Giving Back to Mars Review Subscribers
We want to reward our biggest fans, and create a new paradigm for media companies in the process
I’ve been pretty quiet lately. Paradoxically, that’s because there’s so much brewing in the world of Mars Review that I haven’t known what to prioritize talking about, which has led me to saying nothing at all. My bad. Also, there are some exciting plans that I’m not quite able to speak about publicly yet. But here are the announcements I can make for now, starting with the biggest. More to come.
Lil Skribblers
This is a digital art project from Mars Review Media. There are grand (some might say grandiose) ambitions behind it—the project aims at nothing less than a complete recalibration of the literary arts, along with the formation of a new paradigm for the creation of successful media companies. But I’ll have much more to say about that later, in the form of a long post here on Substack. (As you can see, the images themselves are based on writers’s faces and attributes: if you like, its an updated, meme-ified version of the time-honored tradition of the literary caricature—but, as you’ll discover, there’s much more.) But the most important thing to say about it for now is that I want to reward people who have supported the Mars Review.
Think about it this way: If you were one of the first 500 fans of Radiohead, what did you get out of that? Less than nothing, probably, because it turned you into an annoying hipster who couldn’t stop telling everyone about how you knew them before they were cool.
It really shouldn’t be that way. A project’s initial supporters play an outsize role in its success. So I want to give one of these unique pieces of art (only 2,500 exist in total) to everyone who is currently a paying subscriber to Mars Review—whether that be print only, online only, or both. And if you post a photo (to x.com, Instagram, or Substack) proving that you have all five physical issues, I’ll give you five Lil Skribblers for free. In either case, just reply to this email with an Ethereum address and I’ll list you to receive your free mint which you can access here.
How does this work? For my technical readers, Lil Skribblers are ERC721 non-fungible tokens launching on Ethereum mainnet. (My rationale: I intend for this to be a project with staying power, and I don’t fully believe in the long-term prospects of Solana. Ethereum L2s were intriguing, but I want Lil Skribblers to be accessible to more than crypto degens (much as I love crypto degens), and it doesn’t seem to me that bridging on and off mainnet is quite seamless enough. If you have strong opinions about any of these questions, and want to harangue me, feel free to reply to this email doing so.
For my non-technical readers, do not despair. This is all actually pretty easy. To receive your free Lil Skribblr (1) download Metamask as a browser extension to your browser. (2) Follow Metamask’s instructions from there (3) Reply to this email with your Ethereum address, i.e. your public key. Instructions for how to do this can be found in this three-minute video. Then, when you’re logged in to Metamask, head over to the minting page for Lil Skribblers and click ‘mint’ (which means acquire your free piece of art). The contract will recognize your Ethereum address and allow you a free mint. (4) The only tricky party is you will need to receive some Ether (ETH) beforehand, perhaps $10 worth, because you will need to pay a ‘gas fee’ to mint. I would suggest that before minting, you write to your most crypto-native friend and see if you can buy him or her a drink in exchange for sending you a little bit of ETH. If any of this seems too difficult, let me know in a reply email and I’ll try to help.
Issue 5 is online
The poet-novelist Robert Graves once said that his practice of using his career as a novelist to bankroll the writing of poetry was like breeding show dogs for a living in order to support raising a prize cat. Sometimes I feel like that too—like I create the perception that I edit a magazine for a living, so that I can actually edit a magazine. This is to say that it’s difficult these days to know how to promote the actual content within the magazine online. X.com suppresses links, and I don’t want to spam people by emailing them each article that goes up, especially when some are behind paywalls. If you have any bright ideas, feel free to let me know. In any case, Issue 5 (the Swimsuit Edition) was our best issue yet, and paid subscribers can now read the whole thing online. The issue features:
- on novels by and Adem Luz Rienspects
- on Simone Weil
- (Daniel Miller) on Byung-Chul Han
- on the storied Miami film collective, Borscht
- on Bret Easton Ellis’s latest
Veronica Gabrielle on the newly remodeled European wing at the Met Museum
Clare Casey on
’s new book on contemporary witchcraft- (Shae Sennett) on Betsey Brown, Kansas Bowling, and Phoebe Nir
- on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk
The print issue also features swimsuit models
(Bronze Age Shawty), (New Mexico), Nathalia Escobar (El Salvador), and , Keeley Stuff, and Olivia Hicolau (NYC) in swimwear designed by the talented Patricia Torvalds.For paid subscribers, we posted some images and behind the scenes videos from the swimsuit shoot here. We’ll post more in the coming months.
Media/Events/Misc.
The Mars Review was recently featured in a front page story in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest newspaper, as a central fixture in the New York literary revival. In order to read the article, you will have to (a) give over your hard-earned krona to get behind the paywall and (b) speak Swedish. Good luck.
The illustrious ladies of Temple of Friendship are hosting an event in Austin later this month with Nick Pizzolatto, the writer of True Detective. It promises to be a great time, and it should be very generative to have a discussion with an artist who’s been in the trenches making a popular mainstream show. Use code MARSREVIEW for 30% off.
I recently went on
’s podcast and discussed all and sundry, and was also on the marathon season-ending show of The Beautiful Toilet. It was a great time. I think I came in some time around eight and a half hours in. I bet you didn’t know podcasts came that long. Now you know!I’m rebooting the MRB podcast. Our next episode is with
, and we discuss the Cathars. Stay tuned.
Enough for now! Will write more soon.
Noah Kumin
Editor in Chief
Mars Review of Books