Thom Bettridge

EO

I’m curious what 032c, Interview, Highsnobiety, SSENSE, and i-D have in common.

TB

[Laughs.] I’ve been thinking about that, actually. I recently started a Substack that began as something casual and then became serious almost by accident. I offered free subscriptions to students through this small Google Form and included what I thought was a throwaway question: What do you wish people wrote about more? Most of the answers weren’t about the subject matter at all. They wanted career advice: how to enter this world, how to navigate it, and how to survive it. What struck me is that I’ve never felt like I had a clean doctrine to offer. So much of my own trajectory has come down to timing. When I left 032c in Berlin to return home to New York, it was because my mother was sick. I resigned in the morning and that afternoon got a call from Interview asking if I wanted to help relaunch it. From the outside it looked incredibly strategic. In reality, it was a coincidence.

EO

Can you speak to that? You’ve become the person people call to rebuild a publication.

TB

That reputation developed unintentionally, but I understand why it stuck. Whenever I arrive somewhere, I’m not interested in rearranging what already exists; I’m compelled to take the whole thing down to the studs. There’s a difference between moving furniture and rebuilding the house, and I’m only really engaged when the latter is possible. If the job is simply to maintain an inherited structure, you end up operating inside someone else’s logic. That’s when you go on autopilot. And I’m not useful in autopilot. The work only becomes meaningful when the foundation is available to be rethought.

EO

So what is the Thom Bettridge project?

TB

I think it comes from growing up at a hinge moment between two cultural infrastructures. I was 17 when the iPhone came out in 2007, so my early years were shaped by the pre-digital scarcity of information: tracking down obscure books, art magazines, philosophy texts you could only find by digging. By the time I reached college, during the 2008–09 recession, the entire ecosystem had inverted. Suddenly everything rare was on Instagram or Tumblr, stripped of context, and you were expected to operate within a digital attention economy that rewarded speed over comprehension. That shift created a strange dissonance in me. I felt responsible for material that was disappearing in the transition but didn’t yet have a place in the new world.

EO

Right, but talk about the mechanics of that shift. People don’t always understand how radical it was.

TB

It wasn’t just technological; it fundamentally altered the metabolism of culture: how ideas circulate, how quickly they move, how little space they’re given to unfold. A lot of valuable material didn’t survive that change because it didn’t fit the pace or format of online life. So the through-line of my work is figuring out how to carry the most interesting parts of culture into an environment that flattens almost everything. There are ideas that deserve longevity but don’t make sense on the current grid of consumption. My job is essentially translation: taking depth, nuance, and intellectual eccentricity and finding a form where they can live without being diluted.

EO

What’s happening in that negotiation?

TB

For me, editing is a form of method acting. It begins with genuine research, but instead of following the archive literally, you build a character out of it. You internalize a worldview and operate from that internal logic. When Mel Ottenberg, Richard Turley, and I arrived at Interview, we went through the old issues and realized that Warhol’s sensibility—his flat humor, fixation on fame, and almost Internet-native detachment—actually resonates more fully today than it did in the 1970s. So we didn’t recreate Warhol; we created a contemporary extension of his sensibility, a kind of genetic spawn activated for the social media era. Writing from that position gave us the freedom to push the magazine’s voice as far as it could go while remaining true to its DNA. The extremity was already in the source material; we simply reframed it.

EO

And you pushed that logic as far as you possibly could.

TB

Because the original material demanded it. The same approach applied at i-D. Once you understand the founding logic—that glossy magazines weren’t capturing what people actually looked like in 1980s London, and that i-D was essentially an anthropological project—you see that its methodology was observation. It was about documenting real people in real scenes and treating youth culture as knowledge, not just style. That logic is consistent with how storytelling works now, where lived context and proximity matter more than polish, aesthetics and presentation. So instead of copying i-D’s historical aesthetics, we revived its method. We took its original spore and cloned it for a different century.

EO

When you’re doing what you do, what does it feel like? Do you feel like a scientist?

