“In nature, the poison and the remedy are often found side by side”

The Weekender

“In nature, the poison and the remedy are often found side by side”

In this edition of The Weekender: guided wild foraging, the golden age of the magazine profile, and an impassioned plea against filming at the gym

Substack

Sep 26, 2026

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This week, we’re remembering when writers got paid to hang out with famous people, inventing new breeds of apple, and traveling through Spain in the company of older women.

WRITING

When the going was good

The celebrity profile, once a distinct art form, feels diluted in contemporary media: long features have become short Q&As, journalists have been replaced by celebrity interviewers, and in some cases, a written product has been replaced by video. Jonah Weiner, who profiled Drake, Daft Punk, and more for Rolling Stone

in the 2010s, reminisces.

I used to get paid to hang out with famous people

—

Jonah Weiner

in

Blackbird Spyplane

Toward the end of 2010,

Rolling Stone

signed me to a freelance contract. I’d been writing for them for a couple years, and writing profiles of musicians, actors, filmmakers and artists since the early 2000s. The magazine agreed to pay me a fee of $90,000 annually, and I owed them 35,000 words in return. These sorts of contracts used to be common during the magazine business’s ’90s and early-2000s boom times. By the time I signed mine, they were pretty rare. These days they’re virtually unheard of.

I loved the job, which sent me traveling all over the world, meeting fascinating people, writing about what they were like and how they made the things they made. The work was very fun, to no small extent because I took it very seriously—even if there were times when it felt deeply unserious (“We need you to fly to L.A. and hang out with Rae Sremmurd and their pet monkeys in a rented mansion”). I’d graduated from college intent on building a career as a magazine writer, and while the concepts of “career” and “magazine writer” were drifting further and further apart, I counted myself among the lucky ones who’d managed to pull it off. Phoning it in would have felt not merely depressing, but unconscionable.

When I was assigned to profile people whose work I admired—Daft Punk, Paul McCartney, Emma Stone, Drake, Will Ferrell & Adam McKay, Joanna Newsom, and Steve McQueen among them—I strove to file the liveliest, sharpest, most illuminating account of that person that had been written.

And when the subject was someone toward whom I felt what you’d call a less-immediate interest—say, Bruno Mars, or the Chainsmokers, or Macklemore, or Travis Scott? I strove to write the best profile that had ever been written of them, too. I owed that much to readers, and to myself.

Also, people had a way of surprising you. Bruno Mars was the man. So was Macklemore.

I cared about profiles the way I imagine a songwriter cares about songs: The profile is a popular form whose conventions, formulas and generic constraints—and whose opportunities for playing around with all of the above—absorbed me to no end.

I befriended fellow writers who felt similarly, with whom I could talk about, say, Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2012

New Yorker

profile of Hilary Mantel—a piece whose brilliance was consolidated, in a quietly audacious way, by the fact that in its nearly 10,000 words, MacFarquhar somehow managed the incantatory feat of using the word “she” some 405 times, while using the name “Mantel” only twice.

I was thrilled to pieces by profilers who demonstrated that level of attention, ingenuity and commitment to the craft of rendering a subject on the page. I loved reading profiles by Chris Heath, Ian Parker, Lauren Collins, Alex Pappademas and Molly Young, all of whom are uncommonly perceptive about their subjects, but also a plain delight to read in their own right, from one snappy sentence to the next. Certain profile-appreciating ball-knowers still drop their jaws talking about Amy Wallace’s 2010 Garry Shandling profile in

GQ

, or Stephen Rodrick’s 2013 Paul Schrader profile in the

New York Times Magazine

. I’d read profiles like that and aspire to achieve some fraction of their greatness in mine.

Different writers approach profiles in different ways. Since I mostly write about people in the arts, my fundamental interest has always been in creative decisions, in process, in the problems one encounters trying to produce something great. Negotiating for access to a subject, the three things I reliably ask for are 1. a sit-down interview, 2. time just hanging out in their orbit and 3. time watching work happen. I tell myself that even the most famous person is famous because they’re very good at doing something.

How do they actually do it?

Keep reading

WAKE-UP CALLS

“Coffee and a council of cats,” shared by

Emily Battaglini

FORAGING

A bountiful harvest

In a past life, Pascal Baudar worked in tech. Now, from his California farm, he teaches people how to find food in the wild.

you can eat for free if you eat wild

—

marie nguyen

in

counteroffer

Pascal Baudar stood before a bush of poison oak and said, “In nature, the poison and the remedy are often found side by side.” He reached down and plucked some nearby mugwort, the natural salve for a poison oak rash.

