Hello again and welcome to another edition of Substack Reads.

If you’re new to Reads, take a browse through some of our favorite finds across Substack from the worlds of science, money, culture; plus, walking, bathing, baking, and raging.

We like to think we have something here for everyone. Please let us know what you’re reading this week, and what you’d like to see more of, in the comments.

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ESSAY

The sinking pleasure of a hot bath

For Thao Thai, the bath has become an office, a bar, a parlor, a church, and a site for contemplation. It may seem indulgent, but when we bathe, she writes, we enter a historical practice that feels almost mystical

— in

Sometimes, I’m Ophelia drifting through the lilies, my seaweed tresses snaking the surface of the water. Other times, I’m a tired manatee, lumpy and scarred and sunk to the bottom of the tub. The sunlight glares through the large window in my bathroom, pushing insistently against my closed eyelids. Around me are bath salts gifted by friends and family slightly bemused by my bath obsession; a water-resistant (not waterproof, I learned) Kindle; a Waterloo soda; a ramekin of potato chips; a mermaid-shaped washcloth for drying my hands; a phone with the Notes app open to the beginnings of a very bad short story idea.
I’ll spend half an hour in the bath, sometimes more. I’ve taken calls in the bath, hoping the other person doesn’t hear the faint splash as I shift my body through the water. Certainly, I text in the bath. I’ve written some of my weirdest scenes for my novels in the bath. (I drafted a good part of this newsletter while soaking in a cherry-blossom-scented bath.) I’ve also briefly fallen asleep in the tub, my neck crooked at an odd angle while my feet dangle off the ledge.
My daughter or husband often pop in, sitting next to the ledge as they chat about their days. My daughter likes to reach her hand into the water, just to test her own endurance. “Scorching hot!” she proclaims. They usually get bored of hanging out, calling over their shoulders, “Don’t stay in too long.”

FILM

How Dolly de Leon changed what I think of award shows

As an aging Asian-American actor, Lynn Chen thought award ceremonies weren’t for her. But after speaking to Golden Globe nominee Dolly de Leon, she may just enjoy this season

— in

Despite the bad taste awards shows left lingering, there have been moments that really softened my hardened, heartbroken heart. Like in more recent years, when Parasite, Minari, and The Farewell got a lot of well-deserved recognition. And just this past week, watching both Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh give acceptance speeches made me so emotional, in the best way.
I’m particularly excited about today’s guest post, not only because her performance in Triangle of Sadness was one of my recommendations back in ISSUE 05 but because her Golden Globe nomination and the outfit she wore is helping to shift my mindset about how to enjoy awards shows (and the red carpet) again. I am feeling inspired. I am feeling hopeful. I am feeling seen. There’s an artist in their element, breaking the rules and collecting their long-overdue flowers. To be on the sidelines, just witnessing and cheering—it’s so cool.

FOLKLORE

Interdimensional portals in the British landscape

A beautiful green glade, or hiding place of Ronnie Corbett’s spectacles? Tom Cox takes a walk through the psychedelic portals of the English countryside

— in

When I was dragged (not as reluctantly as I pretended) on walks as a child by my parents, I often amused myself by going off into my own fantasy world: I’d look at derelict buildings and imagine the banshees and spectres who lived in there, wander off into trees and do battle with the dinosaurs and quarter-wolf creatures of my imagination. Water towers were recently landed alien spacecraft. All caves contained witches or ogres. Crich Stand, in Derbyshire, which you could see from the top of my aunt’s garden, was actually the thin outpost of a notorious warlock. In my 40s, not much has changed. On walks I’m constantly looking at the architecture made by the land, and the forgotten architecture made by us which the land has begun to devour, and seeing portals to alternative dimensions: places possibly more threatening, but also probably far more magical, than the one where we live. It recently struck me that I have taken a large number of photos of these portals using my phone (sometimes I do wish I’d used a proper camera) and it might be nice to collate them in some way, rather than just letting them languish higgledy-piggledy on the Cloud (whatever that is). So here, in no particular order, are some of my favourites:

Cave Of The Mercurial Salt Witch.

Gateway To The Land Of Leaping Dogs.

“STEP INTO THE HOLE OF MY TREEFACE TODAY TO EXPERIENCE A SPECIAL TREAT.”

MONEY

Side hustles that actually work

An author of three best-selling finance books and a personal money guru, Erin Lowry shares the best strategies for building a viable second income stream

— in

Often it’s easy to fixate on something of your own creation, like selling the scarves you crochet (don’t monetize your hobby!), or freelance writing in your spare time, or trying to become a YouTuber, podcaster, or Instagram or TikTok influencer and making money through affiliate marketing and brand partnerships. Funnily enough, plugging “side hustle” into Getty Images yields a full page of just influencers in front of cameras…
But really, a side hustle can just be another job that you pick up in addition to your main job. A clock-in, clock-out sort of job (like retail or being a barista) or gig work that builds to consistent, steady money, like babysitting, dog walking, tutoring, photography, freelance editing, etc.
The hope is that you can quit the side hustle if it becomes untenable or after you’ve reached the goal towards which you were striving (e.g. debt payoff, increased saving, helping a family member).
Unfortunately, that’s often mere optimism because there are also plenty of folks, myself formerly included, who cobble a bunch of side hustles together in order to create a livable income or to subsidize a primary job that doesn’t provide a livable income.

