LATEST · MARCH 24, 2026
The end of the long, slow afternoon
Notes from a year of refusing the weekend essay culture, and what I found in the hours I had taken back.
FREE TO READ · 4 MIN
For most of last year I refused to read essays on the weekend.
This was harder than it sounds. The weekend essay is its own kind of object — long, considered, slightly performative about its considered-ness. It arrives in your inbox Saturday morning and waits there, a homework assignment from someone you respect, accruing guilt the longer you don't open it. By Sunday evening you've either read it and felt vaguely improved, or skipped it and felt vaguely diminished. There is no third path.
I had been on this treadmill for ten years. The publications changed. The essayists changed. The shape of the obligation didn't.
What I did, finally, was unsubscribe from all of it. Not the writers I love — I kept those. The ones I read out of duty. There were more of these than I had been willing to count. Some of them were friends. Some of them were people I had once been a friend of and was now keeping up with through their work.
The first weekend I had nothing to read I sat outside for an hour and a half and looked at the trees in the small park behind my building. I had not done this in a long time. Not because I am a person who doesn't look at trees — I am — but because I had not had the time. The essays had taken the time.
What I noticed, and what surprised me, was that I did not miss the essays. I missed the people who wrote them. These are different things. I had conflated them for a decade.
What I do now, on weekends, is one of three things. I read a book — usually fiction, slowly. I write to a friend I haven't seen in a year. I cook something complicated. None of these activities make me feel improved on Sunday evening. They make me feel like a person.
I still write the weekly essay. I still send it on Mondays. The contradiction is not lost on me. But the asymmetry is the thing: I am willing to ask other people for fifteen minutes of their attention because I think the work deserves it. I am no longer willing to give my own weekend afternoons to anyone whose work I had stopped actually wanting.
The essays were never the obligation. The relationship was. And the relationship was something I could rebuild in a different form, on a different schedule, in a way that was actually about the people involved.