Sasha Frere-Jones
An eclectic and rewarding mix of delightful, unpredictable writing from n+1’s second decade.
The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade,
edited by Mark Krotov, Nikil Saval, and Dayna Tortorici,
n+1 Foundation, 525 pages, $20
• • •
The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade is a ball whose bounce depends on the target. Thrown at n+1’s original incarnation—founded in 2004 by four Harvard boys, one Columbia grad, and one Wesleyan grad—this collection sails over the fence and rolls to a rest outside the Dunkin’. In its early years, the magazine presented itself as the snottiest inductee to The Magazine Fellas, a club of which one may not speak.
In its second decade, under editors Mark Krotov, Nikil Saval, and, most importantly, Dayna Tortorici, n+1 developed a tangible ethic and started tapping an unpredictable series of writers. This book contains two of the most politically complete 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 dishwater leftism and barbershop snark of the original cohort would not have admitted refusals this open.
n+1, now, in its periodical form or this anthology, can be found caroming about the magazine court. At one end, n+1 achieves solidarity with smaller magazines allied with what many simply call “the movement,” the fellowship of comrades committed to resistance liberation across the board. Those publications include the New Inquiry (the most valuable magazine started in New York this century) and the Bad Side, an anonymous collective that sprang up in 2023. “Magic Actions” and “Not One Tree” could plausibly have appeared in either. The other edge, to which n+1 is marginally closer, is formed by the garden gnomes of general interest like the New Yorker, New York, and Harper’s. Anna Wiener, whose diary of employment in Silicon Valley is included in The Intellectual Situation, is currently a contributing writer for the New Yorker, and 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 Yorker, and, it should be noted, some of them have also been published in 4Columns.)
That is all context—as for the book itself, it is as rewarding as any anthology of disparate pieces can be. Would you like to confuse your uncles and delight elevated friends during the holidays? Give them Elizabeth Schambelan’s “League of Men,” a rotating quest that starts with campus rape and passes through Norse lore and the taxonomy of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther system on its way to a theory of boys and their time, within ritual, as wolves. “We don’t know what these crimes mean, these assaults that could not occur so regularly, so predictably,” Schambelan writes, “were it not the case that all the players are playing to the edge, not just the small percentage who actually cross the line and rape.” Rereading this essay—as with any Schambelan, for the umpteenth time—I had to remind myself that she was writing about frat boys and not the IDF.
One of the best expressions of how it felt to be alive in 2020, and again in these last few months, is in “Not One Tree,” where direct action is described as “a swarm, a spontaneous, collaborative choreography” that triggers a feeling that is “not exactly solidarity, but something even stranger and more miraculous, closer to goodwill.” I regularly recite not those lines but the declarative statement that follows: “There is no money in the forest.” I trust its genesis also because it is followed by talk of “developing little resentments” toward the militants who never cook or clean up. (Organizing work can lead almost instantly to the reef where the passionate and the petulant turn out to be one and the same.)
I am attracted most to writing I missed the first time. Sarah Resnick’s “H.” is one of the few pieces I’ve encountered that exhibits a concrete understanding of addiction (impossible to define, even for those trained as counselors) and harm reduction (widely misrepresented as low-key drug dealing), possibly because Resnick learned about them through her uncle’s own addiction. Jesse McCarthy’s “Notes on Trap” swings 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 at the glossies: Black Materialist. Trap is defined musically as “the digital capture and looping of the percussive patterns of the drum line,” and politically as “the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made” and “the funeral music that the Reagan revolution deserves.” I would be happy to see McCarthy back in n+1 and happier still to see him start a music magazine. The nervous churn of promotional interviews and desalinated rankings will never sustain a boat this heavy.
Christine Smallwood’s “The Keeper” is equal to the grand tradition of thinking on the toilet, and both Nikil Saval and Alyssa Battistoni provide moving pieces on the nature and necessity of grinding, small-bore political organizing. Francesco Pacifico’s blended view of the pandemic and dentistry and divorce works better than it first seemed to, and Nicolás Medina Mora’s piece on Heriberto Yépez made me wish my high-school Spanish were not so sluggish. How lovely it would be to follow along in the original as Yépez goes to war with Mexico’s “neoliberal mafia” and those dilettantes who see the literary critic as nothing more than an “auto-colonized Grand Amateur.”
Maintaining stability and visibility between all of these dissimilar positions makes the work of n+1 much closer to a calling than a business. All essays are written on spec, meaning both the writer and editor commit a fair amount of unpaid time to each piece. For the first decade, editors weren’t paid for writing they published in the magazine, and the editing was done by a mix of staff and volunteer editorial board members. The magazine is sustained by income that can be fairly evenly split into the categories of “earned” (subscriptions and sales) and “unearned” (charitable donations). That unearned income is a combination of state grants, city grants, foundation grants, and individual donations. The magazine has no VC investors, no endowment, and no single donor has the ability to tank the organization by withdrawing support. In a climate where funders are routinely being exposed for their ties to the genocide, this is no small footnote.
There is little reason to suffer such financial precarity unless you believe, at the deepest level, that the outside world is worth being a part of and that writers need to bring it into their embrace as free from restriction as possible, given the light restraint of collaboration that even the best editor demands. The Intellectual Situation is not a volume that traces the flow of capital or the shape of trends. If these writers wanted money, they went elsewhere, though few wrote as well again. This is why anybody 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 musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).