Cormac vs. Claude: The New York Times shared a quiz asking readers to identify passages from human writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, and Hilary Mantel, against AI-written passages on similar themes. Substackers were unimpressed: BDM writes that given the ongoing piracy issues of LLMs, the quiz is an “exercise in humiliating the writers featured,” while Max Read counters the idea that these quizzes measure what they claim to. And M. E. Rothwelltakes apart a McCarthy sentence to show that what the quiz describes as ungrammatical or “clunky” writing is actually a thoughtfully stylized representation of how the novel’s characters speak.
HOLLYWOOD
That’s all, folks
As the film industry gussies up for its biggest night of the year, Dara Resnik reflects on the changing industry and what happens when Hollywood, the industry, becomes estranged from Hollywood, the place.
After a certain number of cocktails (I’ll let you guess the over/under), several of my friends have recently turned to me at separate dinners, and sighed, exasperated: “It’s over, isn’t it?” They mean Hollywood. And by Hollywood, they mean the glamorous place and the world-famous business that grew in her womb. The bad news is that the answer is yes. The good news is that the answer is also no.
Before the pandemic, I advised film and television writers—students and professionals—from all over the world to move to Los Angeles. That’s where the money was. That’s where the majority of the exciting jobs were. Even growing up in New York City, the Center of Planet Earth (yes, I said it), it was clear to me that if I wanted to write, produce, and/or direct tentpole films or network television, I had to move to LA. Let’s be clear: I really didn’t want to. I had a rent-controlled apartment on 86th and Broadway. I was writing for magazines. I was living a lovely version of an Upper West Side life I coveted as a kid, but I knew if I was gonna Make It, I needed to be in Hollywood.
And I was right. Every wave of young people that moved here in a given year was essentially a college graduating “class.” The people who moved here in ’99, or ’02, or ’06 and on and on, all knew each other in some way. You’d be drinking beer in some stranger’s S’lake backyard one night and realize their roommate was the guy who had the UTA desk next to your best friend, and now he’s an agent, or the young CE you were meeting with was the assistant you used to talk to on the phone all the time when you were a PA. We rose the ranks together, because while jobs out here have always been coveted, there were just enough of them, and we brought each other up alongside us. Vacating a desk in Disney development for a promotion? You knew that girl who’d just left Barry Josephson’s company (uh-huh) would be excited to take it. Need to quit that agency mailroom gig? No problem, the network of “classmates” you arrived with had your back and there was always, within months, a gig around the corner. And while the cost of living was high, it wasn’t nearly as high as it was in the City That Never Sleeps.
On the crew side, if you wanted to learn camera, you could start as a 2nd AC, and climb the ladder the same way. And if you got “stuck” on a rung, either as a mid-level executive, or in a crew position that wasn’t the above-the-line gig you dreamed of, you could still make a living, buy a house, get healthcare for your family, send kids to college on the salary. And the perks were enormous. Sure, maybe you’d be making the same amount of money as a middle school teacher, but you got to be on a studio lot, attend premieres, get paid for being creative in some way. You grew in an ecosystem that was creating one of America’s biggest, most lucrative exports: film and television.
I wish I could explain to my most recent graduate students how thrilling it used to be on a studio lot. How alive it was with movement and sound and creativity. From 2001-2008, I mostly worked at Warner Bros. (first as an intern for Mimi Leder, then for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, then Pushing Daisies). Lunch was a trip. At one commissary table, a legendary TV director, at another, a background extra for ER on a break, eating Poquito Mas with a fake nail sticking out of his chest. Around the corner, wardrobe for The West Wing rolling by, around the next, two janitors gossiping in the Stars Hollow gazebo. Everyone was part of something bigger than themselves. While yes, the assholes still thrived because welcome to humanity, the feeling of being part of a creative community was pervasive. You couldn’t help but look wide-eyed at your colleagues sometimes and go, “Guys, we’re really DOING IT!”
Sadly, anyone paying attention is finally admitting that has changed. Production has fled. There are fewer buyers, fewer development jobs. The studio lots are devoid of life. I recently had an in-person meeting at the Universal Studios lot, which is huge, and when I inevitably got lost, as I always have, I looked around to ask someone, ANYONE for directions, and I think I literally heard crickets. I was alone. It was eerie. Of course, there are a few productions here and there. But it’s not like it was. And it never will be again. Things change.
“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
―Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
Before they were called “Town Hall” meetings, they were called “All Hands.” At some point HR made us change the name because “not everyone has hands.” Believe all 60 of us had both hands but anyway, the point was to get the whole marketing team in a room once a quarter to exchange personality test results and pretend to know what EBITDA means, pretend we control such profitability metrics through Pinterest ads.
