Delia Cai

Photo by David Brandon Geeting

Delia Cai is a freelance writer, editor, and consultant living in New York. She is currently a contributing editor at Highsnobiety; more recently, she was the managing editor at Magasin. She has also worked on projects for clients such as A24, Julie, Instagram, Maybelline, and Spotify, amongst others.

Here is what she’s written lately:

• CULTURED’s Cult100 cover story on Lena Dunham
• This Q&A with Susan Orlean for Totei
• This Q&A with Natasha Stagg for SSENSE
• THE FACE’s cover story on Chappell Roan
• This Q&A with Japanese Breakfast for Vulture
• This normcore retrospective for SSENSE
• This investigation on Gen Z as the most rejected generation for Business Insider

But you most likely know her from her newsletter , which apparently was at the forefront of our 2020s Substack-as-literary-genre wave and was most recently name-dropped in The New Yorker and WSJ. In 2024, she published the viral Hate Read pop-up newsletter (okay it’s a blog), which you can read about in The New York Times. currently has more than 35,000 subscribers.

From 2021-2024, she was the senior vanities correspondent at Vanity Fair, covering celebrity and culture.

Her debut novel, Central Places, was named as one of the “Today” show’s best new books of 2023. Now Nylon thinks she’s a lit “it” girl!

She’s on Twitter @deliacai and IG @deeeliacai; if you’d like to finagle book press, please email the lovely Melissa at mfolds@penguinrandomhouse.com. For partnership/other press requests, please honestly DM me on IG lol.

Features & Essays

• We’ve Reached Peak Girl
• Inside Helmut Lang’s NYFW After-Party With Peter Do, Young Mazino, and What Felt Like All of New York
• It’s Barbie’s World Now. We Just Live Here
• The Professional Try-Hard Is Dead, But You Still Need to Return to the Office
• The Way We Watch Each Other Now
• 'Euphoria,' When We Were Young, and the Millennial High School Forever Time Warp
• Is TikTok Turning Fashion Week Into Pure Chaos?
• Perfectly Imperfect and the Growing Currency of the Personal Recommendation
• How Elon Musk Became the Internet’s New Main Character
• Inside the Jawn-Obsessed Newsletter Nailing Down Exclusives With Jerry Seinfeld and André 3000

Profiles & Interviews

• Greta Lee Was Hiding in Plain Sight - Until Past Lives Changed Everything
• Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback
• Even the Publicists Are Influencers Now. Just Ask Gia Kuan.
• For Mindy Seu, Digital Archiving Isn’t Just a Job - It’s a Lifestyle
• Hell, at Least According to Hozier, Never Sounded Sweeter
• “We Have Built a Giant Treadmill That We Can't Get Off”: Sci-Fi Prophet Ted Chiang on How to Best Think About AI
• Esther Perel Thinks All This Amateur Therapy-Speak Is Just Making Us Lonelier
• Three Generations of Blue's Clues Hosts Are Still Cool With Being Your Best Friend
• Ling Ma’s Continual State of Return
• Zoo Day With Ed Yong, Resident Animals (and Pandemic) Sense Maker
• Rayne Fisher-Quann Deconstructs the Weirdness of Online Womanhood
• She Invented ‘Adulting.’ Her Life Fell Apart. She Wants You to Know That’s Okay.

Wow Everyone Loves

• Fast Company: Deez Links wants to make the internet fun again
• New York Magazine: The Sound of My Inbox
• The New York Times: Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack
• Fortune: Inside Substack, where authors are suddenly making serious money in the newsletter game - but it’s publish or perish
• Business Insider: Substack creators are making 6 figures off their newsletters (not me though, spoiler alert)

Wow Everyone Also Loves Central Places

• The Washington Post: “Ambition is the antihero in ‘Central Places’”
• Interview Magazine: Debut Novelist Delia Cai on Olive Garden, Central Places, and Interracial Relationships
• The Guardian: Central Places by Delia Cai review – a return to one’s roots
• Vogue: Delia Cai’s Poignant Debut Novel Asks: Can You Ever Really Go Home Again?
• Harper’s Bazaar: Give Me All the Stories About Asian American Moms
• Shondaland: The Golden Age of the 20-Something Coming-of-Age Novel Is Here
• The Rumpus: Hometown Humbling: Delia Cai’s ‘Central Places’
• Vulture: 24 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Fall

But What Is She Really Like, Personality-Wise?

• How Long Gone: Ep. 463 Delia Cai
• Normal Gossip: You Must Never Forget Your Nemesis By Proxy
• Longform Podcast: #520 Delia Cai
• Asian Not Asian: S3E40: AI Asians with Delia Cai (Vanity Fair)
• Slate: Dear Prudence: Help! I Wrote to Prudie for Advice and Delia Cai Answered
• GrubStreet Diet: Delia Cai Makes the Most of a Breakup Brunch