WTF is AFM?
A conversation with Maria Dimitrova and Haley Mlotek, editors of A Fucking Magazine
Feeld is a dating app “for the curious” and its users are an adventurous, thoughtful bunch. And Feeld is also a tech company that happens to be led by thoughtful long-term types who see the value in print as a cornerstone for their community of customers. Enter A Fucking Magazine.
Led by editors Maria Dimitrova and Haley Mlotek, AFM is a cultural magazine about sex that is also not about sex. Maybe it’s about everything. Or maybe my old lit prof in college was right and everything really is about sex. The first issue of the magazine is out and it demands attention because it is beautiful and smart and literate. And also because it feels like something new.
Discussions about AFM also lead to discussions about custom publishing: There is no hiding Feeld in the pages of AFM. All of the money behind the magazine is from Feeld, and half the contributors are also users of the app. Customers, in other words.
As someone who came out of the custom world, I have long said the best custom media were the products of brands that were confident and forward thinking; when a brand saw itself more as patron and less as custodian. Meaning they didn’t get overly involved.
Luckily, the higher ups at Feeld are relatively hands off, and allow Maria and Haley to do their thing. Which is very fucking smart.
AFM’s premiere issue
Arjun Basu: Before we start, am I going to refer to it as AFM or am I going to say A Fucking Magazine every time?
Maria Dimitrova: Truly up to you. We thrive in ambiguity.
Arjun Basu: How do you guys talk about it?
Maria Dimitrova: We mostly refer to it as AFM. I think we often use the acronym. It’s a very useful shorthand, and that’s why we went with it. And we even talk about how the acronym can evolve. So in that sense, yeah, in some places it’s A Fucking Magazine, but it doesn’t always have to be.
Arjun Basu: I’ll get to the editorial because I loved it and the way you talk about it. Not just the name, but the word. But there’s just so many layers to AFM. There you go, I called it AFM. There’s so many layers to it, but they all start with Feeld. So I think before we start talking about the magazine, we need to talk about Feeld, which is a “dating app for the curious.” So what is Feeld?
Maria Dimitrova: Haley, do you want to take this one?
Haley Mlotek: Yes, absolutely. I can. I can start this answer. Maria has been with the company a little bit longer, but I guess now I’m entering my third year, so that’s not even as true anymore. So Feeld, as you say, is a dating app for the curious. It is a form of connecting in what is commonly considered the dating app part of the tech industry.
Very literally, it’s an app that’s available on your phone. It’s a place where people can go to look for whatever type of romantic or sexual relationship that they’re looking for. That’s the most common understanding of it. It also has evolved, in the 10 years that it’s been available, to become something where many members report that it’s a place where they find a lot of community.
There’s a lot of platonic friendships that grow out of there or evolving forms of relationships that are not necessarily as straightforward as maybe the more linear experience of dating to get married. It really is an app that’s rooted in this idea of people unlocking people, that who you connect with on this app is a form of self discovery, and vice versa for the other people who become involved in your relationships.
Yeah, and maybe Maria, I don’t know if you want to add anything.
Maria Dimitrova: I think you, you said it really well. It’s hard to give a one-sentence answer. And in my time with the company, which has been quite a while, that’s been a perennial challenge. The impetus behind Feeld was more of an idea and a mindset: the way it related to connecting to others, to sexuality, to anything that’s outside of a sense of convention.
And that aspiration, that ambition, has stayed, but with it the world of sexual identity, gender relationships, relationship structures, it’s changed so much over the last few years. It’s changed in front of my eyes. How we talk about it has changed. The language has changed. And that’s something that Feeld has both been at the forefront of, but also responding to and changing with it.
So yes, the kind of official line, it’s a dating app for the curious. It’s for people who are looking to explore relationships and people in new ways.
Arjun Basu: It seems most dating apps are emotional journeys, but Feeld feels like an intellectual and an emotional app, which probably leads to my next question. Why did Feeld feel the need to create this magazine? It’s not their first. Maria, you were involved with the last one. So what is the magazine’s purpose within Feeld, the Feeld community, and then in the wider world?
