Welcome to another edition of Substack Reads. This week we bring you a bumper crop of essays, serializations, and podcasts from across the Substack ether.
Two months into Reads, we’d love to know what you want more of. Don’t be shy … use the comments section below and tell us. Have we missed any vital new voices? Is someone writing the prose of their life and we simply haven’t seen it? Is there a podcast being created on Substack that the world needs to hear? We’re handing over to you—so let us know.
As always, we hope you enjoy this week’s selections.
MUSIC
Is dance music heading for disaster?
The global club scene is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and, like any industry that size, it’s run into a major roadblock: inflation
—Shawn Reynaldo in First Floor
When it comes to booking, economic insecurity might also prompt promoters to be increasingly risk-averse. It’s easy to take chances on new artists, niche communities, and emerging scenes when clubs are consistently packed and costs are relatively steady, but with so many things up in the air at the moment, how many promoters will go for a safe option instead? Top-tier talent with an established, sizable draw will continue to get gigs, but everyone below that could begin to see their bookings decrease. That’s not even the worst of it; going broad is the easiest way for venues to keep the lights on, and although most electronic music fans hate to admit it, something like a themed Drake vs. Kanye dance party with a couple of low-paid local DJs is not only going to be cheaper than flying in a credible artist, it’s also a lot more likely to fill the dance floor.
Even before the pandemic, there were widespread complaints about dance music’s middle being squeezed in the face of more and bigger festivals, corporate-owned venues, and increasing consolidation across the industry (including at artist management and booking agencies). Inflation will almost surely accelerate that process. Some people will be forced to leave the industry altogether, while those who stick around will need to adjust their practices to stay afloat.
ANCESTRY
Ukraine’s multigenerational turmoil
As part of his serialized memoir, The Soviet Jew: A Weaponized Immigrant’s Tale, journalist Yasha Levine reflects on Ukraine’s long and complex relationship with war through his grandmother’s story
—Yasha Levine in his newsletter
To a lot of people here in America, the war in Ukraine might seem like it came out of nowhere. People throw [around] words like “unprecedented” to describe it. But if you take a slightly longer view on the region, you’ll see that there’s little that’s truly new about it. The internal civil war, the nationalist vs. imperialist fights, the questions of Ukrainian identity and independence, the various territorial beefs, and the faraway outside imperial powers meddling in it all—while these elements aren’t in the same exact configuration as they were a hundred years ago in Ukraine when my grandmother was born, they’re close enough that the larger history around them feels fresh and germane.
And there’s another thing. Looking at my family history in Ukraine and Russia—what I see is a people and a land that simply can’t catch a break. Every generation going back at least a century has seen a war or a revolution or a counter-revolution, or a mix of all three. There have been multiple economic collapses, famines, and death on a scale that’s hard to imagine. People were constantly displaced and forced into shifts in cultural and personal identity. Living on the edge of this kind of rolling multigenerational turmoil and violence is totally normal for people from Russia and Ukraine and much of the Soviet Union. It’s just the basic background, and no one thinks it’s something that needs to be dwelt on too deeply. And as the war in Ukraine is now showing, this process is far from complete—if it ever will be.
TECHNOLOGY
What happens when you ask AI to design stained glass windows?
Scott Alexander found out
I love stained glass. Not so much your usual suburban house stained glass with a picture of lilies. The good stuff. Cathedral windows, Art Nouveau, Art Deco. Why did we stop doing that? I blame the conspiracy.
Recently I’ve been experimenting with small-scale alternatives. You can get custom-printed window film from these people. If you print out a picture of a stained glass scene and stick it on a window, it looks pretty realistic.
But what scenes to use? Most of the stained glass images you can find are saints, which isn’t really the mood I’m going for. What I’d really like is a giant 12-part panel depicting the Virtues of Rationality. But the artists I’ve asked to design this all balk. I need an artist who works for free and isn’t allowed to say no.
Enter DALL-E-2, the new art-generating AI. I’m still on the waitlist, but a friend who jumped in sooner than I did let me use their computer for a while and play around with it. This was my first introduction to the exciting world of DALL-E query framing—the surprisingly complicated relationship between what you ask the AI to do and what it actually does. Seems on topic for this blog. So this is a combination investigation into how DALL-E thinks about queries, but also a practical guide to getting DALL-E to make good stained glass.
