For all the obscure magazine and book lovers out there: this one's for you.

I was scrolling through Instagram a few weeks ago and found this gorgeously designed magazine devoted to cat culture called Catnip that caught my eye. As an unabashed cat lover, I of course had to dig into what this magazine was all about, and then realized Catnip was part of a larger offering of aesthetically-pleasing niche magazines from a Portland, Oregon-based indie publisher called Broccoli. The magazines feel more like rare art collectibles than periodicals — available only in print, in limited quantities. Many issues have a waitlist of readers hoping to scoop a copy (me included).

I caught up with Anja Charbonneau, Broccoli's founder and former creative director of Kinfolk, about her growing all-women print empire and her fantastic recommendations for discovering idiosyncratic books and magazines from around the world (my personal kryptonite).

Then, I've got an update on this week's cuts at Nat Geo and a new newsletter partnership with Allure's former editor-in-chief — plus Olandria threatens to sue Deuxmoi in today's Seen and Heard, and our Thursday roundup of new media jobs that are fresh off the press.

xoxo,

Stephanie

(Also, here's my little fur boy, Archie — while we're on the subject.)

As a growing chorus of print outlets scramble to make the pivot to digital, Broccoli only wants to double down on making good print magazines. 

The Portland-based publisher offers neither digital subscriptions nor online versions of its magazines, instead keeping its expansive range of stories about cat culture, mushrooms, the solar system and music exclusively in print. It's part of Broccoli's charm — an ethereal escape into whimsical worlds that connect to culture in unexpected ways.

The lack of a digital footprint is also why there's a bit of a FOMO factor to Broccoli. Once a magazine is gone, it's incredibly hard to find in the wild. Another reason they're so popular: Anja Charbonneau's incredible visual direction elevates the magazines into timeless keepsakes that are meant to be displayed as artworks in their own right.

Broccoli started as a single magazine of the same name, focused on cannabis lifestyle culture. After weed was legalized in Portland in 2015, Anja was one of the smart ones who saw an opportunity to cater to this exploding interest. Two years later, she left her job as creative director of Kinfolk to launch Broccoli, run entirely by an all-women team. I talked with Anja about some of the unique titles in Broccoli's collection, the evolution of cannabis coverage in mainstream media, and her A-tier podcast, book and magazine recommendations for this week's Maxed Out.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What's one fun fact you've learned about weed or the cannabis community that sticks out to you?

When we started to make Broccoli conceptually, I wanted to use the weirdest art direction — type layered over other things, barely readable, more art-for-art's-sake. But as I started speaking to people and hearing their stories, the way the plant had touched their lives or influenced them or people around them, I thought, okay, this is actually something that needs to be taken much more seriously, and looked at through a lens of art but accessible. 

You could use the concept of beginner's mind — you have to speak to people in a way that welcomes them in, rather than feeling like they look at it and don't understand. It became very clear instantly that there is no one type of person who might be interested in cannabis. It's quite broad, and the kindest and friendliest thing we could do as editors would be to welcome people in. That ethos has translated to every other project we do. We never try to be the experts, even when we are speaking with knowledge — we always try to keep the door open, whether that's how we're speaking to the reader through the writing, or how we find new collaborators. We have big pitch calls and submission calls, and we reply to everybody. That open-door policy is very important to how we work.

I hope to find one of those Broccoli issues in the wild. Why did you decide to expand Broccoli into a full publishing company?

It's half personal and half practical. On the personal side, I like to make new things and think about new ideas. In addition to ‘Mushroom People’ and ‘Catnip,’ we also have a music and sound magazine called ‘Heartbeat’ that came out last year. We're working on a magazine right now called ‘Sun & Moon,’ a celestial-themed magazine.

On the practical side: marketing budgets for cannabis companies would move from state to state as the industry rolled out. We relied a lot on that advertising for production costs, and once a market stabilized, investors would chase new states and the budgets would dry up. General media also stopped covering cannabis the way it once did — everyone still working in the space is kind of like, hello, is anyone still out there? It was getting harder to fund the magazine, so we stopped at issue 20. But stopping felt amazing too. Magazines are a time capsule and that issue captures a moment in this very long timeline of cannabis culture.

What's next for Broccoli as a publishing company? And is everything print, or is any of it digital?

Everything we make is print only — we don't put any stories online. I'm an avid social media user, as I must be in this day and age, to get the word out about the magazine. Sometimes it still works — it's great to know you just randomly came across us on Instagram. As a publishing business, it's really hard to give something away digitally, or even charge for it digitally, and also charge for it in print — you kind of have to choose. It's very difficult, especially right now, when so many writers are turning to Substack and people have more subscriptions than ever. We really like to keep everything in print, and we don't do subscriptions either, because our releases are so staggered it just wouldn't make sense with our calendar. But print for print is all we do.

It’s great to see more print-only magazines come up in the last couple of years, both from independent and legacy publishers. I think with this pivot to digital, people are craving something tangible that they can own and keep as a sort of time capsule. 

Absolutely. We're pretty much interested in making anything made out of paper — that's kind of my restriction. I'm not a big merch girl, I won't be making T-shirts, unfortunately. But I'm really curious about getting into the stationery world — everyone on our team is like, we could really do some damage in a stationery shop, so I'd like to see how we could translate some of what we're making into that form factor. We also have a book we're working on that's our first novel — our first piece of big fiction. It's mostly in the public domain, but we can only sell it in America once it comes out — it's an old fairy tale novel called ‘Lud-in-the-Mist’ by Hope Mirrlees. We collaborate a lot with an artist named Bethany van Rijswijk, and it's her favorite book, so we tracked down the rights, and we have a really beautiful edition coming out probably next spring.

