I'm in this week's New Yorker magazine!

My story on floating architecture, plus Filterworld updates.

Hello, I’m Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Filterworld. This is my personal newsletter, where I share my columns and publish original essays. Subscribe here.

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I have a Profile piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine! It’s the April 1 issue, the one on stands now or in your mailbox this week, with a cute dog on the cover. The print headline is “Water World”; in it, I explore the career of the Dutch architect Koen Olthuis, who has spent the past two decades designing modern buildings that float on water. His firm Waterstudio is building floating apartment towers, theaters, and entire urban neighborhoods. Here is the lovely story spread, with photography by Giulio Di Sturco.

It’s really fun to see the piece listed on the newsstand cover and the table of contents as well:

You can read it online or pick up a print copy (or return to it in your New Yorker backlog in a few months, I don’t mind). I traveled to the Netherlands and France to hang out with Koen and experience Waterstudio’s buildings, plus sleep in an underwater concrete box. The end result is a blend of reportage and thinking about architecture today: how we’re adapting to climate change, what the post-starchitect era looks like, and what it means for someone to maintain such a singular creative pursuit.

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Filterworld update

My book Filterworld is now more than two months old! I’m really happy with the responses I’ve received to it and happy to keep seeing it in bookstore displays. I’d still love to hear what any of you newsletter readers thought of it and if you spot it out in the wild. I recapped a bunch of podcast appearances and reviews in a previous newsletter, but here are a few of the latest:

Decoder: I’m a big fan of Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast. As the editor-in-chief of The Verge, he runs a thriving website and experiences the effects of online distribution firsthand. This was a great conversation about how we make culture online, the media industry, and what algorithmic flattening entails.

People vs. Algorithms: I talked with Brian Morrissey and his media-industry colleagues about how we struggle to make ourselves heard as journalists through algorithmic feeds. (PS sign up for Brian’s The Rebooting newsletter for smart and unsentimental media commentary.)

Offline with Jon Favreau: On this Crooked Media podcast, Jon and I talked a lot about how it feels to be on the internet right now (mostly bad).

Factually: I talked to the comedian Adam Conover about how hard it is for creators to make sustainable livings in the era of Filterworld.

On the Media: Micah Loewinger and I talked about personal taste and the frictionlessness of streaming for a segment on the great radio show.

Decoder Ring: This was a really fun production with Willa Paskin in which we chatted IRL in a generic Manhattan coffee shop to figure out why so many cafes look the same.

Soon I plan to write some follow-up pieces on the themes of the book for this newsletter, like an instructional guide for doing an algorithm cleanse. Let me know if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see!

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One Thing newsletter

Most of the casual writing I’ve been doing lately has been for my other newsletter project, One Thing. It’s an ongoing discussion of taste and authenticity, one object or idea at a time, with posts every Tuesday and Thursday. Here are a few of my recent contributions:

Why did we stop saying “hipster”? (really liked this one)

Hype olive-oil chips

The internet’s distribution problem

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Jess’s new job

My wife Jess Bidgood has a new job! And it’s a newsletter. Pretty much like this one but way, way more important. She’ll be writing the New York Times’s On Politics newsletter. I’m super proud of her for taking it on and if you know Jess you know it’ll be an insightful, accessible guide to the craziness of this election. Sign up here! (You don’t need to be a NYT subscriber.)

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Thank you for following along, as always this newsletter is my favorite place to put thoughts. It’s the single channel I can rely on to reach people who are actually interested in what I do and what I’m thinking about rather than just wanting to fight online. Newsletters are context-creating in the vacuum of the internet, and context is good.