Can fiction become a form of receptacle, or reliquary? Here are two novels about attempts to store unstable objects. In Bora Chung’s The Midnight Timetable, the Institute is home to a selection of haunted items: a tennis shoe, a handkerchief, a cat that should really have been killed by the nail sticking out of its fur. And in There Is No Antimimetics Division, by Sam Hughes, a writer and programmer who works under the pen name qntm, the Organization has a whole department devoted to the containment of ideas and entities that come with “self-censoring” qualities. These “antimemes” shape the world around us but avoid any kind of purchase in our memories or perceptions.

Both the Organization and the Institute are examples of the kind of pulpy, paranoid spaces that Amy Scattergood invokes so luminously in her poem “The Ministry of Truth”:

Inside the locked doors 
a library of telephone books 
from each foot-thick metropolis to the pioneer shacks. 
Every day phones ring.

They are also, as many reviewers have pointed out, timely incarnations of the classic haunted house – both offer a series of rooms in which strange things might happen. And frequently they do.

Chung’s novel is, superficially at least, the more traditional of the two. In the book’s afterword, she suggests that ghost stories are a handy option for writers whenever they’re otherwise blocked, and these are, indeed, all ghost stories in the first reading. It’s not hard to think of each one as a nudge or prompt to get the mind working on a chilly morning. One after another, every story is built around an object in the Institute’s rooms that has unresolved emotions and meaning attached to it. It’s a Freudian approach to haunting: The past holds a terrible controlling power over the present.

And so that handkerchief leads us into the story of a family pulled apart by a pathologically selfish sibling, while the story that starts with the tennis shoe ends with the quiet unraveling of a social media streamer. The final episode in the novel makes the connection between physical items and their tethered ghosts entirely clear, in fact: Once a month the Institute’s noctivagant staff turn up for work in the daylight hours, and air all the items out on the lawn in order to expedite “the freeing of those that haunt the objects.”

In Antimimetics Division, however, things are initially more fraught. The risk inherent in running an organization that seeks to contain objects that can’t be remembered is a kind of institutional dementia. Marie Quinn, who is probably no longer aware how much time she’s served in her role tackling antimemes, is only dimly aware that her staff at the Organization continues to get smaller as people forget their jobs. Whole pieces of de - partmental infrastructure disappear suddenly when antimemes eat the memories of their existence. Plans for containing specific antimemes are made and remade, enacted and reenacted over the course of decades because the results cannot stick in the mind.

Agents are left to discover traces of their own past experiences, driven forward by promising gaps rather than the memories themselves, which no longer exist. “There are ideas that can’t be spread,” Quinn explains early on. “There are entities and phenomena that harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves. You take a Polaroid photo of one, it’ll never develop. You write a description down with a pen on paper and hand it to someone, but what you’ve written turns out to be hieroglyphs ...”

Despite the differences in approach, Chung and Hughes have to contend with the fact that there is nothing in life quite so unstable as a story that’s in the process of being told. And so along with their cursed artifacts, both authors must engage with the maddening way that narrative wriggles around when you try to get it to behave.

For Chung, this leads to a kind of blending effect. The items in her Institute inevitably lead the reader out into the wider world. Once freed from its confines, that tennis shoe, or that handkerchief, is able to travel through time and space and even the porous borders of individual narratives. The Institute’s staff become protagonists as well as custodians: One must deal with an endlessly telescoping tunnel as they drive home from work, while another receives lottery results in advance from a telepathic sheep. The handkerchief is both a desired treasure that destroys a contemporary family and an object from the distant past, created as a gift for a bride-to-be. More than anything, it’s an object that just keeps turning in up in unexpected places.

And for Hughes, an opposite force is at work. Antimimetics Division began life as a serial fiction on the website of the SCP Foundation. This is a wiki-based “collaborative writing project” in which people from all over the world come together to add their own store of paranormal items, along with their histories and instructions on how to contain them, to the website’s archive. But Hughes reworked the book prior to Del Rey’s republication, and in doing so he tinkered with the structure, clarifying that it’s a novel rather than a series of stories. But somewhere along the way, a quietly stabilizing effect has creeped in too, and this is a shame.

