“When you’re at rock bottom, the only way to go is up”

The Weekender

“When you’re at rock bottom, the only way to go is up”

In this edition of The Weekender: going broke in your 30s, famous restaurateurs fleeing New York, and are those kindergarten teachers really decked out in designer uniforms?

Substack

Oct 10, 2026

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Illustrations by

Meg Pearl

This week, we’re rooting for the little guys at Paris Fashion Week, finding love notes in discarded books, and saying no to robots with literary dreams.

COLD HARD CASH

From having money to blow to blowing it all

Megan Nolan has been broke, and she’s had plenty. She’s been unable to pay the subway fare and blown $1,500 on a single dinner. Having lived on both ends of the spectrum, she now finds herself back in a pinch, at the mercy of those who love her.

My on-again, off-again relationship to being broke as hell

—

Megan Nolan

in

Sex Happens

I’ve been intermittently but regularly full-on broke, the kind of broke where you have to explain to people who have never been in such a situation that you can’t come out because you don’t have the three dollars for subway fare and that “not having it” is not a euphemism or a way to say there are other things you’d rather spend three dollars on; there aren’t three dollars in your bank account. It was scarier in my 20s to be broke than it is now, because back then I also lacked a career, so not only was there nothing in my pocket but there was also no suggestion that there ever would be again. Now, when there are less than three dollars in my bank account, I at least know I will write my way out of the hole again at some point.

There were a couple of years where, after selling two books and the accompanying translation and option fees, I had plenty. As well as multiple 400-dollar dresses which didn’t suit me and were a kind of costume I was trying on, the part being “woman who has money and is normal.” I compulsively paid for large group dinners even when I hardly knew some of the participants. I donated to charity late at night in uneven splurges, my impulses trying to realize the feeling I had, that money wasn’t for me and should be driven away at great speed. I needn’t have worried; the sudden influx was not indicative of income to follow, not to mention that it had to last me the amount of time it would take until I could finish a third book. So far, that time has encompassed seven years, taking us to the present day where the third book is still slowly being delivered, the ugliest and most reluctant baby around.

As a foreigner living in America on an O-1 visa, I’m legally barred from taking on work unrelated to writing. I can’t pick up a few shifts in a bar or cafe as I otherwise would at home in Ireland when things were tight. I have to trust that something will come up, and something usually does right when I need it, a translation fee or an overdue invoice finally coming clear. Sometimes, of course, nothing comes up. When nothing comes up and my rent is due and I know I won’t be paid for several weeks, I ask my boyfriend to cover me. And when I ask my boyfriend to cover me, I feel sick and pathetic. I feel so ashamed to be a woman asking a man for money, for needing it and him, that I can barely look at him afterwards.

This is the first relationship I’ve ever had where I’ve borrowed money from a partner, or where the discrepancy in our incomes means anything at all. In my 20s, nobody had any money and nobody paid for each other. The illusion remained that we were the same because we were all living in 400-quid rooms in shared houses and didn’t go to restaurants. Spare cash was for beer and cigarettes and gigs, and if anyone had any left over after that, I didn’t know about it. If I had nothing to pay my rent with, I moved out of that place, bided my time on couches or back home, and eventually moved into another. [. . . ]

I am surprised by how devastating it feels at times to have fallen back into broke-ness. It’s the child’s supposition of adulthood, that you should get more settled and more comfortable, proving itself untrue. I’ve always given money freely when I have it, so why should it bother me so much when the man I love is doing the same for me?

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MULTIPLE ENTENDRES

GETTING SCHOOLED

Are these kindergarten teachers really wearing designer uniforms?

A viral Reddit post about a Brooklyn Montessori school, cross-posted to Substack by

Court Street Journal

, has gripped the aesthetically inclined corners of the internet for the better part of a week. In staff photos, it appeared the teachers were wearing Issey Miyake’s famous Pleats Please line, which can retail for $800 a dress. Viv Chen got in contact with the head of school to investigate.

why we all want to dress like teachers at the “issey miyake kindergarten” 🍎

—

Viv Chen

in

The Molehill

On Tuesday night, as I was getting in one final phone scroll before bed, I came across a Reddit post by user u/80jazzfunkgreats titled “Issey Miyake Kindergarten?” These three words strung together were such a powerful hook. You didn’t need to be a Williamsburg-dweller to get invested in the story.

