[upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Francis Zehrer. And I'm Daisy Alioto. And Daisy, who are we talking to today? Today, we are talking to Sarah Leonard.
She is the editor-in-chief of Lux Magazine, and she is also a contributing editor to Dissent and The Nation. Um, she previously worked at The Appeal and The New Inquiry.
The Lux, if you're not familiar, is a feminist magazine of politics and culture founded in 2021. Um, they publish a glossy print edition, it's honestly beautiful, three times a year, and their writers are award-winning.
They have a newsletter. They have a podcast. So if you haven't dipped into the world of Lux, strongly recommend it. They have a really strong point of view on politics and culture. It's a socialist feminist magazine.
Um, but today we're really gonna get into, like, what it's like to be an independent media company in 2005. '25, oh, shit. Sorry. 2005, wow. Tom. I don't know, whatever. No. Tom, don't cut that. That's a freak day.
Don't cut that. I- It's a, you know, long day. You know it- It's only- You know it's my lunch hour. [laughs] Speaking of lunch, Francis, you were in Portugal. Um- Yes. Okay...
which I, which I found out because I tried to text you and it was green, and I was like, "Sex he blocks me-" Did you block me? [laughs] "I'm so happy to have him." No, I love New York traveling. [laughs] Yeah. So like,
it had, like, a weird... Like, it didn't even, like, deliver, you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. And, uh, I was like- Well, so I u- I use-... so damn-...
eSIM when I travel, and there's probably- This, he's too cheap to pay for international. This is pathetic. Look, look, the l- pathetic, no. No.
It's, it, it's actually an intentional movement to free myself, uh, from the day-to-day. Oh.
No, I, I, I think there's probably a way to set up an eSIM and connect it to my iMessage, but I'm really not interested in that. Like, look, I was, I was out of the country for
Wednesday through Mu- Sunday or s- however many days that is, like five days. Um, is it so wrong to, to not wanna- No... [laughs] get text messages?
I mean, I was texting you about something kind of important, but I just went rogue. So it's fine. That's true. Um, anyways, one thing, uh, so in Portugal, Portugal was beautiful. I was in Porto. Porto.
Two, two points: some great food, nice people... I guess that's three points. Nice people, beautiful gardens. Beautiful gardens. Mm. Wow. There was... Literally we were at this w- the, uh,
I, I'm not gonna try to speak Portuguese, but the Crystal Palace Garden there, and there's kind of like a bandshell. There's a ton of, um, peacocks around this garden. Mm. Like, a ton of them.
This fucking peacock was literally, like, standing in the bandshell, like doing its, you know, with its feathers spread, turning around and preening for, like- He was trying to steal your girl...
for, like, 20 people watching. Well, uh, I, I wonder, though, if, if, if...
'Cause there's, like, 20 people, like, you know, who are walking around the park, standing there, filming him, whatever, and it's like does this, like, trigger the same thing in the peacock getting all this attention from all those people- Mm...
as it would from a lady peacock? Because, you know, th- He's an interspecies exhibitionist. Interspecies exhibition...
And he's in the bandshell, so you, you have to assume, you, you assume that it's because, like, it's good acoustics for when he squawks. Mm-hmm. 'Cause he was squawking, it wasn't just peacocking.
Um- For some reason this is making me wanna do, like, a Slavoj Žižek, like, "The peacock." [laughs] Okay. Well, l- are, are you gonna do it? No. [laughs] I'm not, I'm no longer confident in my ability- Okay...
to do an impression, no. I'm sorry. I figured as much. Um, the, the only, the only other thing I wanna say about that, though, um, I was, when we spoke with Carl Nagy a couple weeks ago- Mm-hmm...
and he was talking about irrational hospitality, uh- Yeah. Did you have any irrational hospitality experiences? I did, but it's almost more that, like, [laughs]
it's more that I feel like a lot of American restaurants and American airlines, by which I don't mean just the airline- No... but American airlines generally.
I think it, they don't even have a rational hospitality, but they have, like, an, they're, like, inhospitable. You know what I mean? Um- Hostile. Hostile hospitality... they're ra- rationally hostile. Yeah. Um, yeah.
So there was one restaurant we went to that's... I'm not gonna, I'm not, I'm gonna gatekeep it. You can, you can, you can Google- No. You can Goog... Not... Okay. Well, I can tell you off po- just give me... Okay.
Just let me Google. Put it in the show notes. Put it in the show notes. No. Um, it's this beautiful restaurant, had a Michelin star from '74 to '80. It's been around since that long. Mm.
It's this beautiful view of the city. It's just such a beautiful room. It's like, you know, the guys in the, the white shirts and the black bow ties, and dessert cart, cocktail cart, et cetera. Beautiful.
And I, I don't know if I've ever had that good of service or at least that type of service- Mm... at a restaurant- Mm-hmm...
that is so, like, dated and, like, you know, is so, "We had a Michelin, Michelin star 40, 50 years ago." Um, but the thing is as an American tourist in Portugal,
you end up eating meals at restaurants next to other American tourists in Portugal, and- Bummer. Bummer. Um, no, I, I, I, I was incensed
when these people sat down next to us, this loud group of ep- of, you know, mid-20s Americans, very loud, no respect for the ritual of it, no respect for receiving this kind of irrational- Mm... hospitality. Um,
I remember they sat down, five of them, and one of the girls was like, takes a look at the wine list. She's like, "There's no Cab Sauv or Pinot Grigio." She's like, "That's weird. They, they sort it by region here."
And I was, I was... It set... They're so loud. You know, it's the type of place where we're kind of speaking in hushed tones over the table, uh, enjoying the, the soft kind of jazzy music being piped in. Mm-hmm. Um,
I don't know. I was just embar- I was, I was embarrassed- Yeah, that would piss me off... to be American. Like, go home and drink some Joshua. Yeah. [laughs] Some Joshua.
Don't use the full, the full g- [laughs] Full government name of the wine.... brand name.
[laughs] Like, yeah, go drink some S- Joshua and watch Summer House in your oversized sorority shirt.And leave the culture for the rest of us Yeah, this...
