Hello, happy new year. I hope you’ve had a generous start to it, though, I’m half Iranian, so spring has long been the official reset in my mind (happy pre-emptive Nowruz, baby).

I’m in Thailand where I’m working on a story about whether Bangkok is the next big beauty capital (did you know there are over 6,600 aesthetic clinics – the second largest amount behind Korea?) and having fun and thinking lots.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a really generous interview I did with To Be Magazine and Lucy Jones, where we talked about what constitutes good cultural criticism, why everyone seems to be seeing a psychic lately, how looking down on what young people are doing ages you, my diplomat-to-journalist pipeline and an in/out for 2026.

LUCY JONES I discovered your writing via Substack, and I really like the way you frame trends through an academic but relatable lens. It feels like chatting to a friend about what’s going on in ‘the culture’. I wanted to start by asking what you’ve been thinking about or reading in the past week. What ideas are occupying your Notes app?

AMY FRANCOMBE So the piece I’m working on at the moment for Vogue Business is about psychics and how everyone seems to be seeing one. I love a little bit of manifestation and crystals and stuff like that but have never really gone into it. I had my first psychic reading this week, and it completely blew my mind. I went to somebody who had come recommended from loads of friends with the craziest stories, and it was just mental.

I feel like we are in an age of extreme self-quantification. We track our sleep, our cortisol levels, and our macros, and in many ways, we’re the healthiest we’ve ever been physically, but we just feel so terrible. I have really enjoyed researching about the spirit and why we’ve ignored it so much, and maybe why a lot of this—going to psychics, tarot readers, Etsy witches and even the TikTok tarot and stuff like that—is interesting is because so many of us are returning to spirit, which, with our obsession with optimisation, we’ve completely ignored.

LJ I’ve been thinking about that too and also reading a lot in that space. I actually just saw the other day that Margaret Atwood reads palms.

AF I love that. Honestly, it’s been quite transformative. This sounds so dramatic [laughs], and I say this about every story but I do feel like this is quite a life-changing discovery for me. I think it ties into so many of the things happening in the world right now, even with AI. I think AI is really cutting us off from our intuition and our creativity. We’re just outsourcing so much to tools. And so much of palm reading, or even psychics, is just intuition.

When I was speaking to the psychics, talking about the people that come to see them, they said their clients are 95 per cent women because women are told not to trust their bodies and their gut feelings. And a lot of the time when the psychic tells them something, they’re like, ‘I already knew that. I just needed it to be confirmed.’”

I think it’s really important to be spending more time in that deep meditative state, connecting with intuition and spirit and how you actually feel about things. Not just being as fast as possible and outsourcing it.

LJ Yeah, definitely. We’re living in the era of the essay, or the Substack version of it, and with so much commentary on topics like girlhood or AI slop, it can feel like we hit a saturation point with particular ideas. I’m interested in hearing about how you navigate that. Are there any topics that you purposely avoid, and on the flip side, what makes an idea worth writing about?

AF I’ve seen a lot of this discourse about how we all need to shut up a little bit. We live in a culture. Things aren’t happening only to you; they are happening to multiple people. We all have experiences. And so much of culture is a dialogue between multiple people. If you connect with something, if you feel like you genuinely have something to say, it’s never a pile-on.

I’m quite intentional with what I write, and it’s because I’ve been doing it for so long in so many different areas of publishing. I’ve had to do the working in-house where it’s just about SEO and chasing traffic, and I know what it is to write when you’re just chasing that dragon. And I know what it is to write when you’re trying to figure out what you think about something. You’re trying to exorcise this demon within you. There are always different modes of writing.

Sometimes writing is quite an insular thing, and I just need to do it for myself. I want to go into the research holes, and I want to make a statement of self. I do think a lot of my writing is about educating myself and finding out things that I think are interesting, or I’m conflicted with, or have tension with. Then I realise it’s almost healing, thinking about why I behave in a certain way. Then I feel a change within myself.

I hope with my writing, when I share it, it’s taking someone on that journey too, and I assume they will also be feeling these things. Within my writing, I like to look at tension and ‘feelings’, for lack of a better word. I really like to unpick why I feel horrible [laughs]. What are the different forces? And what’s a better way to then live my life?

I do think self-help is the biggest category for a reason. And I would never think it, but recently people have—when they read my work and talk to me—spoken about my work in a way that it has that ‘self-help’ element and angle to it. At first I was really upset about that, but then I was like, It’s okay to make people feel better and more understanding of themselves and their influences in your writing.

LJ I think that’s a compliment! So this is kind of a big question, but what do you think the role of cultural criticism, or the cultural critic, is, and would you put yourself in that category?

AF I remember there was this article that The Cut wrote a few years ago that said that there are basically an infinite number of emotions. You just have to name them into existence. Then they went around the office and came up with 72 different emotions. They gave it a name, and it would be for really obscure things, like the feeling when you go to bed and you’ve had a really busy week, and you know that there’s nothing planned tomorrow, so you can sleep in as long as you want… I loved that.

I’m such a feeling person. I think that at our core we are feeling creatures, and so much of what we do and are driven by and think about is based in our feelings. When it comes to a cultural critic, if you apply that, it’s kind of sensing what the collective emotion that we’re all feeling is but we haven’t given a name yet. What is this new emotion? And that, to me, is the role of the cultural critic—to give a name to an emotion.

LJ That’s a really nice way of putting it. In your piece that’s titled after the Mark Fisher quote, ‘No one is bored, and everything is boring’, you write about a stasis of culture—a lack of newness or genuinely interesting ideas. Are you optimistic or pessimistic generally about where we are in ‘the culture’?

