I recently spoke with novelist and culture writer Kat Rosenfield for the third time on this show. Rosenfield writes a column for The Free Press, co-hosts the Feminine Chaos podcast with fellow writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy, and has published six novels, including the Edgar-nominated No One Will Miss Her. Her next book, How to Survive in the Woods, arrives March 2026.
We talked about the death of Teen Vogue, the take economy that preceded the deluge of AI slop, her cancellation from YA fiction in 2017, and the grim future of writing in an age of touchless content generation.
Read on (or listen) to learn more!
RIP Teen Vogue, the Magazine for 30-Year-Old Teenagers
Our conversation began with the November 2025 folding of Teen Vogue back into Vogue proper. Condé Nast laid off 70% of the staff and dissolved the politics desk. I’d written about my own experience writing for Teen Vogue in the mid-2010s, and Rosenfield had her own detailed piece at The Free Press covering the closure.
“I was too old, in my estimation,” Rosenfield said of never pitching Teen Vogue. “I didn’t realize, actually, that I was right in their wheelhouse age-wise. I was the perfect middle-aged candidate to write for Teen Vogue, and I just didn’t realize that I was. I thought that it was for the youth.”
The magazine’s star-making moment came in December 2016 when hot take performance artist Lauren Duca published “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” a glorious thumbsucker of a take that went viral, crashed Condé Nast’s servers, and earned her no small amount of fame when she argued about it with Tucker Carlson. Ryan Zickgraf recently interviewed Duca for UnHerd, catching up with her post-divorce, post-lesbian turn, and newfound Christianity. No new book deal yet on that journey, which seems like a missed opportunity.
We Were the Small Language Models
Rosenfield made a sharp observation when discussing the take economy (“takeconomy”) of the mid-2010s: “We say that we live in the era of slop now, but no, we pre-slopped. We made the slop that now makes the slop.”
Indeed, we hardy hacks were the small language models whose makework now powers today’s large language models. The worst AI writing mimics the worst excesses of quick turnaround journalism. “It’s not this, it’s that” constructions. Substance-free paragraphs assembled to meet deadlines. &c. I put actual work into my low-value Teen Vogue piece only because I was fairly certain I could convert that Kafkaesque experience into a Columbia Journalism Review story (the fee for that one was either 75 cents or a dollar a word, not bad), which I eventually did. But normally, a $150 piece gets slopped together and pushed out.
Rosenfield recalled her time blogging for MTV News at $15 per post. “My terrible secret is that even back in those days, I still took it very seriously,” she said. “I did not just crank it out. I was like, no, my sentences are important.” Some good writers came out of that era. Kaleb Horton, who passed away not too long ago, wrote there. But the economic incentives pushed most budding creatives toward quantity over quality.
Getting Canceled from Young Adult Fiction
The conversation took a turn when Rosenfield described her 2017 cancellation from YA publishing. In late 2016, petitions circulated in private Facebook groups targeting a novel deemed “racist” for its representation choices. The real motive, Rosenfield suggested, was competitive: the author was releasing around the same time as a “YA queen bee” who happened to be “very big into social justice.”
“We’re banning books?” Rosenfield remembered thinking. “When did we start doing this?” She posted publicly against the campaign without naming names. That was enough.
A few months later, someone started spreading a rumor that Rosenfield ran a sock puppet account she used to send racist abuse to women writers of color. “It’s so dumb, because it wasn’t even true,” she said. When she tried damage control by asking people to stop lying about her, she was accused of “harassing” them.
“I was eventually called a predator, it was implied that maybe I was some kind of pedophile,” she said. “I was put on a list of people who were unsafe.”1
The Divarication of the Media Landscape
The cancellation effectively sorted Rosenfield’s career trajectory. She couldn’t write for the explicitly woke publications that dominated the mid-2010s discourse, which turned out to be the more stable path anyway.
“We really all were just frogs falling through the air, trying to land on something stable for a hot second for long enough to get paid,” she said of the 2016-2020 period. “And then that thing would disintegrate underneath you, and you’d be off to try to land on the next lily pad.”
Those who resisted ideological capture, like the two of us, found themselves in a better position (read: still working). “It ended up being the most stable career path that you could choose in that moment as a journalist,” she said.2
Places like UnHerd, The Free Press, and Pirate Wires emerged as alternatives.3 The competition at these outlets proved far less stiff than the mainstream media, where everyone was cranking out the same progressive takes. I’d made the same transition. Outside of the Ringer and Men’s Health, my mainstream bylines largely dried up between 2018 and 2020, not through any dramatic cancellation, just editors leaving and outlets closing. The alternative publications, some of which have the funding to pay pretty well, welcomed writers who could produce without the mandatory throat-clearing.
