State of Dirt

Daisy Alioto here.

We’re more than halfway through 2025, so I figured I would give a state of the union. 

This year has been our busiest yet. In January we launched STRUNG, a monthly tennis newsletter in collaboration with Court Date (if you haven’t seen their new digital clubhouse you have to check it out.) We’ve published some truly wonderful work from writers like Sarah Miller, Nathan Taylor Pemberton and more. 

Also in January, we sold out Notes, the first book collaboration between Dirt and Night Gallery. A tribute to the humble iPhone note, the collection featured 100 phone notes from 100 creative contributors (if you want to sponsor a sequel, you know where to find me!) 

Last summer, I realized that Dirt should have a newsletter dedicated to books and book culture that could also serve as our home for fiction but I wasn’t sure how we were going to finance it—and then I connected with Chantelle. They were the perfect launch partner for Blank and Greta Rainbow has been the ideal contributing writer. I am happy to say that Greta is continuing on with us and will be writing more excellent pieces like her series on where the next literary movement will come from. 

In May, we teamed up with Simple Magic on a series of stories about skateboarding which culminated in Dirt’s second sold-out perfume collab in two years. We worked with Pearfat on Nosegrab, a scent inspired by skating. With top notes of curbside violets, middle notes of tobacco and upper lip sweat, and bottom notes of paraffin wax and hot metal, it’s no surprise the fragheads needed to get their sweet-smelling paws on it. 

Less sweet, but no less charming, is Ick—our newish Instagram magazine for creative complaining. If you like hot takes but can’t watch another video of the subway guy, this account is for you. We’ve also raised the stakes by cold-calling friends of Dirt and asking them their Icks on the spot. Our episode with Geoff Rickly has been viewed over 13,000 times.

So what does the rest of the year look like? Well, I have been thinking a lot about the sheer volume of what we produce and whether there are areas of the Dirt business where less might be more. I want the dirtyverse to feel like an ongoing conversation that builds on itself. Where a look at NEON’s business can call back to a deep examination of A24, an essay on working at Balthazar can echo the themes in Bad Waitress, and a paywalled report on Middle America’s indie perfume boom can run alongside a Prune dispatch on the rise of bergamot. Keep scrolling for more of my favorite stories we’ve published this year. 

There’s a lot of timely content threatening to crowd out the longform stuff that has always made Dirt great. In May we launched Clone, a tech and culture news aggregator co-curated with Boys Club. It updates hourly. I’ve also gotten more involved with booking Boys Club’s weekly Twitter livestream in addition to Tasteland, my weekly podcast with Francis Zierer.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to try a monthly flagship Dirt newsletter issue through the rest of the year. You’ll receive shorter stuff in between—highlights from Tasteland, special projects like The Nightlife Review, and our ever-popular Dirt prompts—but hopefully everything will be just a little easier to pay attention to. Our first monthly issue, sponsored by Every, will be published in September. October’s issue will be in collaboration with Are.na. You’ll still be getting the same amount of Dirt content, just in a more manageable package. 

We’ll also be running the winning essays from The Way We Work contest with Lux and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. (We received nearly 200 submissions!) I can’t wait to share them with you. 

A final thought: Dirt probably shouldn’t exist. From a business perspective, we are a total anomaly. Our success was in no way a foregone conclusion nor has it come easily. But it’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever been a part of. 

Will there be more surprises in 2025? Yes! But for now I will leave you with our September playlist. 

Thank you for everything, 
Daisy 

TOP DIRTYVERSE PICKS

• The f*g h*g grows up by Grace Byron (Dirt)

• Unsportsmanlike conduct by Marlowe Granados (STRUNG) 

• Treatlerites by Walden Green (Dirt)

• Marketing difficulty by Greta Rainbow (Blank)

• Barnes & Noble’s indie rebrand by Paula Mejía (Dirt)

• The Djokovicverse by Isaac Engelberg (STRUNG)

• An ode to the weird fruit bowl by Tyler Watamanuk (Prune)

• Diary of a fragrance diplomat by Em Seely-Katz (Dirt)

• In defense of the underhand serve by Adi Gandhi (STRUNG)

• Bring back high-design cookbooks by Tyler Watamanuk (Prune)

• Möbius strip by Chelsea Hodson and Catherine Lacey (Blank)