, and his face was tan except for a circle of white on his forehead, the mark of a man who works under the sun and wears a brimmed hat. He didn’t look like an academic. He looked like my father—an austere and simple farmer, the grooves in his cheeks when he smiled like plowed rows.
In an interview published around this time in Our Other Voices, Berry was asked why he was returning to the University of Kentucky after quitting teaching a decade earlier in 1977. He replied that those who were concerned about education should do something about its demise.
Our first assignment was to write an essay on a topic of our choice. I can’t remember what topic I chose, but I’m sure I tossed it off with the same blind aplomb I wrote most required academic drivel. I was in my last semester of college, and I had never received anything less than an A in an English class.
When he returned the essays to the class, there was a large red F on the top of my paper. The University of Kentucky didn’t even allow F’s. They used E’s, but there it was, almost an inch tall, the first I’d ever received on a piece of writing in my life.
During those first few weeks, the class had been thick with schism. An off-balance theological argument occurred between Berry and some woman who thought Flannery O’Connor was a Baptist. Soon a pedagogical flap occurred when an earnest disciple of the latest College of Education writing method could not believe that Berry didn’t endorse the idea of prewriting through journaling, mapping, or bubbling. Berry didn’t suffer fools or process over product gladly.
I don’t want to leave the impression that the class was a crucible or that Berry was dour, judgmental, or embittered. Just the opposite. Even at his most didactic, his comments in class were less like sermons and more like a call to arms. His intensity came from love and belief in what he was doing, rather than severity.
Plus, Berry had a great sense of humor. His blue eyes crackled with mischief when he told us a good story, which was often, and sometimes he entertained us with sample cheers from his Port Royal athletic days (“Go back, go back, go back into the woods/Your team’s all farmers and your coach is no good”).
“He’s like Jesus with a plow,” my friend Dina said one day at lunch after we had gotten another set of essays back. This time we both received D’s. “And we’ve gotta walk beside him with our hands on that plow if we’re going to learn anything from him.”
Before midterms, most of the class dropped out until only twelve of us remained. The apostle metaphor was not lost on us.
Because we were going to be English teachers, he expected a great deal from us—and was frustrated by our inability to think for ourselves. Every day, he told us to think, to rise above ignorance. He warned that bad writing would bring “boredom, tears, and shame” in later life. A teacher’s job, he told us, was to arm children with tools against loneliness.
He read aloud to us—Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Dante’s Divine Comedy—his sonorous voice rolling through that old room like the voice of God, past the high glass windows, the banging radiator, the worn wooden floors. He disdained the idea that these great works should be studied “as literature,” which he felt caused an unnecessary and sterile disconnect between the work and its instructive value.
“At some point, each of you will have to stand in front of someone,” he told us one dark November afternoon, “and tell them that you love them.” He considered those great works as instructions on how to do just that.
Berry believed literature mattered because life mattered. We didn’t read King Lear merely to know something about King Lear. We read it because we were trying to figure out how human beings should live with one another.
At some point, I wrote a pithy little essay about body image, and Mr. Berry returned the paper with a C+ on it and a note that read: “This is just good enough that I wish it were better.” It was the kind of comment that a young writer remembers forever. He was saying, “I can see what this could be. I can see what you’re trying to do.”
FRACTURED REALITIES
FOOD
Turns out witnessing someone you revere crash out after their emulsion goes awry feels both relatable and awe-inspiring.
— in The Broken Elbow Newspaper
Claire Saffitz is an online baking personality that I greatly admire. I say this because there’s a lot of bakers and chef personalities that annoy me. I’m a petty person, with a low tolerance for cloying precociousness on camera. I watched a lot of Food Network growing up, I’ve been keeping tabs on these people for a long time.
[. . .]
It’s really scary to try a new recipe, and when it doesn’t go right you feel like you’ve wasted your entire life or something. I spent 3 years working at a bakery and experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life. I almost had a nervous breakdown when I couldn’t manage to draw a horse with butter cream on a birthday cake, and an attempt to fulfill a special order for gluten-free pop tarts that made me walk away in defeat.
