2026-08-08 21:01:07
This week, we’re piercing our navels, visiting Nantucket as unwanted guests, and remembering friends and family in the ways we know how.
SOCIAL GRACES
The relationship between host and guest is often a tightrope, governed by unspoken codes of conduct. What happens when that social contract flies entirely out the window? Ariel Ehrlich, a self-described undesired visitor, investigates.
— in Ari’s Substack
In an earlier essay, I expatiated on how to be likable as a guest.
But what happens when you follow each of my rules and your host still seems to loathe you?
Well, this weekend, I was confronted with that question head-on.
This weekend, I stayed with an old friend at her home in Nantucket, an island I’ve loved since I first set foot on it at the end of the pandemic. It is a deeply emotional place for me, the site of some of the best times of my life thus far. Likewise, the friend is someone whom I have long cherished.
But this weekend was not as spiritually Instagrammable.
At this point, I might disclose that I am by no means a low-maintenance guest. I wake up each morning with approximately 75 pre-breakfast opinions, tell an obscure story from when I was 17 like I’m being interviewed for a Ken Burns documentary, and have yet to come across a tranquil silence that I didn’t feel duty-bound to fill. If hosting were an endurance sport, I would be an Ironman race taking place in the depths of Hell.
Still, one might think they can count on old friends to enjoy their company, despite it all, but this weekend proved me wrong. I am sure that whatever went wrong, I had a hand in it.
I’m not exactly sure where I blundered, though. Nor am I sure how that blunder culminated in my hostess blocking me on Instagram. But we’ll get back to that.
Perhaps it wasn’t any one thing at all, but a thousand at once. A dozen people under one roof, a busy itinerary, little privacy, and exhaustion can make anyone far less urbane than they intend.
I followed all of my own rules:
I made my bed and left my room clean.
Left a Dear Annabelle In Bloom thank-you note.
Lugged flowers and scented candles from the Upper West Side to Sconset.
Thanked my host and her parents sufficiently but not gratuitously.
Displayed excitement and openness to my hostess’s plans.
Only referenced money to say that I’d pay Taylor Swift’s $20 million booking fee for my wedding performance. (And I’d say it again.)
But still, I found myself persona non grata.
I should tell you that it is a rarity in recent years that I am not universally loved. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I’m quite “out there” (in the good way) or simply because I bring the tokenization potential of an obnoxious, pretentious gay Jew, but I find friends more often than I find foes. Perhaps my friends simply suffer from an irreparable level of Stockholm syndrome.
This weekend, my hostess had invited eight other friends from various corners of her life to join us, and I thought it was sure to be a fun, social weekend. I told my therapist how excited I was for such an adult experience.
At the outset of the weekend, I was wondering how I could possibly turn what I expected to be such a wonderful weekend into a Substack other than perhaps by expounding upon the Etiquette of Spending a Weekend in a State of Unfettered Joy. But the universe had different plans.
My mother stitched a needlepoint pillow that says, “I’m Not For Everyone.” My version would say, as one of my BFFLs, Alden, once told me: “Not Everyone Is Going to Be Obsessed With Me.” Though it is difficult to imagine, it is true. Not everyone finds my solipsistic, vocal-fried, Instagram-obsessed, racy, intentionally provocative self to be perfectly charming.
And that’s okay.
But when you find yourself trapped on an island with a hostess who seems to be counting the minutes until your departure, that’s of little comfort.
It was 5 hours into the trip when I realized my hostess might be annoyed. 19 hours when I knew she was. 24 hours when I lost hope. 33 hours when I thought she hated me. 55 hours when I knew she would never speak to me again. Despite realizing that there was no hope with two-thirds of the trip remaining, I continually tried my best to make myself likable and to be the best guest I could be. My friends at home were encouraging me to move up my flight a day earlier, and though I knew that my host would be happy if I did that, I didn’t want to start drama. Remember, this isn’t Temptation Island. It’s Nantucket Island. Go with grace.
One would be acting in poor manners to make the conflict obvious—to say the quiet part out loud. Even if other guests notice the tension between you and your host, there is no upside in playing the part of the Pew Research Center in polling them. When a perceived conflict rests between you and your host, involving others only creates a further source of drama for which you are responsible.
The most [well-]mannered suggestion I can make here is to continually do your absolute best to make your remaining time pleasurable for both yourself and your host. In other words, hydrate with rosé.
TECH
MEDIA
Mitchell Jackson traces an oral history of one of the modern era’s most seismic magazines.
— in Pirate Wires
Every morning, I log onto TikTok and scroll past a video that triggers my complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Most of these videos consist of a Zoomer skipping down Bedford Avenue to a Dirty Projectors song, past what once were Williamsburg’s hip warehouse clubs and are now Whole Foods and banks.
Caption: If I lived in Williamsburg in the 2010s and worked at Vice, I would be the happiest person on earth…
Vice would never have hired most of these Zoomers, with their straight hair and HR personalities. Vice would have made fun of them. I would know: In 2012, I was the youngest worker at Vice, making fun of such people. The company formed the most influential and traumatic years of my life. [. . .]
Zoomers think Vice—the magazine, founded in 1994, that basically created early-2010s hipster Americana—was the Y2K equivalent of Patti Smith’s Just Kids, the Chelsea Hotel replaced by the Wythe. They aren’t alone. Lately, a cottage industry of “experts” has emerged in an attempt to answer the question: What was Vice? [. . .]
To actually understand what Vice was, you had to have sat in our dusty white Williamsburg warehouse, where dildos flew over your head, weed smoke filtered through the vents, and, occasionally, your 40-something-year-old aging punk co-worker would show up with members of the Bloods, who stole your computer.
Those 40-something-year-old aging punks ran a bizarre business. The world knew Vice for its HBO show, magazine, viral documentaries, and Vice.com, a textual prelude to the “manosphere”—but the company operated a vast array of side hustles. Shane licensed the magazine all over the world (almost every week, it seemed, we’d discover a new Vice office in an Eastern Bloc country) and sold sponsorships to blue-chip corporations. (For instance, Unilever paid $20 million a year to sponsor a women’s vertical called Broadly.) [. . .]
Shane theorized that Vice would eventually dominate every genre and medium, from the internet to cable TV to film. But selling so many products confused audiences, and you can only con Unilever and other advertisers into sponsoring shiny new verticals so many times.
Mostly: Vice was a cult. It was also one of the best business schools in modern history. [. . .]
Everyone at Vice was a sociopath, nerd, or weirdo. I was weird enough.
Weeks later, an HR guy led me under the neon sign, up creaky stairs, past rows of video editing bays, accountants, and a taxidermied bear into a crowded back office filled with cardboard boxes. This was the dumpy editorial bay—the heart of the company. (Every team, except ours, had real office space.)
“Your job is to do what we say,” the associate editor told me. “You will transcribe. You will write blog posts. And you should get to know the old Vice issues...”
He pointed at cardboard white boxes stuffed with old magazines, as if they were junk.
“Who started Vice?” I asked an intern next to me.
“Shane and Suroosh,” he said, before whispering, “and he-who-must-not-be-named.”
SUMMER READING
REBELLION
Alyssa Vingan uncovers convalescence where she least expected it: a piercing studio.
— in sex happens
Like most great millennials, I was raised on MTV. An outsized number of my childhood memories involve something I saw or heard on the network, which indelibly shaped my tastes. The first-ever PG-13 movie I was allowed to watch in a theater was Clueless, a couple of years after I met generational hottie Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” music video. Two of the earliest albums I bought with my allowance were Fiona Apple’s Tidal (1996) and Britney Spears’ ...Baby One More Time (1999) after seeing them on my screen after school. Despite their vast aesthetic and artistic differences, they all introduced me to one tantalizing thing in particular: a belly button piercing.
You couldn’t tell preteen me that there was anything more powerful and sexy than that tiny metal ring. I was enthralled by any navel piercing scene, whether animated into an episode of Daria or in the cult-classic bad girl spiral in Thirteen. I dreamed of growing up to be confident enough in my body to not only bare my midriff with abandon—keep in mind, this was the apotheosis of diet culture, before the current GLP-1 era made it look like child’s play—but also to let some guy I’d just met stick a needle through it without cowering in fear of pain. Plus, the more interested I became in fashion and style as I got older, any additional opportunity to accessorize my collection of surf shop baby tees and Hollister denim skirts was enticing. A belly button piercing personified being carefree but, most importantly, cool—the thing I longed to become most of all.
I remember soft launching the idea of getting a belly button ring to my mom in the early aughts, at the height of my Britney obsession, when my dance team friends and I memorized her video choreography in our rooms on weekends. Like most mothers would, she pulled out the big guns to dissuade me: She had a dear family friend who happened to be an OB/GYN warn me about the scar stretching out when I eventually got pregnant, becoming unsightly sometime in my distant future. When talking about my having a baby, it was never an “if,” always a “when”—like it was what I was supposed to do.
