An illustration from Carson Ellis’s new book, shared in Slowpoke
Happy Saturday, all.
We’re writing to you from Substack’s HQ in San Francisco. The past few months of guest curations have been wonderful—there’s nothing like discovering your favorite creators’ favorite creators, to paraphrase Chappell Roan—and we’ll continue to feature guest curators periodically. But for now, it’s fun to be back in the metaphorical driver’s seat.
You may notice some tweaks to this week’s digest. We’re experimenting with a few new things, including layering in more art, multimedia, and notes, in an attempt to better capture the extraordinarily wide variety of work you might encounter on Substack. We’re also trying out an official name for this digest: the Weekender. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Now, on to the good stuff. This week, we’re digging into de-extinctions, Sally Rooney discourse, comforting horror movies, and more. Hope you enjoy.
SCIENCE
Woolly mammoths, coming soon to a tundra near you
If all goes according to plan, woolly mammoths will once again roam the plains of North Dakota—and sooner than you might think. In this post, Brian Klaas reports on scientists’ efforts to “de-extinct” mammoths using DNA found in permafrost. Klaas’s post explores big questions about what de-extinction means, both ethically and ecologically. First, though, he answers the question on everyone’s mind: Haven’t we already seen this movie?
In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, scientists extract dinosaur DNA from blood trapped within mosquitoes encased in amber (all of which is scientifically impossible). But, according to the film, because the “Dino DNA” is imperfect and incomplete, they successfully fill in the gaps with frog DNA (never mind that birds, not frogs, would be the obvious choice). Though that Hollywood “science” was fanciful mumbo-jumbo, it turns out that inverting the central idea of Jurassic Park is becoming increasingly feasible.
Instead of taking a degraded, incomplete extinct genome and filling in the gaps with a living species, the reverse is more plausible: take a living species and splice in the most crucial bits from the extinct genome instead. In other words, it’s much harder to try to create a woolly mammoth from scratch, only filling in the gaps with elephant DNA. It’s much easier to take an elephant genome and—using a powerful technology called CRISPR—insert bits of mammoth DNA.
If you were to do that systematically, replacing the key parts of the genome that separate living elephants from extinct mammoths, it’s suddenly not so far-fetched. Rather helpfully, it turns out that because Asian elephants shared a common ancestor with woolly mammoths several million years ago, there’s a 99 percent overlap in their genome, demanding fewer CRISPR snips. We can now easily imagine that a mammoth-like elephant could soon be forged in the lab, then birthed into the real world.
To the torment of arachnophobes everywhere, a growing share of the world spends the month of October reveling in “spooky season.” Nick Otte’s post offers some perspective: Horror movies can be strangely comforting, even to someone suffering from anxiety. Here, he revisits a classic from Hitchcock to explore “the uncanny nature of anxiety.”
I remember a time, well before sitting down to watch a horror movie became a source of comfort and inspiration, when the mere idea of these movies used to scare the shit out of me. I experienced night terrors extrapolated from fragments of X-Files glimpsed from the top of my stairs, and can still remember sleepless nights after my mom once casually described the plot of Poltergeist to me in our kitchen. I hadn’t even seen Poltergeist, and it still held power over me, kept me awake, eyes searching the dark, my imagination stamping monstrous shapes and horrid faces on the familiar canvas of my bedroom walls.
I’m not sure how old I was when my family rented Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, but I never forgot certain images from it: crows gathering on the playground; seagulls blotting out the blue sky over a children’s birthday party; a farmer staring straight into the camera lens (straight at me) through bloody spaces where his eyes should have been.
It was probably somewhere around the attack on the schoolchildren that I left the room, and I never returned to finish The Birds until this year, following a trip up to Bodega Bay, where the film is set (only about an hour or so from where I now live). Bodega Bay seems proud of its legacy as the backdrop of this enduring story of avian mayhem. And there was a certain charm to the place that made the idea of The Birds seem more whimsical than terrifying. So, I decided it was probably time to finish what I started all those years ago.
Two things surprised me:
The first was how a movie with such a ridiculous premise, one that is so easy to mock and seems ripe for parody, still delivers a palpable feeling of uncanny dread. And second, what a near-perfect representation this film is of certain feelings I’ve had in the year since I arrived in northern California.
A scene from The Wolf House (2018), one of the most unnerving animated horror films. It’s a stop-motion feature from Chile that really has to be seen to be understood.
Celine Nguyen: It is so exciting to feel part of something, Sally Rooney Season, where everyone is reading and discussing her books in a spirited, invested fashion. I understand why people get into sports! It’s great to participate in a collective fervor!
