Article Club

We have a light one for you this week... you guessed it, near death experiences. In her piece, What I Saw When I Peeked Over the Edge of Consciousness, Jessica Grose goes to a Near Death conference (yes that's a real thing) where people who've had a brush with death or lost a loved one gather to connect about science and spirituality. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/opinion/near-death-conference-grief-chicago.html

This week we’re racking up the debt with Courtney Shea’s piece “The Doom Spenders,” where she digs into a new generation of Canadians on the installment plan. As the future looks more uncertain, the buy now, pay later life is taking over... are we doomed?!Check out the piece here: https://macleans.ca/longforms/the-doom-spenders/

We're hitting GQ this week for a piece called, "Dads Are the New Moms. How’s That Going?" Erin Somers interviews stay at home dads and turns out... they have a lot to say (like a lot they need a friend) about identity, marriage, work, and being judged at the playground.

If AI writes for us… do kids even need to learn how to write? English professor Piers Gelly tasks his Creative Writing class with using AI throughout the semester to figure out: "Do you even need me anymore?" Check out the piece:https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-myself-with-chatgpt-in-my-english-classroom/ **This caption was written by a human. 

It's a super light super not-that-deep topic this week... (it's not like we're questioning all the human emotions that ever existed or anything!!) In Gal Beckerman's mind bending piece, he spends time with historians who are trying to understand how feelings felt to people in the past. What did pain actually feel like to a medieval blacksmith? What did happiness feel like for a Widow in WWII. One researcher in particular thinks our guess is farther off than any of us might imagine. Check the article out in The Atlantic here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/human-ancestors-emotion-history/684959/

Are you guilty of the automated respose, "I'm busy... but good!"? You may be a victim of Busy Culture and we're here to help. For our Season 2 opener, we're taking it to Substack for "The Cult of Busyness" and digging into busyness as a proxy for being useful in society. If we aren't busy what value do we have? Yet, it's not cute to complain about it. Press pause notifications and let's revolt against our busy addiction.

Say it ain’t so! It’s the season finale of Article Club and the millennial midlife crises are upon us. In his Vox piece, “The Midlife Crisis is Coming for Milennials lol” Alex Abad-Santos explains why we’re not buying red sports cars and having affairs (who’s got the time and money for that?). It's cool. We’re freaking out over being half-way to death in a whole new way. Check out the piece here:vox.comhttps://www.vox.com › culture › millennial-midlife-crisis

If you've developed the attention span of a mosquito over the last 10 years, you're not alone. In her piece, "How I’m Fixing My Broken Attention Span," Rebecca Jennings discusses how the endlessly scrolley, always-on-ness of our lives has us playing focus whack-a-mole. TLDR (because who has the time to read?)...we're a mess. Tips for how to reclaim your focus are ready for a listen on Ep 11 this week (while you respond to emails, clean up the kitchen, and remember to do that thing you need to do, of course).

Is Big Milk back to stay? We’re uncovering the underbelly of the milk industry with Kelli María Korducki’s piece, “Why everybody’s drinking milk again.” This one’s got it all: binders full of “Got Milk?” Ads, questionable subsidies, and yes… the raw milk debate. Grab a frothy one and buckle in. Check out the article here:  https://thehustle.co/originals/why-everybodys-drinking-milk-again#:~:text=Milk's%20protein%2Dpowered%20comeback,Farms%20of%20America%20Dairy%20Brands

This week we’re heading on an ayahuasca retreat with Sarah Miller and her piece, “Pirates of the Ayahuasca" in N+1 magazine. She makes the trek to Peru to drink the trendy hallucinogenic potion which she says, “compels the drinker to vomit, witness their own death, or — my hope — develop a capacity to endure life.” She’s deeply depressed and also deeply funny and boy do we have a lot to talk about. Get your puke/poo buckets cause Ep 10 is coming right up!https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-50/essays/pirates-of-the-ayahuasca/

Do our siblings have more of an impact on our success than our parents?! This week we’re talking allllll about “The Surprising Ways That Siblings Shape Our Lives,” Susan Dominus’ new piece in NYT that explores patterns in highly successful siblings. Did you know, eldests are more likely to attend an ivy league school and youngests are more likely to play a sport professionally? If you’re “siblinged” you’ve undeniably felt some diffusion and differentiation (maybe without even knowing it!). Come for psychological sibling juice. Stay for the baby pilots blowing up the group chat.Check out the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/magazine/siblings-families-parents-influence.html

