On Allbritton’s top floor last night, three young women  – Carla Blumenkranz, Dayna Tortorici, and Elizabeth Gumport – gave Wesleyan students an eagerly anticipated glimpse into their lives as editors of n+1, a Brooklyn-based print (three times a year) and online outlet for political and cultural commentary founded in 2004. After a brief introduction and reading of a selection from the magazine, the editors took questions and engaged in dialogue with each other and the student attendees for over an hour. Despite extra chairs and the wide surfaces of tables shoved to the corner of the room, the event was packed enough to draw a crowd above seating capacity. Senior humanities majors, students active in progressive politics on campus, and others who I can’t put into a stereotypical box quite as quickly asked questions and heard detailed answers from the editors about n+1‘s history, ideological project, and inner workings, as well as more personal anecdotes about how and why the speakers became involved in the magazine and a recurring joke from the editors identifying their goal for n+1 as perfection “in the eyes of God”.

n+1 self-identifies online as “a print magazine of politics, literature, and culture founded in 2004 and published three times yearly.” At their session, Blumenkranz, Tortorici, and Gumport spoke of the magazine’s group of core editors and writers as a “collective” –  decentralized and minimally hierarchical – of like-minded young people, working on something like a shared passion project. The magazine’s propensity to take on problematic aspects of what they perceive as the left’s literary establishment took front and center last night, too: the brief reading from the magazine, an excerpt from n+1‘s regular, collectively written editorial The Intellectual Situation, critiqued The Atlantic and Harper’s Magazine, largely from a feminist standpoint that the three characterized as a recent development in the magazine’s writing in their interview for the Pyxis blog.