Certified snobs on a sinking ship

We need based pleasures *and* blessed new forms

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

Our list of 35 Spyplane Icons — celebrating design excellence of the contemporary slapper era — is here.

We just published two new Shorts Reports — Erin’s is here, Jonah’s is here.

Since I (Jonah) spend a lot of time exploring Sauce Semiotics and why certain things are cool while others aren’t, it’s only natural that I get a kick out of other people with similar preoccupations.

Rachel Tashjian, Washington Post fashion critic, author of the invitation-only sletter Opulent Tips, and a Spyfriend, is one of them. I still laugh thinking about an OT from 2023 where Rachel called bulls--t on the insipid prevailing discourse around “personal style.” Here’s her take on a ridiculous style-divining technique where you attempt to distill your swag into three adjectives:

It isn’t just the caps-lock “IS DISGUSTING TO ME.” It’s the 14 exclamation points— one less wouldn’t be enough, one more would be too much.

Another such person is my friend Chris Black, who co-hosts the fantastic podcast How Long Gone and writes a weekly sletter for GQ. Chris has a litany of hangups, heroes, and bees in his bonnet, charted along a cool-uncool axis that’s distinctly his own. Chris is so averse to “broke behavior” that he doesn’t like buying things on sale; he loves funny people but thinks stand-up is for dorks; he dislikes watching movies and 99.9% of non-reality-TV; he thinks Frank Ocean songs are boring; he still cares about SNL; he loves old magazines and new books; he dislikes nature; and so on. Some of these opinions he plays up for comic effect, but the reason he connects with people is that all are, on some level, sincerely felt.

It goes without saying that Rachel, Chris and I see lots of things differently. But we have in common a finely tuned — if not hyperactive and occasionally deranging — status consciousness. They both live in New York, my hometown, which I left a decade ago for the sunnier, slower-moving East Bay, so I suspect that questions of status might manifest more vividly and varyingly in their daily experience than mine. And whenever I see them issuing proclamations about coolness and its absence, my ears perk up like I’m a swagged-out rogue ethnobotanist hearing respected colleagues announce bold new findings from the field.

This happened the other day when Chris went on the Mixed Signals podcast and told Blackbird Spyplane subscribers Ben Smith and Max Tani that he vastly prefers the idea of writing a sletter for GQ to writing one for Substack. The former, he explained, offers a validating old-media imprimatur that the latter lacks. “I don’t think Substack is cool,” Chris said, whereas “institutions never stopped being cool.”

His contention was that a company like Condé Nast still retains an intrinsic “glamour” — even as our friends at GQ have been forced by a punishing media economy to flood the zone with SEO-primed, affiliate-harvesting roundups of The Best White Sneakers under $100. Chris sees no glamour, by contrast, in “a lot of this s--t happening online.” This connects to why How Long Gone makes its money from ad reads instead of subscribers, he noted: “We don’t want to be beholden to the listener.”

Here I deviate from him, of course, since our whole s--t at the Plane is A) keeping it mad real and B) how good it is for the work we do to owe nothing to anyone but our readers.

But it’s worth chewing on Chris’s provocative position about institutions being cool. Especially because he’s not alone in feeling this way. Last Monday, after Mixed Signals promoted his remarks on Twitter, Rachel quoted them affirmatively: “This is exactly why, more than four years ago, I chose not to use Substack to start my newsletter and instead just bcc everyone on gmail,” she wrote.

Rachel was making the type of nuanced aesthetic distinction you’d expect from a perceptive fashion writer. I can’t imagine she thinks that Google is cool; I’m guessing she composes her sletters on Apple devices, not Android ones. (If she actually uses a 2006 pre-Lenovo-acquisition IBM Thinkpad, props to her, that is the coolest way to write a newsletter short of photocopying a bunch and dropping them off at the post office.) But — all things being equal — sending out a lo-fi sletter via your Gmail does strike me as a patently funkier and more charming move than using a buzzy templated sletter platform, such as this one. Sort of like how selling furniture on Craigslist is patently funkier and more charming than doing it on Chairish or “Pamono.”

I say “all things being equal” because a sui generis treasure like Blackbird Spyplane would be funky and charming no matter the email client. The reason this all interests me, however, besides the Plane’s own place in this landscape, is that it reflects a pronounced longing and affection among many Current Coolness Observers and other “tastemakers” these days, for an endangered species: The Blue-Chip Culture Stock.

At bottom, this is a longing for some solid signal amid the idiot noise. For some stable consensus reality among the ontological chaos. For some greatness amid the proliferating slop.

You see it in the buzz around recent memoirs by / biographies of Graydon Carter, Lorne Michaels, and Keith McNally: venerated 70+ year-old whitehair NYC transplants to a man, each of whom built empires that helped define the face of the world’s greatest city in the 20th century. Part of that buzz is about admiration for people who made their impacts, and their fortunes, pre-Internet, and who therefore seem more culturally and economically disposed to “let it spray.” They don’t have to make the same concessions to politesse, it seems, nor to play by the same rules, that the rest of us feel we have to, making our bones, as we do, in a social-media surveillance nightmare. (I just finished McNally’s book and it’s as great as everyone’s said — I knew he was a charming jerk but had no idea he was so introspective.)