Maria Dimitrova: It came very naturally out of Feeld’s, I want to call it brand strategy, but it’s come up very naturally out of, I think what Feeld is, which is its people. Something that became very apparent through a big piece of research that informed the strategy, that included conversations with people on the platform, included conversations with people who could potentially be interested in a platform like that but didn’t know about it was that people were having experiences in relation to themselves, in relation to the relationships they were having, the experiences they were having on a dating app like Feeld, or just generally dating, that were just changing them in a very significant way.
And they felt that those experiences didn’t really have an external blueprint and they had nowhere to go. There wasn't an obvious shorthand to how to think or contain those experiences. So there was like a really great sense to explain what Feeld is: it’s a way to share what ultimately it can bring to people’s lives is true, surfacing the voices of the people who use it, the people who’ve been changed by it, the people who are discovering something. And that very naturally lends itself to a magazine. That’s very much almost like an editorial mandate. And which is really where the spark for this magazine started.
But as you mentioned, Feeld already had these kind of intellectual ambitions and pursuits years ago, again, from its very start. And that’s how the previous magazine, which I founded for Feeld called Mal Journal, started. It was a literary journal smaller in scale, more you know, precise in its mandate and its contributor base.
This was more London-based, though at the time it was more trying to elevate the conversation around sexuality and relationships and eroticism to give it legitimacy, to show that it has just a very long prehistory culturally, which again, it’s very connected to what we’re also trying to bring in to AFM.
Haley Mlotek: Yeah. And I’ll just add to that as well something that we talked about a lot is this idea of creating a physical material expression of some of that background that Maria mentions. It’s something that could live in the world with our members, could be an object that people continuously return to or keep for long periods of time or share with their people.
And also something that came up the more we worked on it that we write about a little in our editor’s letter is challenging this idea that there’s some sort of hierarchy or perhaps a binary between print and digital. I think we all know how that’s worked out in traditional media, that the slow collapse has really not served writers and creative workers in many ways and this like new, perhaps, value assessment of what a magazine means versus what reading something on your phone means.
We wanted to create something that called attention to the fact that swiping through profiles is not really that different from turning pages. But also that it can be a new way of engaging with people in a new format that doesn’t necessarily put the two in opposition to each other. It connects them.
Arjun Basu: So you said that the magazine came out of research. And then became part of a strategy. Was that research just understanding the audience, understanding the community better, or, was it a branding strategy?
Maria Dimitrova: It had aspects of both. It was an impressive piece of work in terms of its methodology in the sense that it wasn’t pure marketing, it wasn’t just like branding or positioning. But it is, I think, important for us to say, and we’ve centered it in the editor’s letter.
And it’s a huge part of what AFM is that it does stem from that context. It has come out of a brand, but in a way that we’ve tried to, essentially within that container, find enough space, enough breathing room to create something that is, editorially led, that is actually, I want to say independent in terms of its thinking, its pursuits, its process.
But the context is we wanted the context to be part of the magazine’s conceptual direction as well. The research, again, was fascinating because, again, so much of it, and I think a lot of yeah, I guess the most interesting parts came out of long interviews with people.
There were quantitative parts to it too, but a lot of it came through the language people were using to talk about their experiences on Feeld or experiences that were unlocked by other people that they met. The language was very vivid. It was quite, I don’t want to say ‘literary,’ but it was just clearly language that is not something that you see in that context very often.
It just really, again, paved the path in a way that doesn’t often happen in the tech industry, paved the path to in fact the agency that conducted the research to make a recommendation that the company start the magazine, which was ironic considering the company already had a magazine. It came so organically out of people’s words.
Arjun Basu: So what was the kernel of that? What was the spark in that research, in all those interviews, where someone could point to and say, “See?” Because I’m obviously someone who will always say, “Let’s make a magazine” or “That sounds like it’d be a good magazine.” I say it too often, but what was the spark in those interviews that convinced everyone that this is actually a good idea?
Maria Dimitrova: I’m sure I’ll miss something because there were lots, there were some interesting statistical details about, for example, the fact that a significant percentage of the member base are people who either were creative professionals or had creative practices or in some way, were very interested in in the arts, in culture, in reading, in music.
And that already showed that perhaps a magazine that is made by that membership base for it was just an easy argument to make. And then there were a few other just quite, yeah, quite groundbreaking bits when it came to what people shared and what they said.