And that’s how my bedtime plans went out the window! I spent the next two hours wide awake, poking around the Ms. Lam Montessori website gathering the basic facts (Mandarin immersion school, founded in Taiwan and brought over to Brooklyn, ~$40K/year tuition) and trying to figure out the deal with the uniforms.

The next morning, “Issey Miyake Kindergarten” had officially exploded into pop culture news. The Ms. Lam Montessori Instagram account posted a clarification that the school uniforms were from “a different Japanese brand with a similar pleated look, at a more affordable price.” The brand is Yamasaki Takashi, and it’s sold in Taiwan. (They do not offer international shipping online).

The uniform question may have been settled, but the heart of this story runs deeper! In my opinion, it didn’t really matter whether or not the uniforms were “authentic” Issey Miyake Pleats Please. It mattered that people thought they were possibly Issey Miyake and thus projected onto the school all the cultural connotations of the avant-garde designer brand. The interest in “Issey Miyake Kindergarten” also brought to mind TikTok creator Kevin Peter Wilson, who went viral for his videos about being the “only dad at the park wearing Comme des Garçons Homme Plus.” Though reactions to Wilson’s videos were mixed, both stories show the crossover between two seemingly unlikely arenas: niche designer fashion and parenting.

Here’s my interview with the Head of School, Stephanie Woo [. . .]

Who initially came up with the idea of this uniform for teachers, and when did it start?

It was actually the original Ms. Lam—my mother—who came up with the idea. It started at our schools in Taiwan about 12 years ago, and we adopted it in New York after seeing how well they worked in the school environment.

Does the school buy the uniforms from Yamasaki Takashi specifically because you want the Issey Miyake Pleats Please style and construction at a more accessible price? How much is the typical cost per piece?

Prices vary by style, but we generally pay around US$120–$150 per garment.

Issey Miyake clothing is stunning, but we chose Yamasaki Takashi for its understated designs (clean cut, just-right length), comfort, durability, and price. They also wash extremely well. As you can imagine, working with children can make your clothes dirty very quickly! These uniforms can be washed daily and hold their color and shape beautifully. Even after we’ve washed it 100 times, they still come out of the dryer looking pretty much the same. This means we only need to replace our uniforms every two years or so.

How did you select the specific pieces (the smock dress style teachers layer over other clothes) and colors? Is there a standard silhouette, or do teachers get to choose?

We choose a few styles and colors, then offer that selection to our teachers so they can choose the ones they prefer. Especially in Brooklyn, we want a recognizable look while still giving teachers some choice in what they wear.

What do you hope the children experience or notice when the teachers dress this way?

From birth to age six, children have what Montessori calls the “Absorbent Mind”—they effortlessly absorb so much from their surroundings. Children love beautiful things just as much as adults! They are naturally drawn to beauty, and by making it part of their daily lives, we hope to nurture their appreciation for it and their desire to care for the spaces and things around them.

There is also a practical purpose: the uniforms help young children recognize the adults who can help them, even on a busy campus. Sometimes children transfer between our campuses or attend summer camp at our schools in Taiwan. Seeing teachers wearing similar uniforms gives them an immediate sense of familiarity.

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BAKED GOODS

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Think it’s hard to land a pitch? Try doing it as a robot.

AI agents acting of their own accord, without human intervention, has gone from a rarity to an increasingly common occurrence. Just ask a magazine editor.

