I got a little carried away and launched a premium print magazine on Substack
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They say everything that comes in threes is perfect. Omne trium perfectum, for the priests among us. Good news for me, as I’ve had three life-altering events recently.
First, I started a new job at Discord. The role is one of those rare, perfect fits that seems to retroactively connect all the dots of your previous experiences into a coherent narrative.
Then just last week my wife and I celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary. We had much to toast to: the health of our three kids, my new job, and the launch of a long-gestating passion project.
This third thing is something I’ve been working on for over a year with my dear friend and co-founder Jason Killingsworth. I think longtime subscribers to Push to Talk will be blown away by it.
Introducing Chisel
Chisel is a new, premium magazine that publishes both digitally and in print. The print edition is made using such outrageously high-end materials that the word “magazine” doesn’t quite describe it. Each volume is bound like a book and stuffed with 160+ thick, full-color pages of essays, arts criticism, fiction, photography, philosophy, and poetry.
We’re publishing twice yearly in print and twice per week as a digital newsletter. The print version is intentionally priced high, but if you’re strapped for cash you can still read articles digitally by signing up for free on our Substack.
For the money-havers in the chat, you’re going to want to get your hands on the lavish print edition by subscribing to our annual plan. We’re even doing a launch promo! Bust out your wallet before August 15th and get 17% off your subscription permanently (the discount applies to future renewals as well).
But why make a print magazine in 2026? And what’s it about?
If you know either me or Jason, you might expect Chisel’s content to focus on games – and we do have some great games writing in volume 001. But the vision is bigger. We like to say our thematic pillars are “beauty, obsession, and play.”
So yes, Chisel publishes things like this deeply reported feature about video-game speedrunning from The New Yorker’s Simon Parkin. But we’ve also got a fire-hot manifesto about the necessity of friction and failure by Anu Atluru and a beautifully illustrated dual book review by Christian Donlan. That’s just from week one. Issue 001 has many more surprises.
At its core, Chisel is a magazine about the value of human-made work. One of the core beliefs Jason and I hold is that in a world overwhelmed by slop, there’s no longer room for mediocrity. You can’t launch yet another newsletter, or an also-ran magazine and expect anyone to care. So everything about Chisel is a “big swing.” We decided early on we wanted to bring in the best possible partners to build the mag, and by now something like 50 talented humans have put their fingerprints on it. Each piece is written by a world-class writer and illustrated by an artist whose work inspires us. Our print edition is designed in Atlanta, Georgia by Metaleap Creative, an award-winning firm with design credits including Food & Wine, National Geographic, and the recent redesign of Southern Living. The mag’s first issue is already being printed and bound right now in Italy by our partners at Conti Tipocolor, a family-owned printshop that has operated since 1906.
This is, in other words, a real magazine produced by a founding team with decades of combined experience in print media. And it’s proudly published by Tune & Fairweather, the fine books publisher label Jason has been building since 2017.
None of this is cheap, and Jason and I dug deep into our personal funds to get this thing off the ground. We’re hoping now that we’ll find an audience who loves Chisel enough to make the mag sustainable by the time we ship issue 002. Our dream is to offer writers a platform that pays fairly and publishes their words in a home that feels more permanent than the internet.
Here I’ll quote from the welcome letter Jason and I penned together:
We wrote and edited feature stories for outlets such as Paste, Edge and Wired, and we witnessed the post-2008 implosion of the legacy print world up close. We were there when ad revenues dried up and budgets got slashed. We were among those whose dreams were rug-pulled when old institutions failed to stick the landing on the “pivot to the internet.”
Today, though, we spy new opportunities arising. New infrastructure for publishing and distribution has made possible the creation of new media companies. We believe there is a viable path opening for print media too. Why let the record stores, now in a vinyl renaissance, have all the fun?
Our ambition for Chisel is to build a generational media institution, one that empowers the next wave of writers to build careers and do work they’ll be proud of for the rest of their lives.
Is it possible we’re dreaming too big? Maybe. But sometimes you feel called to do something, and the inner voice calling you is so loud, you know you couldn’t live with yourself if you ignored it.
And in the meantime? See subtitle.
This so cool, the world needs more physical media! Congrats on the job, excited to see what you get up to at Discord :)
Amazing, you are printing in Florence? My city!