“Doing what I’m supposed to do” is one of the biggest through lines in my life, something that’s become uncomfortably clear as I approach my 40th birthday. People pleasing has shown up in both my personal and professional lives in a way that, in hindsight, has been detrimental to my happiness and, ultimately, my success—but that’s another (probably paywalled) essay for another day. Realizing you have a problem is the first step, but actually doing something about it is another beast entirely. This is why, almost 30 years later, I texted my longtime piercer, hopped in a Lyft to Greenpoint on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and finally pulled the trigger. It’s the type of spontaneity afforded to voluntarily childfree women.
My curiosity and desire had lingered for decades—what reason did I have to continue depriving myself? And what better silly, sexy summer activity for a single girl who’s trying to heal her inner child?
REGRET
THE WILD WILD WEB
After a store in Nantucket posted a now-viral sign to ward off content creators, Kate Lindsay unpacks a new round of discourse about who the ire is actually directed toward.
— in embedded
“Influencer” was not coined by any one person. It emerged organically out of late-2000s creator culture. And in my 10 years of talking to creators, it’s not a word any one of them has used to describe themselves. When it comes up, it’s usually with air quotes, or an apologetic wince. “I hate that word,” they say.
Is that because it’s sexist? This is the question after a store in Nantucket posted a “No Influencers” sign, prompting a disappointed response from creator (and fellow Nantucket business owner) Paige Lorenze. Creator Levi Coralynn posted a video saying that hating influencers is just an acceptable way to hate women.
Influencing is unavoidably linked to women. I’ve written before about how any time a woman is murdered or commits some kind of social offense or faux pas, the media slap the word “influencer” in front of her name whenever possible to justify breathless coverage of an otherwise private citizen. I also think it’s no coincidence that, as Levi points out, once women unlocked this career path giving them creative and financial independence over their own image and femininity, the first word for it became derogatory.
Now that the term “creator” has gone mainstream, it is worth asking why a publication or person chooses “influencer” instead. I do believe that reason is often sexism. John Sylvia, owner of the “No Influencers” store, told The New York Times that “I feel sometimes my store is used as someone’s background, a stage.” This is a legitimate gripe—but one that could have just as easily been addressed with a sign that said “No Pictures.”
In two decades, mostly female online creators have built an industry that dominates culture and commerce. You are not exempt from their influence, even if you don’t follow them (the Devil Wears Prada “cerulean” monologue comes to mind…). And yet creators are treated like gnats—scourges on a society that nevertheless actively consumes their labor.
COLLAGES
REMEMBRANCE
Matt Hausfater creates a digital memorial for two loved ones who have passed on.
— in Matt+
One of the first things I told Sam was, “In the old days, before the streaming bubble burst, I tried to sell a network show every year. The networks are buying twenty pitches that they kill by Christmas… I could be one of those dead projects! It’s free money!” // “Let’s fucking go!” Sam said. A few months into our relationship he texted me while I stood in line at CVS. “Do you have anything for Zooey Deschanel? She wants to come back to TV.” I thought about it for a few minutes before realizing that holy shit, yup, I did—a workplace comedy set in a fictional Guitar Center. She would be the Jack Black in the School of Rock character. I sent Sam the one-pager and he sent me a voice note that I wish I still had. “This is perfect, dude!!! Sending to her team right now.” Within weeks I was sitting in front of Zooey, pitching her the show. She said yes before I could even finish my pitch. Sam did that. Put it all together. Connected the dots. Does what any good rep does.
The past six months or so, since January really, Sam had done a few things that made me question our relationship and whether it would last, and if he was a good fit. They are things that I’m not going to go into detail here, but when I look back on them through the lens of the tragic past week, it makes more and more sense. I questioned if Sam was on drugs. The last few times we spoke he sounded… different. He usually had such a positive outlook on Hollywood, even as it continued to contract. We would outlast this change. He would always say, “We’re going to be having a very different conversation come…” And even when things continued to suck, he was super positive… until the last time I saw him in person.
I went to E360 to participate in a table read. It was Day One of the World Cup. I remember because assistants and managers were all streaming the games on their phones. I texted Sam that I was in the building when the table read was over. He told me “AWESOME!! I’ll come down!” I told him I was coming up instead.
He came out to give me a big hug and took me back to his office. I sat down in the low-slung chairs opposite his desk and he painted a pretty dire portrait of the Town. Like I said, he didn’t sound like the Sam I knew. I left his office that day, standing in the courtyard of the building thinking to myself, “I’m not so sure if that is the attitude I like for one of my representatives.”
I had no idea what he was going through. We had joked a few times that we were both “SSRI bois” in therapy, but in LA, who isn’t? Everyone is on something and everybody has a therapist. I didn’t have a clue that he was struggling until the moment I got this text back from him as a response to something we were dealing with on the business side, the last one he would ever send: “Sorry I missed you end of last week. I’ve been dealing with some rather intense personal and health stuff and was about to let you know, but I’m taking a few weeks medical leave. If there’s anything timely, I have a couple of very capable colleagues who will step in. Looking forward to catching up with you on the other side.” I responded in kind, “Oh man. I hope you are okay. I don’t need anyone on your end… PLEASE GET WELL.”
It’s the “other side” bit that haunts me. I assumed he was referring to the other side of rehab, or wherever he may have been going. But upon reading it with 20/20 vision, I ask myself if he already knew then that this was the end.
POETRY
who’s the fool, fueled by a desire for
the fool is fractured, on a quest for a MacGuffin
absurd, right, yes, just, so, absurd, but
the fool is stretchy, Mr. Fantastic,
not as smart
who’s the fool, surrounded by pylons, there’re’re’re um,
houses, yes, houses, McMansions, origami unfolding
into swans, not the exotic ones, just a flaunting goose
could’ve said ugly duckling, who’s the fool, someone
who wishes
because i said so, temperance, tantrums
crying during mini golf
but always loves the sky worlds, one more
chariot derailing, one more (please)
empress proud, one more
hanging pear, one more(?)
go to sleep, darling
Art & Photography: , , Victoria M, Riley
Writing: , , , , , ,
Actress Jo Garcia Swisher has launched Rolling Clover, a lifestyle publication, on Substack.
Nick Grimshaw, a British DJ, television presenter, and podcaster, is now on Substack.
Sports investigative journalist Charles Robinson has launched NFL Blue Book on Substack, where he’ll cover news from across the league.
Charley Walters, a former MLB pitcher and writer at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, has started a Substack to bring fans up-close access to all the Minnesota sports teams.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by out of Substack’s New York office.
2026-08-07 05:01:04
Last week, news broke that Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel, which had reportedly sold for $2 million after a 14-way bidding auction, had been pulled from publication by the author’s own agents over suspected AI use.
In an email to publishers, one of his representatives wrote: “Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion. During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilising AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”
This is at least the third such public instance of AI allegations leveled against an author this year alone, preceded by Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl, which was pulled from publication, and H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth, which was initially self-published and, as of now, is still set to be distributed by Simon & Schuster in a seven-figure deal.
Falade, who has now obtained legal counsel, has vehemently denied the accusations. In a statement sent out to several press organizations, he wrote, “Three Black authors received major publishing deals this year, and all three later had deals cancelled or disrupted following suspicions about AI. There seems to be a troubling assumption that when a Black writer produces work that attracts significant attention, the work could not possibly be their own. Meanwhile, there are popular white writers who have publicly mentioned using AI for their writing processes and they’re still doing fine.” On Instagram, Falade has posted snippets of texts and emails from 2021, prior to the advent of ChatGPT, about his book to show he didn’t use AI to write it.
One way or another, it’s clear the publishing industry is in a state of flux, if not panic, over both the growing use of generative AI in literature and accusations of its use. We’ve asked three industry professionals and writers—Kathleen Schmidt, Lincoln Michel, and John Paul Brammer—to weigh in on how scandals like these keep erupting, if AI use has any place in writing to begin with, and where publishing might go from here.
Kathleen is the president of KMSPR, a strategy, marketing, PR, and branding firm focusing on authors, publishers, and publishing-adjacent entities. Lincoln is an author, editor, and professor of fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. John Paul is an author and columnist.
Kathleen Schmidt: My first reaction was, “Oh no, not again.” It was the third such allegation in a short period of time, but the stakes were much higher. A 14-way auction that results in a big advance is nothing to scoff at. When the agents pulled the book, my immediate thought was to find out more about what happened. My second thought was, “How could this happen?” AI allegations had just been put forth in an Atlantic piece about Daggermouth, a self-published book that Scarlett Press (Simon & Schuster) just published—that resulted in a 60% score of AI from Pangram. It was worrisome that we were hearing about another possible case of AI writing so quickly.
John Paul Brammer: My first thought was, “$2 million? I need to write a crime novel.” It’s always wonderful to learn that there is in fact money in publishing, it’s just that I’m not getting it. My second thought, similar to Kathleen’s, was, “Again?” I haven’t read the text, so I’m not at liberty to discuss whether or not it was AI-generated, but I doubt the agents would have surrendered such a payday if there wasn’t something going on there.
