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n+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics. nplusonemag.com

Poster for Miss Translation Mixers. Brooklyn, NY @ n+1. Tuesday May 19th, 7-9PM. 37 Greenpoint Ave, #316. Chicago, IL @ Mouse Arts & Letters Club. Saturday May 23rd, 4-6 PM, 555 W. 31st Street
About two weeks after Villegas González’s death, in the middle of the night, a group of ICE and Border Patrol agents rappelled out of a Black Hawk helicopter onto the roof of a large dilapidated building in South Shore and raided the apartments inside. According to residents’ testimony, agents armed with long guns broke down the doors of their homes, tore their furniture apart, zip-tied them and their children — some of them naked — and loaded everyone into vans: Latino residents in one van, Black residents in another. Many of the Venezuelan detainees were deported after being falsely accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua, while other residents, after showing proof of citizenship, were allowed back into their homes. After the raid, the editor of a neighborhood newspaper told me that a woman had called her office to express astonishment at the scale of force deployed against her neighbors, but also gratitude to the ICE agents, because the “Venezuelans played their radios too loud at Rainbow Beach.”
At 9 AM I fall in love with Amy. We’re in my friend’s old Corolla, following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle in our neighborhood. We only know “Amy” through the Signal voice call we’re on together, alongside more than eight hundred others, all trying to coordinate sightings throughout South Minneapolis. Amy drives a silver Subaru and is directly in front of us, expertly tailing a black Wagoneer with two masked agents in front. The Wagoneer skips a red light to try and lose us, but Amy’s fast. She bolts across the intersection, Bullitt-style, and we follow just behind, shouting inside the car, GO AMY! WE LOVE YOU! “I’m gonna fucking marry Amy,” my friend says. “You think it’s chill to propose over this call?”
Jameson has been memorialized, rightly, as a singularly gifted and omnivorous scholar of the present. Has anyone else written with such panache and blindsiding humor about cinema (“it is what is good about [Dog Day Afternoon] that is bad about it, and what is bad about it that is on the contrary rather good in many ways”), the textures of consumer life (“marbled by the worst kind of junk-language, such as ‘life-style’ or ‘sexual preference’”), government (“the bureaucracies . . . cannot be called upon as an independent force, any more than a garage band could be installed to run a ministry of culture”), and even Trump himself (“Maoism was an attack by the leader of the Communist Party, from the outside, against his own institution . . . that’s exactly what our forty-fifth president did, and if you want to consider him a follower of Mao, that would be very interesting”)? It strains belief that a single mind could assimilate so many discordant features of our age.
We know from our subscription numbers and website analytics that more people are reading n+1 than ever. People often say nice things about n+1 pieces on Twitter and Bluesky, or (often in much greater detail) complain about them on their Substacks. So why the steep drop in old-fashioned correspondence?
Winant, a historian at the University of Chicago and the author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America—a groundbreaking work of labor and social history—has been writing for n+1 for more than half of the magazine’s lifespan. Since his first piece in 2013, Winant’s contributions have included essays on graduate student organizing and the labor movement; wide-ranging criticism of writers including Walter Johnson, Malcolm Harris, and Lauren Berlant; rigorous and ambitious responses, written in near-real time, to the pandemic, American electoral politics, and more; and, most recently, an evaluation of the many pathologies of J.D. Vance, which remains among the most illuminating analyses, published anywhere, of the man who is now the Vice President of the United States. Uniting all of Winant’s writing is a principled commitment to class struggle and a deep curiosity about the modalities along which class is lived today. Like the great Marxist writers whose literary verve and moral clarity he’s inherited—including Barbara Ehrenreich or Mike Davis, both of whom he beautifully eulogized in the pages of n+1—Winant’s writing is as attuned to the realities of political life as it is to intellectual and historical contradiction. A characteristic Winant essay will begin with a self-contained inquiry—about debates surrounding the professional-managerial class, for example, or about the shifting composition of unions—but always takes flight toward bigger, bolder, more planetary questions: how can we get organized, and how can we stay that way? How can the left defeat the forces of racism, nativism, and inequality? How, in the end, can we live and think in solidarity? We’ll be presenting Winant with the Writers’ Fellowship at this year’s N Plus Ultra on June 10. If you’d like to join us, you can find information about ticketing here.
