A lament for the literary mag

Christian Lorentzen writes in the Washington Post:

But the American magazine is in a state of decay. Now known mostly as brands, once sumptuous print publications exist primarily as websites or YouTube channels, hosts for generic scribblings, the ever-ubiquitous “take.” Meanwhile, a thousand Substacks bloom, some of them very good, with writers in the emancipated state of being paid directly by their readers. Yet even in this atomized, editorless landscape, perverse incentives apply. Are you thirsty for another post about cancel culture or wokeness? Me neither. Yet culture war still largely rules the day.

This piece is a bit of a mess, starting off as something of an indictment of the decline of magazines, but quickly turns into a lament for the sort of publication that used to regularly publish the writer’s work.

However, it does point to one more shift in the publishing landscape, one that hasn’t been noticed quite as much as that affecting newspapers. Magazines like Bookforum (the object of Lorentzen’s piece) were once quite common, and articles published in literary or “intellectual” periodicals once played an outsized role in the broader discourse.

The opinion pages of daily newspapers relied frequently on fodder provided to them by publications such as the Atlantic, the New Yorker, or Harper’s. A magazine would publish a 10,000 word, mildly controversial think-piece and columnists would weigh in with 750 words of their own. Up and coming authors would have the opportunity to get valuable exposure with the sort of audience that would give their career a significant boost. Essayists had a forum in the days before the web provided such a forum to everyone. It’s hard to find a single publication now that can throw around this sort of cultural weight.

Now many of these publications are nowhere near as prominent as they once were. I would imagine if a site like Substack were to offer subscription bundles one might see a further erosion of this format. Book reviewers and essayists would be able to cast aside the need to accept a salary in exchange for their platform and could reach out to readers individually. This appears inevitable at this point.

I appreciate Lorentzen’s lament, however. At various times in my life I’ve been a subscriber to Harper’s, the Paris Review and the New York Review of Books. Each of these is still publishing, but each is also somewhat dated in their own way. Each has stayed true to its format, but the format has become an artifact of yesteryear. I feel a bit embarrassed that I had not heard of Bookforum before reading this piece, but was pleased that one of the writers tipped in it, Max Read, is among those I subscribe to on Substack. I hold some sentimentality for the literary magazine, but at this point I’m looking ahead to its successor rather than pining for the past.