Substack Reads: All-access Hollywood, last supper in Hong Kong, and the ‘index mindset’
Hello and welcome to another edition of Substack Reads, your weekly digest of handpicked great writing from across Substack. British actor Sian Clifford, of Fleabag fame, takes subscribers behind the scenes on the promotional leg of her work; chef and author Anissa Helou shares what’s so special about her food heroine’s tabbouleh in her new Substack; and so much more. Let’s dive in!
Shout out your favorite writers and their writing this week, in the comments:
TRAVEL
Hong Kong days
Travel writer Chris Wallace gets lost in a honeycomb matrix of worlds in Hong Kong and has the feeling of “an end of days for the open, Western-friendly port town and freewheeling money hub”
—
for
With neon and food on my mind, I took the old-timey Star ferry across the bay and walked up Temple Street, once a thicket of neon signs and market stalls, now somewhat thinned out. And I made a sort of pilgrimage to the site of that ultimate packed bubble multiverse, the infamous Kowloon walled city, now a bucolic park with colorful swing sets, and nearby had one of the best meals of my life—beef and chive dumplings in a kind of thin pita; fiery rich pork tendon soup with rice noodles; spinach; and a beef stew—at the halal restaurant Islam Food.
Back on Hong Kong Island, in the Central neighborhood, I played games with the infrastructure, testing just how far I could walk without ever going outdoors in the steamy rain, not stepping into the Blade Runner immensity of a modern metropolis (“cells, interlinked”) where still there are banyan trees growing down brick walls and deep jungle sounds of macaques howling in the sunrise. I made it some miles, it seems, from one mall to another, one mega-structure to another, hotel to hotel, buying, along the way, some caviar for friends, as well as having my hair cut, before plopping down at the Captain’s Bar in the original Mandarin Oriental to a frosted silver tankard of their signature beer.
FILM
The unsung supporting players powering Hollywood
British actor Sian Clifford takes readers on an all-access tour of her latest press junket in L.A. and explains why she ultimately cut the trip short
—
in
Whilst I defy anyone that can make giving just shy of a hundred 4-minute, quick-fire-round interviews one after the other look like a barrel of laughs—inevitably, being asked the same question over and over until you feel like your head is made of cotton wool doesn’t make for the most inspiring of content; just run a quick search for any Ben Affleck interview ever, the poster boy for the truly embodied relentlessness of the press junket—what I do find fun, though, is the people. People are all we’ve got, right?
It’s seeing my hair and makeup artists for the first time since the pandemic, two incredible women that I have worked with for years, and catching up on all of the things. It’s picking out playlists (mostly Rolling Stones this time, plus some New Kids on the Block). It’s playing dress-up. It’s planning a look together along with my incredible stylist, without whom I would literally show up to everything in jeans or a tracksuit. It’s admiring how skilled these women are at their job, women who have undoubtedly seen me at my worst but, no matter what, have always sent me out the door feeling my very best. They help me put together the shiny veneer that is required to fulfil my work obligations, yes, but without feeling like I am in any way being inauthentic to myself—I don’t wear a lot of makeup or fancy clothes outside of work, so for me it really does feel like armour, in a good way: the onslaught of sudden and extreme press attention can feel like you’re heading into battle. Of the 21 hours on that press day last week, they were with me for 14 of them.
RISK
Why the “index mindset” won’t make you happy
Financial writer Bob Seawright looks at this idea across industries from finance to popular culture, and why mitigating risk will leaving us all wanting
—
in
We humans are both terrified and transfixed by extreme events. In the financial world, for example, we routinely overpay both for insurance and for lottery tickets (literal and figurative). There is good reason for that generally, as Morgan Housel has explained (emphasis in original).
“Long tails drive everything. They dominate business, investing, sports, politics, products, careers, everything. Rule of thumb: Anything that is huge, profitable, famous, or influential is the result of a tail event.”
Our world is increasingly characterized by an “index mindset,” in John Luttig’s brilliant construct. The idea comes from the success of index investing, whereby investors eschew active management of their portfolios (searching for big winners) in order to own an entire index of stocks, providing a mechanism for (mostly) not losing big.
MUSIC
Interviewing Lana
When Rolling Stone writer Hannah Ewens got the “kill-me-now-I’ve-made-it” cover interview with Lana Del Rey, she was afraid to miss the mark. But their conversation, spanning childhood to clairvoyance, was better than she ever expected
—
in
The negative questions hover around your peripheries, and you walk into those opportunities with a halo of anxiety that immediately evanesces when you begin. That afternoon, the concerns were: What if your favourite songwriter thinks you’re a wretched moron? What if you touch on the wrong subject and she retreats and you can’t coax her back? She’s had a bad run with journalists—one Rolling Stone cover is fairly notorious in the fan base—and is subsequently sensitive to being misunderstood. I was aware that the odds were probably against me writing something that she liked. What if the fan base took umbrage at a description of her or her work too?
Those are always the risks, of course. You’re not doing it for the artist themselves or just for the fandom but from a desire to understand the person better, because you find them or their work interesting and want to communicate your discoveries to the largest audience possible. But as a fan, when someone’s work is meaningful to you—and has been your whole adult life—you often secretly believe that you’d get on if you ever met.