On Friday night, n+1—alongside many of our peer nonprofit arts organizations—received notice that our 2025 NEA grant has been terminated due to the Trump administration’s “shifting funding priorities.” We knew this might be coming, but receiving the official notice was still jarring, as was some of the messaging itself. It’s unclear to us whether we’ll still be able to recover the money we’ve been promised this year—a $12,500 grant meant to help us pay our authors, our editors, and to have the magazine printed and distributed to our readers. We’ve requested the funds we’ve already spent, and now we’re waiting to see if the money will come through. We’re trying to stay optimistic, but with the administration’s other announcement this week that the NEA might be shut down in its entirety, it’s hard to do so. I’m writing to ask for two things—first, for short-term, immediate assistance to help us replace these funds. You can make a donation through our website, or—if you’re in New York and free on June 10—you can buy a ticket to our annual benefit, the N Plus Ultra. Second, we ask for your ongoing support amid the challenges that we, and other small magazines, are already beginning to face. You can do that by subscribing, of course, convincing your friends to subscribe (or simply sending them a gift subscription), or by buying a bit of merch from our shop. And maybe most meaningfully, you can share the n+1 pieces you’re reading and stay engaged with (and be vocal in your support of) the independent media you care about most. We’ll need all the help we can get. With gratitude, Dani Oliver Development Director, n+1
Join the Yale Review, Yale University Press, and n+1 magazine for AWP PARTY, Thursday, March 27, 7-10 pm, Everson Royce Bar, 1936 E 7th Street, Los Angeles, First round on us, light bites, no readings.
Dear readers, On January 21, 2025, n+1 lost a great contributor and friend in Thomas Bolt, who died at the age of 65 after being diagnosed with glioblastoma. Tom published four short stories with n+1: the O. Henry Award–winning “Inversion of Marcia” (2017), “Insurance” (2017), “Estación Origen MADRID” (2018), and “Area of Isolation” (2023). We’ve unpaywalled them all so that more readers can enjoy the exceptional richness and warm, playful intelligence of his writing, and to honor the life of a talent cut off too soon. Tom was a poet as well as a fiction writer, and he brought a poet’s attention to his stories. He was sensitive to rhythm, and to what a choice of punctuation said about the quality of a thought. Regarding a copyediting query about a misstated quotation in “Inversion of Marcia,” he wrote, “Giving Milt the correct Marlowe quotation is fine (though my variant was intentional), since he has just told a story about Greco di Tufo that traces back no further than a 1950s potboiler novel. Milt is reliable and consistent only in his self-indulgence.” The response is classic Tom: the gameliness (fine to change); the suggestion of deeper esoteric knowledge (the 1950s potboiler novel); the investment in his characters (Milt is as real as you or me). It captures that disposition as a writer—deliberate but open, never prickly or obstinate—that made him so wonderful to work with.
n+1: This piece has become n+1’s most-read piece of all time! Why do you think it resonated so much with people? WT: A common note that I’ve gotten from readers has been: “this article articulated something that I’ve noticed but have never been able to put words to.” Anyone who’s ever had a reading experience like this knows how energizing the feeling is, and n+1 is really good at publishing these kinds of pieces because it doesn’t have the same constraints and incentives that other magazines have. There have been countless thinkpieces and reports published about Netflix over the years, but the vast majority of them haven’t been honest about the company and what it’s done to the film industry. I don’t think another magazine would have published “Casual Viewing,” and if one had it would have stripped the things that people liked about it—including the title, which would have been replaced with something stupid like, “Netflix is the most powerful studio in the world. So why does it feel like it isn’t?” A lot of generalist magazines like publishing glitzy profiles of industry executives, where the reader goes on a hike with Bela Bajaria or learns which Barolo vintage Greg Peters likes to drink with dinner. In other words, a lot of magazines rely on access journalism, and if you call Ted Sarandos an inveterate liar, or Netflix’s business model a Ponzi scheme of attention, you’re probably going to get your access revoked even though both of those things are true. n+1 doesn’t care about access. It’s irrelevant to anything the magazine publishes. It means you can have writing and criticism that’s more honest and pulls no punches. Readers happen to like that kind of writing. More magazines should pay attention to this fact.
I firmly believe that at this crisis moment for media, n+1 is incredibly well positioned to do the critical work of publishing brave, bold, challenging writing from across the world—writing that can meet a terrible moment and make a difference in people’s lives. Our independence allows us to take risks and speak honestly, no matter the consequences. But now it’s time to think about the possibility of entirely new consequences. If you have the means to support independent publishing during this terrifying time, I hope you’ll consider doing so. November is n+1’s most critical fundraising month, the month when we ordinarily ask readers to support the magazine via our annual Bookmatch quiz. I still recommend trying the quiz—perhaps you’ll enjoy the distraction—but right now I’ll simply ask that you donate to n+1 if you believe in what we do. This was not how I hoped we’d spend the end of our twentieth anniversary year, and still: we’re looking ahead to the next twenty. It was always the case that we’d need your help to get there—and now we need it even more. Thank you so much for your support, now and always. In solidarity, Mark Krotov Publisher and coeditor, n+1