Life’s greatest newsletter

5 years of Spyplane miracles

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

The B.L.I.S.S. List — a handy rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.

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, MJ Lenderman, John C. Reilly, Clairo, Conner O’Malley and more are here.

Five years ago this very week, we published the first-ever Blackbird Spyplane.

Today?

Gratitude to our readers. That’s what we feel first and foremost.

Alpha-tier pimpishness. That’s what undergirds the gratitude.

We wouldn’t have put it this way on Day One, but against the backdrop of the pandemic lockdowns, we launched a sletter devoted to 3 core principles:

1. People are feeling lonelier and more disconnected from a sense of meaning in their lives than at any previous point in history.

2. Sick clothes are dope, and their dopeness owes to an alchemical interaction between human ingenuity, craft, passion, wit, and hard work, on one side, and the precious bounties of Gaia (water, plants, living creatures, and the fossils of dead ones stretching back millennia) on the other. When people wear the resulting garments in a fly manner, and other people behold them, all of the above are sanctified & transmogrified by an eternal force that answers to many names — the most sacred of which is swag.

Ipso facto,

3. A lovingly homemade independent e-mail newsletter that celebrates the fullness of love and beauty inherent to great clothes might A) find a blessed audience of likeminded readers, B) help all of us feel less alone, and C) re-enswaggen large swaths of modern life that Dark and Predatory Powers work tirelessly to drain of joy, meaning and enchantment.

We were right — profoundly.

And what’s remarkable is that Blackbird Spyplane has thrived in this tospy-turvy, hustle-bustle modern world even though we’ve done a lot of things “wrong” — at least from a certain cynical “content-creation” P.O.V.

We’ve been known to use “bad” Photoshop illustrations. We’ve enjoyed dipping into a voice that some might deem… idiosyncratic. We don’t run ads or do spon. We don’t use affiliate links on any of the new clothes we point you toward. And so on. Doing things any differently would be ultimately at cross-purposes with what we do and who we do it for.

Instead, we publish interviews with cultural icons and luminaries, many of whom hate to do press but f--k with the Spyplane vision and want to tap in with the readers out there in Spy Nation. We publish incredible travel guides, home-goods reports, and masterful intellectuo-philosophical breakdowns of sauce semiotics.

What’s more, we explore the endlessly fascinating question of why people love the clothes they love — the stories and memories and desires that live in our cherished things. In the process, we find slappers aplenty, and talk to brilliant, passionate people who make them.

And crucially, we theorize powerful mindsets to defend yourself against pervasive marketing forces, so that you can stop feeling like you need to buy s--t all the time, especially in an era when our phones have transformed, cursedly, into tiny 24-hour storefronts!

The only regrettable media rule we confess to following is that, in addition to being brilliant and charming, we are hot. We know that’s always been an asset in this sadly superficial business. 😔

Thanks to a community of beautiful, curious and affable readers who are bored with and/or disgusted by what passes for “right” these days, though, Blackbird Spyplane has not only succeeded by doing things wrong — we’ve reshaped the style and substance of contemporary discourse.

If you see another sletter written in an EBULLIENT mix of ALL CAPS, ast*risks and bolded text, that is either directly or indirectly thanks to our influence. Shout out to them. If you notice that small clothesmakers we’ve been saluting long before anyone else are suddenly everyone else’s favorite clothesmakers, too, that’s non-negligibly thanks to our influence as well.

It’s called The Spyplane Effect, it takes many forms, and we’re proud of it.

As it stands, Blackbird Spyplane is No. 2 on the Fashion Leaderboards. Even more importantly to us, we’re No. 1 on the Blessedness & Sauce Leaderboards.

We want to stress how incredible that is: There are so many exciting and excellent creative projects that die, because the odds are stacked against excellence.

And yet here we are, shining. Sending up our thanks to the Heavens every time we see a new comment from a thoughtful and chill Spyfriend pop up. There is so much kindness, coolness and wisdom in our readers!

We send up our thanks, too, every time we see a viral video about, e.g., a piglet befriending a donkey that has 114k likes — because the communitarian culture of interspecies fellowship that those likes reflect would be measurably less robust if it weren’t for the Uplifting Life Force of everyone in Spy Nation simultaneously contributing to the Positive Energies of the Universe.

And we send up our thanks every time we see literally anyone in public or online wearing an outfit that rocks, humbly knowing that, as a holistically pro-looking-cool publication, we played some part in it. (Like for instance Justin Bieber freaking it the other day and going Hoodie over Bathrobe over Hoodie (H.O.B.O.H.) Mode with the cargo pocket peeking out from under the robe hem!!)

Finally: We refuse to take any of this for granted.

None of it happens without us being extremely good at newsletters, but that means nothing without our readers. You’re the only people we owed anything on day one. You’re the only people we owe anything 5 years later.

Paying for something great feels great. And when you zoom out to a galactic POV, where you can perceive the full sweep of history, Blackbird Spyplane is statistically speaking Life’s Greatest Newsletter.

If the Plane adds value to your life — and let’s be clear, it does — and you’re on our public list, come on into the Classified Recon Tier Inner Sanctum today. Enjoy a better existence and help keep this mighty modern miracle alive.

And if you’re already a Classified Spyfriend, props to you on your enormous self-respect. Week in, week out, you’ve enriched our lives, enriched your life, and enriched the lives of everyone else in Spy Nation — the most “beautiful and blessed” community across all media.

So today’s your 5th birthday, too. Treat yourself to something nice, e.g., that pair of spring-weight linen-wool-gabardine pants you’ve been eyeing, or just sitting under a tree for 20 minutes and looking up at the sky through its boughs. We did this the other day for the first time in years, and we can’t recommend it enough.

Thank you.

— Jonah & Erin