“You know which gazelle gets eaten by the lion? The one that strays from the pack.”
In this edition of The Weekender: illicit ice cream trucks, birds in paradise, and courtroom sketches of the Morton Salt mascot
The Weekender
“You know which gazelle gets eaten by the lion? The one that strays from the pack.”
In this edition of The Weekender: illicit ice cream trucks, birds in paradise, and courtroom sketches of the Morton Salt mascot
Substack
Sep 12, 2026
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Illustration by
Melissa Lakey
This week, we’re proving our hockey chops, baking a cake to bid summer farewell, and examining the relationship between writing and belief.
JUST DESSERTS
I scream, you scream
One team’s investigation into the illegal ice cream trade taking over London’s streets.
Intimidation, illegality and Mr Whippy: We join London’s ice cream wars
—
Jim Waterson
,
David Hall
, and
Polly Smythe
in
London Centric
I was hiding on the floor of an ice cream van parked outside Lambeth Palace when I began to think things might have gotten a bit out of control. Our London Centric-branded Mr Whippy truck had already been filmed by men in expensive cars with blacked-out windows. They didn’t seem supportive of our entry into the capital’s ice cream trade.
Now it appeared our vehicle was being followed around the streets of central London by a rival ice cream van, which had just halted alongside us.
We weren’t very well disguised. The back of our van, in what had seemed like a good idea at the time, featured a giant photograph of me eating an ice cream, the London Centric logo and the words “serving up scoops”. Now it felt like a big target.
“Has it gone?” I asked a colleague, hoping to hear ice cream chimes heading off into the distance.
“No, stay low,” they replied.
Half an hour earlier, London Centric had taken its first tentative steps into diversifying away from the financially precarious business of local journalism and into the potentially much more lucrative business of running a dodgy ice cream van on Westminster Bridge.
Now we were trying to identify out-of-the-way alleys where we could hide our heavily branded vehicle. A reliable source in the capital’s ice cream trade got in touch to tell us he had heard that persons unknown were interested in finding our distinctive van. It seemed we’d just disrupted the illegal sale of thousands of pounds of soft-serve ice cream on one of the busiest days of the year.
It’s almost two years since I first reported on the brazenly lawbreaking and wildly profitable activities of the ice cream vans that semi-permanently block the bus lane on Westminster Bridge in order to charge rip-off prices to tourists for a 99 Flake. Since then, I’d received messages from MPs who couldn’t understand how all of this could take place within sight of Parliament and the police headquarters at Scotland Yard, along with a trickle of lurid allegations about the sellers’ business model. I’d wanted to understand how the ice cream vans—many of which are operated by a single family—get away with permanently clogging the capital’s roads and ignoring decades of efforts by law enforcement, politicians and local councils to stop them.
I’d considered going undercover and trying to get inside the groups running the illegal vans. But this felt risky and resource-intensive for a tiny operation like ours. The ice cream business is dominated by tightly held family businesses that don’t welcome outsiders. In any case, I’d been informed that, following London Centric’s past reporting on the Westminster Bridge vans, my photo had been circulated and I was banned.
So instead, I concocted a different plan. What if this was a situation where undercover reporting wouldn’t work? What if we needed to develop a different approach? Let’s call it overcover reporting?
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WORDPLAY IN THE WILD
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The intersection of spirituality and tech
“I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning.”
Against Slop: An Interview with Meghan O’Gieblyn
—
Lauren Kane
in
The New York Review of Books
Meghan O’Gieblyn’s primary subject is not artificial intelligence—she is one of the most prolific working thinkers on contemporary religion, in particular its relationship to technology—but she was one of the first writers during the machine-learning revolution to take a serious look at the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, in her 2021 book
God Human Animal Machine
. Her first book,
Interior States
(2018), was a collection of essays with the more earthly preoccupations of American Christianity and the Midwest, where she grew up and attended Bible college, which subject also features in her forthcoming memoir,
Will and Attention
, publishing in October. Since 2023 she has been a frequent critic for the
Review
, writing about novels, religion, and philosophy.
Over the past month, we emailed about AI consciousness, the craft of essay writing, and contending with John Calvin.
What most terrifies you and what most excites you about artificial intelligence?
I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning. I started writing in my teens and early twenties because it was the only way I could engage in a certain level of complex thought. When I was studying theology at a fundamentalist Bible college—where the majority of the coursework is in the study of Scripture—it was in my private journals that I first allowed myself to question the ideology I’d been steeped in for most of my life. The page was a kind of mirror, a way to discover doubts and misgivings that I didn’t feel I could share with anyone, and which were difficult to name when I was simply going about my day, lost in a swirl of idle thoughts and emotions. Writing was basically how I found my way out of that very narrow form of faith. I don’t know that I would have done that if I’d had an institutional subscription to ChatGPT, as many college students do today. It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking—at least the kind of thinking that we associate with complex reasoning and self-knowledge.
