The envelope arrived on a Tuesday. It came home in your backpack inside a flyer that was printed in that specific shade of orange that only existed in school communications — a color that had no name but meant something is happening this week and it involves your parents' money. The 8yer said the Scholastic Book Fair was coming. The envelope, if you were lucky, had some cash in it and a note from your mom that said something like don't spend it all in one place, which was advice that made absolutely no sense given that there was only one place.
The Book Fair arrived on a Wednesday and turned the library into something it had never been before and would never be again for the rest of the year: a store. Not a real store. Something better. The folding tables appeared overnight like a stage being set. The spinning rack of bookmarks. The posters rolled into tubes. The erasers shaped like animals. The pencils with the holographic finish. And in the center of all of it, arranged with a seriousness that only elementary school could produce, the books.
You had been waiting for this since the last one. You had approximately twelve dollars and twenty-five minutes and the weight of every choice you had ever made in your small life pressing down on you at once.
The Book Fair was the first time anyone treated you like a person who got to decide something that mattered. You were eight years old and you had money and you were standing in a library and the whole thing was yours.
I remember standing in front of the display for what felt like a very long time. There was an Animorphs book I was fairly certain I had already read but wasn't a hundred percent sure about, and the uncertainty felt like a philosophical problem I wasn't equipped to solve. There was a poster of a cat hanging from a branch that said Hang in there — a poster so ubiquitous it had ceased to mean anything and yet I genuinely considered it for several minutes. There was a book about sharks that I didn't especially want but felt I should want because it was educational and I was at a fair inside a library and some part of me felt the occasion required gravity.
What I actually wanted, and what I suspect most of us actually wanted, was not any specific book. What I wanted was the experience of wanting things in a place that was designed for wanting them. The Book Fair was a controlled environment of desire. Everything was priced so that a kid with seven dollars could participate meaningfully. Everything was arranged so that looking at it felt like browsing, not
begging. The erasers were not stupid. The bookmarks were not beneath you. Every object in that room had been placed there by someone who understood that children needed a place to practice being people with preferences and budgets and the sovereignty to act on both.
I bought the Animorphs book. It was one I had read before. I knew this approximately four minutes after I got home. I did not regret it.
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Here is what I have been thinking about lately, which is why I am writing this as the first letter I send you from The Millennial.
The Scholastic Book Fair was one of the first places most of us experienced the feeling of this was made for me. Not for adults who would tolerate us. Not for a general audience that happened to include us. For us specifically — our scale, our budget, our specific combination of seriousness and silliness, our hunger for stories and our equal hunger for pencils with holographic finishes. Somebody
looked at who we were and designed something around it, and we walked in and felt it immediately even if we couldn't have articulated what we were feeling.
That is what I am trying to build here.
The Millennial exists because there is no platform that has ever looked at our generation — really looked, at the specific texture of what it was to grow up when we did — and built something worthy of it. Not the memes. Not the listicles. Not the brands that say "remember Dunkaroos?" and call it understanding. I mean something that actually goes into the library and rearranges the furniture and puts out the spinner rack and says: this week, this place is for you.
Every week in this newsletter I am going to try to do what the Book Fair did. I am going to try to make something that fits the exact shape of what you actually are — not what the algorithm thinks you are, not what a brand brief says you are, but what you actually know yourself to be. The person who still thinks about that orange envelope. The person who spent twenty minutes on a decision worth eight dollars and has never fully stopped making decisions that way. The person who bought the book they'd already read and would do it again.
That person deserves a platform that gets them. I am going to spend however long it takes building it.
Welcome to The Millennial. I am glad you are here.
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THIS WEEK’S REFLECTION
What did you buy at the Scholastic Book Fair — and why do you still think about it?
Reply to this email or comment below. Every response gets read. The best ones run in Saturday's issue