Move over NYT, this week's article is coming in hot from the Hedgehog Review. In his piece, "The Department of Everything," Stephen Akey, a former librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library in the 80s, takes us into the underbelly of the "Telephone Reference Division" aka the people you called when you had a question aka the Google of yesteryear. He and his team (led by a boss who ruled with a "3 citation per answer" fist) had a strict no-judgement policy and helped everyone from "game show aspirants to police detectives" find the facts. This all got us thinking 1. Will thinking like a librarian (i.e. being an expert in how to find and piece facts together) save us in a world of AI? 2. What are we missing out on in a world where we can get any answer we want to hear without hearing from a human at all? Check out the article here: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-varieties-of-travel-experience/articles/the-department-of-everything

Working hard feels good. But...why? Shouldn't we conserve energy and take the path of least resistance? This week we're reading, "The Paradox of Hard Work" by Alex Hutchinson. He digs into the psychological theories behind motivation (even some birds like snacks they have to fly further for!) and we tiptoe around our shared, lifelong, do-good-reach-for-the-stars-people-pleasing disease. Read along with the article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/03/effort-paradox-hard-work/682156/

This week's article has nerds, gushers, and fruit-by-the-foot dancing in our heads. In her piece, "How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell," Caity Weaver tries to kick a sugar habit by hitting up a fancy sugar detox spa. Spoiler: Things do not go well. Check out the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/magazine/quit-sugar.html

Everything’s a meme these days. We react to a never-ending stream of bad news with a 🙄, an “everything is fine” burning cartoon dog and an LOL. In her New Yorker article, Lauren Michele Jackson asks, is this “The End of Seriousness”? Using humor to deflect or deal with hard things is nothing new. But have the interwebs made us numb to seriousness? Read along with the article here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/the-end-of-seriousnessListen along in all the places and spaces 🎧

Are we turning into anti-social slugs?! Episode 3 is all about loneliness and it’s a doozy. We’re reading Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic “The Antisocial Century.” Did you know that scientists consider the feeling of loneliness a biological signal that lets us know it’s time to fill up our social tank? Enter phones that make us *feel* connected when we’re still very much alone and you've got a perfect antisocial storm. We’re talking about over-correcting with “me” time, the disappearance of social spaces, and (naturally) Martha Stewart.

This week we were pretty flabbergasted to learn that we don't *actually* know why humans sleep. Sure, scientists get that it helps us rest and repair our bodies but they are majorly in the dark about what drives our brains (or jellyfish brains, yes! they sleep!) to get those Zzzzzs. In Veronique Greenwood's piece in The Atlantic, Why Do We Need To Sleep?, she makes a trip to a fancy new sleep lab in Japan where they're trying to tease out everything from sleep pressure to brain scrubbers. We dig into it all (and whether or not you should just add a vibrator to your face mask).

This week on Article Club we ask the very light, very nbd question: “Does anyone really know you?” Joshua Rothman’s article in the New Yorker (check it out here) digs into the layers of identity and how we see ourselves and others. Will anyone ever understand us completely? Is that ok? We talk about how being unknown––aka anonymous at weddings or on first dates––can be pretty powerful orrrr lead to an itty bitty white lie habit. Here's an extra handy link to the New Yorker article we discuss: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/does-anyone-really-know-youWhat’s blowing up the group chat?Every Article Club episode ends with a group chat scan. Here’s what’s getting hearted or “Ha Ha-ed” this week:Husbands and boyfriends are turning into Horny Dorks. Help! Pliability is the stretching app keeping our creaky ol’ bods limber. As always you can find Article Club onSubstackInstagram (we are millennials after all)Tiktok (we are trying to transcend our millennial-hood after all) Article outtakesWe consider a few articles to talk about each week. Here are a few we didn’t chat about but we think you’d like! Why So Many of Us Are Casual Spider Murderers Death of the Party

Tis true. Yet another podcast. Why, you ask? TBH we’re feeling pretty overwhelmed by everything going on out there, we miss going to a physical place to spend time together, and we like to learn and talk about things other than tornados and tariffs. Not everyone has a pal like Allison who seems to ALWAYS have *the* zeitgeisty article of our time (or week) at the ready. In a scrolly world, she’s my (Carly, hi) personal curator of what to go deeper with –– a cultural barometer if you will. One day it struck me (very eureka) that the world should probably read the articles she picks and maybe even listen along as we very un-scientifically dissect them while mostly just talking about our feelings. And so, Article Club was born. It may amuse you to know that Allison and I started a podcast in 2017 called Ready for Nothing in which she went on first dates, recorded them, and I tried to guess on-air if she’d go on a second. We pretty quickly decided this was illegal and scrapped the project. Nothing illegal this time. Except “navigating” around the occasional paywall. See you in your ears!