You also see this longing in the glamour-hungry moodboard canonization of ‘90s icons like Kate Moss, JFK Jr., Carolyn Bissette, Ralph Lauren, Martha Stewart, Naomi Campbell, Chloë Sevigny, Sofia Coppola, and Oasis. You see it in IG accounts like Simplicity City and Simplicity Man, which aggregate old seaside imagery from Eric Rohmer movies and 1987 J. Crew catalogs. You see it in the reverence for crème de a la crème luxury marques like Hermès and (more dubiously) Loro Piana.

You see it in the renewed canonization of epochal GOATS still living (Bob Dylan, David Hammons, Martin Scorsese) and dead (Joan Didion, Miles Davis, Donald Judd, David Lynch, André Leon Talley).

You could detect early rumblings of it in Ethan Hawke’s fantastic Covid-era HBO documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, The Last Movie Stars. You see it in the outpouring of adoration for Tom Cruise, the True Believer Popcorn King. You saw it last winter in the crowds at the Whitney’s excellent Edges of Alvin Ailey exhibition. You can go see it in movie theaters this weekend, in the stately arthouse pacing, wealthy-bohemian milieu, and general period-blurring ‘60s-French-Riviera-via-SS24-Lemaire beauty of Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse.

You see a version of this longing when people go to L.A. and book rooms at fire old art-deco hotels, one amenity of which is that you can post photos like these to stories:

You see something similar in the content gremlins stanced up outside Fanelli and Bemelmans over the past couple years; flicking up with Eli Zabar at E.A.T. anniversary parties; or, if they ever find themselves in Berkeley, posted up beneath the sconces at Chez Panisse. On New Year’s Eve, you see it in the pictures of caviar, potato chips and Bollinger. Come August, you see it in the photos from “the Cape” and the U.S. Open.

And you see it in shifting discourse about which restaurants it’s most flattering to align yourself with, as captured in a recent declaration of Rachel’s concerning the “two kinds of New Yorkers”:

From a guest post at Feed Me

This is a fun line because it is simultaneously zinger-flavored and nonsensical. There are plenty of other kinds of New Yorkers, of course. To name one among millions: my Queens-born dad, who would never be caught dead in either of these places. I’d say “his loss,” because Erin and I got dinner at Le Veau d’Or this month and we loved it, but to each his own. My father’s threshold for what he deems unconscionable levels of pretension, stuffiness and/or priciness, not to mention cholesterol, is superhumanly low. During my childhood, we ate approximately 361 dinners a year at home, and when we did venture out it was usually to an unheralded Chinese joint off Canal Street where the check was probably under $35 for the three of us.

On one level, we’re just talking about the swinging trend-pendulum. Last time I checked, Kismet dinners and low-intervention Martha Stoumen reds were still delicious. But like so much other culture of the last ~decade, they feel increasingly Millennial-coded now, and have been supplanted in the frisson department with the 2000s based-kitsch Big-Bodied Cab pleasures of the Hillstone Restaurant Group, which sit in a certain tension with the more refined and classique old-money neighborhood-brasserie glow of an Odeon or Le Veau d’Or. (For the record, I’ve never been to Hillstone in Manhattan; the Pasadena Houston’s, which we serenaded back in July, 2023 after friends put us on, is a true weird-normal suburban charmer.)

But the old-money appeal of an LVD points toward something deeper at play here: the strong aura of Waspy, patrician fantasy that attaches to so much of the above. WASPs are the purest domestic distillation of A Class You Can Emulate (see Ralph Lauren) but Cannot Join Except Through Birth. To put this in the contemporary parlance, WASP culture is America’s foundational genetic expression of “gatekeeping.” And while bluebloods have long been fascinating, there are distinctly contemporary reasons for their current allure.

At a moment of historic social and financial precarity, they seem to embody ease and elegance — genteel qualities that exceed, but are closely connected to, a sense of intergenerational stability and material comfort. We prize this as much now as ever, when the economy has turned more and more of us into gig workers and filled our screens with all kinds of sweaty salespeople trying their best to look unsweaty as they sell themselves (or, in the case of hustlepreneur / LinkedIn motivation weirdos, not even trying).

This goes beyond class stratification, though. Along with ease and elegance, we desire encounters with beauty, idiosyncrasy, integrity, mystique, and craft, of the kind that artists like Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese, and media wizards like Graydon Carter, typify. The more techno-capitalists eat up the world, though, the less we come across these qualities, because the techno-capitalist seeks margin-boosting efficiency above all else, and beauty, idiosyncrasy, integrity, mystique, and craft are fundamentally incompatible with margin-boosting efficiency.