TB

It’s funny, because I don’t feel scientific at all, not in the math-and-science-brain sense. The closest analogy for me is still the method acting thing. There’s research, yes, but then there’s this strange divination vibe to the work, where you’re tapping into something dormant and coaxing it back into the present. You take a text, an archive, a sensibility that’s essentially dead on the page, and you figure out how to make it breathe again.

EO

You Frankenstein it. Tell me more.

TB

A lot of the material I work with comes from eras that will never repeat themselves in print. But you can revive the tone, the posture, the worldview, and let it act in the world in a new way. That’s where the Frankenstein metaphor comes in: you take these archival limbs—old interviews, layouts, sensibilities—and reassemble them into a creature that moves through the contemporary world with its own agency.

EO

When was your time at Interview?

TB

That was 2018.

EO

Right, basically on the eve of the magazine’s 50th anniversary.

TB

Exactly. I think the 50th-anniversary issue came out right after I left. My last issue, the one with Rihanna wearing the gimp mask, was just before that milestone.

EO

But you were there for the relaunch. For how long?

TB

Only about a year and change. It was a short cycle, but it was the entire structural reset.

EO

Here’s a question that might help you blanket the answer: when did you actually start believing in what you were doing? When did you feel the work cohering, or anticipate what it could become?

TB

I think it’s tied to the rhythm of being an editor. You make something, you put it into the world, you watch how the world reacts, and then you make something else. Over time, if you’re paying attention, you develop a sensitivity to what the world wants from you—not in a pandering way, but in a perceptual one. When you feel attuned to that, it’s exhilarating. That’s why blogging or Substack is thrilling on a micro level, and legacy media is thrilling on a macro one. You’re listening for a vibe in the air and trying to push the conversation a few inches forward. In that sense, it feels a bit like stand-up comedy: most people are terrible at it at first, but once you learn how to feel the crowd, you gain this sixth sense. I’ve never done stand-up, but the parallel makes sense to me.

EO

Let’s zoom in. Again: What did you learn at 032c? Interview? Highsnobiety?

TB

032c was the best possible place to start because the team was so small that I touched almost everything: social media, newsletters, editing the magazine, commissioning photography. It taught me how the entire ecosystem functions when you can’t hide inside a silo. It also taught me that text and image have to be in active tension, not just politely aligned. And the environment itself—Berlin—shaped my work in a way New York couldn’t. I grew up in New York and then studied here, so it let me see New York as an object rather than a backdrop.

EO

Say more about the move to Berlin—the psychology behind it, the cultural perspective, even what it meant to experience New York from Berlin.

TB

I grew up in New York, then did a year at Wesleyan, then came back and transferred to Columbia. Berlin had this intellectual and physical spaciousness that New York didn’t have at that time. That distance clarified what the New York culture industry felt like: overcrowded, mythic, and sealed off. From Berlin, you could see the machinery more clearly, and that clarity fed into how we made the magazine.

EO

Why did you leave Wesleyan?

TB

I still have a lot of love for Wesleyan. It was this intense little bubble. I actually have more friends from Wesleyan than from Columbia. A lot of people who now run A24 were there when I was there. LE1F, the musician, was one of my closest friends. People were already making things before they graduated. But every weekend I would come back to New York. I had friends here, I had a girlfriend here, and a whole social life here I was steady in maintaining. At a certain point I thought, If I’m here every weekend, why am I living in Connecticut? I wanted to be an adult living in a city who happened to attend school, not someone living in a stylized version of college.

EO

Did you change when you moved back to New York?

TB

If anything, I became more myself. Wesleyan was the anomaly. But New York in the early 2010s, post-recession, was complicated. The culture industries felt enormous and inaccessible. As a young person, the opportunities felt minuscule in comparison to the scale of what everyone else was doing. I remember thinking: am I supposed to be a gallery receptionist? Someone’s assistant? What can I possibly contribute to the world at 21? That’s part of why I left the city immediately after graduating. I didn’t want to compete in a world that felt impossible to enter.

EO

That iPhone moment you mentioned earlier—what did it signify? You had these niche interests, but what did the transition feel like at 17?