And the main groundbreaking thing there was just that a lot of people who read it were like, Oh, I haven’t read this, or I haven’t seen this, or that’s not something that we often hear about. And so again, it made sense to create the platform for these stories and put them at the forefront.
Haley Mlotek: Yeah, and I think for me, especially, because I came to the company after this research had been finished and so I was presented with this very beautiful report that was easily comprehensible and I could instantly see why the company had chosen to follow this recommendation.
But also, just in my own personal understanding of what Feeld was and how it fits, and to my social life and the way I’d seen friends use it and the memes that are popular, I’m sure you’ve seen about how verbal people are and vocal they are in their Feeld bios and in their messages, it’s really an app that’s well known for people who are not at a loss for words in describing what they want, which is often the hardest thing to put into words.
And so I think we felt that for members there would be quite a few people who are both readers already, they would want to read a magazine like this, and even if they maybe weren’t people who thought of themselves as magazine readers or that wasn’t the form of media that they liked best, they would like knowing that Feeld was the type of magazine that also really valued language in this way.
“We think of it as a culture magazine in the sense that relationships and sexuality are part of culture.”
Arjun Basu: I’ve been taken by how smart and literate it is. And I’m not saying that because of the subject matter, regardless of the subject matter, it’s just a smart literary magazine. But I guess I was trying to figure out, is it a cultural magazine? It is a magazine about sexuality and, sexuality is a big word, but I think a lot of people reduce it obviously. It’s not a literary magazine, so I guess it’s a cultural magazine. It almost feels like sociology, which would be a cultural magazine. What do you guys think it is?
Maria Dimitrova: First of all, I’m glad you pointed that out. I think these are conversations we’re having very intensely as we work on issue two. We do think of it as a culture magazine in the sense that relationships and sexuality are part of culture but, and also that it represents a lot of different voices. So the kind of polyphony and variety and range is deliberate.
Perhaps it’s mostly united in this kind of anti-reductivist reading of what sexuality, the erotic, gender identity, experiences that are like romantic, that are platonic, they don’t need to necessarily go into a genre. I feel like there are always little genres and subcultures that are formed and we just wanted to break that open.
Haley Mlotek: The most important point for me has always been this idea of being, yes, as you say, Arjun, like a culture and literary publication that takes sexuality as part of what that culture is. So perhaps that’s where the kind of sociological feeling of it comes from, because there is, I think, also with Maria and I, the way we approach our practice as editors, there’s a certain amount of curiosity where we want to pose these questions to writers and artists and see what they come back with.
I think we try really hard not to be prescriptive and certainly not didactic in anything that we publish. But also we just love the type of work that really starts from a question that might not have an answer. It’s about the pleasure of watching and reading somebody try to work it out on their own terms.
And I think there are so many magazines that have served as important references to us and something that we talked about a lot at the beginning is that a lot of those magazines do publish very beautiful writing about sexuality and relationships, but it’s often an exception to what they consider culture or literature or art. And so we wanted to take that tradition and fold it more completely into everything we were doing.
Arjun Basu: As a writer, I always tell people everything’s about sex. It gives you a wide canvas. I loved your editorial, I brought it up before. You talk about pausing to consider the absurdity of it all, in terms of what you’re doing. And especially, you say, “Print feels like more of a provocation than a true dare.” And the desire of editorial work that runs parallel to the desire that is a subject of the magazine itself. It’s this weird ouroboros that keeps eating its own tail in terms of your editorial. Then you have a riff on the word fucking, which I have, I don’t know, it’s not near me, but I have a copy of the F Word which was a dictionary—I’m sure you’ve seen it—which is a fabulous work and I’m sure it’s been updated since then. Ursula K. Le Guin makes an appearance in the editorial. And then, you leave yourself the exit ramp in terms of if you’re talking about fucking too much, that F also stands for Feeld. I think I read that half the people in the magazine have some connection to Feeld, the app. Every editor starts with a blank piece of paper. So how did you fill it?
Maria Dimitrova: You know what a good question. I want to say both the editorial and the magazine really started from a lot of conversations and dialogues and I guess shared obsessions. And one of the very first things that came in was the theme we both have as it happens, an interest in some kind of past work relating to Stanley Cavell, the philosopher. And we both love both the book, but also specifically the title of his book, Pursuits of Happiness. So that is even just abstracted as three words came very early. It felt like it contained a lot of what we wanted, a lot of the feelings that we wanted the first issue to evoke.
