N+1

When I tell my friends that I am reading N+1, they all say the same thing: it’s not what it used to be.Most of you, my readers, have never even heard of N+1, so you must find it strange that I have a circle of friends who all have a strong opinion about this journal you’ve never heard of. And, moreover, this opinion is always the same.I was telling one of these friends, “People feel oppressed by the existence of N+1. They want it to be bad, so they can justify avoiding it.”That’s because this small, Brooklyn-based socialist periodical strikes terror into the hearts of millennial writers. Whatever this magazine achieved, it’s something that a lot of us would also like to achieve, but we haven’t yet managed it.The journal was founded in 2004 by a group of people who (I am told) all knew each other from doing undergrad at Harvard. During the next twenty years, it published some amount of writing. I occasionally read those pieces when they went viral online: I definitely remember reading “The Feminist” by Tony Tulathimutte. In other cases, I can’t actually remember if I read the pieces when they happened, or if I was only linked to them in the following years.What I vividly recall was that during the 2010s, you’d see periodic eruptions onto the literary scene of some bright talent: Elif Batuman, Andrea Long Chu, Wesley Yang. They would make such a splash, suddenly everyone was talking about them. And I’d become vaguely aware that they had gotten their start publishing in N+1.N+1 doesn’t launch star talent anymore. It’s unclear why. It would be very difficult for me to explain why suddenly N+1 no longer has ‘it’. Why people talk about the magazine like a silent film star left unemployed by the arrival of the talkies. “Oh she isn’t what she was!” they said. “You shoulda seen her when she was young.”Personally I quite enjoyed N+1. What I am realizing is that with these journals there are two issues: a) the performance itself; and b) how much I personally enjoy that performance.In this case, the performance is superb, and I have to think that if my politics were more aligned with the journal, I would’ve loved it much more.

On a physical level, N+1 is defined by its comparison to The Drift. N+1 looks and feels cheaper. The cover is glossy, not matte, and the paper feels thinner, more pulpy. I did not enjoy the physical feel of the magazine as much, and I wished that it felt a little more like The Drift—according to its 990 forms, N+1 has twice as much money as The Drift, so I have no idea why the magazine feels cheaper.(It’s hard not to compare N+1 and The Drift because the magazines have a similar readership, format, tone, and political orientation. The Drift is the younger magazine, it was founded in 2020—also by Harvard grads—in an attempt to emulate and supersede N+1.)N+1 begins with an editorial entitled The Intellectual Situation, where the magazine speaks in its own voice, summing up the times. Then comes Politics, a set of short briefs on current events. The bulk of the journal is given over to fiction and essays. And then there’s a Reviews section.I read the four latest issues of the journal, and the format of the essays was quite distinctive. Almost all of them were first-person, and they were usually about people with leftist beliefs who were narrating something about their work or their lives.The standout piece in these four issues was Hannah Zeavin’s “Struggle, Unity, Struggle”, narrating her time as a teenager in a far-left cult, RevCom, centered around a figure (who I had never heard of) named Robert Avakian. She did an incredible job describing what made this group appealing, and how she spent one spring of her life assisting in their efforts to organize a large protest against the 2004 Republican National Convention.What’s striking about this piece is that it leaves open the question of whether and to what extent the group was actually preying on her. It didn’t seem like the group wanted to exploit her sexually, but it did want and expect her to devote her life to meaningless revolutionary struggle. And what made the piece so good was that she tried to narrate what exactly made this group feel pointless.Energy was dwindling. The war we wanted would never arrive, and we were stuck with the war we hated…[We had lost] the contest for revolution, but why?