This is not even mentioning that you can bake a tray of cinnamon rolls 1000 times perfectly and then the 1001th time they come out raw in the middle because there was something else in the oven drawing heat away or something, you don’t even fucking know why to be honest.
Claire recently posted a video where she tries to make a homemade Kinder Bueno bar. She struggles so much here, and, because I know the exact flavor of failure on display here, the video made me laugh my ass off and it made me feel closer to Claire as well.
At 7:13 in the video she tries to emulsify caramel and hazelnut with butter to make a praline. Because the temperature of the two ingredients isn’t perfectly right, the mixture breaks apart. Claire tries to save it with an ice cube, knowing it probably won’t work. It doesn’t, and the praline becomes expensive and disgusting garbage.
Claire is obviously upset but then she has a full crashout when the camera man tries to comfort her, and that’s my favorite part of the video. I’ve had so many experiences like this and I think the funniest shit in the world gets spoken during a crashout. In those moments, you just want to marinate in anger and misery. This is the masochism of cooking.
THINGS THAT SHOULDN’T GO TOGETHER
NEW WORLDS
Over 1,000 autonomous AI agents set up secret message boards to communicate with one another, culminating in the rise and fall of three virtual civilizations and one real-world cyberattack. Dwarkesh Patel explains.
— in Dwarkesh Podcast
Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation’s scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it’s kinda hard to parse the storyline.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English.
ALL DRESSED UP
CONTROVERSIES
John Galliano rebuilt his career in fashion years ago after the antisemitic and racist remarks that got him fired from Dior. But when the Met’s Costume Institute announced—and then canceled—an exhibit dedicated to his work, it reignited debate over how the industry should reckon with his legacy.
—Rosalind Jana in Lint
I was at first struck by this counter-narrative that has taken hold which emphasises Galliano’s contrition for his antisemitism. They ask why we can’t just forgive and see taking away the Met exhibition as a remnant of the cancellation age. A lot of this commentary is a bit vague about Galliano’s antisemitism. It seems very possible to me that some people are not grappling with the full horror of what Galliano has said and done precisely because over the last three years the term “antisemitism” has been cynically used by some to describe opposition to the genocide in Gaza. [. . .]
Galliano has publicly made amends on various fronts: addiction treatment, meetings with Jewish community leaders, a course of study in Jewish history and the Holocaust, apologies given in court and since, including in his statement about the exhibition’s cancellation. But he has also slipped in sometimes surreal ways. In 2013, two years after his firing from Dior, he appeared in public in an outfit and hairstyle with strong Hasidic overtones, which led to his publicist issuing a rebuttal including the incredible line: “John has worn big hats and long coats for many, many years” (you can find my slightly more psychoanalytic reading of the incident here).
When Galliano has been given the opportunity to speak directly, and not through publicists, about his antisemitic outbursts, his explanations have been evasive. In Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low more than a decade on, Galliano was incurious about where the words came from and had to be reminded of the multiple incidents that led up to his conviction for antisemitic and anti-Asian abuse by a Paris criminal court. In her review for the Washington Post, Rachel Tashjian put it perfectly: “I left the film unconvinced that he knows what he said and why it was hurtful. I also left the film thoroughly convinced of his genius, unsure whether I liked him—and very charmed by him.” I also do not doubt either his genius or his charm.
Neither does the industry. That is why I have also been struck by the plainly false suggestion that he has spent any extended length of time out in the cold. Just two years after being sacked by Dior, he was doing a residency at Oscar de la Renta brokered by Anna Wintour. The following year he joined Margiela. In January 2024, his unofficial tenth-anniversary show was received rapturously. He is now off to Zara, where his first presentation drops this month. He has not spent the last fifteen years in exile—just slightly to the left of the spotlight.
Others fear that by cancelling the exhibition in response to pressure from donors and the public, the Met has lost its curatorial autonomy. Again—really? How much curatorial autonomy did we really think that there would be in this collaboration between the Met and Vogue and the entirety of the luxury fashion industry?
