There's No Substitute For Reading: A Roundtable With Four Literary Magazine Editors

Kiara Barrow of The Drift, Lisa Borst of n+1, Meghan O'Rourke of The Yale Review and Anastasia Berg of The Point on how they work and what they look to publish.

Lee Krasner, “Gaea”

I’ve spent a lot of time on book tour making the case to emerging nonfiction writers and memoirists that they should expend their energies pitching literary journals rather than jumping straight into querying agents, particularly if they’ve never been published before. I know how exceedingly rare it is for a writer’s first publication to be a book and that many agents trawl lit mags looking for new talent. This is why the opening chapter of TAKE IT FROM ME isn’t about finding an agent as the first step in a writers’ career and focuses instead on pitching smaller pieces. It includes examples of pitches that got writers published in the Paris Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post op-ed section (RIP), all without the intermediary of a literary agent.

Book tour is fascinating as I get to hear in person what qualifies as new information to writers and what they want to hear more about. Those who’ve read my book are always surprised by how specific and detailed the successful pitches and queries I included tend to be. Another thing I inevitably get asked is, “What literary magazines do you actually read?” I want to get specific about that too; this post is your answer.

Below is a roundtable interview with Kiara Barrow, co-found and co-editor of The Drift, Meghan O’Rourke, executive editor of The Yale Review, Lisa Borst, co-editor of n+1 and Anastasia Berg, editor of The Point. They share what their magazines look to publish, how their submission and editorial processes work, how they view emerging writers and even the unexpected places they’ve found them. Their answers are detailed and generous, but I also encourage you to check out the magazines themselves. I’ve discovered on tour how difficult it is to give language to taste. I find my own impossible to describe without resorting to specific examples. The same is true in trying to describe what a magazine publishes, which is why I asked these editors to give shout-outs to some recent pieces. But you can also pick up a lot about another person’s (or institution’s) taste by continued exposure. Think about the feeling of seeing a dress in a window and knowing immediately that your mom would love it (or hate it). It can be hard to say exactly why but that’s what it means to know someone else’s sensibility.

You could take your intimacy a step further by subscribing and supporting a magazine that strikes your fancy. Quite a few D&A readers have pledged money to support this substack, which I appreciate, but I plan to keep this side hustle free. I say give your money to these folks instead! (If you want to support me, buy TAKE IT FROM ME.) The Trump administration’s cuts to the NEA resulted in huge losses to the already-tight budgets of literary magazines. Ditto its recent cuts to university budgets. If you want to see these magazines continue to provide crucial professional opportunities to new writers, subscribe to one of them.

Another reason these magazines are important to literary life is that they are ecosystems in their own right. As you’ll see in the interviews below, first-time contributors become editors and staffers. Editors at these magazines regularly refer writers they publish to agents they trust. Pieces they publish get turned into acclaimed books. In addition to publishing written work, they all regularly host IRL events, where you can meet other writers, editors, and readers in the flesh. In my book, I address the vexed question of platform and provide ways to think about it as something other than a crude aggregate of social media followers. Having even a loose tie to a literary magazine by being published by one, through interning, or as a volunteer reader, is a very convincing sort of platform. It shows a connection to a meaningful social network of people who love writing and may even be willing to pay for it; that will always be more valuable in my eyes than a few thousand random Instagram followers.

❦

Tell us a bit about how your publication works and the role you play there.

Meghan O’Rourke: I’m the executive editor of The Yale Review, which is the oldest literary quarterly in America — it’s been publishing since 1819 (although under a different title initially), which means it was around before Emily Dickinson was. The modern Yale Review dates from 1911. Over the decades it has published established writers like Edith Wharton — reviewing Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as it was being translated — alongside newcomers like Joyce Carol Oates, critical thinkers like Virginia Woolf and Bayard Rustin, and politicians like President William H. Taft.

I was hired in 2019; Yale did a national search after the longtime previous editor stepped down and the magazine was in need of being reimagined for the digital era. Its readership had radically declined. I think the reason the search committee hired me was that I’d worked for years as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker and poetry editor at The Paris Review, but I had also helped invent Slate’s culture section (in a very different era) in 2002, and had done a lot of thinking about digital publishing.

