What follows is an interview with The New Inquiry's Editor in Chief Rachel Rosenfelt, conducted over email by Los Angeles Review of Books Managing Editor Evan Kindley — the first in an occasional series on internet little magazines for the LARB blog.
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How, when, and why was The New Inquiry originally founded?
I started The New Inquiry with two friends, Mary Borkowski and Jennifer Bernstein, as a shared Tumblr blog in 2009. We weren’t thinking of it as a magazine back then: it was more of a tactic to establish a community-driven creative outlet that wasn’t available to us in our post-collegiate lives. I can’t speak for either of them, but in my case, pouring my energy into TNI fulfilled my need for intellectual and creative stimulation beyond wage work.
We were experimenting with the platform for a while before the formative moment struck. I was reading through the archive of one of my favorite critics, Scott McLemee, when I came across a prescient piece he wrote in a 2007 issue of
Bookforum called
"After the Last Intellectuals." This was a few years after the article’s publication, and in the intervening time we had experienced an economic crash, the contraction of the university system, the death of print, and the rise of new media. The institutions that Russell Jacoby describes in his book
The Last Intellectuals — mass media, mainstream publishing, the academy, all the places which had come to employ and therefore absorb a category we had once known as the public intellectual — had atrophied across the board. As a result, the would-be academicians, editors, copy writers and advertising cronies who would once have been absorbed into those institutions suddenly constituted a surplus population.
I also realized that the most fiercely intellectual, provocative, and original thinkers among this new population were never very well-assimilated into cultural institutions to begin with: they weren’t the kind you’d meet at a publishing party, or who would’ve be dispositionally capable of working their way up the organization ladder. But these same people who had already taken advantage of new media and managed to carve out an independent platform for their for themselves online, and this sudden change in the paradigm actually put them at a distinct advantage. The crazies, the loose cannons, the pseudonymous hermit, the girl shouting on a blogspot soapbox: these were the new voices on the cutting edge of culture and I made it my business to bring them together.
Strengthened and focused by McLemee’s example, ideas, and eventual mentorship, we began to think of The New Inquiry as more of a movement than a magazine — and we still do. I set out to connect with the already established extra-institutional writers and artists that I most admired, as well as discover strong emerging voices that hadn’t yet found a platform to enable their development. It’s sort of a Bad News Bears montage genesis story: me searching the crevices of New York and the Internet to bring together the rag-tag group of misfits who would eventually coalesce into a real team. The salon we run in New York gives my editors and contributors a space to connect as people rather than bylines and form a real, concrete community, for which there is no substitute.
Do you think The New Inquiry reflects New York? Do you aspire to?
I think so. The role of the salon in our organization is a side-effect of the demands placed on New Yorkers by real estate. We can’t gather at each other’s apartments because of inhospitable roommates or landlords, and there are few public spaces that aren’t primarily commerce-driven, which is infertile ground for developing anything resembling a rooted community. The West Village isn’t exactly what it used to be.
It was pure serendipity that helped us find the bookstore where we gather today, and to develop a strong friendship with its proprietor, who has become central to our project. The store has been a New York institution since 1970s, but rent drove it underground over the last few years. Today, it's hidden in a rent-stabilized apartment (contrary to popular assumption, it does not double as a residence) where you’ll find the best rare and used book selection in the city, bar none. The bookstore is a focal point for The New Inquiry’s community, and its keeper instills our project with the value-system that keeps our community bond strong.
What magazines or websites (past or present) do you model yourselves on?
All and none of them in a sense. TNI’s unusual roots makes it a different creature than most of the magazines we resemble on the surface. We aspire to write essay-reviews in the tradition of (if I may) The Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, and Bookforum, which is to say we look for critical pieces that go beyond their subject.
One element that sets us apart from other magazines is that we’ve committed our review section primarily to coverage of independent and academic press books, which have suffered tremendously from the dramatic reduction of review sections in most newspapers and magazines — not to mention the trend of critics-as-publicists sweeping the few book supplements left standing.
Do you think there's a kind of criticism that is more suited to the internet than to print?
It depends on how you define criticism. To my mind, criticism at its core is merely the act of revealing links between objects. The long form essay was once the best (or only) way to reveal social or historical contextualization or demonstrate the relationship between two seemingly unrelated works of art, but new media has created new ways of doing this.
The ability to assemble multimedia is key. The commentary-less juxtapositions between philosophy, contemporary scientific findings, art, and link round-ups that you find on our designer Imp Kerr’s
New Shelton Wet/Dry is one excellent example. And I think the fluid tonality enabled by blogs lays the ground work for something like
If You Can Read This, You’re Lying to develop a political stance that oscillates effectively between audacious claim-making and satire. Just to name two.
What (more generally) are the intellectual influences behind TNI?
I won’t speak for the group as a whole because I don’t filter the contributions of each of our editors through my point of view, but I was initially turned on to criticism by music writers: Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, and Peter Guralnick were all big influences of mine. My degree is in Women’s Studies, and a feminist perspective drives a lot of my sense of purpose to make The New Inquiry one of the (very) few critical magazines committed to bringing attention to the best art and criticism by women, under the direction of an editorial board with women on all levels of leadership, including the person responsible for paying the bills (me) — which key to keeping TNI systemically women-friendly.
