Open Tab: Hunter Harris

Hunter Harris is the creator of Hung Up, the twice-weekly Substack newsletter where she takes a forensic lens to our culture’s obsessions and her own. She says she and her audience of nearly 200,000 subscribers share the same “disease”—insatiability—and that they’re bonded by a specific tunnel vision: her willingness to write a dozen pieces about A Star Is Born or spend time tracking down the marriage license of Taylor Swift’s publicist, if that’s what curiosity demands. Hung Up is part cultural criticism, part late-night group chat, and an ongoing argument for why pop culture matters. Her chat, where paid subscribers debrief everything from season premieres to their own lives, has become one of the most devoted, lore-dense places on the internet and serves as a master class in how to turn an audience into a social world.

Harris grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she watched melodramas with her aunt, crime capers with her dad, and, at 12, wrote a letter to the local film critic disputing his review of The Other Boleyn Girl. In this season finale of Open Tab, she sat down with Substack’s head of new media, Hanne Winarsky, to talk about studying journalism (and thinking she might break the next Watergate), her four years at New York magazine’s Vulture, and launching Hung Up on Substack in 2020. They met at Trees Lounge inside the Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, one of Harris’s home theaters, sipped tequila gimlets, and filled in the rest.

Hanne: So you have subscription revenue as your core, but you also have a podcast, you do TV writing, you still do some freelance for legacy media, and you do some brand stuff. How do you think about the whole mixed-revenue stream, the business of Hung Up?

Hunter: The newsletter is my job. Everything else feels like something fun, something I feel curious about. But I do feel very seriously that people who read the newsletter are customers, and I am fulfilling my contract with them. I just think it’s the most disrespectful thing in the world to be like, “Okay, maybe it’ll come out, maybe it won’t.” Before I owe anyone else work, I owe them work—the readers. And then the brand stuff is just kind of fun. Sometimes it’s like working a different muscle. Like I’ll edit a TikTok and want to kill myself, because my thumbs are too big and my nails are too long to open CapCut. The podcast started as: I just want to have something with my best friend. And it all kind of feels like an ouroboros, where I’m talking about the same thing again and again. But there are people who read the newsletter but don’t listen to the podcast, and vice versa. And the TV stuff is maybe my dream. But if I could write my own series tomorrow, I would still keep the newsletter, because in the middle of the night I’m like, “I love a girl’s emotional support inner wrist tattoo,” and I need a place to say that.

Hanne: You’ve described yourself as having insane tunnel vision. That when you get one of these obsessions, you can really, really follow it. Why do you think that works for you and your audience?

Hunter: I think we just both have the same disease: being insatiable. I think that’s it. Part of it is growing up as an only child, where I just had to entertain myself a lot. And so I maybe will spend more time with something than other people did. The tunnel vision thing really came from one of my old editors who was like, “You have really bad tunnel vision.”

Hanne: Was it a compliment or an insult?

Hunter: No, it was an