Are you listening to Mysie? Her musky vocals and synth-jazz pop songs have been gathering attention in the UK since she released her first EP last year, and now she’s out with new work. She says her new single, “Gift,” is “about realising that someone in your life is puppeteering you. Saying what you want to hear in order to manipulate or oppress you. You’ve given up too much and now you need to get out.” It’s dark for sure, but also warmly optimistic, and catchy as all get out. Listen here.

Let’s rewind for a moment to June, when Bon Appétit’s box of secrets opened revealing racist leadership, toxic work culture, and deep, racialized pay inequities— particularly in their Test Kitchen video series. Condé Nast apologized, ousted the BA chief, and promised to work with the magazine’s video personalities to forge equitable contracts. You’d think Condé would be ready to instate fair pay if only for the optics— but even that is too hopeful, as it turns out. Food-writer-video-personalities Priya Krishna, Sohla El-Waylly and Rick Martinez just announced they’re leaving the series after Condé Nast Video repeatedly refused to offer adequate compensation for their work. And a kicker, Krishna reports, is watching white colleagues support their cause vocally and then duck out to interview new candidates of color who they know will be paid unfairly to replace the figures who fought the losing fight. (Molly Baz, though, stepped down from the video team in solidarity.) Here’s hoping Netflix is ready to offer each of them their own show.

What the exit from Condé Nast Video tells us is that legacy companies like this are, as we feared, too entrenched in their own shit to make room to do things right— so it’s time to look at other models. For the time being, as Taste pointed out this week, independent food newsletters are where it’s at. As you well know, a personal newsletter isn’t bound by the strictures of editorial oversight— the author is in charge of content, frequency, and monetization. So in short, we get to publish what we really want to write. On the list of individual, wonderful, highly specific food newsletters is Andrew Genung’s Family Meal written in Hong Kong, “covering the restaurant industry that aims to help busy workers stay on top of the national conversation in restaurant food media” and Illyanna Maisonet’s Eat Gorda Eat, a personal Puerto Rican food column. Then there’s Josh Gee’s Snack Cart aggregating food news from elsewhere and Anna Hazel’s Fish Galore (self-explanatory).

See the Taste piece for many more thoughtful, liberated foodletters and enjoy your new inbox friends.