April 16, 2026

In the late 1980s, Duke professor Janice Radway embedded herself in the editorial offices of Book of the Month Club, which turns 100 years old today, in the hopes of writing a best-selling book about people reading best-selling books. But she quickly discovered no one in the office actually knew what members read — just what they bought. This led her to posit a unified theory of BOMC book selection: "It was the very intensity of the particular desires these books cultivated that prevented so many of us from seeing that the value of knowledge and expertise they celebrated was dependent in the end on a prior act of exclusion." Put simply, BOMC chose books that reinforced the middle-class's chintz-upholstered self-satisfaction[1].

That strategy worked right up until the middle class cracked up in the nineties. Bridges of Madison County readers went one way. Underworld readers went another. The BOMC, one of a few remaining totems of mid-century middlebrow, went to shit.


It's back now, resurrected and growing under the leadership of a former VP in the Lehman Bros PE practice. But there's no book of the month. Rather than making a single selection, BOMC now selects 5–7 books running the gamut from work Radway would surely dismiss (How to Write a Love Story by Catherine Walsh) to... not that (Kin by Tayari Jones). BOMC is now two clubs masquerading as one. And though the second is more compelling, it's also under siege by insurgent clubs run by seraphinous celebs like Dua Lipa, who recommended Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist in March, and Kaia Gerber, who recommended Giada Scodellaro's Ruins, Child. The stated thesis for Gerber’s club, Library Science, is that "we learn the most from stories that aren't our own." That "we" seems narrowly defined, which is what makes a club a club. Some people feel good about feeling bad. They buy books accordingly. Hell, they might even read them.

The future of Denver's food scene is Substack[2]. The Colorado sate legislature is poised to pass HB26-1033 — the Tamale Act — legalizing the sale of refrigerated, meat-containing food from home kitchens and killing the $10,000 revenue cap that previously forced tamale ladies and buttercream moms to choose between a hobby and a misdemeanor. The legislation, supported by an unlikely coalition of Mountain West libertarian MAHA types and immigrant advocates who use the word "foodways" in casual conversation, is not the first of its kind — the folks in Wyoming don't take kindly to the FDA's 1993 Food Code — but it's the first to land in a self-proclaimed food town (with a two-star restaurant and three Sweetgreens). The result could look a lot like the enthusiastic unbundling we saw in media when printing and payment technologies allowed writers to go direct to their audience. In this particular formulation, Cholula – based on Jose Cuervo’s cook’s hot sauce recipe and now operate by the company that makes French's (weak-ass) Mustard is Newsweek. The abuela in Westwood with a family recipe, a stockpot, and some supportive neighbors is Heather Cox Richardson. The foodie in town for a meeting at Palantir HQ is the sub.

It’s a compelling model and one that could massively expand the market for artisanal food, but whether or not it could work in New York, LA, or Miami is anyone’s guess. Coastal states have fewer libertarians, way fewer ranchers, and restaurant lobbies that make the Colorado Restaurant Association look like two niños in an abrigo. The only path is consumer pressure from the same authenticity-starved progressives that supported food safety legislation in the first place[3]. The question is whether they want authentic food badly enough to accept the risk of getting authentically sick to their stomachs.

In 2022, former Casper mattress marketer Andrew Benin with a squeeze bottle and a playbook for Instagram influencer-led marketing launched an olive oil company. The first week, he brought in half a mil. By year two, the company was doing that twice a week. Graza – the name is a semi-portmanteau of a Spanish word and an Italian noise – is now valued at $240 million.


Over the last few years, the cost of olive oil has been driven up by drought in the Mediterranean, tariffs, and by Benin, who introduced a new pricing strategy to one of the world's oldest markets: Charge more for a product that demonstrates discernment without requiring much. But don’t get angry. He did gnocchi-heads a favor.


To understand why putting a $19.99 bottle of Graza next to all those $9 bottles of Bertolli worked, it's crucial to understand how little most people know about extra virgin olive oil. And not just Giada De Laurentiis fans. In 2011, journalist Tom Mueller convinced a panel of experts, including an importer and food critics, to blind-taste extra virgins. The importer called his own product disgusting. The critics reached for the Bertolli, which a U.C. Davis study the year before had found failed to meet international standards. The only reason the most notorious oil importer this side of BP can even put "extra virgin," theoretically meaning cold-pressed and devoid of solvents, on the packaging is that it has no legal meaning in the U.S.

Because it's so hard to differentiate between olive oils (and because the FDA isn’t helping), consumer choice in the space has historically boiled down to three factors.[4]

1. It was "extra virgin" (fewer than 1% of respondents knew what this meant).
2. It was not the cheapest.
3. It had nice packaging.


Thus the Graza price point and the squeezy bottles. And thus the harvest dates on those squeezy bottles. Polyphenols, the antioxidants responsible for the fresh, peppery taste of better olive oils, degrade approximately 40% per year. The "best by" dates on Bertolli bottles are based on date of bottling not harvest, which makes them literally meaningless. Benin's mote was having good design and the good sense not to behave like those imbrogliones at Bertolli.


Naturally, the market segment Graza created has expanded. California Olive Ranch has its "Chef's Bottle" ($15.49), Iliada has "The Chef's Way" ~$15), and Delallo has its erotic-sounding Castelvetrano squeeze (~$17). Those prices will likely come down — post-draught prices are already down almost a quarter — but not to Bertolli levels, which begs a question about whether or not extra virgin olive oil actually got more expensive. Arguably it didn't. Arguably, comparing Graza to Bertolli is comparing apples to nerf balls slathered in red paint. They don’t gotta the polyphenols so they don’t gotta the sapore.

Still, the shift isn’t all bad for Bertolli, which now sells a 750-ml bottle for $11, up $2 from 2023.