I did not grow up on Vanity Fair, or Esquire, or any of those lurid, mostly fabricated 9,000 word Playboy interviews with, like, James Caan. My parents only started reading The New Yorker after I left for college — a salutatory embrace of their eldest's journalism degree, akin to how dads become field hockey experts overnight — and I myself didn't pay for a
I miss Fun BlogsTM and one day, when my child is not crying for Funyuns and Pokemon cards, I’d like to do one again. This is lovely appreciation of the genre.
I miss the "old internet" so much - I had so many bookmarks of blogs I'd check daily. Just yesterday I found myself so nostalgic for Videogum and wondering if anything could possibly reach those heights again.
Caity Weaver's opus(es), to me, are the "Best Restaurant in New York" entries with Rich Juzwiak. If one pokes around on gawker you can find links to them (although many are broken there are some backdoor ones that work). I re-read them at least once a year - the one in the basement at Macy's makes me chuckle just thinking about the dusty displays and mis-cut cheesecake.
There is a second series "The Best Restaurant in the World Is: Disney's Epcot Theme Park". Recently she wrote an (amazing) article about going to Morocco and I messaged her on twitter asking if the real Morocco was better than epcot Morocco and we had a short convo that fully delighted me! I felt so excited to talk to her haha
God I miss all those blogs and all those writers :(
Excellent piece. As one who spent the last 15 years in an adjacent blogging space (political) I can relate. The medium began to die around 2014-2015, which was when I did a similar thing you did and shifted to do more journalistic work instead.✌️
"Readers simply don't go to websites to look at articles anymore": Except for the ones who do, like me, here, right now. Pretty much every day, I go to at least a dozen websites to look at articles. We probably are a minority, we people who go to websites to look at articles, but we're far from extinct. We may even be a growing minority, what with Zuck, Elon, etc. having shat their nests so stinkily.
By the way, I got here from Today in Tabs. I hadn't been here before. I'll probably be back. And I do pay for some of what I read via Substack.
Also by the way, you mentioned The Awl, which I dearly miss. I kept telling them, in comments, that they needed to offer subscriptions, but they never did. Whether that would have kept them going, I don't know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I miss Fun BlogsTM and one day, when my child is not crying for Funyuns and Pokemon cards, I’d like to do one again. This is lovely appreciation of the genre.
I miss the "old internet" so much - I had so many bookmarks of blogs I'd check daily. Just yesterday I found myself so nostalgic for Videogum and wondering if anything could possibly reach those heights again.
Caity Weaver's opus(es), to me, are the "Best Restaurant in New York" entries with Rich Juzwiak. If one pokes around on gawker you can find links to them (although many are broken there are some backdoor ones that work). I re-read them at least once a year - the one in the basement at Macy's makes me chuckle just thinking about the dusty displays and mis-cut cheesecake.
There is a second series "The Best Restaurant in the World Is: Disney's Epcot Theme Park". Recently she wrote an (amazing) article about going to Morocco and I messaged her on twitter asking if the real Morocco was better than epcot Morocco and we had a short convo that fully delighted me! I felt so excited to talk to her haha
God I miss all those blogs and all those writers :(
Excellent piece. As one who spent the last 15 years in an adjacent blogging space (political) I can relate. The medium began to die around 2014-2015, which was when I did a similar thing you did and shifted to do more journalistic work instead.✌️
This was lovely.
"Readers simply don't go to websites to look at articles anymore": Except for the ones who do, like me, here, right now. Pretty much every day, I go to at least a dozen websites to look at articles. We probably are a minority, we people who go to websites to look at articles, but we're far from extinct. We may even be a growing minority, what with Zuck, Elon, etc. having shat their nests so stinkily.
By the way, I got here from Today in Tabs. I hadn't been here before. I'll probably be back. And I do pay for some of what I read via Substack.
Also by the way, you mentioned The Awl, which I dearly miss. I kept telling them, in comments, that they needed to offer subscriptions, but they never did. Whether that would have kept them going, I don't know, but then, neither does anyone else.