In advance of each Town Hall, leadership would pick a few people for these “get to know the team” panels. The questions were personal, and yet everyone’s answers always circled back to work. The host would ask, “Who’s on your Spotify Wrapped this year?” and some middle manager would gush, “Like alllll classical because it helps me focus!” SHUT THE FUCK UP. JUST SAY TAYLOR SWIFT AND WALK THOSE DUSTY ROTHYS BACK TO YOUR CUBICLE.
I remember the last Town Hall I attended before changing teams. We broke for lunch which was, invariably, a taco bar for gringos on SSRIs. Then it was panel time.
Donna Livingston perched upon a stool in her signature glam. Her long, shiny red hair in loose curls; Disney princess eyes with 100 coats of mascara; berry lip. She embodied the bygone elegance of mid-tier city office life, the kind of woman who called a shirt a “blouse” and pants “slacks.” That day she wore black slacks and a deep-pink-hued blouse. I thought to myself, Donna loves a jewel tone. Gotta respect a woman who knows what looks good on her. I’d only ever seen Donna in sapphire and emerald and this shade of pink; it was the color of love refracting off the edges of a ruby.
Donna worked remotely from DC. We were all used to admiring her through a screen, her dedication to Getting Ready every day to work from home. Always warm, always smiling. To see her up there on the panel reminded me that those intangibles like “grace” and “poise” can’t be fully apprehended via Microsoft Teams. Real-life Donna was just so… lovely. That’s the word. Lovely.
At one point, the panelists were asked about their dream jobs. Everyone got fidgety because what on earth would you do if not write website copy for B2B telecom?
They passed Donna the mic and she turned the color of her shirt.
“I would be a figure skater,“ she confessed, her voice shaky and girlish. “My girls skate and it’s the biggest part of our lives.”
Everybody loved Donna, and that was the first time most of us got a glimpse into her personal life. I must have been in a million meetings with her and she never once mentioned this thing that colored a sterile conference room with charm and wonder and truth. And then it clicked for me: that Donna’s glam might be an extension of her passion for skating. It can be a lovely thing, to look the part; it crystallizes your image in the hearts and minds of everyone who meets you.
On January 29, 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a US Army helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington D.C. It was a small flight, 64people between the crew and passengers, 28 of them returning from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships training camp in Wichita, Kansas. Donna Livingston died alongside her husband Peter and their daughters, Olympic hopefuls Everly, 14, and Alydia, 11, who were known online as The Ice Skating Sisters.
I was working from home when my friend called and broke the news. “The whole office is a mess. Everyone’s crying and leaving for the day,” she said. Meanwhile, our friend Sarah had just taken a job under Donna. Sarah was in California for a conference where Donna was to meet her when she returned from Wichita. She was texting with Donna just before she boarded Flight 5342, wished her safe travels and everything.
What are the odds of knowing someone who dies in a 64-person plane crash? I was too catatonic for statistics but just responsive and incredulous enough to watch the video footage over and over and over. The helicopter looks like it’s being pulled directly into the plane by some invisible force, something bigger and more sinister than human error. The aircrafts collide into a magnificent ball of fire suspended in the night sky. I just kept thinking, they were almost home.
Sachin traces the arc from 3D-printed crapjects to vibe-coded slop and proposes a more sustainable way to think about what all this building actually produces.
Whenever a new technology arrives, the impulse is to treat it as something that has never existed before. A clean break from everything that came prior. I catch myself doing this with vibe coding constantly, and I see it everywhere around me. But the most useful lens for understanding a new phenomenon is almost never the phenomenon itself. You want something adjacent, close enough to share structural similarities but removed enough to see clearly. It’s on the lookout for something like this that I started reading more about the Maker Movement of ~2005-2015.
The Maker Movement was the spiritual predecessor to vibe coding. The parallels are hard to miss. Vibe coding has slop. The Maker Movement had crapjects, a term the community coined for 3D-printed objects that served no purpose beyond proving you could extrude plastic into a shape. The Claude Code of that era was a $200 printer from Monoprice and a breadboard.
The scene around making produced what were probably the first internet-native network intellectuals. Chris Anderson (who wrote the widely-read piece about the long tail) left his editor-in-chief role at Wired to start a robotics company called 3D Robotics. Cory Doctorow wrote Makers, a sci-fi novel based around characters who are hacking hardware and business models to survive in a world where everything is falling apart. These were people who gained influence by participating visibly in a making culture and writing about what it meant.
A lot of the intellectual energy of the AI era orbits around AGI: when it arrives, what it’ll do to jobs, whether it will be aligned. The Maker Movement had its own gravitational center, and it was the idea that making physical things with your hands could produce an internal transformation. You would become more creative, more entrepreneurial, more self-reliant. The object you made mattered less than what the act of making did to you.
In 2018, the media scholar Fred Turner published a paper that put this ideology under a microscope. His argument was that the Maker Movement had reinvented the theology of the Western Frontier for the digital age.
