"Kids his age are just better at making friends. They haven’t learned to be weird about it."

The Weekender

"Kids his age are just better at making friends. They haven’t learned to be weird about it."

In this edition of The Weekender: a twee resurgence, a bittersweet roommate breakup, and why Americans aren’t hanging out anymore

Substack

Oct 03, 2026

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Embroidery by

Olivia Zisman

This week, we’re moving to Ireland, wondering what happened to dinner parties, and getting older in an image-obsessed industry.

FRIENDSHIP

Leaving behind a great love

Over the past four years as roommates, Mackenzie and Taryn moved between cities and apartments, going from strangers to best friends. Now the two are saying goodbye and tasked with unraveling parts of themselves from one another.

notes from september: for taryn

—

Mackenzie Thomas

in

I Will Do Whatever I Want

To Taryn:

There was a time when we had nothing, when we were basically strangers sharing a wall in a dark apartment in Los Angeles, California. A spot nobody liked, not even me—with gray laminate floors, a strange shape, and unreliable plumbing. A friend told me once, “This place has 7-Eleven parking lot vibes,” and all I could do was laugh as a means to mask the hurt of an embarrassment I didn’t know I could catch.

You appeared out of the back of a U-Haul in a white shirt with a big red scrunchie in your hair. I remember the sound, the face of each box, and scanning the inside of the truck to gather as much information as I could about you. I saw cameras with labels and hand-painted furniture. Yellow, blue, and red. The name “Taryn” written in loved Sharpie over and over, in varying caps and scripts. Noting then, feet planted on steel, that if something belongs to you, it really belongs to you.

I was nervous that day and was sure that you’d regret it as soon as the damp reality of my life bled onto yours—that you’d break your lease to disappear as a face on the wall at a party, as the receiver of a side hug, as a singular tagged photo, and a looping plan to catch up.

But most miracles come in disguise.

Slowly, we became close. Ending most nights on my green Craigslist couch, at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., discussing past lives and dreams. Stuck in a molded milquetoast common place, working retail and stretching a dollar. Both of us sharing wants that might’ve sounded impossible to an eavesdropper or a bad friend, but somehow felt finally achievable while sitting two feet apart.

In 2023, we moved to New York. We had giant suitcases, no plan, and no money.

Collectively, we’ve lived in four apartments together in four years, and I could tell the story of all of them and give the brief history of why and how, but they all end the same:

There were boxes. There was you. There was me. We had everything when we had nothing because we had each other.

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THE COSMOS

“Tonight’s sky and moon against my still-victorious cosmos,” by

Rosie Birkett

SOCIOLOGY

Why are Americans’ social lives in decline?

According to a survey, practically no one is hosting at home, let alone throwing dinner parties. Derek Thompson investigates.

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner

—

Derek Thompson

in

Derek Thompson

Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—

Couples

, by John Updike;

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

by Edward Albee;

Revolutionary Road

by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms.

The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic. Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

But then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamentally, they stopped visiting each other. Between 1975 and 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. While cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared to the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style survey.

In his 2000 book

Bowling Alone

, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Well, check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.

So, what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century?

In the 1970 book

The Harried Leisure Class

, the Swedish economist Staffan Burenstam Linder wrote that as a society gets richer, leisure time takes on the frantic quality of work. As rich people feel like their downtime is scarce—as each non-working hour practically shouts, “excuse me! you could be making money, right now!” —the experience of leisure time speeds up. We multitask and pack various downtime activities into short periods. Firing up a Netflix show at 9pm that you can half-ignore while you answer email is a perfect activity for people who need their leisure time to feel like half-productive box-checking. Taking several hours to coordinate with other busy people to set up a lengthy dinner party is a tougher sell for the harried leisure class.

That’s a sociological explanation, but I think the decline of hosting is also about macroeconomic trends. In

Bowling Alone,

Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack. As I’ve written:

“In 1970, right around the inflection point of America’s social decline, the share of women between 25 and 54 who participated in the labor force surged past 50 percent for the first time; it’s currently near 80 percent. As more women poured their weekdays into 9-to-5 work, men failed to take over the logistical labor required to fill out the social calendar, and adult gatherings gradually eroded in the age of the dual-earner household.”

Moving from macro to micro: My wife and I love to host parties at our place in D.C. But these get-togethers are a lot of work: conception, communication, coordination, shopping (

are your kids coming, or are you getting a babysitter? does your eldest kid eat eggplant? no? okay, we’ll make pasta. oh, that’s right, your wife’s gluten allergy

…). These sorts of multi-skilled logistical adventures are almost indistinguishable from the sort of logistical problem-solving that characterizes a good deal of white-collar work. But when both parents are already inundated with literal white-collar work, it’s hard to add the job of unpaid party planner.

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STOOPING

FASHION

“I do not like worrying about the direct correlation between how my face looks and my success”

Like all of us, Mandy Lee is getting older. For the first time, she’s wondering how that might affect her career in an industry built on image.