Taken in small chunks, Hughes’ tales excel at wrong-footing the reader. Narrators turn out to be unreliable, simply because they cannot remember the details of what they’re doing for very long. A bureaucrat’s aide turns out to be an infiltrating specter in one story, while a woman must scrub away the memory of her marriage to save her husband in another. These moments work beautifully as vignettes.

But for a novel, the narrative must often build in the telling, and as the threat posed by the anti-memes grows more apocalyptic, even a story as strange as Hughes’ finds itself slipping into familiar beats. As the third act looms, there are protagonists and antagonists handily established. There’s a world-ending disaster looming and there’s a desperate plan in place to avert it. It doesn’t really matter what the flavor of horror is anymore, because the story has succumbed to the comfort of familiar beats and a timeworn Hollywood structure.

Is this a disappointment? Perhaps a slight one. But it may also be part of both books’ real message. Stories, Chung and Hughes can testify, are the ultimate unstable element. They are as uncanny as things get. Any attempt to store them or organize them may change them forever. Ultimately, then, both these spooky books are twice haunted, firstly by the horrors that lurk in the archives, and then by narrative, and by structure, and by all the tricks we have learned and unlearned over the centuries of telling ghost stories in the middle of the night.

At a meeting of a North American college speedrunning club in the late 2010s, introductions went around the circle. How did you get into this? Which video games do you follow? Which world record would you personally like to shatter? One by one, the students explained the origins of their obsession with completing video games against the clock.

One mentioned Punch-Out!!, a game famously suited to speedrunning. Another cited Andrew G, a pioneering figure in early Super Mario Bros. runs, whose fraction-of-a-second world bests helped define the discipline. A third said that he had followed Games Done Quick, the long-running charity event in which speedrunners perform live marathons for vast online audiences. Others nodded along. Then two or three people in the circle offered the same answer: They’d fallen into the speedrunning hobby via a YouTube channel that charts the history and evolution of world records.

The group was unaware, but Summoning Salt, the founder of that channel – and, in fact, founder of the club they had all just joined – was sitting among them. He was still a teenager at the time, but his online handle, “Salt,” had already become synonymous with the speedrunning scene, thanks to his brisk, meticulously structured documentaries. He chose, however, to not reveal his identity. Salt simply smiled politely and let the moment pass.

Today, Salt, as he is known to the 2-million-or-so subscribers to his channel, remains bafflingly coy for an individual whose audience rivals in size many of the most-viewed television shows. His peculiar combination of documentarian, historian, and internet personality has made him widely known. And yet, when we talk over Zoom, he declines to share his real name, and will only confirm, somewhat apologetically, that he is in his 20s and lives in Oregon. He explains that it took him nearly a decade to feel comfortable enough to perform, in June 2025, what’s known in the YouTube business as a “face reveal.” Until then, to his devoted audience, he was no more than a soft-spoken (albeit commanding), disembodied voice.

Part of that shyness comes, perhaps, from the fact that Salt never intended to become internet famous. He studied economics at university (which one, he won’t say), with a special emphasis on business studies. These academic choices felt, to him, arbitrary rather than intentional, the sort of path expected of a young man of his circumstances finding a way into the world. He became interested in speedrunning when he started watching videos uploaded by Sinister1, a speedrunner who made a name for himself by expertly playing games while blindfolded.

Speedrunners, Salt learned via Sinister1, are players who approach video games less as entertainment than as competitive systems to be mastered. They train in the same way as professional athletes by memorizing optimal routes, drilling precise inputs, and developing strategies that minimize risk and maximize speed. The goal is not simply to finish a video game quickly, but to play it perfectly, or as close to perfectly as human anatomy allows. Progress is measured in vanishingly small increments: a second shaved here, a frame of animation saved there. Yet these infinitesimal gains accumulate, and by the time a record falls it often carries the drama of any major sporting upset.