The specifics of seventeenth-century Puritanism are obviously gone. Nobody at a Maker Faire was talking about predestination. But Turner traced the literary forms and the millenarian structure—the belief that a great transformation is coming, and that individual discipline will determine who makes it through. In the Maker narrative, the American landscape is economically barren. Jobs have disappeared. Institutions have failed you. And in this wilderness, the lone individual searches inside themselves for signs of the entrepreneurial spirit, the creative spark, evidence that they are among the elect who will build their way to salvation.
Turner’s observation extends well beyond 3D printers. You can trace this same pattern through almost every hobbyist technology scene of the past fifty years. Homebrew computer clubs in the 1970s. Punk zines in the 1980s. The early web in the 1990s. Each one developed a community of practice—what Brian Eno would call a “scenius”—where people played with tools that the mainstream considered toys. Each one generated its own salvation narrative: master this tool, transform yourself, become the kind of person who builds the future.
And each one operated with a useful kind of slack. The tools were unproductive on purpose. Nobody expected your Arduino project to ship to customers. Nobody expected your homebrew computer to compete with IBM. The whole point was that you had permission to fuck around, and the finding-out happened gradually, through play, over years. This is where the old Silicon Valley adage comes from: “What smart people do on the weekends, everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”
The 19th-century Japanese master artist Kawanabe Kyōsai is well known for imaginative and satirical visions carried out in energetic, free brushwork. Between political caricatures, animals, ghosts, and acrobats, his scenes favour movement and lightness. It’s no surprise that he often painted birds.
What better subjects to express liberation and motion? Kyōsai’s soaring eagles, ravens, and songbirds share their substance with moving, changing water and buoyant leaves. Their bodies are as free and flexible as the wind. Air passes through their feathers.
Furthest from this lightness among birds is the ostrich—three hundred pounds and fully grounded. Though they share a class, an ostrich would never fit into a Kyōsai picture like a raven or an eagle does.
This is a thick and gawky animal, strutting on heavy legs, with feathers like hair draping thickly over the bulky body and spraying out at the tail. Up the curve of the neck, there are long black eyelashes, big black eyes, and big black nostrils set into a squat beak. Besides the beak and feathers, not much about the ostrich really looks birdlike at all. They have wings, of course, but these are instrumental in running, not flying.
“In some points it resembles a bird, in others a quadruped,” Aristotle wrote of the ostrich in the 4th-century B.C.E. biological study Parts of Animals. He could make no clear sense of what he observed: feathers and hair, two bird legs and a quadruped’s size, wings and no flight. In his taxonomy of animals, the ostrich was ultimately neither avian nor beast. It was classifiable only as “intermediate”. Indeed, many languages reflect a hybrid view of the ostrich: the Greek term strouthokámilos, the Persian shotormorq, the Turkish devekuşu, and the Chinese tuóniǎo each describe a “camel-bird.”
Though post-Aristotle Jewish and Islamic scholars viewed the ostrich unambiguously as a bird, it was clearly not like other birds. It ate strange things; it built unusual nests; most pressingly, it didn’t fly. In Job 39:13-17, God speaks: “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly / But are her wings and pinions like the kindly stork’s?” The stork has wings that, as biology professor Joel Duff reads, “are beautiful and enable flight.” Not the ostrich.
We on foot have always coveted the wide space of the sky, and the natural ease with which birds navigate it. A bird seems to be a light and free spirit, unconfined by its nature. The caging of a bird is a serious cruelty, and doves soar at weddings. A winged human is nothing less than an angel.
(Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended’st, / And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee) / Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating
—Walt Whitman (To the Man-of-War-Bird)
“The human fascination with flight seems to be associated with our desire for the pure transcendence of art,” writes poet Rosemarie Corlett. Leonardo da Vinci, who worked obsessively at building a flying machine, loved birds; he used to buy them at the market so that he could set them free. Wilbur Wright, of the brothers who finally saw the dream of aviation through, wrote:
The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.
The musician Maggie Rogers has launched her Substack: “Part-creative outlet, part-self indulgence, part-community connective tissue: this site is a place for me to document, hypothesize, criticize, vent, narrate, and wring out the excess thought-liquid swooshing around my own personal existential aquarium.”
Sonia Sodha, the former chief leader writer and columnist at The Observer, has joined Substack, where the center-left journalist will “ask the difficult questions the left too often avoids, from a nuanced and researched vantage.”
The team behind Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film Disclosure Day has launched a Substack, sharing the trailer and promising insider access to the movie.
Universal Music has launched a Substack dedicated to celebrating Amy Winehouse’s music, “where we revisit the stories behind the songs, the collaborators who helped bring them to life and the cultural legacy that still ripples through a new generation of artists.”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
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RJ Hamster