AF … Am I optimistic or pessimistic? I don’t know. I feel really conflicted because I think there’s always this element of, “The culture was better in my days.” I remember someone once said to me that the minute you start complaining that young people are doing something lame, you’re old. When I wrote that piece, I was trying to divorce myself from this idea of complaining that everything that is made by young people is lame. The issue is that mainstream culture has become so big and bloated. And so many subcultures, where really interesting things happen and really meaningful things grow and develop and have real weight, gravity and depth, suffocate because we are so swallowed and eaten by this monoculture.

When I think about whether I am optimistic, I think that every young person and all humans want to innovate. As much as that piece was quite damning, I did want to end it with, “This is how you reclaim that space.”

I do think that so many things that are getting more popular—whether it’s IRL culture or knowledge as a status symbol—are humans trying to push back. Culture always goes to one extreme and then it goes to another extreme. We’re constantly swinging between. We have definitely swung very heavily into what that piece was discussing, but it will swing back the other way.

LJ What would you be doing if you weren’t writing?

AF I had no intention of being a journalist. I used to run a family newspaper, but that wasn’t because I wanted to be a journalist. The first job I ever remember wanting to have is a spy because I’ve always been really interested in the information that the 0.001% of society knows. I think that’s why I’m such a good researcher now. I’m always looking for information. Basically, I just love information.

But I genuinely wanted to be a spy. MI5 would do these training programs that my teachers would send to me.

LJ Oh wow.

AF I’m a private person, but I’m not a secretive person. I like to talk and share things. So then I really wanted to be a diplomat. I went to university and studied politics, philosophy and economics. I even got onto the Civil Service fast track to become a diplomat. It’s a really competitive grad scheme, and I was fully going to be one. But then I went to this open day and thought, this does not align with me.

Throughout my second and third years of studying, I was interning at this city discovery app, purely because I could go to free dinners, free exhibitions and free concerts as long as I wrote about them. That was when I really started to get the remnants of reporting and speaking to people and interviewing people, and I absolutely loved it. I was not quite ready to let being a diplomat go, so I delayed it for a year.

But then, I kid you not, once I delayed it, the next day I was made redundant. I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I used to be someone that was very much like: this is my plan, this is what I’m doing, and I can’t just live in existential dread. But after that I was able to follow my intuition.

Journalism didn’t just happen overnight. I started emailing hundreds of people with ideas. You have to be talking to people, and you have to be talking to people you wouldn’t normally talk to and finding out what is going on in their world. So many of my stories come from dinner conversations next to someone that I’ve never met before.

I went to Paris Fashion Week, literally just to sneak into shows and go to parties because I had friends that were going and had a reason to be there. And there, I bumped into the person who was about to be the Digital Editor of The Face before it relaunched. I was telling her about myself. She was like, “We’re actually hiring. Come in for an interview.” Obviously, I did not have the experience to be a staff writer, but I interned for a couple of months. Absolutely loved it. They were like, “Would you want to be Staff Writer now?” And that’s how I fell into journalism and publishing. It was very organic.

LJ I think when you find that alignment of personal interests crossing over with career ambitions, it all just starts to make sense. One thing I’ve been thinking about while reading your essays is this idea of ‘brainmaxxing’. I feel like everyone’s very focused on addressing our brain rot and getting smarter. I’m constantly seeing things around this. I loved your ‘Knowledge as status is in [and clothes as status is out]’. I wanted to get into that a bit more. Because I do feel like there’s this sense that we all feel a little bit stupid or something. And as a self-proclaimed nerd it’s nice to see intelligence getting the spotlight, but then I wonder if it is just another form of self-improvement…

AF I have been thinking about this a lot, because obviously I put it on my ins and outs. Before I get into the ‘we’re feeling dumb’ thing, one thing I’ve been mulling over in my head is that we’re still scrolling a lot, right? And we’re talking about knowledge being status online. It’s not necessarily like everybody is now suddenly reading books. The form of content that does really well at the moment online is sharing knowledge. That’s for multiple reasons, but one of them definitely is the fact that we are so sick of lifestyle influencers.

If you think of the internet of a few years ago, it was really this thing of logos and flexing, especially the hypebeast era. And that’s how you’d grow a following. We’ve obviously had such a pushback towards that. People are really angry. There’s so much discourse about gatekeeping, so people don’t want to share their favourite clothing pieces because then it becomes a trend, and then you’re a meme. On the other hand, people are so sick of influencers making all this money selling us clothes. Influencers that are doing well are knowledge influencers. If you can’t make content about aspirational things, you have to share knowledge.

I fucking feel stupid too. I know that my brain capacity is not where it used to be. And there’s a reason why ‘slop’ was word of the year. We’re really atrophying our brains, and our synapses are fraying. I can feel it. Even as somebody who is reading a lot and trying to write, I still fucking scroll, babe. It’s got me. My screen time is way too high. I’m trying to work on it. I can feel my brain is not at the capacity it used to be. It’s really scary. We’re starting to have more content about what this effect will be on our brains. We all want to regulate this.

I did a piece on my Substack about the ‘enshittification of thinking’. And I do think that that’s happening. What I was saying about this idea of a pendulum swinging between two things—we’re going to have to swing back.

Francombe’s ‘in/out’ for to Be:

OUT: ultra-slick tech minimalism aesthetics.

IN: design that shows a human touch.

We’re moving away from the super-polished, Apple-era look and towards work that makes the human behind the design visible. This will show up in childlike drawings, annotations, blueprints, how-to manual graphics, etcetera. Instead of hiding the process, it will put it on display, using visible workings as a way to prove it was made by someone who knows what they’re doing (not just someone who prompted well).