PARENTING

The shame of shouting

Sunday Times best-selling author and journalist Matt Farquharson is an average male in a world of extremes. In his new Substack, he shares a moment he wishes he could take back

— in

We were late and I was enraged. Not with her, but with our lateness and what had led to it: a fairly standard blunder between me and my wife, her failing to pass on a nugget of info that would cost me a couple of hours of my Saturday morning to put right. The kind of logistical error that happens all the time when you are balancing work and child-rearing.
So I was in a huff, trying to get my daughter to something that was important to her. And then someone got in our way.
Our route was through a part of London’s Docklands—a heavily redeveloped place of shiny spires of glass and steel, paved squares, and chain sandwich shops.
Stepping out of the Tube, a woman in a yellow puffer jacket stood before us: “Sorry, guys, we’re just doing some filming…”
And a mist descended.
“Is this a public street?”

HISTORY

The secret troubled life of Vanessa Bell

“I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not, as long as one is forced to think”—Beyond Bloomsbury shares the life of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister and a celebrated artist, interior designer, and founding member of the legendary Bloomsbury Group

— in

Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell playing cricket at Talland House, St. Ives, 1894, via Beyond Bloomsbury

[This] settled existence was shattered when their mother died suddenly on 5th May—just days before Vanessa’s sixteenth birthday. Julia had taken to her bed with influenza but died from heart failure. Their father’s grief was overwhelming, and according to Virginia:
There was something in the darkened rooms, the groans, the passionate lamentations that passed the normal limits of sorrow … now that against all his expectations, his wife had died before him, he was like one who, by the failure of some stay, reels staggering blindly about the world, and fills it with his woe.
Her mother’s death marked the beginning of Virginia’s struggle with mental illness whilst Vanessa, trapped between childhood and adulthood, kept a veil over her grief and became increasingly practical and sensible. Stella, sacrificing her own independence to assume household duties and care for her younger siblings, would become the central figure in the lives of the Stephen children—until her untimely death from peritonitis—just two years after their mother and at only twenty-eight years of age.

SCIENCE

The seven habits of freedom-loving academics

Alan Wolan gathered notes from listening to 150 professors from universities all over the world discussing free inquiry and free speech at Stanford University. He distilled everything he learned into one Substack post

— Alan Wolan in

4. Training students in the habits of open inquiry. This is a more bottom-up approach. John Rose from Duke University leads a program there about open inquiry, political polarization, and conservatism, which has proven to be immensely popular with students. He believes that students want free and open inquiry and that this natural tendency should be encouraged and developed.
5. Restructuring the university to embed a sort of “judicial branch” within the administration whose main purpose is to adjudicate questions relating to freedom of speech and thought. Tyler Cowen from George Mason and Niall Ferguson from Hoover discussed why universities must have such a “third branch,” whose main purpose is to defend the boundaries of free inquiry from the encroachments of both students and faculty.
6. Twitter, podcasts, YouTube, and all the other ways we can express ourselves freely using the internet. Tyler Cowen made a passionate and persuasive case that academics today enjoy more freedom of speech than ever before, but only if they are willing to take their ideas outside of the university and into the wider world via social media and other platforms such as Substack. It’s not always easy to do, and there are pitfalls, but it’s worth the effort. The Substack you are reading right now is a perfect example of this.

BAKING

Eat this cake whenever the hell you want

Chef and cookbook author Sohla El-Waylly shares one of her favorite quick-to-eat fruit-and-nut snacking cake recipes

— in

Sometimes when I want to bake, I really want to bake. I’ll have perfectly tempered butter that I’ll cream until fluffy before folding in sifted flour. I’ll make a towering cake layered with curds and pralines and mousse, all covered in Swiss meringue buttercream and homemade sprinkles. Other times, I want to turn on the oven, stir together a simple batter, and get to the eating part a whole lot faster. This cake is for those days when I’m looking to find the shortest distance between myself and a baked good.
This cake uses the muffin method, which is hands-down the easiest way to cake. The dry ingredients are whisked together in one bowl, the wet in another, then the two come together in a few swift strokes. The other two cake-mixing methods (the creaming method and the reverse creaming method) require room-temperature ingredients, lots of creaming and scraping, and usually an electric mixer.
So, if the muffin method is so easy, why cake any other way? With the muffin method, all the lift comes from baking powder, while with the other two methods, you get extra fluff from creaming the fat full of teeny air bubbles. The creaming and reverse creaming processes also have a lower risk of overmixing and developing gluten, so you end up with a more fine-textured and tender cake.

POETRY

This is how tortillas are made

Every day, SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) publishes a poem by women writers. Here’s a dispatch from this week

—Sara Munjack in

a hunk of driftwood
            washed up on dogbeach
            in the shape of the palisades
how many deepsea divers
            hauled up and soggy
            from hightide with disks
warmed from the backs of rays
            if we close our eyes
            we see angels there
the shadow of mother
            from the black lagoon
            sunday nights when we lay awake
taught ourselves to read together
            the english thick as hardened soap
            on our tongues
our drunk appetite for dialogue

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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 by Hannah Ray.

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