And then again, it was a very interesting mix between, on one hand, thinking of what is the function of the magazine, the issue for the company within the company, inside the company that ultimately originated it. So in that sense, thinking of how the Feeld member base is involved, in what way does it kind of surface these stories that we talked about, but at the same time, it being something that is, that any magazine reader would want to read anyone who might not know what Feeld is would still find something there and find it compelling.
And so it was like running on those two tracks as editors. There was the theme, but then a lot of it was about thinking of writers and voices and just giving people that like blank canvas or giving people that opportunity of what have, is there something you’ve wanted to write that there wasn’t an obvious home for? It relates to whether it relates to the team or not, whether it relates to the kind of broader subject matter that we mentioned. And making our magazine a place for that.
So it’s been really, it started with those again, as you can see I think vague, instinctive directives and then what, and then slowly. We built it as the pieces came in.
Haley Mlotek: Yes yeah, it’s so true that every editor who’s lucky enough to start a magazine starts with a blank page, but I also feel like I came in from a very privileged position because we did have Maria and the history of Mal Journal to work with as well and so many of those writers that we were putting on our dream list of people that we absolutely wanted in AFM were already people who had written for Mal, or Maria had been speaking to about the possibility of them contributing to and then, of course, I feel extremely lucky to be part of a community of writers and editors that I’ve worked with in different capacities for a long time.
So there was this, definitely, trepidation about starting something new, but there’s also the excitement of being able to return to maybe some collaborations that we already had experienced and do it in a completely different way for a completely different type of magazine. We knew going into it that a big part of what would differentiate AFM from Mal was the visuals and how important that side of the content would be to AFM.
So that also really widened the aperture of what it was we were considering as well, because then we got to think very deeply about photographers. We responded to illustrators there, like the most fun part of starting any project is the research, which I always refer to for myself as “procrasti research” because I can do it forever and convince myself I’m making progress.
But there was a dream day very early on where we went to a beautiful magazine store in London and just talked endlessly about why we gravitated to which cover or which spine or what size and that part of it as well, the form of it also, I think, inspired our approach to how we wanted to actually put together the content itself.
Arjun Basu: This is, in what I would call enlightened custom publishing. As someone who has been in custom publishing, the best products are when the brand just trusts you and steps away. I always used to say, if it was a brand person that contact was the client, he’d come up with a really good magazine. And if it was a marketing person, it wouldn’t be that good, because the marketing people are really about immediate and about selling, and the brand person is thinking long term and just wants to elevate the space. But at the same time, you are working with the community. Like the community is not just reading this but they are part of the content. So how involved, or how in the way or out of the way, are the people at Feeld?
Maria Dimitrova: Inside the company or the people on the app or both?
Arjun Basu: With AFM.
Maria Dimitrova: I’ll answer it both ways. I think we’ve been very lucky, I think, to have that breathing room that you mentioned and to have enough trust from the company, enough support, to be able to follow our editorial instincts. There might’ve been like banging with fists on tables as we mentioned in the editorial in terms of keeping that but we have been very lucky.
And the person who had structured the brand team originally, and also his successor, both have been like great, I think, great cornerstones in like providing that space and believing in the project from a brand building standpoint, which was always very important in terms of how Feeld members and like the people on the app were involved.
When we say more than half of the contributors are on Feeld that’s true. And we take a broad view of obviously what that means without being too prescriptive, but it often means that you’ve either been on the app at some point or you’re using it right now.
But we also made a very deliberate decision not to indicate who uses it when. That’s a big part of, again, what Feeld is. It could be relevant to you at any point of your life, it might not be, but how and when you use it is also something that could be entirely your business. And then we commissioned and sourced some of the work via calls for submissions that were sent through the app. So some of the poetry came that way. A lot of sources.
Some authors, some pieces came that way. But also, again, through our editorial grapevine as Haley mentioned, in our networks friends of friends, people we knew we did really put also those unofficial call outs for like writers who happened, writers we admire, who we want to work with, who happen to also be on Feeld.
