Welcome to Chisel

A letter from the founders

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.