Creatures of NYC

Walden Green interviews Defector’s Sabrina Imbler about their new email newsletter. Plus, good links from Daisy and Walden.

When it comes to careers in media, Sabrina Imbler is an anomaly. As Defector Media’s resident “creature beat,” they’ve carved out a niche as a reporter that, even Sabrina admits, many publications would consider a “luxury.” Except people love reading about animals; I for one will watch one of those Nature is Amazing videos anytime it comes across my feed. Sabrina’s published one collection of essays—How Far The Light Reaches, in late 2022—and their last three Defector bylines are about sharks on cocaine, owning dinosaur bones, and Bat Boy Summer. To me, that’s living the dream—in this industry but also, like, in life.

Last month, Sabrina announced a new project: Creatures of NYC, an email newsletter dedicated to bringing New Yorkers closer to the critters that share our city. “I’ve been living in Brooklyn for about 7 years now,” they wrote in a welcome bulletin, “and pretty early on I felt a kind of existential dread because the only wild animals I ever saw were rats, cockroaches, and house sparrows.” Now, it’s like Sabrina’s discovered another world that exists above, below, and around us—one of horseshoe crab festivals, solo mothing expeditions, and dragonfly mating rituals. Through our conversation, I was able to catch a glimpse.

The following interview has been edited and condensed. 

Walden Green: I'm so curious to know a little bit about your career trajectory—how does one end up as Defector’s “resident animal beat”?

Sabrina Imbler: When I started in media, I quickly realized that I wanted to be a science journalist. I didn't have any background in science, but I had always loved animals. At that time, I was reading a lot of Ed Yong, and I was like, “What a dream beat this guy has, just writing about scorpions whose anuses fall off, or whales that are doing incredible, classically whale things.” I guess it's a popular beat, but not one that lots of publications invest in; it seems sort of like a luxury, since you're not talking about things that necessarily affect humans. 

I started to publish some freelance pieces about animals, which led me to my first job writing about science—at Atlas Obscura—and since then I've just tried to find jobs that allow me to write specifically about non-human life and the natural world. [Creatures] is the term that I use to talk about animals, because I think when you say animals, people conjure the idea of a lion or a zebra or a dog, and creature conjures like a weird little parasite. Those are the kinds of animals that I like to write about the most.

WG: That casts Creatures of NYC in an interesting light, because it’s about animals that we, as residents of the city, interact with on a daily basis—knowingly or unknowingly.

SI: I think it's a mixture of both. There are so many creatures that we see every day and we just don't give a second thought to, and then there are so many that are a little bit harder to find, maybe a bus ride away. This week, I’ve been reporting a story about noctule bats in Germany and honeybees in Japan; I write a lot about creatures that I probably will never meet.  

So I made a New Year's resolution at the beginning of this year to spend as much time as I could with the wildlife of New York. I also felt guilty, right? Like I'm writing about all of these animals that live so far away from me, and I'm not really getting to know my neighbors—in the most species-inclusive definition of that.

Main Image: Horseshoe Crabs at Plumb Beach (ComplexRational, Wikimedia Commons). 🪲

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ remixes Hotline TNT (Spotify)

• Give & Give by Conway the Machine feat. Cool & Dre (Spotify)

• Moses Sumney produced by quickly, quickly—why was I not informed of this earlier? (Spotify)

• Brijean’s Macro (Spotify)

• Petey’s The Closest Thing To Being Over Is Going On (Spotify)

• Meaghan “your favorite music critic’s favorite music critic” Garvey reviews Britney’s Blackout (Pitchfork)

• Kathryn VanArendonk is writing the book on Bluey (X)

• Ben Affleck and Matt Damon may be bringing one of our era’s great love stories—Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel—to the big screen. (PWInsider)

• Alex N. Press meditates on how Sing Sing resists dehumanization (Jacobin)

• A new video essay on The Idea of You, beach reads, and shame from Broey Deschanel (YouTube)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• The house party is dead, and we may have killed her (Financial Times)

• And speaking of dead, read Kate Knibbs on an epidemic of “zombie alt-weeklies” consumed by AI articles about OnlyFans performers (WIRED)

• Sigilkore still shows signs of life, even though no one wants to call it that anymore, according to Kieran Press-Reynolds (no bells)

• But Fred Segal has officially shuttered its last two LA stores (The Hollywood Reporter)

• “No rose blooms / In the tepid air.” Robert Rubsam writes on the Berlin avant-garde poet Else Lasker-Schüler (Poetry Foundation)

• Game (Charlotte Shane) recognizes game (Miranda July) in an essay on All Fours (Bookforum)

• Dirt alumnae corner! Naomi Kanakia has beef with literary critics; Grace Byron interviewed Hunter Schafer; Vivian Medithi wrote about The Culture at the Cincinnati Art Museum

• Carl Wilson shares an unpublished essay about why our culture is in need of a good cry (Crritic!)

• One of the must-read short essays of the year: Isabel Cristo on getting dressed (The Paris Review)