There was this wonderful breakthrough when we didn’t know who our cover star would be when we read Juliana Huxtable’s interview, which Haley commissioned, and when we read Juliana’s answers about the role Feeld played in her creative work, in her personal life, that was a real, that was a real moment when we felt like, this is it, this is exactly the kind of way we want to feature people who use Feeld that was not, there was never a condition of the interview. It just came naturally in the conversation. It was something that she shared.
“We love the type of work that really starts from a question that might not have an answer. It’s about the pleasure of watching somebody try to work it out on their own terms.”
Arjun Basu: And it just feels like there’s buy-in from the CEO which is really probably the most important form of buy in‚as long as the CEO is on board—then you can start doing things and she seems to really support the effort.
Maria Dimitrova: She’s also the one who many years ago, she really saw the potential in Mal as well. So I think there was already that history. But she does support the effort. She believes in it, but it really helped, I’ll name her name, but also the, again, the name of our colleagues in the broader creative team.
It feels the person who first saw it was the former chief creative officer, Charles Fulford, and then our current VP of creative Andrew Peet, both of whom, again, I think without their advocacy and support, I think you wouldn’t be holding the magazine as it stands in your hands in the same form.
And I don’t think we would have been able to do it with the same intuitive process because some of it was intuitive. And we were able to work that way rather than this kind of more, marketing led with a more marketing led logic.
Arjun Basu: The best magazines I worked on have been the ones where we had the most freedom. One of the largest magazines I worked on, the client literally didn’t know what was coming. They were as surprised as everyone else when they saw the magazine. We might give some broad strokes, but he trusted us so completely. And as a company, they had a lot of other things to worry about. I stopped working on it and a few years later, they lost that freedom completely. And it became a different publication for sure. Haley, you have done custom work before you were with Ssense, and you teach journalism—I’ve actually spoken at Concordia in Sarah’s class about this podcast. You approached Feeld as a freelancer, and now you’re here. So how did that happen?
Haley Mlotek: Yes, something like that. It is the only time in my career that this has happened and it feels very fateful. Many years ago, I was working with a wonderful editor, Natalie Shutler, who was at the Times Style section and is now at Salon.
But we were looking for something to work on together. And she mentioned that she wanted more stories about dating and relationships. And I said, Oh, my friends are all using this app that I’ve been meaning to check out. And that turned into her assigning me a profile of the then co founders.
So that’s Ana and Dimo. And that was a really fun story to work on. I liked it very much. I was very pleased with the response to it. And, when I was using dating apps, I definitely preferred Feeld for most of those experiences. So it was always present in my social life as well as professional life. And then many years later, I left Ssense to finish the manuscript of my first book, which—
Arjun Basu: —is out right now. Now, I can say right now because this is running in February. It’s out right now. Congratulations.
Haley Mlotek: Thank you so much. Yes, lots going on. But yes, I had stepped away from Ssense and I was focusing on the manuscript and that’s when I was teaching at Concordia. And I submitted the manuscript, a few months later and I started thinking, Oh, I should probably get another day job.
And I saw that Feeld was hiring a copywriter and more than that, when I was doing my investigative journalism on LinkedIn, I saw that most of the people that I had spoken to for that story still worked at Feeld, which, Arjun, for a tech company or any type of company, says a lot.
And so I sent in an application and I emailed some of the people I knew to say, oh, do you think this would be good? And then Maria thankfully stepped in. And, very tactfully it was like, “You could do this job and be great at this job, but we’re also starting a magazine. We didn’t even know that you were somebody who was looking for a job. Let’s talk about that.” So I really, I thank my lucky stars every day that it worked out that way.
Maria Dimitrova: And very much likewise. I thank my lucky stars. I’ve known about Haley’s work for a while obviously, everyone knew Haley as the author of The New York Times piece but more than that, I think just seeing the ambitious work that she did at Ssense under Durga Chew-Bose’s editorship, which again was very much an incredible example, again, of being able to do very ambitious editorial under a brand.
Arjun Basu: So Maria, you’ve been there for a while, and I guess this goes back to Haley’s point of doing the LinkedIn search. I think this is the first time LinkedIn has shown up in this podcast, and I did not expect it to show up in this episode.
Haley Mlotek: I’m so sorry to have the distinction of being the first one to say it.
Arjun Basu: You are going to have to wear it, Haley. But what is it about Feeld, Maria? They have an extremely strong brand, and the brand is 90 percent culture, and everything points to proof of culture.
