listening to The Vanity Fair Diaries on audiobook and hearing how in 1980s Tina Brown was paying writers $10,000 for a piece. Fully immersed in a world in which being a professional writer offered the chance of a comfortable income and essayists were feted household names. Being a culture writer in 2026 with an unedited Substack listening along to all this makes me feel like a mouse snuffling around inside the rib cage of a dead elephant.