Good afternoon, everyone.
Last night, I went to a dinner at Bistrot Ha (Sadie Mae Burns, one of the owners, told me it’s event season at the restaurant) to celebrate New York Magazine’s inaugural “Men’s Style” issue. I recognized Angus O’Brien from the steamy pages of the magazine, but also from a short film called The Pass that I saw for the first time at the Hamptons International Film Festival. It screened in the same selection of shorts as my doc, The End. I said hi and congrats to Angus, and then I sat across from Holden Jaffe and Samuel Hine (New York’s Senior Men’s Style Editor) and ate some of Ha’s addicting fried yuba and tuna carpaccio, before zooming off to JFK. I’m writing this to you from my hotel in Paris. I already bumped into laura reilly in the lobby.
Today’s Guest Lecture is one of my favorites that I’ve published. Every few months I’ll meet someone — sometimes digitally, sometimes IRL, in this case both — who I think is on to something. That’s the best way I can put it, because that’s what it feels like in my gut. When I meet someone like this, I can’t look away from what they’re doing (or writing, or building). Alex Bronzini-Vender and I have mostly interacted online, aside from a few minutes of catching up at a Feed Me party on Shelter Island over the summer. I asked him to participate in a Guest Lecture, and in his responses below, he discusses his cheating Harvard classmates, what outlets his friends actually read, the fact that the most powerful people in America spend hours on social media every day, and getting blocked by Marc Andreessen on X. Occasionally, Guest Lecture responses feel phoned in, and today’s are very obviously not.
Todays’s newsletter also includes: Catching up with Michael Ratner on why he opened an OBB office in London, a new publication started from an NYU dorm, media companies are building apps and mom group chats, Condé’s CEO is out (I don’t blame him), Hailey Bieber opened a cafe, I want to join the crochet and liquor club, Pinterest is actually bad for creativity, and Vox’s is podcast roster expands.
FALL EVENTS FOR YOUR CALENDAR 🍁
🍕 Emmett’s is hosting a night of Sangiovese. IrROSSO and Brunello di Montalcino by the glass. And lots of pizza. October 1.
🥃 🧶 Craft Society is hosting a crocheting and liquor club on October 8th.
🧀 CAKE ZINE is throwing a party for their latest issue, Spoiled Rotten, on October 13. There will be drinks, pastries, and plenty of zines for purchase.
🎃 The Edward Gorey House is hosting a Halloween Film Festival. On October 25th at 6pm, the House will screen the camp-horror classic House (1977). There will be fresh popcorn and snacks.
This interview is part of a Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. In this series, I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want. Past guests have included Lauren Sherman, Jeremy O. Harris, and Lina Khan.
“What was the topic of your college essay and how does you feel about that piece of writing 3+ years later?” - Natasha
Before I discovered that I love writing, and that I’m reasonably good at meeting deadlines, I wanted to major in art history. I love art, and as a high schooler I voraciously read the copies of Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail my parents had lying around the house. My mother taught art history to middle schoolers and now works as an art advisor. (Shoutout to her.) If I’m being honest, at seventeen I was hoping she might find some way to nepo me into the art world.
By then, I was beginning to publish my writing. I wrote about how I felt as an outsider, breaking into media, and about the analogies between what I was doing and the category of outsider art, and moreover, the value of being an outsider. What were the insights that I could bring to well-trodden subjects as a seventeen-year-old?
I find the whole idea of the college essay pretty obscene. It’s a genre with impossible rules. You have to confess, but only to the right sins (I’m such a perfectionist!). You have to aggrandize yourself, but not be too self-aggrandizing. I think I wrote the truest thing I could within those constraints, but the reality is that the college essay doesn’t encourage students to be true to themselves. I understand why a college might want to assess an applicant’s character, but there’s something deeply wrong about distributing opportunity through what is essentially a sob-story-writing contest.
It’s a terrible genre, and I’d happily see it abolished. But in fairness to admissions offices, the people who work in them are not idiots. I get a lot of emails from high schoolers begging for college admissions advice, and I try to help them how I can. Yes, you have to come across as a good person with the right moral virtues, balanced in exactly the right ways: humble but not a pushover, ambitious but not a monster. My essay was esoteric, and more than a little nerdy, and the people reading it understood it perfectly well. Their job is to read, and they are good at it.
“I want to know how you and your friends are using AI. It seems like you still like to engage deeply with reading and writing, and I’m curious if that’s common for your friends/classmates or if you find that fewer and fewer of your peers are doing that.” - Emily
David Wallace-Wells had a great newsletter back in July questioning the narrative that we’re sliding toward a post-literate America. His evidence comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, which is the strongest record of how Americans actually spend their days that we have.
In 2003, the average American over fifteen spent 21.9 minutes a day reading. In 2025, it was 16.2. But Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 are actually reading more than they used to. In 2003, they read 8.4 minutes daily. In 2025, it was 10.2 minutes!
Our figures are low, and they’re almost certainly inflated by a small cult of heavy readers. Americans over 65 went from reading an average of 58.5 minutes a day in 2003 to 32.4 minutes in 2025. They still read more than us, but they—not us zoomers—are driving the contraction.
So what’s going on? Well, the youngest Americans’ reading habits have barely changed in two decades. It absolutely sucks that boomers read more than us, and their aging portends grim things for publishing. Beyond them, though, the world hasn’t really changed. There was always a small, strange, committed minority of us who read for pleasure, and there still is.