For those of you who aren’t already familiar, Mary is one of the all-time millennial media greats: She is a screenwriter, essayist, and the bestselling author of Emergency Contact, Permanent Record, and Yolk. You may also recognize her as a former culture correspondent for Vice News Tonight and also because she now blogs in such an inimitable Mary way about fashion, style, and culture on her choitotheworld newsletter.

Like so many folks in the New York literary community, I’ve had the pleasure of benefitting personally from Mary’s hard-won advice on everything from writing to money to major life decisions. She has a generous habit of taking fledglings under her own wing and being utterly clear-eyed about The Work, so it’s very exciting to be able to pass on some of her wisdom below.

We talked about how she sold Pool House on without a manuscript; how she maintains her creative discipline amidst a million development projects and other unfinished novels; and how she cultivates a life that centers her writing, often in the most unromantic terms possible…

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Was it worth it? Absolutely yes, though I now think endurance for endurance’s sake should never be the prevailing motivation. (You are, after all, talking about someone who read the Bible twice in high school — partially so she could see if there were any loopholes no one was talking about, but mostly for the flex.) While I was somewhat prepared for the amazing figurative language, the meticulous whaling knowledge, the (less enjoyable) old timey sailor rants, I wasn’t at all prepared for how funny and downright sarcastic the writing could be.

And while I do not plan to ever reread all that again, I did want to commit to memory (and maybe save you 3.5 months of your life) with a list of my favorite zingers, with page numbers included if you end up ordering the same edition (which I do recommend even though it is too fucking big to take anywhere with you….hmm… there’s a metaphor in that….). Bolding is my own; imagine I’m underlining it with a pencil to show you amidst a shared bout of literary ecstasies. Anyway, I salute you Mr. Melville. I am also absolutely certain that you would have loved Twitter.

1. Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? (p.4)
   
   

2. What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? (5)
   
   

3. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable inflection that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (6) (“The two orchard thieves” !! What a way to reference the reference.)
   
   

4. But as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. (7) (Really, the whole first chapter is just perfect.)
   
   

5. With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The Crossed Harpoons” — but it looked too expensive and jolly there. (9)
   
   

6. …as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. (10)
   
   

7. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted (11)

8. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. (39)
   
   

9. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. (39)
   
   

10. …and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean… (50) (HM was big on the alliterations!)
    
    

11. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. (56) (This on laying in a cozy bed — all of Chapter 10 and 11, when Ishamel is being roomies with Queequeg, is quite hilarious.)
    
    

12. I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. (56) (same, brother)
    
    

13. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records. (61-62)
    
    

14. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois. (64) (The coastal elitism was strong even in 1851.)
    
    

15. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.” (66)
    
    

16. For what are the comprehensible terrors of a man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God! (112)
    
    

17. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural relevance, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition… (117)
    
    

18. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. (118)
    
    

19. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, over-flowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. (127)
    
    

20. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. (140) (One of the best parts starts at Chapter 32, when he describes types of whales)
    
    

21. Of this whale little is known but his name … Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else. (142) (Why is the idea of HM being too lazy to describe a razor back whale so hilarious…)
    
    

22. His voracity is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lip are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. (143) (This is why you need the illustrated Arion Press edition, because the drawing of this whale really matches the description).
    
    

23. They are the lads that always live before the wind. (146) (He’s talking about the common porpoise lol)
    
    

24. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! (148) (literally every writer as they run out of steam ¼ through their first draft…)
    
    

25. It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. (152)
    
    

26. However it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man! (153) (so much good insult potential in this book overall)
    
    

27. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harponeers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it. (154)
    
    

28. Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task … But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home. (162)
    
    

29. …when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. (185)
    
    

30. …for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock … (186)
    
    

31. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. (187)
    
    

32. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity … (187)
    
    

33. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea… (188)
    
    

34. He was intent on audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge. (188)
    
    

35. Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light … (198) (Chapter 42, I kid you not, is basically just waxing on and on about the significance of the color white)
    
    

36. I looked around me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault. (233)
    
    

37. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe. (280)
    
    

38. Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure (281)
    
    

39. For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. (281)
    
    

40. But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea … when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoying some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on … (282) (ICYWW, Herman was not a Pisces; he was a Leo, which checks out more tbh).
    
    

41. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla [rope] is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold (285) (just an incredible sentence to behold - HM inventing new kinds of racism that have never been invented before…)
    
    

42. …he cannot thus be circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones quiver in him like shaken jelly. (287)
    
    

43. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right Whale’s sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale’s head.” (338)
    
    

44. …the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys … (339) (Chapter 74 on the sperm whale’s head is also just overall amazing)
    
    

45. Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it. (341)
    
    

46. What a really beautiful and chaste looking mouth! From floor to ceiling lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. (341)
    
    

47. …in which case you will take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem.” (343)
    
    

48. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. (345)
    
    

49. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference to death. But mark the other head’s expression … Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. (346)
    
    

50. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in truth. (348)
    
    

51. In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning. (356)
    
    

52. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world. (359)
    
    

53. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world. (360)
    
    

54. …Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place. (393)
    
    

55. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts. (398)
    
    

56. …and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve around me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. (399)
    
    

57. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety. (403) (he’s talking about a female pod of whales)
    
    

58. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature himself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps os many moody secrets. (404)
    
    

59. Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round … let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness” (426) (he’s talking about spermaceti lol not the other kind)
    
    

60. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. (428)
    
    

61. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. (428) (Petition to call our AI-infested feeds “slopgollion”)
    
    

62. Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men. (429)
    
    

63. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm … when—there she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again. (439)
    
    

64. Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo … with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals … (470)
    
    

65. Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. (475) (I mean, oh my GOD)
    
    

66. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. (485)
    
    

67. He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponed encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. (492)
    
    

68. …when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin … (498) (I just love the idea of “the ocean’s skin”!)
    
    

69. …when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together … (502)
    
    

70. …the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep. (543)
    
    

71. But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. (546)
    
    

72. …his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. (549)
    
    

73. Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! (565)
    
    

74. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains bet too much for that. (565)
    

What a book. What a mind. Madness indeed!

It’s not a hyperbole to say that Eddie is quite possibly the one multi-hyphenate to rule them all, which is why I’ve been dying to know what motivated him to take up the novel form amid his career as a bestselling memoirist, successful New York restauranteur, iconic host of Huang’s World on ViceTV, plus podcaster and newsletter writer. We had a Zoom sesh late last week to talk about the book, his literary faves Ottessa/Junot/Sally, and the fact that he wrote Come Undone effectively in five days. Five days!! You can read our convo below:

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Some recent tidbits of interest…

• Adding a home phone line costs only around an extra $15/month, as Jeremy Rellosa found out in his attempt to try to use only a landline phone for a month, which he documented for The Strategist. Unfortunately the entire appeal of this kind of experiment, if you ask me, is waiting until the end to turn that phone back on and seeing how many texts came in while I was being terribly, totally missed. (Sometimes it’s the technology that’s the problem; sometimes it’s ya own personality…)
  

• The Dodo — yes, as in the animal news website — is still around? It’s one of the Vox Media brands that James Murdoch didn’t want, and per Adweek, it sounds like Penske Media might scoop it up alongside Eater, The Verge, SB Nation, and Popsugar. You know what, it’s not the worst fate for a feel-good website that launched in 2014!
  

• ICYMI: On the subject of the newly Murdoch-backed Vox Media properties, New York magazine editor David Haskell told us himself that the future is feeling good, adding “I don’t expect there to be any noticeable change” re: the magazine.
  

• “The Times also tries to avoid hiring freelance writers who in the past three years have participated in freebie trips for other publications.” Hmm! Something to think about if you regularly enjoy a press trip now and then, yet still harbor dreams of writing for The NYT’s travel section. (No wonder they still haven’t properly replaced the T magazine editor yet…)
  

• Extremely niche media ball: Airmail has a funny habit of crediting its photo illustrations to an entity called “Chop Choppish Shop,” and I have been wondering for a while whether this was some third-party service that they outsourced the work to. Turns out, per Airmail editor Julia Vitale, it’s just the name of their in-house illustration team. Someone close to the publication further explained that “Chop Choppish” is a bit of an inside joke for the team, which I like as a concept. More mags should have their little jokes!
  

