Article Club

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-seriousness

Listen 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.

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 from 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. We’re talking about over-correcting with the “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-you

What’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 on

• Substack
• Instagram (we are millennials after all)
• Tiktok (we are trying to transcend our millennial-hood after all) 

Article outtakes

We 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!