TB

It felt like a chapter break between an unpublicized life and a semi-public one. Before the iPhone, you’d take pictures on a digital camera, upload them later, and would engage Friendster or MySpace in a limited way to archive and share those moments with your people. But the iPhone created a loop: the device itself took the pictures and presented an immediate yet accessible archive to you, then those pictures fed the social media feed, wherein the feed shaped the culture, and the phone delivered that experience back to you. It was the hinge between analog adolescence and digital adulthood.

EO

What made you believe in magazines? What was the premonition that drew you to 032c?

TB

My original ambition was to be a curator.

EO

Seriously?

TB

Yes. I studied art history and philosophy at Columbia with people who were deeply embedded in the October journal tradition: Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, that whole world. My mentor was John Rajchman, who was also close to Deleuze. That was the intellectual environment I was conditioned in. I thought contemporary art was the medium through which you could make arguments about culture.

EO

What did being a curator mean to you? And what art were you meeting at the time?

TB

I wanted to use contemporary art to create conceptual messages about the world. Jordan Wolfson and artists of that generation were emerging around 2008–09. One of the brain-breaking experiences for me was seeing the Jeffrey Deitch–Dakis Joannou exhibitions, like Post Human. And shortly after graduating, there was Speculations on Anonymous Materials, curated by Susanne Pfeffer, which essentially inaugurated post-internet art in Germany. Those shows convinced me that you could use theory to build a meta-structure around a network of symbols. But over time I realized magazines let me do that work with more speed, more play, and more contact with everyday culture than curating ever could.

EO

Okay, so you were on your way to curating. How did that inform your thinking once you entered the magazine space?

TB

Working with Joerg at 032c showed me how much power there is in the tension between text and image. He loved taking a beautiful photograph and overlaying something abrasive on it, or pairing two things that had no business being together and forcing a new meaning to emerge. A magazine is literally one page attached to another, so the friction between words and visuals is its core power. Curating didn’t offer that same kind of immediacy. With magazines, everything is more mobilized. You’re not moving art around the world; you’re emailing people. At 032c, I could ask photographers to send images to illustrate a story, or pull press pictures from an art book and collage them into something that made a new argument about an artist.

EO

What did you feel like you had to translate? I read that across your work—the sense of method acting or improv as translation. You have this theoretical background, but what did you have to learn? What was the 032c language?

TB

The 032c language was about making pop culture feel weird and niche, and making niche, weird things feel pop. That was the mantra. We’d shoot the Kardashians in a way where you couldn’t even see their faces, or frame them in something uncanny rather than aspirational. Then we’d publish a story about a 95-year-old Austrian sociologist and make him sound like the most vital cultural commentator alive. It was all about bridging worlds that weren’t supposed to meet.

EO

And what did you learn about exaggeration? How did that become a doctrine for approaching editorial content?

TB

I gravitated toward making things as loud as possible. The aesthetic I couldn’t stand was that dainty, overly structured, “good taste zone” magazine voice: polite, academic, mannered. When I made magazines, I wanted to jolt people a bit, to mess with their expectations, to create something you’d want to photograph while you were reading it. “Beautiful and smart” wasn’t the goal. It needed tension.

EO

Because you wanted to make it a little nasty.

TB

Yes. The early 2010s had that whole Kinfolk, twee, indie vibe—everything soft, pale, tastefully arranged—which to me sucked ass. I wanted to go in the opposite direction.

EO

You’re like, “I’m too indie for the indie shit.” I’d argue that rap was the indie of the late aughts, early 2010s.

TB

During my first year at Interview, I pushed hard to put Young Thug on the cover. To the team it was wild—“Why not Charlize Theron?” But to me, the people shaping the zeitgeist at that time were rappers like Young Thug and Travis Scott. Movie stars were famous, but they weren’t changing culture. I don’t think rap occupies that same structural space anymore, but in that moment it really did.

EO

What’s the Highsnobiety version? And same with SSENSE?