• “It’s actually reasonably common at Meta” to take mental health leave, according to an anonymous Meta source in this San Francisco Standard piece on the general vibes at Menlo Park (coincidentally, it appears this source was laid off in last week’s reaping): in fact, “It feels like a bit of an open secret.” The disillusionment of elite tech workers continues apace!
  

• Speaking of inside jokes, Jonah Peretti is betting big on the fact that most people (kids?) just want to use generative AI as a novelty toy — “kind of like an inside joke engine,” as he described to The Verge. “We found that making AI content and posting it on Instagram or TikTok just kind of feels like slop, but making funny things with your friends that are about the specific things that you’re joking about and talking about is just a lot more fun.” Hence the launch of BF Island, a messaging app that lets you talk to friends using AI? I guess that’s not…terrible?
  

• Less of a learned fact and more of a genuine question: the SF-based singer-songwriter Trinity Ace revealed on her Perfectly Imperfect “Taste of Taste” profile that the “Shark Bowl” blue drink at the Fisherman’s Wharf Applebee’s is “thick because they grind up gummy sharks into it.” But the Applebee’s website just says you get a “signature gummy shark garnish” with the drink, which in photos appears to have a regular viscosity otherwise. Which is the truth??? Because if a gummy-thickened alcoholic blue drink actually does exist, I unfortunately would like to try it.
  

• The quarterly reading series at Nightclub 101 hosted by Viking Penguin publicist Alexis Nowicki and audio producer Maria Robins-Somerville is QUITE good. I think you and I both know that the New York readings scene can be pretty… uneven shall we say (and I think that range is a good thing, to be clear), but I left last week’s rendition of Reading 101 not only impressed, but inspired. (There’s nothing like hearing people reading fiction out loud to help you work out some thoughts about how to do dialogue yourself.) I think the best way to find out about the series is through Alexis’s and Maria’s IGs, so maybe I will see you at the next one!
  

• At the New Museum 2.0 over the weekend, I was most enchanted by the “Soft City” drawings of the Norwegian Pop artist Hariton Pushwagner, which depict mid-century office drones and housewives in absurdly regimented formations. If I could do my visit over, I would have spent way more time following the entire series down the wall where they are displayed. (Peep part of a drawing below; I love the claustrophobic effect of the buildings jutting right into each other.) I later found out that these drawings are part of an epic 2016 graphic novel of the same name and am very curious about it now…….Otherwise, most of the “New Humans” show tries to address the man vs. cyborg question in predictable uncanny valley-baiting ways, so it was interesting that a series of drawings banking on the power of a repeating image + elementary 2D perspective play nailed the eerie factor much more effectively.

The hire is definitely a coup for New York, yet it’s only one of two tantalizing developments happening over on Broad Street this week. Just yesterday, the news came out that James Murdoch is buying New York mag (along with Vox Media’s podcast network). Which is to say: magazine-making looks like it’s about to get a lot more interesting in Haskellville.

This morning, I had the chance to hop on a video call with both David and Sam to make sense of the current moment for the magazine, its future style coverage, Sam’s career (Fun fact: both David and Sam are serious company men — Sam started his career at GQ, and David has only ever worked at New York). You can read our conversation, lightly condensed and edited, below:

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The act of classification, specifically of images, has become an extraordinarily valued skill these days, whether you’re an AI algorithm, enterprising trendcaster, or regular person on the internet, per Elizabeth Goodspeed on “aesthetics” and the state of visual culture:

The impulse to describe images by “aesthetic” (a term that once described philosophical ideas about beauty and perception that now functions as shorthand for a recognisable visual vibe) emerges naturally from this way of seeing: once images are encountered as clusters instead of singular works, identifying their category becomes part of the experience of looking itself. The classification of an image shifts from a scholarly or critical exercise to a participatory social activity … Naming [has become] a way of forcing coherence onto this dispersed material.

The essay then ventures into a bit of art history and the naming of various movements/periods, from Fauvism to art deco to lesser-known ones like “austerity binge” (!), lingering over the relationship between aesthetic and affiliation — AKA, there’s nothing terribly new being argued here, but there are worse ways to spend one’s scroll time than putting the mind through some familiar paces.

Overall, the piece made me think about about how an obsession with pattern-matching has infiltrated every level of discourse, visual or otherwise (conspiracy theories, trendpiece industrial complex, “vibe checks” galore). Like of course it doesn’t feel like much advancing of thought is happening in civilization in general; we’re still a bunch of confused robots spending all our energy trying to figure out what it is we’re even looking at.

For the literary pattern-matchers among us: What comes after the trauma plot? Vulture’s Gideon Leek takes a stab at defining the post-trauma plot as embodied by a few recent novels, noting that “The trauma plot was characterized by repression; the post-trauma plot is all about obsessive expression.” In a word, it sounds like the latest spate of novel protagonists are crushingly self-aware (which is probably good in saving us, the reader, a lot of time) but also they’re more than a little annoying about it? (Related: I’d absolutely read any and all literacy criticism about the changing role of alcohol and drugs as characterization / plot devices, in the style of that Sloane Crosley essay on literary boozing, given the new norms of sobriety in culture. What’s a main character to do if they aren’t busy repressing stuff for the first third of the novel?)

Meanwhile, as the rest of us are still working over the finer points of Parul Sehgal’s original 2021 critique on the trauma plot, Parul herself dove into the phenom Gisèle Pelicot memoir, situating the book within the context of France’s memoir-driven #MeToo movement and daring to evaluate Pelicot in an actual authorial capacity re: her grasp of narrative control. Lest we forget that the ripest fruits of literary criticism so often do just come about from wondering out loud: But is the book any good????

So many L’s to O L, so little time…

• Have belatedly learned that Arthur “Prof. Happiness” Brooks moved his column from The Atlantic to The Free Press this year. Given his pre-happiness career, this actually makes perfect sense (derogatory)!
  

• “Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. contains quotes made up by A.I.” I mean….. Are you shocked? Is anyone shocked? Does anyone who writes about AI seem to not understand that they are all irredeemably ridiculous for allowing such oopsies? I’m so bored by all these AI scandals, man…
  

• The NYT is merging their Audio and Video departments into one “Shows” Department, though probably what every company should invest in is an almighty Clipping squad. Just imagine: Little Barbaros everywhere…
  

• Among the directives for clients who would like to book Choupette — yes, the late Karl Lagerfeld’s beloved cat / heir — for a shoot: “There must be no noise on set, and no one may take photographs aside from the photographer. Also, Choupette must not be shot from above. Shooting from human height … is the classic amateur pet-owner blunder.” Of course! Oh and obviously, Choupette only works with animal-cruelty-free brands.
  

• And finally: “For there to be a critical conversation about an art form at large, there has to be shared experiences. If only a few hundred people get to eat at Noma each year, then that’s an inside baseball conversation that a infinitesimal elite group of people can access. The rest of us are on the outside scratching our heads wondering why every one is nutting themselves over gárûmş while the chef is beating his cooks when on their face garums seem no different than 3 Crabs Fish Sauce.” Of course, Eddie Huang on food criticism in light of the new NYT list of the 100 best restaurants delivers.

Join Yu & Me Books and Warm Clay Co. for a delightful hands-on workshop, where you’ll learn to design and sculpt your own tiny book charm. All materials provided—just bring your love for craft and tiny things! June 13th, 7-9pm at Yu & Me Books, $75.00pp

“Middlebrow is a culture podcast hosted by comedians, Dan Rosen and Brian Park.

“you guys have on the most amazing guests, the only podcast hosted by men that I listen to <3<3” -katieizzy2011

Listen and find out for yourself! You can find us on Spotify, Apple, Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts.”

Stuff2Discuss: My Q&A with Susan Orlean for Puja Patel’s new fiefdom, the gnarliest part of Moby Dick thus far, + an art show off Wooster with the most glorious quality of light you must experience in person…

There’s a new arts magazine on the scene focused on creative work and the creative process — which sure sounds like it has the potential to be unbearably fluffy, until you factor in former Pitchfork editor-in-chief Puja Patel at the wheel. The publication is called Totei, it’s free to read, and there are no advertisements (the founder is the investor and philanthropist Gaurav Kapadia, who “wanted to launch a high-quality publication that focused on artistic creation, but was also easily accessible to readers.” ← Which, wow! You just really never read that combination of words together anymore, eh?).

