RJ Hamster
“It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual…
“It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual perversion, rampant classism”In this edition of the Weekender: the history of looksmaxxing, a defense of love, and the myth of timelessness SUBSTACKFEB 14 READ IN APP Aerial photography by 36 ExposuresIt’s Valentine’s Day and everyone’s making questionable decisions—about love, about peptides, about couches, and about eating a mystery gummy and then wandering into the woods.THE DISCOURSEBriefly notedLooksmaxxing takes center stage: laura reilly announced a new health and aesthetics newsletter, High Touch, with a viral post that described an extensive beauty regimen. Responses ran the gamut, from “this sounds like a dream month to me” to “I truly think I’d rather just be ugly and die a little sooner.” But, as Kaitlin Phillips points out, the newsletter is called “‘High Touch,’ not ‘Accessible Health Hacks for Poor People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Go To The Gym.’”Is AI coming for our jobs? redux: An AI startup founder’s viral essay on X sparked the latest round of discussions on whether AI is coming for white-collar work. Derek Thompson talks through “The Doomsday Scenario for AI and Jobs,” while David Oks pushed back on the ideathat AI is soon to replace humans—largely due to the bottlenecks that humans themselves present.DESIRESConsumerism vs. spiritualismA weed-induced crisis in the woods leads to a spiritual reckoning with what we actually want.My Wishlist Bored Me to Tears—Totally Recommend in Total RecYears ago, I got really into CBD oil. It was the kind you squirt directly into your mouth like a horse supplement. I don’t remember the brand, because I didn’t buy it for myself. Someone at work handed it to me one day and said they couldn’t stand the minty taste. “Don’t you love mint? Want to give it a try?” I thought it was sweet at the time. I now realize it was also their way of saying, “You look pretty tired.”But I didn’t get mad, because it worked! I slept. I relaxed. I became briefly evangelical and annoying about CBD in a way that now warrants a sincere apology.When I ran out of that liquid gold, I bought some gummies. I popped what I thought was a CBD gummy, and an hour later I felt afraid of heights while just looking out the window. My heart was racing and I was convinced I was having a heart attack.So I checked the packaging: THC. Actual weed.The important context here is that I hadn’t done drugs in a very long time. High school me was a rebel who loved the devil’s herb, but something in my adult nervous system rejected it entirely. It didn’t make me feel relaxed. It made an already overly introspective person feel like I went forty matryoshka dolls deep into my skull and discovered something cosmically wrong.I wasn’t happy about being high. After a lot of heavy breathing, I decided the only solution was to walk aimlessly into the woods like a sick animal preparing for death. Twenty minutes later, I was staring at mossy rocks imagining what photo would end up on my missing persons report.This was extremely dramatic considering I was about 0.02 miles from a Dunkin’ Donuts, and if my brain wasn’t operating at 400% fear capacity I probably could’ve heard traffic nearby.But instead of stumbling to Dunkin’, I sat down and opened a meditation book on my phone (a very on-brand choice for someone having a weed-induced crisis in the woods).The meditation was meant for moments when you feel inadequate, fearful, or closed off. I was told that instead of trying to fix myself or make the feeling disappear, I should imagine giving away the most pleasing and beautiful gifts I could think of—they could even be parts of myself that I loved. Not exactly the most calming advice for someone freaking out and lost in the woods.But I closed my eyes. I started thinking about everything I had personally wanted in the last 48 hours. I was deep in heated negotiations over the price of a cardigan on Poshmark. There was a lamp I’d been debating buying.And then I read what these Buddhists were offering and realized… they were not messing around. While I’m haggling over resale listings, they’re offering jeweled mountains, perfumed oils, incense clouds, celestial bathing chambers, golden lotus lamps. Entire beautiful and peaceful universes imagined just to be given away, and I’m stuck on a button-down shirt.“A bathing chamber excellently fragrant,With floors of crystal, radiant and clear,With graceful pillars shimmering with gems,All hung about with gleaming canopies of pearls…”The imagery went on and on in its abundance. If I wasn’t high, I probably would’ve taken it as a sign to level up my material desires. Missoni towels. A face-sculpting massage. A new perfume. But when I imagined offering those things to someone I actually loved—or offering them to the world—they suddenly felt small.Keep readingA DAY IN THE LIFE Gallery 98 2dIn the ‘70s, I asked people if I could take photos of their daily life and they could write captions about them. This is Harry, the Bar Owner, c. 1974  2.7K  159 ROMANCELove as a work of artTara Isabella Burton on the art—and folly—of falling in love.In defense of falling in love—Tara Isabella Burton in The Lost WordWe had a symposium on Christmas Eve. Technically it was Christmas Day. We’d all had dinner and then gone to Midnight Mass and then gone to a piano bar we all knew in Midtown East. The people who go to a piano bar at two in the morning on Christmas are as riotously lonely as you’d expect. A man in a fur coat held the door for us. The pianist sang “Jesus Freaks” and “Tradition.” We ordered garlic bread and got onto the subject of love.One of us made the case that “falling in love” was not only unnecessary, when it came to one’s life partner, but actively undesirable. This was just controversial enough to keep us arguing past last call.I took the side of the romantics. Whether this was out of habit or principle or stubbornness, I’m not sure. If there was ever a year for one to decry romantic impetuousness it is the year of one’s divorce, but I’ve