Emily Fiffer: Books with this much hype are dangerous. They get your hopes up, creating unfair expectations (and poorly designed bucket hats).
Sam J.:Poor Sally Rooney. Each new book released and here the termites come, nibbling away at the edges, always inevitably trying to eat up and diminish the work she has poured her soul—and, let’s be real, the soul of a whole generation—into.
Tahirah Hairston:[A]t this point her haters are also fans because they talk about her so much.
Brittney Rigby: It’s hard to be sure it isn’t recency bias, but this might be her best yet. I cared about these characters. I thought of them when I wasn’t reading the book. I thought to myself at some point, about three-quarters of the way through: how would I describe the plot? I’d have a hard time doing so. Not much happens in the way of big plot points, and yet it miraculously never sags or drags. This is a character study. A slow unfurling of conflict and desire, connection and disconnection.
Alyssa AKA Nerdy Nurse Reads: We still have classic Rooney messy relationships, but they’re more mature and slightly less unstable (comparatively speaking). Gone is the “right person, wrong time” plot line. Instead, we’re watching two brothers process their grief and how that affects their relationships with their partners and each other.
Sam J.: It’s a dirty sin to judge a book based on what you wish it would be, but I couldn’t help it. I kept wishing it would do something else, besides just intricately and minutely sifting through the endless actions and reactions of her characters.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens: I find it very depressing that for all the kerfuffle there has been almost no discussion at all of Intermezzo’s primary interest, which is language games.
Henry Oliver: Intermezzo is full of sentences like Dublin he’s gone today. This has been received badly by British and American reviewers, who see it as sub-Joycean, but there is a colloquial strain to it as well.
Camille Sojit Pejcha: Is it just me or is Sally Rooney writing like Yoda in Intermezzo[?]
Jessi Jezewska Stevens: How can people in love—how can Rooney, an author so interested in erotics, or her characters, consumed by lust and desire—try to describe and ethically negotiate embodiment and sexual intimacy when the language they must use to do so has proved such a broken tool? Can we come up with a new language?
I unsubscribed from a bunch of wonderful newsletters. I couldn’t take it anymore. Extremely educated, excellent writing, minds full of ideas, who can stand it? It’s unbearable. They always say they have so many essays in the pipeline, or drafts in various stages of completion, it’s just a matter of finding the time to polish them, what with all the thick books to read, notebooks to fill, all the international travel, research in renowned libraries, academic conferences, meetings with publishers, agents, plus the kids at home, here are photos from my biking holiday through breathtaking landscapes, and there’s that novel to finish, etc etc. They are burdened with too much life, too much joyful activity, too much vigorous engagement with brilliant minds similar to theirs, and let’s not forget the many, many friends in far-off lands, dining al fresco in Rome with my beautiful roommate from college, how the reminiscences flowed. Can you believe the proprietress of that sweet little trattoria remembered us after all these years?
Whereas: I have to eat a banana every day to prevent excruciating foot cramps. I can’t miss a day. I tried taking magnesium tablets, but those didn’t work, so I have to get magnesium from bananas for some reason. I don’t like bananas. I have to time my purchase of bananas so that a ripe one is available every day. I have occasionally waited too long and run out and gone to the store and all the bunches are green, so now I have to scheme days ahead lest I suffer another banana crisis. If I can avoid any more banana crises then maybe I can really begin to live, get my shit together and really make a go of things.
I think I might be entering my caftan years, but I need a cat first. Knock on my door and be greeted by a rheumy-eyed queen in a caftan with a cat in one arm and a Hendrick’s and tonic in the other hand. I once had a beloved cat named Abner. I had him his whole life, but it was so long ago that I can’t remember the circumstances of his death. I ate a whole thing of cookies yesterday, and who can blame me? I can’t find a photo of him but I remember he was gray with a white chest and enjoyed early 70s Van Morrison records.
I happen to think bitter envy is a perfectly valid reason for unsubscribing from someone, because what choice do I have? How much of conscience is how cleverly you rationalize what you were always going to do anyway?
In this post, Haley Nahman interrogates the psychology of both selfie-taking and its absence. She discovers that the photos “became a trap of my own making—a practice I told myself was fun and affirming but was actually, in time, the opposite.”
For a long time, my impulse to photograph myself came from an aspirational place. As a young adult interested in being self-possessed but not quite knowing how to be, imitating the sort of person I wanted to be in photos or online felt like an externalized expression of an inward search. When I succeeded—took a photo I liked, even if it took me a long time to get it right—the result felt like confirmation that self-possession was possible, like I had autonomy in my own becoming. It didn’t feel self-negating, at least consciously, until I did have a better sense of who I was, and then the project took on a more sinister spirit.
