The week after a long weekend always feels a tad longer than usual, but here it is: Friday. We’ve arrived. Whether the week crawled by or flew by for you, here are a few Venns to remind you what happened, and what we covered here on the Hub.
See ya Monday!
At a ceremony on Thursday night, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars was awarded the second annual Inside Literary Prize, the first-ever US-based literary award to be judged by currently incarcerated people. Readers from 15 prisons across 6 states and territories selected Adjei-Brenyah’s novel from a shortlist of four.
“There is no question that this is the highest possible honor a book like this could ever receive,” said Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, in a statement. “I take it to mean those who judged believed I was not careless or callous, that I used language in a way that felt like truth. This retroactive mandate is a gift I can never repay, but one I will forever be grateful for. I want to thank all those Inside, those who judged and those who did not. This award is dedicated to you all.”
The Inside Prize is organized by Freedom Reads, in collaboration with the National Book Foundation, the Center for Justice Innovation, and Interabang Books co-owner Lori Feathers.
This was a week for escapist coping. We lived off indie pop and indie movies. We dreamed of a throwback internet and healthier lungs.
Molly Odintz has music to thank for making it to Friday. Specifically The Marías, who she got to see live at the Moody Theater in Austin. María Zardoya, frontwoman for the eclectic bilingual indie outfit, was apparently “dressed like Morticia Adams and sang like CocoRosie mixed with Portishead.” IYKYK!
McKayla Coyle also recommends some jubilant summer bop. “Automatic,” from the California-based Half Alive, reminds me of MTV’s heyday in more ways than one. The single’s glorious video includes a puppet, a rad group dance, and a dense, crunchy guitar. I’m with McKayla. “Bring back choreography!” (And videos.)
In other old-school news, Drew Broussard recommends an extra goofy sketch from Pile of Garbage, a Skeeter to watch. “Bozo eat dust, this bag two thirds air” is true crackpot. Or in Drew’s words, “Hilarious, weird, and the kind of thing that makes me hopeful for a return to an internet that looks more like the one I grew up on.”
I, Brittany Allen, am also feeling nostalgic. My happy thing this week was a network television show that’s been off the air for four years. Freeform’s The Bold Type has just the right mix of goofiness and treacle for this gal’s smooth, hopeful nighttime brain. I’m charmed by the friendship at the center of this workplace bildungsroman. Our three buddy heroes end almost every episode in a hug, while suitors circle the periphery.
The much more intrepid Julia Hass fell in love with a new flick—the auteur comedian Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby. “After a slew of mediocre films that promised greatness, it was such a relief to see a movie that felt so powerful, so raw, so real,” says Julia. “Eva Victor is a force!” I cosign endorsement of this chamber piece, which explores how trauma scuttles our sense of time.
Speaking of weird brains, James Folta has been fighting a nasty cold (prayers up!) with Vitamin C and podcasts. Some of the best medicine has turned out to be In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. Every episode of this dope show includes a mini lecture by three experts, “and the topics are all over the map: The Sack of Rome in 1527, The Kalevala, horses, The Gin Craze, ‘P versus NP,’ vampires and on and on…” says our sniffling hero.
“There are over a thousand episodes and they all start with Bragg’s very proper ‘Hello.”‘This week’s episode is on the evolution of lungs, and had a wild detail on how hiccups started as a way for freaked out frogs to run faster.” May we all follow suit.
Finally, we at Lit Hub refuse to stop ringing the pickle bell. Jessie Gaynor’s joy this week was a crisp chickpea salad. She reminds us all not to sleep on pickled onions.
Wishing you a weekend full of satisfying brine and group dancing.
Image from South China Morning Post on YouTube
Late in June, an entire city block in Shanghai stood up and walked back home.
8,270-tons of Shikumen style, brick row houses built in the 1920s, all 43,380 square feet from the courtyard stones to the rooftop tiles, strolled 300 feet home on 432 robotic feet. The project began two years ago, when a construction firm unleashed self-guided drilling robots beneath the Huayanli complex to dig out debris and dirt via thousands of feet of conveyor belts and make room for the hundreds of hydraulic feet, each able to lift ten tons. Once in place, the walking robots moved Huayanli 33 feet a day, or 0.0003 miles per hour, to the west then to the north, like a knight’s move in chess. With the block safely tucked to the side, a multi level mall, parking lot, and subway station was built underneath the block’s foundation, before the original city block took a three week trip to shuffle back and lower itself into place.
I came across the conclusion to this dizzying story on Geoff Manaugh’s excellent BLDGBLOG, where he takes the novelistic leap of imagining what an ambulatory city implies. He envisions buildings that can “dodge flash floods” and dancing structures that allow for “demented emperors requiring all their court’s buildings to be mobile, with urban-scale choreographers designing elaborate birthday fetes of architectural dressage.” He also predicts a futuristic heist on a large scale, grand theft arch. Why rob the safe from the bank if you can rob the bank from the block? (If you haven’t, check out Manaugh’s excellent A Burglar’s Guide To The City.)
But this kind of thing is more than just a great premise; my fascination with this story reminded me of why I love literature. Watching a city stand up is as exhilarating as reading a great sentence. A book can reshape how we see the world, like and afterimage burned into our retinas. Experiencing the most solid things imaginable lumber along on tiny feet is uncanny, it’s sublime. To the Burkean sublime fear and pleasure derived from “Sound and Loudness,” “Suddenness,” and “The Cries of Animals,” I’d add “City Blocks Walking.”