For the magazine’s launch, I had the pleasure of interviewing Susan Orlean (hence the random deep cut reference a few weeks ago lol) last fall, and the resulting Q&A — on her latest memoir and, amongst other things, interviewing technique, which was quite meta — is also live now. This was such a great excuse to talk shop with one of the journalistic masters; I loved the way Susan held forth on how to develop a “posture of quiet confidence” when one goes into the field as an outsider, or how she’s noticed that subjects open up way more when you’re taking notes vs. recording them on tape (to say nothing of shoving a camera in their face).

Anyway, between this convo and Totei’s launch overall, I’m feeling quite optimistic about the potential of the profile/deep interview form to get into really niche process-y how-they-do-it territory, which I suspect will only gain currency as the rest of the culture shifts toward quick-hit Automationville.

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I don’t know why I’m still so cringed out when reading whichever rich/famous people’s digital communications are circulating in the public sphere at the moment, but my real takeaway from Reeves Wiedeman’s (hopefully) definitive explainer on the Justin Baldoni/Blake Lively mess re: It Ends With Us is how moronic everyone comes across in their text messages. You would think that like, on a literary level, written communications such as texts or emails would fold nicely into the flow of prose when you’re reading what is essentially more written communication (a magazine article). After all, a central problem with writing dialogue or conveying quotes is that you can’t actually write the way people speak; everyone understands implicitly that it looks crazy.

Arguably the whole premise of literature (see: Victorian novels, Paul’s epistles in the Bible) is letter-based, but it seems these digital micro-dispatches we dash off with our fingies on our phones are just so horrific for the reading eye to behold outside of their specific original context. (For example, on most occasions, I actually really despise it when someone, especially if I don’t know them well, sends me a screenshot of one of their text convos — just show me a nude while you’re at it if you’re already revealing all your emoji-based intimacies??). (<-I mean that’s a really extreme grumpy take and probably not in the majority opinion. Also if you are a friend I am not talking about you! Probably!!!)

But yeah back to Baldoni/Blake. I think we can all agree by now that here were two people who couldn’t have handled an afternoon shopping together, much less making a $300 million movie about domestic abuse, so the real journalistic coup here lies in showcasing just what kind of delusional texting was occurring on all sides. By the time I got to the financial backer texting “Right now I am in the mindset of my name is Onigo Montoya” [sic] I felt in my bones not only affirmation that Hollywood elites are dumb as rocks, but also that they never seem to have any references to anything besides the same three movies and Game of Thrones?

A few recent links regarding the conundrum of the writer’s life…

First, Scratch interviewed a few of the writers on Substack who aren’t the same 7 you’ve been hearing about (Deez Links of course being the exception as both indie darling and commercial success); I thought it was quite illuminating when they talked about how hard it was to actually move off Substack as a platform if you want to go to Ghost, Beehiiv, etc.:

How easy or difficult was the process of leaving? This includes migrating existing subscribers, moving their financial information over, any new backend tech issues you encountered, etc.

FC: Full disclosure, it was a nightmare. But the reason it was a nightmare was fully because of Substack. Their data export is terrible, and they give you almost no data aside from subscribers and the words you’ve written. I lost every single paywall, every lede image. Formatting was a mess. Subscriptions duplicated. There were payment issues. It took about six months for me to stop fielding regular questions or issues from subscribers. Most of the issues I had could have been avoided if Substack’s data export was better, but that’s just another way they keep you dependent on their platform — by withholding your own data and IP from you.

I wrote something a few years ago along the lines of how a good newsletter exit strategy is hard to find, which was merely based on the premise of “but what happens when you want to quit and everyone’s already paid for those annual subscriptions.” So it seems the whole monetized direct relationship thing is hairy in many ways. For now, the best option for getting off one’s current newsletter platform at least seems to be 1) Be Max Read, or someone of that caliber, and 2) Get courted by Patreon to switch over. (I support getting of the bag but I’m not sure I want all those emails about every subsequent creator that Read Max now “recommends” on Patreon; wow suddenly Substack Notes doesn’t seem that annoying anymore?) Anyway some Patreon bucks doesn’t really solve the problem of how to fully but easily own your relationship with your audience, but hey it’s hard to build your own hamster wheel!

Secondly: Matthew Donovan wrote an interesting response from his reading group to that Josh Kline essay on the ruin of American art (the main link that took you to the PDF has since been taken down, it appears!) where he articulated “the minor-artist position” in a way that feels refreshing in a time where the image of the ultra-sponsored creative life seems to be the only mode worth aspiring to:

The minor-artist position is not a post-collapse hypothetical. Some of us are already there. Some of us have been there since before the word for it existed. Where we came from, becoming a writer wasn’t an option. Some of us did it anyway, and I still don’t know how. I don’t know how long it lasts. I don’t know what I go back to if it stops. I have a friend I have coffee with who tells me we are lifers, that we have always lived on nothing, that this is fine. We laugh. It’s not fine, life is “grotesquely expensive.” We laugh anyway.

And author Geoffrey Mak nicely added to Matthew’s post on Notes, noting (heh), “This might be a call to cultivating a life as a minor writer.” Both things extremely invigorating to read if the sound of your own (hamster) wheels is making you crazy.

Third: Julia Carpenter showed me this newsletter post, A Year in the Life of a Novel, from author Laura Van Den Berg, after she (Julia) and I got lunch this week in FiDi. We were talking about big projects and the value of putting them on “simmer” in the back of our heads from time to time, and this ‘letter from LVDB is a fantastic endorsement of that strategy. Also there’s just a lot of great process-y detail in there — more than enough to remind us all that the Work is It.

Finally… 👀

Pregnant? Trying? Screaming, crying, throwing up? Read Amanda Hess’s memoir SECOND LIFE: HAVING A CHILD IN THE DIGITAL AGE, a story about technology’s dark influence over reproduction that Vulture called “an unexpected page-turner” and “as vulnerable as it is sharp.” Now in paperback.

New Yorkers! The WNBA is back, and so is Defector Media’s WNBA-themed comedy show, Ten Minute Quarters, at Littlefield in Gowanus on Monday May 18. There’ll be games, predictions, giveaways, and a lineup of hilarious comics from Comedy Central, HBO, and the Late Late Show. Go to defector.com/wnbashow for tickets, and use code LETSGOLIBS for 10% off.

Cuttino Mobley, Brandon Bass, Leon Powe, Al Harrington, Monta Ellis, cmon…those guys were awesome. I love guys like that. Listen to the Nothing But Respect podcast hosted by Harry Krinsky and Patrick Redford. Part of Defector Media.

You have to let them do this, you cannot interfere, you cannot let the fear in your heart overcome your restraint. Then you wait. You must be patient. Soon, if you played your hand correctly, the queen will be dead. Or so Wirecutter promises.

Un petit oiseau told me recently that getting your wedding into The New York Times Vows requires, at minimum, a 90-minute interview and a round of fact-checking, which makes this recent Vows wedding announcement even more bizarre to behold. While I’ve also heard that Vows loves a little “hardship element” in one’s love story, the extensive focus on the groom’s Adderall addiction, which apparently derailed the original wedding, is definitely………… a choice.

Is it a brave, vulnerable choice? Perhaps a somewhat punitive one? (One thinks of the typical one-sided Notes App mea culpas posted by many a cheating pro athlete or TikTokker, so often communicated with verbiage suggestive of We And Her Lawyer Agreed I Have To Post This). Personally I can’t imagine the worst period of my life used as a plot twist (at least not for free!!!) for what’s supposed to be a happy announcement, especially when the narrative material of the father’s complicated trip to cross the Iranian border is right there? But me, I’m impossible to please. I’m not out here at night railing Vows on my phone to help me sleep, after all…

“If I were on the Chris Brown PR payroll, I would suggest he just cop to all of BROWN being AI, because if not, he’s got bigger problems,” writes Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre, and that’s honestly not even in the Top 3 Best Quips in his review of the musician’s never-ending comeback. I liked how this piece gives those of us who’ve checked out on CB for a long time a way to understand this phase of Brown’s career and the narrative machinery at work, especially in the context of all the general superstar biopic chatter that’s been in the air with the famously Jackson family-backed Michael.