Okay, one of these people, too, um, they were all, like, med students from Ohio or something. One, one of them- A likely place for them to be [laughs] Likely place for them to be.
But one of the g- one of the guys was living in Porto, though. He was- Mm-hmm... doing, like, a residency or something, I don't know. Mm-hmm. And I heard him say they'd...
I know way too much about these people, 'cause they were talking so damn loud. Yeah, me too. Um, and, and he said that he, he [laughs] learned about the restaurant from one of the nurses at the hospital.
He said something, he's like, uh, he's like, "Yeah, you know, I picked this path in, in med school because you can do 30 biopsies in a day, and they pay really well.
And because it's essential surgery or whatever, they al- you're always reimbursed." Um, which I found to, to be grim. But anyways, the name of the restaurant is... Not gonna say it. Uh...
Well, we'd be eating them all the time if I was doing biopsies, but instead I am editing blog posts, so. Unfortunately, you're editing blog posts.
So let's go talk, [laughs] let's go talk to Sarah about- Let's talk about magazines... about editing. Yeah. [laughs] [upbeat music] Are you gonna talk about, what's that underpass y- that you love to talk about?
Are Dave's Tunnel? I love to talk about the Big Dig. [laughs] It wasn't, it was so much more than a tunnel, Francis. It was all that Bostonians talked about for about 11 years.
[laughs] It was, like, a classically, like, you know, like, over budget, over extended construction project that was ultimately, like, named after a Kennedy. Like- Mm-hmm...
I mean, it was, like, really- I feel like this is, like-... like some piece of shit... some, some ripe IP for, like, for some studio to pick up.
[laughs] I mean, I think you could make an, an argument that Mitt Romney would not have been governor of Massachusetts if people weren't radicalized by the runaway budget [laughs] of the Big Dig.
You know, I think in the era- That's a great point... in the era when every- I'm just saying...
company is a media company, I would say we're about 15 years from the Dunkin' Donuts content studio creating a 60-minute movie about this. Oh, yeah. That seems right. Um- Mm-hmm... well, maybe I, they'll give me a job.
[laughs] Maybe that, that'll be, like, the last good job in, in, uh, media. How come you haven't partnered with them for Dirt yet? Such a good question.
I mean, they are quite a large operation, but I do think some people I went to high school with work there. Mm-hmm.
So maybe it's time for me to do a little DM slide and be like, "Congratulations on all of your children, and also..." [laughs] Um, speaking of working together- Yeah...
I believe y'all are working on a project together coming up this- Well, I don't know how much we can reveal. So we- Oh, okay. [laughs]... technically revealing everything on Friday.
Um, but yeah, Luxe and Dirt are collaborating on a contest. Um, I'm not going to say what the theme is, but it will be, uh, it's an editorial project that we're doing together.
So the, the, uh, the winner will be published in both Luxe and Dirt. Yeah, our first crossover. I love a crossover. Me too. But
Sarah, I mean, not to throw you right into it, but, um, I think w- part of what was interesting about collaborating is, like, Dirt is not in print, Luxe is.
And we had, um, Eliza from Cake Scene on, I guess a few months ago now, maybe more than a few months ago, and we talked a little bit about, like, "Hey, what's up with print?"
Um, obviously people are really searching for tangible things, but I know that there's, like, very real costs associated with having a physical magazine.
And I was curious, like, what, how are you feeling about print, like, in this moment, and what are the challenges and what are the advantages? I think people really like it. We like it, and it's why we made it.
You know, a lot of us grew up reading magazines and associate it with, like, having time to think by yourself or share something with a friend and not be bombarded with garbage all the time, which I think is how we feel online.
And I think print has been making a bit of a comeback. I've been invited lately to more zine fairs and stuff like that than I used to be. Mm-hmm. And I think that as people are experiencing a lot of the
platform internet culture as mostly a bad, painful, embarrassing, and exhausting experience, um, people are getting curious about print again.
Um, and it's also why newsletters are successful, obviously, like Dirt. I mean, people are like, "Yes, I can read, like, one thing from someone I trust that's not part of a stream."
And, um, so I mean, I think for us it's been very exciting to get to do the sort of collaborations between writers and artists that are very natural to the format, uh, to have launches when a new one comes out, it feels like a bigger deal.
We have all the authors come. We travel with it. I was just in North Carolina with it. It's very, very fun. We love it. We love putting it together.
At the same time, um, from a business standpoint, like you said, it's actually kind of s- like, a terrible idea. Like, it, the costs are just monumentally larger.
Um, you know, we print to a pretty high standard, because we wanted a magazine that was really welcoming to our politics and our point of view and that delighted us and we would want to get in the mail.
Um, and we didn't really see the point of making it in print if we're, we weren't gonna make it, like, really gorgeous. And our creative director, Sharanya Durvasula, is amazing, so it's also like a playground for her.
So, like, it comes with a lot of, like, sort of fun elements and excuse to do a lot of events, and we found that our readers really like in-person events a lot. Um-And so it, it has all these benefits.
But yeah, from a business perspective, it's like the magazine industry was built on print advertising.
That basically doesn't exist anymore, totally dysfunctional, and so if you wanna print something, you have to get subscriptions of course, but you also have to fundraise. It's impossible not to.
Um, so it creates its own other forms of work and all of that sort of thing. But, you know, in terms of how people react to print, like extremely positive and lovely.
What was the process of designing the magazine and site like? 'Cause I actually had the LUXE site on our mood board when we were designing Dirt's website, um, because I thought it was an example of...
Yeah, I thought it was an example of a webpage that really felt like it had a relationship to print.
Like, I love, um, websites that feel like magazines, and it's cool, like, when you do stuff on the web that you wouldn't be able to do on the page, but I think certain things go too far in the other direction.
Like, I don't like web brutalism where there's like huge fonts and moving shapes and inexplicable gradients- [laughs]... um, which is less the brutalism and more the sort of like web three aesthetic.
So I thought LUXE toed the line really well because there are like, you know, elements and moving modules that you can only really do on a screen, but it feels like a true translation of the magazine to the web.
Um, was that, was that process like fun for you? 'Cause I, I think... I mean, whenever I get to go through a design exercise, that's like the fun part for me. Totally.