Lincoln Michel: My first reaction was “Welp. About time.” I think everyone in the publishing industry has been expecting a big scandal like this for a while. Agents and editors have, I think, been very worried they’d be at the center of a scandal. The fact that the agents themselves recalled this novel surprised me. This wasn’t the publisher getting cold feet. The agents were giving up a huge chunk of money. This makes me assume there’s some there there. However, I do not want to judge an author who is denying and whose work I haven’t read. Unlike other recent AI allegations, the text isn’t out there for us to judge.
KS: The problem is that the checks and balances in publishing really come down to an editor and agent’s experience and gut checks. As we have seen with some memoir scandals, there is no fact-checking in publishing. Likewise, there is no uniform policy on checking a manuscript for AI. I was confounded by the fact that 14 different editors had the manuscript that resulted in a bidding war. If the book “dazzled” as the agents have claimed but also had “hallmarks of AI,” it makes me question the entire process. I can’t comment on the book’s merits because I haven’t read it, but it is notable that so many people in the industry jumped in to bid on it. Overall, I think it is becoming more difficult to detect AI. It’s also a risky business to start accusing authors of using it when we depend on something like Pangram, which is not infallible.
I agree with Lincoln that publishers should be conducting LLM training. It is one step in the right direction.
JP: Well, I thought about the Commonwealth short-story prize fiasco/Granta dustup from not too long ago, and I guess what depresses me is that I have to assume there’s a lack of rigorous reading happening among people who should be able to catch this kind of prose. What bothers me most about AI in literature is that, as much as I would love to blame Big Tech, what’s being exposed here is that we don’t have a robust literary culture. The people who are judging these things (I believe, however, that they stood by the Commonwealth story? I’ll check), are awarding this kind of prose, which, whether it was AI-generated or not, is troubling to me. I don’t think the average person needs to be reading Proust in their spare time or whatever, but the fact that the people in our culture who should be discerning readers are being proven time and again to be undiscerning makes me worried about the future of literature. AI is only accelerating and revealing it.
LM: Like the others, I don’t want to judge this book, since we haven’t read it. However, the initial Publishers Lunch article by Erin Somers reported what I’ve heard myself: Many imprints have had to pull books or get authors to rewrite them because of LLM use. They just haven’t made the news. It’s more widespread than many realize. How can it happen? Well, LLMs are really good at evading our current systems. I get several AI emails each day past my spam filter. Every professor I know can tell you they get work that is also likely AI but gets past TurnItIn. It’s tricky.
But also… I’m not sure most people in publishing have studied LLM tics and learned to spot it. They have, perhaps naively, relied on the integrity of the author they work with. You can learn how to spot this stuff, not in every case but in many. I expect publishers will be doing LLM training at some point. Hell, probably everyone (annoyingly) who deals with text or images of any kind in any field will need it.
JP: A skill issue for sure! Look, I don’t mean to say I can’t be fooled. I’m sure I have been. But for me, it’s usually pretty obvious when I read something that has that AI-affected prose. It seems to me that AI does have a certain libido for a certain style, and for certain techniques. There’s this corny animism everywhere. The bench that watches. The rock that remembers. Etc.
KS: I think it was a complicated decision. Giving up a $300K commission is not easy, but they clearly had their reasons, most of which allegedly have to do with communication with the author about his suspected AI use. Since we haven’t read the book, it is hard to say what specifically set off alarms. What is notable to me is how public the agents have been about this. It makes me uncomfortable because confidentiality is being broken, and many of their statements struck me as them simply saving face. From what I understand, an editor first noted that they thought AI was used. Then Publishers Lunch ran the manuscript through Pangram. They shouldn’t even have had the manuscript at that point. I think the agents’ reputations may take a hit in this case.
JP: Girl, that’s so much money… It does make me wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. Imagine those emails. I get stressed just thinking about them. What I would say is it feels like we’re in a Wild West with this stuff. It’s all so case-by-case.
LM: I will say I think it is smart for literary publishers/agents/etc. to take stands here. I’ve always thought the real issue with LLMs in publishing is quantity. They can pump out endless slop. This slop is already overwhelming things like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited store. I also think we’ll see people turn to customizable LLM slop, paying OpenAI or whatever directly for stories. So I think literary publishers would be smart to make themselves a home for the people who want human-authored work.
JP: I would not be fine if I lost out on millions of dollars, but that’s just me. I don’t know what will happen in his case, and I probably won’t read the book if and when it comes out (for forensic purposes, I’d probably crack it open, I suppose). But I imagine there will be more cases like this in the near future. I’m against generative AI in literature, but I also recognize things are reaching a fever pitch where people on all sides are struggling to be rational. Yes, I bet some people really will get falsely accused, and while I can’t know if that’s what’s happening here, we do need to start thinking about, like… what happens when someone is innocent but becomes the subject of intense public scrutiny? I worry about that.
LM: Yeah, I can’t even imagine what the author is going through, especially if the accusations are false. I think this could go any way, though. If he can prove authorship, I imagine some big publisher might be interested. Hell, I can imagine some would take a chance just because of the free publicity of the scandal. Getting coverage is the biggest problem for books these days…
KS: I think Jerry Falade should self-publish the book ASAP. That is what I would advise him to do. However, yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that he has now retained a lawyer, so this is about to get very interesting. Conversely, in the case of Daggermouth, Scarlett Press just acquired additional titles from the author, so they are clearly standing by her. I also think we can’t discuss the fallout without noting that the accused are all authors of color. That is a problem in itself that must be addressed.
LM: A problem with any discussion of “AI” is the term is vague and applies to many different technologies, and the uses of a given tech are so wide. I think everyone can agree there’s a vast gulf between using an LLM as a spellchecker and having it churn out a book for you in 45 minutes, as the romance author profiled by the NYT claimed to do. I think the standards will shake out in some way. Even if the legality and such remain murky, some standards for artistic integrity will shake out.
Also… if you use AI in significant ways and are open about it, great! Readers can judge with their eyes and dollars. The problem is that very few such people want to admit what they are doing. That’s the root of all these scandals, really. It’s all the people hiding or lying about their use.
JP: I do think we’re heading to a place where to use technology at all is to use AI. When I do a Google search, it’s Gemini answering. I know some people who are finding ways to abstain, but candidly I’m probably not going to go out of my way to practice absolute nonparticipation. It’s also a funny, paranoid era we’re in, where it feels like everyone suspects each other in some way. Like, Okay, but you use it for X, Y, or Z… right? The Hank Green thing, for example. He basically said he was using it for research, but there are people out there calling for his head on a spike over it. It all feels random and emotional. Which, that was the internet before Claude or ChatGPT… so…
I agree with Lincoln. The lack of transparency is making people act up.
KS: I don’t think we can have absolutes about AI right now, but I do think there needs to be very clear guidelines, and that publishers must come together to create them. It is not a secret that publishers have begun using AI internally. To what extent, I don’t know, but if publishers are using it, they need to be clear about how. I myself use Claude Cowork in my day-to-day because it assists me with administrative tasks like contracts, invoices, and status updates. What we need are differentiators: it is okay to use AI for X, but not Y. The problem, of course, is that you will always have people who use these tools for nefarious reasons. That is my worry with Pangram: You have an AI-detection tool open to the public. They can run anything through it and receive a false positive. What if that happens to an author, who is then publicly blamed, but the accusations are untrue? This is very tricky territory.
Personally, I hate that Google uses Gemini as search results. It really has ruined search, which is a whole other discussion.
JP: There’s a little Gemini sparkle thing in this very Google doc. It showed up for me yesterday, and I don’t know what it wants. I really am an abuelita when it comes to technology, for better and for worse. Like, what happens when I press it? Did I consent to it being here? Basically: I just don’t know if I’m vigilant enough to keep AI at bay from all aspects of my daily life. Someone smart will probably say, “You can disable that by clicking this, then that, etc.!” But I, like most people, am kind of lazy.
LM: I’m tempted to say… it hasn’t really? It’s obviously caused lots of angst, think pieces, and discourse. There have been a few scandals. But if we’re talking about traditionally published books at least, I don’t think if you walked into a bookstore today and bought 25 new releases and compared them to 25 new releases from five years ago, you’d notice a difference. LLMs have failed to produce any new genre or styles. There hasn’t been some bestseller written by AI that changed how books are published. This may change. As of now, it’s more of a looming threat.
I’m also a professor, and that is a situation where LLMs have changed everything, almost entirely for the worse for everyone. The way assignments are made. How they are graded. How classes operate. The paranoia from both professors and students. It’s a full-on crisis. Nothing like that in publishing yet.
KS: I agree with Lincoln here—AI hasn’t really changed literature. That said, I think what people forget is what consumers want. If we look at the bestseller list, historically, most of the books on it are not great literary works. They are books that the masses read. What does that mean? Well, it could mean that those with less discerning taste could be easily fooled by an AI-written book. That is my concern. We’ve already seen a large swath of the public buy into misinformation when it comes to current events. That tells me a lot about how much AI could affect the book world, especially in nonfiction. It’s a slippery slope we are on, and I feel the industry is in a crisis.
