Study Hall

With so much uncertainty in the media industry, it’s always useful to pick up a new skill and pay attention to the sectors that are growing. According to Pew Research Center, podcast listenership continues to increase. Younger generations, in particular, are gravitating toward the medium to get their news. But making the switch from written journalism to podcasting can be difficult.

In May 2026, independent investigative reporter and longtime Study Hall member Yael Grauer, alongside a team of full-time reporters at the Associated Press, won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. “It was pretty surreal,” she said on the latest episode of the Study Hall podcast.

The Scoop by Erin Van Der Meer. Grand Central Publisher, 320 pages. 2026. The latest episode of Serial is playing in your wired earbuds. You just moved from Kips Bay to somewhere called East Williamsburg. You’ll try that new place Sweetgreen for lunch, sit down with the Gawker link everyone’s been circulating — something about failing the Ice Bucket Challenge. No, this is not hell; you’re just working in digital media in the year 2014.

When Pitchfork was acquired by Condé Nast in 2015, then-director of editorial operations Brandon Stosuy decided that this new direction would provide fewer opportunities for the kind of work that felt meaningful to him. It seemed “like suddenly things were going to change a lot. The magazine was going to leave our little warehouse in Greenpoint.” Ten years ago, Stosuy met Yancey Strickler, then-CEO of the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, at a coffee shop in Greenpoint.

The founders of the New York Review of Finance (NYRF) are not in the business of offering investment tips. They are not CFAs; they do not clock late nights at banks or funds. Lest there be any confusion, the print-only publication’s cheeky tagline-cum-disclaimer, which appears on the front page of its first two issues, reads, “This is not financial advice.” But if you’re looking to start a scrappy newsprint magazine, the trio can share what worked for them: Go to magazine league softball games.

If you’re worried about young straight men’s place in literary production, or young white men’s, or young straight white American men’s; or if the question bedeviling you is why men don’t read, or read less than women but more than sometimes reported, or read performatively; or if, say, you want to know about the unspoken presupposition of cissexuality in discussions of dick-swaggering texts and the anxieties about measuring up that those texts express: there are essays and articles for you.

On a frigid, gray January day in Midtown Manhattan, shuffling down Sixth Avenue, I pass one of the many stone slabs that comprise Rockefeller Center. A news ticker, hued hyperlink blue, advertises news out of the World Economic Forum at Davos. An American flag waves. But the lettered signage above the glass doors has been stripped, leaving just a shadow of a name: “News Corporat”—the “ion” is hacked off completely.

Dinah Brooke is in her early nineties; she’s never heard of a “trad-wife.” When I begin describing the phenomenon, she shakes her head in the Zoom window. “ I’m beginning to see how incredibly hard it is for women today, actually,” she says. “I have a friend who lives in America and does research there, and she was horrified by the sorts of things that women are doing.

Photo credit: Matthew Avignone At holidays, as a journalist, family friends sometimes come to me with suggestions for whom I should profile next. Maybe their neighbor who handpaints wind chimes and is making a killing selling them on Etsy? Or a neurologist who is also an avid birder? But what makes a subject worthy of a profile? Jess McHugh, an author and journalist based in France with writing in The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The New York Times, is the right person to ask.