Peak newsletter
According to Vanity Fair, we are at peak personal newsletter. Every journalist has a Tinyletter or a Substack now!
I subscribe to dozens and dozens of newsletters. It’s partly because I work in media, so it’s my job to know what’s going on and consume as much content as I can and I just keep signing up when I hear of a new newsletter that catches my interest. (Eventually, every once in a while, I go through my inbox and mass unsubscribe to a bunch of them when I realize I’m never opening them). But there are a handful of newsletters that I reliably open every single time: NYT’s Morning Briefing, Washington Post Daily Headlines, Kara Cutruzzula’s Brass Ring Daily, NYT Cooking’s Five Weeknight Dishes, Girls’ Night In, NYT’s Smarter Living, Bon Appetit’s Healthyish, Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Molly, Ann Friedman’s newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen’s collected ahp, Rachel Wilkerson Miller’s Just Good Shit, to name a few off the top of my head.
There are so MANY good newsletters to subscribe to and not enough time to read them all. Which makes me all the more grateful for those of you who read these emails of mine every week. You have hundreds of choices of newsletters you could sign up for — thanks for letting me take up space in your inbox every week. I hope you enjoy it, and if you feel like it, I’d forever appreciate if you share it with a friend.
What I’m writing
Decoding the book of the summer, Fleishman Is In Trouble. I joined a roundtable with some of my colleagues at Vox to talk about our thoughts on Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s much talked-about new book. Spoiler: I loved it!
What I’m reading
It was never about busing, New York Times. Nikole Hannah-Jones is, as usual, a must-read.
Why is it so hard to finish a notebook?, Vox.
The best $3,000 I ever spent: training for my dog, Vox. This is a delightful read, and it also made me feel better, as a relatively new dog owner, about how expensive training is! (But unfortunately….sometimes necessary!)
Big Little Lies season 2 turmoil: Inside Andrea Arnold’s loss of creative control, IndieWire. If you care about HBO’s Big Little Lies, this is a pretty wild story.
Everyone wants to Instagram the world’s most beautiful canyon. Should they?, Vox. How Instagram turned a beautiful canyon in Native American territory into a tourist trap — and changed the Navajo community that has lived there for decades.
Call me they, New York Times. Farhad Manjoo makes the case for the singular “they” — and genderless, inclusive pronouns for all.
The ignoring of Kirsten Gillibrand, Washington Post Magazine. She was once a rising star in the Democratic Party, but now she’s barely getting any attention in the crowded Democratic primary. Why is that?
How Americans became a nation of snackers, The Atlantic.
Thanks for reading! If you like this newsletter, please share it on social media or forward to a friend — they can subscribe at nishachittal.substack.com. And if you have thoughts on this week’s newsletter or suggestions to include in the future, feel free to reply to this email and let me know