JP: Echoing my esteemed colleagues here to say I’m not sure it has. A lot of literature of the recent past, at least the ones that make it to “the discourse,” gives “warm-blooded LLM.” But yeah, I have concerns! My basic thing is that we have a culture that defines “writer” not as something you do, but as something you produce. Writing should be in the doing. The laboring over small choices on the sentence level. A lot of people think that “writer” is an identity they are being gatekept from by dastardly effort. People feel this way about a lot of things. Technology exists to reduce effort. So I suppose what I’m concerned about is just… the volume of it all. There’s going to be so, so much of it.
LM: Piggybacking on those concerns, I’m honestly less worried about AI-assisted artists than fully automated AI entertainment displacing human art. By that, I mean I could easily see a future where many people pay a subscription to, say, a Disney-GPT partnership (which was sort of in the works with Sora before OpenAI shut it down) to get AI-generated Harry Potter stories or AI-generated Star Wars clips. Maybe you pay extra to get Yoda fighting Voldemort. The focus in most of the media has been on AI quality. I think quantity is the threat. It can produce endless customizable work for very cheap. If AI capabilities improve as all the boosters claim, then why do you need a human there at all? If an LLM can produce a book that’s 95% as good as your average commercial thriller, how many people care about that last 5%? Some will. Many won’t.
KS: It has less to do with publishing as a whole and more to do with what consumers will buy. Let’s take Kindle Unlimited, for example. Do I think there is a lot of AI slop there? Yes. Do I think a lot of people are reading it? Maybe. I think we have to look at the industry’s output as a whole. Generally speaking, the books that sell the most are largely for consumption and not so much for absorption. It’s very much like the film industry. A superhero movie is very different from an Oscar-contending indie film. Book publishing is not that different.
LM: Kathleen’s point is key. Some people act like publishing should equal great books. But publishing equals all books published in all styles and genres. Some editors and imprints are focused on what we might call great art, but others are looking for highly formulaic work that will sell. We shouldn’t be shocked that low-quality bestsellers exist anymore than bland blockbusters or dull reality TV shows. If something sells, industries will put it out.
JP: There’s literature as an industry and there’s literature as a calling, of course, and anyone who embraces the latter probably has a built-in cynicism pertaining to the former. I think it’s always been the case that, if you want to be a bestseller, there are certain shortcuts you can take, sacrifices to your vision and all that. Sorry if it’s a bit woo-woo, but if you know why you’re writing, it does exempt you from a lot of this stuff. As for the mass market, what people are buying, yeah, AI is going to go to town there. Like Kathleen said, publishers pick up subpar literature regularly.
LM: A few years ago, Clarkesworld and some other big science fiction magazines got inundated with AI submissions. They eventually traced the flood back to TikTok “side hustle” accounts that told followers they could make “easy money” submitting AI science fiction stories (every SF writer I know laugh-cried at the idea there’s lots of money in SFF short stories, but I digress). My point is that a lot of the “AI authors” are not actually people who care about writing at all. Many are just some form of scammers or spammers trying to get easy money. So I’m not sure it says that much about publishing per se except that it remains for many prestigious and aspirational to many, and also resented. Every author can tell you about having co-workers, family members, or random strangers say something like “I’ve always wanted to write a novel but I never had time, working in the real world!” or else asking you for advice on “getting published quickly.”
I want to note that I do think some authors are using LLMs in artistically ambitious ways. Universally, though, they say the process takes as much time as writing without LLMs. That’s obviously not the appeal for most people.
JP: It always struck me as odd that the tech types on social media who champion gen AI demand to be called “artists.” Like, I thought you guys were ruthlessly practical and results-oriented? Who cares what anyone calls you, if you have the product? But what’s interesting is that, no, it’s not all about the results for these types! They want the identity of “artist” or “writer.” It’s a spiritual thing for them, no less than it is for us. In my opinion, this phenomenon has a deep pedigree that would take too long to get into here. The concept of the authentic, inner self, which is invariably some kind of artist. They don’t read or write, but they’re “writers”! It has something to say about how we approach identity generally, and the thin membrane between contemporary identity and… marketing demographic, I guess. For me, it’s pushed me to locate my identity more in the doing than in the producing. I think a “real writer,” if there is such a thing, has an obligation first and foremost to be a “real reader” today. Be a reader before you’re a writer!
KS: As I wrote in my newsletter last week, it is really about the idea of wanting to be known for something. Many, many people romanticize the idea of being an author. They think you can get rich from publishing books. What they don’t understand is that writing is a craft that people work at for years. AI undervalues that notion, and I don’t think non-writers quite understand that having an idea for a book and writing a book are two very different things. I have ideas for fiction books all the time, but I don’t write fiction, so they stay in my head or in a notebook. Someone else might take those ideas, plug them into an LLM, and get a book out of it. To me, that kills so much of why I was an English Lit major and why I have dedicated my career to book publishing. If some of those same people read literary fiction, they might better understand that it is not so easy to write a good book.
LM: I have always found it a bit odd how many people think they can easily be professional writers in a way they don’t about other art forms. People don’t say, “Oh, I could be an opera star if I just made a little time” or “Everyone has a blueprint for a skyscraper inside them.” I think a lot of it comes down to the technical skills of writing (typing on a laptop, grammar, etc.) seeming to be things everyone learns in school. There’s more to it than that, from my POV! But everyone does write something, even if it’s just texts or emails. It’s easier to fantasize that you could easily write a novel than that you could pick up a guitar and play a killer heavy metal solo or sculpt a great statue with no training. Plus, the supplies are cheap compared to, say, film equipment. But yes, it is a lot harder than it looks!
JP: I was concerned when I saw the Substack x Pangram thing. I thought, what if it says my work was AI-generated? I don’t use AI in my writing, but I don’t love the idea of entrusting that fact to Pangram. I guess I’m also just thinking, I don’t want a big chunk of my writing career to be so defined in relation to AI. It feels like those of us who don’t use it have some obligation to talk about it all the time, or to change our styles, to react. It reminds me of Peak Twitter in a way, where there was this giant Eyeball constantly over my work. It’s not good for a writer to feel that way, I think. Even outside of false accusations, which I’m sure will be an issue, there’s the problem of this looming shadow over everything.
KS: I am not crazy about the public having access to Pangram, and I have been very vocal about it. Pangram is getting a lot of free publicity, which helps their funding rounds. We can’t ignore that. There is so much jealousy in the writing world that it is inevitable that people will start falsely accusing authors of using AI. I am not hearing fear from authors I work with, but every now and then, I receive a response from media I’ve pitched asking me if the pitch was AI. It is insulting. We are in a precarious position right now, and I do worry for authors who put in the work. I also worry that journalists who cover the industry are looking for too many “gotcha!” moments that will give them clicks.
I am about to begin writing a book, and yes, I am nervous, but I also have confidence in my writing and will back it up with notes and drafts. That is where things are right now. Authors need their receipts.
JP: To Kathleen’s point, I’ve already seen on social media people quote-sharing essays with some version of “it’s giving AI.” There’s definitely a burgeoning social technology of paranoia and accusations. As fractured as social media is right now, it remains one of the few ways for new writers to be discovered. Weren’t there already enough booby traps in that temple? Yeesh.
LM: It’s all very depressing, and I hate the idea that authors will have to prove their work and have readers skeptically poring over their “evidence” and lobbing accusations on social media without any real proof. (Again, as a professor, I’ve seen how much damage it has done to trust and everything else for professors and students.)
I guess all I can say is that I blame primarily the tech companies, who released these programs without any thought about how they could damage various fields. And secondarily, I blame the AI authors who don’t disclose their use. We wouldn’t be having these problems if everyone were open about it, and the reason they aren’t open about it is because readers have so far been rejecting LLM books. So they lie or hide it to try and basically trick readers. I’m sure they have mental justifications for it, but it still is what it is.
KS: Publishing companies need to form an alliance and create uniform AI policies. It can’t be that one publishing house does it one way and another does it differently. The only way to move into the future is to create universal guidelines and provide training. The industry is frustrating in that it is slow to adapt. I really feel we’ve reached an inflection point with AI, so change is necessary, but I also know too much about how the industry works to be overly optimistic.
JP: Standards. Rules. Norms. Those will probably get ossified somewhat. I’ve never known a “healthy” publishing industry, so in some ways my expectations are in a healthy place, I believe. I try not to get too into predictions or anxiety. I have my notebook that I’m scribbling in, and a pile of books to read, and that, to me, is “my job.” All sorts of wacky shenanigans are possible in this industry.
LM: I expect we’ll see a bit of everything. Some segments of readers will be happy to prompt their own LLM outputs without humans involved. Others will be fine paying for “AI-assisted” work. And others—I suspect the majority—will seek out human-authored texts and human-made art, even if they’re fine with LLM use for other things like Google Search or a calendar app. I suspect no one will ever like being tricked, though, and authors who lie about LLM use and get caught will cause scandals. That won’t change.
JP: I’m buying low on “being literate.” I’ve written about this before, but I do think it’s an exciting time to be a reader and a writer. Reading has a heroic valence to it in the LLM era. Imagine that! You’re fighting the system by reading a book. You’re a prodigy for “using your own words.” I love when the bar is in hell. I’ll say this, at least. My writing is getting weirder. I’m getting into literature that I’m not sure I would have found if I wasn’t reading so many books right now, and I don’t think I’d be reading so many books if my understanding of “writer” hadn’t changed in opposition to all these Big Tech moves. Twitter dying. AI slop everywhere. In a calmer world, I’m still writing essays with the goal of being screenshotted for Twitter, and I’m glad things fell apart enough for me to stop doing that. Consolation prizes abound.