Maria Dimitrova: I joined Feeld in 2017. And initially it was a similarly serendipitous thing of me seeing an ad for a creative copywriter, doing a little bit of freelance work. They had never worked with a copywriter before. I met Anna initially, who is now the CEO. She wasn’t the CEO then.
And we got on and she liked my writing samples. My background is I worked at Tank Magazine. It was editorial. I worked in film and then I was freelance at that time when I got involved with Feeld. And I did the kind of full spectrum of freelance writing and editing work than one can do.
I did some copywriting on the side. One of my clients became Feeld. Through that work we, I saw the potential and the ambition. I definitely saw the kind of ambition and the vision that both Ana and Dimo had. And then they kept giving me more work.
And at some point, again, actually it’s a magazine that kind of got me involved in the Feeld. They said, “We really want to start a magazine.” I suggested the idea of Mal Journal and that’s how it all started. And then through the years, and I don’t think I would have stayed if it weren’t the case.
There has obviously been consistency. That vision has stayed, that ambition has definitely been there. And if anything, I feel like it’s only now, the last couple of years, it’s being fulfilled in the sense of actually seeing how many people know and accept the brand on these terms. When I joined, that wasn’t the case. Feeld was quite marginal. It was very much either people want to know about it or it would be very eyebrow-raising to mention it in any context that was at a dinner table or among groups of friends. I joined as head of copy and the magazine was part of my responsibilities, but not the soul.
It was my favorite part, but not the soul. To me it was a day job with an exciting editorial component. My job really was to elevate the brand through language and to try and create that positioning for them using copy, using language, using editorial, using content. And throughout the years, again, I was very, I’m lucky to be able to go from like a one man band, one woman band, to actually being able to build a team.
But right now my work is much more focused almost entirely, exclusively focused on the print editions of AFM which is a kind of full circle in a way. It’s like going back to working on a magazine, which has always been where my personal interest leans into. But building the Feeld brand, working on the Feeld brand, leading content, has been a very important part of that. I want to say it feels like a long time, but the company has also changed quite a bit in those, I don’t know how many, eight years.
Arjun Basu: I would say the print is, it’s a literal tattoo. It’s like a tattoo. You can’t take it off once you put it on. Okay. You said all that about Feeld. So what are Feelds? How do they use it? Is it part of their marketing? Is it a loyalty device for the community as a feedback loop? How does the marketing department feel about your fucking magazine?
Haley Mlotek: First I was going to say, because it’s such a good point, what you mentioned about the difference between a brand approach and a marketing approach, how one is very much about depth and longevity, and the other one is very about immediacy and results, and how important it is to have both in mind. I think coming from a print background, I definitely have a bias or a preference towards which one I gravitate towards, but keeping the sense of right now and how it functions and like you say, what it’ll do for the company and for the members is crucial.
So a big part of, I think, like one of the functions that serves both in many ways is that like we were saying Feeld is not necessarily an app that people can use until they reach a conclusion. And then they they don’t need it anymore. And we see many members who are on it very actively for a long time and then less active or people who maybe leave it for a period and then come back.
And so I think, yeah, part of the function of the magazine is to be a way for Feeld to be present in our members lives and in the wider community of Feeld members’ lives off the app, So it’s not quite so literally connected to the actual company product, but it is an extension of it, like we were saying, that’s It’s in magazine stores and bookstores, on your coffee table, in your bookcase and again like you say, it’s a tattoo, it’s permanent, so people can always pick it up and always hopefully find something new inside of it that they didn’t see the first time.
Yeah, beyond that, I think there are other very immediate positives to having a magazine. It is a great opportunity for us to be able to have conversations exactly like this with people who also make magazines or love magazines. Who are doing their own, like Maria was saying, who are members of their own creative practice. And so that just, I think, renews the ability for both AFM and Feeld to be part of a wider circle of conversations that overlap with dating and relationships and sexuality, but is more broadly about culture.
Maria Dimitrova: And I can just add as well, it’s Feeld is for quite a while invested in events and experiences. And so the magazine plays a role there too. And it’s also, again, it’s not lost on the company that again, it being in certain bookshops, museum shops, places where potential Feeld members reside is a wonderful place and a wonderful way to encounter the Feeld brand in a way that again, isn’t on the nose, isn’t literal, and perhaps better communicates that kind of depth and nuance that Feeld really cares about.
