How Substack will swallow the inbox
The future is brand-friendly messaging...and also Chinesemaxxing
So if Substack is launching piloting native ads, as Feed Me reported last week, and brands are already flocking to the platform for their own content marketing purposes (see: this roundup from Feb. by Rachel Karten), what’s stopping Substack from expanding their purview beyond writer-driven newsletters and creator content into the much larger, much more lucrative world of email marketing itself?
As any marketing person who’s wrestled with Sailthru, Campaign Monitor, Iterable, Mailchimp, and its ilk, those platforms are pretty much a nightmare to use (and to train anyone to use). Substack has already proved itself a thousand times over as the best, most straightforward UX in the game (anyone who thinks whipping up a quick lil bespoke email-and-payment delivery system of one’s own is suuuupes easy is, frankly, deluded). The company now just needs to be able to deliver emails at an exponential scale, and probably offer some more customizable design templates.
So say they scale up their capabilities 100000x and spin out a shiny Substack Business product, which allows any brand from Balenciaga to Wal-mart to manage their email campaigns and membership programs (AKA paid subs + the subscriber chat), for some meaty premium fee that’s still way less than what like, Sailthru costs. Oh, and if these brands also want some display ads or product placement to show up in their fellow creator-driven Substack newsletters? Well well well, I wonder who’ll be brokering that/I refer you to the first link above. Hope everyone’s prepping some 2026? 2027? brand-friendly content!
This is the last week of the Anthology Film Archives’ monthlong run of their Avant-Garde Ads series; I caught an evening of this last week with Chris Gayomali (with Jack Black in the row behind us?) and we really enjoyed this David Lynch coffee ad in particular. Very weird experience to sit in a theater and be bombarded with 40 ads over an hour—though I suppose that’s not so different than just scrolling through TikTok. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I would mind going to a scrolling screening: Imagine someone curating their feed and showing a little room all of their favorite saved videos, or letting loose and unburdening the secrets of their FYP live. How revealing!
This morning, The New York Times published a huge investigative report on the global surrogacy/trafficking market by Sarah Topol, with a focus on Thai women who traveled to Georgia in order to work as surrogates. The resulting abuse and exploitation, of course, are as horrific as you’d imagine the potential could be, and the story brings to mind two other compulsively read bombshells re: surrogacy and assisted reproductive technologies published this year, which include the NYT Magazine story about MaryBeth Lewis, the 65-year-old woman in a custody battle over her 14th and 15th children, and the wild Wired story about venture capitalist Cindy Bi and her surrogate, Rebecca Smith.
It’s clear that we’re going to see more of these stories amid a time of global pronatalist pressure and population anxiety, not to mention the general heterofatalist vibes, weakening of reproductive rights, rising inequality, and the rising class of affluent would-be parents accustomed to frictionless, customizable, on-demand solutions. “Perhaps it was inevitable that at the collision of social pressure and biological demand, there would be a monetary value on the most vulnerable products — babies,” Topol writes in her piece. If the arc of human history has always centered around reproduction, then of course it’s also always been about keeping fertile women under someone’s thumb. It’s always actually been a trad, trad world!
Really enjoyed reading Minh Tran’s analysis of “Chinesemaxxing” as an aesthetic fad, tracing the ways that trappings of authentic “Chinese-ness”—which is remarkably different from the exoticized “white person’s idea of Chineseness” aspect that once gave everything from chop suey to kung fu its long-standing appeal in America, though the former is still not immune a little orientalist abuse its own—and how Chinese soft power has infiltrated American life as both a niche curiosity (say, getting into TCM as a wellness girly) and fact of mainstream reality (one word: TikTok):
The latest trend I’ve been seeing is known as Chinesemaxxing, a way of being that apes off of the habits of old Chinese men over there and in the U.S. This involves smoking cigarettes, squatting low to the ground, drinking outside, yelling with the fellas, wearing jackets with toggle buttons, and in the words of Nick Mullen, speaking a little Chinese for em. Ten years ago, this would’ve been the fodder for an essay about “cultural appropriation” from some second-generation Asian American who believed that congee was a sacred food or that white people needed permits to enter Asian supermarkets. Thankfully, the times have changed, even if Simu Liu hasn’t realized it yet…
Part of the reason these videos don’t feel like outright mockery is because there’s some kernel of truth and desire in the cosplay. Though things have always been made in China, we are increasingly making ourselves in the image of the Chinese. Labubus hang from our bags, we go for Dim Sum at odd hours of the day (anytime after brunch hours), and we beg our homies to bring back the skinny, flavored cigarettes for the whole team. The most fashionable thing you can do in downtown New York these days is drink a beer on Canal Street, crouched on a low plastic stool in vintage Margiela
Tran’s piece encapsulates what feels to me like an interesting shift for Asian America in particular (which was always more of an Idea of a Demographic rather than any kind of cohesive demographic itself), which has spent the last decade or two successfully assembling itself as a discrete cultural product, in place of anything politically meaningful. For so long, the subtextual appeal of Asian America’s ploy for more power in a pluralist society was in the insistence on its Americanness first (Rachel Chu is just like u and me!!!); with the arrival of Chinesemaxxing (which as Tran notes, follows the modern “trendiness” of Japanese-ness and Korean-ness exports in mainstream as well), cultural fluency in the Asian half of the descriptor appears to hold more potency on a global, or at least internetized stage. To that point: A friend recently joked that it wasn’t “cool” to be one of the “obvious” Asians anymore; if nicheness is now the prize, even in the realm of identity, the Cambodiamaxxers, for example, stand to win big.
Finally, you probably already heard, but…lol:
The Ministry of Words is a teaching collective offering courses in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Fatimah Asghar, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and R. O. Kwon are widely acclaimed, award-winning writers and teachers. The classes will each be four months long, and will start 2/4—the first spring semester will focus on generating work, and the fall semester will be workshop-based (with help, for those who want it, on working toward publication). The application deadline is 1/20. You can sign up for one or both, and there are limited partial scholarships for writers of color. The Ministry of Words will offer cross-disciplinary lectures open to all participants, as well as space for shared online writing sessions that bring together all 3 classes on the weeks they’re not meeting.
By putting this together, Asghar, Rojas Contreras, and Kwon wanted to create a structured place outside of academia for people to work on their writing and craft, a place that’s nurturing and community-fostering and generally supportive and fun. If you have any questions, they’d love to hear from you.
