The Monday Media Diet with Sami Reiss

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Sami Reiss (SM) is a writer who writes the excellent interior design Substack called Snake. He was introduced to us by Sam Valenti following his excellent Herb Sundays Edition. (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Sami Reiss and I am a writer from Ottawa, Ontario who lives and works in Carroll Gardens. To pay the bills I write freelance stories on the seed oil beat, design and other topics for GQ, Ssense, The Wall St. Journal and other publications, and consult, train people and source/sell furniture and vintage clothing. I most regularly write a weekly Substack, Snake, that covers furniture and interior design. It collects 20 or so well-designed items a week at reasonable (under $2K, sofas, lamps, chairs, everything) prices, plus reportage/investor profiles on brands, and interviews, and essays. Its archives were published as a book this spring. Lots to like. In my free time I do the usual.

Describe your media diet. 

I don’t read the news like I used to—partly as a function of my beat veering to food and design, which are topics less reported on than my previous work in sports, partly because when I read news heavily I did so as a sort of unpaid media critic—an execrable use of one’s time—and partly because as a private citizen, keeping up cements the reality that I am completely powerless over domestic and foreign policy, and would therefore like to no longer get regular updates on things that I don’t agree with and cannot change. Will reading the Times’ A section every day drop the price of eggs under $7 again? Or end the warzone? That said, I do take in a decent amount.   

I have a routine. I subscribe to some straight newsletters — Harper’s Weekly, Matt Levine’s,  Automotive News, which I especially enjoy (the auto beat is fascinating). For individual letters I like Max Read (he has fine taste in thrillers), Blackbird Spyplane (access and reporting, wish there was more), Perfectly Imperfect (they’re my guys), Herb Sundays and Deep Voices. My friend Miguel runs the Paradox newsletter which is peerless. For health, there isn’t much. I like Helios Movement, an occasional letter written by George Ferman, who is a dark nutrition trainer/consultant and whose newsletters mostly function as reverse marketing for his work. He hasn’t been very prolific lately but for a while he was sending out two, three emails a day. I bought his book and it’s good.   

On the web, I skim the usual design sources (mostly trade pubs; a few newsletters—For Scale is cool) as a matter of course and keep up with dark nutrition mostly through social media. I skim the FT daily (their Ukraine coverage in early 2022 should be studied), commodities esp. (I like the idea of someone becoming a millionaire because of coffee beans.) Throughout the day I check GQ, and ESPN for F1/Horns/soccer during lags, and visit the New Yorker’s magazine page weekly and spend time there. 

I don’t really listen to podcasts aside from Richie Krutch’s Post America. Though I check in on health ones now and then for work, like PsychoPhysical (they’re great but have stopped making episodes) and Generative Energy. When I was abroad I would jam “How Long Gone” to feel connected to home; I’ll listen to Throwing Fits in the car and Best Show (I am an FOT). And I listen to every Finebaum callers episode. But I have a feeling the Spotify versions have some calls edited out.  

What’s the last great book you read?

The real answer is too obvious—Russian stuff everyone’s read—for such an interview; an equally true answer is whatever Maigret paperback it is I just finished. They are the best books. Maigret is a renowned detective in Paris who solves murders in languorous style. Georges Simenon wrote 75 Maigrets between the 30s and 70s between other noirs that feature different main characters. I like the Maigrets more than his romans durs because their conservative limitations allow Simenon to be more free. Maigret books are short; I put one in my pocket or bag when I leave the house and read a few pages here and there. I recently finished Maigret and the Wine Merchant. In the story, a successful wine merchant is killed outside a cathouse in Paris’ 16e, and Maigret searches for and, of course, finds the killer. Like every Maigret novel it’s deftly written, specific, and propulsive, with understatement and a magisterial sense of place. In this one, Maigret nurses the flu, and at one point medicates with methylene blue.   

What are you reading now?

Because of the news I am reading or re-reading work Edward Said published in the New Left Review, and his books. For work, Dan Duchaine’s The Underground Steroid Handbook II—it’s from the ‘80s and its premise is steroids can be healthy if properly administered. He is probably right and it is probably the single greatest work of journalism of the past 50 years. I am also re-reading Moby Dick for my own edification, and I just got out of a Le Carré phase, which I go through every other year. With respect, after each run-through I like his work less. Tinker Tailor is more detailed and prolix than I remember. Everything gets described front and back. Like British Balzac… but about work? Who wants that? But this adjustment was bound to happen since I liked him so much from the jump. 