never dropped a cause for being lost.We all weighed in. We came to no conclusions. Some of us saw each other eighteen hours later for Chinese food and kept debating, even though the person who’d tossed the gauntlet was no longer there, and then I spent a month trying to work out what I thought.We were drunk, and didn’t define our terms, and probably all enjoyed playing into our expected roles more than we enjoyed narrowing down the precise limitations of our disagreement, but the rough contours of the proposition, edited in the service of an interesting essay, are these:Falling in love, understood as an erotic vulnerability, or a stronger form of infatuation (but distinguished, let’s say, from sexual attraction), is a bad idea because:a) it makes you crazy;b) it makes you make ill-advised decisions about who to marry, andc) is likely to be more a result of your own projections and idealizations about the other person, downstream of your own projections and idealizations about yourself, and the kind of relationship a person like you should be in, and the fantasy of the other person playing that role, than it is about the kind of actual mutuality and engagement with true otherness that lasting, real, agapic love requires.Points granted. C) is, I think, the most compelling.You should probably do it anyway.No doubt we shouldn’t marry most people we fall in love with. But even sober, even granting the necessity for social order and the begetting of children, even granting that “falling in love” is primarily about the interplay of illusions and not whole human beings, I still think it’s no less worth doing than any other form of artistic creation.It’s only by falling in love that we learn to be ourselves in the first place. I can’t think of a more foundational requirement, for a partner, than the person with whom you act out the illusion of who you think you are.I have been in love a handful of times in my life. Fewer, maybe, than you’d think if you knew me. With the benefit of hindsight I’ve imagined I was in love more times than I actually was, which is to say that I experienced a)-c), and made myself insufferable in the process. But the distinction between “intense physical attraction” and “idiotic infatuation” and “truly falling in love” can be made in hindsight only. Falling in love is less about how you feel (or make your exasperated friends feel) in the moment than about who you become afterwards.The times in my life I have actually been in love, by the definition I’m proposing here, I have become somebody else. However the fantasy started, whenever the pas des deux began, whatever pattern of call-and-response led me to imagine that life as the counterpart to, say, a cast-mate in a high school Shakespeare play or an antiquarian book dealer over a decade my senior was the apotheosis of my entire narrative identity, what I ended up left with, after it was all over, was the recognition that my entire narrative identity was completely wrong. Each imagined endpoint—this settles the story of who I am—turned out to be a place where my sense of self began.If anything, falling in love signifies, to me, those relationships in which I have so completely absorbed into myself the person I fell in love with, that I can only say that after them I became someone else, and that the someone else in question more closely resembled the person with whom I was in love than the person I fancied myself to be. But the illusion of someone else as the answer—always, like a witch’s prophecy, right, just never in the way I expected—was what snared me. It was what made me willing—the way Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah makes me willing; the way Four Quartets makes me willing; the way an all-night dance party makes me willing—to gamble on a version of myself, and lose. The experience of falling in love for me has always been the experience of good art. Something you recognize snares you; something you don’t keeps you there.Keep readingPAINTING“Flowers in a Glass Vase” by Adam Lister, shared by Strung Out on PlenitudesVANITYFace valueOn a very different side of the internet from Laura Reilly’s High Touch, a similar conversation about the lengths we’ll go to for our looks is taking place: this week, 20-year-old looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular broke through to mainstream attention. Sean Monahan reports on the history of this mogging, jestergooning cohort.Clavicular: a picaresque internet personality—Sean Monahan in 8BallLooksmaxxing isn’t so new. Neither is the term mogging that’s risen to prominence with it. Both are downstream of the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) subculture that has been receiving media coverage since the Rolling Stone contributing editor Neil Strauss wrote a New York Times bestseller on the subject in 2005: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.Looksmaxxing and mogging (or being the Alpha Male Of the Group) were both born in the cauldron of PUA forums roughly a decade ago. I first came in contact with the terms via Doomscroll’s Josh Citarella. (He also introduced me to the concept of mewing—a tongue posture technique used to align the face and reshape the jawline.)But a decade ago, moral panic was directed at the rise of fillers, Botox, and other injectables among young women, inspired by influencer culture, especially the Kardashian-Jenner clan. I distinctly remember being at a party where a twentysomething Angeleno was bragging to anyone who would listen that Kim Kardashian had been copying her face.Today, this has become so common as to be passé. We chortle at Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s “MAGA face.” Plastic surgeons on TikTok play guess-the-age-of-this-face, as 20-year-old girls now have the faces of 35-year-olds.Looksmaxxing, like Instagram face before it, is powered by the popularity of a new class of drugs: peptides. Introduced to the American public under the banner of GLP-1s—weight-loss drugs like Ozempic (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide)—a whole class of unregulated grey-market “Chinese