I watched the latter recently (in what felt like a fair ethical trade-off) at a friend’s house who was streaming a pirated version of it at home. It wasn’t unentertaining; I found it spooky how compelled I was by both the predictable musical biopic razzle dazzle and also the unsubtle positioning of MJ as a guileless, ever-stunted child. (This is a small spoiler, but the scene of physical abuse depicted early on with the child actor Juliano Valdi as young Michael was honestly one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen on a screen? Did anyone else feel that way?) The play for pathos there felt literally and figuratively violent, and while this Pitchfork review reaffirmed my decision to continue not caring about Brown, it does seem important to try to figure out why things appeal the way they do.

Curbed writer Anne Kadet (who also writes the charmingly provincial Café Anne newsletter) got to the bottom of why all those trendy internet brand storefronts seem to pop-up in packs — and turns out, it’s not so much due to a kind of grassroots Airspacey effect as it is notably because of one single NY-based “retail platform” called Leap that is responsible for 28 storefronts in four hotspots around the city, including the Bombas, Leset, Alohas, Frankies Bikinis, etc. of it all:

While a shopper wandering down the block might experience it as an eclectic mix of small brands, the boundaries between stores are, in fact, quite porous. Some Leap employees bounce between different brands up and down the street … And by pooling the sales data from all 11 Bleecker storefronts, Leap can help the brands decide what to sell. “We can actually say, ‘We know the Bleecker shopper buys a lot of extra smalls, they buy a lot of black, they buy a lot of athleisure,’” says Levy. The data also suggests new brands that would complement the existing mix. When Leap noticed Frankies Bikinis was doing well on Bleecker, it lured in another upscale swimwear brand, Australia’s Bond-Eye, installing it one door down from Frankies and creating what may be the start of a little swimwear district.

The piece also gets into a commercial broker who’s making the UES feel younger and adequately Reformationed, as well as a good old fashioned real estate company that’s making Williamsburg (complimenary) well, Williamsburgy (derogatory). Talk about that kicker, though.

Madison Huizinga’s dispatch in her newsletter Cafe Hysteria about leisure as the dream job made me think about the appeal of Dua Lipa and Anthony Bourdain (speaking of biopics) as hyper-influencers in a more cohesive way:

The brand is about abundance - about being a student in life. Dua is the final realization of a European pop star - embodying truly equal parts work and play, eschewing contemporary it girl capitalist side ventures (i.e., a shoddily-made skincare/makeup brand) in favor of promoting cultural and literary fluency, not likely for any large monetary profit. It’s all very cool …

Dua Lipa’s endurance as not necessarily a pop singer, but a pop emblem, reminds me of the resurgence of Anthony Bourdain in mainstream zillennial culture. Whether it’s an image of him smoking a cigarette at a Parisian bistro, slurping noodles on the streets of Hanoi, or diving into the turquoise Med, Bourdain has become a similar symbol of informed, pleasure-forward living.

Something to think about as the ultimate season of leisure performance (normies call it “summer”) crashes down upon us…

(Also related: between performative leisure and performative intelligence, has relevance become synonymous with showmanship?)

Finally, here’s a particularly fun story I got to help work on at Highsnobiety: we sent photographer Billal Taright and writer Hayley J. Clark into Donald Judd’s Spring Street studio to get an up-close look at the various accoutrement of the artist’s domestic life — and, as an extra touch, had Judd’s son Flavin give us the backstory on some of the objects, which we published as the captions.

To the surprise of no one, the man was exactingly intentional about his taste in furniture and art, but I was tickled to also get insight into what Donald Judd must have been like as a father. A choice sample: “These chairs are an example of what to do when given a design task: You need to buy chairs for your toddlers, but all the available options are made of garish plastic. What do you do? Get 19th century Thonet.” Oh, well of course!

When it comes to the wild and seemingly exotic world of Olympic-level athletes competing while on performance-enhancing drugs — to what end, you ask? Turns out, this question is the best part of the story! — there’s literally no one I’d want to explain everything to me than Chris, especially considering his famous journey into the world of human augmentation in the form of leg-lengthening procedures (you’re welcome, Materialists!). He also writes the health and wellness newsletter Heavies, so truly, this story could not be a better cut of ribeye for Chris to sink his teeth into.

With the Enhanced Games beginning May 24 in Las Vegas, Chris and I took a walk around our neighborhood in Brooklyn last week to discuss his reporting — which involved 40-ish interviews and resulted in an 8,000-word initial draft for GQ — plus the question of whether athletes make good interviewees.

When did you first take an interest in the Enhanced Games and think, I should write about this?

After I finished the leg-lengthening piece, I was on the hunt for whatever the next body augmentation thing was going to be. In order to do that, I listened religiously to Joe Rogan. Then two of the founders of Enhanced went on there, and they were talking about, like, “We’re going to juice everyone to the gills, and we’re going to try to shatter world records and make all this money.” It was the kind of thing where a million magazine writers were immediately going to chase it, and they kind of did.

So I got in touch with the lead guy, Aron D’Souza, and was like, “Hey, you should let me write it. Here’s where I stand. I love weird body shit. Let me be the magazine journalist to do the big feature story on you.” Then on Valentine’s Day 2025, I got this invite to go to a penthouse on the east side of Manhattan. It was near where the weird Trader Joe’s is in the 50s or whatever. I took the elevator up; weird, weird vibes the whole way around. There were beautiful men on TRT all around me.

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Some mornings, I pour it all into thermos to sip on the train to the office. My current experiment now is pushing the limits on how much tofu I can cram in. I started off with ⅓ of a regular 16oz pack, but then when I realized that I can’t really taste or feel the tofu as it goes down, one could easily up it to ½ a pack per morning. BUT I COULD KEEP GOING. What if I end up consuming a whole pound of tofu every morning for breakfast? Has Joe Rogan tried THAT?

Did you have a chance to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 over the weekend? I’ve been dying to discuss. My chief complaints — because what would the point of releasing a follow-up to a millennial touchstone on work culture and magazine publishing be otherwise — are as follows (spoilers abound):

• Andy’s love interest, played by Patrick Brammall, and that whole storyline was so boring that I only ever felt paroxysms of anger whenever he came onscreen. CERTAINLY not desire, or even pretend happiness that Andy has found, what, a bland real estate guy to, what, answer her text messages? I thought this was a franchise about ASPIRATION, sorry to Patrick Brammall! Given how endlessly optimized every second of runtime was for product placement or referencing the first movie, this whole part seemed like a waste of everyone’s time and retinal capacity. I don’t even think it would have been some radical choice to let Andy be successful mid-career without having a partner or spouse — there was so much going on otherwise that I doubt we would have even noticed.
  

• The default to “good billionaire owner, bad billionaire owner” trope. The plot around Runway’s future as a magazine felt appropriately ripped straight from the Condé cafeteria, set into motion with the death of the S.I. Newhouse character and the rising cultural power of Jeff Bezos Justin Theroux’s character, who wants to buy the magazine for his new girlfriend. (Around this time last year, rumors were flying around that Bezos was actually considering buying Vogue as a wedding present for Lauren Sanchez). The resolution of having MacKenzie Scott Lucy Liu’s character step in and buy the magazine instead (and of course, bequeathing Miranda and her team total editorial control) was such a conventional fantasy that I think I snorted out loud in the theater. I don’t suppose I expected Runway to turn into a like, a subscription-backed media co-op, but it’s annoying that even in our wildest fantasies, no one has a neater solution for the future of media.
  

• To that point: I did think it was interesting for this second movie to continue on the theme of the “impossible media job.” In the first movie, the whole bit centers on Andy rising to meet the demands of her impossible job as Miranda navigates her own impossible job (with Emily muddling along somewhere in between). In DWP2, the actual impossible job broadens out to Saving The Magazine. Instead of the mercurial but ultimately contained constraints of one demanding boss, everyone at Runway is forced to work together and kowtow to the moneyed interests who actually rule the roost. The joke seems to be that the Miranda Priestly of DWP1 was actually more of a comrade in the trenches than anyone ever imagined. Quite the positive spin for Anna Wintour’s legacy; a bit of a buzzkill for the entire fantasy underpinning the DWP-iverse in the first place.