What are some of your favorite pieces that you've run, which reflect what you want The New Inquiry to be all about?
Rob Horning’s writing has definitely given shape to
The New Inquiry’s voice. He’s developed a brilliant and original body of work related to social media. A representative piece might be
“Comfortably Alone,” and I also recommend one of his sleeper-hits,
“The Failure Addict."
Matt Pearce’s
“Death by Twitter” is a great example of how a critic who is also a digital native can extract deeper meanings from the new forms enabled by digital media than your average trend columnist.
Malcolm Harris’ body of work on TNI and elsewhere about student debt has made the issue a defining one for us. One of my favorites of his is
"School’s Out Forever."
I think Jenna Brager’s essays for us do a great job of positioning what might otherwise be esoteric academic press books in the center of widely-relevant public discourse. Her
“Bad Mothers” piece, which we published just two days after the Casey Anthony verdict was announced, is one example.
Much of your material has been outspokenly political. Do you see TNI as occupying any particular ideological position? Are there causes or tendencies that you, as a group, align yourselves with?
The guiding principle in the editorial process is: Is this boring? Is this safe? If the answer is yes, then it’s not for us. We’re not offering a platform for any one political group to rally around. I’m lucky to have a lot of politically active, passionate editors on staff and I’m happy their work produces conversation and debate, but TNI isn’t an organ for some leftist faction. I picked the best writers and thinkers I could find. If a lot of them happen to be socialists, communists or radical anarchists, so be it.
How is the new TNI Beta site, launching this week, different from what's been online since 2009?
The most significant change enabled by the new site is our ability to host blogs in addition to publish our regular flow of essays and reviews.
We’ve assembled a dream team of the best bloggers on the internet: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (South/South), Aaron Bady (Zunguzungu), Evan Calder Williams (Noonday Shadow, formerly of Socialism and/or Barbarism), Christine Baumgarthuber (The Austerity Kitchen), Autumn Whitefield-Madrano (The Beheld), Imp Kerr (Shines Like Gold), and, of course, Rob Horning (Marginal Utility).
In addition to the free content available on your website, you're now offering a $2 downloadable magazine. Can you explain the thinking that led to this decision? Will magazine readers get any content that website readers won't?
The New Inquiry Magazine is a monthly collection of new and past content organized around a common theme, delivered on the first Monday of each month as an e-reader-enabled PDF. Readers can subscribe to the magazine for $2 per month.
It’s counter to our editorial perspective to protect content behind a paywall and frankly, it’s bad business. It astonishes me when editors of magazines tell me they save their best essays for print. Why on earth would they think it’s wise to actively prohibit their best articles from going viral online? On the off-chance that people do end up talking about a print-only article, the publication will get shamed into putting it online anyway. It’s silly.
In theory, freeloading readers can make a point of reading absolutely everything we publish over a several month stretch for free on the web and get the full TNI "experience," but I think subscribing to the magazine adds value for other reasons. First and foremost, because it provides our readers with a low-barrier method of supporting what we do. Most people don’t know that our editors work on a volunteer basis, and part of that work includes raising money to pay all of our contributors for their work. We have less funding than most other magazines of our visibility, yet we're one of the few online publications that offer writers compensation. The $2 subscription model creates a micro-payment revenue stream to help us do this.
The other reason to subscribe is for the value of the magazine itself. It’s worth noting that our editorial structure is relatively non-hierarchical. Editors are authorized to develop pieces with contributors of their choosing without my direct oversight, which results in the defining characteristic of The New Inquiry’s editorial voice: unpredictability.
Aside from the convenience of delivery and the beautiful design and original illustrations by Imp Kerr, the magazine gives readers the ability to engage with our content in a more editorially focused way (under the direction of Atossa Araxia Abrahamian and Sarah Leonard). For instance, our first issue, "Precarity," features both new and classic essays we’ve written or commissioned that rhyme in some sense with this notion of “precarity.” We have a dialogue between Hannah Hart of
My Drunk Kitchen and Frank Warren of
Post Secret discussing the unprecedented experience and inherent instability of sudden, unlooked-for internet fame; a conversation about freelance writing between Willie Osterweil and Susan Salter Reynolds (whose firing from the
L.A. Times we learned about from
Tom Lutz's essay "Future Tense" in the
LARB); a piece on women’s tenuous use of so-called "erotic capital" in the workplace; essays about internships and temp work; and criticism about the precarious-economy underpinnings for shows like
Breaking Bad and
Dexter — all rounded out with magazine-y content like a regular advice column and other features that you’ll have to subscribe to the magazine to see! The content will all be online eventually, but you see some of it first in the magazine. It’s a really fine line to walk: we’re mostly of the generation that believes we’re entitled to all information whenever we want it for free, but my whole goal is to put these writers in the position to feed themselves with their work.
Basically, $2 a month is a pretty negligible price to pay for 130 pages of outstanding, illustrated, meticulously labored-over content. And if a lot of people subscribe to it even though they don’t really have to, we can keep making it.
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