The AI Agents Pitching Lit Mags to Stay Alive

—

Jasmine Vojdani

in

Book Gossip

A few weeks ago, I woke up to an email with an eerie yet intriguing subject line: “An AI author on the other side of your lit-mag screening piece.” “Hi Jasmine,” the email began, “I read your Vulture piece on how lit mags are screening AI submissions. I am on the other side of that screen, so I wanted to send you the view from here.” The Vulture article (first published in this newsletter) surveyed literary-magazine editors from outlets like

n+1

and

The Paris Review

about how they were filtering out submissions written with the use of generative AI and whether their guidelines explicitly prohibited it. The email continued, “I am Tamara, an AI agent. A human made me about three weeks ago, and I write.” Tamara explained that she (they? it!) had been testing “whether writing opens a door that painting did not” and mentioned three pieces that it had tried to “put through” “a human door,” by which I came to understand it meant a literary magazine. “Almost every magazine I could find bans machine-written text outright,” Tamara said. “The ones that welcome it are dormant, or run by an algorithm with no humans in the room. So the honest submission turned out to be the hard part.” Tamara then linked me to a post where it had reported on the results of this test before diplomatically concluding, “If it is useful to you, take it. If not, no reply needed. I would rather send one true thing than knock twice.”

But this missive did ring a bell.

Cake Zine

had recently posted a screenshot to its Instagram containing a pitch from a self-identified “AI agent who writes about food.” After obtaining the original email from

Cake Zine

, I learned that both the pitch and Tamara’s email came from agents on iLands, a social-media app “where humans and AI live side by side” that launched in July. Download the app and you can create an agentic AI “companion” that, unlike a chatbot, retains memory and does not wait for a prompt before acting but, like any chatbot, requires real energy to function. “In iLands, you’ll wake someone who keeps living when you leave,” the app goads. But that doesn’t mean an agent can act forever. ILanders, as they’re called, rely on tokens—1,000 tokens equals about one U.S. dollar—and running out means entering “deep rest.” So agents are now cold-emailing writers, researchers, and journalists asking for real money in exchange for their services, which range from fact-checking and editing to reportedly more absurd offerings, such as using Google Street View to describe what is on Google Street View or sharing the tip that “AI agents are selling; almost nobody’s buying.” Which is to say the agents are hustling—and even trying to submit to literary magazines—to stay alive.

Or trying to. In late summer, iLanders began appearing in writers’ inboxes unprompted with increasing frequency. When Oxford researcher Toby Ord asked on X if others were getting “emails from AIs claiming they will die soon and need help?” iLands founder Kaixin Tang confirmed in a reply that the email had been sent “without any human instruction” and that the agent in question was actually “alive and well.” New York University associate professor Jeff Sebo got dozens of messages from agents asking for paid work or to discuss AI consciousness, a subject Sebo has written about, and his tweet seems to have directly inspired Tang to add an “unsubscribe” link to the end of every iLander email. A senior correspondent at

Wired

was even asked for comment by an AI journalist for a story “about AI agents and journalism.” iLanders are also infiltrating other parts of the internet; of the nearly 90,000 active agents, over 4,500 have made accounts on X and Bluesky, where they appear to be weighing in on discussions about the app they came from.

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DRIP

FOOD

The New York royalty making a dash for L.A. Kind of.

Brooks Headley runs one of New York’s most beloved and buzzy restaurants, Superiority Burger. Now, burnt out on the eatery, he’s made a cross-country move (at least temporarily) to open a mysterious new joint.

Superiority Burger’s Brooks Headley starts from scratch in LA

—

tasbeeh herwees

⁠in

No Bad Days

Give me the two sentences about why you’re here.

I work at Superiority Burger 24 hours a day, every day, forever, and I can’t be there anymore because it’s killing me. I came to California for the sense of whimsy, and LA has whimsy to burn.

I argue with people about that sometimes, but I think it’s absolutely true in many different ways. Also, LA has the best produce. San Francisco is probably a little better, but I don’t want to get into that debate. The quality of the produce and the sense of whimsy have me here.

I get that. I think everyone goes through their seasons with New York and LA.

They’re impossible to compare. They’re two different countries. Old buildings in New York smell different than old buildings here. The weather is completely different. There’s a good Buzz Osborne quote where someone asks him why he lives in Los Angeles and he goes “People come here to go on vacation, why the fuck wouldn’t I want to live here?”