I'm so happy to hear you say all of that, and I'm completely with you that having moving things following you around or like having to read sideways or having things explode in the corner of your screen is like not actually an enjoyable reading experience.
[laughs] Um, uh, so for us, yeah, I mean, we wanted it to be clean. We wanted in a way to respect the reader.
Like, if you're trying to read something, we believe that you're here to read it, and we don't wanna like try to like hold your attention in artificial ways with a lot of like shit zinging around.
Um, but then on the web VR side of it, um, we... The way we have our article archive looks a lot more like a database, so you can sort by different functions, um, you know, keywords and authors and things like that.
But it sort of... It, it's not, but it almost looks like it was built on a spreadsheet or an Airtable or something the way you can sort it.
And I really wanted something like that because I like the idea of being able to sort of see the whole picture, and I'm like an Airtable freak personally.
Like, I run parts of my own life on it in a way that is probably unhealthy, but it gives me a sense of control over the world. Wait, this is fascinating. J- not to interrupt- [laughs]... but like what part of your...
What parts of your personal life are you managing on Airtable? Hmm. Well, this... Okay. I'm, uh... Okay, 'cause we're friends I'm just gonna embarrass myself. So I, I mean, I have like a to-do list in there. Mm-hmm.
That's pretty normal. But I've also cataloged all of my books and all of my clothes [laughs] into very, like a fairly rigorous- Whoa... set of databases in a way that is a little crazy. I... Wait, I love this.
Are you using this for like, "Oh, I lent this book to this person," or, "Oh, I've read this book X amount of times. Let me update it after reading it," and like, "This is the order I read them," and like what...
Is it like your own personal Goodreads or something? It's not as much about personal data as like finding books, knowing what category I put them in on my shelves. I have like, you know, like too many.
Um, I do check off if I've read them. I try to take notes on them sometimes, so I'll like... I use that to organize them. Um, and what actually has helped me is there are certain topics I write about regularly.
So I have written many articles about abortion, for example. Yeah. It will shock you to know. And what I've found is as I read books, I can tag them.
So sometimes it's kind of nice for me to know here are the novels I've read that actually make some sort of mention of abortion.
Um, and so when I'm like thinking about a topic, I'm not sure what I'm saying yet, I can kind of like look around and be like, "What, what books have I thought about to date?"
Or like, "What do I have that once looked incredibly interesting to me and that I never read?" Uh, it, it sort of started when I was buying so many secondhand books that I had rebought a book and I was like, I...
[laughs] Th- this is out of control on a number of levels, but A, I'll make a list of them, and B, I will return to using the public library. Uh, so anyway, yeah. [laughs] That's how I use it in my life.
That's so fascinating. Uh- [laughs]... well, you mentioned before, like, I mean, you could obviously share as much or as little as you want about like the business model, but in addition to subscriptions, fundraising.
Um, you know, for example, like I've seen N plus 1 does their book match thing every year. They have a gala. Um, I know a lot of independent magazines are eligible for grants.
What is the sort of like breakdown of like the overall pie of your operating budget? Like, where... What's the fraction coming from readers versus elsewhere? It's about half and half. Mm-hmm.
Um, and I think for us fundraising is an interesting endeavor, 'cause some of it is applying for grants that go to journalism projects and support writers.
But-Really for us, we have such a specific politics and such a specific point of view, that the people who are going to donate to us in any consistent way, they have to like, it has to really appeal to them. Mm-hmm.
They have to get it.
They have to share some of our politics, or it's just not going to be compelling to them, and it'll be, um, you know, I tried earlier on in the magazine process sort of casting a wider net, which, like, we're certainly always open to, but, like, trying to sell people who are obsessed with the re-election prospects of Democratic Congress people on supporting a socialist magazine that has a strong culture component is just not productive.
Mm-hmm. Like, they have to be people who have already seen some problems with the system and are looking for different kinds of answers.
And for those folks, it's really exciting and interesting to support the magazine because they're, all of a sudden it's like, here's this world of, like, writers and editors and people who are really thinking about the questions that I'm asking.
Um, and then it's exciting. It's essentially collaborative. Um, you know, so that's, like, a very different experience than you would get at, like, a really long-standing large publication.
Did your experience at Dissent and The Nation sort of inform how you went about finding and approaching these people, or is it just, like, totally different?
I mean, I know, like, the editorial process, and you've talked about, like, in interviews, like, with The Creative Independent, like, how it's much different from plugging into an existing ecosystem, but were there things about your background there that kind of prepared you for
running an operation like this? [laughs] Yes and no. Um- Mm-hmm... I mean, they really prepared me editorially. Yeah. I had incredible training at both of those places. I started out at Dissent, which is a publication of
political theory, political economy. Um, it, you know, the tradition there, the intellectual tradition, which was socialist, but it was a very specific sort of New York intellectual tradition of
ta- expecting that anyone should be able to talk about anything. Mm-hmm. And so you really had to come in ready to those editorial meetings.
And, you know, you're gonna talk about the teacher strike in Chicago, but you were also meant to talk about the war in Syria, and you were meant to do those on the same day, y- you know, with radically different types of authors and to have an intelligent opinion about it.
And, you know, there are pluses and minuses of approaching intellectual work that way at all, but it did train me to, as an editor, to think, "Okay, I can work with any writer.
If I do a lot of reading, if I ask the right kinds of questions, I can work with anyone." And that's very exciting and very liberating.
It's also a very difficult way to edit in that you're constantly trying to educate yourself, um, almost as much as the writer of the article. You know, I'd be, like, reading books in order to edit.
So that's a very particular type of tradition, and The Nation is much more journalistic.
So I would go in there and be like, "I think we should do this article on this really interesting idea," and they'd be like, "Yes, what's the news hook?" And I'm like, "It's interesting?" You know?
[laughs] So for them, it was much more journalistic. It's what's happening, what's the news hook, uh, what new information is our reporting adding to this issue, um, can we send someone there, can we do more interviews?
