The burger Graydon Carter dreams about.
Plus the fashion week dinner that I think will spike wedding venue inquiries.
Hello everyone.
Did you catch the new GQ cover? They’re billing it as “The State of the American Male in 2025” — a sequel to 2019’s New Masculinity issue (Pharrell in the yellow sleeping-bag coat, remember?). Earlier this summer, I got to work on a feature for the issue that I’ve been wanting to work on since last year. Will Welch briefly mentioned it on TV yesterday. Getting edited by the GQ team is a gift. That they’ve managed to make this issue feel like an event in 2025? A glimmer of hope for Condé. And can we get a round of applause for Tilda Mace, the special effects and prosthetics artist who worked on the cover shoot?
Today’s newsletter includes: Graydon Carter’s Feed Me debut, the print magazine that had groundbreaking revenue this year,
is changing her town’s economy, and a sauna club from the co-founder of recently-shuttered NeueHouse.
Feed Me is throwing a party with Shy’s Burgers next week on Tuesday, September 16th at Time Again on Canal Street. Every day this week you will be getting a short essay from a writer (or someone who knows how to write) about a burger. We are calling this whole thing… Smashion Week.
I always hoped that one day Graydon Carter would write for Feed Me. I open his Air Mail every day, at least once a day, and it’s the only homepage on the internet that currently has headlines about high-budget Coppola chaos, Brooke Callahan pants, and my favorite beauty writer in the world, Linda Wells. If you didn’t have Graydon’s memoir on your summer reading list, there’s always fall.
Earlier this year, Graydon Carter went on Ruth Rogers’ podcast and said, “You can't have a successful restaurant in New York (that serves American food) unless you make a great hamburger.” He told Interview that he “pines” for cheeseburgers. Today, he writes about the burger he thinks about while lying in bed at night.
“I left New York in 2017 for six on-and-off years in Provence. I thought I’d miss the luxuries of my past life: the car and driver, the expense account, and the two assistants. I was fine without them. What I missed most during those years in France was a hamburger — which, along with the weed whacker, ice cream, and the traffic light, may well be our greatest gift to the world. And in the way that English or French men just can’t wear jeans with any success, a proper hamburger, for some reason, can only be made in America.