One of Sinister1’s favorite games, Punch-Out!!, particularly appealed to Salt. “It has these bright, really big sprites that are beautiful,” he told me. So, he downloaded a copy of the NES game, which was first released in North America in 1987, years before Salt was born. He was astonished to discover he’d picked up many effective techniques for playing the game simply by watching speedrunning videos. The experience of acquiring skill indirectly, through observation rather than instruction, felt revelatory. It suggested that expertise could be transmitted through careful watching, and that the logic of mastery could be made legible to outsiders.

While Salt enjoyed playing video games through a new lens, he soon realized he enjoyed learning about how records were broken much more than attempting to break them himself. He watched a two-hour-long video from 2013 in which Sinister1 offered his viewers a detailed history of the Punch-Out!! world record, that is, the fastest verified time in which a player reached the game’s end credits. “Sinister charted the world record from the early days of the ’80s, examining how the strategy had evolved,” Salt recalled. “I thought it was the coolest video I’d ever seen.”

An idea formed in his mind. What if he took this concept of charting the history of a world-beating attempt, but condensed the story down to 15 minutes or so, something more accessible to online viewers? So, he opened a new YouTube channel. When it came to giving his new venture a name, he remembered an old online video he’d watched in which the presenter opened a 30-year-old tin of spaghetti. While reading aloud the list of ingredients, the man misread “seasoning salt” as “summoning salt.”

“That phrase stuck in my head,” Salt said.

Salt’s first video, about Punch-Out!!, attracted only a few thousand views. But the feedback was good. “A lot of people told me: ‘Wow, what a great idea,’” he recalled. For his second upload, Salt examined Super Mario Bros. Overnight he saw his subscriber numbers double. Within a few days the video had earned a few hundred thousand views. Salt’s popularity began to snowball. Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and people had more free time to dedicate to following eccentric pursuits like speedrunning video games, Salt’s channel passed a million subscribers.

He quit his job (which one, he won’t say), and his hobby became his vocation.

Speedrunning long predates the word itself. Players were racing to complete games as quickly as possible as early as the 1980s, particularly on arcade machines and home consoles. At the time, however, the practice went unnamed. The term “speedrun” only entered the lexicon in the mid-’90s, emerging from early PC communities built around games like Doom, where players shared videos of their fastest completions. By the early 2000s, as online archives and leaderboards began to formalize competition across multiple games, “speedrunning” had solidified as the catchall label for a hobby that had already been thriving for years.

While the act of speedrunning can look, from the outside, faintly absurd, it obeys a strict internal logic. Speedrunners exploit the fact that video games are, like ours, worlds built upon systems. Beneath the pixels, games run on timers, counters, and invisible rules. If those rules can be bent – by entering a pipe at the wrong angle, by forcing the screen to scroll a pixel too far, by triggering a calculation the designers never anticipated – time can be saved. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a lot.

In Elden Ring, for example, a vast open-world role-playing game that can take the average player 50 hours or more to complete, speedrunners discovered what became known as the “chainsaw glitch.” By using a precisely timed input sequence, players were able to manipulate the game’s attack calculations, effectively transforming an ordinary weapon into a rapid-fire instrument capable of destroying bosses in seconds. In September 2022, the runner “FirstTwoWeeks” used the glitch to complete the game in just 19 minutes and 49 seconds. What had been envisioned by director Hidetaka Miyazaki as an arduous journey through a punishing fantasy world was reduced to a tightly choreographed burst of system manipulation, shaving dozens of hours from the intended experience.

Progress like this rarely comes smoothly. Instead, speedrunning history typically advances in jolts. There are prolonged periods of stagnation interrupted by sudden conceptual breakthroughs. Someone notices something others have overlooked. A constraint dissolves. The record falls. Then the slow work of refinement begins again.

On the surface, Salt’s films are about old games and microscopic optimizations: a jump executed one frame earlier, a pixel-perfect landing, a timer nudged forward by a 60th of a second. But their real subject is not technology so much as people. What Salt charts, patiently and with keen narrative sympathy, is how human beings congregate around the smallest imaginable targets and worry at them for years, sometimes decades, until nothing more can be taken.

