Marcel Winatschek

The Lights Go Out at Blond

Vice, NEON, Blond. My magazine holy trinity for a while—Vice for the deliberately provocative cultural dispatches, NEON for the smart-but-unpretentious feature writing that actually respected its readers, and Blond for reasons I’d struggle to fully articulate except that it felt like it was made by people who genuinely cared.

Blond is apparently going dark. They’d just done a relaunch, just cut the cover price, and now—silence from the editorial team, readers left to piece together what happened in the comments section while the people responsible say nothing publicly. There’s something depressingly familiar about that pattern: announce the comeback, go quiet, let it slowly become obvious.

The long NEON vs Blond rivalry looks like it has a winner by default now. That’s a terrible way for it to end. Genuinely sad.