And that was really exciting, and I got trained in that, in fact-checking, in everything that it takes to make bulletproof journalism. So that sort of editing education was huge. Um,
and in terms of, like, the business of making a magazine run, I think every magazine is very idiosyncratic actually.
Dissent had a subscriber base, um, that dated back not quite to the magazine's founding, which was in 1954, but people who had been with the magazine for decades and were like family.
So that's a very specific sort of thing. The Nation has, like, this incredible, passionate, very large small donor program- Mm-hmm... where, like, people really identify with The Nation as their politics.
And, um, the magazine prints everyone's name in the magazine every year. And so it's this really nice sort... They have their own sort of thing there.
So I think for us, we're discovering on the sort of business side what that will look like, and I think our point of view is strong enough that over time the right people will find us who, like, that speaks to, and we're always looking for them.
So yeah, I mean, I got a very particular kind of, like, lefty media intellectual training.
And then I had also, um, als- uh, early on worked with The New Inquiry, which was, like, a young, weird literary publication that wrote a lot about the internet.
So I got also a bit of that, which was, like, the scrappy project, which in many ways is closer to what Lutz is. What else do you, like, know about your audience?
Um, obviously that identification of being, like, a Lux reader or a Lux writer is so important and, like, I think being able to build that brand equity in, like, less than five years really speaks to the quality of what you're doing and is an argument for doing everything custom and not necessarily just starting a Substack.
I mean, obviously mileage varies, but when I hear people describe something as a Dirt story or I see that they wanna collect the byline because they wanna be known as a Dirt writer, that to me is, like, the ultimate validation of our platform and our taste, and it is the thing about, um, media that I really don't think is going to go away because it stands out so much among-...
the slop and like, you know, the permeability of the algorithm where things come and things go, and nothing looks special and nothing looks distinct.
So, you know, beyond that sort of identification, which really is, I think, the most important part, like, what are the sort of demographics and kinda qualities of, of your audience that you're aware of, and how do you use that to, um, you know, better serve them and, and find more people like that could be luxe readers?
Yeah. I mean, I know that feeling so well, and it's so cool to know the dirt reader or the luxe reader and feel like your people have found you. It's really rewarding.
I think what I've seen so far is that at least when we have events, which might be different from the overall readership, but when we have events, um, our audience skews young, so a lot of people in their 20s, um, diverse across a lot of different axes, um, definitely skews queer.
Um, and what we've found is that when we do public events, friends bring friends, and so that's- Mm... a very fun way to involve more people.
But we're also kind of intentional about it, so we, for example, we had an issue where we interviewed a lot of public librarians about the bizarre pressures they were under because the library is like the social service center of last resort, and also now Moms for Liberty are showing up and, like- Mm...
yelling at them and being crazy. And they're unionized, and there are also folks who take their work and their sort of ethics in their work extremely seriously.
So we had this one piece that interviewed some different librarians, and then when we had our launch party, we invited all of the librarians who are in the New York and Brooklyn Public Library unions to come to the launch party.
You know, and normally you have to be a subscriber, but we were like, "Just, you know, come hang out." Um, and people came, and, like, that was really lovely.
And in the last issue, we had a big cover story on policing gender in sports, which is, of course, tied to the attacks on trans athletes right now, but goes deeper into the history of, um, testing cis women to see if they're, like, woman enough or have been, like, masculinized by sports.
I mean, this goes back, like, 100 years, and all sorts of, like, disgusting testing regimes and all sorts of things that are now being sort of translated out into new kinds of attacks on especially queer athletes.
Um, and so that piece was a big project for us, and on the cover of the magazine, we used a photograph of Brooklyn Rugby, which is, like, a team that exists in New York City, um, that's inclusive and very popular.
And there are other inclusive teams in New York City that people play on recreationally but, like, quite seriously. It's New York, so, you know.
Uh, and that includes, like, this amazing hockey team that I have friends on. So we, like, reached out to the sports teams, and we were like, "Come to the party," and people did.
And you know, so it's kind of like these ways of not just covering something, but also making sure that coverage, like, gets to the people who it would be relevant to, and not just doing that but, like, also doing an event that expands on it.
You know, we just did one around the sports thing at the Brooklyn Public Library. Like, a ton of young people were there. Like, queer athletes were there. It was amazing.
Um, and then we also then try to capture those people. We get their emails. We get their information. We try to get them to come back and, like, bring their friends. So you know, I don't feel like...
For us, it's been this sort of, like, development over time. I don't think... I don't know. There, there are ways that you can try to explode onto the scene. You know, have things going viral.
You can try to get coverage of the magazine in other outlets, and we've done a bit of that, and I think we should do more of that. That's, that's all to the good.
But nothing really replaces sort of, like, building up the audience with people who actually are committed to the project and interested in the politics because those people aren't going anywhere, and you can do things with them.
Those are the people who wanna have a reading group. Those are the people who wanna, like, host you in Texas. You know, those are the... You know, that's how it builds into something that I think is, um,
sustainable in the, the true sense of the word. And especially right now, having something that's, like, connective tissue among people with that point of view in different places feels really important.
And if we start doing more newsletter-y stuff, that will be why, to, like, be a little more responsive to what folks are dealing with. You, you said something in that Creative Independent interview that Daisy referenced.
Um, I'll read, like, a quick bit from it. You said, "When I was younger, if I felt behind in my work, I would deny myself leaving the house at the end of the day and feel like I had to keep working."
A- and then you talk about how what you learned is you have to go out. You should always go out. You have to talk to people. It makes it easier. It makes the work flow.
Um, and I was just thinking about that the whole time you were saying that, how it... That, I mean, especially
for something that is this, like, politically sharp, socialist in particular project, like, that type of literally real world connection is so important and is so crucial, and it feels like that is...
The way you were talking about it just now and all the different... Like, you had so many examples.
It, it feels like that's kind of the point of the project is to bring people together in the real world based on these ideas that you're publishing.
But the, the point is more the connection, the, the social connection than, than just the reading. Yeah. I, I think so. You know- I'm so guilty of this...
I think we want people to be together.I think the thing that I've, for me, that it's no longer about, um, any sort of like writer's block or editorial, uh, instinct keeping me at my desk.