KS: I feel good about my writing, because I know that I am capable, and I am not trying to be any other kind of writer than who I am. Meaning, I am not trying to write the next Great American Novel when I know I write nonfiction. I exercise my writing muscle by publishing a newsletter once per week, which I love. I’ve also been reading a lot of great debut literary fiction lately, which makes me a bit optimistic. Here’s the thing: Before AI, there were still terrible books being published. That will still happen. There are still a great number of people who recognize good writing, and thank goodness for that.
I am also in grad school for a second master’s, and researching/writing papers is something I enjoy doing. Writing means you are constantly building a muscle in your brain. Too many people don’t realize that. There is truly nothing like the satisfaction of writing your own work and it being well-received. I don’t think someone using AI for all of their writing can feel that way. I imagine that is more of a “getting away with it” feeling, which is sad.
LM: Being a writer or an artist of any type—hell, being a person of any type—is not merely about the end point. I don’t write because it’s an easy path to wealth and riches. I write fiction because—I’m paraphrasing my friend and author Helen Phillips here—it’s my favorite thing to do with my brain. I want to expand my own skills, explore my own thoughts, and produce work that only I could create. LLMs have little appeal for me there, outside of perhaps some rote functions like a better spellcheck. Outsourcing your thinking to LLMs risks degrading one’s skills and making your work more impersonal.
What’s the point there? Even if an LLM could write a Lincoln Michel novel that was as good or better than one I write… so what? I didn’t write it. I didn’t learn anything from it. It isn’t mine. Many people treat LLMs like ghostwriters. I also would not hire a ghostwriter to write my work. I became a writer because I like writing. The appeal is in the act itself.
JP: I’m thinking a lot about how this is all impacting young writers. I have my career because of Twitter. I went to state school in Oklahoma. Twitter was an open door to talk to editors, and to pitch. Plus, there was this media apparatus in place to scoop up young writers and supply them with $300 in exchange for a byline and a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. It had problems, yes, and a lot of the issues we’re discussing today seem logical extensions of those same problems. But what is in place for young writers today to be discovered, and how are they navigating LLMs? I suppose, entering “wizened hermit” mode, I would tell them that writing should hurt. It should be hard. There’s only growth when there’s struggle. But as for how to make a living out of it, well, there’s never really been an easy answer on that front. Community is one answer. I’ve been heartened to see more zines and alt lit scenes popping up with a DIY vibe.
I guess I would also say, on the optimistic side: The best writers have always been something apart. The best writers don’t play by the rules. No one can decide what time or culture they inherit. But the most interesting artists make something of it. They transcend it, and widen the scope of what’s possible. To that end, no, I don’t think the next genius of our time is going to be a prompt expert. Well, I hope not, anyway. Egad…
Lastly, I’ve noticed that writers are doing more and more in-person things. Maybe that’s because I, personally, keep throwing parties for them. But it’s fun, and I feel more connected to other writers now than I ever did than when we were all in the same “digital town square.” Play at salon culture! Be pretentious together! It’s a lot more fun than calling each other out on Threads or whatever.
LM: I’m with JP that I do fear for younger writers. I have to go back to the quantity question. AI can produce endless work, which can easily overwhelm our systems. Agent query inboxes, magazine slush piles, etc. There will have to be some way to combat this. An editor simply cannot evaluate 100 times as many manuscripts. They were already getting too many to really read before ChatGPT. So I fear these systems will close down and become more about networking and personal recommendations and such, not because people want to be elitist but because they have to find some way to winnow things down. Will established writers be even more wary of blurbing someone they don’t know? Will agents be less likely to open cold queries? I do think community, as JP says, is one answer. Maybe we will see a flourishing of local art scenes or groups of artists with shared aesthetics.
The other optimistic thing I tell myself is that there will always be people who care about good literature and interesting art. And maybe the flattening effects of LLM text will conversely inspire readers and writers to be more original and more unique in their art. LLM fans love to compare it to the camera, but the camera didn’t kill painting as an art form by any stretch. Instead, it helped push painting into new territory, with styles outside of realism: impressionism, surrealism, cubism, etc. Maybe there’s a utopian scenario where that happens for literature in response to LLM text.
KS: Since I am in the book publicity space, I will say this: Almost every PR platform is now AI-powered, and it is not for the better. In fact, it has made researching contacts and creating media lists more difficult because these systems basically scrape the internet. In the “old” days, we had a system that one guy created and that we manually updated. It was dependable. What is out there now, and what most PR professionals pay quite a bit of money for, is not all that dependable. Interestingly, I think this makes cultivating relationships with journalists more important than ever.
I also worry about the workload of in-house publicists. Most marketing and publicity departments are understaffed, so it is easy to imagine publishers creating an environment where AI assistance is necessary because they don’t want to spend the money on human staff.
I agree with JP and Lincoln that younger writers have an uphill battle ahead of them. How will agents assess queries or manuscripts? Will younger writers be questioned about their work if it seems too good? I think debut novelists are especially susceptible to scrutiny. I don’t envy the position they are in. I also agree with LM regarding systems being overwhelmed. Agents and editors already receive more submissions than is humanly possible to read or keep up with. If the pace of this worsens, it will indeed come down to personal connections and recommendations. If that is the case, I fear we will miss out on some great books.
2026-08-05 00:00:34
Richard Rushfield has had a storied career as an entertainment journalist, covering Hollywood deals, shake-ups, and scandals since the ’90s. He reported on the early days of American Idol and the more recent SAG-AFTRA strikes and has watched the industry weather everything from the consolidation of studios to the rise of streaming and the threat of AI. As a founder of the industry publication The Ankler, the host of a live weekly interview show, and the creator of The Rushfield Jamboree on Substack, he’s also a pioneer in independent media.
We visited Richard’s office, where we discussed the ups and downs of his career as a journalist, then watched him record an episode of The Rushfield Lunch, his weekly live video show. When it wrapped, Richard took us on a tour of historic L.A. theaters1 while offering a realistic assessment of the state of show business.
This is the last episode of Someone on Film, Los Angeles. Let us know where we should go next, in the comments.
Both theaters featured in this episode are now set to re-open over the next year.
2026-08-01 21:03:14
This week, we’re cherishing Jimothy, translating The Odyssey, and getting advice from 10-year-olds.
SELF-DISCOVERY
Emily North explores the experience of “having potential,” and the weight that comes with ambition.
— in angel cake
i do not have a fear of aging, but instead i have a fear of time passing and me not opening my mouth wide enough to catch everything. some of you may know one of my favorite quotes is, “kiss the joy as it flies” but lately i don’t just want to kiss it, i want to stick my tongue so far down its throat before it has to leave. i have dedicated this summer to being the one where i do literally whatever i want at all times. as a rule this is how i like to live my life 365 days a year but this summer in particular i have been practicing joie de vivre as if it was a prayer and i am on my knees begging for nothing about my life to change i promise to be good i promise i will be fun and sexy and kind forever i promise i promise i promise i will do anything thank you God amen.
walking around with the weight of your potential has a special kind of power to make you notice the pace at which days, weeks, years fly by in your calendar. i spent the past week with my extended family where my tiny cousins have somehow morphed from toddlers into little teenagers who are able to do k-pop choreography with precision, i overheard my little brother taking work calls from the dining room using a low voice i have never heard before, my sister was talking about when she wants to have a baby, and i realized my parents have had the beach house for almost ten years. lately time has been moving as slow as honey, except for when it slides down my throat it burns instead of feeling sweet. i feel i am wasting my time by lying in the sun and reading books and drinking too many martinis and staying out way too late on a weeknight… i could be using this time to become a better daughter, sister, colleague, friend, future partner and instead i am lying in a pool of my own sweat, physically and emotionally drowning in myself. my anxiety about the slipping of time is extremely self-indulgent, so much so that even typing this essay has made me lose my appetite. to be so obsessed with the pace of your own life and its potential blinds you from the people you pass along the way. happiness fuels self-obsession, despair fuels self-obsession, all i want to do is feel numb and forget who i am and never face anyone who thinks about my potential ever again.
at my best, when i chug along the rosy pink path i make for myself i know that my potential is not finite, it has no expiration date, and i am a girl of exceptional tenacity to make her life exactly how she wants; however, i would be lying if i said i didn’t crack from time to time and think about when it will all eventually leave me.
PERSPECTIVE
HUMANITIES
Emily Wilson, a classical scholar who has translated both The Odyssey and The Iliad, shares her thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s adaptation in an excerpted Q&A.
— in EMILY’s Substack
You’ve dedicated much of your career to bringing the Odyssey to life. What are your initial reactions to the film?
