Pleasure Principle is a fortnightly newsletter of long-form essays, oriented around the concept and experience of pleasure. Pleasure Principle comes from Anna Carlsson and Bella Suckling – two writers and book workers with relationships to pleasure that both intersect and contradict each other. The newsletter is invested in ritual, sensoria, beauty, sensuality, sexuality, feeling, comfort, discomfort, freedom, terror, joy. We want to follow the threads of these ideas, to trace the ways they might entwine with pleasure. We want to be as close to feeling as possible. We want to give ourselves room to experiment and to play, to be at once sincere and frivolous, to be wrong, to be cringe.

In a recent interview with Exhibition Magazine, critic Becca Rothfeld said, ‘We tend to fetishi[s]e usefulness. Instead, we should try to discern the value of useless things, like art. Superfluities like beauty and eroticism are not necessary for our survival, but they make us what we are, and they are pleasures in their own right.’ It is these kinds of comforts that form the centre of our Pleasure Principle.