Rawdoggin' Reality
Rawdoggin' Reality recounts an actual evening drinking with Anthony Bourdain — and uses it as a way into his philosophy: that a shared meal across difference is the simplest antidote to racism. The piece is personal and unhurried, grounding Bourdain's famous restlessness in something specific: his conviction that plans tie you down and curiosity is the point.
Gary's Journey Through Hell
Gary Shteyngart turns a TV writers' room poll, where his Brooklyn twenty-something colleagues picked November and April over his beloved July, into a wry screed in defense of summer. Equal parts real bewilderment ('What the effing eff?') and knowing self-mockery, he reads the generational cold-snap as a way into climate dread, changing bodies, and a youth culture retreating from warmth and exposed skin.
Ottessa Moshfegh's Substack
Ottessa Moshfegh's Substack advice column takes on the anxiety of the unread writer — someone who's kept poems private for fifteen years and wonders if that privacy is self-protection or self-knowledge. Her answer sidesteps the question of quality entirely: good writing, in any form, is irreducibly specific to its author. Ineffable, uncopiable, fingerprinted.
offline crush
Offline Crush argues that Euphoria's divisive final season isn't a creative stumble but the payoff of a Biblical retelling Levinson has been building since episode one. The piece earns its thesis by grounding it in what viewers actually resisted — Rue's turn toward God — and reframing that friction as the point. A genuine reading, not a defense dressed up as analysis.
The Believer Magazine
Marjane Satrapi, in this 2006 interview shared by The Believer in her memory, argues that empathy — not politics — is the real subject of her comics. The exchange is sharp on why small personal anecdotes carry more explanatory power than headlines, and why cultural exchange (Iranians discovering punk before midwesterners did) undoes the assumptions people don't realize they're holding.
i-D
i-D uses the box office run of Backrooms — shot by a 19-year-old — to ask what we actually mean when we call a young artist prodigious. The piece traces the lineage from Welles to Akerman to argue that early creative output isn't anomaly; it's a recurring pattern. The real question is whether youth is ingredient or coincidence.
Good Life
A personal essay reflecting on a deep emotional response to something published by the New York Times, exploring feelings of vengeance and what triggered them beneath surface-level upset.
Low Maintenance
Ben Sinclair reflects on his fondness for blur, drawing from experiences at Paris' Musée de l'Orangerie and its exhibit 'Dans le Flou,' and explores themes of surrendering certitude, embracing the unknown, and returning to his artistic origin in Brooklyn after five months without weed.