PSYCHOLOGY
Rethinking rejection
Valorie Clark catches up with author Michael Estrin, in her On Rejection interview series
—Valorie Clark in Collected Rejections
Sometimes rejection makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, you have to move forward. Sometimes, when the rejection makes sense, there’s a lesson about whatever it is you’re pursuing, and you should apply that lesson for next time. But not every rejection carries a lesson. Sometimes it’s just bad luck, and if that’s the case, the only real lesson is persistence.
I often say the only thing better than hearing yes is getting a quick no. It’s not that I want to hear no (who does?), but the faster rejection comes, the better, because you can just move forward. That’s actually a gift, but it doesn’t always feel that way.
POLITICS
How Brexit tore Britain apart
It’s been six years since Britain decided to leave the European Union. Andrew Adonis and Harry Phibbs look at what that means for a country left picking up the pieces
—Andrew Adonis and Harry Phibbs in Persuasion
For many Leave voters, one of the most attractive prospects of leaving the EU was this idea of “a Global Britain.” But there is no reality to Global Britain if the first step on the way is to make trade harder with our closest partners. Leaving the European Union means that Britain has left one of the largest economic blocs in the world.
While Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has been parading around the world seeking trade agreements with countries such as Canada and Japan, Britain would be kidding itself if it thought these trade settlements could even be remotely compared to the titanic EU, of which nine member states internally exported €100 billion worth of goods in 2020. Astonishingly, nearly half of British companies that traded with the EU before Brexit are doing less trade or have stopped doing so entirely. This is the steepest fall recorded in trade with our European neighbors since records began.
The subversive joy of being a single mother
Finding power outside the nuclear family
Single mothers are not the threat; the American institution of marriage is.
These regressive ideas about partnership are based in a mythology that subverts the desires of women as simply those things that women have to give up—to be nailed to a cross to save children and partnerships. Additionally, a lot of the data that is used to scold single mothers is often untrustworthy, plagued by bias and inaccurate reporting. Still, the response is indicative of a tightening bind around the choices and options women have, one represented by the Pew data, and that shows Americans are more willing to control a woman daring to parent alone than they are willing to control guns or the spread of a deadly virus.
And it shows how little people think of women, that they think their happiness is so disposable—that it should be sacrificed in service to the ideal of marriage. Marriage is hard, they say. And sure, some things are hard, but it shouldn’t be miserable. And if it is, then it’s the institution that should be chucked out, rather than the happiness of women.
But the prevalence of this logic isn’t surprising. Free women are destabilizing. Single women, single mothers, their existence, their radical happiness—it upsets the whole enterprise. Women and love are the infrastructure of this exploitative culture. You begin to examine love and partnership, question it, reject it, the entire system becomes weak.
And I am happy. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Even when I was broke and ghostwriting op-eds to buy groceries, I was happy because I was finally free. This monolithic image of the exhausted single mother is simply a myth.
CULTURE
The politics of film
Inserting political fads into pop culture is always tricky. Freddie deBoer explains how to do it without it coming off like a two-hour lecture
—Freddie deBoer in his newsletter
Part of the problem with movies made to flatter the politics of critics, though, is that you can never be sure just how authentic the praise it receives might be.
I want to stress, for the record, that my feeling that Invisible Man is a much superior politically-charged film is not necessarily a matter of subtlety or restraint. I mean, I do think that Invisible Man is more subtle in its politics than Promising Young Woman, but those politics are still front and center, still unapologetic. The movie makes no bones about its themes of gaslighting and abuse and pulls no punches in representing them in explicitly gendered terms. But it does so in service to the horror movie that it is; it delivers via drama that which Promising Young Woman delivers via lecture.
LISTEN
Portrait of the woman artist
Chris Ryan often records his weekly podcast from the road while traveling in his van, Scarlett Jovansson. Conversations feature comics, bank robbers, drug smugglers, porn stars, creatives, and the occasional rattlesnake expert. This week, Chris interviews artist Gym Halama, whom he met while renting her Airbnb in Spain and was fascinated by her life story (as well as the funky decor)—including tales from Keith Richards’s greenhouse, sleeping in strangers’ unlocked cars in Italy, and pretending to be a top model in Paris
—Chris Ryan in Tangentially Speaking
ILLUSTRATION
Ode to a barn owl
—Carson Ellis in Slowpoke
Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost with writer Hannah Ray and editor Farrah Storr.
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Substack Reads: Is dance music finished? Plus: the secret lives of women
I think Substack Reads occasionally presents a perspective I missed. Keep it up.
Especially enjoyed the Ukrainian article. I am always drawn to articles with an historical bent. Especially European Theatre during WWI and WWII. I'm new to Substack. I have imported a few writings from Word Press and feeling my way on this platform.