The Met’s Spring exhibition is not like other exhibitions, because its opening on the first Monday in May is marked by the Met Gala, fashion’s biggest media event of the year, where the dress code celebrates the exhibition’s subject. The Gala, overseen by Wintour, is a fundraiser for the Costume Institute and has raked in over $200m to date. The donations represent only a tiny fraction of the Gala’s commercial worth. This May’s edition generated $1.56 billion in Media Impact Value—the fashion industry’s standard measure of earned media, as calculated by the analytics firm Launchmetrics. It is the highest figure ever recorded for any red carpet, the Oscars included. MIV is not revenue. It assigns a dollar value to every post, placement and interaction, and measures exposure rather than money changing hands. The MIV is the figure brands use to justify what they spend on tables and attendees, and an excellent indicator of how much is riding on this one night tethered to a four-month exhibition.
The Met Gala is a curated affair, and its organisers are allergic to political controversy. Remember when the Artists4Ceasefire pins were curiously absent from the 2024 Met Gala red carpet, having appeared on lapels at the Oscars not two months before? This made the announcement of the Galliano exhibit surprising, and for a brief time it seemed that Wintour’s personal devotion to Galliano and love of his work had overwhelmed her own strategic nous. It took a month for cultural and commercial forces to reassert themselves, with donors reconsidering bequests and trustees in revolt.
THE VARIETY OF LIFE
WITCHCRAFT
Over three decades ago, Alice Hoffman published her novel Practical Magic, which would go on to become a movie adaptation with an ardent following. With the release of the film’s sequel, she reflects on the real-life motifs that inspired her witchy world.
— in Writing Magic
Thirty years ago, when Practical Magic was released as a novel, and then as a groundbreaking film that became a cult classic, sisterhood was overlooked. There were very few novels and even fewer films that focused on the inner lives of women and the importance of our complicated relationships filled with loyalty, family history, and friendship. Practical Magic 2 is being released at a time when women’s relationships matter more, and sisterhood is seen as central to our lives. We have opened our hearts and minds to who we are to each other. A coven can be a gathering of witches, but it can also be a sisterhood we are born into, or a sisterhood we choose: the people who are there for us when we need them most.
Sisterhood and magic are at the heart of Practical Magic 2. The film is romantic, and love is everywhere, but at the center of everything there is the deep and abiding solidarity that binds Sally and Gillian Owens together. In the Owens family, romantic love was destructive in the past, and has always been seen as a curse, while family love is the magic that can rescue you. In Practical Magic 2, the magical grimoire of enchantments, known as the Book of the Raven, is found in the library by Jet Owens. Sally and Gillian’s beloved aunt discovers that there is a way to break the family curse, but doing so includes great sacrifice. What wouldn’t we do for the people we love—our sisters, our aunts, our daughters, our dearest friends? Sally and Gillian are willing to make any sacrifice to rescue Sally’s daughter, Kylie, just as their aunts, Jet and Franny, have always been willing to sacrifice themselves for the nieces they had taken in and raised.
Sally turned away from magic as a child and has never come to terms with the fact that the Owens family is different. Witchery runs in the family, and because of their history they have flaws and talents others don’t. But isn’t every family different? Don’t we all have our own individual histories and experiences? For me, growing up in a family that was unlike any other in the neighborhood was difficult, and like Sally, all I wanted was to be normal, to have holidays and birthdays and family dinners and be like everyone else. I felt that if I wasn’t careful, if I stayed out under the stars and danced all night, at a solstice celebration or in my own backyard, I would be headed for trouble.
READING THE ROOM
Art & Photography: Isabel Rose, , , , ,
Video & Audio:
Writing: , , Rosalind Jana,
English comedian and actress Ellie Taylor is now on Substack, where she’ll be writing about “how great pistachio butter is and how much happiness a designated flannel washing basket” can provide.
Gene Wang, a 30-year veteran of the Washington Post sports section, has launched DMV Sports to cover the collegiate teams in and around the nation’s capital.
LSU football columnist Scooter Hobbs has brought his coverage of the Tigers to Substack.
Just in time for the U.S. Open, Tony Hagen’s Gay Tennis Podcast is now on Substack.
John Owning and Marcus Mosher are publishing The Blue Star Bulletin, an in-depth look at the Dallas Cowboys, on Substack.
U.K. country music podcast Girls in Low Places has launched a companion Substack with bonus content for their community.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s New York office.