The sublime is encoded with terror, though. A roving city can easily be a nightmare: a home that can be a weapon, or chase you down, or as Manaugh imagines, stolen from you. Even the true facts of this construction project are horrifying if you shift the telling. Imagine moving back into your home and finding it exactly the same, in the exact same place, but knowing that it has gone somewhere in your absence and that something new and gigantic is writhing beneath it. Invention is not inherently altruistic or even optimistic.
Architecture, like great literature, imagines a different world and attempts to realize it in words, or on paper, or in stone and brick. They share the impulse of facing something as it is and imagining how it could be. It’s the “what if” behind every good story.
One of the engineers in Shanghai described the construction challenge as like a Huarong Dao sliding block puzzle. That description of playfulness on a grand scale is the joy of reading a well crafted novel, and seeing the puzzle pieces slide along in satisfying and surprising ways. The work requires shifting your lens: what if we turned this old block into a 21st century Baba Yaga hut?
And of course the impossibility of an engineering challenge can feel similar to the challenge of writing. Facing a blank page is like being asked to lift up a city block.
This whole thing is fascinating. If we live in a world where a city block can become a slow centipede crawling along seeking its home, what else is possible?
A recent Vulture piece considered the appeal of Substack. “Part promotional platform, part social-media site, part venue for rambling journal entries, Substack is attracting an increasing number of people who write literature for a living,” wrote Emma Alpern, before going on to praise the site’s hyper-specific offerings.
In our zip code, novelists like Ottessa Moshfegh, George Saunders, and Junot Díaz are all making hay on the site. Meanwhile journalists, lately ousted from their mastheads in legacy media, are starting to slouch towards Substehem. Commentators like Margaret Sullivan, Jennifer Rubin, and former MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan can all be found fresh in the stacks.
But over the past few years, Substack’s lost some shine. In 2022, the site was knocked for platforming TERF-y hate speech. At the time, Hamish McKenzie, a principal founder, jumped to defend the site’s “decentralized approach” to content moderation. Many writers, like Grace Lavery, abandoned sub shortly after.
Last year, the company was embroiled in scandal again after an Atlantic investigation revealed “scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters” on the platform. An open letter from 247 Substackers Against Nazis went unanswered. There were more defections, more hand-wringing calculations. But the site has continued to attract writers, readers, and mostly warm coverage, as we see above.
Given that we now have several well-publicized examples of management’s shaky ethics, the case against the platform feels fairly clear. Being a private equity venture, Substack directly profits from its creators, hateful and hopeful alike. So if you make or send money off subscriptions, the big bad board bites off some of that revenue.
And though Substack’s leaders could intervene on the moderation front, or even equivocate with a mealy-mouthed pledge to look into their Nazi problem, they’ve consistently favored a bottom line. Mostly, leadership has stuck to the ole free speech playbook we last saw deployed on Elon Musk’s X.
On the other hand, you could argue that every digital platform backed by venture capital is ethically compromised. And for writers who’ve sunk a lot into building flocks and relationships on the site, it’s hard to argue that another shop would be a whole lot better for the world. This makes fine sense, especially if you’re bound to make a living off it. But that brings us to the bubble problem.
In a June 23rd newsletter, Ana Marie Cox, author and founder of the political blog Wonkette, predicted a Sub-comeuppance. Cox is one of a growing group of business soothsayers who believe that as Substack grows, the harder it will become for newcomers—and so, the money men—to make their money.
As we’ve seen occur with the big TV streamers, any individualizing platform risks subscription fatigue. Writing in Wired, Steven Levy noted that amassing stacks in lieu of “full-fledged publications” is “a terrible value proposition.”
Likewise, Cox predicts that as the site’s pressure to grow increases, “so will the incentives to double down on the kind of polarizing, high-engagement content that gets attention even if it poisons the well.” This could leave creators who’ve gambled to stay on the stack out to dry, both ethically and financially.
And at what cost, really? My colleague Drew Broussard hates the whole phenomenon of attention-trap platforms. “It’s extractive SV capitalism at its worst,” he told me. “The world doesn’t require your newsletter.”
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Personally, I get being stuck on this one. In a constantly contracting media ecosystem, it’s hard to blame writers who’ve built followings anywhere. I read and admire several stacks, including these. And when it comes to the exodus question, I tend to flock with other writers who have fled the platform for the No Malice Palace. Writers who go out of their way in goodbye notes to say they don’t judge anyone else for sticking around.
On the attention-trap phenom in general, I’m a little less charmed by newsletters than some because 1) I tend to love editors, and 2) especially if you want me to pony up, I’d prefer an idea that’s fully baked. If everyone’s blogging for free, I figure we might as well Tumbl back to where we came from, in the glorious mid-aughts. But I know this skirts the practical aspects of today’s gig and hustle economy.
That said, if you’re a newsletter creator starting out or contemplating a big change, you should know there are alternatives to Substack. Like Beehiiv, which markets itself as more of a distribution tool than a social media platform. By making itself structurally distinct from the baddies, management hopes to sidestep the whole content moderation snafu.
There’s also Ghost, the non-profit, open access site that Platformer jumped to in 2024. And Ana Marie Cox uses Buttondown. My pal, the writer Gemma Kaneko, also likes that one for its “nuts and bolts interface” and minimal tracking. She says it feels like a zine, in the best way.
But Drew’s point about the why of it all—especially when it comes to making money—does stick to my skin. “A different newsletter platform isn’t all I want, because newsletters aren’t the answer to a disintegrating media ecosphere,” wrote Cox, in a similar spirit. “We need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing. The idea that we can hustle our way to safety will only push us closer to collapse. We don’t need better tools as much as we need each other.”
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