"In 2016, there was no way any of us could have charged for a link round-up.”

Feed Me: "In 2016, there was no way any of us could have charged for a link round-up.” Plus Boy Smells bottled up a bathhouse, cake job applications, and more. Good afternoon everyone. I drank a Guinness at 11am today for a project that will soon be announced. Apologies for any typos. Today’s letter includes: Delia Cai on why nobody could’ve charged for a link aggregation email in 2016, East Village guys are taking sartorial risks in order to dress like JFK Jr., POOG Podcast at London Fashion Week, Boy Smells bottled up the bathhouse boom. Guest Lecture: Delia Cai 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 Lina Khan, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and Audrey Hobert. Today, Delia Cai, writer of Deez Links, answers your questions about how she decides what goes in her newsletter, planning events with the Substack team, and how her feelings about newsletters have changed over the last ten years. “Will Welch talked about this amazingly and plenty from an editor’s POV but since you have also interviewed plenty of musicians/famous personalities that define cultural moments, it would be cool to lea

rn about this from a writer’s POV. In a world of social media where famous artists, musicians, or any personalities that already have a large audience – one they can speak to directly (moreso, even monetize it for themselves) how does a writer and publication demonstrate the value of their coverage? How do you make a subject feel that your perception/profile of them holds value and will discover or broadcast something they couldn’t on their own?” - Yanit When I first started writing at Vanity Fair, my editor Matt Lynch almost always gave me the same note: context, context, context.

He was constantly reminding me that perhaps the most important part of any profile (or really, any story) was to be able to succinctly describe why this person or topic was worth the reader’s attention — and why now.It’s now one of the most common notes I also give when working with writers myself, because any feature must answer the most implicit question of all, which is “Why should you, the reader, care about this one topic in the broad scheme of things?” Because of course we’re swimming in a deluge of self-promotional messages that everyone is already broadcasting. But no one is ever that good at answering that question themselves.

Clavicular can go live until he’s blue in the face, but he’s never going to personally give you a nuanced, sociological read on why live-streamed masculinity is having a moment. Subjects need to be perceived by a third party (ideally a writer with a snappy voice, journalistic integrity, and world-class bullshit detection) for us as a public to make sense of them.Clout/hype/success is never some entirely self-driven phenomenon.

It relies on a delicate web of collab posts and institutional co-signs and of course, advertiser dollars — the latter of which depend a lot a lot on the imprimatur of traditional press. When I first started writing at Vanity Fair, my editor Matt Lynch almost always gave me the same note: context, context, context.

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The article discusses the importance of context in content creation, which is relevant to brand strategy professionals, but the concepts presented are not particularly groundbreaking or new.

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