“The writing in this issue is quite spectacular”

This evolution is not merely physical – from small format to large; from text-only pages to lots of varied design elements; from black type to reverse type and shades of red; from uniform font sizes and styles to immense variation in the type; from academic appearance to popular magazine – but also substantive. The stars! Just consider a few of the names in the TOC of this first issue of the new mag: Richard Rodriguez, Dave Eggers, Phillip Lopate, David Shields, Bill McKibben, Virginia Morell, the now-famous-though-less-so-when-this-mag-was-in-production Rebecca Skloot, and Carolyn Forché. […]

The writing in this issue is quite spectacular and includes exemplary models (as befits a magazine that takes credit for founding a movement and evolving along with it) of the genre. – Sima Rabinowitz