The best parts:

• The implication that Miranda Priestly had some kind of DEI training off-screen. This was honestly the most successful (new) joke in the movie
  

• The spotlight on Milan as the European fashion capital (or at least where they do Vogue World) over Paris — now that is the international stroke of spon-con I would like to know more details about
  

• Simone Ashley, who looked so incredibly good at all times
  

• Tina Brown’s cameo at the Hamptons tablescape (which she wrote about here, making the shoot sound so deliciously unglamorous)
  

• The specificity and realism of Andy’s $350K book deal; I was like mmm you know what that’s probably absolutely correct.
  

• The part where Meryl as Miranda gets very very close to articulating something interesting about fashion magazine-making as a philosophical pursuit of beauty and human effort. It almost scratches the itch of making her job (or any job) feel like it actually is this noble pure thing — cut to her purring in the cab later about how much she loves work, unabashedly and unapologetically — but I was thirsting for something a little more clear-eyed about beauty’s relationship to money. That’s probably the biggest question that the movie provoked for me: Has beauty (that is, beautiful magazines about beautiful clothes) only ever really existed to serve the rich (billionaires, Dior, all the faceless VICs we serve in the end)? And if so, what actually makes that endeavor still worthy in the end? Surely Miranda Priestly has something fantastic to say about that.

Mostly I left the movie very curious if Lauren Weisberger is very, very rich now. Per her update in Vogue, she currently lives on a fishing boat in the Bahamas, so it seems yes but also she still has to like, use Zoom for work, so maybe there’s only one “very” to be deployed as a descriptor.

Actually okay, the final thing I’m curious about regarding all this DWP mania and the Met Gala tonight is……..is the fact that Anna Wintour can both align herself and the magazine with A) a movie that makes very obvious fun of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in no uncertain terms and also B) still have Bezos/Sanchez on as chief sponsors of her little fundraising event the only proof we need that she is first and foremost the GOAT? Or does Bezchez simply happen to have a way better sense of humor that we give them credit for?

Micro Party Report: Gabbing with Gloria + CULTURED’s Cult 100 Gala

Finally, in honor of tonight’s festivities, I bring you a micro dispatch from a different gala and overall bizarre day I had last week: On Thursday afternoon, I found myself trundling over to the Upper East Side with an extra pair of heels and not a clue in the world when I might get to go home. First stop was Gloria Steinem’s apartment, where Warby Parker was convening a veritable summit meeting between Gloria and Lena Dunham.

If you read the Vogue recap here, you’ll note that at one point, Gloria proposed a not-that-rhetorical question on whether anyone is being asked if they are a “feminist” anymore. Unfortunately I was sitting nearby and said “no” to myself accidentally loudly that Big G zeroed in and asked me what I meant (thank you Vogue for not including that part). I so wish I had said something like, well the standard for moral purity is so high these days that if you identify by a certain label, all of your past present and future actions will be judged against it; instead I was like, ummmmmmm it’s kind of a dated term? which I do not recommend for one’s likely only interaction with the most prominent activist of our time.

It was very, very bizarre to be inside her actual apartment; I was too scared to use the main bathroom because looking at Gloria Steinem’s tub felt kind of illegal? (Later, some people were sitting on the edge of her bed and taking photos; this is just me but if I were a 92-year-old icon I would probably throw everyone in jail for doing so.) Of her decor, I’ll say this: there was a lot of elephant stuff, including one random mylar balloon in the shape of an elephant, cut loose and trapped against the ceiling. Rather whimsical!

After the talk, I very generously got a lift from Lena and her team to the CULTURED gala at the Guggenheim, which is a place I have been dying to experience as a party venue…but alas. I guess I kind of visualized that everyone would be walking up and down the spiral, maybe shouting across the way once you spotted so-and-so, but as it turned out, you couldn’t bring any glassware or drinks up past the atrium, so we were mostly condemned to the over-crowded pit. It was the first time I’ve ever been to a thing where celebs are just free range out in the open like that, and it was funny to see how everyone was moving extremely carefully lest an errant elbow knock down Kaia Gerber walking by. Mostly I was just congratulating myself on mastering the logistics for the day: I’d gotten a long-overdue haircut in the morning, worn my dress (borrowed from a friend’s label, Gauntlett Cheng) under a blazer with flats to Gloria’s, changed into (also borrowed) heels in the car, and managed to stow everything in a giant tote bag at coat check upon arrival. (I also borrowed this purse from Susan Alexandra — not linking for affiliate just out of gratitude lol — which was perfect as a conversation starter and as a lightweight bag that doesn’t flop around on your shoulder or require being hiked up all night.)

Someone later asked me if the party was fun, and I had to think about it and say that it wasn’t fun in a conventional way, in that no one was dancing (the acoustics of a museum in the shape of a spiral, it turns out, are total ass) or like, doing fun substances that I could see. (To get anything stiffer than prosecco, you had to cross the oceania of the atrium to find the martini bar by the ice sculpture, which I touched just to make sure it really was ice, which in hindsight must have looked like some real country mouse shit.) One of the most unexpected belles of the ball was undeniably the author Emma Cline, who looked like a third Fanning sister in real life and appeared to have brought Nathan Fielder as her date. (I asked a mutual friend if she would mind introducing us; we circled the unofficial receiving line for a while before giving up.) Everyone was mostly just looking and pointing at everyone else; whenever I ran into someone I knew, usually another writer, my pretty useless opener was “Did you know there’s a coat check?” Shortly after 10pm, it died down and I went outside to chat with a few more friends before hopping into one of the waiting cabs. That was a nice touch, I decided. One should always have an easy way out when going back to reality.

I want to take a chance to give a special thank you to Ruth Ann Harnisch, whose support of Deez Links (and Hate Read!) has been nothing short of life-changing. Quite possibly the most obvious and under-covered story in media right now is the extent to which Ruth Ann has been championing so many voices in indie media following her own career in journalism. She gets it, and thus she makes it easier for the rest of us to construct the media landscape we wish to see.

Looking ahead to the next year, I want to pay it forward and to make things easier for readers who are college students, or who are in their first few years of their career, or who are dealing with a layoff or job hunt that’s stressful enough in itself. If you’d like a comp year to the Deez, please don’t hesitate to email me delia@deezlinks.com (or reply to this email), and I’ll get you set up, no questions asked. I’m just happy you’re here, and very thankful to all of the subscribers who make this all possible.

xoxo delia

Something strong is circulating in the water per recent portrayals of weddings in pop culture: Earlier this month, ELLE’s Erica Gonzales wrote about why weddings are descending into chaos on our screens right now as a response to The Drama and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and that was all before the Nate-Cassie wedding fiasco that unfolded on Euphoria last weekend. There’s definitely a consumer porny aspect of it; a wrecked wedding dress or the ability to witness an extravagant wedding (set) get ruined certainly scratches a special patch of schadenfreude in the exact opposite way that the wedding as plot device once functioned in ancient Greek comedies to symbolize union and closure.

I also liked reading Halima Jibril’s piece for Dazed, which reexamines the marriage plots of Materialists, The Drama, and the new season of Beef (which I found so boring! Any critic who says Beef is “back and better than ever” is wrong! It is, as Variety’s Alison Herman put it, overcrowded, unfocused, and unnecessary. A huge waste of Charles Melton, tbh). I think Jibril is exactly right in that marriage has become the perfect lens with which to parse ideas about isolation and loneliness.

After Emma reveals her darkest secret, Charlie proves himself hypocritical and disloyal, yet she still wants him. Is it love? Is it relief at no longer having to hide her past? Or is it, as the film suggests, that Emma has no one else? Like Materialists, The Drama left me wondering whether Emma ever really believed she could leave Charlie when the alternative was not freedom, but isolation.

