It seems funny now, but on July 20, 2019, we were so excited—and nervous—about the first issue of Air Mail that a group of us gathered at the office on West Ninth Street at five a.m. to watch the first batch of Saturday e-mails go out, holding our breath like NASA engineers launching the maiden voyage of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1981. Only chief technology officer John Tornow, who pressed Send from mission control, was serenely confident.
Now we all are. Six years later, Air Mail has survived inflation, recession, a pandemic, one and a quarter Trump presidencies, the January 6 insurrection, foreign wars, coups (abroad and at home), wildfires, Kardashians, ICE raids, and many other disasters. And it has thrived, producing 329 Saturday editions; umpteen daily newsletters and broadsheets; as well as our spirited beauty vertical, Look; an e-commerce shopping site; two newsstands; a brick-and-mortar shop on Hudson Street; our culture and travel vertical, Arts Intel; a knock-their-socks-off black-tie party at Cannes in 2023; and, most recently, a joyous dinner to celebrate the winners of our first annual Tom Wolfe literary prizes. All that, and we also brought into the world two Air Mail babies (with medical help).
Air Mail has grown, but it hasn’t changed. The panache, humor, and elegance that defined the earliest prototypes remain as distinctive now as the day we started. Our friend Maureen Dowd described it in The New York Times as “a weekly confection that hits your inbox Saturday mornings like something wrapped in cashmere.”
Some of the world’s finest writers, artists, designers, and photographers are eager and proud to be showcased in what we like to think of as our pages. Air Mail has published groundbreaking investigations into public figures and institutions, shedding new light on everything from the downfalls of Armie Hammer and Jared Leto to an alarming, and mysterious, cancer cluster at Roanoke College, in Virginia.
Air Mail’s success is owed to our discerning readers and our advertisers, who are the leading lights of luxury and good taste. And, of course, the Air Mail staff, veterans and rookies who are extraordinarily talented, creative, and passionately dedicated—to excellence and to each other.
Nothing stays the same forever, and Air Mail will soon be part of the Puck digital-news portfolio. The good news is that the editors and columnists there are not strangers; Puck is a sister publication of sorts, nurtured by some of the same investors and created by several alumni of Vanity Fair, including the founder, Jon Kelly, and William D. Cohan, who writes for AIR MAIL and Puck. Many colleagues will stay on, led by the brilliant Julia Vitale, the next editor of Air Mail.
When we started, we pledged that Air Mail would “focus on subjects both foreign and domestic and regularly cover politics and the environment, art and literature, film and television, food, design, architecture, theater, society, fashion, and high-end crime. This coverage will include superb writing by some of the world’s finest journalists, and they will treat these subjects with sophistication, authority, and wit.”
That’s the formula for continued success in the future. We thank our investors, sponsors, readers, contributors, and colleagues for everything they’ve done to make Air Mail such a delight to read and a special place to work, and we look forward to seeing what comes next. Stick around.
Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley are the Co-Editors of AIR MAIL
