They Found Us

This journal ended up in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Not as a cautionary tale—in the Jetzt supplement, which was the paper’s culture insert and the section people under forty actually read. I wrote the piece myself, which was either brave or a catastrophic misallocation of editorial trust, and I dragged in some of the notebook’s less flattering history because that’s always where the interesting material lives.

It ran in the same issue that covered the protests in Iran and Obama killing a fly at a press conference. I’m not sure what that says about the news cycle, but there it is.

Seeing this site’s name in print felt genuinely strange—not famous, exactly, more like briefly legible to an audience that hadn’t gone looking. Hannah and I had been at this long enough that the recognition arrived with a kind of mild, slightly embarrassed pleasure. You build something strange on the internet for long enough, keep showing up to it for years, and occasionally the newspaper finds out. Doesn’t change anything. You notice it anyway.