WHO WE ARE
Blackbird Spyplane is your no. 1 source for “unbeatable recon” into style, travel & culture, by journalist Jonah Weiner and design scout Erin Wylie. Jonah is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and has written for Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, WSJ., WIRED and New York, among other places. Erin has worked as a design scout for Apple’s Industrial Design Team and as a magazine editor for titles at Martha Stewart and Condé Nast, among other publishers.
WHAT WE DO
We publish Blackbird Spyplane 2x a week. Twice monthly, we also publish Concorde — our “women’s sletter,” except it’s for everyone who is cool.
We talk to interesting people about what they make, how they make it, and what they love. Every “Blackbird Spyplane Interview” we’ve done — including conversations with Jerry Seinfeld, André 3000, Nathan Fielder, Tyler, The Creator, Phoebe Bridgers, Matty Matheson, Emily Bode, Evan Kinori, Sandy Liang, Seth Rogen, Lorde, Mac DeMarco, John Mayer, Molly Ringwald, Steven Yeun, and Rashida Jones — is archived here.
We celebrate small makers and unearth vintage gems across the worlds of fashion, culture & design.
We publish travel intel reports and trade elite globetrotting tips with our readers in our Global Intel Travel Chat Room.
We identify cool trends, ponder profound questions, and round up sick under-the-radar finds.
Read our most popular posts here.
WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT US
You can read a New Yorker story about us here, a Vanity Fair profile about us here, a profile of us in The New York Times here, and a story about us in The Guardian here. There’s also a Blackbird Spyplane story we wrote about ourselves here. 😉
Business of Fashion recognized our immense powers by inducting us into their illustrious BoF 500 — the “definitive index of people shaping fashion.”
OUR SACRED PLEDGE TO YOU
If something’s in the newsletter it’s because we think it’s cool & that you will, too. We don’t run ads, we refuse gifts, and we don’t use affiliate links when we cover new clothes. (We do use them for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and Etsy, plus books on the independent bookseller Bookshop.) We think that if you want to try and do something fun, strange and special on the internet, it helps to owe nothing to anyone but your readers. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.
JOIN OUR CLASSIFIED TIER FOR THE FULL EXPERIENCE
We are subscription-supported, so YOU, our “beautiful and blessed” readers, are the only people we owe anything. Cop a paid Classified Tier subscription to support Blackbird Spyplane, and enjoy a bunch of exclusive material behind the paywall, including:
Full details on paid subscriptions are here — they’re $5 monthly, $50 for the year, $100 if you are a truly cool player who enjoys the best things in life, and signing up for one helps keep our recon Mach 3+.
☮️ Our “Spyplane Ruminations” — essays where we answer the most profound questions life and the jawns sciences inspire — are collected here.
☮️ The Blackbird Spyplane Master Jawn Index is an exhaustive list of the coolest jawns and jawns-makers we’ve covered in the newsletter.
☮️ The Global Intel Travel Chat Room features earth-spanning GOAT-locale recommendations.
☮️ Ask a question in the “Classified SpyTalk” chat room.
☮️ Find a rare grail in the Blackbird SpyMall.
You can follow us on Instagram here and on Twitter here, too.
Peace! Jonah & Erin