A Brief Theory of the Modern Gift Guide

We Are All Wirecutter Now

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This is how I remember the Gift Guides of the past: collections of expensive and esoteric stuff, clearly paid for by companies, relegated to the back of the magazine. When you search the archives of New York Magazine, that’s exactly what you find: “Special Advertising Sections” that start on page 121 of the weekly issue.

These were paid placements by advertisers who understood New York Magazine readers of 1989 as their target demographic. Relatively rich, learned, with an appreciation for musicals and a need for bland gift yet expensive gift baskets.

I also have memories of gift guides in magazines like Cosmo and Entertainment Weekly — again, mostly stuff I’d never dream of buying for someone else, let alone wanting for myself. I was a 15-year-old living in North Idaho, two hours to the closest real mall; how would I possibly even access this stuff? I didn’t know much, but I knew that most of the stuff in those guides was from companies whose ads I found on pages elsewhere in the magazine.

So how’d we get from forgettable back-of-the-mag esoterica to Peak Gift Guide 2024, when every publication, no matter the subject or audience, is cramming your inbox with gift ideas?

Analyzing the success of a gift guide is very meta when you have your own gift guide that has proven very successful at converting free subscribers. I’m self-aware! And yet: I love this shit. Chalk up to the media studies degree, but I loved thinking about it when I was at BuzzFeed News and I love thinking about it now. Reader behavior is endlessly fascinating.

So here’s what I know about a Gift Guide. First and foremost, for any site that uses affiliate links — and that’s almost all major publications and many newsletters, but not this one — it’s a way to significantly increase affiliate income. So long as an organization is following a set of ethics when it comes to its own recs and endorsements and avoiding the trap of only recommending products with affiliate kickback, the practice feels like a pretty standard replacement for the advertising dollars that once propped up most publications. It’s not a perfect scenario, but it’s not objectionable.

And if you argue that it leads to more consumerist content, I’d ask you to remember what a newspaper or magazine from early December looked like in, say, 1985: absolutely overflowing with fucking ads.

The difference, of course, is that with a gift guide, the publication itself is making the rec — instead of the company itself making the rec vis-a-vis its own advertisement. I get it, but I also think it’s sort of bullshit. Because the real utility of a gift guide is visibility or, to use the language of the internet, discovery. Online shopping is a nightmare. There is too much fucking stuff. Even if you only shop at the places where you’ve shopped before, there’s still much fucking stuff. And what gift guides and advertisements do is tell you something exists.

And they tell you it exists with some measure of authority and legitimacy. My Instagram ads are always telling me what jumpsuits exist. Most of them look great, but I need a recommendation from a friend or a gift guide to know that the jumpsuit in question isn’t made of napkins and dropshipped by a dude who reverse-engineered a twee bourgeois homepage intended to beguile me. The gift guide tells me something exists, then, but it also assures me I’m not going to feel like an abject fool for buying it.

We’ve all been that fool and desperately want to avoid it. Optimization culture calls for us all to give perfect gifts to every person in our lives, no matter how opaque or punishingly specific their tastes may be. Consumerism demands that we manifest love through purchases, but gift cards become tokens of laziness or apparent unwillingness to put in the work to hunt down a gift that’s at once appealing yet unique, appropriately priced but not a piece of junk, made by a small business owner but also available. For the select few who love this particular sort of puzzle, the holiday season is bliss. The rest of us sit there slowly melting under the pressure and the Christmas lights. The gift guide theoretically eases that pressure even as it exacerbates it. Now you have no excuse.

The appeal of the gift guide is also similar to the ever-popular Recs and Links feature that you’ll find here and on so many other newsletters. In short: you’re paying for access to a person’s taste and discernment. It can create a feeling of intimacy, or just specialness, but what most people appreciate is the act of curation. It’s my job to read a ton of the internet every week, and maybe you, yourself, don’t have the time or wherewithal or desire to read that much internet, so you’re willing to pay to access that curation.

That same desire is ultimately at the heart of the business model for so many art and culture publications: readers are willing to pay for access to someone else’s smart thoughts about the culture that surrounds us. Links and Recs exploit that same desire, only with fewer asks of the reader, and less guilt that they’re neglecting edifying reading (see: the New Yorker pile of shame). You open an email and instead of finding a piece of reading, you find a sentence recommending a piece of reading.

I’m ambivalent about this shift, but I also benefit from it. I like reading other people’s recs. I like deciding what I want to rec. I like rec’ing things and others reading them and then talking about them with me, which has become all the more useful now that Twitter has become functionally unusable, Facebook’s utility has shifted, and I’ve become so accustomed to doing my job without either that I can’t bring myself to get on board with any of their replacements. Recs and Links are a gentle conversation starter on an internet largely devoid of gentle conversation.

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If online shopping creates a canyon of never-ending gift options, and the pressure of optimization culture makes it feel even more daunting, then the hyper-personalized rec offers a rickety suspension bridge from one side (having purchased zero gifts) to the other (having purchased a gift with a decent chance of being appreciated). All you need is someone writing a guide who is 1) similar, in the ways that matter, to the person for whom you are buying or 2) intimate/understanding, in the ways that matter, of the type of person you are buying for.