It's really that like, um, an independent media company is, at the end of the day, a small business.
And that will to sort of babysit that side of it can be really strong, even when you're waiting to hear back from somebody else and you don't have control over it.
You feel that sense of control if you're at your laptop, and it's something I'm still working on. And I agree with you about, um, [lips smack]
I'm never really sure like what the right amount of attention Dirt should be courting is, and, um, I've turned down press too, and I... Could be because I think at the end of the day, it's about consistency.
I'm not good at making things go viral. I don't really understand the mechanisms of it.
Um, I'm pretty good at like picking out of things that I haven't created, things, and predicting things that would go viral or could go viral.
But when it comes to actually doing it and pulling those levers, I just don't think it's my specialty.
But what I do understand is like consistency, and consistency of cadence, and consistency of quality and editorial voice, and the deep relationship that that can create with a reader.
And so because I understand that, I'm confident in that playbook. Um, [lips smack]
but I wanted to actually reference something else that you said in the Creative Independent interview that really resonated with me, um, which is you said, "When I was younger, I wrote a lot of very polemical pieces like, 'You all think that liberal feminism is good, but actually I'm here to tell you that class matters.'
That's the enormous confidence of youth, which is not a bad thing. It just is." Um,
I think w- a, [chuckles] a piece that I come back to all the time, I think it was in The Baffler, and I wanna say Rachel Connolly wrote it, but it could've been somebody else, and it was, um,
calling out a style of writing that was basically like, "This thing is late capitalism." Like there was- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah...
a whole period where, yeah, everything in mainstream magazines was about things that millennials ruined, and everything in the left press was just identifying things as late capitalism, whether it was like a KitchenAid or, um, [lips smack]
you know, uh, the wing or whatever. So, and I think, and I think I was guilty of that in some ways too, and I see it now when I review pitches.
There are young, talented people and writers with a lot of enthusiasm, and they'll come and they'll say something like, um, you know, "Susan Sontag's writing about photography explains
Instagram and, you know, capitalism." And it's like, yeah, that's right. Like, you could tell they like just figured it out, and it's like, that is... That's right. But also like, who cares? That's not a story. Like,
it, it's true, like these, these ideas that you're putting together are part of growing as a writer, but like the story is not identifying something as like inherently capitalist or inherently unequal.
It's really showing the stakes and the narrative around it, even if it's just a personal critical essay.
And so I wish I had more time to explain when I get these pitches, other than just to give some encouragement and say that it's not right, and frankly, I don't always have time.
And, um, that is something that I feel like time limited and that ability to offer mentorship with people that we're not commissioning.
But, um, you know, I think I've thought a lot about like how do you teach people this, and I think it really is just about experience.
Um, but I'm curious whether you agree, and if you've worked with young people that you've been able to sort of like
break out of just, I think, you know, just coming out of the academic environment where everything is like theory. Um, theory writing is not magazine writing. Totally. Yeah, I certainly identify with that experience. Uh,
we actually have a set of documents that we wrote, like Google Docs, h- about how to pitch Luxx and how to pitch us a feature or how to pitch us a review and what we look for in those.
Because like you, I was like, it's probably not the best strategy for me to try to like re-explain our entire concept of a feature article every time. So those have been useful to us. We give examples, you know,
for us, we're not looking for news exactly for Luxx.
We would like there to be some answer to the question why now, but every article is going to have some sort of argument behind it, some sort of analysis, some intervention in how we think we understand things. So, um,
you know, we tend to ask a question like, you know, we're really interested... There's a period
sort of during the defund the police moment, right afterwards, where mayors in various cities were saying, "Defund has caused crime to rise."
And we knew this was a stupid narrative, partly because nothing had been defunded. However, um, there were cities where people were experiencing a lot of violence.
And so if we didn't have a way to think through why that was and how that related to demands like defunding the police, like that was not gonna be good for us politically and our point of view.
And so we're really interested in actually just exploring how does defund interact with situations where people experience violence and often turn to the police.
And so we ended up doing a piece on the organizer Kat Brooks, who's in Oakland, who had been working on abolitionist projects for some time. And Oakland was alsoUm, experiencing a lot of violence in that moment.
And so it became a reported piece that, of course, was following Kat Brooks around and looking at the work, but it was really trying to answer a deeper question, and it was bringing that question to her and the other people who she met.
So, you know, I'm always trying to explain, like, yes, we don't just want something cool is happening. [laughs] We wanna know what is this telling us about the world that we didn't know before.
And that can definitely be challenging. I think like any place there are a lot of pitches we just can't really engage with.
Um, certainly we don't engage with pitches where it's clear the person has never looked at the magazine. Um, but in some cases I've thought, "Oh, this writer is asking really interesting questions.
They just don't really know how to do a piece yet." Mm. And usually in that case, I really like the phone. I spend a lot of time on the phone with writers. And a lot of the time, it's asking them
more and more questions until we get to what I think is actually the nut of the idea and what they're trying to say. Um, and it's often not what they first thought they were trying to say.
We get to something more interesting. Um, and sometimes I'll read around before talking with them and try to think, like, how are the questions you're asking fitting into the larger coverage of this area?
Um, you know, I... So I think, I think the phone is very underrated. I, I, you know, I, I think most of the problems I've solved with writers have been over the phone.
Um, and then I, I'm a very, um, I, I am a fairly interventionist editor always. Um, I mean, not... Obviously, it varies in relation [laughs] to where the piece is at.
But, you know, I ask a lot of questions in the margins. I will rewrite text completely if I think it's not clear or if I think the piece wants to go somewhere other than where it's going to begin with.
And then I always write to the writer and I say, um, I tell them where I've intervened. Um, I'm like, "Look, if you think that I've got you wrong, please tell me."
Like, I'm not trying to, like, write your piece for you, but this is the best way I can articulate to you what I think, where I think we wanna go. Um, and people reject things sometimes too. But, um, you know, I...
It, it's a lot of communication, and it took me many years to realize that the submission of a rough draft was like the beginning of a conversation and not, you know,
something I had to decide right then, like, is this good? Is this bad? If it's not ready, do I have to, like, freak out and worry if I'm gonna have to kill the piece? But no, it's like, it's actually like the opening.