TB

With Highsnobiety, which started as a streetwear-and-sneakers blog and grew into a culture platform, I was basically asking: How do you make a GQ for people born after 1990? Something that’s about culture and style at the same time, and that also makes sense with the way people’s brains work now. It was still a “blog-first” operation in many ways, that’s where the traffic came from, but the mandate was to turn that velocity into something that felt like an actual publication and brand, not just a feed. With SSENSE, the question was different: how do you build an editorial platform that’s completely native to a retailer, rather than bolted on as an afterthought?

EO

And where were we in the pandemic? When did you leave?

TB

That part was surreal. I left Interview and started at Highsnobiety at the end of 2019. The first day of the COVID lockdown—March 11, 2020—was literally the release date of my first print issue of the Highsnobiety magazine. I remember watching people cancel in real time—emails coming in like, “Our office is closed, I can’t come to your launch.” It was just this downward spiral. And then I spent the next two years in my weird home office, managing a team of about forty-five people entirely through screens.

EO

I’m curious about that COVID period. What was it like to be at a place that was essentially a blog, and then try to reposition that thinking into a periodical?

TB

It was hard but exhilarating. Publications are already grueling, but part of what makes them bearable is the camaraderie of being in the same room: joking around, arguing, and building something together. When you take that away and you’re just alone at home, the work can become joyless. I had so many calls where people would tell me they weren’t okay, that they were really sad, and I remember thinking, If you’re telling your boss, or your boss’s boss about your depression, it must be really bad. At the same time, 2020—George Floyd, BLM—gave us a license to use the platform in a more political way. One of my favorite things we did was an Election Day takeover where every single link on the site led to a pop-up that basically said, “Stop reading this site. Go vote.” We turned the entire homepage into a call to action. Some people made fun of it. Some people got mad at the people making fun of it. But it created this intense conversation. And when you have a big audience, that kind of friction is interesting.

EO

How did that shift the way you worked or how you understood the magazine? Did it change your sense of what was possible?

TB

It absolutely brought the brand out of its shell. When I first joined, I never would’ve imagined we’d run something like a digital cover with Jamaal Bowman, a progressive congressman, right before he got elected. That would’ve felt unthinkable for Highsnobiety a year earlier. So there was real satisfaction in stretching the platform beyond its comfort zone.

EO

And were you rewarded for that? How did people respond to those moments?

TB

People really liked it. I think there’s always this fear that if an audience knows you for one thing, they won’t let you talk about anything else. But even when I’m reading a fashion magazine, I still care about politics. Maybe a few readers are like, “Why is there a piece about politics?” or “Why are you writing about ceramics?” But honestly, who cares about that person? Fuck that person. Working across different publishing brands, I’ve come to see there’s always churn when you change direction. You join, you shift the logic, and some of the old audience freaks out. When we put Young Thug in Interview, we got comments from old-head fashion people saying, “Interview is dead. This isn’t culture.” Those are the people you eventually want to train to drop you. If you try to keep everyone happy, the thing curdles.

EO

How do you feel about the work you’re doing—across all these publications? And finish taking me from SSENSE and then to i-D.

TB

SSENSE was interesting because my relationship with it started while I was still at 032c. From 2016 to 2018, I consulted for SSENSE alongside Joerg, so for a lot of that time I was basically half working there: doing 032c during the morning on European time and at night helping build this editorial platform for a fashion retailer. That gig came about really naturally. The CEO loved 032c. He wanted a publication that felt native to SSENSE’s brand rather than some generic fashion-news window dressing. So he did the logical thing and hired the editor of his favorite magazine to invent it. It’s a straightforward idea, but a smart one.

EO

Did you see the promise of SSENSE at that time?

TB

The moment I understood SSENSE’s potential was pretty unexpected. When I first came in as a consultant, my assumption was naïve: they sell clothes, so editorial will just help move product. I imagined writing stories about “cool sweaters you should buy” and assumed translating that into sales was the whole point. But they conducted this massive data study while I was there, and the results flipped my understanding. We found that the most profitable content wasn’t product-driven at all. It was articles about ideas, aesthetics, and culture relevant to people who buy expensive clothes. One of our top-performing pieces, in terms of revenue correlation, was an article about brutalist architecture—Ricardo Bofill, specifically.

