The Monday Media Diet with Maria Shollenbarger

Maria (MS) writes for FT’s HTSI magazine and also our beloved FT Weekend. Her work is amazing. She was kind enough to give me her picks this week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

Born and raised in California, still feel very much psychically linked to it, despite having not lived there for almost 30 years, and being resolutely Italy- and UK-based now. I had a long and very circuitous route to magazines and writing for a living, which is ironic because I knew I wanted to write, travel and work at Condé Nast by my freshman year at college. I was a commercial TV producer in my 20's in NYC, which was sometimes extraordinarily fun, if ultimately a job ill-matched to my character. (The days holed up in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont doing post-production between massages and Chin Chin takeaways on some fat-cat client's bazillion-dollar budget were great; working for high-maintenance creative directors who didn't quite cut it for jobs at the New Yorker or Pentagram, and were taking those shortcomings out on the rest of us, not so much.)

Then the Internet happened, and I got a job at Gerry Laybourne and Oprah's Oxygen Media. I met Martha McCully there—co-founder of Allure, brilliant OG women's mag editor—who took me along when she jumped ship for Estee Lauder, and then for InStyle. From there I went to Real Simple and then Travel + Leisure. Then in 2007 I moved over to Europe. I got the job at the FT a few months after I arrived in London; I was deputy editor of How To Spend It (now HTSI) for about four years before going on contract as the magazine's travel editor, so I could write more and manage less. And that's what I am still predominantly doing, though there were a few years of simultaneously being an editor-at-large at CN Traveler in there. 

Describe your media diet. 

The Guardian and the FT every day. Then, in no particular order, the London/New York Review of Books, the Economist. The Crooked Media and The Rest Is ... podcasts (call me basic, I'm fine with that, they're brilliant). The Atlantic, and The Intercept once in a while. A handful of these Substacks, mostly by friends: Yolanda Edwards, Lindsay Tramuta, Gisela Williams and Antje Wewer, people like that. I no longer read the NY Times and the New Yorker nearly as much as I should, though I get about half a dozen news alerts from the former, which makes me feel connected enough. 

What’s the last great book you read?

A tie: The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright, and How To Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum. Both searingly naked and honest about how complex and uncomfortable the feelings endemic to mother-daughter relationship can be. Hila Blum's prose is exquisite. Whoever translated it from Hebrew—I can't remember the name (translators need to be celebrated more!)—deserves a prize.

What are you reading now?

Soldiers Don't Go Mad, by my friend Charles Glass. In the 80s Charlie was ABC's Middle East bureau chief; he wrote a book called Tribes with Flags, which started out as a travelog about exploring the Levant from Alexandretta, on the Turkish border, down through Israel etc. Then he got kidnapped by pro-Shia terrorists in Beirut; he escaped a few months later. (Being kidnapped = excellent fodder for a writer, if not a box I especially feel the need to tick.)  Soldiers Don't Go Mad is his newest; it's about the 20th century poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and how they met while recuperating at Craiglockhart, a war hospital in Scotland were they were being treated for shell shock during world war one. I'm not a huge nonfiction person, but Charlie writes beautifully—he's a regular contributor to the LRB—and it's a quite moving story about PTSD, and how art and pain intersect, and being gay in a century and country and military culture that didn't really accept it. 

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

I've two, broadly visual- and words- driven. If it's World of Interiors or H&G or Cabana—visual—I flip-flip-flip and just stop on what captures my attention. It kind of palate-cleanses my mind. Or, I’m reading expressly for written content, like the NYRB, because I focus much better away from my phone, when it’s print. I try to sit down and read it cover to cover.  

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

In fiction, Nicole Krauss. She is just a fucking genius. Sharp, really elegant prose, so much heart, sadness and humour.  I re-read The History of Love, which is, I believe, her second novel, about once every two years because I find it so perfect and life-affirming. Non-fiction: Henry Mance at the FT. He is Interview Guy, and extremely good at it, as well as at feature writing; a proper stylist who makes beautiful sentences while simultaneously totally nailing the person he's profiling. 

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

3BMeteo. The weather is sexier in Italian.

Plane or train?

Train. The high-speed FrecciaRossa from Rome to Florence is my happy place. It's true that there is still that lovely untethered feeling, literally and existentially, that attends being up in the sky—an Italian friend recently flew from Tokyo home to Milan and posted a pic on IG of the flight path going almost over the Arctic, and I thought, Wow, what a world we live in. But flying is a bit too fraught these days, both with guilt and, now I’m getting old, with health concerns: I'm writing this after a 26-hour trip from London to Melbourne which has absolutely destroyed me. I can still barely spell my own name at 3 pm and am awake as f*k at 3 am, and it's four days later. 

What is one place everyone should visit? 

This is a hard one. If you're asking me to designate a country, I'd say somewhere like Kenya or Indonesia, where there are multiple intersecting and overlapping cultures, where there's a lot of inward investment and diverse business speculation, where there are animist traditions of spiritual belief alongside modern religion (in both these countries' cases, Islam and Christianity). Where colonization/occupation is part of the history, so you get a different lens on whiteness. Where you can get deep in a natural environment of extraordinary beauty, to be reminded, in a very immediate and personal way, that the planet is beautiful—and also sick, and we need to be better custodians. These strike me as two countries where there are really dynamic ways, from the tourism/infrastructure standpoints, to experience all of that. Or:  the Holy Land. Endless stories there. (MS)

—

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)

—

Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.