There are precious few “ambiguous monument[s]” still standing. Many periodicals like Lionel Trilling’s beloved Partisan Review are now extinct. The wages of the little magazines left standing are continually mocked online. Their purpose, however, is to serve those who “value their ability to live some part of their lives with serious ideas,” as Trilling put in his 1946 essay “The Function of the Little Magazine.” The ecosystem of criticism that existed then, exemplified by Edmund Wilson and codified by Norman Podhoretz in Making It, was robust.1 Now, critics like Becca Rothfeld mourn the death of The Washington Post books section. Established writers like Ron Charles are taking to Substack where nearly every month a new takedown piece arises and a new school of thought is birthed. AI is eroding people’s ability to read, interpret, and think. The work of critical thought has never felt more endangered. There are, of course, mighty magazines still acting as a fulcrum for inquiry. From N+1’s “The High Style of the Hater” to The Drift’s re-evaluation of Simone Weil to The Point’s diagnosis of liberal fantasia these small but nimble institutions build a counter culture that reinforce, break, and shift what criticism can do in the modern era—an ability AI lacks.
This calls to mind Trilling’s original assertion that “the politics with which we are now being confronted may be of such kind as to crush the possibility of that interplay between free will and circumstance upon which all literature depends. These conditions can scarcely encourage us.” Perhaps that sounds familiar. But the little magazine, he argues, is a “natural and heroic response.” These cultural institutions play a vital role in our world. Their goal is to keep our culture from becoming “cautious and settled.” Of course, even small magazines can create a new status quo and some accuse these vessels of culture of being gatekeepers. Open the blogs, they cheer. Editors, however, are the keepers of sanity. Their job, often thankless and exhausting, is to corral the writer and re-establish clarity. Everyone has read a Substack that was a Tweet, or a blog that needed a fact check. Nor does every piece of writing needs to be the length of a novella. This is not to say that Substacks and blogs can’t also play an important role in culture—there are essays that can only exist in such a format. Many great writers have risen on the website. There’s a watchdog component to Substack and similar outlets, a way to check the powers that be. I immensely enjoy reading the work of Seymour Hersh, Ken Klippenstein, Kate Wagner, B. D. McClay, John Ganz, Brandon Taylor, Sam Bodrojan, Rayne Fisher-Quann, and many others. But Substack is a complement to magazines, not a replacement. Infrastructure and healthcare are nice perks. Gatekeeping is a job that comes with benefits and resources.
Trilling, of course, was not very taken with the cultural output of his time. He was worried that people preferred optimistic slop to the “tough, complex psychology of Freud.” Heady interpretation was what separated the wheat from the chaff. This is the goal of all little magazines. Criticism and interpretation, like Torah Study or Sufi dervishes, molds and expands the mind. While blogs allow a new kind of wilderness, the little magazine is like a dam, protecting the alluvial nature of the swamplands—filtering down and shaping our minds. A magazine curates, a blog flows.
Perhaps this sounds snobbish. Trilling faced similar controversies for his exacting standards and ideas. Yet I don’t think holding a higher standard for literature or art is elitist. We can take lowbrow art just as seriously as Donald Judd or John Donne. Criticism can be approachable even if it’s metabolizing Kafka or Rilke. Look at the feral tenderness of Patricia Lockwood or the vicious buoyancy of Andrea Long Chu. Margo Jefferson writes about the music of her youth in Constructing a Nervous System with the flair of a playwright. Vinson Cunningham approaches the Knicks with reverent solemnity. These are the result of a life steeped in the process of thinking, working through the rubble of literature and politics. If novels are getting worse, criticism itself is not. I am skeptical of these cyclical pronouncements—that novels or criticism are in danger, that there’s a decline of some kind. In reality, I find magazines allow for a diversity of style and intellect, collecting a coterie of disparate writers and ideas that reverberate and echo, a symphony in the same key even if they utilize different chord progressions.
The panic over declining literacy rates, the book review, and media coverage at large, however, continues. With such pressure put on readers, it’s no wonder that, as Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote: “a Sunday morning with the book reviews is often a dismal experience.” Both writers and critics must contend with the apocalyptic mood. As institutions crumble, many erudite journalists are quick to defend the credibility of their livelihood even if they are no longer the vanguards of taste. We’re terrified about the lack of authority, the free fall of magazines. Everyone is seeking confidence, trying to believe themselves the arbiters of what is good and what is bad. Personally, I welcome that gauntlet. Say it with style.
But there’s a more grim undercurrent to this crisis of authority. The layoffs and closures are alarming. Equally concerning is the attempt by tech companies to outsource the life of the mind to robots that rely on deadly data centers. Some have argued that standards are falling across the board. “Bad criticism is bad not because it has been deflowered by political ideology but for all the typical reasons that writing is bad: it is poorly paid, hastily edited, and written mostly by freelancers with so little in the way of financial security,” Andrea Long Chu wrote in her 2025 collection Authority. Even movies like The Devil Wears Prada 2 are worried about the future of big magazines.