One of the most widely celebrated moments in modern athletics came in 1968, when Dick Fosbury unveiled a new way of clearing the high jump bar. Until then, jumpers attacked the obstacle face-on, scissoring or rolling their bodies over it in increasingly marginal refinements of the same basic idea. Fosbury approached the problem differently. He curved his run-up, turned his back to the bar, and arched over it headfirst. The technique, which was soon dubbed the Fosbury Flop, looked ungainly, almost like a mistake. But it worked and within a decade it had rendered every previous method obsolete. The bar had not changed. The athlete’s understanding of how to pass over it had.

Speedrunning has its own Fosbury moments. Each game, no matter how old or apparently exhausted, contains the possibility of being reimagined by someone willing to ask a slightly different question of it. Runners of Super Mario 64 discovered that by long-jumping backward against certain walls and staircases, Mario could gain so much speed that he could break the laws of physics, passing through locked doors and otherwise impassable walls, allowing players to bypass entire swathes of the game. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a single misloaded cutscene, later dubbed a “wrong warp,” collapsed a sprawling adventure into a brief prelude to the end credits.

More recently, competitive Tetris was transformed when players developed a new way of manipulating the controller that shattered long-standing score ceilings. In each case, the breakthrough did not merely improve a winning time; it invalidated the terms on which records had previously been pursued.

Salt recognized that speedrunning history is built from these ruptures, tiny revolutions that redefine what mastery looks like, and soon discovered a talent for identifying when these technical histories contain narrative shape, and then making that shape legible.

“He found a format that shows people the most exciting parts of speedrunning while also telling a story,” said Beck Abney, a speedrunner known to the community as Abney317, who specializes in the 1996 game Mario Kart 64, and has been featured on Salt’s channel. “People can look up the videos, but without the background and story that Salt provides, viewers wouldn’t know what it took to achieve those records.”

History was Salt’s favorite subject at school, he told me, and it felt natural to combine that interest with storytelling. Each video begins as an act of excavation. “I look at the record timeline,” he said. “How many people are involved? Is there a rivalry? Are there big technique shifts?”

Matt Merkle, Games Done Quick’s director of operations, told me that Salt’s work is part of a broader effort to preserve a culture that has historically been fragile. Records fall, forums disappear, runners move on. What Salt provides, he suggested, is history rendered in a way that people want to watch, and therefore remember. That shift, Merkle noted, has encouraged more communities to take their own pasts seriously, maintaining archives and leaderboards with an awareness that today’s marginal gains may one day be a historian’s primary source material.

Indeed, Salt told me he studies old runs, forum archives and leaderboard data, then contacts the runners themselves – many of whom are surprised, years later, to find that their teenage fixations have acquired a historical weight. He checks interpretations, verifies mechanics and cross-references memory against footage. Errors he made in early videos taught him caution. These days, he consults widely with others in the scene before pressing publish on a new video.

In part, Salt exercises caution because so much of the history itself is contested, existing in liminal spaces on the internet, where it can be difficult to separate fact from mythmaking. Speedrunning is not a subculture built on fame. Many of its most consequential figures are anonymous handles, long retired, their achievements preserved only in forum posts and grainy video uploads. Salt’s work functions, in effect, as an act of recovery: an effort to turn scattered, obsessive labor into coherent folk history. He does not merely document the scene. He interprets it, shaping chaos into story, competition into meaning.

It’s contemplative, intricate work and often what eventually emerges is a true drama: Rivalries flare and fade, lone figures push far ahead of the pack, techniques arrive too early to be fully appreciated. Salt thinks carefully about pacing in his videos, when to linger, when to accelerate, when to allow a breakthrough to arrive suddenly. “You want viewers guessing what’s coming next,” he said, “but without lying about what happened.”

Salt occupies a curious position. He is not quite an insider (he no longer chases any records himself) but neither is he a detached observer. His authority comes from immersion. He often lives, for months at a time, inside other people’s obsessions. The cost of that intimacy is real. Each film requires hundreds of hours of solitary work, attention tuned to vanishingly trivial differences.

