Open Tab

Hunter Harris is the creator of Hung Up , the twice-weekly Substack newsletter where she takes a forensic lens to our culture’s obsessions and her own. She says she and her audience of nearly 200,000 subscribers share the same “disease”—insatiability—and that they’re bonded by a specific tunnel vision: her willingness to write a dozen pieces about A Star Is Born or spend time tracking down the mar...

In this week’s Open Tab, Australian-born, New York–based muckraker Lachlan Cartwright sat down with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie to walk through two decades covering media, money, and power—from The Sun and the New York Post to executive editor of the National Enquirer, where he went from breaking news to becoming an anonymous source in one of the biggest political scandals of the decade. H...

Joanna Coles has spent her formidable career at the center of media: London’s Fleet Street in the ’80s, New York magazine, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and eventually the chief content officer role overseeing Hearst’s entire global magazine portfolio. She knows intimately what legacy media organizations have looked like at every stage of their life cycle and spent years “managing decline” from the...

We sat down with writer, editor, photographer, and futurist Kevin Kelly at the Interval at Long Now in San Francisco’s Fort Mason. Part cocktail bar, part science-centric museum to the future, the Interval houses an eight-foot-tall model of the solar system, artwork by the musician Brian Eno, and prototypes for the Long Now Foundation’s most ambitious project: a clock being built inside a West Tex...

In episode 3 of Open Tab, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie shared a few rounds with filmmaker and tech journalist Ashlee Vance at Fred’s Place, a longtime neighborhood dive in Mountain View just minutes from where the technology that gave Silicon Valley its name was born. After two decades covering tech for major publications, Ashlee circled the globe for Hello World, Bloomberg’s travel-tech do...

The psychotherapy room is, by design, one of the most private spaces in human life, but Esther Perel has devoted much of her career to opening the door. Addressing relationships, cross-cultural psychology, and the contours of belonging, she brought therapeutic ideas out into the world through a body of work that spans talks, books, and her hit podcast Where Should We Begin? , which has reached mil...

For our inaugural episode of Open Tab, we knew we wanted to speak with Emily Sundberg . Emily’s the founder and daily writer of Feed Me , a business, tech, and culture newsletter that’s been described as “ must-read (and much-read) .” She publishes almost every weekday— something like 250 sends a year—covering everything from DTC darlings and media industry churn to New York hospitality and new wo...

Most of what we hear from media insiders is a story of decline: collapsing economics, algorithmic chaos, layoffs, and LLMs nipping at journalists’ heels. But a new class of independent media founders is creating powerful businesses around their own work and direct relationships with readers, listeners, and viewers—highly-profitable, multi-format, and built without first raising millions of dollars...