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It’s a beautiful day to send our second installment of BYLINE NEWS: News about bylines.1

This week we’re highlighting two essays we enjoyed from The Paris Review and Vogue, an update from Tax Magazine, new faces on Substack, new news from Substack, and a few opportunities that should be on your radar now.

• The Paris Review published a beautiful dispatch from Beirut by writer Jacob Russel.

• TikTokker Julia Mervis, part of the Jake Shane cinematic universe, got a digital column at Cosmo. “Life According to Julia” appears to be a blend of her own trend reporting and personal style anecdotes, though some girls aren’t excited. “Ballet flats are not new to the world of fashion,” she writes in her first column, “But I think summer is the perfect way to reinvent them because when everyone else is wearing flip-flops, you can be wearing ballet flats.” Hmm. We will be monitoring the situation. While wearing ballet flats.

  

• Vogue published a personal essay by Andrea Javor about her relationship’s demise, and the impact it had on her ready-made family.

• Tax Magazine is ending after its next issue, issue 6.

• Ky Newman is directing a short film. He’s making his directorial debut with Mary Beth Barone’s Galaxy Brain, out July 28th on Netflix.

• While we’re talking about Netflix, the former EIC of InStyle, Laura Brown, posted a poignant story about Evan Ross Katz’s return to Netflix. “In 2018, @evanrosskatz lost his job when his entire company shut down. The next few years were filled with freelancing, uncertainty, and learning to trust the thing he’s always loved: pop culture. He eventually landed a job back at Netflix… only to be laid off again in 2021.” Folks, never forget to try, try again

  

• Supermodel Elsa Hosk is now on Substack. She’ll be writing about what she’s wearing, according to her bio. But honestly, we want to know a bit more than that.

• Substack rolled out an AI-detection feature to protect us all from the AI slop. The words app is for words you write yourself! Let’s keep it that way!

• Gus Dapperton is hosting a music video night at SoHo House, curated by director Matthew Dillon Cohen. Music videos these days feel like a lost art form—but if anyone is capable of creating (and curating) impeccable music videos, it’s MDC. Friends of the mag Junior Varsity are DJing after.

• The best song on the new Gracie Abrams album is “Mini Bar,” which was written by Audrey Hobert—who, by the way, is one of our favorite modern culture writers. But the fact that it’s by leaps and bounds the best essay on Gracie’s album made us wonder…was Audrey the secret sauce behind Gracie all along?

• SAP Magazine is starting a new art show called Flakken:

  • “I got pretty heavily into flags over the past year. Vexillography is cool because what a flag represents can mean many different things depending on a range of factors: who’s flying it, where it’s flying, when it appears, and what’s actually on it. I’m drawn to things that can carry different meanings for different people. I’m giving a group of artists blank flags and seeing what they would do with it, mostly out of curiosity but also because I like the idea of people gathering for the meanings they choose. Come through August 1st for the first one with Amanda Ba.” —Max Burkeman, Co-founder of SAP Magazine

    

• Rachel Cusk’s upcoming novel, The Life of M, is rumored to be about Natalie Portman—and, allegedly, is largely unflattering. Valerie Stivers broke the news on UnHerd. Cusk and Portman are purportedly friends, though perhaps not for long…

OPPORTUNTIES

• Friends of Byline Spread the Jelly are accepting essay pitches. Send them your funniest, strangest, unfiltered essays on motherhood.

• It’s Freezing in LA is accepting submissions for climate fiction—comics, flash fiction, longform, shortform. Email your pitch to editor@itsfreezinginla.com. Deadline is August 15th!

• The Baffler is seeking an administrative assistant. Could it be you…?

• Printed Matter is on the hunt for interns. Could this also be you…?