8.25.26 // The one where Nate shares an update from the studio.
Hey, Neighbor,
Over the last four years, I’ve written nearly five hundred newsletters.
I stumbled into that figure somewhat unintentionally. In January 2023, I took a job ideating, writing, and sending three a week. With the muscle built, I began publishing this one. For a long time, I could count the amount of weeks where I didn’t send a newsletter on a single hand (three, give-or-take).
I love writing. Always will. I believe the written word offers the most depth of any form of storytelling. As a medium, it’s the closest thing we have to understanding each other. As a practice, it’s the closest thing we have to understanding ourselves.
I’ve learned to love the process, too. From penning ten thousand-word magazine profiles to showing up weekly in email inboxes (and at the forefront of readers’ minds), the muscle only grew in strength, and scope.
But this spring, I fell out of love with what, exactly, I was writing.1
Fundamentally, there’s always an inherent tension between writing what one wants to write, and writing the things that readers actually read.
Over the last decade, the resurgence of email newsletters—a Nineties-era format that first caught fire alongside the advent of the Internet, a rather frictionless evolution from the handwritten sheets once passed around Ancient Rome—has encouraged a new generation of writers, and readers, to take shape.
Platforms like Substack and Beehiiv grabbed this mantle and ran with it. Today, it’s never been easier to start a “publication” and immediately distribute words to your closest readers.
But newsletters, at their core, are still a “format,” truncated by inboxes…and competing with every other work ping and summer sale also demanding readers’ attention. Forget the fact that email services (such as Gmail) like to change their filters, meaning writers are always one too-large image away from drowning in the dreaded “Promotions” tab.2 The email reading experience is, quite simply, clunky, and anything longer than two thousand words quickly starts to feel like (re)attempting to read Infinite Jest.
To sum: No matter how high-and-mighty Substack likes to portray itself, self-proclaiming the platform as “a new economic engine for culture,” it’s hard to imagine a world where the writing of the next F. Scott Fitzgerald appears in an email inbox.
We all like to sound smart when quoting media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who coined the term “the medium is the message.” In practice, though, there’s a reason why punchy, bullet-point-laden newsletters written in a “Smart Brevity” style3 work so well.
We’re all busy! And there’s a million other things we could be reading, watching, or listening to. (See the sentence three grafs above.)
I’m endlessly proud of the essays, reviews, interviews, and actual, original reporting we’ve published through this newsletter since the start of 2025. Even when sticking to our vision felt like a Sisyphean task, there’s no doubt about it: We continued to show up, building a digital and print magazine with an illogical love for longform writing.
Therefore, taking a step back—after personally publishing something weekly for, again, four years—was not an easy decision to make. Justifiable or not, my lizard brain still feels a lot of subconscious shame. Similar to working out, when you let up, when you stop writing, the muscle quickly atrophies, and you’re left starting from scratch.
So why pause this spring? Several reasons. One was personal: If you’re a longtime reader, you know that Vicky and I were doing super-duper-long-distance (Chicago, Illinois to Geneva, Switzerland) since October 2024.
This June, she took a new job stateside. We’re now living together again (exciting!), and the move brought its own fair share of logistics (exhausting!).4
Another reason was business-related. Earlier this year, I felt we needed to shrink in order to grow again. My time was spread thin across five things: events, shortform and longform video, writing this newsletter twice a week, and publishing our quarterly print magazine. About eighty percent of my schedule was operations-focused; the remainder was spent scraping together whatever creative gas I had left in the tank.
I don’t think anyone is capable of doing those five things consistently for more than a year. I certainly don’t think anyone can do them all simultaneously well. So for the last five months, we’ve been operating as a scrappy team of two, channeling our energy into a seasonless documentary series on YouTube. Even with its flaws, I still believe YouTube is the most effective online space to reach (and engage) an ardent audience. Long-term, the theory goes, building our channel will set a sustainable floor for everything we do.5
That singular focus has paid dividends. This weekend, we passed ten thousand subscribers.6 A small milestone, in the grand scheme of things. Yet a noteworthy number at that.
The third reason I stepped back from writing here was because, to put it succinctly, I felt the love slipping away. And whether true or not, I felt like you, dear reader, can tell when the love starts slipping, too.