If once magazines launched major talents, it seems now there are fewer public intellectuals. Certainly no one is interviewed on TV like Susan Sontag or Noam Chomsky. But little magazines still face the uphill battle, the noble one, to try and explore the stories behind the headlines and the niche ideas, books, and events that deserve space on the page. There have certainly been attempts to interrogate their place in the cultural sphere. Writer Naomi Kanakia has recently been reviewing one periodical after another. Criticism begets criticism. But often I think back to the days when I longed to appear in those very magazines. I imagined there was a secret castle full of stiff upper-lipped editors drinking gimlets and eating caviar who only hired their friends. I was, of course, wrong. It’s merely a long, toiling road from one piece to another. Editors are mostly overworked and underpaid like the rest of us, many hold multiple jobs and contend with unruly inboxes.
As a child, I loved reading used copies of Harper’s from Half-Priced Books. I’m not sure I understood very much, but I admired the steely prose and unfussy fonts. Now, I also love devouring Bookforum and Parapraxis. A good critic can turn something on its head while erecting lyrical carnivals with the elemental bones of language. She can animate a subculture you’ve never heard of.
In Rothfeld’s elegy for The Washington Post’s book section she sets out what I believe is a very beautiful way to think about the (new) function of the little magazine and its readers: “What they often evinced was better than interest, better even than bibliophilia; it was the rare and precious capacity to be interested in what they didn’t already know interested them. It was a willingness to be changed.”
There’s a still wide field available for writers aspiring to grace the pages of little magazines—even if perhaps literacy rates are falling and NEA grants are being stripped away. Those who do pursue such a calling (I hesitate to call it a career) certainly still toil, but the resulting camaraderie can be a wonderful thing. Certainly, some writers can be cliquish, but not all. The trenches of freelancing and writing for small (and occasionally big) magazines is the only home I know. It’s not all doom and gloom either. Some organizations are thriving. Luckily, certain special grants are replacing the loss of the NEA for outlets like N+1 and the beloved Dalkey Archive.
No little magazine will appeal to everyone, nor should it. Perhaps it seems I write from inside the house, but I am not a staff writer or editor. I did not go to an Ivy League school or get an MFA. Of course, I don’t think it’s an easy career for anyone. I make my career hopping from one beloved little magazine to another, reporting and writing about the far-right, healthcare, religion, and books. I enjoy it. I enjoy the writers I get to write alongside both here and in outlets like The Baffler and Lux. The line between a big and small magazine is growing eerily thin. If the definition is merely about circulation it seems nearly every glossy publication is in trouble. Let’s just presume that we are talking about the outlets I’ve mentioned rather than a publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
It’s a magnificent thing to hold a magazine in your hand, smoke a Capri, and drink a Diet Coke or a glass of wine. Bourgeoisie? Perhaps. Yet these magazines often cost merely $40 a year. Besides, people from every walk of life desire culture. It seems more insulting to me to say that only a certain kind of people read a certain kind of magazine. (Let it be known that even e-flux has grown remarkably more readable over the years.) Those few of us who strive to be writers know exactly what Norman Podhoretz meant when he said “What I wanted was to see my name in print, to be praised, and above all to attract attention.” We know what he meant. We all have the magazine we treat like an avoidant boyfriend who won’t text us back. Our white whale. Even Sontag, for her part, dreamed of breaking into such a world through specific “little magazines,” as Benjamin Moser notes in his biography: “My greatest dream,” Sontag said, “was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.”
The “little magazine” shouldn’t be underestimated. No matter how widely read, they offer a beacon to the next generation of readers, devoted bookworms, and pseudo-intellectuals alike. I don’t believe in much but I believe in the sanctity of the little magazine. Reading, after all, is the godliest profession. In a world where everything is about being more accessible and more slick, the little magazine offers another way—an afternoon or evening spent trying to understand.
It should be noted, of course, some of these magazines had dubious funding sources. The CIA stepped in to help the Partisan Review and Commentary. Read Edward Said on this very subject in the LRB. Few literary and art institutions are totally clean. Another reason to support the few small magazines that actually do resist the conservative, pro-war agenda. Podhoretz, of course, became an aggressive Zionist and conservative. “Today the American Left is pretty much in tatters. A few small weeklies or monthlies such as the Nation or the Progressive can still be called left-wing, but the contemporary cultural climate in the United States is dominated by the corporate-government nexus,” Said wrote in 1999. Now, at least, N+1 is regularly publishing protest diaries and investigations into ICE. The Drift published a great piece on nationalistic AI slop by the talented Mitch Therieau and regularly publishes the lovely left-wing feminist Sophie Lewis. The Baffler regularly publishes reporting on Gaza. These things matter.
The above image is by Dike Blair.
OK now I need all the small magazine reccommendations please. I already subscribe to Baffler, and love it.
Yes! More coughing up a couple of bucks a month for a beautiful physical product!