The Monday Media Diet with Emma Apple Chozick

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Emma Apple Chozick is the founder of gr8 collab. Happy to have her with us this week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

Hi, I’m Emma Apple Chozick! I’m someone who is driven by relentless curiosity– I was on Instagram and Tumblr when I was eleven, and I learned early that the internet could be a tool to see beyond your world and build one of your own. Naturally, my first internship was for Fuckjerry, which I got by making memes about working for them and DMing to everyone working there.

Today, I’m the founder of gr8 collab, one part creative brand strategy consultancy, one part written and video deep dives into the stories of brands, spaces, and the people behind them. I also write for design publications like Architectural Digest and Surface Mag.

Right now I’m working on Surroundings, an exploration into the histories and environments that shape creative lives. The first three episodes are live on YouTube – it’s for anyone who’s ever wondered, “What makes a space truly yours?”

Describe your media diet.

I’m realizing now that my media diet is a bit chaotic, but I’m going to attempt to distill it down. I will say, I’m a loyalist to very few things– I’ll read an interesting story wherever it pops up or listen to a podcast episode one-off, often based on who is sharing it or recommending it, rather than being from a specific publication.

Naturally, a lot of what I consume is design stories. From a written perspective, I love World of Interiors, Cultured, and How to Spend It for this. Nowness: in Residence is an all-time favorite video series and I deeply respect The Local Project’s video work too.

For work/biz, I turn most often to Business of Fashion and Business of Home, WSJ, Glossy.

I love it anytime someone covers something ridiculously niche, led by curiosity and conviction. My tried and trues for this are GQ, The Cut, and New York Times. I miss Vice’s videos that really leaned in here. My friend Marty’s Palm Report substack is always putting new people, brands, and random side quests on my radar too.

Lastly, I clock several hours a week on Are.na and Pinterest. I use both as jumping off points for research or when I’m looking for something very specific.

What’s the last great book you read?

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me. It’s kind of a memoir, but switches off between the author’s point of view and that of her dead grandmother and the stories of their lives and connection with each other. It reminded me a lot of my relationship with my own grandmother.

What are you reading now?

These days, I’m trying to read for fun more. It turns out, you don’t always need to be living at the mercy of news alerts, upskilling, and becoming a better, more powerful business person. I say this because for a long time, this was my factory setting for what made something worth reading. I’ve found some substacks I love that are none of this: Looking at Picture Books, Orzo Bimbo, Angel Cake, and Liminal Space. I’m in my essay-reading era and I love it!

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I like to start with a quick skim to get a lay of the land, then back to the top, reading anything in full that catches my eye. When I was a kid, my grandma used to tear out pages from her magazines and write notes directly on the page to my sister and I that she would then mail to us – ie “This top would look fantastic with your eyes.” It always seemed like a lot of work, but now I want to fold a touch of this analog behavior into my own strategy moving forward.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

On the subject of reading for fun – my sister’s best friend, Eileen Cartter, is a staff writer at GQ and is writing some of the best cultural pieces (see her quest to buy a Labubu) and celebrity profiles (see Hailey Bieber interviewed at Palm Heights). She keeps me plugged in even when my FYP is lacking.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Arca, though I imagine it will be famous soon. It’s a platform for curating/cataloging/organizing everything you love online – links, images, videos. To be honest, I’m not much of a curator on here (I already feel like I’m running a content farm across other channels), but I’m always discovering something new to read or explore. You’re essentially accessing a bunch of other people’s media diets which I’ve found (aside from this newsletter) to be a very efficient way to expand my own.

Plane or train?

If you were to look solely at my travel history, planes would win on sheer miles, but I yearn for taking the more scenic route. I know I would do just fine on the Eastern & Oriental Express.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Scandinavia in the summer. I have a lot of conviction behind this one. You get so many hours of sunshine, it’s spectacular.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I’ve been falling deep into rabbit holes for as long as I can remember, which these days often serve as inspiration for my content. Here’s an example…

In March, I was at a party when a friend briefly mentioned sending an extravagant invite for an event he hosted, inspired by Area. I knew Shawn Hausman, who went on to do the iconic interiors for The Standard Hotels and Chateau Marmont, had been among the creators of Area, but I had never given much thought to the 1980s club.

That night I went home and did what any rabbit hole aficionado would do– began digging up pieces of the puzzle: archival invites that sold at auction through Sotheby’s for $10,000, a digital copy of the AREA coffee table book on Archive.org that I had to recheck-out every 10 minutes because it kept expiring, photos of regulars like Madonna, Warhol, Basquiat, and Keith Haring, and behind-the-scenes of the theme builds that happened every six weeks.

Within three days, I had enough information, understanding, and most importantly, archival images to make a video for TikTok and Instagram. In five days time, my 1 minute, 29 second video had 1.6M views, two follow up videos zooming in on more invitations, and the work Shawn Hausman went on to do after the club closed. Later that same week, I was on email with Shawn himself, and a few days after that, on a series of video calls interviewing him for my Substack. The day after my substack interview went live, someone DM’d me a link to The Strand, where the AREA coffee table book written by cocreater Eric Goode and his sister Jennifer was selling for $600. The same book that I had bought on eBay a week before for $150 from a seller in Japan and MAST had sold a month before my video went live for $200. A month after all of that, I was drinking wine with Shawn and his son in a living room in Soho, all because I fell deep down the rabbit hole. (EAC)