Welcome to The Elysian

We need thinkers more than journalists

This is all because I’m nostalgic for the Enlightenment, when our writers were thinkers.

Literary salons popped up all over the place. So did leagues and social clubs. People wanted to think, and to think up solutions! They came up with ideas like democracy and capitalism and socialism and humanism. They were philosophers, literary thinkers, and spread these ideas far and wide with pamphlets delivered to every door.

Now all of our writers are doomers. Journalism is not about thinking up solutions, it’s about reporting on the problems. Even our fiction is dystopian. Our science fiction writers can only imagine a future plagued by AI apocalypse, government surveillance, computer chips in our brains, and space colonies that take us away from the polluted world we created.

If even our best literary minds cannot imagine a better future, how are we supposed to create it?

That’s why I’ve created The Elysian—a utopian garden where we can study philosophy and debate politics and rethink capitalism and enjoy contemplative leisure and be part of a new enlightenment. It’s a place where we can think through a more beautiful future through collaborative essay collections and print pamphlets.

And I’m just optimistic enough to believe that’s enough of a start to creating one.

We create media projects imagining a better future

We are thinking through the most important ideas of our time through collaborative media projects. Paid subscribers get everything published by the collective, and Collector subscribers get everything we publish as collectible print pamphlets.

I’m Elle Griffin

Hi, I’m Elle. I am the founder and editor for the Elysian Collective. For my work in human progress, I was named an O’Shaughnessy grantee in 2025, a Roots of Progress fellow in 2023, a Substack fellow in 2022. After I serialized my first novel in my newsletter, I also gave a TEDx talk about my experience and the return of serial publishing.

My newsletter has been featured by The New York Times, BBC, Business Insider, Fast Company, The Information, Publisher’s Weekly, Means of Creation, and Morning Brew. I am also a freelance journalist with bylines at Freethink, Esquire, and others.

I want to see our media ecosystem transformed from doomer sensationalism, partisan journalism, and dystopian thought, to solutions-oriented journalism, speculative brainstorming, and generative thought about how we can create something better. I’d love to see that media ecosystem owned and operated by independent writers and podcasters and filmmakers rather than media moguls with an agenda, an algorithm, and an ad-captured sensationalist bent.

I’m even optimistic enough to believe that by changing our media ecosystem, we could change our outlook on the world. And be inspired to create a better one.

I hope you’ll join us.