1. TEAR AND JOY: @TheSamhita, who was the heart and backbone of @TeenVogue for the past few years as its Executive Editor, is moving on. Great for her, a big loss for Condé + TV's readers.
2. Executive editors don't often get the acknowledgment they deserve that EICs do, but they often hold publications together . and make them fly. @TheSamhita was so important in making Teen Vogue what it was: a unique, cross-generational publication
3. that treated teens and adults with respect and harnessed journalism's greatest power: to let readers and writers discourse about the important matters of our lives.
6. In a 2018 series called "The F Word," @TheSamhita wrote a landmark essay called "How I Learned to Embrace Calling Myself Fat." This is where @TeenVogue thrived: In teaching young ppl of all genders to be honest abt our bodies, world, lives teenvogue.com/story/how-i-le…
7. Teen Vogue was such a special place, where writers & readers of all ages could read about . bodies, gender, race, capitalism, seuxality, politics, beauty & identity w honesty & critical rigor teens NEED. Thanks for making this space, @TheSamhita. Here's to more truth telling!
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You are a hack who for yrs made your living by showing up in a studio for an hour a week & reading things your staff prepared for you so ppl would mistakenly think you’re clever. Actual inquiry doesn’t work this way, but hopefully you feel better dumping on someone’s monograph.
It’s a bit rich that someone whose livelihood came from others distilling and synthesizing information for him is going after people who deconstruct & think deeply about literature.
Something similar here to “cancel culture” hysteria: Few people get angrier about any kind of critical rigor than white man like @KBAndersen who’ve has everything handed to them. Bc everything they know has been chewed up for their unthinking digestion so they can hold power—
I’m done. “Diversity,” a word that totally obscures racist power relationships, is beyond parody; the shark has jumped over the moon (along with the cow), the horse has been beaten into ground meat. It’s a word I never want to hear again.
Buckingham Palace will engage in a “listen and learn” tour about “minority rights” 😆. Are they going to bring in Robin DiAngelo?! Are Elizabeth and Charles going to be lectured and then have to go into a break out group to reflect on their white privilege????
One thing I teach my students is you want to build a body of work you’re proud of.
In my career, I’ve had thoughts & a few pieces I regret + WILDLY uneven earnings at too many jobs.
But overall, I’ve made a body of work aligned w my values—& that does a lot for your peace.
It means the world to me when a Black trans teen writes to me about a piece I published about therapy in 2018, or someone whose sibling died of cancer writes abt a piece I wrote even before that. Only got a few hundred dollars for both pieces, written for different pubs...
...it’s hard freelancing and turning down bland & more stable work. But if you can hold on to do work in alignment w your values over time, you’ll grow, & your readers will grow w you & allow you room to grow. And you’ll feel good abt the work (even when your bank account hurts).
In hiring her, Condé Nast seemed to be going for representational politics/optics over substance. There is NO shortage of Black women, ppl of color, QTPoC etc who could have helmed this very important space & its recent, unique and wildly popular history of sharp analysis.
Instead, Condé seemed to be trying to reign in the Marxism, anal sex tips & labor coverage with someone who’d ~never been an editor~. The timing of the anti-Asian tweets couldn’t be more worse than this week, but zoom out please... nytimes.com/2021/03/18/bus…
Everything is a shameless marketing opportunity, isn’t it? Is there a platform that has done MORE to stoke Asian fetishization & promote white supremacist beauty standards for gay men than Grindr?!
Substack is increasingly a kind of anti-union (dis)(u)topia: package up a lot of writers, make them work against each other, encourage no one to talk about who is getting what $$ (this is a classic tactic to suppress income), through in a dash of “giving them the religion” hustle
As @mattdpearce put, $15 a month can get you subscriptions to 3 writers a month on Substack or like a subscription to a paper w hundreds of unionized journalists & support staff. I Subscribe to newsletters & am glad friends can make work for & with them. But...
...Substack seems to be a predatory platform built on extracting value from atomized writers in an “entrepreneur” model. I worry about them using their $ to poach stars who could be working in teams (even unions!) & encouraging everyone to go on their own w/o benefits or “jobs.”