The Monday Media Diet with Gillian Morris
On Supernuclear, The New Urban Order, and The Aleph and Other Stories
Gillian Morris (GM) is friend of WITI. She’s working on Supernuclear.
Tell us about yourself.
I’ve lived a few lives from being an analyst in the Middle East, to making an app, Hitlist, that millions of people used to find cheap flights, to now writing Supernuclear, a blog about communal living. It’s strange to think that my lifestyle has become my professional life as well: I enjoy living with friends, so I set up a few communal homes over the years and now co-own a set of apartments with a few others. It turns out enough people are curious about this that I now make a living writing, speaking, and consulting others about how to set up their communities.
Describe your media diet.
I avoid breaking news - I briefly worked at CNN and while I have immense respect for the journalists I was with there, I saw firsthand how there is always pressure to make a story more shocking to get attention. I prefer longer form analysis in weeklies like the Economist or the FT weekend edition.
I subscribe to the New York Times but mostly gravitate towards the magazine. I am particularly pro-Times at the moment since they just published an op-ed I wrote.
I try and read the New Yorker cover to cover each week but my only 100% completion rate is the crossword puzzle, which I do with my housemates - it’s always fun to see how our arcane knowledge overlaps or doesn’t.
I religiously read a few blogs: The New Urban Order by Diana Lind, which has creative takes on housing policy and how we could build better cities; Thesis Driven on the construction & housing industry; Agartha.One for futurist experiments; Quinn Larrabee for incisive commentary on the jet set burning man shamanic searchers of our age.
What’s the last great book you read?
Jerusalem Demsas’s On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, and Democracy. I’ve enjoyed Demsas’s writing since she was at Vox. This little booklet is a damning, infuriating summary of why homes are so unaffordable and what we could do to change that - though I wish she spent more time considering communal living.
What are you reading now?
On my nightstand is The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, which I’m finding at times incandescent but mostly confusing.
Also: I just finished Heated Rivalry and ordered the next book in the series and will probably finish that before I make it the rest of the way through the Borges.
What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?
Scan to see if any of my favorite writers have pieces - Nathan Heller, Elif Batuman, Andrew Marantz, Anthony Lane, Dexter Filkins in that order. Then Talk of the Town. Movie and book reviews. Fiction. The rest.
Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?
Plenty of people read Margaret Atwood, but man every time I read another piece of hers I’m struck by how prescient her writing can be. I re-read the MaddAddam trilogy recently and it packs a punch post-COVID. She also had a great interview with Ezra Klein recently which he introduced by saying ‘A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now.’
What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?
I was an early beta tester of Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley’s new app, Beebot. It’s an audio DJ that gives you updates about your friends & the city around you when you put in your airpods. It has that janky feel of an app still figuring out its purpose, but I’m enjoying being along for the ride, and getting the occasional very random update from other early adopters.
Plane or train?
Train and I feel like I have good authority on this: I’ve taken most of the long distance trains across the US. The names are heaven: the California Zephyr, the Coast Starlight, the Sunset Limited. Outside the US I’ve taken the trans-Mongolian, and lots of obscure trains around places like Uzbekistan and the interior of China. There’s nowhere I sleep better than on a moving train.
What is one place everyone should visit?
Puerto Rico. I visited in 2019 and ended up moving there. I feel like it has a mixed to bad reputation as a mass market cruise destination / victim of US colonialism and/or hurricanes, but the island is one of the most gorgeous places on earth AND gave us Bad Bunny. The people are warm, the nature is stunning, and there’s a witchy energy that will probably change your life.
Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.
I’m not proud of this, but I can’t stop watching these videos of people selling and buying Hermes handbags from Love Luxury, a Dubai and London based boutique. I can’t explain it. I have no desire to ever own a luxury handbag, and the stories definitely seem staged. But there’s a quiet drama to each interaction that speaks to our particular moment of late stage capitalism. And the names of the colors are Pynchonesque: Vert Comics, Mauve Sylvestre, Anemone. This is the YouTube rabbit hole I haven’t been able to escape for months.