RevCom self-critiques tend to go as follows: We failed to generate a mass party because of our petit bourgeois individualism — our fears of struggle, our allergy to commitment, and our aversion to the masses we wanted to join. Or, relatedly, we failed because we didn’t want it badly enough, didn’t work hard enough, weren’t in the struggle enough. But I was the very picture of devotion, and so were my coms. If we didn’t win, I knew it wasn’t because we didn’t want it enough. It had to be something else. (And it was — it was history.)In her subsequent life, she didn’t abandon these principles, but she realized that if she devoted herself solely to revolutionary struggle then…well…then she would just waste her life without bringing the revolution one iota closer.This was one of the first long pieces I read in N+1, and I texted all my friends to be like, “Wait why is this journal supposed to be bad?” None of the other pieces in these four issues of N+1 quite matched the heights of the Zeavin piece, but at least one other was very good. I really respected Lily Scherlis’s piece on group therapy. You might recall that Scherlis wrote an article about DBT for The Drift that I really didn’t enjoy. The Drift seems quite hostile to first-person essays (they state in their guidelines that they’re not interested in ‘personal essays’), which I am realizing now is a way of purposefully distinguishing themselves from N+1. As a result, The Drift’s DBT piece is written in a very polemical voice, in which a certain hostility to the practice emanated from the writing itself—an affect that I found mystifying. In the N+1 essay, Scherlis participates in a very high-intensity form of group therapy, at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, in Britain. And because the piece is in the first-person, she’s able to make it clear that she’s participating both as part of the research for her dissertation and because she’s trying to process her experiences in the student encampments that protested the Gaza war.I found this piece just as mystifying as The Drift piece, but in a much more productive way.

In this case, I did not really understand why anyone would undergo the form of group therapy that Scherlis is describing. It feels quite involved, very high-intensity, and doesn’t seem to have any clear therapeutic benefits. Essentially, a group of participants just talks to each other, endlessly, for two weeks, during which time they’re encouraged to comment upon the various group dynamics that they notice between themselves, in this very tiny group. Scherlis describes a sample interaction:“I feel defensive of Carl,” says Patty. “It is extremely difficult to be a white man right now.”“I feel annoyed,” I say.We will go on like this for two weeks, some of us losing our minds through sheer proximity to other people. The conversation eventually devolves into a kind of libidinal dodgeball; we pelt each other with hurtful mischaracterizations and pleas for connection.The piece is anchored by the fact that it really happened. Scherlis really did choose to go through this experience for some reason. It is a bizarre thing to do, but the first-person voice is a good anchor to hold bizarre experiences.I understood now why so many people had built reputations writing for the journal. Many journals force their writers into a very constrained style that doesn’t allow them to showcase their literary talents. These first-person N+1 essays had more variation in voice and structure, so it always felt like the writer was developing their own vision. Thus, if a piece was good, it felt like it was good because the writer was talented.(As an aside, in my run through these journals I’ve noticed that they vary in how tightly they throttle the writer’s individual style. Liberties is another journal where more individuality shows through.)The failure state for these first-person essays was the “So What?” factor. Not infrequently, I’d be deep into reading about someone’s experience, which they portrayed with a great deal of care and craft, and then I’d wonder if there was really any larger story here. Sometimes I wanted more analysis—I wanted the piece to justify itself more.The worst offender was Emily Callaci’s “In The Wages For The Housework Archive”, which was a ten thousand word article about a very internecine dispute between two 1970s feminists who both claimed they had authored an important and very seminal article.

Callaci’s account was very aimless and never cohered: it sounds incredible to say it, but I read ten thousand words about this article from the 1970s—“Women and the Subversion of Community”—and never gained any understanding of what was actually in this particular article and why it was important. All I got was that feminist writers can sometimes squabble over credit.In this case, Callaci is a professor who is writing a book about this group, Wages For Housework, and it feels like she contorted her research to fit this first-person format. So she narrates her time chasing down the truth of this authorship question, without considering whether it really matters to the reader.Elias Rodriguez’s “Lifetime Achievement” falls into a similar trap. It’s nine thousand words about an art exhibition that was canceled due to fears of Trump administration retribution. The piece doubles as a profile of the artist, Andil Gosine, but it’s too focused on the narrative of this man’s life and what happened to his exhibition, and there’s no broader discussion of significance. Yes, it is obviously bad to be censored by the Trump administration, but this piece doesn’t make a forceful case that the exhibition had any particular aesthetic merit.Iman Mersal’s “Our Butterfly Effect” is told as a series of diary entries, and I sometimes found myself a bit confused. I gathered that the author’s son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and eventually this broke up her family, with her son perhaps having to live elsewhere. Eventually he ends up in an institution—I understood that much—but some of the intervening story (which takes place on three continents) was unclear. It was a hauntingly sad tale, but quite difficult to parse. The piece was translated from Arabic, so I assume the magazine had no ability to ask for edits.With these three pieces, you see the downside of the freedom the journal gives its contributors. If the individual vision isn’t there, then the pieces can feel very self-indulgent and aimless.Sometimes these first-person pieces weren’t bad, they just didn’t reach the heights of the Zeavin piece.