I’m also a writer — a poet and nonfiction writer. I’ve published five books, including poetry, memoir, and criticism — and I write a Substack about the craft of writing and literature, which keeps me close to the question of what it feels like to be making work right now, not just editing it. I think that helped me understand, firsthand, the exciting foment of American and international literature right now, and also the hunger for a slower, reflective criticism than the sort that many mainstream magazines published.

Lisa Borst: I’m a coeditor of n+1, alongside Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov (both of whom have been in the game for a lot longer than I have, and have been wildly generous about sharing what they know). A quirk of n+1, due mostly to our small size (and also maybe to a commitment to generalism and a hazy sort of jack-of-all-trades sensibility), is that pretty much everybody on staff has multiple roles: our development director also reads poetry submissions, our circulation guy is also a talented politics editor and sports writer, our publisher does heroic amounts of basically everything.

So, in addition to helping edit print and web pieces, I also handle a lot of our comms—newsletters, social media, occasional event-planning, and so on—plus a fair amount of production and graphic design-y stuff, like typesetting the magazine and making very stupid event flyers. The comms stuff, in particular, was what I was first brought on to do, several geological eras ago (2019), and the editorial work was initially a kind of highly occasional extracurricular pleasure. I always knew I liked the editorial side of things, but I grew up in a pretty scrappy all-ages music scene, where the expectation was that everybody should pretty much know how to run sound, analyze the budget, and for that matter design a flyer. I think, as an earlyish-career person, I understood pretty intuitively that if one is interested in working in small magazines—as with volunteering at a punk venue—it’s a good idea to have enthusiasm for a lot of different types of work, because there will always be plenty to do.

Anastasia Berg: I‘m an editor of The Point magazine. The Point was founded in 2008 by three graduate students at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago—Jon Baskin, Jonny Thakkar and Etay Zwick. The story goes that at the university they were approaching the texts that they were studying together not only with intellectual curiosity or professional duty but with a sense that the study of great works in philosophy, literature, history, etc. could help them think better about the issues that they cared about as individuals, friends, political actors. They decided to found the magazine to share that possibility with a non-academic audience. I joined in 2015, right before the 2016 elections. As political-cultural discourse was becoming even more acerbic and politicized we came to recognize that the magazine’s commitment to depth, intellectual rigor and curiosity about perspectives we don’t share and don’t understand might in addition to intellectual merit have also a kind of ethical significance.

My core responsibility as an editor is to solicit writers and edit pieces. In practice, I spend more time doing other things than that. I spend a very large part of the time I dedicate to The Point in conversation with my colleagues about whether and how to respond to emerging political, cultural and social developments, new books and works of art, public debates. Is there something interesting going on and is it the kind of thing we can bring a unique Point perspective to? Is there a question that isn’t getting treated to our satisfaction elsewhere? Concretely, this might mean that we think a topic or question could be illuminated by more attention to intellectual history or literature or philosophy, or that the responses on all sides are too shallow and predictable or just that no one ese will publish something quite as weird as we’d be willing to on this topic.

The rest of my work consists in working directly with writers on their pieces, though this too continues to be a collaborative process between the editors.

I would also be remiss not to mention that The Point is collaborating with the University of Chicago on a large initiative called the Program for Public Thinking, which aims to share the intellectual values of the Point and cultivate a more thoughtful public discourse more broadly—bringing the best of the academy to a curious public, and bringing the best of that public, its curiosity and urgency, to academia. It consists of programming on the UChicago campus but also a summer workshop for US-based undergraduates which I’ve helped design and now teach in.

(In my day job, I’m a university professor of philosophy, and, when something really bothers me and I can’t think of anyone better suited for the job, I write myself.)

Kiara Barrow: I’m cofounder and coeditor of The Drift, which I launched with Rebecca Panovka in 2020. It wasn’t intentionally a pandemic project—we began working on our first issue in 2019, driven by the sense that the political upheaval of Trump’s first election and the liberal response to it demanded better thinking from the left and, in particular, a space for more intellectual contributions from a new generation. We initially had very modest ambitions, but after our first issue struck a chord, we were grateful to be welcomed into the community of little magazines, and have continued to grow steadily ever since. In addition to essays and criticism, we publish short fiction, poetry, dispatches, interviews, and extremely abbreviated reviews. Our first four issues were online-only, but we have been in print, too, since our fifth issue in 2021.