And so doesn't mean you never have to kill a piece, but, like, I don't know. I, I've learned over time that it's just, like, an enormous amount of communication and a conversation up to the finish line.
And looked at that way, it becomes really interesting because I always learn a lot from my writers. They're always writing on something they know better than me. So, like, that's the great gift of it, being an editor.
One, one thing I...
Like, connecting this back to what you were talking about earlier is how, like, earlier in your career you, you know, you had to come to these editorial meetings, like, with a really informed opinion on something that you may not have known anything about before you were approaching a piece, and then talking about maybe younger writers who are coming with a pitch that is maybe, like, developing their ideas about a thing, but just more like as a self-serving function of like, "Oh, now I understand this," without connecting it to a broader world.
It's like your job is then to bridge to them, like, "Yes, you're right to be interested in this thing.
Like, now let me help guide you to, like, the actual socially consequential aspect of this beyond, like, what other people have already written about and covered and is more known.
Like, here's how I push you to, to really advancing that idea in the discourse." Which, I mean, I think about, like, uh... I saw some tweet yesterday that was like...
It was one of these things where somebody's quote tweeting another tweet with a screenshot of a tweet, and I always hate when I talk about, "Oh, I saw this tweet." There's... Anyways, um, [laughs] but it was- Hey...
one that was like, uh, "Some of you think you're really glamorous philosophers, but you're actually just kind of stupid." Which, you know, very flippant, but I think, like, to soften that- Classic tweet. Love that one...
to soften that into what we're talking about here, it's like, yes, when you can publish your own newsletter, your tweets or your Substack, whatever it is, and get some positive feedback, um, about one of these more, like, baseline ideas,
it can trick you into thinking that you've figured out the core of this idea. Uh, but that's just why editors are important, I guess, is the point I'm making. Oh, yeah. I tweeted a lot when I was 22.
I mean, I was on Twitter all the time. I, um, was very engaged and did get that kind of feedback sometimes, you know?
Like, it was before it was quite so brutal out there, but you could get a lot of affirmation by tweeting something funny or s- smart or, you know, that people shared your politics.
Um, and I would get a very different kind of feedback from, like, the older editors at the publication where, like, they knew a lot of stuff I didn't.
And they'd be like, "That's a really interesting point, but X, Y, Z people have already written that, and here are the challenges with that, and maybe you wanna incorporate that into your piece."
And, you know, I would learn from them. Um, it's not that you can't learn from Twitter. People have intellectual debates there all the time.
But I learned a lot from editors, and I think it's our job, honestly, to develop people into better writers the same way I had the absolute privilege of being edited by people who were senior to me or even by my peers.
Um,
you know, otherwiseLike there's a kind of exploitation that goes on online where young people are just meant to write like personal essays about the worst thing that ever happened to them, and that's what they learn to produce.
But people are capable of a lot more than that, and the question of how do you get there, you know, is it through reporting? How does reporting work? Like what do you do when you call someone on the phone?
Like how you check your facts? Those things are skills, and they can be taught, and it's our job to teach them so people can, um, y- you know, ex- can sort of do the, the...
I don't know, it sounds corny, can do the best work that they can do. People have ideas, but they need the tools, and so that's what, that's a big part of what editing is, I think.
Is there a piece that, uh, that you're particularly proud of publishing at Lux that really represents the kind of culmination of this process, everything coming together, like
the specific point of view of Lux, the like readiness of the writer, um, your ability to sort of like interject in that process? Yeah, there are a lot of pieces I feel that way about actually. Um,
the gender in sports one we just published, I was really proud of. Um, I edited that. It was by a pair of writers who had written jointly for us before, Emily Janakiram and Megan Lessard, and they, I mean, they're not...
Their day job is not to be writers. They have other day jobs, and they just really went for it. They did an enormous amount of research. They really, they talked about it a lot.
You know, when it came to me, it was already well advanced as an idea. I mean, it was fantastic. Um, and then my job was to help them refine it and to also suggest additional books or readings,
um, to restructure some parts of it, and also because it was on this very sensitive topic, um, to also find second readers who could reflect on it with me.
We have contributing editors who often serve this role, um, and make sure we didn't have blind spots, make sure there weren't things that were missing.
And so it, you know, it is in that sense again like a collaborative process, and out of it came this really extraordinary piece which became our cover, which also allowed us to seek out cover imagery, which then connected us with all these sports teams, and like that felt really good as a process.
And another one I'd point to, um, you know, the Kat Brooks piece is actually an interesting example of this as well. Um, something else I'd point to is, um, I did not edit this, my colleague Cora did, um,
but, uh, we had a piece on, uh, restorative justice because the left was big on like, well, the justice system deals horribly with questions of sexual violence, so we need to have these processes of restorative justice that we run ourselves.
And so for us, that's important and that's compelling. All of that's true.
Um, but we had a pitch from a writer who had been an organizer in restorative justice processes for organizations and lefty groups for years, and she was like, "Look, like there are pros and cons to this.
Like this is an important type of process that I believe in, and it has serious limitations too." And she wanted to write about that,
um, in a place where she knew that those ideas would be taken seriously and in good faith by both the editors and the readers.
You can't publish that in The New York Times because then you're just asking for like a million people with no stake in this at all to be like, "Ha ha, yeah, your radical weird thing isn't working."
You have to have a place that can really work with those ideas, um, and there's a personal component to it as well, so she had to feel like it's a safe thing to talk about with us.
So, you know, that to me felt like something that no one else would have published and that because of our particular nature, we were able to, uh, publish. Um, and then I would also just finally point to our editors.
Um, we have a couple of editors who are fairly new to publishing, um, when we started Lux, who have become absolute superstars and are incredible writers.
Um, you know, Natalie Adler was already a writer, but she wasn't working in editing and publishing and so forth, um, and she has just written like banger after banger, I gotta say. Um, she, um, did...
She, she sort of like cultivated this series of investigations on the bi- unhinged bisexual novel, which has really become a trademark for us.
Um, she wrote a piece on psychotherapy and class and family that was incredible.
