How the Play Issue was born
Recently I was on the phone with a friend, one of those rare catch-ups where you’re both on a roll, laughing and talking over each other. Then she looked at the time and said she had to go, something about her sleep score and Pilates in the morning.
Ugh, I thought, what a bummer. I love a morning Pilates class, but damn, this was a rare, beautiful moment of friendship and girlhood, and it had just been shut down by a stupid metric. I don’t wear any wearables, I’m an old school analog kind of gal, and it ticks me right off how much the data is running our lives.
Then there was the viral clip from The Diary of a CEO, explaining that a few glasses of wine had ruined his entire week. His sleep score, his work, his podcast numbers and his diet, all taken down by one night out.
Since when did three glasses of wine become a catastrophe for humankind?
Drinking used to be the social lubricant that built community, the thing that got you silly and made you new friends, not a sign of the end of the world.
Is this the death of fun? We optimize every moment, proteinmaxxing and looksmaxxing and taking orders from our Oura Rings and Apple Watches, when we could be on the phone until three in the morning because the conversation is that good.
That’s how the Play Issue emerged.
The making of: Stuck in the mud
So I went to Burning Man to “research” play. To me it’s the most creative place in the world, and one of its ten principles is immediacy: being fully present with whatever is in front of you. That is exactly what I think we’ve lost to optimization culture.
I realized the trip had backfired as I sat in eleven hours of traffic just to get in, and then it rained. Rain on the playa means everything sinks into the mud, so we wore garbage bags over our shoes to get to the bathroom. I spent those mornings at the epicenter of play in an RV, on Starlink, working on this issue.
I was also there on assignment. Every writer in the issue was in their twenties or thirties, so I went looking for the Elders of Burning Man, people over sixty. Friends spotted me at the back of the dance floor holding my phone up as a microphone. I interviewed our friends’ parents, a couple and a few naked old men. They had wildly different backgrounds, and they all said the same thing. You can read it in Issue 004.
The low moments
1. A few days before the print deadline, exactly when I needed to be sharp and managing my designer, I got the flu. I spent the final days of production in bed with one eye open, texting feedback from my bed while my body fought off the flu.
2. The last-minute scramble meant I could only do a small print run, and then, as luck would have it, the printer broke. I got fifteen copies for launch night, the most they could manage because they didn’t want me to have zero. I was so upset. It was a soft launch rather than a hard one, and not everyone got to take home a magazine.
3. Trust is built on quality and consistency, so when this issue went out with a few major errors, I felt I’d let the community down. A friend reminded me that magazines decades old still print corrections, and others said the errors made it feel more human. So I’m owning them and carrying on.
Move like spaghetti, eat your spaghetti
My friend Daphne Zahara, who I worked with at Open, runs a side project called Spaghetti: dinner parties that open with a movement class where you might pretend to play the piano or salsa across the room, anything to get you out of your head and into your body, and then you sit down to spaghetti. I’d wanted to throw a launch with her for six months, and for the Play Issue this felt fitting.
Daphne flew in from LA and held the room. My sister Ruby and friend Brooke cooked, Mimi and Oscar ran the door, Diana ran to the print shop to pick up the final copies seconds before they closed, Elisabeth Johs lent us her gallery in SoHo, and friends stayed late to clean up. It was Fashion Week, so plenty of people were double booked, which turned out to be a blessing, since I was coughing through the whole event.
NYC as our backdrop
One of my favorite days making this issue started with a shoe brand from the other side of the world. Lisa, the founder of LMS, was in New York from Sydney, and instead of a coffee meeting we made a fashion shoot. We pulled vintage pieces from The NY Archive and pieces fresh off the runway from Collina Strada, finished every look in a pair of LMS, and shot on the streets of SoHo and Chinatown with photographer Lalo Ambris. Mara Shmiedt, Elisabeth Johs, Mimi Nightingale and Ellie Williams of @ellie.forthegirls wore the shoes.
Lisa also brought The Paloma, a wooden platform that hadn’t launched yet, so her first time in a magazine was in ours. The partnership covered the shoot, a mention in print and social content we made together. You can read LMS’s side of the story here, and watch the reel here.
This is what I want a Galconomist partnership to feel like. The brand has a point of view, the shoot belongs inside the issue, and everyone has a lot of fun making it.
The good stuff
This is my favorite issue for range. Priyanka Desai’s Boomers Got a Convertible, We Got a Barbell reads like a VC’s map of where we’re all heading, India McTaggart gave us a love story in distress and asked “how long until we start dating data?” and our new designer Zoe Neal worked around the clock the week before going back to school. What keeps me going are the random messages from readers, asking when it will be stocked in London, sharing that they read it cover to cover, or that The Galconomist feels like it’s inside their brain and they are so happy it exists.
While I was photographing the magazine on the shelf at Iconic Magazines in SoHo, a woman (now a friend!) walked past and told me she’d just followed us on Instagram and loved The Galconomist. She came to our event we co-hosted with The Protocole at Silence Please, the Japanese listening bar in SoHo, and that’s where we met in person.
Made in New York
The Pinball Queen of Brooklyn came out of one of our salons at the Lightning Society, where Heather Nigro told the table she’s obsessed with pinball and talked about it like an art form. Kristin Wolfe, a writer who’d been coming to the salons and who introduced me to Zoe, was sitting next to her. Kristin pitched the story, went to Brooklyn, interviewed and shot Heather, and now it’s in print. I’m not just finding people I like online, I’m building this magazine with the people of New York.
What’s next
We’re less than a year old and on Issue 004, stocked in New York, LA, London and Australia and shipping globally, with copies in Brazil and France. We’ve also launched The Galconomist Society, a members group with a WhatsApp chat and invitations to exclusive events.
Issue 005 is out in December with a special guest editor I’ll announce soon! We’re making changes behind the scenes so there are fewer mistakes and I can keep delivering the quality and consistency you deserve.
We’re booking brand partners for The Wisdom Issue now. If your brand has something to say and wants to be in print, email me at renee@galconomist.com.
So buy the Play Issue, subscribe, come to a salon, and join the Galconomist Society, we’d love to have you.
And the next time you’re having a really good night, stay a little longer, because the sleep score will survive.
Originally published on The Galconomist Substack.