Join us for the first of the Insider Trading panel series, hosted by Eli Rosenbloom. Insider Trading operates on the premise that the best conversations about publishing happen off the record. Taxi rides. Design labs. Deadline decisions. Backstage. Editorial dinners. Loading docks.
The panel series examines the anatomy of publishing before print—turning its attention to the figures who conceive, build, and sustain publications: highly present in the culture, rarely visible in it. Each panel creates a forum for candid, substantive conversation among a specific constellation of practitioners, examining the questions the industry runs on but barely surfaces: the money, idiosyncratic design decisions, how stories are formed, distribution, and New York’s stubborn conviction that the printed object is where it always ends up, if it’s any good.
The first panel in the series is themed ‘system’. Each entry point into publishing has its own logic and each panelist embodies a distinct way through it. Camille Okhio balances a historian’s rigor with mega-scale: a writer whose expertise weaves fine and decorative arts through the institutional machinery of legacy media and organically back into her own practice. Nick Sethi is both shovel and bridge: a photographer with over 60 self-published books and superstar magazine covers to his name, his practice has moved fluidly through every register of the system while knowing downtown like the back of his hand. Nathalie Nguyen speaks to the fastest moving part of the system, peering over the edge of the independent brand-scape from her Happy99 storefront, tracking how supply and demand move, and how a new hyper-contemporary visual language between internet identity and the physical object is rewriting the rules of what it means to put something into the world.
