Constance Grady

hey quick q did we all know that the baby in Bringing Up Baby was a leopard

what if a woman was an agent of pure chaos and also had a leopard, a cinematic inquiry

all those expensive image consultants and no one taught Elizabeth Holmes to embrace her natural 2C wave pattern

Lizzie the trick is you want to use the gel to scrunch up, rather than smooth down

constancegrady.substack.comThe Treat | Constance Grady | SubstackRecommendations and cultural analysis on art that makes life feel better. Click to read The Treat, by Constance Grady, a Substack publication. Launched a minute ago.

he's so insecure about signaling he gets high culture, because it's ostensibly what his politics are all about preserving. but in fact he does not get it, and he worries that's a tell that he's dumb/poor when his whole brand is smart/rich. so he overcompensates like this. exhausting.

Constance Grady reposted

Anna North

@annanorth.bsky.social

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Constance Grady@constancegrady.bsky.social

I'm starting a newsletter! In the first issue: a book rec, how graffiti in DC is different from graffiti in NYC, and a good recipe constancegrady.substack.com?r=38q&utm_ca...

I'm starting a newsletter! In the first issue: a book rec, how graffiti in DC is different from graffiti in NYC, and a good recipe constancegrady.substack.com?r=38q&utm_ca...

I would love it if you subscribed! Figuring out how to do sustainable cultural criticism in this ecosystem is a real project

I thought the hair discourse on Sense and Sensibility was overblown but I just walked out of the theater and it’s really half the movie

Marianne’s arc is basically entirely expressed by how greasy her hair is or is not in any given scene

I feel positive with no evidence that a very jarring addition to the plot was inspired specifically by the staging of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, Georgia Oakley please confirm

huge news: hearing that the French tuck is millennial coded now and the cool kids are doing "side tucks." per the kids, side tuck (shirt) good, side part (hair) bad.

youtube.comNARNIA: THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW | Official Trailer | NetflixYouTube video by Netflix

hell yeah, this looks the way those psychedelic sci-fi covers from the 60s feel www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDJ-...

oh we talking publishing and gender again? I'll suit up

Is it unhealthy for publishing to be overwhelmingly staffed by one demographic that is both privileged and precarious? IMO that's an unqualified yes.

Publishing should be putting out more books for more kinds of people, and it will never be equipped to do so if it maintains its current economic structures.

oh we talking publishing and gender again? I'll suit up

Circa American Dirt, we talked a lot about how rare it was for people of color to be able to afford to work in publishing. A corollary is that it's rare for straight white men to opt into the kind of romantic but low wage job that keeps arts organizations (publishing, museums) afloat.

Are there fewer bloody middlebrow novels about heterosexual men being macho than there used to be? Look, I don't know; candidly, it's not my genre; it seems plausible to me.

oh we talking publishing and gender again? I'll suit up

My unpopular opinion, I guess, is that Barkan is correct that the publishing workforce is mostly women (albeit not at the executive level), and I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that has an effect on the kinds of books that get published. Publishing is a reflection of its workforce.

I would not say that the solution here is to try to push women out of publishing or to push men in. I would say that the stronger move would be to address the low entry level salaries that keep publishing so pink collar.

oh we talking publishing and gender again? I'll suit up

So I'm on the record that the decline of the male novel reader is vastly overstated — people love to claim that women buy 80 percent of fiction, but that is almost certainly untrue.

There are also still lots of successful male novelists, many of them winning prestigious awards like the NBA and the Pulitzer. When people say that male novelists aren't successful anymore, what they mean is there are fewer straight white male novelists writing macho prose — and that's probably true

Watching unnamed screeners, and it's kind of fascinating to see a show outright vie for the "we watch it every year at Christmas" slot

to be clear it IS working on me

This rules actually

Nobel Prize@nobelprize.org

BREAKING NEWS The 2026 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the Canadian author Anne Carson, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

ctpublic.orgGeneration: Baby-Sitters Club | Jean’s Great IdeaIn this first episode of “Generation: Baby-Sitters Club”, we time travel to the Scholastic Book Fairs of our childhoods to learn about the origins of “The Baby-sitters Club” — and other iconic paperba...

I had such a great time talking about Baby-Sitters Club, love of my youth, with Connecticut Public Radio. They have a full BSC podcast! www.ctpublic.org/podcast/gene...

refamiliarizing myself with the plot of Verity in preparation for two of the finest actresses of their generation bringing it to movie screens everywhere

AI has come for DC’s anti-Trump wheatpasters now

nytimes.comThe 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st CenturyMore than 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV voted on the best series released since Jan. 1, 2000. See what they chose.

21 Sept

Shocked by my own outrage to see Gilmore Girls get such a low ranking. I wonder if its cultural value got depreciated by AYITL, or maybe by the over-inflated Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — I would have expected it to end up in the 40 to 70 range. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

soraya.pressAllow Me To Reintroduce MyselfLook at me. I’m the publisher now.

20 Sept

The first post from @soraya.press has me all fired up and yelling www.soraya.press/allow-me-to-...

I think one of the issues with the NYT rural revival piece is that it's moving back and forth between different definitions of country music — a notoriously slippery genre to define — without ever acknowledging what it's doing.