So it makes sense that we should adulate figures, and institutions, that predated the online scrum: Artists and writers who made masterpieces via traditional 20th century distribution channels, creating work in partnership, however fraught, with the capital-g Gatekeepers at music labels, movie studios and publishing companies — before those machers saw their power diminish as everything got so fragmented and “disrupted.”

Disruption — a process of venture capital breaking open new markets within existing ones, and ferociously driving down labor costs in the name of convenience — is supposed to have had a democratizing effect on art-making. In theory, after all, anyone with an internet connection can find an audience. But while this is true to a point (the Plane is a great example) the internet has at this juncture served mostly to shift power from one set of elites to another rather than spread it around democratically. It turns out that when Time named “You” the person of the year in 2006, they could have gone with “Still them, except now they’re antisocial nerds.”

The reigning tech elite are by and large tasteless, swagless people who see artists as “creatives” and creative work as “content.” So, again, it’s understandable that many of us are missing the almighty Robert Evans-type studio boss / label head / magazine king, in it not just for the money but also for the love. As Chris put it on Mixed Signals, “Gatekeeping is something that I just respect. I think there are people that know more than me, and I want them to help inform what I’m seeing and listening to and hearing.”

I agree with him. And I like that Rachel calls herself a Certified Snob, however tongue-in-cheek. Because good can’t exist without bad. Brilliant can’t exist without stupid. Sauce can’t exist without swaglessness. There is not just a utility but a virtue to these kinds of dividing lines, and some people are better at drawing them than others.

But I’m not ready to leap all the way from there to “institutions never stopped being cool.” Because when it comes to creative work, coolness derives fundamentally not from the businesspeople who help you make money from that work, but from the work itself. (Put another way: If this place is cool enough for Kaitlin Phillips, it’s cool enough for you.)

Perhaps you believe that the weakening of traditional gatekeepers has allowed hordes of low-talent dilettantes and mediocrities to rush in. In the newsletter context, the eternal refrain you hear along these lines is that writers benefit tremendously from good editors, and that the experience of reading suffers without them. That’s inarguably true. I could not do the features I do for the New York Times Magazine without a team of editors and fact-checkers, and when I work on any given sletter, I benefit from both Erin’s notes and instincts honed over 20+ years of professional editing. If you’re wondering, I sent a draft of this essay to 11 editors at world-class publications, and they all said the same thing: “Jonah — thank you. Don’t change a word.”

I do wonder, though, how many current-day media institutions, given current-day economic pressures, are able to give young writers that same training. And let me tell you, there’s never been a shortage of low-talent dilettantes and mediocrities within the halls of Venerable Institutions, anyway. Some of these mediocrities are children of the people who helped build the institutions, whom they go on to replace at the top. I guarantee that if [prominent media figure redacted] tried to start a subscriber-supported newsletter, it would be embarrassingly bad and make very little money. This is exactly the kind of person who needs to submerge their lack of talent within the supposed glamour and greatness of an institution where more gifted and imaginative people make less money than them. Institutions are great for that.

But here’s the depressing elephant in the room, if you, like me, love newspapers and magazines, in terms of making them, reading them, or both: a lot of these institutions are living on borrowed time. All but a few of the ships that haven’t sunk are in the process of sinking, and as they sink, their new overlords often gut what was great about them, replacing every wood plank in the hull with cheap particleboard, leaving nothing but the name intact. Not even that, in the case of HBO. As the waters rise, clinging to some sense of vestigial institutional coolness and prestige is like clinging to a slender, beautiful piece of driftwood, hoping it alone will keep your chin above the waves.

Some institutions are worth fighting for. Others need to die, so that we can build new ones.

My interest lies in collaborative, communitarian models. Think of it this way. Taking a yellow cab from JFK into the city is, in 2025, cooler and more based than taking an Uber (where, simultaneously, it’s gotten harder and harder for drivers to make a living). But New York’s taxi-medallion system was famously punishing, unfair and corruption-prone. The blue-chip institution I treasure in this equation? The MTA. Every time I go back to New York, I’m immensely grateful that I can take the subway into town from the airport. This doesn’t even require that you sacrifice an impulse toward snobbishness, because you can always feel superior to the people who paid $250 to sit in traffic in Uber Blacks for an hour and a half while your a-- is beholding the gorgeous wetlands at the Howard Beach A station before gliding through Utica Junction in the company of fellow Real Ones.

Things are cursed. Swag, grace and dignity are under assault. The answer, though, isn’t to lionize and fetishize old, crumbling seats of power. It’s to do something much harder: Maintain the blessed, pro-social institutions we already have, while working to create different ones, where new kinds of beauty, elegance, human greatness, and coolness, can thrive.

Peace until next time,

Jonah

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Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, Adam Sandler, Steven Yeun, Patrick Radden Keefe, Kim Gordon, André 3000, Rachel Kushner, Mac DeMarco, Danielle Haim, David Grann, Matty Matheson, Seth Rogen, Laraaji, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, Rashida Jones, Father John Misty, MJ Lenderman, John C. Reilly, Clairo, Conner O’Malley and more are here.