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

Quick leaf through of the entire mag, going to the back third first for features, then the TOC, then the ads—what’s Prada been doing? If it’s the New Yorker, the cartoon then straight to the TOC with my fingers crossed that a writer I like has a story; with design magazines, I tend to just look at the ads, with the Japanese mags at Kinokuniya I leaf through every page and if an image jumps out at me I buy the mag.  

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I am sure everyone reads him but I think Richard Brody is in a league of his own among writers and critics right now. He has a great sense of authority, he is completely unpredictable, he cares about usage (which is refreshing), he is not cynical about the mediums he reviews (also refreshing and rare), and has a sneakily massive body of work (a decade and change worth of quick hits covering most of the directors I like), he really knows his beat and his life seems to be in complete service to his writing; he is always seems to be doing stuff in his free time that informs his criticism. Many other writers are like this, but he publishes the most out of all of them. He’s also equitable: films are reviewed without deference to or derision regarding their budgets/marketing—his artistic judgments don’t reference a film’s ubiquity or place in current discussion. (This is notable because so much criticism lately, not all of it bylined, reviews work in the context of its popularity. This is sort of in the Pauline Kael tradition of knowingness; Brody goes in more respectful, educated and blank.) And since he’s a bit of a snob—opera over the radio—this allows for surprises to come through in the work. He takes shallow work seriously in a different way from, like, a “poptimist” writer. As a reader, it’s a treat when he weighs in on a grand master or masterpiece and fascinating when he, I don’t know, gets assigned to list the best 50 streaming films available now. And as someone who sort of works in this industry, it’s edifying to see someone with a steady paycheck get freer, less restrained, better and more prolific. I bet if more writers were given similar leash and cash we’d be seeing similar career arcs. Maybe this is happening with newsletters now? Who knows. Long may he reign. 

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

Nothing super crazy, I pay for YouTube, which is obviously super well-known, but as a music streaming app it gets short shrift. It’s the best one by far: fewer licensing deletions, more obscure music, more live stuff, more DJ mixes, demos, night and day for rap… it’s the best money I spend all month. I also like Seed Oil Scout, which is a crowdsourced wiki map for restaurants that don’t use that sludge for cooking (just about every single one does), and Vinted, for vintage clothing, when I’m in Europe. 

Plane or train?

I love flying… 

What is one place everyone should visit? 

Everyone should go to a city park that has bars and try to do five chin-ups. They should do this every other day until they can do 10. Then they should go for 20, then 30. Absent that, I would say the swimming pond at Hampstead Heath in London. George Smiley swam there in the beginning of the Tinker Tailor flick from a decade ago; it’s full of pensioners who don’t get their hair wet—movie got it right. It’s also crazy to see British lifeguards. I stumbled on it last year and left very moved, it is both peaceful and vivid; there is nowhere else like it. 

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

Gee whiz, I do this p. Often. How about one for me and one for work? Just this week, for me, I was searching for a stand-alone pedometer so I could go on walks and track steps without having to have my phone on me. Such a device is surprisingly hard to find; only one company makes one that looks durable and competent, and it’s an uncharacteristic product for them as the rest of their stock is classified as “predictive maintenance”—not sure what that is—and electrical testing tools. So… long story short, I can’t buy one because only one website sells this pedometer (otherwise sold out everywhere), which is priced below the order minimum, and everything else on the site is like… Geiger counters, signal generators, oscilloscopes, insulation meters... So now I am trying to figure out what the best insulation meter to buy is, and also what an insulation meter is and what it’s used for. 

I’ve also been off the deep end with digital watches and am picking up stock so I can start selling again (I used to sell vintage regularly a decade ago). Most germane though, to what I do now, is furniture by Alberto Meda, an Italian designer who worked at Cassina for a while in the ‘70s. He then went freelance and produced a huge body of work, with a lot of outré pieces, especially in the ‘90s and 2000s. I initially didn’t like his work when I saw it, which was recently; I came across an auction for one of his coat racks and included it in a recent newsletter. It’s a bit hideous, and its lines feel off. But… the more I looked the more I warmed to it… like the best difficult design it grows on you. I kept re-writing the graf and 180’d. Now I think he’s great and so am researching his work for a newsletter feature, and am in a rabbit hole of links and books and the like. It is hard to find examples of his design, collected anyways, since there is just not very much information out there about him—or indeed any designer. It’s wild because Meda specifically has won a number of design awards, worked at the highest level of the industry, and has turned out a 50-year career. But his work’s kind of unrecognizable and unremarked upon outside professional circles. We’re really in a super primitive era of design knowledge, one that’s hard to conceive since we now have a decent grasp of so many other things. It’s wild—a lot of design lanes are in reality more obscure than, say, subculture. And so I’ve been trying to fill in the gaps with my work. (SR)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Sami

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