“Oh, wow,” I hear you say. “Great. Another snarky pop-culture newsletter with an irreverent, conversational tone. How original.”

But wait! You’re here now, and it’s unlikely that you’re here by accident. Hold on a moment – together, we can be so much more…

Why subscribe to The Chimera?

Together, we’ll dip our toes into the warm, brackish waters of collective taste. Sometimes, we’ll stay safe, splashing about in the shallows; on occasion, we’ll go deeper, until the cool surface closes over us, sound fades and warps, and we look up and can no longer tell if it’s night or day.

We’ll traverse the dusty canyons of old Hollywood; drown in the mud of a hundred circle pits; excavate the bones of playwrights of yore; stalk the midnight corridors of Chiltern Firehouse, smiling assassins with negronis in hand. We’ll squash ourselves between the nerds in Screen 4 to watch the newest Marvel dross, and lay out our blankets at Glyndebourne. We’ll throw bombs, take scalps, shoot from the hip, slay art monsters.

No subject is too obscure, and no angle too oblique, for The Chimera.

Okay, but what does that actually mean?

It means that you’ll get between two and four emails from me each month, usually on a Friday or Saturday (though no promises), about a topic drawn from books, film, TV, art or music. Occasionally it will be something about politics, sport, or the internet. It’s unlikely to be topical; the whole idea behind The Chimera is that we put thought and effort into our posts, rather than chasing trends.

So, if you’re a fan of up-to-the-minute coverage of new trends in pop and high culture then this isn’t the newsletter for you; posts are going to be thematic (“capitalism in video games”; “the psychology of Midwest emo music”; “why does Gen Z dress like they’re all characters in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?”) rather than topical (“I saw the latest Star Wars and here’s what it says about Joe Biden”). There are people out there doing slow news already – so think of this as slow culture. If you want 750 words of reaction scribbled out on the bus home from an album launch, you can go read the NME.

Most posts are free, with the occasional one paywalled for the misanthropes who really like to slog through my screeds and enjoy extra punishment.

Who are you?

My name’s Tom Barrie. I’m a freelance journalist, ex- of Vanity Fair and British GQ where I was a staff writer for several years, who has decided to jump on the Substack bandwagon far, far too late. Over my career I’ve interviewed hundreds of figures in the cultural space, from Mick Jagger to Zara Larsson to Gareth Southgate to James Patterson, and have been published in magazines ranging from Wired to The Face.

Why the chimera?

If you’re the type that lurks on Substack, you probably already know that the chimera was, of course, an ancient mythological creature who was meant to have lived in what is now Turkey. She was a subtle, many-headed beast. Deadly and beguiling, and most of all unpredictable, the chimera was described in the Iliad by Homer:

“that savage monster, the Chimaera, who was not a human being, but a goddess, for she had the head of a lion and the tail of a serpent, while her body was that of a goat, and she breathed forth flames of fire; but Bellerophon slew her, for he was guided by signs from heaven.”

Lions, snakes, goats and goddesses – lovely. More recently, though, a chimera has become a metaphorical byword for a foolish or unattainable dream. A folly. Given launching a newsletter is perhaps the most foolish and vain undertaking for a modern writer, the name felt apt.