We built The Drift from scratch, so just about everything has been part of my purview, including designing the website and then selecting paper stock when we moved to print, fundraising and applying to grants, hiring and management of our staff, social media and newsletters, working with our accountants and bookkeepers to make sure our budget is sound and we’re compliant with nonprofit law, party venue scouting, and the day-to-day problem-solving that eats up so much of all of our time. But, of course, the core of my work is editing what goes into the magazine, which is a very in-depth and very collaborative process that involves high-level thinking about the editorial direction of The Drift, fielding pitches and submissions, helping guide conversations between our contributors and our team, and then digging into the drafts themselves—and then digging in to the next drafts, and then the next.

What are some of your favorite recent pieces you’ve published, and how do they represent what you aim to do more broadly?

MOR: Two that come to mind: Brandy Jensen’s “The Polycrisis,” about polyamory, which was one of our most-read pieces — it’s funny and sharp and takes what could be a tired culture-war topic and does real thinking about desire and ethics. And Garth Greenwell’s essays on art and morality, most recently “Taking Offense,” a gorgeous slow reading of a scene in Miranda July’s All Fours that asks what it means to stay with (and available to) the art that upsets us. Both are examples of what I’m always looking for at TYR: criticism that is also a form of inquiry — writing that doesn’t just evaluate but genuinely changes how you see and think, even if you don’t always agree with it. I want every piece to have the quality of discovery, where you feel the writer reflecting in real time, not performing a settled opinion.

KB: It’s nearly impossible to pick favorites as we have the luxury and privilege of publishing only our favorite work in the first place. But a few pieces from our most recent issue that feel particularly representative of what we look for at The Drift are Daniel Yadin’s masterful survey of romantasy, which combines rigor, humor, curiosity, and critique with astute analysis of the broader cultural, political, and psychic forces at hand. Daniel was a first-time contributor to The Drift. Similarly, Erik Baker (who wrote for our very first issue and then became an editor with us—he now helms our newsletter, in addition to editing essays and fiction) wrote a piece on the convergence of philosophy and self-help that is deeply learned, sensitive, and just plain fun to read. I’ll mention a couple of the short stories from last issue’s excellent fiction section, too: Nick Foretek’s “Porn” and Mimi Diamond’s “Good Health.” Both writers new contributors to the magazine, and both stories are hilarious, surprising, inventive, and totally original, from the conceit to the line level.

AB: My favorite reader response we ever got was that our work is unpredictable: you don’t know what we’ll cover and our approach to it is more likely to surprise you than not.

Some recent highlights include Grazie Christie’s two pieces for us, “My Beautiful Friend,” which uses the dynamics of beauty and envy in relationships between women to reflect on the non-egalitarian aspects of human beauty; and “Among the Post-Feminists” which explores a few far out women-centric internet subcultures (sick girls, witches and fertility healers, hustlers and scammers) as perverse gestures of disillusionment with the dominant forms of the feminism of the 2010s, first and foremost the so-called “girlboss,” “you can have it all,” aspirational feminism. These pieces are very Point in that they feature an author thinking carefully and deeply through questions that are not entirely comfortable and about which it is very easy to say predictable and ultimately crude things on both sides of the political-cultural divide. They also feature a singular voice, defined by a personal stake in these big questions and writing that draws exuberantly on literature, theory and mass culture to show how there are profound things at stake in what might at first glance appear to be surface phenomena.

The two other great examples are Mana Afsari’s “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” which explores the trend of young men who—in a move that might seem paradoxical to many—find in MAGA an answer to their philosophical ambition and hunger for ideas and her “Doomers in Love” about the inverted mirror images, on the right and the left, of contemporary dating paradigms and how they make heterosexual relationships for young people today very hard if not, in principle, impossible. Both of these topics could have been fumbled in so many ways but Mana manages to illuminate the phenomena and maintain ethical integrity while avoiding the clichés of the genre: feigning anthropological distance, evincing tiresome moral judgment.

Then finally I also want to mention pieces like Sam Kriss’s recent essays for us on the unique meaning of political assassinations to the American imagination, and alt-lit, or Sophie Lewis on the complicated legacy of Andrea Dworkin, because they display how The Point can be a home for established authors to explore a topic or do so in a way that they could not do in quite the same way elsewhere.

