Every Friday
wait it's getting dark too early
The dark hours are coming for us… when we walk out of the office and it already feels like 9pm. It’s only going to get more grim as the days pass. As easy as it is to phone it in when these days start creeping in, we will not be doing that here. We have a stacked line up for you this week, thanks for being here.
Below you will find one of the greatest live performances ever recorded. We can think of no other way to kick off your weekend than with this one. Cheers to Every Friday.
“He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
“The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.”
– James Baldwin
Top of Mind
The Row Sample Sale & The Exploitation of Gig Workers in NYC
Everybody knows what’s going on. We just don’t say it out loud.
Most of these men on mopeds recently arrived from Venezuela, Ecuador, or West Africa. They aren’t legally allowed to work, but they are anyway, leasing vehicles from brokers for $300 to $500/week, and renting app logins from citizens who farm them out for another predatory fee. No payroll records, 1099s, or workers comp. No real path to lasting freedom.
- Abolish ICE! (So You Can Get Your $10 Burrito at Midnight) Pirate Wires
New York City in all its grandeur and glory has a tendency to put a magnifying glass on societal dynamics and exaggerate them to their fullest extent. Think of any everyday scenario and New York will have the “most” extreme version of that. The Row’s Sample Sale this week reminded me how bizarre and drastic the wealth divide in the city is. The night before the sale, the line wrapped around the block. Tent after tent of gig-economy hires to sit in line overnight for their remitter.
Truly wealthy New Yorkers have no problem paying retail for $1,000 t-shirts but there is a large cohort of people who exist in the city with enough money to spend $300 in chase of a deal and $50 for someone to hold their place in line. To be clear, I (Zach) am a hardcore capitalist. However, this pattern of lifestyle subsidization on the back of gig-economy workers isn’t the answer. I love having any cuisine in the world delivered to me in less than 30 minutes to my apartment like anyone else, but turning a blind eye to the machine causing this oppression is not just.
Things Worth Remembering: Your Work Can Outlive You, (The Free Press)
This life is so full of status games—of people jockeying for recognition, clicks, and notoriety. Practically everyone seems to be hungry for social media fame. The people who win it are too often the ones who feed their audiences’ ugliest prejudices and smallest resentments. When I’m tempted to lose heart over all this, though, I remember Keats.
Spencer Klavan over at The Free Press (and fellow Nashvillian I occasionally bump into at my daily coffee stop near the office — one day I’ll get over myself and pass on how much I enjoy what he puts out in the world) writes better than anyone about our literary and philosophical inheritance from the last few hundred years and why its relevant in 2025. Some of it can be a little much for my non–PhD-in-comparative-literature brain, but here he walks through the story of John Keats and his miserable, dread-soaked final year.
As bleak as it was, it felt like an exhale to read. His whole story is a middle finger to the feedback-optimization-industrial-complex we live in now. We’re all trapped in our own overly-zoomed in perspectives. It was a good midweek reminder that how we (I) feel about a situation is largely irrelevant to how it’ll eventually turn out.
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
“Out here beneath the wide Wyoming sky, the air felt renewed. For the SATISFY Pro Team, The Ranch was a return to the source. For releasing old things and pushing to new ground. A time to reset body and mind. Days for endurance, community, and finding renewal in motion.”
We don’t feature sports too often here save running brands (exhibit A 👆🏼) but it’s really something to witness greatness as it’s happening.
The West, in contrast, is letting its civilizational symbols burn. Its heroes are being torn down not entirely by foreign invaders, but by its own children.
Best of Substack this Week
62 Extremely Passionate Recommendations –
David Senra on Dedicating a Life to Craft –
37 Tools and Tactics to Protect Your Attention —
This Week in Relay’s Shopping Cart
Bastion Brown Marble 8” Drink Table, (Zach)
The furniture shopping is continuing, t-minus 1 week to the move! This week we’ve got this beautiful marble drink table.
TRMNL, (Jack)
If you haven’t realized yet I’m a real sucker for E-Ink displays. Something about the analog design pulls me in. You can write your own plugins and integrations for this little guy, if that’s your cup of tea.
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
The internet is an overwhelming mess of headlines, ads, and mid takes from the worst people you know. Big Tech owns our attention spans. Everything is content. Nothing makes sense.
We’re not here to “fix discourse” or “build a better internet.” Relay is just our attempt to riff on what we’re already talking about at happy hour without feeling like we’ve been hit by a content truck. Some analysis, some memes, call it a day.
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Another quality read, love the writing yall do. No opinions on the nba gambling or the Louvre heist?