Beef season two pushes this narrative even further. It’s not just that these couples only have each other, but that everyone outside the marriage begins to feel like a threat … But as Josh, Lindsay, Ashley and Austin continue to meddle in one another’s lives – trying to hurt, expose, destroy and eventually save each other – their emotional walls begin to come down. They become more honest, more vulnerable and more self-sacrificing than they ever were inside their sealed-off couples. In Beef, it is only by rupturing the closed circuit of marriage that they are finally able to express their full humanity.

This marriage vs. isolation dichotomy (or even the idea of marriage as one big institutional coping mechanism for individual isolation) does seem to illuminate the tenor of our modern anxieties around it, especially since its economic appeal is less dominant (though never not part of the equation). The rub, of course, is when marriage inevitably proves to be a vehicle for its own brand of loneliness, as every other piece of culture tries to remind us. No wonder that in our movies, TV shows, and our imaginations, the act of wedding resembles less a joyous rite of passage and more so the ritual of an ancient doom cult.

Ever since the New York Dept. of Sanitation released their line of “limited-edition” merch from the “compost collection” (NYDS SS26?), I’ve been thinking about the proliferation of that particular font and its insinuation of a kind of crunchy handfeel — then came across Elizabeth Goodspeed’s 2023 piece for Port magazine on the commercial rebirth of counterculture via the Whole Earth Catalog aesthetic, which identifies that iconic typeface as “the psychedelic mainstay Windsor … itself a resurgence of a typeface designed during … the Arts and Crafts movement,” amongst many other influences the magazine had over contemporary visual culture:

Companies hawking everything from yoga mats to skincare have embraced the aesthetics of the Whole Earth Catalog, enticing consumers into a commercialised nirvana. Spend enough time scrolling and you’ll come across squares of grainy multicolour backdrops punctuated by delicate linework, each tile offering a roadmap to navigating emotions, introspective tools, or guiding affirmation … The original intent behind these repurposed formal motifs – to weave together the logical and the mystical, challenge societal norms, and encourage profound personal transformation – feels increasingly overshadowed by a simpler, more marketable message: buy this product and be better

As Goodspeed pointed out on X, seeing AI companies actively co-opt that look and feel seems par for the course amid the Anthropic-ization of AI branding with cozy earth tones and faux connotations of the handmade. It reminds me of the whole DTC millennial start-up craze that so depended on the corporate Memphis look, which made all those brands seem childishly simple to entrust with our lives. Little did we know! Or maybe we did, but such savvy design compelled us anyway…

Questions I still have…

• How did The Yale Review manage such a killer lineup for their summer issue? And which are we reading first: Lauren Oyler on her AI boyfriend or Sheila Heti on her chatbot?
  

• Apparently 1/3 of top publications on Substack contain AI-generated content, but unfortunately Taylor Lorenz is not naming names… “Just two large Culture publications account for roughly three-quarters of AI content in that category.” Shall we guess?
  

• Greta Rainbow went long on that Book of the Month campaign, asking the question that a lifetime of grade school-sanctioned Pizza Hut certificates and library summer read-a-thons have tried to crack for a millennia: Is it even possible to make reading seem “cool”? (A lot of good publishing industry factoids in here, the most interesting to me being that Book of the Month controls the supply chain so well that they print their own books, and you can tell the difference!)
  

• Can it even be called “fame” if it’s not happening to a human person? So I wondered while reading Teddy Brown’s dispatch on the virtual influencers and “identity cosplay” in The New Yorker. I think: popular, yes, in-demand, yes. But my sense is that real celebrité inherently requires a sense of human scarcity — the thrill is in Taylor Swift’s impossible ubiquity + mortal coil combo (the idea of her aging, falling in love, dying, etc.). But in the near-future, saying a virtual influencer (or, as is more often the case, an AI pornbot) is “famous” might just feel like saying Coca Cola is famous. But perhaps reading Oyler or Heti this summer will change my mind!

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Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Orleans car crash conspiracy investigation: Worth The Read? (<- Rebranding this because it doesn’t feel right to make any corporate comms account contend with the “longass” descriptor” ) Hard yes. I had every intention to skip over this one while flipping through The New Yorker issue on a long train ride on Friday — the culture was feeling almost too PRK-saturated for a second there (my lobster too buttery, my steak too juicy, etc.) with the roll-out of his new book — but figured I’d at least skim the first few paragraphs to see if I could pick up any lede writing tips.

The story itself is very, very wild — if PRK hasn’t already sold the film rights on this one, I’m not above quitting my life to launch a production company and snag them myself. The reporting is phenomenal, too, but I most admired the way such a sprawling piece — which centers on a handful of principal characters, the trucking industry, personal injury law, post-Katrina NOLA economics, and an intricately choreographed scam where people are crashing cars into semi trucks on the highway on purpose — starts off with the widest lens possible.

Instead of, say, plunking you down in NOLA and introducing you to the shady stuntwoman-turned-personal-injury-lawyer or the main “slammer” who drives a cream Cadillac Escalade (the “meet the main character” lede), or beginning with a lecture on like, the history of insurance fraud through the ages (which would be very New Yorker), PRK first begins with an S tier version of the kind of intro you were taught in grade school to never attempt: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to crash into a tractor-trailer?

There’s a reason why so many of us had the instinct to start every elementary school essay with that kind of question: We implicitly know that good storytelling requires us to make contact first with the reader’s own neuroses and experiences before we can get going narratively. By writing a lede that essentially poses that question and then answers it with grisly, data-driven detail, PRK nails the universal horror that serves as the true spiritual driver of the story. Crazy, right? Yeah so there are people who do this on purpose! Let me explain… That’s how he gets you to care about the statistical anomalies around tractor-trailer crashes on a particular stretch of a particular interstate; by the time you, the reader, start connecting the dots about Interstate 10, your own intended commute is screwed. That subway stop has come and gone, baby, and you can’t stop reading.

(While writing the subject line for this newsletter, I almost went with this is the OBAA of lede-writing and then realized that both the Paul Thomas Anderson Oscar-winning movie and this piece belong in the same category of recent excellence in car-driven storytelling. You can’t tell me the American dream isn’t alive!)

For the record, I was on my way to The Met in hopes of seeing the Raphael exhibit, which art world friends warned me would be hopelessly mobbed by lines day and night. I’m happy to report (once I finally finished the piece and got off the train) that at 4:45pm last Friday, there was no line to get into the exhibit (though it was still pretty crowded). I was glad to have read Zachary Fine (the New Yorker’s new go-to art critic, post-Arn?)’s dispatch earlier, which included a helpful directive to make a beeline for the society portraits if you’re short on time.

It was funny, though. The paintings are so technically excellent that I got this unnerving feeling that I was looking at something AI-generated, when objectively I knew these were priceless Renaissance masterpieces. But there was something about Raphael’s total brushlessness (a technical term), the big cartoon-like eyes, the glitchy wrongness of the babies, the unearthly luminosity of all that glowy flesh... (Fine gets at this in his review as well: “A modern eyeball can handle only so much before it starts to derange itself in search of a single painterly quirk or sliver of personality.”) Better to rinse the retinas out in between each gaze by looking at the sketches and their pleasingly mortal traces.

Forget Influencers. Welcome to the World of the ‘Alternatively Influential,’ per Katie Deighton for The Wall Street Journal, which caught my eye for great use of the word demesnes (as in “tastemakers who have real clout in their own demesnes”). This is basically a follow-up to the Brigade story/effect, wherein talent agencies are starting to assemble rosters of “cerebral” talent — basically, influencers who come pre-loaded with cultural currency, taste, or a certain ideology, mass reach be damned.

Overall, it seems like a rather pleasant evolution of the influencer economy; if the “traditional” model of influencership required chasing virality via the social media machine so that you could build up a large enough audience to advertise against, the “alternative” strategy is based on amassing niche expertise or appeal to a specific (and ideally affluent) group of highly loyal followers. So it’s less a game of lowest common denominator, and more so a matter of understanding — than playing up — your edge.

To draw the connection between “quiet luxury” and taxes, Avery Trufelman does make you work for the answer (i.e. listen to a 58-minute talk with author Ray Madoff) but I promise it’s going to make you sound much smarter for your trouble.