I experienced this transition as a growing humiliation at my own photographic tics. Suddenly, posing felt too directly like hiding the parts of me I was otherwise working to embrace. The youthful search had become denial, containment. So instead of getting the right angle, the challenge became: What if I didn’t take the photo at all? What would it feel like to experience myself only as a participant rather than an object? To never have visual confirmation of how an outfit looked, or a moment appeared, but instead be forced to surrender to total immersion in the present, whatever loss of “memory-making” that required?
“[O]ne of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people,” Watts wrote. “Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious.” In his book The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts suggests that in our efforts to be secure and certain about ourselves and the world, we end up deadening ourselves to a greater truth. He says we can’t understand life and its mysteries by containing them—that it would be like trying to contain a river in a bucket. “To ‘have’ running water, you must let go of it and let it run.”
Just kidding, it’s only one: a bird’s eye view of Hurricane Milton from Daily Overview. But now that the Wallace Stevens poem is in your head, isn’t the roving eye of the hurricane reminiscent of the blackbird’s eye in the snow?
October is a great month to be a sports fan. Football is going strong, the WNBA finals are upon us, and the men’s NBA season kicks off soon. And then, of course, there’s baseball. Here, Michael Ian Black uses the playoffs as an opportunity to write about the larger-than-life baseball stars of his youth.
The baseball playoffs are here and I confess I have almost no idea what’s happening. All I know is the Yankees and Mets both made it to the post-season, which for a New Jersey kid like myself is pretty good.
As a boy, I loved baseball, both watching and playing. One of my earliest memories is sitting, by myself, in my parent’s bedroom watching Reggie Jackson bat during a Yankees post-season run. I remember the dueling senses of calamity and elation with each pitch. Strike one, ball one, a foul tip for strike two. An entire opera from the moment the ball left the pitcher’s hand to the time it crossed the plate.
To a kid, sports stars are indistinguishable from gods. They were, if anything, more powerful than the gods of my upbringing. After all, Reggie Jackson had an entire candy bar named after him, which seemed more miraculous to me than turning water into wine.
God didn’t have His own candy bar.
It never occurred to me that professional baseball players were just guys in their 20’s and 30’s, young men only slightly removed from the guys who pumped gas at our local filling station. Had I met one in person, I think I would have been too awestruck to speak, the same way I was when I met Robin Williams years and years later. Some people, I thought, were just better. At the time, I didn’t know who the X-Men were, but that’s how I imagined them. Mutants with extraordinary powers. Part of me still does.
For those in the Northern Hemisphere, autumn marks a return to the kitchen; with cooler temperatures comes a desire for hearty, home-cooked meals. Simone—a Canadian based in Norway—shares her guide to the best foods of the early fall season.
While some people refer to this time of year as “the start of brown food season,” I like to think that it can easily be the opposite: indeed, vividly orange winter squashes, deep red and pink and golden beets, silvery green brassicas, snow white parsnips and cotton-hued chicories, as well as delicately pale celery, cauliflower and quince all seem to challenge the notion.
Be that as it may, there's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with brown foods. In fact, below are some ideas for meals of all colours to help you celebrate and make the most of fresh seasonal produce this fall:
Mushrooms 🍄 Although you can find button mushrooms grown indoors year-round, you'll want to be keeping an eye out for the forest-foraged varieties at this time of year. Their unique textures make them great flavour-sponges, as well as the perfect substitute in any dish where you might be otherwise tempted to cook some meat. Pair well with: cream, garlic, miso, white wine, thyme, soy sauce, black pepper
Swiss chard, beetroot, spinach & other beet relatives: Now is really the time for these vegetables to shine, when they're still crisp and it's early enough in the year to enjoy their dark leafy greens at their freshest; roast them, sauté them, savour them raw! No matter how you choose to enjoy them, you're bound to feel delightfully nourished once you've absorbed their colourful goodness. Pair well with: balsamic vinegar, goat cheese, rosemary, barley, hazelnuts, nutmeg, currants
Apples, pears & quinces 🍎 Though raw apples and pears make great fuss-free snacks, cooking them — as well as quinces — opens up a whole new world of flavour. These bake beautifully into crumbles or cakes, are fantastic poached in spiced wine for dessert, and will balance roasted meats and various cheeses with ease and flair. Pair well with: pork, red wine, cinnamon, thyme, brie
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