I very much hope many people go and see it in cinemas—it’s worth it to see it on the big screen, because so much of the movie is about the visual effects, as well as the very loud soundtrack. This film is an event, and it has a lot of memorable moments. But I hope those who do so will also read or reread the poem. I hate to be that guy, but the book is a lot better than the film.
You’re the first woman to have her translation of the Odyssey published in English. What does that mean to you, and why does it matter?
Mostly, I don’t think it matters at all. It’s a silly little factoid, not something particularly relevant for my actual work. Gender wasn’t a topic in my scholarly or critical work before I began work on the Odyssey. I’d published various books and articles, mostly about male authors and male characters, with very little attention to gender. I’d published earlier translations—of Seneca’s tragedies—and none of the reviewers or readers of those translations seem to have thought my gender mattered for that work, and nor did I. But all of a sudden, “Woman Translates Odyssey” became the universal headline, and then journalists began to ask me endlessly and unstoppably about my supposedly female or feminine or feminist perspective. Whatever I say or do, it continues even unto this day.
I’ve found it quite limiting to have my work constantly framed by journalists in terms of my gender. I see it as both simplistic and anti-feminist to insist that all women’s work has to be viewed as primarily “women’s”, as if all our toys must be pink and no other color—whereas men, lucky things, get to focus on what they actually care about, which might not be gender at all. Everything a woman does has to be described as a “feminist intervention”, even if she doesn’t see it in those terms at all (which I certainly don’t). As members of the unmarked gender category, men get to imagine that their gender has nothing to do with their interpretations or perspectives on the world or on literature or history. I keep urging journalists to ask men about their gender and how it informs their work, and please stop asking me about it, because I really don’t work on gender and it’s not my main interest... but those pleas don’t seem to be going anywhere.
I took on the project of re-translating the Odyssey, and then the Iliad, for reasons that had nothing to do with my gender identity, but had to do with my specific scholarly training and literary sensibilities, as someone with longstanding interests in poetic and narrative form, the long traditions of both ancient and early modern verse, and a very long-standing interest in drama and dramatic narrative. I felt that there was an opportunity to provide English readers with translations in traditional, regular meter—in contrast with the dozens of existing free verse and prose translations—and versions that would, like the originals, have a supple multiplicity of voice and perspective, as well as their emotional directness and vividness. Those proto-dramatic qualities are flattened in many existing translations. In approaching any dialogue or scene in the Homeric poems, I make a conscious attempt to understand how the text portrays multiple perspectives, and I don’t assume ahead of time that women characters will be presented as inferior or ridiculous. But that’s surely not feminism; it’s about being a reasonably responsible, competent translator of these great poems. The bar for what “feminist translation” means ought to be a lot higher than that.
Beyond my own specific work: the fact that most translations of ancient texts into English have been done by men is notable and quite surprising. There are plenty of English-speaking classicists of all genders, so it’s not about lack of people who could do it, in theory. Plenty of women scholars have written books and articles about Homer. In other linguistic traditions (like French and Italian), there are plenty of published translations of ancient texts, including the Homeric poems, by women. I think it may have to do with the different educational traditions, and differing attitudes towards translation in general: in France and Italy, more people of all genders have some knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin (because of the lycée/ liceo schools), so there’s a wider pool of people qualified to translate texts like the Odyssey—it’s not confined to those who have PhDs—and within the Anglophone academy, translation has traditionally been treated as a marginal pursuit—and therefore, the translation of ancient texts is often done by those who aren’t working towards tenure. But I still don’t fully know how to explain the gender gap. Maybe it’s partly about networks: I personally would have never done any of my translations if I hadn’t been invited to do so by specific editors in publishing houses. It seems possible that English-speaking publishers and editors have more often reached out to men, when looking for someone to sign up to create a new translation of a big epic poem. Beyond that, I really don’t know how to explain it.
TROUBLESHOOTING
TECH
For the past few years, artificial intelligence has been touted as an earth-shattering advancement for humanity. Noah Smith argues that, while this new technology has reshaped our habits in many ways, it has yet to shatter our current reality.
— in Noahpinion
Not a lot of people expected that AI would come for the mathematicians before it came for the truck drivers, but it did. The other day, an AI model disproved the Jacobian Conjecture—an 87-year-old open problem that human mathematicians had struggled to solve. The greatest living human mathematician, Terence Tao, turned to AI to help him understand the solution. Around the same time, AI solved a very important open question in quantum cryptography. Solving Erdos problems has now become almost child’s play for the best AI models. And this is the worst AI will ever be at math. Model capabilities, and the amount of compute available, both continue to increase at rapid rates. (Meanwhile, long-distance trucking employment is slightly higher than it was a decade ago.)
I don’t expect mathematicians to actually lose their jobs en masse, of course. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that humankind has invented machines that are smarter than we are. Intelligence isn’t defined for machines the same way it is for humans—AI’s capabilities are spiky in different ways than ours—but it’s undeniable that the technology is improving rapidly in every domain of cognitive capability. It’s still possible to find some mental tasks that humans are better than machines at, but those final advantages tend to disappear almost as quickly as we can identify them. “AGI”, or “ASI”, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly here.
And yet… the world remains much the same. In lots of sci-fi books, as soon as artificial superintelligence arrives, it bootstraps itself to even more godlike intelligence in an explosive “singularity” that rapidly transforms the entire physical universe. Lots of people, especially “AI safety” and “effective altruist” types, expected things to play out basically the same way in reality. But looking around, not much has changed since we entered the intelligence explosion. There’s a huge data center boom, and most people use AI on a daily basis, but we still live basically the same lives—driving to work or taking the train, sitting in front of a computer, scrolling on our phones, collecting a paycheck. People are staying in their jobs longer, but employment hasn’t been disrupted in a significant way:
Meanwhile, we’ve had decently robust productivity growth, but nothing really amazing:
[. . .]
It seems possible that humans are simply incredibly specialized in a few types of cognitive tasks—extracting patterns from sparse data, synthesizing various patterns into “intuition” and “judgement”, and communicating those patterns in language—and that we’ve basically approached the theoretical maximum in those narrow areas… That would explain why AI has gotten much better at things like math and coding and forecasting over the last year but why the basic chatbot interface doesn’t seem much more “intelligent.” It would also explain why when you talk to Terence Tao about math, it’s like talking to a superhuman, but when you talk to him about where to get lunch or which movies are the best, he’ll just sound like a fairly smart normal dude. AI will eventually get better than Tao at math… but it may never get much better than the most thoughtful, eloquent humans at deciding where to get lunch or recommending movies. It may simply not be mathematically possible to get much better than we already are at that sort of thing.
Why would intelligence top out like this? Well, if we think of intelligence as the ability to extract information from data, then even an infinitely advanced model endowed with infinite compute will be limited by the fact that there’s a limited amount of information that can be extracted from the data.
For one thing, data itself is in limited supply. You can’t transform the world unless you can (in some generalized sense) understand it, and you can’t understand the world unless you can measure it, and our ability to measure the world is inherently limited and finite.
ICONOGRAPHY
PAYBACK
A legion of ne’er-do-wells is targeting an already-vulnerable group (contemporary writers). Bess Kalb took matters into her own hands.
— in The Grudge Report
There is a predatory vanity scam targeting authors, in which the scammer writes an email lavishing an author’s work with effusive, specific praise, then invites the author to take part in a book club event, then charges the author to promote the event. The “book clubs” all have European-sounding names, and lack a website or any online footprint, and the emails are glaringly AI-generated. The proliferation of these scammers makes me sad because it means authors struggling to find a readership are falling for them. And PAYING them. It is a vulturous, pathetic, dystopian nightmare that weaponizes AI against the declining publishing industry by making an author feel seen and celebrated, only to siphon hundreds and thousands of dollars from them. Normally, that’s what publicists are for.
To torment one scammer right back, I decided to go completely insane. Here is the record of that saga, for your amusement and mine.
FREE WILL
PARENTING
A child’s worldview is shaped by their caregiver. Turns out the inverse is true too.
— in the examined family
Stella turns 10 years old tomorrow. A decade of Stella is a lot of Stella, and of course, I can’t wait for as many more as life will bless me with. She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met, with some star trails of various family members (dead and alive). She’s a real Leo—confident in her talent, magnanimous and charismatic, and very emotional. Thanks for making me wiser, my girl…
Completion is for suckers. The measure of how worthwhile something is should not be whether you finished it. In fact, who says what’s finished? We don’t even know if death is a real ending. Why would we keep doing something once it stops being fun and alive for us?
Fluidity is where it’s at. If you worry less about defining yourself or other people, you have more time to respond in the white hot moment to what you feel, what you want to wear, and who you want to crush on. Stella hasn’t read Octavia Butler yet, but damn if she doesn’t live like “the only lasting truth is change.”
Feel your feelings and move them along. Stella loves feelings. She has a feelings posters taped on her wall, a wheel of emotions in her room, and notebooks filled with original love songs, dreams, and secrets. When she gets mad, you really know it. When she’s sad, it permeates the room. And then it’s gone—moved on through her body because it had a chance to be exercised, expressed, acknowledged.