I’ve been wondering what Graydon Carter is going to do now that Airmail has been taken off his hands; someone suggested to me recently that maybe he’d get more into the publishing world and start his own indie press, Tyrant Books style. After all, if last year’s tell-nothing memoir was any indication, he isn’t quite ready to burn real bridges or eschew society in any kind of interesting way.

Well, per The Hollywood Reporter, he’s apparently up for his biggest challenge of tastewashing (an instant classic Kyleism) yet: making Anthropic cool by hosting a Cannes party with CEO Dario Amodei. This isn’t a total surprise since the Airmail store is where Anthropic did that moronic Claude “thinking cap” pop-up last October (Graydon sold Airmail later that month). In some ways I do respect industry veterans who can’t stay away from the mix; in other ways I’m like, surely there are other ways to write off one’s Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc residency as a business expense. In other other other ways, finding out that Anthropic is also hiring a regular non-Graydon events lead for a salary of $400,000 sounds about right, seeing as the scarcest skill in Silicon Valley is the ability throwing a decent party. (Though Anthropic buying their way into cultural relevance sure makes the luxury fashion house takeover of every significant cultural event — looking at you, ever single brand on earth at Salone this past month — seem adorable, no?)

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My humble contribution to the Lena Dunham press tour: for CULTURED magazine’s Cult 100 issue, I visited our favorite girl at her home in New York and had a lovely conversation about her new memoir, Famesick, and her overall oeuvre.

While reading Famesick ahead of our conversation, I found myself having a hugely intense reaction. It becomes unnervingly clear, in Dunham’s telling about her Girls years and what came after, that the kind of success that has made her career a kind of millennial gold standard also carried with it a deeply taxing burden on her health and her relationships, to say nothing of the public scrutiny. As a member of the cohort (confessional New York woman writer, amongst others) expected to aspire toward the Dunhamian template, I found her honesty about its costs almost a little too bracing. Later, I told a friend that the memoir did well to essentially cauterize any latent ambition one could have about wanting to work in Hollywood.

It’s an interesting time for Dunham to invite us to revisit those years with her, at a moment when millennial nostalgia practically dictates the cultural agenda, and also when so many aspects of her ambition are revealed to be startlingly prescient — Girls is nearly flawless, yes, but also remember Lenny Letter, the original magazine-as-longform-newsletter??? (At lunch, we talked about Substack, of course, and how Hannah Horvath would have loved the platform <- a detail that makes it in the piece, though some classic Dunham riffing on Hannah’s Substack life was sadly cut: “She would have published a lot at an aggressive cadence and acted like she was running a media empire, but she would have had between 150-300 followers, and that would have been enough.”)

In our conversation and in Famesick, I found it startling how specific Dunham’s memories of young womanhood can be, whether she was recalling the all-white Betsey Johnson set she wore to prom or other important milestones of the 2010s hipsterdom (A perfect quote also left on the cutting room floor when we were talking about her looking back on her old journals: “I have a diary entry that’s like, ‘I tried this amazing new thing at a place called Iris Cafe in Brooklyn Heights … It’s called ‘avocado toast.’”). These kinds of details, this level of noticing, is what sets her art apart, clearly, but I also would like to think that the resulting cover story helped both of us work out a Theory of Lena Dunham and Girlhood, and the way that remembrance, reimagination, and fictionalization work together to give us the kind of double (or triple, or quintuple, etc.) lives that we as artists have the privilege of pursuing.

Give it a read, then give Famesick a read, and tell me what you think?

Monday night, Chris Murphy brought me as his +1 to The Devil Wears Prada 2 (I thought it was just a press screening and brought heels for fun; found out on the way to Lincoln Center it was the world premiere so shoutout to the heels). You should just read Chris’s report on the event to get a sense for what a grab bag of New York society it was who showed up, or how the premiere resembled a veritable Disneyland of brand activations. (My favorite was either the Zillow-sponsored set with a working “Runway” elevator that you could get inside and then be photographed walking out of, or the Diet Coke station where I think you could get a leather soda can holder custom-embossed. “You’re witnessing luxury in the making,” a sign informed me.)

After the movie — more on that soon — we helped ourselves to the buffet and then wandered around the giiiiiant pavilion they’d set up to enclose the Lincoln Center fountain, so that the interior smelled vaguely of pool as everyone milled about, taking photos and looking longingly toward the VIP section that was curtained off (Inside there: Justin Theroux, Amelia Dimoldenberg, nicer charcuterie plates, a fleet of velvet upholstered furniture). The sensation of all movies as now brands and this particular movie’s marketing budget was overpowering; later when I went home — me and my branded Tweezerman tweezers took the train — I read Coleman Spilde’s Salon piece about the campaign, which directed me to the original movie’s original 2006 trailer, which as Spilde points out, was essentially a 3-min clip of just one perfect scene, barely edited down. Less used to be more, it seems.

Some questions I have today…

• Did you read about the media newsletter that was using AI to aggregate other media newsletters incorrectly for $8/month, and then a different media newsletter caught on and broke the news, and then the other media newsletter broke the whole kerfuffle down?
  

• Why is West Coast status anxiety somehow always more fun to read about than East coast status anxiety?
  

• They’ve unleashed TMZ upon DC; could this quite possibly be good for the nation? Have we ever thrown two apex predator institutions like TMZ and the federal government in a pit together like this?

Let’s start with Thursday night, which was such a treat: My dearest Rachel Yang invited me to the new Pietro Alexander gallery in Soho for a staged reading of “Summer with Dianne,” a play written by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld (Netflix’s The Get Down, HBO’s How to Make It in America). The reading was directed by Chloë Sevigny and produced by Rachel and David Potters; the cast included Industry’s Myha’la and Sofia Black-D’Elia (no relation).

I’ve gone to a couple of staged readings before done by friends for funsies; this was my first time experiencing the table read as an industry event, where the room was full of commercial theater and film producers. Rachel and David have been doing these amazing renegade theater readings with their crew via @goodevening.rep for as long as I’ve known them; I think the second time I met Rachel was at a reading they put on inside a menswear store downtown in 2023. (That event was so packed that night that I literally fell to my knees and fainted; some nice Australian girls helped me up). It’s been a point of pride to work with Rachel on Deez Links events ever since. Nothing is better than working with friends, or seeing how they raise the bar for New York’s cool factor every time. PROUD OF YOU RACHIE!!

Then yesterday, while killing time before lunch, I wandered into a few galleries on Henry Street and wound up at Lyles & King, where they were showing photographer Aneta Grzeszykowska’s “Daughter” series. I skimmed the photos before reading the show’s press release, which made for a funny reveal: What at first glance looked like some sweet pictures of two teen girls — maybe sisters? — swimming in the ocean, sitting at the beach, arranging flower crowns on each others’ heads — turned out to be photos of Grzeszykowska herself, wearing a literal mask of her 14-year-old self, along with her daughter. (In this photo, for example, you can see where the edge of the mask is visible along the chin.)

When I looked at the images again, they gave me such a delicious shiver of the uncanny, both from the juxtaposition of Grzeszykowska-as-girl next to her daughter as the “real” girl, and from the tension between her docile, blank-eyed mask of youth and Grzeszykowska’s body — her obviously older hands, for example. The show runs through May 9. Go see it!

Meanwhile, uptown at the Museum of the City of New York, I finally got to see Joe Macken’s model of New York City, which opened last February after Macken became a TikTok sensation. (Per this Artnet story on him, Macken himself had never actually seen the entire model city in one piece until it was displayed at an upstate fair last summer — he’d been stacking the panels in a storage unit, which is some real Doing It For The Love of the Game shit.)

There’s an easy, obvious appeal to Macken’s work: Everyone loves getting their brain tickled by miniatures of the familiar, and New Yorkers are, of course, famously obsessed with new ways of looking at themselves. But I loved loved loved how the museum set up the exhibit so that you could only get physically close to certain edges of the map along the Rockaways, the east side of Jersey, and above the Bronx. There was such a palpable itch for everyone in the room to try finding a better view of all the sexy parts of Manhattan; at least one woman was reprimanded for dangerously too far over the edge, her shadow looming Godzilla-esque on the balsa wood buildings.