In a world crowded with urgent problems, speedrunning can seem like a marginal, trivial pursuit. Undeniably, the hobby demands an immense devotion of time and intellect to games most people finished, or abandoned, long ago. But the pursuit of video-game records belongs to a much older human tradition. For as long as there have been boundaries, people have tested themselves against them, measuring strength, endurance and ingenuity against the limits of terrain, body and law. Speedrunners do the same, only their arenas are digital ones, governed by unfamiliar calibrations of physics, time and gravity.

The obstacles are invisible, the margins infinitesimal, the victories often legible only to the initiated. And yet the impulse is recognizable: to see how far a system can be pushed and, of course, to climb to the summit of the leaderboard, the organizing structure around which so much competition takes shape.

For Sinister1, the speedrunner known for playing games while blindfolded, seeing Salt build a career from a format he had once explored has been a source of deep satisfaction. “I’m proud to have been a small part of that,” he told me. Any work that draws people into speedrunning strengthens the scene, he said. The reach of Salt’s stories has had tangible consequences: broadening the audience for speedrunning, raising its profile beyond specialist forums, and inspiring both established runners and newcomers.

Thanks, in part, to Salt’s work, the semiannual Games Done Quick marathon has grown into one of speedrunning’s most visible institutions, drawing hundreds of thousands of livestream viewers over weeklong broadcasts and encouraging donations in real time. Since its inception in 2010, the events have raised nearly $60 million for charity. “People who otherwise would have no interest in the community are suddenly drawn in,” Merkle told me of Salt’s videos.

And for runners themselves, Salt’s work of ordering and narrating the past serves a practical purpose beyond spreading interest in the scene. “The journey of a speedrun record and all the people that touch it along the way always has an interesting story,” said Sinister1, “and for that to be lost to time would be tragic given how much time and effort so many put in.”

Speedrunning advances cumulatively, with each generation refining or repurposing what came before. Knowing how strategy evolved (especially where progress stalled, which ideas failed, and which techniques were abandoned too early) can provide critical insight for those attempting to push times lower still. Old runs sometimes contain overlooked details that unlock new strategies. In that sense, the history functions as a working archive, actively shaping the present.

That impulse has also changed how the community remembers its own past. By tracing the evolution of records in so much detail, Salt’s videos have helped bring attention to figures whose contributions predated modern internet platforms and were therefore easy to overlook. “Not everyone takes the time to go back and look at old historical archives for the game,” said Mario Kart 64 speedrunner Abney. “When Salt makes videos, he brings attention to a lot of the past records that people might not have seen otherwise.”

Sometimes, Salt’s videos have resulted in speedrunners who were only active decades ago becoming belatedly famous. Matt Turk, for example, was an early Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! runner whose influence was widely felt but rarely acknowledged beyond a small circle, largely because his achievements came before YouTube and Twitch. Through Salt’s work, Turk has emerged as a foundational figure, his role newly visible to a much larger audience. These moments capture the deeper significance of careful documentation: They ensure that speedrunning’s history reflects not only its winners, but the many hands that shaped the path toward them.

If speedrunning risks vanishing into the digital ether, then the value of Salt’s work lies in his refusal to allow that to happen. He writes a history that would otherwise remain dispersed and easy to forget, treating these fleeting acts of optimization with the seriousness usually reserved for more established forms of competition. His work, as well as his attitude to fame, is carefully aligned with the culture it preserves. Many of the runners Salt chronicles are known only by pseudonyms; they seek recognition for what they have done, not for who they are. Salt, who has long resisted attaching a face or full name to his own voice, shares that instinct. What matters, in both cases, is not identity but achievement, that attention is directed at the act, not the actor.

His parents, he admits, find the enterprise strange. “They think it’s weird,” he told me, laughing, before conceding that they’ve come to see it working not just financially, but as a kind of calling. That ambivalence feels appropriate. Salt’s films do not argue that speedrunning is important in any grand, world-altering sense. They simply insist that attention, given honestly and patiently, confers value. In documenting how people devote themselves to the smallest imaginable margins – often without names, faces or lasting claim to fame – he preserves how meaning is made, through repetition, refinement, and the choice that something is worth taking seriously at all.

Pop stars pen essays now – 2,000-word meditations on the existential weight of fame. Public figures launch podcasts because yapping is how you capture the voting masses. Founders commission films to canonize their fledgling start-ups as inflection points in human civilization.

