Welcome to The Metropolitan, a weekly newsletter about the pop-cultural and social experience of British Generation X.
We’ll be covering movies, books, films, TV programmes, music, advertising and marketing, social trends, and other cultural phenomena that we find brilliant, interesting or resonant. This could mean Life On Mars or Angela Carter, Jaws or Jack Reacher, Kaye Webb’s reign at Puffin Books or the way that men’s friendships play out in the presenting teams on popular podcasts.
We aim to write honestly and thoughtfully about how our generation’s cultural viewpoint was formed, and how we interact with culture to this day. This means we’re writing with an explicit focus on the viewpoints of British people aged around 45-65, but if we do it right we hope many other people will find it interesting too.
Pieces we’ve written so far include:
We won’t be providing instant reviews and hot takes, because the internet is full of them. We won’t be doing hit jobs either; it’s harder, and more interesting, to put your finger on why something works.
As Tracey Thorn sang in Oxford Street, we ‘grew up in a little world’ that flared and guttered between Playschool and Facebook, and would be unrecognisable to those younger than us. That little world influences us to this day. The Metropolitan is our swing at analysing pop culture and social trends from this specific viewpoint. We’d love you to come along with us.
Weekly emails
Every week we publish a short essay (about ten minutes of reading). It might be art, it might be children’s TV, it might be lost and haunted shipwrecks at the bottom of the Great Lakes.
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At the moment, paying for The Metropolitan doesn’t bring you any extra content, so we’re very grateful to those of you who have signed up for the paid subscription option. We’re thinking about producing a second weekly email for paid subs only, possibly focusing on really deep dives into long-running series such as Doctor Who or the Jack Reacher books. If you’ve got any ideas about what you’d like to see in a subscribers-only email (or if you have anything else at all you’d like to share with us) please email us on editor@themetropolitan.uk
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
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