Apologize genuinely and quickly. Stella can be hurtful, but she also registers when she’s hurt someone and is very quick to apologize—usually in a handwritten note slipped under the door. She doesn’t seem to be hampered by a grand theory that she doesn’t or won’t hurt people, like some of us; she knows she will and she’s explicitly sorry when she does.
ACCIDENTAL ART
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Astead Herndon, a politics reporter and host of the Vox Media podcast “America, Actually,” is now on Substack, where he’ll be writing a “weekly guide to the big ideas and key people behind the political shifts shaping the 2026 elections.”
Musician Lizzy McAlpine has launched a newsletter, The Angel Club, on Substack.
Writer, author, and creator Frankie McNamara has launched Meditations for the Anxious Mind on Substack, where he’ll be posting weekly essays on culture and modern life.
Rob Doing Rob is now sharing nature tips and tricks and glimpses into his “chaotic gardening” 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.
2026-07-25 21:03:21
This week, we’re breaking teeth, writing books, and going on our own odysseys.
COPING
Ella Gray Hickman recounts the days after she lost her home in a fire through the bagels, candy, and frozen pizzas she consumed in the aftermath.
— in Ella Going Gray
I wake up in Rayne’s bed around 9:00am. Her room is always nice to wake up in. For some reason, the sun never feels jarring or intruding when it shines through her windows in the morning. My husband is calling me to come downstairs to let him in, the firefighters have asked him all the questions they needed to and let him pack up some essentials from the smoldering mess of our apartment. I feel a little guilty because I didn’t think to change out of my sooty pajamas when I collapsed into Rayne’s white sheets and I must assume they smell like smoke by now. It is hard for me to tell because everything smells like smoke to me and will for a few days.
Rayne was awake writing at 3:30am and the first person to pick up my call after the firefighters got us out. The restaurant we lived over, a mom and pop sushi place we loyally kept ordering from even after the health department briefly shut them down and our minor cockroach problem coincidentally went away, was, in that early morning hour, still on fire. My husband, Andrew, had wrangled the cat into his crate before the firefighters chopped their way up to our floor. On the street, he rubbed my back as I hacked black snot onto the sidewalk and then ushered me and the cat into a car to Rayne’s. Despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help feeling very romantic about it all. I was getting on him just a day before about never holding doors open for me. It’s not that I’m surprised by how good he is in a crisis nor how good he is to me in general, but I suddenly feel very aware of it. Sometimes in my head, he’s still 19.
Andrew, my knight in flannel pajama pants and a pair of Caterpillar construction boots some sympathetic Belgian raver gave him on their way to after-afters, arrives at Rayne’s with breakfast from Apollo Bagels, which is funny because we’ve never had them before and right now seems like an odd time to follow a staycation tourist-in-my-own-city impulse. Maybe he went because we’re never in Williamsburg this early or maybe it was because he spent all the early morning from about 4am onward waiting around for the fire chief to show up and say nothing, really, of substance and so the long line seemed less daunting. I can’t tell if the toasted bagel is burnt or if my mouth is burnt, but it crackles when I bite into it. The tomato is gorgeously tender, the thin ribbon of skin on the slices doesn’t even catch as I take a sloppy bite. The salt and acid tang of the tomato stings my tongue in odd spots like metal zaps, but the cream cheese is soothing. It isn’t the most generous layer of cream cheese I’ve ever had on a bagel, but the consistency is far more buttery and silky than I’m used to.
After breakfast, we load the cat and the go-bags into Andrew’s car and relocate to the apartment of our best New York friends from college. Gene and Maude have offered up their couch for the weekend. Once Alamo is settled with litter and food, Andrew takes me back to our place to survey the damage. We each gather a laundry bag of clothing to serve as our respective wardrobes for the foreseeable future and decide that opting for wash and fold is completely worth it. After we drop off our smokey clothes to the laundromat, I want to walk around alone for a little while to clear my head and I want to stress eat sugar. I make my way down Knickerbocker stopping into 99 cent stores to buy packs of socks and boxers and white tee shirts we can wear immediately. It begins raining harder and I realize I should have grabbed the umbrella Gene offered me, but that wouldn’t do anything to keep my slippers dry. I am still wearing the clothing I fled the apartment in: Christmas patterned pajama pants, a big tee shirt covered in paint splatter, and rubber bottomed felt clog slippers. I am soaked-through halfway back to Maude and Gene’s.
SEA LIFE
DOCUMENTARIES
After Flaco the owl escaped the Central Park Zoo, he became an overnight sensation. One filmmaker took it upon herself to document the moment.
— in Penny Lane Is My Real Name
In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked a famous question about consciousness: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Nagel chose the bat because, as a fellow mammal, we readily accept that it possesses consciousness, in the sense that it is like something to be a bat. A bat has subjective experience.
But he also chose the bat because it is so weird and alien to us—humans can’t echolocate, for example, or fly—that even if we knew every scientific fact about bat biology, we’d still lack access to what it actually feels like to be one. As Nagel put it, we can rely only on our own experience to provide “the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited.”
Every documentary begins with an impossible ambition: to understand what it is like to be someone—or something—other than yourself. Telling the truth about the experience of any other being is never easy. You never really know if you are getting it right. But at least with human subjects, you can ask them, “What is it like to be you?” You can ask them, “Did I get that right?”
There’s a reason so many people at Q&As will ask a documentarian, “What did [subject of film] think about the film?” They’re looking, in a way, for a fact-check on the whole enterprise of the filmmaker having tried to represent what it is like to be the subject.
With an animal protagonist, the mystery is even more irresolvable. There are no interviews, and no explanations. Just the best available scientific understanding, close observations of behavior, and ultimately, your own imagination.
This is the challenge I found myself facing when an owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and immediately became the most captivating protagonist I’ve ever encountered in real life. This owl, who had lived in captivity his whole life, was now suddenly free. He had begun writing his own story. My job became to try, however imperfectly, to tell it.
What is it like to be an owl? The question announced itself to anyone who saw him on the sidewalk near the Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue.
But we weren’t just asking it about owls in general—we were asking it about Flaco. An individual, with his own personal history, his own individual temperament, and his own subjective experience. That’s the invitation at the heart of Wild Inside: to get to know one extraordinary individual, on an extraordinary quest… who just happens to be an owl.
That said, the first step in avoiding the mistake of anthropomorphism is remembering Flaco is, in fact, not a human but an owl. One must try to understand the owl’s world: his umwelt. This wonderfully German word refers to the distinct perceptual reality of a species, deriving from their unique biological abilities.
And so, I asked embarrassingly basic questions of esteemed scientists over many months as I learned about owl biology. I was delighted to learn that owls, with their forward-facing eyes fixed inside their sockets and their long-range vision, probably see the world not so differently from a birder with binoculars glued to the face. This parallel vision became a visual motif throughout Wild Inside… especially because it so often seemed Flaco was watching us as much as we were watching him.
MAGIC
FILM REVIEW
E.K. Carlisle got the hottest ticket in town—a spot at a screening of The Odyssey—but argues that the plot feels eerily similar to the director’s past work.
— in E. K. C-mail
Nolan, renowned for high-concept sci-fi and action films such as Interstellar and The Dark Knight, is one of the few modern filmmakers that can reliably drum up packed cinemas whatever he puts out. Oppenheimer, his last feature chronicling the life and times of the guy who built the nuclear bomb, was 180 minutes of boring political machinations and Cillian Murphy looking stressed. It still earned nearly $1 billion worldwide.
The Odyssey will no doubt achieve similar success. As a former student of ancient history, I was interested to see how Big Chris would adapt Homer’s lengthy ancient Greek poem for a modern audience. It hasn’t hurt that he’s roped in an all-star cast: Matt Damon as the wandering warrior Odysseus, and Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland as his patient wife and son waiting for him back home.
I had doubts about how well Nolan’s brooding, clinical style of filmmaking would gel the chaotic, colourful world of ancient epic, and I was justified in having them. His preference for high-contrast neutrals creates scenescapes that are expansive and expensive, but dry. We’ve known for years now that our idea of the classical world as one of white statues and gleaming marble temples is completely inaccurate. Ancient cities would have been full of vibrancy, from the painted icons in shrines to intricate wall paintings. Even going back to the Minoan civilization on Bronze Age Crete we find fragments of art that reflect a playfulness and eclecticism that is nowhere to be found in Nolan’s dusty vision of the Mediterranean.
This cultural levity is mirrored in the Homeric poems: although they contain sombre episodes (Achilles brutalising Hector’s corpse, Odysseus losing all his men, Agamemnon sacrificing his own daughter to ensure safe passage of his ships), there’s also many ridiculous moments that can only be described as camp. The oafish cyclops Odysseus encounters also keeps sheep and makes cheese. Circe turns Odysseus’s men into squeaking little pigs. The famous episode of the Trojan horse is unbelievably absurd and borderline comic. You’re telling me Odysseus’s cunning plan is to build a huge equine structure and stuff it with soldiers, and for some reason the Trojans are stupid enough to accept it as a gift, and the subsequent ambush is enough to end a ten year conflict? Have a day off!