LB: The print issues of n+1 adhere to a pretty classical magazine format: an editorial note at the top (we call it the “Intellectual Situation”), followed by a politics section, then a “well” with essays and fiction, and then reviews in the back of the book. A few favorites from a quick tour through those sections:

From the Politics section of our Fall 2025 issue: this trilogy of short pieces about ICE. We’ve been talking a lot recently about the function of political critique in a moment when fascism feels fully present and demystified—what analysis can be offered? How to avoid overly academic approaches to urgent on-the-ground crises? In these conversations we tend to return to the idea that a magazine can, among other things, function as a record of shifts in historical feeling. The season and year are written right there on the cover, and then you open the magazine and read a description—nothing fancy—of what it feels like to be alive just now. These three pieces about Immigration and Customs Enforcement were written over the spring and summer of 2025, just as Trump’s deportation regime was escalating. I really admire how straightforward all three are, how committed to observation and variously literal kinds of transcription.

From the Essays section: Mina Tavakoli on attending a convention of puppeteers. I love a good “ticket to the fair”–style piece—to me that kind of thing is literary journalism as it’s meant to be done—and Mina is the perfect observer for this particular gathering of talented practitioners of a residual art form: empathetic, unbelievably fun and funny, with an ear for irony, a nose for the mildly grotesque, and an eye for deep American weirdness. She’s also, as a stylist, doing a kind of zillennial maximalism thing that I sincerely hope n+1 can reinvigorate more broadly.

From the Reviews section of our Winter 2025 issue: Alan Dean on Radu Jude. Remember the circulation guy I mentioned, who’s also a politics editor and sports writer? I forgot to say up there that he’s also a great film critic! This is a truly rigorous, well-researched, wildly stylish deep dive into contemporary Romanian cinema, as seen through its greatest and weirdest director.

Emerging writers sometimes think you need a literary agent in order to get into literary magazines. How much of the work you publish comes from agents? What are some other ways you find contributors? And what does your editorial process look like once you decide you want to publish a piece?

AB: The idea you need an agent to get published in a magazine, is, as you, Alia, very helpfully and decisively clarify in your book, false; it is doubly false for a smaller magazine like The Point.

We have a submission portal on our website and all blind submissions get reviewed by a discerning editor. We have published some incredible pieces that started as blind submissions, including a piece from 2014 by Jesse McCarthy—who went on to become not only an award winning author but also an editor The Point!—on French hip-hop.

That said, it is not impossible to find ways of emailing the editors directly with a pitch. I won’t speak for others but let me just say that as a university professor my email address is publicly available—make whatever inferences you will from this… (though for me just use anaberg@thepointmag.com!). When I get a cold email from a writer, what I’m looking for, aside from obvious things that a good pitch consists in—chief among them, a good idea—I personally really welcome an indication that the author knows what The Point is and has reason to believe their piece would be the right fit for us. We’re not just a vehicle for “publication” conceived of as an abstract goal, we’re a magazine with a concrete, particular sensibility. Indicating that you broadly get this also bodes well for the editorial process—when an idea is promising but the pitch isn’t quite there yet, this can make the difference between a rejection and an invitation to explore things further.

As for actively soliciting, we find authors anywhere from major publications to Substack, to Twitter (Mana Afsari’s first piece started as a reply to a tweet that Jon Baskin posted after the recent election about why so many young men moved to the right). I’ve asked people to elaborate on ideas they first put out in the form of Instagram stories. A lot of our editors also have a foot or two in the academy and there’s a sizable number of pieces that start with one of us stumbling upon an academic version of an idea and then all of us praying they can also write: Jacob Abolafia is for example a philosopher and political theorist whom I approached for our recent violence symposium and ended up writing an incredible piece on attitudes towards violence on the left.

The editorial process consists, sometimes, of preliminary conversations about the idea and its execution, and, always, the exchange of drafts. The latter will include anything from restructuring suggestions to objections to requests to write more material to many many cuts.

