What is Airplane Mode? ✈️
Airplane Mode is a bi-weekly newsletter from Liz Plank, a solutions-based journalist invested in your mental health rather than your clicks. I’ve won a few awards, became an international bestselling author have a regular column on MSNBC, co-host a podcast about masculinity called #ManEnough and I’m directing my first film about disability rights.
Previously, I was the executive producer and host of a few critically-acclaimed digital series at Mic, Vox Media and NBC News. I made videos about identity through the lens of national politics and also got to play go fish with Kristen Gillibrand, taught Senator Murphy how to face swap, convinced Cory Booker and Ilhan Omar to make their first Tik Toks and talked about how to fix America with Justin Trudeau. I’ve gone deep with icons like Olivia Wilde, Riz Ahmed, Esther Perel, Lena Waithe, Rainn Wilson, Matthew McConaughey and Shawn Mendes and called a “travel icon” by TIME Magazine for getting an entire plane to boogie.
I’ve written for various magazines about why performing oral sex should be mandatory for men, why we must defund the pro-life movement, white women’s complicity with racism, why it’s easier for a man to get a gun than a psychiatrist and predicted a time when male voters would flee the Republican party. And yet what got me blocked from the 45th president was a tweet probing the quality (not the content!) of the propaganda he shared on Twitter.
But when my tweets aren’t being used as evidence in class action lawsuits against a sitting president, I love to help others understand current events without making them feel worse about themselves (or the world). I believe the business model for news is broken. If it bleeds, I don’t think it has to lead. We spend so much time consuming reporting that makes us feel more hopeless about the world that we have become skewed to only perceiving its problems. I don't believe mental illness should be the opportunity cost of getting informed.
That’s why I created Airplane Mode, as a home base for solution-based journalism and positive news and culture. But it’s also a space for everything else that I think could add value to your life: essays my editor doesn’t want you to read, jokes my therapist doesn’t think I should make, intimate details from conversations with my favorite friends, mental health hacks, keto diet slander, risqué texts I didn’t send as well as local gossip and cool volunteer opportunities. My goal is to help you learn and make you smile while you’re doing it.
Why be on Airplane Mode? 👩🏻💜
Airplane Mode is a place for us to meet without all the distraction and all the depression, my version of a cool community center on the internet where you don’t feel judged, dumb or both. As an extremely online person I feel burned out by all the apps and wanted to create a space just for us without algorithms or the looming threat of your ex’s engagement shower pics. I hate that the only place to connect with me is somewhere that tends to make you feel bad, so I wanted to create an alternative that feels like a conversation we’re having in our respective bedrooms with our new clear v-tech wireless phones pre-call waiting, when no one could interrupt except when maybe one of our dads was getting a fax. Consider this newsletter your mental health pit stop or your spiritual speed bump. That’s what I called Airplane Mode. It’s like if a newsletter could be a vitamin. I need a place that makes me feel good, and I thought you might too.
You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
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If you enjoy Airplane Mode at all, please consider subscribing. As the media industry goes through massive changes, I'm truly excited by the possibility of being able to make an income independently. If you follow me on social media, then I would appreciate it if you could make my work possible by subscribing of the media it’s my main source of income and subscribing is the best way to support my work and help me make sure I can pay my insurance premium every month so that I can keep taking the ADHD medication that allows me to keep writing this newsletter which pays for the ADHD medication. Like most women’s studies majors, I went into it for the money and the bottle service, but the truth is that the reporting business is in a pretty rough spot. Jobs have vanished and resources have disappeared. I can't think of a single non-journalist friend of mine that was fired in the last five years, while almost all of my closest friends in journalism have at some point been laid off, some more than once, several with the infamous words spring is here.
By subscribing you’re helping me avoid ending up having to take a corporate advertising job or having to move back to Canada where health insurance is free instead of EARNED like God intended it (the Bible clearly states heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and then charge them an exorbitant co-pay). The lowest amount I can charge on this platform is $5 a month or $50 a year so that’s all I’ll be asking for. In exchange, you’ll get me right in your email box every week and if you feel like seeing other people you’re free to cancel at any time. Whatever feels right for you feels good for me.
I’m just glad you’re here.