Arjun Basu: Yeah. So it’s closing the circle in many ways, or the parts of the circle that are not accessible to what is, I don’t want to belittle it, but it’s just an app, right? And it’s also, it keeps it in mind. Like the coffee table, like at the stockists and stuff. What are Feeld’s long-term intentions? Because I read this article in The Atlantic, which was a snarky thing, but they did make the point that tech has dabbled in print a lot and they always retreat, one because print is hard, especially for people in tech. People who live in a constant beta just cannot handle having something as final as print. And they always forget that custom publishing has been around for a long time, of course. Are they committed to this, or is it something in terms of budget that has to be fought over every year or…
Maria Dimitrova: I would say it’s—and I know what you mean about the Atlantic article and that context—I think the magazine exists in a similar context with similar circumstances that any print publishing project at the moment in the sense that there is uncertainty. In our case, the uncertainty comes from that specific place, which is yes, the long term vision and commitment of the company to producing it.
Right now there is that commitment. Wholeheartedly. The company itself, again, like any tech company operates with these timeframes that are in fact much shorter, as you say, than a print timeframe. And so we’ve learned to operate within that. So in that sense, there is, I had said this in the Atlantic and they chose to emphasize it as a big point.
And I really respect the journalists who read on it and I understand where it came from, but that point is about how every single issue could be your last. But there’s something very exciting to me about that. Our main ambition is to make every issue better than the last. And as you say, it is an archive. It is building an archive. And it’s both an archive of the content inside, but it’s also an archive of, again, a publishing project run that way, funded that way, which is becoming more of a thing but it’s quite new.
When I was researching Mal and trying to find comparisons, there weren’t so many, but there were already a few really excellent ones. Both of them, unfortunately, have now closed down. And yet I think of them as references all the time. One is the digital magazine of Aesop, The Fabulist, which published fantastic work. Sometimes they published print pamphlets and print versions of the content at events. And I still think of it fondly.
I still love a lot of the writers and writing they published. And then The Happy Reader, Penguin’s own magazine. And that’s how we’re approaching AFM with that kind of cautious awareness but as far as we’re concerned it’s running, we’re going, we’re working on it. And the second issue is underway. Yeah, and I did pure—
Arjun Basu: —Pure sex. It was just pure sex, which you talked about right there. Everything really is about sex!
Haley Mlotek: But I did want to add a little bit to your point about how tech companies approach print specifically, because I think very broadly in the major umbrella that tech as an industry can encompass.
I think that’s absolutely true. And something that I’ve come to feel as well, which is mostly based on my experience working as an organizer for the National Writers Union and working with digital media freelancers specifically is maybe challenging the assumption of reality that tech companies have imposed on us where it’s very true that in their corner of the industry, everything has to be right now or it’s already too late and that there is a sense of constantly starting over, of impatience, which can lead to a real devaluation, particularly of human labor, but also of the work that’s created by those people.
But at the same time, I wouldn’t say that media or publishing is completely exempt from those principles either. I think we’ve seen so many examples of our supposedly strongest literary institutions crumbling bit by bit, like really being chipped away by the same ideas around capital and growth and speed to the detriment of all of us.
So any opportunity to create something that’s intended to last and intended to have that sort of depth that, you know, the people we trust and respect to want to bring to it is worth it, no matter how long it lasts, if only just because it challenges that perception that nothing’s really built to go on as long as we might want it to.
Arjun Basu: So I just wanted to touch on some of the things in terms of Feeld’s brand and they hold events and all sorts of things. And how is the AFM brand going to sit under that? Is AFM going to have its own events? There’s a Venn diagram going on here, but it’s almost a circle, a pure circle. Is AFM as a brand going to become like a media brand, a larger media brand, or is that all going to be folded under Feeld or is that discussion still underway?
Maria Dimitrova: I think that’s a very good question. And the Venn diagram is definitely a mode of illustration that we’ve used to illustrate the relationship. The way we think of AFM is a kind of sub brand of Feeld in that sense that it is separate in a way. It has some of its own accounts, has its own Instagram channel, it will hold its own specific events. But of course, when we say its own events, it’s of course under the umbrella of Feeld.
