My second book proposal is now six months in the making, and I’ve finally reached what feels like a reasonable stopping point, despite my inclination to indefinitely tinker and tweak. (I’m probably still going to tinker and tweak.) Not to do that annoying “I hope to share more with you soon!” thing, but, you know, I do hope to share more with you soon—about the book and some other updates I’ve been weighing this year.
In the meantime, it felt like a good time to conduct an informal pulse check. When I worked at Morning Brew, the fancy analytics teams would regularly send out surveys and collect all manner of psychographic reader data about you, like your wildest dreams and most embarrassing moments and, yes, household income. I was swimming in insights, most of which were, as it turns out, wholly irrelevant to whatever I was writing each week. Still, leaving Morning Brew meant kissing that sweet, sweet analytics team and all its learnings goodbye.
So I have two-ish questions for you, if you consider yourself a regular reader, or just someone with opinions.1
Cards on the table, whenever I receive surveys like this from writers, my first thought is always, nobody is thinking about this as much as you are; I do not have impassioned opinions about the cadence of your newsletter. Let the record reflect that I would not be so presumptuous as to assume you are spending your idle time meditating on the precise editorial strategy of one Katie Gatti Tassin’s weekly missives, though if you can muster the strength in your index finger to click a couple times, read on.
No promises that I’ll act on every single finding; unfortunately I am a bit like a toddler in that I am very good at doing things I find interesting and very bad at doing things I find uninteresting.
I am fairly certain that proper survey methodology would proscribe nestling these poll questions within a bunch of explanation and backstory, but I do not abide by the oppressive standards of statisticians.
A quick procedure note: If you’re reading in your inbox, I believe clicking a response will transport you to the web version so your response can be recorded.
How and where you read
We’ll start with an easy one. How did you find yourself subscribed to this fine publication?
And another easy one. Where do you typically read?
Your impeccable readerly tastes
Generally speaking, I send two kinds of newsletters, according to semi-self-imposed rules.
One is an extended link roundup, which functions a little like a news brief with a bunch of analysis and commentary—the more traditional “newsletter” format you might find at an outlet like Morning Brew, my former employer. It’s less about deep or original analysis and more about staying “broadly informed,” whatever that means—although I do of course try to bubble up stories you may not stumble across on your own. Here’s an example.
The other is an original essay, usually inspired by some recent event, discourse, or piece of media (okay, fine, it’s usually reality television). This is the format that allows me to go long on one subject and draw connections between the topic and the systems we operate in everyday. Here’s an example.
I’d love to tell you there’s some grand strategy for when I deploy one format over the other, but in truth I leaned a lot more heavily on the link list in the first couple months of the year when I felt completely tapped out after my talent contract at the Brew ended. I was reading a lot anyway, so compiling (and adding my two cents) on a bunch of news stories that I figured you may be keen to hear about made sense. Eventually I amassed 46 sources that I checked daily and the whole thing spiraled out of control and people kept responding to the emails saying things like, this is way too long; you bring shame upon your family name, etc.
As I regained brain cells and the proper amount of sleep around April, I found myself again far more interested in producing original arguments vs. aggregating. The idea of building an elaborate link list felt a little like homework, while writing a short (is 2,000 words short?) piece every week seemed interesting and manageable again.
So naturally, as the self-conscious producer of this publication, I’m curious about what you prefer. By “prefer,” I mean actually read and enjoy; what has actually inspired you to stick around.
And because I gave myself liberty with the ‘ish’ on “two-ish” questions and we’ve already blown past two:
Sometimes I find we (publishers) hold ourselves to rigorous publishing schedules because we assume our readers are just languishing in a hot-take-drought, desperately refreshing their inboxes awaiting our next promptly scheduled piece. We believe, in short, that you notice when we’re gone. But if my own reading habits are any indication, the amount of material coming my way is overwhelming. I can’t read the stack of magazines on my coffee table as quickly as the postman keeps delivering more, and “read the New Yorker” is practically a job requirement of mine.
So, how frequently do you read (or like to receive) this scream into the void?
That’ll do it. Thanks for playing.
I got to provide a quote for a recent New York Times article about the most recent predictable Sydney Sweeney advertising debacle. The TL;DR of my response was that Sweeney is engineered (or has, maybe more accurately, engineered her career) to slot perfectly into the politicized nudity-and-outrage machine that is the internet, and no-name brands are all too happy to capitalize.
Relatedly, I thought Jennifer Wilson’s latest for The New Yorker—“Have Conservatives Taken Sexy Back?”—was absolutely brilliant and prescient. For example, here’s her
poetrycoverage about Sweeney’s recent lingerie brand activation:
“Inside the SYRN Saloon, which I had entered through batwing doors labelled ‘SS,’ the crowd sang a rowdy rendition of Shania Twain’s ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman!’ I wondered whether anyone there knew that the song had been inspired by drag queens or that, when Twain made her début in Nashville, in 1993, she was shamed for her bare midriff and bed-tousled hair. When I was growing up, in the early two-thousands, ‘conservative’ meant conservative. The right was the party of George W. Bush, abstinence-only sex education, and Christian evangelical teens who recited chastity pledges and wore promise rings under the banner of ‘True Love Waits.’ Now, at Trumpchella, I was sipping a Made You Look margarita while examining SYRN’s Hoedown Throwdown: a three-pack of thongs emblazoned with slogans such as ‘tight jeans, loose morals’ and ‘cowboys ride harder and stay on longer.’
[…]
Finally, Sweeney—blindingly blond—arrived, wearing SYRN’s Date Night Satin Corset in Dew Me blue and Cowgirl Crush lace-ruffle miniskirt. ‘I have a special guest, everybody!’ she yelled into a microphone, before inviting Chase Rice, who performed at the 2022 Turning Point USA festival, onstage to sing his 2012 bro-country anthem, ‘Cruise.’ Next, she brought up the country star Riley Green, who had also performed at that festival.”
We’ve been watching the psychological thriller miniseries The Undoing (2020) on HBO Max this week. I could watch Nicole Kidman float around her dark Manhattan brownstone with that skeptical, squinty look on her face all day.
please note that this is not an open call for you to detail all the strangely specific things you detest about my work or personhood (etc.) though if you feel you simply cannot resist I understand
I just miss the MWK pod. It was introspective and analytical on broader topics that (mostly) women face as we're going through life and learning.
On the which format question, I would have liked a "both" option. I enjoy both formats of your emails.