The intellectual situation | 4Columns

An eclectic and rewarding mix of delightful, unpredictable writing from n+1‘s second decade.

The Intellectual Situation: The Best of the Second Decade of n+1,
edited by Mark Krotov, Nikil Saval and Dayna Tortorici,
n+1 Foundation, 525 pages, $20

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The Intellectual Situation: The Best of N+1‘s second decade is a ball whose bounce depends on the target. Thrown to n+1‘s original incarnation—founded in 2004 by four Harvard kids, a Columbia grad, and a Wesleyan grad—this collection sails over the fence and rolls into a rest stop outside Dunkin’. In its early years, the magazine billed itself as the snottiest inductee into The Magazine Fellas, a club people may not talk about.

In its second decade, edited by Mark Krotov, Nikil Saval and, most importantly, Dayna Tortorici, n+1 developed a palpable ethic and began tapping into an unpredictable range of writers. This book contains two of the most politically accomplished essays of the last decade: Tobi Haslett’s “Magic Actions” and Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko’s “Not One Tree,” definitive pieces on the Floyd Rebellion and Stop Cop City, respectively. The leftist dishwashing and barbershop sarcasm of the original crop would have allowed no refusals in this openness.

n+1now, in its periodical form or this anthology, can be found circulating about the magazine court. At one end, n+1 achieves solidarity with smaller magazines that are connected to what many simply call “the movement,” the community of comrades committed to resistance liberation in general. These publications include the New research (the most valuable magazine started in New York this century) and the Bad sidean anonymous collective formed in 2023. “Magic Actions” and “Not One Tree” could be in both cases. The other side, where n+1 is marginally closer, is formed by the garden gnomes of general interest such as the New Yorker, New YorkAnd Harpers. Anna Wiener, whose diary of her work in Silicon Valley is included in The intellectual situationis currently a contributing writer for the New Yorkerand Andrea Long Chu, whose “On Liking Women” is also featured, is the book critic for New York magazine. (Eleven of the writers have been published in the New Yorkerand it should be noted that some of them have also been published in 4Columns.)

That’s all context—as for the book itself, it’s about as rewarding as an anthology of standalone pieces can be. Want to confuse your uncles and cheer up your exalted friends this holiday season? Give them Elizabeth Schambelan’s “League of Men,” a shifting quest that begins with campus rape and moves through Norse lore and the taxonomy of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther system to a theory of boys and their time, within ritual, as wolves. “We don’t know what these crimes mean, these attacks that could not happen so regularly, so predictably,” Schambelan writes, “if it weren’t for the fact that all the players went to extremes, not just the small percentage who actually crossed the line and raped.” Rereading this essay—as I do every time Schambelan does it, for the umpteenth time—I had to remind myself that she was writing about fraternity boys, not the IDF.

One of the best expressions of what it’s been like to be alive in 2020, and again in recent months, is in “Not One Tree,” where direct action is described as “a swarm, a spontaneous, collaborative choreography” that evokes a feeling that is “not exactly solidarity but something even stranger and more wonderful, closer to goodwill.” I often recite not those lines, but the declarative statement that follows: “There’s no money in the forest.” I also trust its genesis because it’s followed by talk of “developing little grudges” against the militants who never cook or clean up. (Organizing work can lead almost immediately to the reef where the passionate and the moody turn out to be one and the same.)

I’m most drawn to writings I missed the first time around. Sarah Resnick’s “H.” is one of the few pieces I’ve come across that offers a concrete understanding of addiction (impossible to define, even for those trained as counselors) and harm reduction (often misrepresented as a clandestine drug trade), possibly because Resnick learned about them from her uncle’s addiction. Jesse McCarthy’s “Notes on Trap” rocks n+1 back to the movement side of the screen, as it presents a future of music criticism that will never be allowed to take root in the glossies: Black Materialist. Trap is defined musically as “the digital capture and looping of the percussive patterns of the drumline,” and politically as “the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made” and “the funeral music the Reagan revolution deserves.” I’d love to see McCarthy back in n+1 and even happier to see him starting a music magazine. The nervous rush of promotional interviews and desalinated rankings will never support a boat of this size.

Christine Smallwood’s “The Keeper” is equal parts toilet-thinking and both Nikil Saval and Alyssa Battistoni deliver moving pieces on the nature and necessity of ground-up, small-scale political organizing. Francesco Pacifico’s mixed take on the pandemic and dentistry and divorce works better than it initially seemed, and Nicolás Medina Mora’s piece on Heriberto Yépez made me wish my high-school Spanish wasn’t so lame. How wonderful it would be to be able to follow along in the original as Yépez wages war against Mexico’s “neoliberal mafia” and those amateurs who see the literary critic as nothing more than a “self-colonized Grand Amateur.”

By maintaining stability and visibility between all these different positions, the work of n+1 much closer to a calling than a business. All essays are written on spec, meaning that both the writer and the editor devote a significant amount of unpaid time to each piece. For the first ten years, editors were not paid for the writing they published in the magazine, and editing was done by a mix of staff and volunteer editors. The magazine is sustained by revenue that can be divided fairly evenly into the categories of “earned” (subscriptions and sales) and “unearned” (charitable donations). That unearned revenue is a combination of state grants, city grants, foundation grants, and individual donations. The magazine has no VC investors, no endowments, and no donor has the ability to sink the organization by withdrawing their support. In a climate where funders are routinely exposed for their ties to genocide, this is no small footnote.

There’s little reason to live in such financial uncertainty unless you believe deep down that the outside world is worth being a part of and that writers should embrace it as freely as possible, given the slight restrictions even the best editor places on collaboration. The intellectual situation is not a book that follows the flow of capital or the shape of trends. If these writers wanted money, they went somewhere else, though few wrote as well. This is why everyone does this work: because you have the spiritual strength to admit that others might have something to teach you. There is no money in the forest.

Sasha Frere-Jones is a New York-based musician and writer. His memoir, Earlierwas recently published by Semiotext(e).