It can feel as though these definitions are equivalent, because people use the same word to describe them: country. But they're actually describing three separate, sometimes overlapping phenomena. The piece's failure to distinguish between them clearly is, for me, the big reason it doesn't succeed.

That's without going into his buy in of the narrative that capitalist appropriations of progressive analysis, like those much-maligned corporate DEI programs, are legitimate grounds for a rural-identifying conservative movement to identify as outsiders. Who's doing DEI at the honkey tonk bar?

3. Marketing: as put by Barbara Mandrell, "Whoever happens to be hot in Nashville and on country stations at the time."

Schmitz sort of moves back and forth between using 1 and 3 as proof of 2 — that is, saying that music that uses the formal properties of country (e.g. Cowboy Carter) or is hot on country radio (e.g. Ella Langley) is proof of a revival of rural culture, which he reads as synonymous with whiteness.

In Major Labels, Kalefa Sanneh comes up with three different definitions for country as a genre: 1. The formalist definition: music played with fiddles, banjos, and pedal steel, with a twang and a narrative. 2. Cultural: an expression of rural identity, with connotations of whiteness. …

vox.comHow to make friends by lying to themWith the rise of social deduction games like Blood on the Clocktower, everyone can be a traitor now.

4 Sept

My last story for Vox is up! I looked at the rise in social deduction games like Blood on the Clocktower. They create a safe space for anti-social behavior like lying — which ironically helps create pro-social bonds. www.vox.com/the-highligh...

ms.nowOpinion | The Anthony Bourdain biopic 'Tony' is a charming antidote to today’s toxic masculinityConstance Grady: “Tony” shows the evolution of a young man deciding where his values lie, before he became a famous chef.

29 Aug

For MSNOW, I wrote about Tony and Anthony Bourdain's brand of masculinity www.ms.now/opinion/anth...

Constance Grady reposted

Leila Sales

@leilasalesbooks.bsky.social

22 Aug

This is so, so dumb and shortsighted of Vox. I read pretty much everything Constance writes. She's a brilliant writer and big-picture thinker who gives popular culture the analysis it deserves. Her inbox had better be full of job offers, stat.

Constance Grady@constancegrady.bsky.social

Well, I have been laid off from Vox after 10 years there. It has been the honor and the privilege of a lifetime to get to work with such brilliant people for so long.

Constance Grady reposted

Kelly

@onesmartcupcake.bsky.social

22 Aug

I was thrilled & honored to chat with Constance for this incredibly thoughtful article about a topic dear to my professional heart - check it out!

Constance Grady@constancegrady.bsky.social

So there's an interesting debate happening in publishing that I think people outside the industry don't know about. When kids' reading scores started going down, so did sales of middle-grade books. But the industry disagrees on the cause and effect here. www.vox.com/culture/4996...

vox.comThe promising race to get kids reading againThe next generation of middle-grade books doesn’t look like Harry Potter. Good.

Constance Grady reposted

Ann Foster

@vulgarhistory.bsky.social

@vulgarhistory.bsky.social

** bangs on drum ** someone please hire Constance!!!

Constance Grady@constancegrady.bsky.social

Relatedly: I am open to work! If you need someone to write about books, gender in pop culture or in general, and big cultural shifts, I'm your gal.

Constance Grady reposted

Ann Foster

Constance Grady is a superstar of literary journalism, if you are hiring an incredible writer she’s the one for you!!

Constance Grady@constancegrady.bsky.social

Well, I have been laid off from Vox after 10 years there. It has been the honor and the privilege of a lifetime to get to work with such brilliant people for so long.

All right, here's my first order of business. Like all unemployed arts journalists, I am going to start a newsletter. But I've got a couple options for the focus.

I have been scheming up a newsletter for a while now that would be me reading through all the Agatha Christie novels and breaking down the mechanics of her misdirects. I will still be doing that! But should I also have general book recs and so on? What are people interested in?

Constance Grady reposted

Lisa Schmeiser

@lschmeiser.bsky.social

@alexshephard.bsky.social

Constance is such an original voice and fantastic critic, and one of the few bylines I would consistently open a browser tab for. Someone smart needs to snap her up ASAP.

Constance Grady@constancegrady.bsky.social

Well, I have been laid off from Vox after 10 years there. It has been the honor and the privilege of a lifetime to get to work with such brilliant people for so long.

Constance Grady reposted

Alex Shephard

There are very, very few people out there who are great at writing about both pop culture and the culture industry, and Constance is one of them. I've learned so much reading her at Vox and look forward to reading her again soon

Constance Grady@constancegrady.bsky.social

Relatedly: I am open to work! If you need someone to write about books, gender in pop culture or in general, and big cultural shifts, I'm your gal.

Constance Grady reposted

Aja Romano

@bookshop.bsky.social

Vox killed off the culture section slowly and painfully, and my hat's off to Constance for all the amazing work she managed to create despite dwindling support. Constance is a wonderful colleague and an incredible critic doing necessary work. If you're a very smart editor you'll hire her post-haste.

Constance Grady@constancegrady.bsky.social

Relatedly: I am open to work! If you need someone to write about books, gender in pop culture or in general, and big cultural shifts, I'm your gal.

Constance Grady reposted

Seth Maxon

@methsaxon.bsky.social