peptides” address all manner of ailments and hedonistic desires. There are peptides for energy and peptides for hair loss. There are peptides for collagen production and peptides for muscle growth.At cocktail bars, people in Los Angeles casually recommend their peptide dealers, if only as an opportunity to brag about the celebrities their dealer services.There may be risks. Clavicular may report being infertile at 20. But the body has replaced the garment as the fixation of fashion. Or as Rick Owens put it:“Working out is modern couture. No outfit is going to make you look or feel as good as having a fit body. Buy less clothing and go to the gym instead.”Looksmaxxing is the avant-garde of style inasmuch as style is the art of self-presentation and appearance.Keep readingTHE MYTH OF TIMELESSNESS Talia 4dif you have a brown velvet couch on your mood board and you’re aiming for “timeless”, allow me to issue you this warning:  8819RELATIONSHIPS“It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual perversion, rampant classism”Miriam’s tale of falling for a school-aged toff feels like a love story from a different era, complete with wooing by Chaucer comparisons and Gertrude Stein poems.A Coward’s Guide to Eden pt. II—Miriam in Between Monk and MyrmidonPhilip was one of a handful of men left on earth who still played court tennis. Last I heard from him, he was trying to gain membership to the Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, which to this day prohibits women. One of his friends, who had slept with over fifty sorority girls, had already gotten him into the New York Athletic Club. My own experience of tennis began and ended in India, where the boys grew so tired of coaching me, I had to run laps around the dirt court.We met through the university’s literary society, which was the sort of institution you’d describe if you needed to evoke trivial decline, the way one complains about an art film where everyone is ugly. The library was named after William Henry Harrison, the only American president who died after only forty days in office. At his inauguration, he refused to heed the warnings of the cold; he was overzealous and spoke too long. In the secret society offices there were scale models of warships, Latin tomes, and, inexplicably, a naked portrait of Ayn Rand. A taxidermy enthusiast once set a lobster loose in the halls, leaving us with a mysterious stench and the game of finding its carcass. The building was named after his great-uncle, who died during the First World War. During its remodeling, Philip would regularly inquire after his ancestor’s missing portrait, and the fact that it was eventually mounted near the gender-neutral bathroom sent him into paroxysms of anguish.I was in attendance when the society was deliberating whether to admit him; I can’t recall whether I voted yea or nay. I remember resolving to stay away from him; men that handsome could never amount to any good. He wore loafers without socks and crossed his legs so that the hem of his Bon Marché trousers settled high above the ankle. Typical upper-class British thrift ensured his haircuts were always too severe.Philip soon found I was the only person at Penn charmed by his knowledge of Napoleon and the Risorgimento. He’d read thirty books on Napoleon, who was great, I was told, because he was both the law’s architect and its exception. That summer we visited Les Invalides twice, both times wearing paper bicornes. On our first date, I read him Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso”—‘If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon.’ …It was just as well that, upon first reading, the poem sounds like nonsense—I do not think we were paying attention to the words.When I visited my aunt in Manhattan, she told me to stay far away from him. She’d met plenty such men at Cambridge and then Oxford. It was always the same story: eternal adolescence, sexual perversion, rampant classism. I tried to break up with him, but folded when he started to cry. He told me he loved me eleven days after our first meeting, which marked the end of any resistance on my part.At the beginning, he was one of Chaucer’s verray parfit gentil knyghts; he always knew what to say. Instead of a couch, I had two sofa chairs bought for $25 each at the Goodwill; he swooped in graciously and said all it meant was that I was ‘a dynamic woman of discourse’ and ‘not someone who wastes her time lounging.’ A Lawrence of Arabia type, he wore a keffiyeh in Jordan when he went to teach English at a refugee camp on his gap year, and spent all day playing cricket with boys on the street when his family visited India for a wedding. Wooed as I was by his Conservative Party membership card and talk of “polemical sweet nothings,” he became my Lawrence of Philadelphia, pointing out timeless beauty amidst urban decay, such as the scalloped Ghibelline crenelations of Penn’s football field, which cast curling shadows over all the future Wall Street tycoons.Keep readingPATCHES“Thread doodling” by Emma Mary MurraySubstackers featured in this editionArt & Photography: 36 Exposures, Gallery 98, Strung Out on Plenitudes, Emma Mary MurrayVideo & Audio: TaliaWriting: Tara Isabella Burton, Sean Monahan, Totally Recommend, MiriamRecently launchedPlayboy is here. In the editors’ first post, aptly titled “I Read It for the Articles,” they revisit the magazine’s illustrious literary history. They’ll be continuing that legacy here, with a selection from their archives along with “new fiction and nonfiction alike from some of our favorite established and up-and-coming writers today.”The Western Edge, “a new type of journalism from the Pacific Northwest,” has joined Substack. It may be a new magazine, but the writers “make journalism the old way: through public records requests, long interviews, source-building, institutional knowledge, archival research and picking up the damn phone.”Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:Start a SubstackThe Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments. 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