Dear Teddy (T.M.) Brown,

While we are all (almost) as excited as you are about your New York Times clips - mashallah! - some of us are starting to wonder about what your theory is for the advancement of culture. Because it’s kind of sounding as if what you’d like is for things to be exactly the same way they were in 1970 or, for that matter, 1870. There will be about five newspapers/magazines, with their offices all in walking distance of the same watering holes. They will all have the same wearily enlightened perspective on everything, they will all have exactly the same organizational structure, and the same writing style (although The New Yorker, as the jaunty new kid on the block, may throw umlauts over a few random words). And creatives will spend their lives doing everything they can think of to break in, and then bending backwards in every imaginable way to keep their gigs, and in return they may get a pat on the back every so often from the gruff-yet-kindly veteran editor. And while we’re at it, we can maybe all wear fedoras into work, which really was a great look, and do all our first drafts in ballpoint pen.

What we strongly feel you’re missing is that the role of a creative is not just to fight for a piece of the pie but to look to expand the whole. Substack, and the internet more broadly, represents the greatest expansion of possibilities for expression since Gutenberg (or, if we’re being conservative, maybe the penny press). Sure, some of the content would go to the bottom of Maxwell Perkins’ slush pile, but a lot of it is really really good. It’s an ocean of heartfelt, creative, democratic expression, and this is only the beginning of it by the way, and it seems odd to not be the least bit excited about that. In any case, jadedness is very early aughts. Some of us actually are trying to build something here - that’s what The Republic of Letters is, for instance, and I’m not sure how you would conceptualize the many magazines that are on this platform, that use fully-accepted standards of editing but find it helpful to reduce overhead by being digital-only. Maybe that institution-building is not the same kind of hustle as showing up at Joe’s Pub and hoping that David Remnick is standing at the same bar as you and then gently prodding him about that pitch you sent him that may have somehow ended up in his spam folder, but what we’re doing here is still hustle and the only difference is that it has the potential (actually, that potential is already largely realized) to lead to something that’s genuinely new.

With affection, and in the spirit of civil disagreement,

The Substack Riff-Raff