And it’s just a case of how Feeld shows up when it’s something that is an AFM event or it’s initiated by AFM and it just shows up in those ways that are relevant for the medium, for the platform, for the context. Whether that’s like a reading, whether it’s a panel discussion, these are types of things that we are working on right now and working on programming, but again, we’re working on programming events, for example, for AFM in partnership with a bigger partner Feeld.
So it’s really trying to bring them close together, but not force that closeness when it doesn’t make sense, when it doesn’t serve neither AFM nor Feeld. But how, what exactly this looks like where again, we’re, we’re only one issue in. Yeah. So there’s no—
Arjun Basu: —strategy really yet. And it’s a case by case. Yes. But I know you’re going to get it right because otherwise, the brand, it’s like a perfect bit of branding. If some enlightened school is going to teach this as a branding thing, community, quality, engagement, authenticity, it’s all there. The brand is a promise to a customer and AFM just feels like 200 pages of that promise from Feeld. Hats off to everyone. We usually end this with three magazines or media that you both love right now. So that’ll be six, since it’s three times two, unless you guys are perfectly aligned. Maria, we’ll start with you.
Maria Dimitrova: Okay. I was thinking about this and—it’s awful to have to only contain it to three, but I have been loving Granta especially under the editorship of Thomas Meany. I love that they brought in, I guess, investigative journalism and long form nonfiction, as well as continuing to publish really excellent fiction—the kind of thematic coherence of the issues the writers that they bring together. It’s a magazine that I read closely. I’m very jealous of every single issue. Lately it has been so strong.
I also really love Neptune Papers. The interiors magazine. It has, again, a very distinctive voice in that space. Wonderful art direction. And the size and format of it, and I don’t mean just physically; how many stories, how they’re approached, that kind of more intimate lens on people’s homes and interiors and creating in that space to me, it’s very rare. I’ve loved Apartamento for a very long time, but Neptune is a great recent find.
And I love Marfa in terms of fashion magazines, Marfa Journal, and the irreverence that only I feel like only they get away with the kind of things that they do both, visually and format wise, so I’m quite inspired by, by these three at the moment.
Arjun Basu: Great. Haley?
Haley Mlotek: Yes. Those were such good ones, Maria. So I co-sign all of those and I have three of my own. I’ll say first N+1 now and always. I am continuously so impressed by the way they approach the work of editing their writers and just like the care and consideration that they give to what they publish and how they publish it.
They recently released a collection called “The Intellectual Situation” and I was flipping through it and realizing how many of my all-time favorite essays were N+1 essays. So it’s wonderful to have that, so long to look back on and to be so excited about what they’re still going to do.
I also have really been loving The Paris Review for two years now, a long time, in terms of respecting the tradition and always returning to the archive. But I think the redesign that’s been done under the current editorial team is also so inspiring in a similar way because it is so considered and careful and represents the history and the tradition in a way that feels completely contemporary, completely a signature of the people who are working on it.
And it’s just really been a joy to receive it in the last few years. And again, I want to be clear before that as well, but I just think the redesign really deserves some extra praise and attention. And then I’ve also really been loving and looking to Cultured recently, actually. I think they have a really beautiful approach to covering art and culture and celebrity.
And also I’ve been—I’ve really loved to see the way they are taking criticism so seriously with their new newsletter and column that’s run by John Vincler and Johanna Fateman. Just any time a magazine takes our criticism as something that should be appreciated on its own terms and distributed widely and read generously, I think that’s also worth celebrating.
Arjun Basu: Okay, and I also want you to right now plug your book.
Haley Mlotek: Me? My book?
Arjun Basu: Your book.
Haley Mlotek: Plug my book. Okay. My book is called No Fault, a Memoir of Romance and Divorce. The publication date is February 18th, 2025. In Canada it’s published by McClelland and Stewart. In America it’s published by Viking. It is a personal, social, and cultural history of divorce, loosely from the mid-century in North America to the present day, focusing on the idea of how what’s commonly referred to as no-fault divorce has changed people’s experience.
Arjun Basu: Great. Thank you. Good luck with that. And thank you for appearing here. It’s been great.
Haley Mlotek: Thank you.
Maria Dimitrova: Three Things
Haley Mlotek: Three Things
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