Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Jan. 21-27

True Detective: Night Country, the frozen tundra of media jobs, Bruce Lee, and more!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’m watching, reading, playing, and listening to. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my career in culture writing full-time, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or Letterboxd (for free!). Thank you for reading!

Media graveyard

Back in 2022, my old coworker Tarpley wrote a blog for Gawker that asked What Are The Odds These Media Brands Will Survive? The post was funny and telling — and mostly pretty accurate. Over the past few weeks, there has been a frustrating and unfortunate reckoning in media, with Pitchfork getting folded into GQ, the greater Condé Nast walkout, LA Times layoffs, and so on. As I write, I’m three days away from the one year anniversary of being laid off from Gawker. That day was horrible. Sunny and strange. I got laid off over Zoom — the second time this has happened in my career — and then I went out for a run with little left to do with the rest of the week.

Being a writer in a precarious industry means that a lot of us are getting laid off all the time, and when this happens, there used to be a general refrain of “you’ll get scooped up somewhere” or “someone will figure out what to do with you.” This basically doesn’t happen anymore. I can’t tell if that’s better than the lying to each other and ourselves, but now everyone seems to pick themselves up and go back to work in one way or another. It’s hard not to feel conflicted and miserable about the whole affair. On one hand, it’s easy to see this industry bloat and expand in a way that we know when we’re in it feels truly unsustainable. I don’t really think everyone who is a writer on the internet deserves — whatever that means — to be a writer on the internet, but I also know that there are a lot of bullshit “email jobs” that exist, and I don’t think those are any more or less real than anything my blogger and media friends write or have written. On the other hand, I can think of, like, two hands’ worth of websites I used to log onto my computer and read for fun, and now I don’t do that with much of anything besides what my friends write on Substack.

I write all this as some continuously awful and terrible shit happens — nationally, globally. It feels notable that the literal murder of journalists occurs as the journalism jobs go under- and unfunded. This is not only devalued work, but it is loathed. One of these is much worse than the other — when someone has died, someone has died. There’s little that can be said and done to make this right.

In an email, my dad wrote, “Misery in numbers is not as good as safety in numbers, but it should lessen the pain.”

Going forward, I want to use the Sunday Dispatch to recommend writing that I am also reading on Substack, if only to go above and beyond the site’s “Recommendations” tool and speak on why I read what I read and what actually takes up my media consumption. Curating taste and interests through reading and writing has been one of few consistent pleasures in my life, and it is worth sharing here.