Everything is a mess

Welcome to Ernie's Kitchen. I am Ernie. This is my kitchen.

If you don't know me: I'm from Alaska, lived in Istanbul for awhile, and now live in London. I've been working as a journalist and editor for the past ten-ish years covering all sorts of things: internet culture, politics, travel and lifestyle, oil and gas, "disinformation." I wrote a travel guide, I wrote a memoir about doing a musical with a bunch of misfits in Istanbul.

While I have found some success at that and have enjoyed learning about a lot of the things I covered, I really miss the sort of stuff I used to write: stories from my life, unusual encounters, tales of adventure, essays about travel and ideas and art. And food. I used to have a blog, and that was the sort of writing it featured. I stopped posting on it a few years ago. The thing that I liked about blogging was that nothing had to be perfect: it could just be any old mix of things. This newsletter is an attempt to resurrect that. Let me explain.

When I was interning at The Stranger many years ago I watched early aughts' blog culture set the agenda for journalism for the next decade. We had such an amazing cast of journalists and I was so grateful to them for their attention and patience and wit. We had Charles Mudede, the filmmaker, cultural critic, and Marxist (the first one I'd ever met), whose writing by turns is hilarious and bizarre and profound; Paul Constant, who has read everything and writes great comics and was maybe one of the first people who really took my newspaper writing seriously and gave me some excellent feedback; Eli Sanders, whose moral center and diligent investigations brought comfort to survivors and exposed the greedy – he once asked me to transcribe opinion columns stored on microfiche in the University of Washington library basement to help investigate a judge, and that remains some of the most interesting journalism work I've done; and then of course Dan Savage, the brash irreverent sex columnist who could talk about things like fisting or BDSM in such an approachable, down-to-earth way that even my mother would read it. His work made queer culture more acceptable for lots of straights of America, and he single-handedly created huge public support for LGBTQ rights and for gay marriage. His charities, The Trevor Project and It Gets Better, probably saved hundreds if not thousands of queer youth from despair and suicide.

But. Lindy West was my favorite. She was my direct mentor and everything I ever wanted to be as a writer. Completely unafraid to be a mess. Absolutely petrifyingly funny. Compassionate and fair and generous. (She really let me take some pretty insane risks, too – she let me write the entire film listings section, which was something like 20 one-sentence blurbs of every film playing in every theatre around the city, from the ALL CAPS perspective of an angry barbarian entering human society for the first time.) She wrote movie columns that lit up the whole paper. The first one that got her national attention was that one about Sex and the City II, where she skewered how a sort of Hollywood girlboss feminism was being used to promote this ridiculous post-9/11 Ra-Ra American Gender Roles shit, and then of course the career-launching and culture-defining post "Hello, I am Fat" where her and Dan Savage were basically having a public argument about fatphobia on the Stranger's blog from different rooms in the office, which I'll tell you, was HUGELY anxiety-inducing for the normally nonconfrontational people of the pacific northwest. But before all that stuff were loads of columns about movies. And we'd all just cry ourselves laughing every week. She was one of the first writers where I thought to myself every time the paper came out, "I can't wait to see what Lindy's done this time." (I am beyond overjoyed that she has gone back to writing about movies, and you can subscribe to her newsletter, Butt News, here.)

We're maybe at a point where that kind of blogging culture could come back. Traditional media has lost a lot of its power and relevance. The digital media model that basically my entire career has been built on is also collapsing because it was never actually profitable (whoooops, RIP Vice News, Buzzfeed, and the rest). Twitter's becoming a desert of crypto spam, Instagram is a shopping mall, Facebook is a ghost town. Everything is falling apart to some degree. The information sphere is WILDLY decentralized. Everyone's writing newsletters. I guess that creates an opportunity for a new way of writing and connecting.

My concept for this newsletter is like we're all sitting down in my kitchen and having a chat. Maybe I'm cooking, maybe we've been out all night and just got home and want a snack, maybe we're drunk and eating fried chicken, maybe it's a house party and everyone's in the next room. Maybe it's Sunday morning breakfast and we're about to go for a walk somewhere new and fun in London, maybe we're just meeting up here before we head to the pub. Maybe we're looking at the paper, maybe relaxing after a day's work, maybe the radio's on. Maybe I'm clattering pans around and hunting around for a spice I've misplaced.

It's not really a topic or a beat in the conventional sense. It's also a frank acknowledgement that I will likely change my mind a dozen times writing this newsletter. As a writer it's always a real challenge for me to STAY ON SUBJECT and regrettably, to be successful as a writer, you have to get really good at structure. I understand structure but struggle to stay in it because I get bored. Write a letter – change the topic. Try a short story – change the genre. (This is the facts of living with adhd, folks. Boredom overrides even my survival instincts.) From one perspective it's creative, but also a bit tiring for me and confusing for my readers. So a perennial challenge is "find a structure that will account for if and when I change my mind." But having a good structure is also a lot less important than "just get the writing done and up there."

I always loved writing for the internet for this reason. I write it, I publish, it appears. It doesn't have to be perfect, because fixing stuff online is way easier than fixing a print error. With a single click I create the world. Extremely satisfying. Early blogging culture took those realizations– we don't have physical publishing constraints anymore! Anyone can publish! – and brought that casual register to public journalism.

So this is the idea of the newsletter-as-kitchen: it's a place where we can have the sorts of informal conversations that don't have the searing delivery of a hot take or the cold hard facts of an investigation. It's a place to start with small everyday encounters and talk about what they mean. It's a place to use food – one of my absolute favorite things – as a means of exploring the world. But to be totally honest, it's actually just an extended metaphor to trick myself into feeling comfortable enough to just write stuff and publish it without overthinking it, as if we're both hanging out in my kitchen and just having a chat.

I have lots of ideas for content here: I plan to interview really interesting people I know and get their perspectives on things. I want to highlight other things I'm reading, and connect them in lots of ways. I want to do some original reporting about digital culture and world events. And also like, I will be talking about food, obviously. I mean there is just no point to having a blog with "kitchen" in the title and not talking about the stuff I'm cooking. I will be (gratefully!) accepting donations while I do this, because good writing takes time, and any time I spend doing this means less time doing paid work. I plan – and may god forgive me for making this promise here already, as the chances I break it are high – to publish once a week, at least for the next few months, and see where this experiment takes me.

And anyways – my kitchen has always been a mess. I promise I won't make you do the dishes.