Um, she just had a piece in the latest issue on the Moomins actually, and Tove Jansson, who invented the Moomins, which is also like amazing and about queerness and kids books and utopias.
Um, and then our other editor, Cheryl Rivera, um, who had not worked in publishing at all and is largely, um, an organizer,
um, also joined and turned out to not only be an incredible writer, um, which she had studied a bit in school, but like she's a, she's a really excellent writer.
But also because of her relationship to organizing and the work that she does, was always thinking of stories that were truly not being covered yet and had like a lot of insight into questions around organizing and wrote, uh, an amazing piece about mutual aid and whether mutual aid in New York CityHad become just charity, whether Mutually during COVID had actually produced any kind of radical activity or organizing, um, h- how to think about that, and that was partly drawn from her own experience and partly drawn from reporting.
So those experiences of, like, seeing them now working as, like, quite experienced, um, very talented editors is just awesome.
Um, whereas, like, me and Cora Currier, another editor, had come out of publishing experience and were... You know, knew a lot about it.
So, you know, that sort of connection, collaboration among all of us, and along with our creative director, Sharanya, had been very magical, and I think that development has felt very good.
How many people work on Lux total? [laughs] Um, so we have five core people: the creative director and the four editors I just mentioned, um, Cheryl, Natalie, Cora, and me. Um,
and then we have a group of contributing editors who brainstorm ideas with us. They write pieces. They second read things.
Um, and we have a, an advisory board that's a few people who are just, um, experienced people who we love and admire, who, um, you know, help us out from time to time.
Um, and then we have a whole world of writers and artists. Yeah, I, I agree. I think it's not worth it. I mean, [laughs]
I have the, I have a whole theory of, um, uh, what I call, like, the attention economy trap, or what is it? The clout trap? Anyway, it's on- Yeah... it's, like, on a slide somewhere. Also a trap.
[laughs] Yeah, I've mapped it out. The...
It's like you have to pick really early on to what extent your project is going to be a small business and to what extent it's going to be DIY because there are people running really cool DIY things in New York and other places who are able to bring, pull in people
with a lot of clout and the ability to work for free.
But once those projects surpass a certain point of attention, it crosses a clout threshold where there's actually an expectation of, like, power and resources from people who are outside of that network, um, that might not be out of step with the reality.
You just don't realize how much things cost until you're in it, and you're like, "Oh, God. Slack, okay, $99 a month." Like, everyone jokes in New York you leave your house and $20 flies out of your pocket.
As soon as you start a small business, even the smallest business, I feel like I wake up and it cost me $1,000 in something. [laughs] Um- Yes... I don't know. It's...
I could rant about this all day, but- I very much relate to that. Yeah, and it's...
The irony is especially if you are, like, um, a socialist and you're a small business owner, then now you're, like, you have a different perspective on what it means to be sort of anti-capitalist but also build something that could be sustainable just in the purview that you want it to be for the sake of being able to compensate people for their participation, and I think there is another instinct.
I mean, this might be controversial with you, but there's another little instinct I think in leftist circles when these projects come about if they fail and they fail because of some sort of
failure in, like, the business process or the inability to raise enough money.
People sort of ra- throw up their hands and say, like, kind of, "Well, fuck capitalism anyway" or, like, "Well, of course I couldn't pay you on time because, [laughs] you know, capitalism" or whatever, and it's like, well, no.
[laughs] Yeah. I mean, I- I'm probably overstating the issue. Totally. But there's a little bit of- You know-... the learned helplessness masquerading- Yeah, I think that's right...
as, like, socialism, and I'm like, "No."
[laughs] It's just a question of trying to do stuff, trying to make things happen, working with the resources you have, and you can take different approaches to make it a small business, to make it a volunteer operation, some blend.
It can be, like, a, you know, the blend is that it's effectively just a really small business, [laughs] you know?
Or maybe it's a completely volunteer project where it's like, "We don't wanna be beholden to questions of making money.
We wanna make our weird shit, and we don't wanna have to worry about anything else, and so we're gonna do it in this more casual way or we're gonna do it, um, you know, much less frequently or whatever." And, like, the,
you know, saying, like, "We're socialists, so of course we can't pay you" is a little silly.
You make choices, you know, and either you think you can go out and you can raise enough money that you can give it to a bunch of socialists and, like, make sure that, um, their writer bills are paid and all of that, or you announce up front, "We're doing a weird project over here in the corner, and if you, it moves you so much that you just wanna do it like the rest of us as volunteers, that's great."
You know, people who have been involved in this project, um, you know, we all make those decisions, and no one's obligated to continue. No one's obligated to stop. When we get money, we give it to people.
[laughs] You know? We- Yeah. It's like, you know, things are pretty transparent as well because we're small. Um, and it can be scary. It can be really stressful. I worry about it all the time.
I worry about fundraising, about subscription development, all of those questions all the time, and I think in really long-standing institutions where things like subscription rates and income in general are predictable, you know, that's sounds very relaxing to me right now.
That sounds great. It's not how it is. But, you know, we're making choices to do kind of weird things and be as strategic as humanly possible about making them work.
Um, and I don't think a lot of, uh, sort of like abstract thinking about-Life under capitalism is very helpful in the day-to-day, except in as much as you understand things like, um,
you know, people are chained to their jobs because of healthcare, and [laughs] you know, they're the accommodations you have to make.
Anyway, that- that's a little rambly, but all of that is to say I relate to what you're saying. Yeah.
I completely agree, and I think the disconnect only happens if you say like, "Hey, we're gonna do this fun, cool, free thing, no money exchanged," and then, you know, that cool free thing ends up having like 100,000 Instagram followers and then, you know, maybe the core people that founded it use it as a springboard into something like really prestigious.
And then other people are sort of like, "Oh, huh, I volunteered for that for 10 years," and, you know, now you- Right. That's a horrible situation. Yeah. And like, I think one of the things that's important to us is...
I mean, that's not exactly the position we're in, but I think one of the things that's important to us is to, um, do what we can to make it a springboard for everyone who's involved in it. Um- Absolutely...
and sort of figure out, like, what do people want? How will this project help them get that? Like, you know, very important.