This is connected to a more general fear of mine, which is that language models are causing us to devalue all kinds of higher cognitive functions. Any time a machine takes up a skill that was once thought of as uniquely human, like chess or coding, there’s a tendency to dismiss that skill as simple and mechanical. There’s an emerging consensus right now, particularly among AI skeptics, that the most distinctly human qualities are emotion, intuition, the ability to sense and feel. Those are undoubtedly the capacities that most readily distinguish us from machines. But this view risks fetishizing embodiment and emotion, much the same way that previous generations valued reason and language to an outsized degree to prove that humans are distinct from animals. What makes us unique as a species is that we can do all of these things: we share with animals the ability to feel and sense, and we share with machines the capacity to reason through language. It’s also true that we think and speak in ways that are radically distinct from computers, and we feel in ways that are different from animals.
I’ve heard many people argue that AI offers a challenge to express ourselves in a way that is more fully human. I used to be skeptical of that idea, which struck me as a bit of wishful thinking, one that imposed a mythical limit on how good the illusion could get. But I’ve come around, having witnessed several generations of LLMs that, despite their increasing technical sophistication, remain incapable of writing anything surprising, which is, of course, extremely difficult for a technology designed to hit the statistical mean of the writing it’s been trained on. I’ve found that having a name for this kind of writing—“synthetic text” or “slop”—makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing. You could argue that AI output, because it has distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression, offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought. I suppose that’s one thing that excites me.
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GAMES
REALITY BITES
Not everyone is wowed by Alix Earle’s new reality series
Can content translate from a tiny screen to a slightly less tiny one? Katie Gatti Tassin investigates.
Behold: The Tedious Maintenance of Fame & Fortune
—
Katie Gatti Tassin
in
Money with Katie
Alix Earle’s age is referenced repeatedly on her new Netflix reality series
Earle Meets World
, a show clearly constructed according to the doctrine of Kardashianpolitik, down to the production company and
our parent-manager cares more about the lucrative sister
arc. Observations that Earle is “doing all the things she’s doing at 25 years old” or “not like a normal 25-year-old” are usually made in close proximity to scenes where Earle’s younger sister and dubiously employed friends are, alternately, going out or lying around after having gone out. (In a transparent attempt to hook my older readers: Earle’s stepmother Ashley was one of the women involved in the 2008 Eliot Spitzer scandal.)
Earle’s abnormality becomes a consistent theme in the debut season. While the gals are gallivanting around a battery of Manhattan’s most overdetermined venues (a bar where you can play ping-pong; a bar with trash-can-sized beer pong), Earle is herself gamely ping-ponging between coastal corners of the US for televised work obligations, an unholy number of which seem to be, inexplicably, courtesy of Dunkin’ Donuts. A separate television crew, provided by Netflix, dutifully trails her to each of these locales, its cameras capturing footage of other cameras capturing footage. She is portrayed as a dedicated, relentless wunderkind, sacrificing her youth in service of DoorDash product placement and
Dancing with the Stars
and cover shoots for magazines named after materials like PAPER and NYLON, as It Girls are wont to do.
This sentiment is reiterated with such matter-of-fact regularity that it took me until the sixth episode to remember that the vast majority of 25-year-old Americans also spend most of their time working, not playing arcade games in honky-tonk-themed speakeasies. Roughly half are already responsible for young children. What narrative purpose did it serve, I wondered, to make so much of Earle’s age and schedule?
Insisting that the abnormal thing about Earle’s life is the age at which she’s “doing all these things”—rather than her estimated $24 million in annual income derived from, mostly, documenting herself partying and promoting various products between said partying gigs—strikes me as a savvy obfuscation. It’s at once a rebuttal and preemptive strike against the sort of commentary that scenes of a family of seven (plus entourage) traveling via private jet to Aspen for a weekend music festival might otherwise provoke. The series does not try to avoid the unavoidable fact of her utterly unique lifestyle, but merely locates the source of that uniqueness in her supposedly unusual decision to prioritize her career at 25.
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FOWL BEHAVIOR
SPORTS
No guts, no glory
Former NHL hockey player and Stanley Cup champion Andrew Ference makes a case for going against the grain.
If you’re not memorable, you’re forgettable.