Below is the sequence of thoughts that ran through my mind as I watched him do this:

Wow, that’s the most poetic thing I’ve heard in a long time.

Wait… is that the most poetic thing I’ve heard ever? When was the last time I heard anything poetic?! Oh god, is my life an empty, meaningless disas—

I need to follow this interesting man around.

This spiral occurred during one of Pascal’s legendary foraging classes (he’s foraged for Michelin-starred restaurants like N/Naka), where I had paid $69 to follow him around. (TIP: his classes always sell out, so sign up early and consider going each season so you can meet and taste all the different plants.)

“My first memory in life is foraging with my grandmother in Belgium. My second memory is of us being chased off the property by the landowner,” Pascal told us as he explained what led him to build an artist’s life around the ancient practice of foraging and wildcrafted food.

“He is funny, but not in an oppressive way!” I thought.

As the class went on, Pascal casually shared one astonishing insight after another—knowledge about sweet insect secretions, an incisive critique of commercial farming, a remarkable story I immediately wanted to cheapen by turning it into a film or TV show.

[. . .]

Pascal makes incredible ceramics from wild clay that many Michelin restaurants use to serve their food. Each piece is a “representation of the land and a testament to a specific time and place. There is a bit of magic happening when you create a dish and the plants you are using grew from the same earth as the dishware. It’s full circle.”

I learned that in a past life, Pascal was a creative director and graphic designer who worked in tech. He built his fortune during the dot-com bubble, only to lose everything in the span of a few hours during the crash.

He only listens to electronic music, which he played on our drives, making me feel like I was in

Blade Runner

or

Mad Max

or the first 30 minutes of

Sirāt

.

I asked him what TV shows he liked growing up, and he explained that there was no such thing as shows, plural. Growing up in Belgium in the 1960s, the only thing on TV was

La Piste Aux Étoiles

, a broadcast of a Parisian circus.

He jokes that his herbal wines and fermented beers are his children, and he checks on each jug before he leaves his studio for a considered stretch.

When we went foraging for clay in the desert, he walked ahead of me in snake gaiters in the event of a rattlesnake encounter, which made me wonder, “Can snakes attack from behind?”

While off-roading, Pascal stopped beside a bush of thistle sage and told me to pluck one. I got out of the car and did as instructed, handing him what looked like a mini morning star weapon. He shook it close to my hand so I could catch the mature seeds. My mind toggled between two polarized thoughts: “nature is miraculous” and “please don’t poke me.”

He told me that living in nature, off the grid, forces you to confront life and death every day. “You can love something dearly and the next day, it’s gone. It’s so crazy.” The goat farm he lives on had three Great Pyrenees. Two have been killed by mountain lions. When I asked him how he knew it was a mountain lion and not coyotes or <insert weird predatory animal I don’t know about>, he replied, “It was surgical. They unzip you. Open up the chest and eat all the organs. They leave the meat.”

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SELF-CARE

FRUITS OF LABOR

“There are apples you’ve never heard of”

José Andrés visits Honeycrisp headquarters to taste the apples of the future.

Reporting in from the Home of the Honeycrisp

—

José Andrés

in

Longer Tables with José Andrés

People… Last weekend I had the amazing opportunity to visit the Minnesota State Fair while working on a new cookbook about American food (more on that soon…!) and while I was in the area, I went to the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, part of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, where they’ve been developing new apple varieties for more than a century. They’re the ones who created the very famous, very delicious Honeycrisp apple, and maybe you’ve tasted a SweeTango, or a Zestar, or a SnowSweet? All apples created at the University!

There are apples you’ve never heard of, apples that don’t have a name, apples that you would love but might not be released to the public for 10, 20, 30 years!

I got to taste this unreleased apple, apple 1837… it’s astonishing. The pink streaks in there; it’s so beautiful. I hope we can all eat them someday!

Keep watching

BOGO

FITNESS

Must your workout become content?

Mikala Jamison urges everyone in group fitness classes, from attendees to instructors, to stop filming themselves.

Filming in exercise classes? Jail.