You know, everyone who's involved, we believe in their work, like we believe in each other's work. If we think it's important, so like, that's kind of the only reason we're in the game, [laughs] you know? So.
The point is quality of the rigor of reporting, the quality of ideas, and, and the relationships built in, in publishing them, not profit. Yeah, totally. And helping, um, the people who write for us or edit for us also
find their specific audiences and their people and, uh, you know, publish their work in whatever way they want that work to be published.
Um, you know, I think we're f- fairly transparent about what we are and how we work and what we can and can't offer and what we can and can't do. And- Mm-hmm... you know, I, I think that's... Yeah.
And I don't know where I'm going with that. Well, okay, here, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll save you then. There's one other th- We, we probably don't have so much more time to get into this. Yeah.
But there is one other thing I was really curious to ask you about, which is your NYU course- Mm...
The Politics of New Media: How the Internet Works, uh, and for Whom, which sounds like exactly the kind of th- class I would've wanted to take when I was a rhetoric and media studies undergrad.
Um, could you tell us a little bit- I don't think they offer that at Reed. Uh, well, actually, I went to Lewis & Clark. Or Lewis & Clark. Excuse me. [laughs] So, um, I wouldn't know what they offered at Reed at the time.
Uh, anyways, [laughs] uh, what was I gonna ask? I, I'm, yeah, I'm curious- Same difference...
I'm curious what, like, what, what, what the, what the, what the course, what you discuss about with your students, and especially what you've learned from your students, um, over the course of, of teaching this the last few years.
I mean, I love my students. Uh, I think they're great, and some of them I've, you know, have continued to stay in touch over the years.
And I think that they, they're all born at a time when they can be on social media from birth, so many of them are on social media from like age seven or, you know, something crazy like that, or maybe it's just 12, but
they are integrated into the platforms very early on in a way that I could not have been.
And so I learn from them a lot about that experience, for one thing, and I think there are a lot of stereotypes about Gen Z and about young people in general that they are,
you know, just addicted to their phones and don't wanna participate in real life, and they're, you know, they're not having sex because they're on the internet and, like, whatever.
And it's like, uh, my experience with the students is they're aware that the platforms that they're using and the ways they communicate have problems.
What they don't have is a ton of context for where those problems come from, and what they experience is actually a lot of anxiety.
So people also make fun of this generation for being very anxious, but they're all born using platforms that are, millions of dollars have been poured into those platforms to make young people anxious, so they will buy things [laughs]
and stay on the platforms. And so,
you know, the level of, like, really abusive and exploitive manipulation carried out by these social media companies and technology companies on the, like, psyches of young people is really disgusting. And it...
You know, that's where the blame belongs.
And so my students are aware of that, and they've more recently started being like, "Can we read a book that's about the psychology of social media and what it's doing to our brains?"
I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting that you're asking for that." Um, when I started teaching the course 10 years ago, which is crazy, um, I was, like, barely older than they were.
But, um, you know, they were all really optimistic about technology, and they wanted to go work at Google and Facebook, and they're like, "These companies are changing the world, and they're really exciting."
And so part of my course was really showing them a different point of view on tech, that there was a heavy surveillance component, for example, um, that it was built on advertising.
So, and then by the end of the course, they'd have more perspective on what before they had been very optimistic about. It was [laughs] it was, like, a little bit maybe of a downer.
But, um, now they all come in super cynical about tech and politics and are like, "These companies are bad. The CEOs are bad. Um, they're spying on us.
They're making us miserable, but we don't see any other options in terms of..."
They don't know what politics would look like offline.And they don't, um, you know, they wanna go work somewhere fancy and pay off their student loans. They're like, "What are my options?"
You know, tech is huge, and it pays well. Um, and so my role has kind of shifted in relation to them. You know, they're, um,
uh, trying to also still sort of give that context, but it's not really about disillusioning them anymore.
Um, and in fact, I've been trying to find ways to bring in, um, conversations about how political activity or just, like, one's activity as a citizen or as a participant in public life, um, can happen in ways that are not completely tied to platforms and the tech industry, which is strange, 'cause it's a new media course.
So, you know, I'm trying to teach them about the internet, but it also becomes about talking about what the internet can't do and what you have- Hmm... to do somewhere else. And so that's been interesting.
Last year they read Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing. Mm. And they really liked it, and they all took a challenge of no social media for one day. Um, and they set their own terms for it.
Like, some of them still use texting 'cause they have family or whatever. Um, and they all came in and just wanted to talk about it and thought it was great. Like, they're like, "This is amazing.
I discovered that my barista knows my name." [laughs] "Because I'm always on my phone when I go to get my coffee, and this time I wasn't on my phone, so we had a conversation."
Like, "I went and read a book in the park, and it was, like, the longest I've read in the park." I mean, it was like, it was like a dream of what you would hope students might experience.
And so they are very much more aware than I think people give them credit for of the problems.
And I think they have genuine political commitments and point, points of view that are very positive and open-minded and, you know, all this stuff about, like, how this generation can't tolerate dissent, and everything has to be the same, and, like, everything's cancel culture.
Like, they're not like that at all. They're- Mm-hmm... very open to ideas, much more than media people on Twitter. They're kind to each other.
Um, and I'm sure that there are people who still have to work up the courage to express their opinion and don't find that easy, but that's always been the case. That's what class is.
Like, it's not always easy to say your point of view. That's hard.
But my experience is, like, people have been pretty forthcoming and supportive of each other, and if someone, like, misstates a pronoun, someone corrects them in, like, a really friendly way. And, like, I don't know.
I just, like, I really like them a lot, and I think that they're looking for ways to move in a direction that feels better to them than what they've been offered. Um...
I think, uh, let's end it on an optimistic note right here. Yeah. And, um, to the listener, we'll give you a challenge to... You- you're listening to this on your phone or your computer.
Close it, put it down, go outside, take a 15-minute walk, and- Read a copy of Luxe... read a copy of Luxe. There you go. Go to- subscribe to Luxe. Thank you for coming on, Sarah. Okay. Thanks, Sarah.
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