The Devil Wears Prada: On the Future and Pompeii

On the death of print media, the sequel 20 years in the making, and spilling permanent ink on a rented floor.

I watched the new Devil Wears Prada sequel in New York last night, and it sent me into somewhat of a spiral of existential doom.

The film perfectly captures the precise, terrifying moment an entire industry realises it’s no longer the main character. There is a scene where the characters are forced to reckon with the shifting, digital landscape of modern media. One of them compares the future to the lava of Pompeii, “rushing at us while we just have to let it take what it wants to take.” It is a bleak sentiment, punctuated by the absolute, quiet certainty that one day, it is going to come and smother us all.

Naturally, my brain latched onto this like a barnacle.

I live in Manhattan in an apartment that technically qualifies as a pre-war cupboard, which makes any minor panic feel intensely claustrophobic. I sat at my drafting table this morning, staring at a blank piece of heavy Bristol board. I was surrounded by Hunt 101 nibs and tiny glass bottles of black ink. I was trying to force myself to draw a cartoon. Getting started on anything requires fighting through a thick fog of neurological static..

So, when I hear a fictional character admit that the legacy magazine publisher Elias Clark (Condé Nast) is just the last piece of wood floating next to the Titanic, my immediate internal response is to throw my Blackwing pencils out the window, crawl under the drafting table, and go back to sleep (where Morris is currently curled up, farting loudly.)

My first newspaper job was when I was 19, back in my hometown of Perth. (This is the sister city, Fremantle.)

I have been working in this industry for more than twenty years. My very first media job was at a local newspaper in Western Australia, breathing in the smell of the offset presses and learning the brutal, beautiful rhythm of daily deadlines. I am a newspaper man through and through; I practically have Higgins ink in my veins. (Yes, I’m a fucking dinosaur.)

I deeply love the traditions of physical print media. I mourn for the era when a reader’s attention wasn’t violently divided a million different ways- fractured by algorithms, endless scrolling, notification badges, and whatever new app Silicon Valley insists we need to survive. I miss the quiet dignity of someone just sitting in a chair, holding a magazine, and looking at one thing at a time.

Now? In the movie, they drop the bomb that someone sold all of Elias Clark, including Runway, to someone else anyway. The giant magazines are dead. The advertisers have the steering wheel. The algorithm is the new Editor-in-Chief. We’re all just scrambling for scraps of attention on the internet.

But there is a friction here, a quiet hypocrisy I try not to look directly at.

I guess I’m mourning the death of print while actively typing this out for a digital newsletter that will be beamed directly into your glowing pocket screen. I am blaming the collapse of the media industry for my blank page, when the truth is much closer to home. It is immensely easier to blame the metaphorical lava of Pompeii than it is to admit I cannot wrangle my own brain into focusing on a single, analogue task for more than twelve minutes without feeling like my skin is vibrating.

In the film, Miranda notes that people should know there is a cost to this life. But she follows it up with a terrifyingly relatable admission. She says, “But boy, I love working. I really do, don’t you?”

That is the trap.

We love the work. The hustle. The doing of the thing. We love the physical scratch of the steel nib on the paper, even when the world seems entirely uninterested in how the sausage is made.

I was sitting there, trying to reconcile the (long-told) ‘death of print’ with my own inability to focus. Morris waddled out of the room, then back in, climbed on my armchair, looked me dead in the eye, and produced a sound from his lower intestine that sounded exactly like a tuba filled with hot soup.

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The smell hit the air just as my phone violently buzzed on the desk, vibrating its way toward the edge. I lunged to catch the phone, knocking my elbow directly into the open bottle of ink. It tipped perfectly, in excruciating slow motion, launching a glorious arc of permanent, carbon-black fluid toward the newly mopped, jagged wood floor.

It was a beautiful mess. And honestly, it is the perfect metaphor for navigating a creative life right now. You try to hold onto the old ways, you try to protect the institutions, but eventually, a dog passes wind, you panic, and everything gets permanently stained anyway.

The truth is, the print world might be sinking like the Titanic, but complaining about the water temperature does not keep you afloat. We have to learn to swim in the digital ocean, even if it feels completely unnatural. I might struggle to sit down and do the work every day. My brain might constantly beg for a distraction, pleading for anything other than the quiet, monastic discipline of drawing.

But I still love the feeling of working on a piece. Of finishing a piece. I still love the ink. (I just have to figure out how to stop spilling it.)

Thank you to everyone reading this on a screen right now. If you enjoyed reading about my slow descent into analogue madness, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your subscription directly funds my rent, my art supplies, and the industrial-strength cleaning supplies I now desperately need.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

More pics of my old newspaper office…