I hate when the party ends :')

Newsletters' biggest night out.

Last night in Manhattan, we threw a little Hate Read party with Substack, which you can read all about in The New York Times (!). We served literal “haterade,” handed out T-shirts that said “I <3 2H8” and packed about 70 friends/haters into The River in Chinatown, where nine of our amazing (and previously anonymous he he he) Hate Read essay authors read from their screeds; the incredible Mary H.K. Choi even treated us to a reading of her own special Hate Read, prepared specifically for the evening. What a gem! What a night!! The wonderful Anna Maria Lopez documented it fully in the photos below…

I’m ummmm still honestly pretty hungover, so I’ll keep this gushy part short: Hate Read has been the most fun project since, well, Deez Links, and I’m so grateful you all indulged me. Hate Read Live!™ was then the perfect encapsulation of so many things I’ve been personally trying to figure out re: the question of “living and doing stuff online but also trying to not feel a dead hole inside my soul amidst the undertaking” (not to mention the general career chaos and resulting existentialism). How is anyone supposed to reconcile the kind of opposing demands of online vs. IRL connection in life?

By throwing parties, yes, but also, I think, by laser-focusing one’s ambition down to “Would this make my friends laugh?” and letting that guiding force always take the lead. Make things a group project! Lean into the chaos of organizing an event within 11 days! (Matt Starr, you’re a party planner extraordinaire and an alchemist) Buy giant packs of Hanes T-shirts from Target with the plan to Sharpie-design them yourself, just in case the screenprinter is late, because the concert tee concept is still going to be funny even if it’s extremely DIY, right? RIGHT. Envision more intimate nights with friends, family and fellow compatriots who are working hard to define this exact weird cultural situation, too, through their own newsletters, podcasts, meme accounts, bylines, entire websites. Dream of bigger venues (and second seasons…) for the events and blogs and discourse to come—trust me, if we could throw a HateReadchella and invite every subscriber, I’d quit everything and do it!—but always always always always always always always always remember that, at the end of the day, it’s only ever about sitting in a bar and sloshing your martini over everything and talking about the things you love. And especially the things you hate.

xoxo delia

---

Photo credits: Anna Maria Lopez / Substack

queen!

:)