36. The year analog goes mainstream
I will not be making my Substack into a Newspaper tysm.
Today’s letter includes: Every free museum day in NYC, the LinkedIn experiment that quadrupled reach with one simple switch, why Shopify is hiring 1,000 interns, a billionaire's baby surrogacy scandal, and the most unexpectedly chic final project ever completed.
Hi friends.
Everyone in LA apparently hates I Love LA and everyone I meet in NYC loves it. But regardless of your East Coast/West Coast affiliation, I sincerely hope we can all agree that episode 7. Divas Down is one of the funniest TV episodes I’ve seen in recent history. Also, I did not realize the actress who plays Alani was Forrest Whitaker’s daughter and now I cannot unsee it. Not in a bad way, she’s objectively gorgeous.
On the very first day of 2026, a developer built a tool that turns your Substack into a newspaper. The button on the tool literally reads: “Go analog!”
She was ahead of the curve, as “ANALOG” is the very word currently plastered all over the internet and every marketing deck.
Why? We’re in a somewhat obvious pendulum swing. Gary Vaynerchuk dropped his 2026 Consumer Trends list with “the unplugging of Gen Alpha” sitting at #2. In 2006, smartphones and social platforms had zero market share. Now they’ve captured so much of the market that Gen Alpha is going to crave balance.
Not exactly a revelation but certainly interesting to look at how this is manifesting in the world.
One example is the rise of @chriskindareads, who’s gone viral on Instagram for simply reading classic literature and being genuinely excited about it. We’re talking The Count of Monte Cristo, East of Eden—dense novels that feel almost radical in their offline commitment. He even has a video with tips on how he is able to read for so long without getting bored. Cute, I’m here for it.
From a design perspective, this means we’ll see fewer screens cluttering living spaces and more rooms built around analog activities—library nooks, craft corners, actual conversation areas instead of media centers. The bigger your flatscreen LED TV, the less tasteful. Hello death of screens as status symbols.
With the accessibility of music streaming, where you can listen to anything, anytime for free, we’ve already seen the experience of seeing it live increase in value (concert ticket prices are LITERALLY insane). But the general population has clearly proven they are willing to pay those prices. My husband’s brother has an old car that only has a CD player. He’s noted that it’s actually much easier to get CDs now than say 2 years ago, because artists are increasingly selling CDs at concerts.
This shift presents an increased emphasis on experiential marketing for brands, including B2B. For example, AI companies are opening cafés run by humans (Anthropic in San Francisco). Expect to see brands sponsoring everything from book clubs to pottery classes. Even digital campaigns are starting to re-create analog experiences. Take Netflix’s Tarot Card campaign.
The interest in analog activities certainly isn’t new—we’ve been watching these shifts for months (hello crafting/sewing machine craze I covered in an earlier letter) —but 2026 is the year it goes fully mainstream.
What “analog” activities are you and your friends doing? Prepare for a brand to try to sponsor it!
Field Meridians is launching a newspaper. The launch party is tonight at the Ace Hotel.
First Round Review released The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2025. This was the most interesting one IMO:
“In the age of AI, hire more entry-level people, not fewer. We sat down with Shopify’s VP and Head of Engineering, Farhan Thawar, to find out how he’s brought CEO Tobi Lütke’s famous AI memo to life in his org. Bucking the trend to slash entry-level roles, Shopify has made hiring young people a key part of its AI strategy: the company brought on 1,000 interns last year. Thawar says young people are AI centaurs — they use AI in reflexive, creative ways.”
Prepare for your friends to get bold print sofas. The pendulum is swinging from Millennial Gray or as The Guardian called it, “the sad beige aesthetic” to big and bold centerpieces. Though brands like Anthropologie had a 2-year head start on manufacturing animal print sofas, followed by Soho Home & Urban Outfitters, we’re starting to see the big boys join in with both animal and floral prints: Arhaus, West Elm, CB2, the entire Wayfair ecosystem, Joon Loloi etc.
The gray area around Chinese Billionaires having dozens of U.S. babies via surrogacy is fascinating. Xu Bo was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, and the court’s additional research showed that he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more—all through surrogates. In a rare act, the judge denied his request for parentage.
WSJ reports: “Several of his kids were being raised by nannies in nearby Irvine as they awaited paperwork to travel to China. He hadn’t yet met them, he told the judge, because work had been busy.”
A woman’s gender-swap experiment on the platform quadrupled her reach when she switched to a male identity on LinkedIn. Another woman removed her pronouns and changed her LI gender marker to male. She reposted the same content seen by fewer than 150 people and this time it had over 30K impressions.
The team from King is opening a new British spot called Dean’s. It will be in Soho and focus on British Seafood.
Venezuela. Trump says the US will get 30-50M barrels of oil from Venezuela at market price. Though Maduro is gone, NYT reports that repression has only intensified as they interrogate people and look for evidence that they welcomed the capture of Maduro. The US is now supporting the current government, led by Maduro’s VP Delcy Rodriguez, as they work to “fix up the oil” as Trump put it.
Australia’s oldest man (110) spent his final days knitting tiny sweaters for penguins and in addition to being heartwarming, they’re kind of chic. It’s giving House of Errors.
This is an important list of every free Museum Day in NYC.
Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3
With love!
I had to look up the definition of analog and I’m still not seeing why we are calling it that 😩 someone please explain