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Welcome back

The cast of Bob's Burgers crowds outside of the titular restaurant during its grand "re-re-re-opening."
Hi, everybody, and welcome to our re-re-re-opening. We are now officially Bob's Burgers.

The last time I wrote anything for this newsletter, I was writing on a different platform. (Best of luck to Letterdrop, a wonderful platform that has opted to move in a different direction with its business model.) I was waiting for my child to be born and freaking out that they were coming a full month early. (They're now eight months old, and I adore them so much.) And I was fully sure I would either be back in May or shutter the newsletter for good.

Then my entire life changed, and while I'm mostly thrilled with the way things have shaken out, I wanted a place to post the many thoughts that enter my head at any given time. So we're back! Hi!

Just to run down the last several months in roughly chronological order, I:

  • Had a baby. This one I just mentioned.
  • Got laid off. While on maternity leave! Which was not fun! While I am still proud of the work I did at Vox, it had been clear for a while that the publication and I were trapped in a doom spiral, so I guess I'm glad I got laid off? Question mark?
  • Sold a bunch of freelance pieces. You may have seen me writing about Succession in the New York Times, reality TV in Vanity Fair, and TV fan theories in Garbage Day, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Sold a novel. More about this soon! I have to wait for my publisher to announce it, which is taking a second.
  • Got hired to write on the TV show Yellowjackets. Very neato turn of events!
  • Worked one day, then went on strike. The WGA needs a fair deal! Let's be honest with ourselves here.

And in all this time, I was still watching stuff and having thoughts about the stuff and wondering what Emily Rogers was up to. As such, the newsletter is back! If you look around, you should see all of the old posts. I'm going to work on organizing the archive at least somewhat, but to a certain degree, there are nearly eight years of posts in there (give or take), so it will always be a little unwieldy.

That said, this newsletter is an unwieldy beast, and I will be turning subscriptions on again on July 15. The money I make from this newsletter allows me a financial cushion that lets me write about more niche topics than the latest season of The Bear (tho I would love to write about the latest season of The Bear, too!).

Ghost is a wonderful platform, but it's also an expensive one, so your subscriptions will also go toward keeping the newsletter online. This is literally my last stand. If Ghost doesn't work out, I will officially give up on newsletters forever and retire to the sun. (This sounds like a joke; it is, but only mildly so.)

Now that I have a baby and other commitments, doing many posts per week is probably out of the question, but I want you to get some sort of exclusive content if you're paying. Maybe that will be TV recaps every other week. Maybe it will be Zoom AMAs or a Discord server or something.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you would consider worth your hard-earned dollars. Just reply to the email version of this newsletter to let me know what you think! You can send any other questions you want there too. Or leave a comment! Who doesn't love to leave a comment?

In the meantime, welcome back. I'll be back soon (probably) with a piece on James Gunn and The Abuse Plot.