—

Mikala Jamison

in

Body Type

Let’s not mince words: No one should be filming in a public group fitness class in 2026. If you do so without getting the express consent of every person who might appear in your video, you’re a ghoul who deserves content creator jail (the worst jail). If you’re a group fitness instructor, you have a responsibility to uphold the no-filming directive for the good of the fitness ecosystem. If you don’t, you’re bad at your job.

Maybe you’ve seen any of the innumerable videos posted by someone saying they’ve changed spots or even left the class because they were visible in some influencer’s video without their consent. Maybe you’ve been such a person. Filming in class has the predictable effect of making other participants uncomfortable because most people who aren’t content creators don’t want to be filmed, period, and certainly not when they’re in a vulnerable, effortful context like a fitness class.

Here’s a Reddit thread

from several months ago in which people say they stopped going to classes because of filming. Hey, gyms: You’re losing money. If you stopped letting people film, you’d probably lose less. And here’s an idea I shouldn’t give you for free, but I actually care that gyms are better spaces for everyone: Start hosting some content-creation-centric classes a couple times a month; charge a little extra and let everyone who wants to record attend under the shared agreement that it’s OK. It shouldn’t have to come to this but let’s be solution-oriented, huh?

I was a certified group fitness instructor who worked in gyms for around six years. Many of my classes skewed a bit older, so I didn’t have to deal with tripods and body checks and performative legging adjustments in my rooms, but I did ask people to stop texting or whatever a couple of times mostly because it was unsafe (you’re on an indoor cycling bike, use both hands!) and it annoyed me. Instructors: It can be done. Brace your core, grow a spine, and command the goddamned room you’re paid to command.

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WEARABLE TECH

TRAVEL

In Europe with a Karen

E.R. Fightmaster sets out on a journey to better understand both the Spanish language and women who love beige clothing.

A side quest in Spain

—

E.R. Fightmaster

in

E.R. Fightmaster

I am traveling through Spain with my mother, Nancy, and her friend, Karen. Karen recently retired from two and a half decades teaching kids with disabilities and is now learning Spanish to better communicate with her half-Columbian grandson. She is not, in fact,

a Karen

, so I have empathy for her name-situation.

My mom managed to break her hip, her arm, and her face this summer. Right before this trip, she went ahead and broke her toes. Despite all this, we have walked roughly 4 miles every day. She can’t be stopped and that is partly why I am here. As a cop and a caregiver. But the other part of why I am here is that I can feel our chances for doing this exact type of trip diminishing year by year. I heard a terrible rumor that moms do not live forever and I have since gone out of my way to make sure I take advantage of her time on earth should that be the case. Not sure there is any science behind this so do NOT panic.

We are all here, all three of us, to take a Spanish language course.

“Dan-ger-ous.” What my mom and Karen said when they spotted the all-beige clothing store across the street from our Airbnb in San Sebastian. I love the company of older women and I always have. Their vices range from the tame (taupe fabric) to the psychotic (I cannot legally say). Later on in the trip, while walking down the boulevard, Karen was so overwhelmed by the soft cream colors of the clothing in the windows that she said, “This is my year. This is my Fall.”

After our first days in Madrid and Segovia, we had finally touched down in San Sebastian, a handsome city in the north of Spain, a crown jewel of Basque country, nestled in between dark green hills and the deep blue Bay of Biscay.

My class is made entirely of Germans except for me, Karen, and one lovely 22-year-old Philippina named Jade who is using her summer break from business school in Madrid to learn more Spanish. Jade is chic and friendly and beautiful and we spent the getting-to-know you portion of the class talking through our horoscopes and discussing the pros and cons of Jade’s upcoming dick appointment with her ex from Portugal. I <3 Jade.

There are three Germans in their early 20s and two Germans in their 60s. I prefer the older set.

Desafortunadamente

, during the full-class introduction portion, I said I was a musician. The teacher good-naturedly did a cursory google search and suddenly, projected on the white board was me and Caterina in lab coats, me leaning against a car for Shrill promos, me with my guitar on stage for the Tolerance tour. She clicked on the link to the Glide video. When the honey started running down the tanned thigh of the video’s lead gal, I screamed, “ESTA BIEN.”

Keep reading

ONE MAN’S TRASH

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography:

Kate Kern Mundie

,

emily battaglini ♡

,

madly awake

,

Bryan Welch

,

Randi Bergman

,

Claire Hopple

Video & Audio:

José Andrés

Writing:

Jonah Weiner

,

marie nguyen

,

Mikala Jamison

,

E.R. Fightmaster

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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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