PERSONAL ESSAY
Paint your nails at the bus stop
The life of a 20-something can be one of endless contradictions. Writer Charlie Squire offers an etiquette-style tip list for creating “delusional grandiosity” in your own life
—
in
To become a lover, you must read. And watch movies and TV in abundance. And take in plays and musicals and memoirs and essay collections. Go to the opera or the ballet—you can dress up in a $15 Goodwill gown and long gloves and you can usually get cheap tickets if you’re under thirty. Many things may be boring or arduous, but it’s far better to be bored in feathers and furs than to be bored in the blue light cast by a three-hour doom-scroll. The more ideas you have in your brain—regardless of if they are yours or not—the more ways you have to consider the world, even the tiny things that don’t feel like considering. Listen to Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens and imagine yourself as a seventeen-year-old summer camp counselor somewhere in the Poconos sometime in the 1970s. Take in excellent art and take in trashy mass media, but shy away from the mediocre. Go to the jazz bar on Cuban jazz night and order a Manhattan, and go to the Jersey Shore and wear an airbrushed T-shirt you bought on the boardwalk. Listen to everything everyone says to you and make them handmade cards on their birthday.
[...]
Paint your nails at the bus stop. Modify everything you own: pick out new buttons for your raincoat, re-stain the wood on your bureau, sew ribbons onto your tote bag. Make everything yourself that you can: lavender syrup for your lemonade, paintings in your favorite colors for your walls, cherry tomatoes grown on the balcony, just like Courtney Barnett said. Do not go into credit card debt. Get your heart broken and then broken again and then broken again. You should be deeply in love with all of your friends. Emotional vacancy is for fourteen-year-old girls who just discovered Marina and the Diamonds—a very necessary and important stage in life, but boring after that. The antidote to the sensitivity that comes with being open and vulnerable and passionate is to learn how to laugh things off. Most everything is funny or silly or strange when you really think about it.
POLITICS
What makes a power great?
A professor of strategic studies at Scotland’s University of St. Andrew, Phillips P. OBrien, shares the second part in his series on global power
—
in
The remarkable thing about these political systems is the range of political structure. You have two what might be termed liberal democracies (UK and USA), one hybrid state (Germany) that had three distinct kinds of government, Wilhelmine Germany (a hybrid authoritarian/liberal state), Weimar Republic Democracy, and the Hitlerian dictatorship, and two clear one-party dictatorial states throughout (the USSR and China). The upshot of this is that it seems that almost any political system is capable of being a ‘great’ power.
However, it’s not quite so simple—I would argue looking at the cases that there is one significant difference; and that is between creating and maintaining a great power. If different political systems can create ‘great’ power status, more flexible ones are needed to maintain it longer. That is because they can efficiently transfer power amongst different parties/interest groups, and are seen as more accountable. This is a major strength. In comparison, the more dictatorial you are, the more you are likely to undermine your power going forward, and often the political systems of dictatorships are the exact thing that ends great power status. Again, breaking down the case studies would be the best way to do that.
FOOD
Meet the grand lady of English food
In her new Substack, chef and food writer Anissa Helou celebrates former Vogue food columnist Arabella Boxer and her beloved tabbouleh recipe
—
in
I have all her cookbooks in Sicily, where I keep my library, but there is one I have a particular affection for, and that is her Mediterranean Cookbook. Not only because it is one of the regions I specialise in but also because she was the first (if I am not mistaken) to give a proper recipe for tabbouleh, as a parsley and tomato salad with very little burghul, rather than a burghul or, even worse, couscous salad—in those days and until much later, any tabbouleh recipe had a lot more burghul in it than either herbs or tomatoes, which is exactly the opposite of how it should be. I suspect it was because she got the recipe from her sister-in-law, Rosemary Sayigh, who lives in Beirut. For that book, Arabella launched into a daring adventure—it was the late ’70s—by driving around the northern coast of the Mediterranean with her niece, Joumana (Rosemary’s daughter), in a Volkswagen camper van she had bought for that purpose, collecting recipes along the way. The van finally broke down in Athens, and Arabella carried on to Turkey by bus while Joumana returned to her mother in Beirut. In Turkey, Arabella met with a silversmith friend of hers, and once her research was done, they both returned to Athens to pick up the repaired van and drive it back home. The whole adventure lasted about two months—Arabella had two young children waiting for her at home.
ILLUSTRATION
Home is a cup of tea
In the last installment of her illustrated essay on home, writer and artist Candace Rose Rardon shows how far she’s traveled to discover what she always knew
—
in , recommended by of
Recently launched
Coming soon
Congratulations to the following writer celebrating publication:
of announced her new novel, You’re Safe Here, to be published in 2024 by Scout Press:
Inspired by the writers featured in Substack Reads? Writing on your own Substack is just a few clicks away
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.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
thanks for the shout out!!!! always deeply honored to see my name next to such smart and articulate people <3
I've really been enjoying reading Inner Workings by Rae Katz lately
https://raekatz.substack.com/p/the-writer-origin-story-youve-never
:)