It’s somewhat reassuring to hear that at least some mainstream outlets have since moved away from the old formula, which made most of that content nigh-impossible to read. I recall being asked by The Atlantic in 2019 to include my sexual orientation and race in the opening paragraph of a piece about fitness. The request had nothing to do with the article’s content. I ignored the questions, and the piece eventually ran without those irrelevant4 details.
“It was like you had to say the incantation to ward off the devil before you could actually get to the meat of the writing,” Rosenfield said. “It was just ritual.”
The End of All Things
We ended on AI and the future of writing. I’d spent the week preparing a presentation on “humanizing AI” for my day job in marketing. Rosenfield’s response to the topic was visceral: “I’m a novelist. The idea that people are happily engaging with AI slop feels like a personal attack to me, and also maybe the end of all things.”
She referenced “The Whispering Earring,” a short story by long-time blogger Scott Alexander. The premise: an earring that always tells you what’s best for you. The first thing it whispers is “Better for you if you take me off.” If you ignore that, it never repeats the suggestion. Instead, it offers increasingly granular advice until it’s directing your individual muscle movements. The catch is that the earring is always right. And by the end, you’ve outsourced your entire capacity for judgment.
“We’re making ourselves autistic,” Rosenfield said of the broader trend. People optimizing for machines rather than human connection, such as my colleague who tunes her Zoom camera to watch herself rather than the other person . The friend who’s muted everyone on social media so he only sees his own notifications. The C-suite executive who told me that if our AI output “looks more human, people won’t think we’re using AI.”
The comforting news, for now: AI still can’t imitate individual voice. Rosenfield has had readers send her ChatGPT attempts to write in her style. “It does not sound anything like me,” she said. “Which is very flattering of them to do, but also very reassuring.”
The Downside of Flexibility
Since this is strength month at the Substack, I asked Rosenfield about her training. She still teaches two yoga classes a week, but had to take an extended break from her own practice after developing chronic hamstring tendinopathy.
“The tendons that attach your hamstring muscles to your pelvis, for me, they started to fray on both sides,” she said. “It was incredibly painful, and basically every single exercise in the world made it worse.”
The culprit was overstretching. Naturally flexible people push harder to feel something, and the stretch dumps into the tendons rather than the muscles. “They don’t stretch, and so they just start to break and fray, and then there’s no blood flow to them, so they don’t heal.”
For months she could only ride a bike and walk with an unnaturally short stride. She’s back in the gym now, taking it slow. “I can probably never do a split again for the rest of my life. But I had a good run.”
The injury tracks with what flexibility researchers have warned about for years. Static stretching at extreme angles carries risks that the “stretching is always good” crowd tends to ignore.
On the Actual Work of Writing
One bright spot for fans of human-composed content: Rosenfield’s forthcoming novel, How to Survive in the Woods, which she described as “sexy wilderness survival thriller — think Basic Instinct, but with bears.” The book follows Emma, raised by a doomsday prepper, who ventures into Maine’s Hundred Mile Wilderness with her controlling husband. Bad things happen (and also, I assume, titillating things, though I haven’t read it yet).
AI remains useful as a sounding board, she said. “I rarely like what it suggests to me, but what it does suggest often is how I stumble onto something that’s even better. It’s like having a dumb conversation partner who inspires you to be better.”
Whether that dumb conversation partner eventually replaces the need for real ones remains an open question. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. The earring is always right, after all.
Kat Rosenfield’s How to Survive in the Woods releases March 10, 2026. Her podcast Feminine Chaos releases episodes semimonthly. Find her columns at The Free Press, among other places.
She is also on a list of people — Noam Chomsky and Salman Rushdie are there, too — who signed that “notorious” Harper’s letter about free speech.
In this article, she goes into much greater detail about her approach to the work: “One of my longtime survival strategies as a career freelance writer is a policy of saying yes to everything. This includes paid work, of course, but it also includes lunch invitations, since the only thing I love more than writing is eating. (These are also, incidentally, the only two things in the world that I am any good at.) [Editor’s note: She is also good at handstands.] My policy goes like this: If you invite me to lunch, I will come. Embedded in my policy is a second, equally important policy of asking no further questions about the purpose of the lunch, lest I accidentally trigger a series of events leading to the withdrawal of the invitation, which would be tragic.”
Rosenfield has written for all three and I’ve written occasionally for Pirate Wires and weekly for UnHerd since 2020 (don’t expect to ever see me in FP, though — I’m far too much of a meathead for their demographic).
At least in that context!
