MEDIA DIET
By:
March 3, 2026
A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.
Lucy has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2009. Her first post was on the topic of DASHIELL HAMMETT. Her most recent contributions to this publication include: WOMAN COME | PSYCHOTIC REACTION | HOME GUARD MANUAL OF CAMOUFLAGE.
Kingston (NY)…
HILOBROW: What forms of media do you “take in” the most regularly/frequently, during a typical day or week?
LUCY SANTE: I begin every day by reading one or more pieces in the NYRB, the LRB, the New Yorker, or Harper’s. I read the NYT online, although I dislike reading online and read less than half of what I used to when I got it on paper. I think my internet use has declined in recent years: I visit Instagram, do some light shopping, primarily use it to fact-check what I’m writing. (I can mistily remember following dozens of blogs once.) I play music while making dinner or driving, and in the evening I watch a movie or two, often documentaries. Before going to sleep I read the current book.
HILOBROW: How do you use social media, these days?
LUCY SANTE: I’ve become emotionally dependent on Instagram. I’m obsessed with pictures, and it’s a way to see and share them, but more importantly it keeps me in touch with friends scattered across the globe. And I’ve made some new friends through the app, and am constantly on the lookout for more kin. My relationship with it is close to how your grandmother uses FishBox, but that embarrasses me less than the fact that it is FishBox and I’m a corporate tool.
HILOBROW: What music did you love as a teenager? Do you still listen to it today?
LUCY SANTE: I’ve remained faithful to my teenage self; nothing I do would surprise that kid. Pretty much everything I listen to would make sense to her, including reggae, which I didn’t discover until I was 19, and post-punk, which didn’t exist until I was 24. But back then it was folk — the very first popular music I stumbled on, when I was 9 — British Invasion, folk-rock, psychedelia, as well as jazz and blues, which I was then systematically learning about from the small but choice collection at my local public library. I’ve always tended to listen to music in phases. Right now I’m on an early-’60s NYC jazz kick; last month it was folk-rock, British variety. My teenage self would approve.
HILOBROW: What’s the best movie you’ve seen recently?
LUCY SANTE: I saw the “Lovers Rock” episode of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series when it first aired about five years ago, but I’ve watched it many times since — I’ve lost count. I watch it when I’m in need of uplift, or when I already feel uplifted and want a party. Because that’s what it is: a party, from cutting up the chickens and moving in the sound system to the lovers drifting home together after daybreak. It uses its predetermined arc in spectacular ways, making a spatiotemporal frieze that suggests Bruegel’s paintings, Max Ophuls’s La Ronde, the painting by Ernie Barnes on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You. There are dozens of stories threaded through, following a whole cast as they make their separate but intersecting ways through the evening. New patterns appear with every rewatch. The music has its own narrative line. The men engage in violent stomping and thrashing when their dubwise numbers come on; the women reply with their sublime singalong to Janet Kay’s “Silly Games.” Romance, heartbreak, betrayal, fury, joy, release, ecstasy, menace, racism are all included. It is perfect.
HILOBROW: What are your reading habits?
LUCY SANTE: Right now I’m partway through a big, research-intensive book that has required (and keeps requiring) me to read dozens and dozens of books — most of them “vertically” — as well as magazines, newspapers, and so on. That means that I’ve been crawling through my bedside reading, Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, at about three pages a night before conking out. I feel guilty, accountable to Pynchon, whose V. I excitedly tore through when I was 15. When I’m not engaged in major research-reading, I read erratically and for all sorts of reasons. I don’t read a lot of fiction, generally, but I can go on a tear, such as when I find a voice that particularly speaks to me (Patrick Modiano, for example), or when I go on one of my periodic Simenon bursts (I’ll never get through the whole list), or now and then when a book somehow finds me and demands to be read, so that I’m reading around the clock (it’s been a while). Anyway, I’m reading all the time, every kind of printed matter. I often use it to time-travel. It’s what old people do, but it’s also what I’ve always done.
MEDIA DIET series: MATTHEW BATTLES | DEB CHACHRA | ADRIENNE CREW | HOLLY INTERLANDI | CAROLYN KELLOGG | MARK KINGWELL | ADAM McGOVERN | CHARLIE MITCHELL | TOM NEALON | PEGGY NELSON | ANNIE NOCENTI | GARY PANTER | LYNN PERIL | JONATHAN PINCHERA | HEATHER QUINLAN | NICHOLAS ROMBES | CARLO ROTELLA | LUCY SANTE | SETH | MIKE WATT | JUDITH ZISSMAN | & more to come! Visit the SERIES INDEX.