The rest of everything
Turns out rubbing salt on your skin is a bad idea.
I forgot to mention that for last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I reviewed Annie Ernaux’s newest English translation, The Other Girl, first published (in French) in 2011. The NYTBR is impossible to find, online or in print (right?); I even paged through my neighbor’s newspaper and went to the huge Barnes & Noble in Union Square, to no avail. It does, however, exist on the B&N Nook app, if you’d like to read it.
A couple nights ago, Taylore texted Whitney and Biz and I this image, which someone sent to her, who was shown it by a coworker, and which I of course love. I hope there are more somewhere.
Zoe’s newsletter today gives a frank account of what it’s like seeing the Ssense sale gear up when you’re owed something like $150k from them. The line sheet of their debts, if you haven’t seen it, is wild.
(You may have noticed a strange amount of designers owed $1 on this list. I asked about that in a group chat of fashion insiders, and was told it means the amount is yet to be determined…so, Ssense actually owes quite a bit more than that sum at the bottom, which is already at over $394m.)
She also mentions that they offered her $150 to include links to some of their products in said newsletter and she took the money. I’ve been thinking a lot about the sway companies have over social media and what that does to the joy of both creating and shopping. And yet, we all keep trying to get what it is we’re doing to pay us, even if it is pennies.
(Literally, my last post has so far made me under a dollar. I’ve changed out the links to those vintage items that sold—a process that feeds an unhealthy organizational compulsion and more than likely amounts to no additional pennies.)
When I was asked, due to my “rising” status on Substack, I guess, if I’d like to set up an account with one of these affiliate linking platforms, I got flashbacks to when I was tasked, as a web editor at a fashion magazine, to affiliate-link all editorialized products using some other, earlier app. It was a nightmare. As my old coworker told me only the other day, “For me, you invented affiliate linking.” That’s because I became obsessed with attempting to find any possible portal to commission. This was before every magazine was affiliate linking, and all our content was basically a retrofitting of something printed, so I was making high fashion photo shoots “shoppable.” As it turned out, our web audience wasn’t in the market for all that.
Today, it’s become the algorhythm-listening norm for bloggers/vloggers to constantly get kickbacks from any little thing mentioned/in frame, but I don’t love that, obviously. And now that I have the access, I’m seeing which sites give higher percentages for click-through sales, so it’s all making more sense. I know why everyone keeps pushing that new hair conditioner company, which I myself fell for and ordered from. We’ll see if it’s worth the hype or it’s just another pennies-grab.
So, after that disclaimer, I’m posting the rest of everything I’ve ever recommended on this newsletter and some others’—before I was incentivized—below. Here is the first part. Again, this is minus books, which is for another time, and maybe the lowest commission rate of all. And again, please click through as this post is too long for your inbox.