At first it was bizarre. Why is an architecture story that doesn’t even mention clothing generating the highest value? Then it clicked: the person who vibes with Bofill is the person who wants to buy avant-garde fashion. The article made no explicit pitch, but it created an environment, an ecosystem, that made someone want to stay, trust the brand, and eventually make a purchase. That was the lightbulb for me: the most valuable editorial isn’t shilling to people. It’s building a community of people who see themselves reflected in what you publish.

EO

What was that like in practice? I’m specifically curious about the promise of SSENSE as an e-commerce platform. How did you engage with the idea that they sell clothes, but they also plug into all these different cultural circuits?

TB

We orbited the retail operation, but we weren’t fused to it. Once we understood that storytelling, not shilling, was the mission, we didn’t need to sync constantly with merchandising. If the team was doing a huge buy with a new designer, we’d do a profile. But beyond that, the editorial engine didn’t need to shadow the retail calendar. It functioned best when it created its own gravitational pull.

EO

When you returned to SSENSE full-time, how did the project change? What was the apparatus you were encountering?

TB

When I returned to SSENSE full-time in 2022, my vision was clear. I wanted SSENSE to be the place where people discovered fashion—not just where they bought it, but where they learned about it first. So we put enormous resources into sending people to every fashion show, posting coverage in real time, and creating this meme-driven language around product, even when it was just a random new boot or bag. The idea was to build an association: I first saw those Rick Owens boots on the SSENSE feed. I first learned about this designer from their profile on SSENSE. It was about making the brand a gravitational center for the online conversation around fashion.

EO

The approach was really specific—the billboards, the memification of the brand. It felt almost like an album rollout. What do you follow most in culture now? For me, in that moment, it seemed like you were treating SSENSE as if it were a pop star meeting the market for the first time.

TB

Totally. We structured it like release cycles. The billboards, for instance, were part of SSENSE’s twentieth anniversary. We asked: what happens if we strip out imagery altogether and present the brand’s attitude through text alone? No products, no pictures, no models, just tone. The inspiration was HAL, the computer from 2001: Space Odyssey. This frame let us articulate the sensibility behind the brand in a way that felt pure. And a lot of our biggest campaigns were about taking the SSENSE world into real life. The kidswear campaign, where kids spelled out luxury brand names, created this tension between high fashion and childhood innocence. It became a world unto itself.

EO

Did that idea come from you having kids?

TB

Probably subconsciously. But the conscious prompt was simpler. SSENSE had launched kidswear a year before I came back, and nobody knew it. When a retailer’s public identity is eighteen years of adult clothing, customers don’t magically assume you can also buy baby Balenciaga there. So the brief was: create an idea that makes people understand we sell kids’ clothes. That guided the whole concept.

EO

Do you work best when you have a prompt? Or are you generating your own prompts? How does your creativity actually function?

TB

Both. A prompt is great because it simplifies the field; constraints help. But I also store ideas constantly. Sometimes a concept sits in my head for months before the right opportunity appears. Other times, the idea just arrives fully formed. It depends on the moment.

EO

Where do those ideas get worked out? Do you need people around you? Do you need to write them down? How do you think best?

TB

It’s a combination. I need momentum from people, almost a writers’ room energy. That sparks the first round of ideas. But then I need to step away. At i-D now, we’ll have a brainstorm, get nine good ideas on the table, and then I’ll walk away and immediately see that one is actually the idea. Sometimes it’s entirely spontaneous. With my first issue at i-D, I had been doing all this research and suddenly called Steff Yotka, who I work closely with, and said, “I have a crazy idea. What if we put someone completely unknown on the cover, and build the whole issue around a casting call?”

EO

What led you there? What convinced you of that?

