Who are you?

Man, I don’t know.

Okay, for real: Writer Oriana Schwindt, please don’t follow me on Twitter.

I used to cover the TV industry for places like TV Guide Magazine and Variety. I occasionally write for places like New York Magazine and Vox and Vice, but not so much anymore because nobody really pays enough.

Why?

Man, I don’t know. I’m bad at self-promotion and marketing. But I am good at writing e-mails. Like, long, bespoke e-mails about topics as varied as Robert Fucking Moses, television, grift, travel, the dismal marriage of technology and culture, et cetera, et cetera… that nonetheless feel like I am speaking directly to you, a dear friend.

So: Each one of these will be about the Thing I Could Not Stop Thinking About during the preceding week. That might be an insane grift, or an attempt to figure out if it really means anything culturally that Finnish does not have gendered pronouns for the singular third person.

When will these bespoke missives appear in my inbox?

Sunday morning! Maybe you will save them to read until later in the day when the Sunday Scaries start to set in. Maybe you’ll read one or two, and then not really feel like reading the next couple, and after a month or so you’ll relegate them to your Promotions folder in Gmail before eventually using an auto-unsubscribe service to rid yourself of these troublesome e-mails.

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(This is part of the standard About page that Substack sets up for you and it amused me so much I wanted to leave it here. I don’t really know what community they’re talking about.)