Working in fashion when ur only kinda pretty and definitely not hot

—

Mandy Lee

in

Cyclical

It takes a special, demonic, and almost masochistic, type of resilience to work in this industry. As I’ve grown in my career, and as an aging 30-something, I’m learning there is a different kind of resilience required when you’re not hot hot or pretty pretty or skinny skinny. That’s not to be self-deprecating. I know my place and I don’t think it shouldn’t be so weird or taboo or uncomfortable to talk about it without people tripping over themselves to try to make you feel better—that is not my intention writing this. I know I’m cute for a 30-something who does her own HMU most days, doesn’t have plastic surgery or a hot body… in the REAL world, but in this digital-first world (without a flashy editor/buyer title or VIC status) being cute/average is the same thing as being ugly, and being ugly is the same thing as being a speck of dust. Invisible.

Oftentimes in these spaces, I feel invisible and oftentimes, I don’t mind it. I’m a trend forecaster, fashion commentator and analyst—my work doesn’t always

require

an IG photo carousel or GRWM, and thank God for that. Brands invite me to shows and dress me because I’m influential in a different way. I can sell like a hot-girl-influencer because I know my shit and am able to communicate in a way that resonates; a way that doesn’t require having beauty, and sometimes that really sucks to confront. For a long time, I didn’t really care, but lately I find myself wanting to feel pretty and trying really hard to look pretty. Being dressed by brands is an absolute honor. I love clothes. It’s why I started doing what I do, but at fashion week, sometimes working means glam, a full look and photo call and without sounding ungrateful or bratty (because I am so grateful it’s sick) I’ve been dreading it.

Maybe it’s because the bags under my eyes have grown heavier. My skin elasticity is that of an old backyard trampoline. The deep smile line on my right side will no longer go away with gua sha. I don’t have a 23” waist anymore, and I cannot camouflage any of that behind a DSLR. I’m signed with IMG Models as a commentator, and when people ask about my representation, I cannot bring myself to just say IMG, because that would raise eyebrows. The answer is only ever followed with a caveat, “I’m with IMG, as a commentator of course. I’m not a model” followed by some teehees because it’s disarming, and I genuinely don’t want to know what people would say or what questions they might have without that caveat included.

[. . .]

We all know what we’re signing up for when we enter this business. There are no big secrets. We are all aware of the beauty standards and where we fit into them. I knew that going into this industry, but it has been harder to deal with as I get older and more invisible. I worry about my career. I worry I am going to hurt my career by showing my face on a green screen. I worry I’m one unflattering photo away from a “sorry we cannot accommodate you this season” email. I do not like worrying about the direct correlation between how my face looks and my success. I am the best at what I do in the niche I occupy and worry that is not enough anymore.

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ORGANIC GROWTH

BIG MOVES

From the U.S. to Ireland, a retrospective

Casey McCallister misses Mexican food and neon-colored candy, but as he reflects on a year of trading the comforts of suburban America for the lush Irish coast, he finds plenty that’s good.

Ireland: One Year In

—

Casey McCallister

in

The Dirt Road

It has been about one year since my wife, our five-year-old, our golden retriever, and I traded Colorado for a town on the Irish coast. Some of you read the post I wrote on the way out where I laid out every fear I had. The short version: most of the fears were for nothing. A couple were as expected. First, let’s talk about what has been a struggle.

The biggest loss is real, and I refuse to act brave about it. There is no Mexican food here. I don’t mean it’s bad. I mean it does not exist in the form factor that I need. What passes for spice in this country is a casual warning. I once ordered something advertised as “spicy” and where I’m from, it might land a score of 2 of 10. I would hand over real money for what I actually want at this point: a decent flour tortilla and a bowl of salsa made from real peppers. If anyone reading this wants to mail me a gallon of Taco Villa hot sauce from West Texas, I will not be upset. I’ll grant the Irish exactly one concession here: the ground beef is exceptional. Cleaner and beefier. But I did not cross an ocean for superior beef.

The thing that surprised me most is almost anticlimactic, in the best way. Day to day, Ireland doesn’t feel that different from America. You settle in fast. You build a routine and the routine carries you. Wake up. Breakfast. Take the kid to school. Work. Collect the kid. A bit of playtime. Dinner. Relax. Bed. The comforting sameness of an ordinary, happy week. The funny part is that I cannot stand routine. I want life free-flowing and improvised, with every decision made in the moment it happens. It turns out, though, that a familiar rhythm is exactly what made moving across an ocean feel simple, because underneath the new accents and the strange weather it’s just the same good life. The move didn’t blow my life up. It just picked it up and moved it to somewhere a lot greener.