TB

It came from spending a lot of time in the archive. I remember coming across this 1990s cover—1994, I think—with Rachel Weisz. At the time, I didn’t know much about when her career actually began, but what struck me was that the cover came out almost a decade before she became famous. She had been street-cast and photographed in this bunny costume simply because she was an interesting-looking girl. I realized how epic that was: a magazine spotting someone before the world did. Today, doing that feels like engagement suicide. You’d never street-cast a completely unknown person and put them on the cover of your magazine. But that impossibility is precisely what made it compelling. I thought, what happens if we do it now? That tension between past precedent and present expectation was the spark.

EO

It’s like how Hedi Slimane street-casts his shows. That whole moment was born from a culture where no one was famous in the same way.

TB

Exactly. There was a time, before my timeline, when going out in New York meant you could genuinely get discovered. That sense of social mobility, the idea that your life could pivot from one encounter, felt real. Now that energy has migrated into the digital realm. The modern version of being discovered is going viral overnight, but that doesn’t create the same IRL shift. It’s fame without the physical ceremony.

EO

How are you thinking about fame and celebrity now? Because this is only your second issue.

TB

Yes, our second issue.

EO

It feels like your eighteenth. How has it changed your relationship to celebrity? Because these covers aren’t conventional. And i-D has its own mythology.

TB

i-D is a very specific beast. When I started at 032c, the magazine was maybe twelve years old, still relatively young. Interview has its own serious IP. 032c has its own serious IP. But i-D is different because it’s mass and cult at the same time. You have this magazine which is a cult object but then this digital presence that’s massive. Last month, our Instagram broke 100M views.

EO

What is it like encountering something with two alien counterparts?

TB

The challenge is to make the two things speak to each other. Digital and print run on different physics: different speeds, different expectations, different ways readers metabolize information. So we’ve been trying to mesh them more deliberately, not by making them identical—that would be impossible—but by locating the shared DNA.

EO

Do you feel the difference? Do they feel distinct to you?

TB

Yes, always. You have to make hyperspecific content for the platform they’re on. A story that works beautifully in print might look ridiculous on TikTok. A TikTok that goes viral might seem trivial or juvenile if you transposed it into a magazine layout. So the question becomes: what are the constants? Tone of voice is one. A headline in the magazine should feel genetically linked to a caption on Instagram. Graphic design is another. Seeing the same fonts and typographic behavior activates a basic sense of cohesion across platforms. But the hardest part is scale and speed. On Instagram, we’ll have a conversation at nine in the morning and post something at 9:41. Print takes months.

EO

Are you guessing? Gambling? What have been the quiet wins?

TB

I think we’ve built a strong presence, something with a recognizable rhythm. It’s hard to point to a single “win” because so much of it is cumulative. It’s the machine itself becoming coherent. The print issue served almost as a thesis statement, and the satisfying part is watching that thesis seep into the bloodstream of everything else. When the digital reacts instinctively to the same logic as the print, that’s when you know the system is taking shape.

EO

I wanted to ask about your relationship to risk. Do you run toward it, or do these things not actually feel risky when you’re doing them?

TB

The unknown cover star was definitely a risk. It went against every contemporary incentive structure: data, engagement, celebrity logic, the security of recognizable faces. But it was a productive risk—the kind that reopens the question of what a magazine can still do.

EO

Did you feel it every step of the way? Were you challenged on it?

TB

I knew it was a risk, but I wasn’t afraid of it. I understood that if it failed, it would be on me. There are endless reasons something can flop, so you always have to consider flopping as an outcome. But it still felt like a bigger risk not to do something distinct. Playing it safe seemed like the real danger.

EO

If you had put an actual celebrity on the cover.

TB

I even tried imagining the hardest-to-get star I could land. Even then, it didn’t feel exciting; it felt inevitable. Flipping the logic, choosing someone no one knew, created an actual charge.

EO

With this Substack moment in writing, it feels like what you’re doing with the magazine is also a form of curation. You’re ushering in new talent. How has writing the Substack refocused what you want the magazine to be?

