Dream Baby Press in London
Dream Baby Press is a Substack-led literary platform-cum-live reading hotpot- founded by poet Matt Starr and creative director Zac Roif. Famed for the viral Burger King erotic reading night in New York last December, which pulled in journalists from Vogue, Office Mag, Paper, The New York Times, etc.
For London, that meant a boxing gym in Kilburn, decades of sweat in the walls, a ring at the centre, and 300 people leaning in..
A Literary Night That Didn’t Feel Like One
Dream Baby Press doesn’t do “readings” in the traditional sense. There was no hush or polite intellect. It sat somewhere between WWE and vaudeville, staged in spaces that feel regular rather than curated.
Matt Starr opened with a line that doubles as a mission statement: “Make reading and writing fun, accessible, and exciting.”
And he’s not just a host/star, he’s the creative strategist at Substack, which means he's not only riding the long-read renaissance- he's helping build the infrastructure for it. What he's doing with Dream Baby Press is less like a side project and more like a signal- a working model for how people want to engage with culture, content, and each other right now. Quietly tapping into something some of us are craving.
The Return of Long-Form
With a huge respect for trad PR, long reads make complete sense to us. They build depth, authorship, and meaning. They give audiences something to hold onto, to reference, to return to.
And as eager adapters of where culture is moving, seeing long-form writing get this kind of recognition feels less like a trend, and more like a correction - a response to years of short-form overload. For PR, this is the dream: a desire for context over content, and for voice over volume.
There's also a cultural shift happening: being 'clever' is fashionable, even sexy. You see it everywhere, from tote bags and books as accessories, Substack bios as identity markers, quiet declarations of “I’m reading again.” Smart is no longer separate from taste, it’s part of your cultural capital stack.
But, long-form existence doesn’t automatically mean people are thinking more deeply. Intellectualism is still unevenly distributed and what’s changed is its visibility- it’s now aspirational, and increasingly social.
Trend or Turning Point?
Is it a trend or isn’t it? Are people just trying to be smart-sexy?
We don’t really care because what we’re seeing in the work is more interesting than the discourse around it.
PR teams are connecting more and more with bloggers, Substack writers, and independent voices. Not just pitching headlines, but pitching thinking. Conversations are becoming more collaborative, more personal. We’re matching the synchronicities between a campaign and a writer’s own experience. And out of that comes the feature we drool over. The kind we haven’t really seen since the golden era of long-form storytelling- think old Esquire investigations, early Vice, or the kind of late-night reads that felt like you’d discovered something, not been sold to.
These platforms aren’t just distribution channels, they build intimate, repeat readership- returning attention, not just one-off reach. And, increasingly, they matter beyond the audience itself as AI is pulling from long-form as a source of authority. Depth is discoverable.
Presence Over Content
What Dream Baby Press gets right is something bigger than format. They create a cultural space that rewards depth- talks, readings, essays, zines, an IRL and editorial crossover that lets thinking be social.
We bought the book, the dodgeball t-shirt, the stickers, gushed, hovered, and left, not only entertained, but completely inspired.
If attention has been the currency of the last decade, understanding might be the next. We’re watching a shift from attention as currency, to understanding as status, and spaces like Dream Baby Press are proving that when you give people something deeper, something more human, something they can actually feel part of… we remember, and we laugh, really hard.
Photo: Tish Weinstock reading at Dream Baby Press event in London, theme: Pleasure.
Credit: Miyuki Wang for Vogue