We have so much to work with, and so many amazing artists we collaborate with, that it would be really easy for us to just offer a licensing fee and turn something into something else. I love when we can make money available to artists with that kind of ease.

Well, I know most of your time is spent in the print world, but I’d love to hear your recommendations on what’s good to watch, read and listen to online. First, in the spirit of Maxed Out, we like to ask people how much screen time they’re racking up on their phones. What’s yours? 

My reports are usually in the three-to-four-hour screen time range, which I'd love to see lower. I don't know how it ends up being that long. I see people's numbers that are much bigger, so I guess I'm doing okay. But I do spend a lot of time — I'm a TikTok scroller, can't lie, it's addicting. 

Any corners of the internet — podcasts, newsletters, books — you want to shout out?

I've been experimenting with being a YouTube viewer lately. I'd never really bothered watching people's vlogs before, but the pacing is nice, a nice slowdown. I really enjoy Madeline Woo — she's a ballerina in San Francisco, and it's fun to see what she's making; she's developing a fashion line of her own. There's also an illustrator — Jana Polak — who lives in Berlin, and her vibe is just so sweet and lovely. She shares her illustration work and her life in Berlin, and does these pop-up portrait booth things at farmers-type markets that are really fun. I find her videos very peaceful — I think that's the common thing people look for, calming vibes, a break. I'll watch them when I'm making lunch.

An author I can shout out, that I actually found through someone's YouTube — I've been reading novels by Magda Szabó, a Hungarian writer. Are you familiar with her work?

I’m not! What books should I read by her? 

The New York Review of Books has been publishing a lot of her work. The first book I read was ‘The Door,’ but the second one, ‘Abigail,’ I really loved — it's about a young girl being sent to a boarding school in wartime Hungary, and the universe the girls at the school have created, and being the newcomer learning all the systems, being accepted, being bullied — how do you fit in, do you want to fit in. It taught me more probably about wartime Europe than anything else I've ever encountered, because it's in the background but shaping the context of the whole story. I also just love a boarding school story. There's a secret character in the book, and it was fun because my other two editors have read it too — we're always asking each other, how soon did you know who it was?

Ok, I’ll need to add those to my list. Those books are also great to reread, I love going back and seeing what easter eggs I missed the first time. 

Totally. Also, on my drive yesterday, I spent three or four hours listening to ‘Articles of Interest’ — such a great fashion and clothing podcast. I started on her series about gear and the outdoor industry, and once again I learned more about the history of the military than I've ever learned in my life, because it all comes from the military. I love the way you can learn things you weren't expecting to learn, especially through the lens of clothing and how and why we wear things and what it says about us.

In the realm of what we were talking about with our first novel, there's a new publisher Mandylion releasing public domain novels that are quirky and strange. I'm enjoying the way they're putting out releases; they have a Substack as well, and they just have a fun vibe, really interesting cover design. Check that out too.

I should mention one magazine thing — a really great place to start with magazines is Stack, a monthly magazine subscription service based in the UK. Every month they send you a different independent magazine, so it's a cool way to get exposed to different things without having to know which one to pick. A lot of people don't know where to find magazines. Also based in the UK, MagCulture is a great website, podcast, platform and shop. Even for those of us far away — I'm pretty far on the West Coast — it's the perfect resource for learning what people are doing. 

I feel spoiled being in New York and living next to shops like Casa Magazine. I’ve thought about making a Substack at one point to cover all the indie mags I find out in the wild for people who don’t have easy access to magazines in that way.  

There's also a shop in the desert called Hi Desert Times; there are probably fewer than ten magazine-focused stores in the entire country, and they carry our stuff and have a Substack where they talk about what's new. We just got one in Portland recently too, called Chess Club — I think they just hit their two-year anniversary, with hundreds of magazines from all over the world. I'm so grateful to be able to go look at that. We need more of these out in the wild.

What we’re seeing and hearing around the industry.

More on Nat Geo's layoffs. For the OG readers of this newsletter, you know that I spent a few years working for National Geographic's television group, so I had a lot of thoughts in Tuesday's paid newsletter about the fallout from this week's layoffs. One particularly unfortunate thing I discovered after writing that breakdown was that, based on Disney's recent job postings, it appears the company is hiring for roles in some of the same departments that were affected by this week's layoffs, often at lower titles and salaries.

For example, the production team was among the groups hit hardest by the layoffs, including several executive producers. Within days, Disney's careers page listed several production openings at junior- to mid-level titles. There were also director- and VP-level departures in the TV research and social media departments, and new openings have since appeared on Disney's careers page for those departments as well. I reached out to Disney and National Geographic for comment and did not receive a response by publishing time. But if they respond after I send this newsletter out, I'll make sure to update you all here.

Allure’s former editor-in-chief returns for a new Substack project. Look, I hate anything that gives off a whiff of branded content as much as the next person, but I’m intrigued by this new collab Allure’s former editor-in-chief Michelle Lee has going on with DRMTLGY. The skin care company launched a Substack this week called The Art of Formulation where a rotation of beauty editors will do deep-dive interviews with experts about the beauty industry, with Michelle helming the first wave of stories. Her first piece for the newsletter is an essay where she addresses the growing number of beauty magazines shuttering and the fractured relationship between beauty creators and publishers. I thought this point she made was right on target:

If anything, it’s great to see her back doing beauty coverage again. I didn’t have the privilege of getting to meet her during my Condé days as she was on her way out to Netflix by the time I started there (back when they were scooping up Condé folks left and right to beef up their editorial team). I’ll be keeping tabs on this new project of hers.

And finally, a little sip of mindless tea. Olandria called out Deuxmoi on Instagram today after the outlet posted a rumor that the ‘Love Island’ star has been hooking up with Travis Scott.

Deuxmoi says Olandria blocked their Instagram account after dropping the legal threat in the chat. And rightfully so.