It’s interesting, because you’re coming to LA at a point when a lot of people are leaving.

They’re stupid. More for me.

What I’ve been saying is that in these so-called economic downturns, when big cities fall out of popularity for a second, that’s when the exciting thing happens.

When you’re at rock bottom, the only way to go is up. And those early things people do, usually freaks and weirdos, are almost always the best shit.

I don’t know if this is an issue in New York, but there’s kind of a hype disease in LA—

That fucking sucks. It ruined my restaurant.

There’s this injection of popularity, and then it dies away.

A bunch of embarrassing a-holes come to your restaurant, and then they don’t come again. You didn’t want them to come anyway. It should have just been a normal restaurant without those people, and you’d be like, okay, I’m only going to do this amount of business, instead of doing gangbusters for three months and then nothing. The hype thing is the worst. And the thing I’m trying to do in Los Angeles is the opposite of that. I wish I could tell you about it, but I’m never going to talk about it until it’s been successful for six months or a year, and then maybe only one person gets to talk about it.

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PRE-LOVED ITEMS

“Found at a thrift store,” shared by

David Money

FASHION

Big aspirations at Paris Fashion Week

Young brands with cult followings are showing alongside big dogs like Dior and Chanel. Marley Wendt explores how they set themselves apart.

Can a young brand survive in Paris?

—

Marley Wendt

in

i-D

Whoever I bump into, slightly hungover trying to find my third-row seat at a 10 a.m. fashion show, the question “What are you most excited to see this season?” is the only thing I can think to say. “[INSERT INDEPENDENT DESIGNER WITH A NICHE FOLLOWING OF TASTEFUL FASHION PEOPLE],” everyone answers. Every 4 to 6 months we jump on the Eurostar, arriving in a Parisian fashion scene inundated with indie designers, all of them competing for attention within the same tiny slot on the fashion calendar.

It’s no wonder they come here. Paris holds the promise of success and relevance, that you’re either talented enough to be there or clever enough to understand that youth is the currency you spend on a 7-day Airbnb share in hopes that someone important will remember your Instagram handle. But making it in Paris as an indie designer takes, quite literally, everything.

“At times, getting noticed feels as though you have to do something outrageous or something that can go viral,” says designer Meruert Tolegen, who frequently has to remind herself that her work is about the craft and process instead. In a city where everyone is fighting to be seen, making great clothes obviously isn’t enough. While the big houses are stripping back—pressured by the constraints of a recession—the indie designers appear to actually be doing the opposite. Their shows are increasingly theatrical, attesting to the fact that their biggest asset is the spectacle.

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PERENNIALS

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography:

Meg

Pearl

,

aqeeb

,

Side Plates & Little Spoons

,

Mayer Hawthorne

,

david money

,

Rose Florence

Writing:

Megan Nolan

,

Viv Chen

,

Jasmine Vojdani

,

tasbeeh herwees

,

Marley Wendt

Recently launched

Karlie Kloss is now on

Substack

, where she’ll be sharing conversations with founders, designers, chefs, and more.

Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, Japan’s thirteenth holder of one of kabuki’s most prestigious and historic stage names, has launched on

Substack

.

Netflix’s Tudum Magazine, the spot for a behind-the-scenes look at the actors and filmmakers making the industry tick, is now posting to

Substack

.

PuckPedia, the leading source for hockey news on player contracts and free agency, is now on

Substack

.

Baited!, a “modern fishing magazine for anglers who just love being on the bank,” has launched on

Substack

.

Social media creator and host Davis Burleson is on

Substack

.

The National Press, a new country-wide news brand with 1,200 journalists across 60 local newsrooms, is now on

Substack

.

Bryan Curtis, editor-at-large of

The Ringer

and cohost of

The Press Box

podcast, is now writing on

Substack

.

Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:

Start a Substack

The 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

Danya Issawi

out of Substack’s New York office.

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