See: Phil’s Gift Guide for Esoteric Boyfriends, exquisitely introduced as such:

Is your boyfriend a little strange? Are his hobbies and interests extremely, even bafflingly, niche? Do you frequently roll over, bleary-eyed, at two in the morning to find that he’s awake and on his phone/laptop, reading a Wikipedia article (or worse, an obscure PDF) about something you’ve never heard of and have no context for?¹ Does he sometimes put music on in the car that sounds like a bunch of weird, fucked up bullshit?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you may have what is called an esoteric boyfriend — and he need not be your literal boyfriend. He could also be your esoteric husband, brother, coworker, or even an esoteric woman or nonbinary person. As an esoteric boyfriend myself, I know how difficult they are to shop for. Their heads are filled with lore, weird facts, and micro-obsessions. How could you even begin to know where to source a thoughtful gift for someone whose “Roman Empire” is not only the literal Roman Empire, but also something like Sethian Gnosticism or Curta Mechanical Calculators or Private Press Outsider Gospel-Funk Records from the 1970s? What do you buy the guy who knows everything, so long as it’s inconsequential and weird?

The guide is composed of hyper-specific recommendations, and what I appreciate most is that they’re not united by, say, topic so much as vibe. Sort of like: If your mind is curious in this way, then these are the sorts of things that might make it light up. The primary utility of this gift guide is access to someone who is/sees/understands the genre of human here dubbed Esoteric Boyfriend — and offers awareness of things in the Esoteric Boyfriend Universe that heretofore might not have been on their radar.

I don’t write a gift guide thinking that I have outstanding taste; I write it with the understanding that a lot of the people who are faithful readers of this sort of newsletter are weird in the ways that I am weird, or are curious about things I’m curious about.

And let’s be real: the popularity of the modern gift guide is about affiliate links replacing advertising as a primary source of advertising — but it’s also about the popularity of newsletters just generally. Stumbling upon a good newsletter can make you feel like you found a friendly, smart, and obsessive person who can walk you through their one specific corner of the world like a travel guide. They inspire a specific kind of trust because they can demonstrate that they either care more about a topic than you do or have more experience in that realm than you can conceivably amass.

This format, of course, is not specific to newsletters. Most recently, it is the format of success for product recommendation sites like Wirecutter, which offer a panel of experts and obsessives and a laundry list of reasons to trust them (like Consumer Reports, but with the direct link to purchase!). Wirecutter’s success has remade the internet’s product review and discovery ecosystem (often to Wirecutter’s detriment), but the internet and consumerism have evolved alongside it.

Wirecutter’s system of building trust still holds up for tons of people, but its job has become increasingly difficult. Recommendations need to be more specific for specific groups. A lot of people don’t want the clinical, rational recommendation, particularly when it comes to gifts; they want the joyful one. And trust has become even harder to build. The Wirecutter is owned by the New York Times, an association that has all kinds of connotations for different people. It makes sense that people have moved away from monolithic recommendations. We are all Wirecutter now.

In my capacity as a mini-Wirecutter, I can help out with the Obsessed Dahlia Lady quadrant of humans on your list, but I can’t account for the other corners of the brilliant cornucopia of beloved and tolerated humans. That’s where something like the Culture Study Gift Concierge becomes particularly useful. If you can describe a gift recipient with enough loving (or frustrated) detail, there’s someone in the community who will recognize themselves (or their own periodically frustrating or complicated loved one) and be able to assist.

That’s also why the descriptions of parents and elders in the thread are always so enjoyable. We lean more fully into our own niche human genres as we age; we become more delightfully and specifically ourselves. An under-acknowledged side-effect of this change is becoming incredibly and increasingly difficult to shop for.

But I also noticed a lot of people - and millennial-aged moms in particular - who put descriptions of themselves on the list, wondering what others could possibly gift them. Is that a symptom of being more fully yourself — or of navigating a period in life when you’re not fully in touch with who that self might be or become?

I saw a lot of online hand-wringing about gift guides this year, as if their proliferation were a manifestation of the decline of journalism. If we’re talking about the shell of People Magazine sending me “gift guide” notifications about the Lululemon Cyber Monday Sale, sure — but you can read about that dynamic here. I see gift guides primarily as a means of helping others navigate the abyss of contemporary consumerism. But they’re also texts to help wield resources in more thoughtful and meaningful ways - where the emphasis isn’t on how much you spend, but making someone feel like they’re beloved and understood and worthy.

Sometimes that person is your Esoteric Boyfriend. Sometimes it’s your Finnish Expat Aunt. And sometimes — and this makes the hunt no less worthy or important — it’s yourself. ●

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You can find the Culture Study Gift Guide, filled with 98 ideas almost entirely sourced from small businesses, here.

You can join the Culture Study Gift Concierge here — lots of people still need help, and there’s still plenty of time to request help! Just sort comments by “New First” instead of “Top First.”

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