Not Here

“I’ll tell you everything, just not here,” a sex columnist says to me, about a series of scandals in the fashion magazine world. “I have all the receipts.” We laugh at ourselves, attending a Substack meetup, speaking of the inevitable demise of indie print. “One day there will be no more potential bridges to burn, and all the stories about these EICs will come out,” I say, and then, “not that it’s what any of us wanted.”

“We’ve met before.” That’s easy for the editor of Mars Review to say because I am wearing a name tag. He didn’t know I had a Substack. “I didn’t know you had one, either,” I counter. His is the magazine, plus some online-only content, he explains.

“And what is the magazine?” asks Sami, making the rounds. Everyone has an elevator pitch. “Reviews of books that wouldn’t get reviewed anywhere else,” says Noah. His latest (paywalled) post is titled “How to Understand the Election Results and why you should be happy with them, no matter your political persuasion.”