Introducing our new newsletter: The Culture

Let’s begin this new newsletter by newslettering about newsletters. After all, there’s a lot of them about these days, including Prospect’s own The Round-up and The Insider. And now we’re adding another, this one, The Culture, not just to our own family of newsletters, but to the extended family of thousands—millions?—of newsletters around the world.

What for some people may be an unforgivable torrent of spam is, for me—and, I’m sure, many others—a golden age. I’ve loved newsletters since before I’d even read one, when I discovered in a childhood book that people exchanged prototypical versions in the Roman empire to inform each other about, well, the news and also about their own lives. The modern magazine came out of what we’d recognise as newsletters; hastily printed, double-sided things such as Addison and Steele’s Spectator in the 18th century.

And today? Gosh. Thanks in the first instance to the internet, and then to platforms such as Substack, the means of production and distribution have become far more open and less costly—and now my inbox is full of newsletters catering to all my interests.

Speaking just culturally, there’s Farran Smith Nehme’s Substack, Self-Styled Siren, on (mostly) old Hollywood. Nathan Brown’s Hit Points, on the video-game industry. Katy Hessel’s The Great Women Artists. Leo Robson’s Taproot and Henry Oliver’s The Common Reader, which both focus mainly on literature. And since the death of Cormac McCarthy, Aaron Gwyn’s Substack, The Night Does Not End, which exclusively concerns McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, has been less a newsletter and more a form of collective therapy.

It’s not just Substacks, either: Sight & Sound magazine’s Weekly Film Bulletin, which is put together by one of my favourite critics, Pamela Hutchinson, is a wonderful guide to film culture—new and old.

These newsletters exemplify one of the great joys of newsletters in general: they inhabit niches. They’re authored by people with great knowledge in a particular area, who then tumble down rabbit holes of their own choosing, all for the benefit of a like-minded readership. In this respect, they remind me of blogging in the mid- to late-2010s, where I happened to begin my career in journalism. Newsletters are both part of and endearingly apart from the daily flurry of stories and rumour and excitement. They’re not about shouting the loudest, nor having the gaudiest opinions.

There’s another way in which newsletters remind me of the good ol’ blogging years: they’re communities. Although, at first glance, they might appear to be one-way broadcasts, they’re actually a form of dialogue between their authors and their readers—or, more accurately, as they were in ancient Rome, a network between the author and each reader. This is especially clear on Substack, with its comment systems and extra modes of communication for paid subscribers, but it’s also there with most newsletters—which are shared around, remarked upon, email-to-the-author-ed about. Unlike social media, where millions of voices jostle for a fleeting, unsatisfying form of attention, newsletters are a real conversation between friends.

I compare all this to blogging, about which I’m nostalgic. But, actually, these are many of the same qualities I love about magazines; the villages to newspapers’ cities. We all know each other here. We’re all tempted to stray beyond the palisades, but we’d be much safer if we didn’t. In fact, maybe we should draw in the palisades a little closer. Make magazines within the magazines.

Which brings me to this newsletter, The Culture. It’s called that to match the name of the books and arts section in Prospect’s print edition; which we changed recently, from “Books and Culture”, in part because every other magazine has a “Books and Culture” or “Culture and Books” or “Arts and Books” or “Culture and Arts” section, but also to reflect our belief that culture—which is to say, books, paintings, albums, video games, and all the rest—is a big part of that amorphous thing we all occupy and call the culture. We want to cover one as it overlaps with and influences the other.

That’s certainly the goal of this newsletter, too. Each week, it will start with an article on some cultural event or trend, written by one of our critics, so you’ll be getting some real expertise. It will continue with reading-watching-listening recommendations from more of our critics (the first selection is below). Then, finally, links to Prospect’s rich trove of cultural writing, past and present. We hope that it will grow to become a guidebook to the culture itself.

So here’s to newsletters—and to The Culture. I’ve mentioned plenty of good newsletters above; please do read ’em. But only after you’ve read this one, when it lands in your inbox every Thursday.

And if you’d like to email me about The Culture—or anything else, really—I’m on peter.hoskin [at] prospect-magazine.co.uk

Thanks for reading.