The Monday Media Diet with Abby Rapoport

On Texas, Reliable Sources, and Marcus Samuelsson

Abby Rapoport (AR) publishes the excellent Strangers Guide, which recently landed on our desk. We’re happy to have us with us this morning. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

About five years ago I started Stranger’s Guide publication with Kira Brunner Don. We have a quarterly print magazine as well as weekly newsletters. We focus on a different place each quarter—a city, country or region—and feature local writers and photographers on a wide range of subjects including sports, music, politics and human rights. We’ve won some big awards, including the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2021 and 2022, but we’re not a household name (unless we’re talking about my own household). My title is “publisher,” which doesn’t mean much in 2022 but basically I spend most of my time working on our web and newsletter strategies, building partnerships and generally finding ways to spread the word.

I also spend a lot of time around nonprofit boards, despite being a little ambivalent on the “nonprofit industrial complex.”

I’m pretty into being a multi-generational Texan, which I think is a hazard of this weird place, and I’m mother to a 7 year-old and a 5 year-old, which involves a lot more music practice than I thought it would. 

Describe your media diet. 

My peak Twitter use was basically a decade ago (an evolution looking quite wise at the moment.) These days, to get national news, I do what supposedly no one does and I visit the homepages of CNN, the Washington Post and the NYTimes a couple times each day.

Most of my media consumption comes from email. I have loved email newsletters since long before Substack and I subscribe to far more than I can actually read. I know some people are constantly pruning their media intake, unsubscribing from emails, etc. 

I tend to dive into my inbox in a kind of chaotic manner. I'm incapable of routine, which I always feel a bit guilty about, because routines feel so virtuous. But I don’t feel guilty when I skip a newsletter. There’s always another one coming.

For basic knowledge, I tend to read some combination of The Monocle Minute, the NYTimes’ The Morning and the Texas Tribune’s The Brief most mornings before my kids wake up. I am still mourning Brian Stelter’s version of Reliable Sources which was my favorite thing to read before bed. 

When I get to it, I also like to read Delayed Gratification, a British publication that fights the 24-hour news cycle through in-depth looks at the issues that dominated headlines three months earlier. I try to catch Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press, documenting the book publishing world from a particular vantage point. For good media reporting, I try to make sure I don’t miss any work by Clare Malone, a friend and I think sharpest media critic.

Throughout each week, I nearly always read Girl’s Night In, Cup of Jo and A Thing or Two, and when I can, I also like to poke through The Browser, which identifies great, often idiosyncratic essays around the internet. There’s also, Vittles, on food and culture, and perhaps best of all Dearest which delves into interesting antique jewelry being sold at auction.

I’m an avid reader of the Strategist’s Celebrity “Can’t Live Without” series, although between you and me, I think they’ve started letting the celebs recommend too many fancy items.

We get the print versions of Jewish Currents, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and Science. I’ll freely admit that I’m perpetually behind on all of them, but the best thing about print is that you can always return to it and the work feels worthwhile—if not timely, then a frozen-in-amber look at how people were viewing a topic a few weeks or months prior. 

I don’t watch a ton of tv, but I do like British panel shows “Would I Lie to You?” and “Taskmaster,” which I like to have on when doing chores. I also highly recommend the UK celebrity version of the Great British Bake Off, which is available on Roku under the title “Celebrity Baking Show”—it’s hilarious and the opposite of stressful.

What’s the last great book you read?

I read Persuasion for the first time this fall—somehow I just never got to it before—and while this is hardly a controversial opinion, it’s just so good that it sort of blew the curve for most of my winter reading. 

I will also mention Shine On Bright and Dangerous Object by Laurie Colwin which is beautiful and deeply satisfying in my opinion.

What are you reading now?

I’m taking a second stab at Ducks, Newburyport, which I started in 2020 but failed to finish. It’s an experimental novel, ostensibly one stream-of-conscious sentence that takes you through 1000 pages. I described it to a friend as “Infinite Jest for women.” While I try to get my arms around it, I’m also rereading Marcus Samuelsson’s memoir Yes, Chef, which is excellent.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I skim the table of contents, flip through for photos and pull quotes and then pick an article, usually from the middle issue, to start reading first. I also love seeing ads, if there are any, and combing through the masthead.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Well, self-interestedly, I'd say Stranger's Guide; I think we’re doing something unique and interesting  and our latest guide on Ukraine and its recent post-Maidan history is, I think, among the best collections we’ve published. But in particular, I’d highlight works by Courtney Desiree Morris and Haska Shyyan, both of whom are spectacular essayists. Everyone should follow them and read whatever they publish.

While I think plenty of people are reading them, I also think John Ganz and Anand Giridharadas are doing some of the more interesting social commentary around and more people should be reading their work.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

The Balance meditation app has been amazing for helping my kids fall asleep–and sometimes I wind up falling asleep right with them.

Plane or train?

I live in Texas where the rail options are laughably minimal—and in general I find airplanes to still be an appealing, liminal space where I can somehow disconnect from daily life and watch hours of Bravo TV or the Food Network instead. But nonetheless, I’ll always choose trains if traveling on the East Coast or in train-friendly locales outside the US. Among the best moments of parenthood came when we were taking the Chunnel from Paris to London and my then-3 year old suddenly looked at me wide-eyed and announced—”I think we’re riding on Thomas!”

WITI Classifieds:

We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.

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What is one place everyone should visit? 

New Orleans. While I’d been before, it was really working on the Stranger’s Guide: New Orleans volume that I really connected with the city and its complexity and fragility. I think it’s especially intense for me because I live in Austin, which is becoming blander and more like a watered-down version of LA. As so many American cities start to look more and more the same, New Orleans stands apart in all its glorious strangeness.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into. 

The best thing about my work is I get to fall into deep rabbit holes all the time, as we do a newsletter devoted to a different theme (whiskey, soccer, punk rock, it varies) and follow it around the world through facts and literary excerpts. This summer, I went deep into the world of South African reality tv shows and wound up watching a number of them. (Too many to list.)

But I also have a weird thing tracing family trees of prominent people downward into their less famous progeny—inevitably, the great-great-grandson of some European count is now an expert of tax law somewhere. For instance, I was briefly working on a book project that led me to do a bunch of research on the Warburg family at the turn of the twentieth century. That somehow led me to a sort-of “Where are they now?” including delving into the work of Sandol Stoddard, the children’s book author who wrote “I Like You” (illustrated by Maurice Sendak) and was married to a Warburg and—and who also wrote the first major work in the US in favor of hospice care in 1978. (AR).

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Abby (AR)

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