But Christopher Nolan re-enacts the episode with a characteristic po-face. The only time that drops is during the Circe scenes: here, he doesn’t lean into humour, but horror, with the soldiers’ transformation into pigs rendered in genuinely grotesque fashion, to the point where I began to wonder if Robert Eggers had suddenly seized directorial control.
CANINES
ACCIDENTS
Parvati Shallow has been on several seasons of Survivor, where she’s faced every kind of challenge. Still, having an emergency in front of her daughter was new territory.
— in The Queendom
“Mommy, did you die?” My daughter’s voice rang out in the blackness.
I felt the cold concrete on my left cheek before I opened my eyes. My tongue brushed against my front tooth and felt a jagged edge.
“No,” I hurried to answer her, with my face still on the ground, my body sprawled out on the gritty cement.
What happened? I was so disoriented.
Opening my eyes, I searched in the dark for my daughter. She was standing about ten feet behind me by a wooden beam. Why was she so far away? My thoughts swirled inside my head while I grasped at understanding my predicament. My mouth tasted of blood and dirt.
Okay. I know some things.
What happened: We were under the Santa Monica pier. We’d been rollerskating. I was holding my daughter’s hand and we’d fallen down. My knee had popped and I’d felt lightheaded. I was scared I’d really fucked up my knee. Would I even be able to walk?
The tunnel was black as midnight but just beyond it the sun was blazing bright, making it hard for my eyes to adjust. I remembered sitting on the ground for a bit to stabilize, but my head just kept spinning. Beyond me, people were buzzing through the tunnel on motorized scooters, their screams echoing off the walls and corners.
This was hell.
Before I found myself belly down on the boardwalk, I’d been sitting up, trying to ground myself. I’d been aware of my daughter watching me, her eyes heavy with worry. An urgent energy pulsing off her tiny body, waiting for me—willing me—to stand up.
[. . .]
Now that I had a grasp on the sequence of events I’d just experienced, I had another thought, one that struck me with horror—did I lose a tooth?
Oh my God.
I’d played five seasons of Survivor and had competed as an amateur boxer. I’d sliced my thumb with a machete on Survivor Cook Islands, gotten a fat lip on Survivor Micronesia, and broken my wrist in a quad bike accident while hosting a travel show, but I had NEVER. Lost. A. Tooth.
Sound the alarm!!
All of a sudden, this was a very real emergency, and my head was back on my shoulders right where it belonged.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said assertively to my daughter. She was scooping up my skates which had rolled away when I fell. I watched her face soften in relief when she heard my strong voice, but her eyes still looked worried.
“I’m okay. We have to get out of this tunnel,” I said again to reassure her.
A minute later, we were out in the brightest sunshine under an expansive cloudless blue sky. Hallelujah. We’d been resurrected.
Plopping down on the sand, I called my dentist to make an emergency appointment. They scheduled me for 9am the next day. Then I called my emergency contact.
COWORKING
THE PROCESS
Tyler McCall divulges what she’s learned while working on her debut book.
— in Voted Most Talkative
Whenever I tell someone that I sold a novel, the most common response I get—by a lot—is some variation of, “I could never write a book!”
To that, I say: Not with that attitude!
In all seriousness, I get why books are intimidating. Staring at a blank document and knowing you need to come up with somewhere between 75,000-95,000 words to fill it is like standing at the bottom of a mountain and knowing you gotta make it to the top. And that’s provided you have an idea for a book in the first place!
Having chatted with author friends of mine, I know that every writer has a different approach to turning that blank document into a shiny novel for people to read, so I can’t tell you exactly how to write a book. Finding your process is part of the fun, imo! But I can tell you how I wrote a book and maybe de-mystify that process a little bit, in case you’ve got an idea rumbling around inside your head.
First, my credentials, in case you don’t know me: Hi, my name is Tyler McCall, and my debut novel PEOPLE LIKE YOU comes out in spring 2027! Soon I’ll have a cover and a preorder link and all that fun stuff, but until then, you can follow me over on Goodreads to stay updated.
For some, the very concept of coming up with an idea for a novel is foreign, and I get it. I definitely couldn’t open up a blank document and force myself to come up with ideas. Explaining the way I get ideas for stories actually makes me sound a bit nuts, I think, because the way it has always happened is that I’ll be in the middle of something—showering, reading, out on a walk—and a scene or a bit of dialogue will pop into my head. The characters are already there and they’re real, even if they’re still pretty fuzzy to me.
That’s what happened with PEOPLE LIKE YOU. The initial idea came to me in 2022; it’s funny, actually, how specifically I can remember the moment it happened, because it was January and I was at my in-laws for a delayed Christmas celebration. It was late at night, I was reading because I couldn’t sleep, and the image of Jacob and Charlotte—my two main characters—arguing in a private library sprung into my head fully formed. I could see their dynamic so clearly, that even while they were at odds with each other, they wanted each other desperately. (I really can’t wait until the book is out so I can discuss which scene this is!)
Whenever I have a scene pop into my head that I find interesting, I try to imagine those characters in a few different scenarios. If I can’t put together maybe another five to ten snippets, it usually dies (or, if I like the scene enough, gets absorbed into a different story). But usually, while I’m pulling on those threads, a fuller picture starts to come together and that’s when I know I’m cooking.
ART
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, the creative director at Balenciaga, is now on Substack. His first post is an inside look into the making of the fashion house’s most recent couture collection.
Author and speaker is now on Substack, where he’ll be sharing life lessons and philosophy.
Internet fixture Henry Smith has published his first Substack post, an exploration into the phrase “of course.”
The San Francisco Chronicle’s former sports columnist, Scott Ostler, is now on Substack.
Hunter Harris, a Team USA luge athlete, is documenting his journey as a hopeful for the 2030 Winter Olympics 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.
2026-07-22 00:02:33
It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet.
This is less true on Substack, and we aim to keep it that way. As a first step, we’re launching a feature with Pangram in the Substack app today. Going forward, you’ll be able to scan text to see how much of it was likely written by hand or with AI assistance. More on that in a moment, but first let me explain why this matters.
There is an increasing share of text on social media that is generated by AI—as much as 40% on some platforms, according to Pangram’s estimate. This is a big change. Many people complain their feeds are filled with soulless slop. Others don’t yet realize when they are reading something written by no one.
The core problem is not people using AI, or the quality of its output. Not everything made with AI is slop, and not all slop is made with AI. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That’s Claudefishing.
Here’s how Freddie deBoer put it:
I access human-made art because I know there’s a human behind it and that’s what I’m looking for, other humans, showing me in art what they hide in their selves. Fooling me in that process is just a con.
We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of what we do: building an economic engine for culture. That means helping real people, who think, feel, observe, argue, experiment, consider, struggle, exhort, and care, to make money doing work they believe in. The network is based on trust between people, and that’s why it works.
When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.
This is an emerging space, and we don’t claim to have all the answers. But one thing we do know is that we don’t want to wait until your Substack app turns into LinkedIn before we start to learn and make progress. So to start, we’re launching some new tools that we hope will increase transparency and give us a basis to ask for your feedback.
We’re partnering with Pangram, the leading AI-detection tool. You’ll be able to scan notes, replies, comments, and posts to see an estimate of how much of the text was written by hand or with AI assistance. This will work on text longer than 100 words, published from today on, and will show an analysis only to those who request it.
Note that Pangram can only detect whether AI was used to make the text, not whether great human care went into creating it, nor whether AI tools were used as a source. It is not perfect, but independent research suggests that it detects AI-generated text with a high degree of accuracy. We believe it is beneficial for people to have access to tools like this to help make their own judgments.
We’re also introducing tools for creators, including the ability to add a “How I make this” statement where you can explain your process and set expectations for readers. You can run Pangram on your drafts prior to publication, as well as report and remove any scans on your own work that you believe are mistaken.
These features are available now on web and iOS and will be coming to Android soon. This is just a starting point. Depending on feedback and interest, we are considering tools that will:
Let you set preferences around AI content for your own community in your Reply Rules
Give creators more ways to express the individual value they offer, whether through human writing or thoughtful AI use
Give readers the option to set preferences about what gets recommended to them
Continue to improve our systems that fight spam, bots, and scams of all kinds as AI accelerates these problems
We’re not against people using AI to assist their work, and we think people should be free to choose which tools they use to express themselves. Some on the platform are human-writing maximalists, others are publicly exploring the frontier of using AI tools while sweating the details to make work they stand behind. We use AI all the time at Substack to write software, do research, and build product features like clipping, translations, and more.
But people should know what they’re getting. For example, you might be fine reading someone’s sharp analysis in which they leaned heavily on AI to present their findings but only want to spend time engaging with replies written by a human hand. Either way, you should have a choice in the matter.
We’re all entering this strange new world together, and we can think of no better way to figure out the new tools and new social norms we need than open debate. We want to hear from you: How can Substack help support valuable human creation in the age of AI? When is AI use Claudefishing? When is it great?
Human perspective is the essential ingredient of culture, and this will be true no matter how powerful AI becomes. In fact, the more you expect these tools to keep improving, the more important it is to understand the provenance of what you read. Claude has a lot to offer! But when I want Claude’s opinion, I’ll ask Claude.