It is no longer enough to do something. Everyone feels compelled to say something too. The creator and the commentator have all but collapsed into the same figure. And if you haven’t made anything, you become an internet judge of what everyone else has said, done or made.

Saying something has become the unit of value.

But few have earned something to say. Fewer still limit themselves to what they’ve earned. Performative insight has become the norm, and it runs on schedule.

There was a time when only lived experience counted – when information, argument and perspective could only come from real-world immersion. From places with people and stories that weren’t desperate to be seen. But “experience” has become a blurry concept. If the internet is real life, does living inside it count as experience? Does voyeurism deserve an equal voice?

The clearest case: We’ve replaced time in the field with time on our phones. What we now call experience is the weighted average of our own and the residue of what others broadcast (and theirs is a weighted average too). Inspiration springs from algorithmic reference engines. Novel thoughts are mined from obscure blogs. Doomscrolling has become a primary source.

And now AI surfaces anecdotes and allegories and even perfect quotes that were never said. You can read about experiences you can never have from people who never existed. The ouroboros eats its own tail and calls it research. And yet, we can feel the uncanny valley of thin experience and stretched insight. So why are we still so seduced by the stage?

For one, we’ve lost faith in slow work. The American Dream feels increasingly unattainable or unappealing or both. So we embrace lottery culture. Why strive for 10 years when you can get there by going viral? Patience starts to look like gambling and gambling like a rational game.

The path of least resistance is the remix.

There’s a genre of writing flourishing that never requires the author to leave home: what’s been called “laptop nonfiction” (though any screen will do). You can watch YouTube to write about culture and skim Wikipedia to write about history and read blogs about the human condition … then opine on the human condition. You can reverse-search your way to profundity. The market for insight has been subsumed by public intellectual theater – everyone is a performer now.

Immersion is expensive. Reporting costs money and interviewing takes time and site visits don’t scale. It’s faster to parse and package what’s already legible than labor over the new. And the attention economy rewards formulas (see Substack’s diary entries and Twitter’s memetic threads). Mastering the algorithm pays faster than mastering your craft.

But this “source material” is degrading too. ‘Dead internet theory’ creeps closer to truth every day as ads, bots, and all kinds of slop get noisier. If you’re still living online, you’re working from a hollowing-out representation of reality. Soon immersion will be the only reliable source again.

You don’t have to work in an ahistorical vacuum – everything builds on what came before. But skimming your way to synthesis isn’t a substitute for experience. The epiphany must be earned.

Technical mastery masks existential poverty.

The aesthetics are immaculate. The substance is vibes.

The sexier way to say something profound now is by mastering the form. New creative tools and formats favor the young – the digitally native and technically savvy and performatively fluent. They’re wired from the womb to master the medium of internet influence.

A Harvard undergrad made a YouTube film that went viral enough to catch the eye of Hollywood directors. The cinematography was crisp and the mood atmospheric. And I liked it. But can you live through a full-fledged existential crisis and emerge with a neatly wrapped moral all before graduation? Sure, in theory. But there’s a technique to vibes, and mastering that alone makes you a virtuoso now.

Silicon Valley has its own version of this. The talent is real and the prodigies get crowned early too. Founders are expected to perform product-market fit before they have it. But the more insidious performance is the performance of soul: Launch videos and manifestos declaring deep purpose and world-changing insight. Founders bifurcating their identity into online visionary and offline scrambling to figure out what they’re building and why.

Taste without skill is a gap you can close. Taste and skill without soul is beautifully hollow.

You can’t extract infinite wisdom from finite experience.

Even earned insight has an expiration date. Legitimate voices become their own tribute bands endlessly covering their greatest hits. Manufactured freshness is premature and reheated wisdom is postmature, both cousin sins chasing relevance over sincerity.

Even as the well runs dry, the culture still demands you post. We demand perma-presence in a world struck by collective amnesia, where moments have shorter and shorter lives. The questions are always the same: What have you done lately? What have you said lately?