The kid is doing better than all of us. We moved largely for him. To get him near his Irish grandparents and aunts and uncles. I think worrying is the most overrated emotion and, if I’m being honest, I had unwillingly developed a daily worry of dropping him off at school in the states. That part still sits heavy in me and I’m not going to make light of it. What I will say is that the Irish school has been a revelation. The worry is gone. He’s learning to speak Irish, and the friends, my God, the friends. He made them in roughly the time it takes me to decide on a sandwich. I watched him walk into a playground full of strangers and walk out with a posse, while I stood at the gate, a proud father being out-socialized by a five-year-old. Kids his age are just better at making friends. They haven’t learned to be weird about it.

Keep reading

RECIPES

SONICALLY SPEAKING

Music’s twee takeover

A new, soft sound is shaping the underground scene.

The Rise of Laptop Twee

—

Hannah Morgan

in

Welcome Magazine

People say culture is a pendulum. It swings back and forth, one era reacting to the last, and thereby informing the next. But the cultural expression of any given moment is not the product of a single pendulum, but many: from maximalist to minimalist, colorful to dark, absurd to rational, all of them swinging at once, competing for influence.

Right now, one of these back-and-forth tensions is shaping the direction of underground music. It is swinging away from a cold and stilted self-seriousness, and toward a soft, earnest sentimentality. The result, which has been taking shape for over a year, is the emergence of a subgenre that is defining contemporary indie electronica: Laptop Twee.

Laptop Twee was coined by blogger and musician Friends& to describe a burgeoning movement that combines (1) the innocent, simple, melody-driven and lo-fi ethos of twee music with (2) the production tools and sounds of bedroom laptop production.

But truly understanding Laptop Twee requires us to begin much earlier, tracing the lineage of twee music from its 1980s emergence in response to a harsh post-punk scene, through its 2010s revival in response to increasing ironic detachment in underground culture.

By understanding these past precedents, we can see that Laptop Twee is not a standalone modern subgenre, but a predictable reaction against the colder, more detached cultural era of the early 2020s, and a third major chapter in one single twee story, this time shaped by our era’s defining technological tool.

[. . .]

First, we should understand what we mean by ‘twee.’ It is most commonly understood as a music genre, but has come to be associated with a more general set of aesthetic signifiers as well.

Sonically, twee began as a genre of innocent and unpolished music under the indie pop umbrella. It has historically been defined by: lo-fi vocals, simple melodies and chords played on guitars and ukuleles, unpolished sounds (think tape hiss and jangly strings), and deeply personal, diaristic lyrics (Beat Happening or The Pastels).

But ‘twee’ today can also refer to a fashion sensibility: vintage silhouettes, Mary Janes, floral patterns, stripes, colorful tights (in contemporary dress, think Zooey Deschanel or Alexa Chung). There is also a more general design aesthetic associated with twee: letterpress graphics, pastel colors, scrapbook layouts, retro homage (think Wes Anderson or Tavi Gevinson).

Philosophically, Twee is founded on sincerity and sentimentalism. It prefers sincerity to irony and favors unpolished, childlike, homemade approaches to creativity. Twee is fundamentally a countercultural reaction, and it has had two major iterations before this present resurgence.

Twee (1980s-90s)

The original iteration of twee began in the 1980s as a subgenre of underground guitar pop that was distributed on cassette tapes among close-knit fans. Unlike other popular post-punk music, which often dealt with nihilistically grandiose subject matter (such as The Jam in the mainstream, Nirvana in the grunge scene, or Joy Division in the art-rock wing), twee had a nostalgic sensibility and innocent lyrical themes.

KEXP writes that bands like Beat Happening were “throwing flower petals in the face” of heroin chic and darker dominant cultures. Other twee bands from this first chapter include The Pastels, Talulah Gosh and The Field Mice.

People seeking respite from sorrowful, cynical ideologies were drawn to Twee, causing the genre (and its associated aesthetic) to spread. After peaking in the mid-’90s, Twee moved back underground as pop homogenized around radio-friendly sounds.

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TINY CREATURES

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography:

Olivia Zisman

,

Rosie Birkett

,

covarchive

,

Frank Shyong

,

nattie

,

hannah louise

Writing:

Mackenzie Thomas

,

Derek Thompson

,

Mandy Lee

,

Hannah Morgan

,

Casey McCallister

Recently launched

Journalist

Connie Walker

, who’s won Pulitzer, Peabody, and duPont awards, is now on

Substack

.

Historian, broadcaster, and bestselling author

Alice Loxton

has launched on

Substack

.

Anine Bing

, the designer and founder behind the eponymous global fashion brand, is now on

Substack

.

Historian, author, and broadcaster

Janina Ramirez

is writing about women in history and early medieval art on

Substack

.

Nicole Lapin

, a former CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg anchor and current MNN founder and CEO, is now on

Substack

.

Ravi Mehta

, a former product lead at Facebook, Tripadvisor, and Xbox, has launched on

Substack

to share over 20 years of experience building for the modern era.

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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