"If you look around at the news industry, there are more and more sites clamoring for that kind of writing, whether it's an Ideas section or personal essay series or longform. Readers are hungry for it. It's like prestige TV, though; it's execution-dependent. You have to figure out the right advertiser or sponsor, and you have to deliver, you can't just feed the beast."

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Through panel moderations and talks around culture, politics and identity I gradually gained opportunities to write in my own voice and not that of the brand. I'm interested in a lot of the languages that drive our culture. I'm interested in user experience as language or how societal malaise takes root. So through essays and short stories I began exploring some of these things.

— Michael Salu