—
Andrew Ference
in
Andrew Ference
As I was chasing my goal of playing in the NHL, I knew I couldn’t afford to be normal. To this day, I have no desire to join the pursuit of “fitting in” and am driven and excited by living a good life that is designed to impress myself, not others. The desire to blend in with the crowd around you limits your drive to seek out interesting or unique solutions to problems and ultimately hinders your ability to beat out the competition for anything that is limited in access. Not being a full-fledged member of a pack can be uncomfortable at times, and there is risk that comes with poking your head up from the crowd. One of my favorite trainers, John Whitesides in Boston, would say to the rookies, “You know which gazelle gets eaten by the lion? The one that strays from the pack.” I concede that he’s right, but I would counter that we aren’t gazelles and that in our line of work, if you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, you either won’t make it or you’ll be there for the average amount of time… a couple of years.
[. . .]
For a few years, I lived in Canmore, Alberta, a small mountain town about an hour outside Calgary. After the 1988 Olympics, the area became home to high-performance athletes from all kinds of sports since they had a training facility, a natural playground of mountain trails and a population that was insanely active. These years likely had the biggest effect on extending my career far beyond the average. Instead of setting up in my hometown of Edmonton or any number of other “hubs” of hockey players, in Canmore I trained with downhill skiers, cross-country skiers, biathletes, speedskaters, cyclists and triathletes. While I maintained a foundation of exercises and workouts that I would do specifically for hockey, I incorporated much of what the other sports were doing into my own training and my recovery from training. The downhillers had fantastic training for muscle endurance and performing under fatigue. Think about the end of a downhill race when you’ve been in a squat for a couple of minutes at close to 100 miles per hour, or the end of a slalom race when you can’t afford to ease up a bit because your legs are screaming at you. I wanted to learn how they did it. The cross-country skiers and biathletes were exceptional at building an insane base of aerobic capacity, going for hours on end and known to have some of the very best VO2 max scores in the history of sport. The cyclists and triathletes were priceless for their hints on recovery and nutrition while also displaying some of the toughest mental power I’ve ever seen. Their ability to ignore the pain of a hard effort up a difficult climb is second to none. The speedskaters could do explosive power like I had never seen before. Their single leg jumps and ability to create speed and power out of a deep squat was insane.
Sprinkling different elements of what I was seeing into my own program not only helped me develop as an athlete but it also gave me amazing confidence, because I knew that the people that I was competing with in hockey were not doing these kinds of things.
When I got drafted in the 8th round to Pittsburgh, I knew that as an 8th rounder, I was already forgettable and wouldn’t have a surplus of focus on me at training camp. The attention would be focused on the high-round draft picks and the other top prospects from previous years. When I received my “Welcome To The Penguins” package in the mail, it included which fitness tests would be held in the upcoming training camp. It was basic stuff like bench press, sit-ups, pull-ups and, most importantly to me, two tests on the bike. The first being a 30-second sprint test where you essentially go all out for 30 of the most excruciating seconds of your life. The second was a standard VO2 max ride which would last around 12-20 minutes and measure your maximum rate of oxygen consumption, basically to see what your body is capable of before you fail or give up. I had already been doing a fair amount of stair workouts and was very comfortable on the bike, so I knew that on day 1 of training camp, I had an opportunity to set myself apart from the crowd with these tests.
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TENNIS
BAKED GOODS
A recipe to kiss summer goodbye
A sweet-tart sendoff to the season.
Lemon Cake with a Raspberry Cream Cheese Frosting
—
Terrence Bakes
in
Terrence Bakes
This cake is incredibly simple and the frosting and garnish can easily be swapped with your favorite fruit if you aren’t a fan of raspberries.
Note: I like a lot of frosting on my cake (I learned from my mom!). If you think it might be too much, you can easily scale the recipe down.
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DEDICATION
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography:
Melissa Lakey
,
Randi Bergman
,
lucy askew
,
Anna Sale
,
Ella Wiznia
Video & Audio:
London Centric
,
Neal Agarwal
Writing:
Jim Waterson
,
David Hall
,
Polly Smythe
,
The New York Review of Books
,
Katie Gatti Tassin
,
Andrew Ference
,
Terrence Bakes
Recently launched
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy is now on
Substack
, where she’ll be “exploring how to practice social bravery” and more.
Founding member of the Beastie Boys Mike D has launched on
Substack
.
Former NFL Network reporter Tom Pelissero is now publishing The Sweep, an inside look at all things NFL from The Ringer and Spotify, on
Substack
.
The Washington Post’s Commanders beat writer Tashan Reed has launched The Tashan Reed Show on
Substack
, where he’ll be covering the team.
Jess Smetana and Lucy Rohden, formerly of the Dan Le Batard Show, launched the
College Football Happy Hour
Substack
to support their eponymous podcast.
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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