Weekend Reads #299

Weekend Reads

Does Alexa Chung still have ‘It?' (New York Times – gift link)

Selling America: The Army’s fight to find recruits in a mistrustful, divided nation. (Washington Post – gift link)

Ina Garten and the age of abundance. (The New Yorker)

The 6 best movie closets of all time—and what makes them so memorable. (Architectural Digest)

Untangling visibility, value, and race on Substack. (AdHoc)

Inside the great Gap glow-up. (New York Times – gift link)

J. Crew is reintroducing the nostalgic catalog with Demi Moore on the fall cover and hoping to build on its sales momentum. (Wall Street Journal – gift link)

These two articles sound an awful lot like Americana Chic…

On the cusp of 50, Chloë Sevigny is pondering something different. (The Cut)

How a leading chain of psychiatric hospitals traps patients. (New York Times – gift link)

Linkin Park announce comeback album and tour, unveil Emily Armstrong as new singer. (Consequence)

Fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto says work is a ‘prison.’ (Wall Street Journal – gift link)

As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results. (New York Times – gift link)

How The Business of Fashion became an unlikely insider’s guide. (Columbia Journalism Review)

Can mutual aid be more than a survival strategy? (Lux Magazine)

Speaking of mutual aid, I am contributing to the Fall session of the Consistent Money-Moving Project. (CMMP) Consider signing up next session or finding a similar group in your community!

Below I share my experience at two concerts, I would have loved to see something similar for them. Series of 56 photo montages of music fans outside concerts. (James Mollison)

See/Hear/Read

I love live music, and PrePan I went to a lot of concerts and music festivals. I have slowly been getting back into live music, and really dove in last month with two concerts within 24 hours of each other!

Back in the spring, my sister, best friend, and I decided to get tickets to see Melissa Ethridge and Indigo Girls at Wolf Trap, which took place on a Sunday evening. The weather was perfect. We had a picnic dinner of my sister's ricotta and her pea pesto, crackers and bread and veggies, meats and cheeses, fruit and chocolate and bubbly. Proper plates, napkins, and silverware and wine glasses that didn't look like plastic until you held them. We got pavilion seats, it was all very grown-ass woman.

Melissa Ethridge was phenomenal. It was my first time seeing her live and I'd see her in concert again. Indigo Girls had great enthusiasm, but sadly, Emily's voice isn't what it used to be. Glad we went, but also glad I saw them decades ago. I wore a Printfresh sundress and comfortable sandals.

The following night, my sister and I scored tickets to a last-minute show at Black Cat for Jack White. If you haven't been to Black Cat, it's a small general admission venue that holds only a few hundred folks. I've been going there since college and love the intimate, nostalgic space. To see Jack White there was amazing, even if I was still exhausted from being out on a school night the day prior.

This was the first concert I've been to PostPan that gave me the PrePan feels. I was maybe 12′ from the stage, deep in the crowd, us cheering and jumping and dancing together. The A/C was cut off once the music started and I sweat buckets and didn't care. My WHOOP tracked me dancing for an hour and a half straight because I was.

Considering the tickets to this show went on sale at noon on a workday and cost over $100 each, the audience was primarily folks over 30 who are super fans. It made for such amazing energy in the space. Jack White usually bans phones at his shows, but he didn't at this one. That being said, few had their phones up the whole time because they were so into the moment. I was too. I left Black Cat feeling high, even though I was sober and low on sleep.

I wore my Universal Standard Ikat print shorts and top because I wanted something flowy with deep pockets that wouldn't show sweat (it was a brutally hot and humid day). I paired it with my New Balance 327s but switched out the insoles for my Birkenstock Bend ones for additional support. 90% of the audience was wearing denim and a black t-shirt and sneakers and no one cared what anyone else was wearing unless it was a badass concert t-shirt from a special artist or tour.

I didn't do Hear/See/Read last week and I have seen and read a lot, but the one that made the biggest impact on me and I highly recommend you watch is Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa (Netflix). It's a documentary about a sherpa who was the first woman to summit Everest and live, and continued to break world records for numbers of summits. In this film, she again attempts Mount Everest in her late 40s. So good!

For Your Entertainment

Rakim Athelaston Mayers, AKA A$AP Rocky, AKA Rihanna's man is out with a new song and the weirdest video to go with it. Filmed in Kyiv, Ukraine, two months before the Russian invasion, “Tailor Swif” is a fever dream of the weirdest oddities that may wish you to pause or even watch again to try to understand what you just saw. Of course, Swifties are mad about using a variation of her name but there isn't really anything about her in the song. It's just weird AF.