The imperative: Resist smooth understandings for textured ones, easy frames for richer ones that come with time. Read to challenge and write to think, not just to cite and speak. Let ideas marinate for years. The path to having something to say runs through years of nothing to say.

You can’t make an entrance if you never leave the room.

Musicians who never leave the studio inevitably just write songs about writing songs. Comics who never leave the stage end up with sets full of jokes about writing jokes. Writers who never leave their desk only have observations about observations. Yes, they’re doing the real thing. But when being the thing becomes your whole identity, the meta becomes all the material.

The meme doesn’t go far enough: Don’t just touch grass, plant it. One odd conversation isn’t enough but a hundred might be. Insight is forged in resistance, and silence can be laziness and cowardice or it can be preparation. It’s the work you do in the dark that earns you the light.

You can’t reverse-engineer having lived.

I’ve wrestled with this too. It’s screentime versus the rest of the world.

It’s my nature to consume critically: I glean motivations from every digital trail and predict industry patterns from apps I use and watch movies I’m not even excited about just to earn my critique of them. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if this is fieldwork or just fluff – it’s probably both. But when you’re in this mode for too long (curator, commentator, analyst), the tethers to reality start to weaken. Your sources slowly devolve into a collection of shower thoughts and URLs. The tacit work starts to fade. You find yourself conviction-poor and running low on truths to tell.

The worst feeling isn’t being ignored but fearing that you deserved to be. Imposter syndrome hits when you are indeed an imposter of lived experience. And lived experience is ultimately what people seek out and remember and want to pay for – the stuff of life that can’t be queried.

So interrogate: Where does your insight come from? Whose experience are you describing? What do you know that you didn’t read somewhere first? What have you alone seen and felt? Are you locked-in or just performing being locked-in? What have you earned the right to say?

I wrote about making something heavy, but the precondition: Heavy outputs depend on heavy inputs. You can’t make something truly heavy without having lived what you’re trying to make.

Earn something to say.

The pressure to say something, anything, isn’t going away.

The standard you must hold yourself to: Earn the right to say it.

The friction of reality must precede creation. So leave the room and get back into the field. Accumulate the firsts and the failures and the raw encounters with the universe that can’t be borrowed. Take your time, stay a little quiet a little longer, and cultivate something undeniable.

Then, and only then, say something.

Chisel will publish words worth carving in stone.

Most of what is produced online today is designed to be consumed and immediately discarded. We are overwhelmed by content, slop, posts that literally disappear.

When sculptors of antiquity picked up a hammer and chisel, they expected their Latin inscriptions to remain legible a thousand years. Chisel aspires to that level of conviction. We will prioritize the timeless over the topical. And we believe that to last, an object or idea must be beautiful.

Chisel is about the things in life worth holding on to: ideas, works of art, people that move us in ways we don’t forget.

Twice per week, we’ll publish stories for our newsletter subscribers across a variety of genres – culture, philosophy, arts criticism, fiction, poetry. Twice per year, those who’ve subscribed at the print tier will also receive a world-class print product unlike anything you’ve ever seen on a newsstand.

Print editions of Chisel are published by the fine-press Irish book publisher Tune & Fairweather, printed in Florence, Italy, with a level of production finish you’ll be proud to collect and display on that one shelf in your home that sits right at eye level for the appreciation of discerning guests. (No shame, we’ve got one too.)

But why a magazine? And why Substack?

Our founding team has decades of combined experience in the world of print media. We wrote and edited feature stories for outlets such as Paste, Edge and Wired, and we witnessed the post-2008 implosion of the legacy print world up close. We were there when ad revenues dried up and budgets got slashed. We were among those whose dreams were rug-pulled when old institutions failed to stick the landing on the “pivot to the internet.”

Today, though, we spy new opportunities arising. New infrastructure for publishing and distribution has made possible the creation of new media companies. We believe there is a viable path opening for print media too. Why let the record stores, now in a vinyl renaissance, have all the fun?

Our ambition for Chisel is to build a generational media institution, one that empowers the next wave of writers to build careers and do work they’ll be proud of for the rest of their lives. We are obsessed with the magazine we’re building.

Okay then. Let’s do this.