How Emily Sundberg’s ‘Feed Me’ Newsletter Made Her Into a Rising Substack Star

Until recently, almost every edition included a pouting selfie of Ms. Sundberg, even if the headline was about Goldman Sachs interns. (“There’s a lot of guys,” she said of her subscriber base.) Feed Me is preoccupied with a certain slice of millennial culture in New York City. The restaurants they patronize, the media they consume, their picturesque vacations, their online shopping habits, their obsession with Gen Z.

“She’s almost like a Carrie Bradshaw of her generation,” said Ms. Min, whose company also publishes its flagship newsletter, The Ankler, on Substack. On the platform’s leaderboard of popular business publications, Feed Me is now at No. 4, one spot below The Ankler.

Like the divisive heroine of “Sex and the City,” Ms. Sundberg writes in the first person, usually to place herself in a scene (“I went to dinner at The Odeon last night …”) or to emphasize her connections to one (“I texted a few friends who work on Wall Street this morning …”).

She is not, however, a confessional sex columnist. But that was not the point of Ms. Min’s comparison: “If ‘Sex and the City’ was about the search for romantic fulfillment, Emily’s voyeurism is about money — and that same sense of it being possibly unattainable, frustrating and, for some, something that comes easy,” Ms. Min said.

Because of its gossipy core, Feed Me also sometimes reminds people of Gawker — written by young people in New York, self-assured in its own taste and authority. Max Read, a former editor of Gawker, said that he might not understand or occupy the “parallel New York City” that Ms. Sundberg had built, but that he still loved to read about it.