TB

I’d been thinking about starting it for three years, but I never had the bandwidth. I finally did it because I wanted a place to talk about how all this gets made. I create magazines and campaigns for brands, but there’s this entire theoretical layer that ends up hidden. One of my first posts was an email I’d written to the managers working under me four years earlier about “creative leadership.” I realized all these frameworks, drafts, and structures shouldn’t live in a drawer. People should have access to them, to think through them and push on them.

EO

Have you always thought of what you do as educational?

TB

Not until now.

EO

How old are you?

TB

Thirty-five.

EO

Wait, really?

TB

Yeah.

EO

You’ve only been doing this for ten years?

TB

I started really young. I started in magazines at twenty-three professionally, but I started making them in college when I was nineteen. So this work has been my whole adult life.

EO

Now you’re running a magazine, writing a Substack, bridging these modes. Substack allows quieter, more reflective conversations to become public. You reach people directly.

TB

It feels utopian. I remember an onboarding meeting at TikTok four years ago—no shade, I love TikTok—where they showed a slide saying the ideal length of a viral video was seven seconds. I remember thinking, seven seconds is the unit of meaning now. It was fun, but you can only say so much. Substack is the opposite. People write 2,000-word essays and they’re the hottest things on the platform. It rewards depth over velocity.

EO

So what do you feel your project is now? How have these experiences filtered into your work?

TB

For SSENSE, the mission was to become the digital water cooler of fashion.

EO

And at i-D?

TB

With i-D, I want to build a cultural institution within the spirit of DIY. The fact that a fanzine became one of the most influential fashion magazines in the world is still wild. So how do we extend that lineage? How do we open-source tools and make them available? For the first time, I’m thinking about education. I’m even teaching at Central Saint Martins next year. That’s new for me.

EO

What changed? Is it having kids?

TB

Partly, but also the world. So many young people want to be content creators, and there’s no real resource for how to do that. I want to codify this new form of cultural production.

EO

How important is education to you?

TB

Honestly, education is a little overrated. I don’t feel like what I studied made me who I am. Doing the work in real time did.

EO

It’s ironic. [Laughs.] You’re extremely educated.

TB

Sure, but I don’t credit my degree with my skills. I learned more from writing newsletters, prepping Facebook posts, and making magazines under deadline than from reading Heidegger.

EO

But you still channel theory. You experience the world through it.

TB

What philosophy gave me was structure: the ability to build systems around ideas, to take five disconnected things and click them into shape. In a chaotic world, that’s useful.

EO

Do you think of yourself as an architect, someone building systems and platforms?

TB

I wish I had more time for it. I juggle so many things. The Substack is where I get closest. Even then, I’ll think, if I had ten hours to write this instead of two, this could be better. But putting the best version of the idea out there still gives people something to work with.

EO

Have you identified the structure yet?

TB

Not fully. I want to expand it, talk to people who make content from different positions, and build something like an oral history of this ecosystem.

EO

So how do you feel about this thing you’ve been doing for so long? You’ve built the runway for others. You’re in a new place. What does it feel like right now?

TB

This might sound corny, but I feel grateful. After working for a brand and returning to publishing, I think almost every day, Holy shit, it’s my job to make a magazine. That still shocks me. I’m lucky. If I were retired, this is what I’d be doing for fun anyway. My next ambition is figuring out how to give that back, how to be more generous with what I’ve been given and what I’ve learned.

EO

What are the new challenges?

TB

In media, you constantly have to re-earn your relevance, not just as a business but in how people absorb information. You have to prove why you belong in the conversation. I don’t think of my competitors as other magazines. My competitors are people with strong accounts talking about culture in their own voice. That’s the lane I’m in.

EO

Last question re: print. How often are you publishing now?

TB

Twice a year.

EO

It used to be quarterly.

TB

Yeah. Now it’s two main issues, with fanzine-style supplements in between, more project-based.

EO

That’s nice. It gives people time to miss it and you.

TB

Exactly. It’s a healthier rhythm. Monthly is fast and fun; biannual lets you build something conceptual and monumental. The middle ground is the worst. You’re always working but never with enough time to make it as good as it should be.