But that effort proved amazingly futile. You could pick up a pair of the provided binoculars to try your best to zoom in on the “good bits” — the skyscrapers, the usual landmarks, Central Park. Nevertheless, those familiars remained tantalizingly, pleasingly out of reach. The resulting sensation therefore hewed loyal to both Macken’s own upbringing in Middle Village and to so many people’s experience of the city from an outerborough perspective. The ability to gaze at the skyline — sized down and made so enticingly twee, yes — yet still positioned just slightly of reach? Now that’s the real New York experience.

For the second Sunday in a row, I was distracted all morning by Justin Bieber’s second Coachella set, which I Airplayed to the TV off a short-lived @PopBase upload. Very much hoping The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham gets to write a follow-up to his review of the first weekend’s performance, which got at Bieber’s livestreamed intimate reminiscences perfectly.

This time around, I felt utterly enchanted by the way Bieber cozied up to the gawping, grasping crowd. Instead of being put off by the various anonymous arms snaking around him (so many phones as third appendage) any time he got too close, Bieber leaned in quite literally, at several points, pulling himself into delighted embraces. Cunningham calls Bieber “pop music’s fallen angel;” I had the thought, while watching Bieber cavort with his overwhelmed, largely female adorers with a wattage that not even Billie Eilish could resist crumpling toward, that Bieber felt so much like America’s prodigal ex-boyfriend — irresistable, intractable, yet always so suspiciously redeemable.

Should You Read That Longass Thing: Caity Weaver’s Carbo Quest Edition? Of course. It’s been nearly 12 years since her Gawker appetizer quest at TGI Friday’s; between that and her 2025 NYT Magazine journey to quit sugar at an Austrian detox retreat, I think we can safely say that Caity is our journalistic Odysseus, forever venturing out and trying to thread the Charybdis/Scylla needle between the excesses and ecstasies of American food culture.

Does that not make her our preeminent food writer? Maybe. But even that seems like a vulgar way to describe what it is that Caity does so well; which in this case is relaying a story about bread that is really a story about the restaurant industry, the publicity machine, national ideas of value, and her family. But even on the merit of figurative language alone, she’s running laps around everyone. I was so dazzled by all the descriptions of the bread — likening its coloring to shades of golden retriever was particularly inspired. But even imagine tossing off an aside about salad like this in a cover story decidedly not about salad. What an image!!

The rolls served at Texas Roadhouse (third place in the best-free-restaurant-bread contest by raw votes) are indisputably soft and white, roundly square, and immaculate enough to have possibly made themselves with no outside aid. Seven hundred years ago, a king might have eaten such satin-smooth bread on Easter; the Roadhouse gives it out for free, in portions that are infinite. (The first basket accompanies you to your table, like a fellow guest.) The menu items my husband and I order during our visit are remarkable in their own way—no rabbits stealing the last of the November lettuces by moonlight ever chewed a colder salad than our Caesar—but without question, the free rolls, accompanied by honey-cinnamon butter, are the only items really worth paying for (besides the lovely, big Diet Cokes).

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But I did feel mixed emotions watching him gaze at footage of his young self. For most celebs who pull this “look how far i’ve come” shtick, it works because they’re looking back at a starting point of a great, magnificent rise. For Bieber, that rise has been famously convoluted. It was easy to project a bittersweetness and longing from him for a more innocent time, or a more innocent self. “Baby,” indeed. At this point, Bieber isn’t so much a musician as an embodiment of the millennial id. In that, he always succeeds…

The other night, a fellow millennial friend and I were discussing the experience of having Gen Z colleagues at the office. What we realized is that, whether consciously deployed or not, there’s a real power move pulled any time a young co-worker compliments you, the elder, on your clothes. “Cute skirt,” the 20-something might say. “I love that scarf,” “Cool jacket, man.” (Many of them have not seen Mean Girls, so it doesn’t seem as though they are intimately familiar with the Regina George undertone of this kind of comment.)

Our theory was that for the young person, complimenting your co-worker’s outfit is an easy, generic, and therefore reliable social bid to make in the professional setting. We suspected it is also probably one of the only ways a young person can even imagine relating to an older person. (At least, that’s how I remember it; there was this wild child cool girl who was the HR manager at my first job who wore the most insane outfits — booty shorts and couture, often in the same get-up. I probably wanted to get to know her, but I was so bewildered by her seniority that all I could ever muster up was a quick scan of her outfit that day, where I’d pick one thing to compliment). And if you really drill down into it, it’s highly likely that the compliment itself is a bit less than authentic — more likely than JJ from social or Madlee the assistant actually fucking with your professor-core pashmina is the possibility that they’ve simply noticed it and are verbalizing the act out of social duty.

But what is hilarious, we agreed, was how this compliment lands with us as the “olds” nevertheless. By which I mean: It feels soooooooooooooooooo good when your younger co-worker says they like your outfit. To the degree that it really disarms you? You could be in your most Boss Manager Mode (but in a cool way right) giving orders, slaying dragons, editing da deck, etc. but the minute someone sub-30 tells you they endorse a sartorial choice you made at 8am less so out of any particular fashion-related inspiration, and more so as an ongoing project of surrender to your go-to staples due to a calcifying refusal to learn if you are a spring or autumn or whatever the fuck Kibbe type, the clouds part. Honey-hued sunshine beams down. For a microsecond you are drunk on the validation of the youth.

Then it passes, and you realize with some embarrassment that being the recipient of this kind of polite compliment definitely absolutely means you are viewed as one of the elders, and also these punks probably didn’t even really mean it in the first place. They’re just trying to be nice. Unless??

Anyway: Do what you will with this bit of Deez pseudo-psychology if you happen to want to manipulate disarm your manager or older co-workers at the office this week. It’s tough being the youngest in the office, but as it turns out, you do hold some power. Enjoy it. Wield it responsibly. Make me feel alive again by noticing my jeans tomorrow?

An item I first read about in the perfectly British and gossipy Popbitch newsletter: Buried in a Guardian story on Pet Shop Boys is an amazing quote/dichotomy from Neil Tennant about the common thread amongst the magazines that are actually doing well: “The New Yorker. The Spectator. The Atlantic. The stapled magazine opens invitingly, whereas the instinct of a perfect bound magazine is to close.” Something to think about!

Cake Zine is turning into Steak Zine for a new special issue (TBD whether it is stapled or bound…), which is already a highly pleasing riff on the magazine’s conceit. And from the looks of this essay on the legendary “Cattle Queen” of steakhouse iconography by Rachel Ossip (published in part on Substack and in full on N+1, interesting), the team is taking the subject amazingly seriously. Is Cake running circles around the slate of newish food media start-ups? (They certainly know how to throw a party and assign serious work!)

Whether it’s Gen Z or due to Zohran, there’s certainly a Z-fication of institutional comms in New York. Exhibit A: that tweet about hole-filling.

Exhibit B: The Brooklyn Botanic Garden on what a bad job everyone does every spring re: identifying cherry blossoms correctly.

I suppose I don’t mind this at the local level as long as these places are not trying to totes doggo on fleekify actually important information; please just list your hours in a normal way, etc. The federal government should be banned from this though. Nothing more embarrassing than being a literal world power looking for online clout. Oh wait…

Finally: Did you guys watch this last season of Bridgerton? I kind of thought I was done with the show after suffering Season 3; obviously, nothing will replace the heroic psychosis of watching Season 1 during the first quarantine Christmas (what happened to Regé-Jean’s career though? I thought he was supposed to get Elordi-ed!). But the critics were saying that this season’s Cinderella story (also okay it has an Asian lead so obviously that compelled me too) was actually good, and you know what? I had a nice time with it.

Most interesting to me was how this season (spoilers ahead) was finally actually a little interested in the class of it all; there also is a sudden death of a minor character that seems uncharacteristic for the happily-ever-after Bridgertonian vibe otherwise. There’s much to find fault about the aesthetically and sociopolitially polished universe of Bridgerton — where imperialism, racism, homophobia, and like, bad sex are simply not a thing, to say nothing of that color palette, ugh. But if we are grading on the curve of general Netflix slop, it was kind of interesting to see how the show handled death as the ultimate caveat of everlasting love. Or as Francesca puts it: “What is the point of finding love when your husband will probably die?” I mean, it’s not Shakespeare, but it’s not a bad question!