As creative people, we often go through waves of finding the right cadence to create stuff. Constraints can be a good thing. When you come to terms with the realization that not every project we make, write, or edit needs to be a masterpiece, we accept that scheduled output serves a purpose—and a stronger muscle can ultimately take bigger swings, anyway.
Nevertheless, constraints without direction is not a good thing. Showing up feels like a chore. You begin to dread it. You’re no longer proud of it. And when you’re pouring yourself into your work…well, that’s when the fun questions really start.
Roughly twenty months have passed since we opened the studio’s doors at the beginning of 2025. Belief is a finnicky thing, but the thing that’s kept powering us is, and will always be, you.
While I’ve published these letters sparingly, we’ve continued to host events at the studio, every month, from a storytelling night in June to a secret premiere with philosophy creator Michael Burns in August. It’s been a great honor watching neighbors continue to become friends, and collaborators—and, sometimes, even develop crushes, between our humble four walls.
Conversely, as we continue to stare down the long, winding road of producing the next episode of our docuseries,7 you have inspired us, too. It’s so damn easy to get swept up in the before (production) and after (trying, and failing, not to refresh YouTube’s analytics dashboard). But even when we get caught up in it all, all I have to do is close my eyes, and picture our early studio screenings, when we show new episodes for the first time.
Nothing beats a small room, full of real humans. Laughing at the right moments, and tensing up when things get serious—sparking conversations that last all night.
It feels good to have found the right tone, and voice. I believe a healthy dose of satire is the proper vehicle to express our unique perspective on an increasingly-disconnected world. It’s strange, but there’s real merit to hiding the broccoli. Inauthenticity might just be the most efficient Trojan Horse to implementing actual connection.
Personally? This direction has left me feeling more creatively-motivated than I have in a long time, and you can expect to see us show up on your YouTube homepage every month(ish) before the end of the year. The majority of my right brain juices are being spent there, combining all my past lives—everything from magazine journalism writing to podcast interview production to even my goofy mockumentaries back in high school.
As for this space: New writing will begin popping up in your inbox in the coming weeks.8 A little less pressure on constraints for constraints’ sake, a little more focus on a direction that, ultimately, serves our mission.
Make The Internet Feel Smaller.
— NGL
🎥 Can Bowling, Alone, Solve the “Male Loneliness Epidemic?”
Bowling is the largest participatory sport in America, with nearly 70 million people visiting their local alley every year. So if more people are bowling than ever before, why have ~75% of bowling centers closed over the last several decades?
To find an answer, we spoke with a Hall of Fame bowler, and visited the oldest bowling alley in Chicago—the 102-year-old Immaculate Conception. And while we soon realized that private equity-backed companies like Bowlero have played a major role in this downward trend, the core issue runs much, much deeper.
In 2021, the American Survey Center found that 15% of men report having zero close friends...a fivefold increase since 1990. This study took off like wildfire, and became the basis for the so-called "male loneliness epidemic."
But just how accurate is this narrative? And is the solution really as simple as joining your weekly bowling league?
Watch Bowling, Alone, streaming now on @powderblueworld.
Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.
Dramatic, I know.
No matter where you hide, the Game of Algorithms is inescapable. Chaos is a ladder, or something like that.
This is a communication formula created by the news organization Axios—and later iterated upon by outlets such as Morning Brew and Semafor. If you saw it, you’d probably recognize it instantly. The creators of Axios believe in it so thoroughly that they even published a book titled Smart Brevity in 2022.
Want to learn more about the business of space? You can read Vicky’s reporting daily over at Payload—it’s free to subscribe!
There’s a lot more I can say here, but the short version is this: When you’re consistently “borrowing” an audience—relying on the guests you interview to draw people in—it doesn’t just make things feel somewhat transactional (an icky feeling itself). Most of that audience also doesn’t stick around. They need to care about you…which is what the whole creator revolution has always been about.
Ironically enough, this newsletter is also growing more now than when I was actually writing it twice-a-week.
Still coming up with a name for it. Will take any and all suggestions.
To our loyal members who have stuck by our side for quite some time, don’t worry—the first print issue of OFFLINE will be arriving at your doorsteps in the coming months.
It will feature new essays, behind-the-scenes stories, and exclusive interviews. We appreciate your longstanding support greatly.
♥️