KB: It is absolutely not necessary to have an agent! In fact, a truly tiny, vanishingly small fraction of what we publish comes from agents. The Drift’s aim has always been to provide a platform for emerging writers, so it is essential to our mission to be constantly discovering new voices. Please help us do that by reaching out. By design, we have open pitch and submission inboxes for each genre we publish, and those email addresses, plus guidelines and tips, can be found on our About page (note the detailed pitch guide for essays specifically). And although these inboxes may sound like black holes, I promise that our human editors are reading every message that comes in. (As quickly as they can…) Now, that’s not to say that we’ll discriminate against you if you do have an agent—or if you are one.

Our editorial process is fairly involved. When we’re interested in a pitch, we’ll generally first spend some time going back and forth to really nail down the idea and the argument, or the set of texts (broadly defined) that will serve as evidence or objects of analysis. Then, the writer will work on a first draft. From there, our team of editors will refine the piece over the course of, typically, several months, through a combination of editorial memos, conversations by phone or Zoom, and edits to structure and prose. Multiple Drift editors will read the piece at different stages so that we can be sure we have the benefit of various perspectives and pools of knowledge, and have anticipated as many potential objections as we can. When we all feel ready to do so, we’ll slot an essay into a forthcoming issue, and then begin the process of fact-checking, copyediting, and, finally, proofreading. Our fiction process similarly involves multiple editorial reads, light fact-checking, copyediting, and proofreading, though it’s certainly less invasive. And then, our poetry editor has been known to make a suggestion or pose a question from time to time, but not much more.

MOR: We take pieces from agents, we commission work from writers, and we read everything submitted to us through Submittable — multiple times over. It’s true that as a small magazine with a long history of publishing established writers alongside new discoveries, we do publish a fair amount of agented work. But we also read widely — books, lit mags, Substacks, even social media — looking for voices that surprise and entrance us. One of the greatest thrills I’ve felt as an editor has been publishing writers who hadn’t yet been published, or not yet published widely. For instance, we published both Sasha Debevec-McKenney and Aria Aber early in their careers ... We try to do that regularly, alongside routinely publishing writers who are new to TYR.

Our editorial process tends to be involved. We’re not a place that just takes a piece and runs it through a copy edit; we work closely with writers on revision, often through multiple rounds. That’s part of what I think a literary magazine should be — not just a venue for the work to reach readers, but a deep relationship between writers and an editorial staff they know can read their work well and thoughtfully.

It also helps us make The Yale Review the best version of itself, a place readers know they will find high-quality, curated work, which has led to the steady growth in our readership, which is now nearly a million online readers a year.

LB: I’d say a minority of what we publish comes from agents. We do really place a lot of emphasis on building relationships with contributors, and so even when our returning contributors have representation, we’re often cooking up projects together directly. But literary agents are certainly an important part of the n+1 ecosystem—for instance, when emerging writers we’ve worked with let us know that they’re looking for representation, we do our best to put them in touch with agents we know and trust.

Other ways we find contributors: there are many channels! I work with plenty of writers who just find my email online (it’s very findable) and get in touch directly. We’re also, at this point, lucky to have a big and diffuse network of contributors who have a pretty good sense of our vibe, and it happens pretty frequently that someone who wrote for the magazine, like, five or ten years ago will write to us and say that they have a friend/student/comrade from their organizing group/whatever who’s been working on a cool essay and do we want to read a draft. I also just love meeting people organically and alighting on a possible idea for a piece—it’s really the greatest thing to be at a party or something and have someone tell you, “You must meet this journalist who’s visiting from Turkey and who just told me a crazy story!” Of course, one doesn’t want to hermetically work only with people in one’s social world, so I especially try to meet people when I’m outside of New York. The author of one of those ICE pieces, for instance, is somebody I met last summer at the Socialism Conference in Chicago.

As for n+1’s editorial process: it’s shifted a bit over the years, but basically—and this is for print; our online-only publication process is a little simpler—we’ll send drafts around to our editorial board, which is a committee composed of a mix of staff members who work in the office as well as some volunteer editors for whom n+1 is more of a side project. Then, depending on the subject of the piece, different editors with different areas of expertise will offer notes. Those notes might be purely formal (e.g., “let’s make this narrative more chronological”); they might offer specific feedback on content or argument (e.g., “this writer ought to read some Jane Macalevey to juice up the analytical turn in section 3”); they might be that mysterious flavor of edit that’s almost more psychological than literary (e.g., “I had a hard time trusting the writer after the mean account of his sister on page 8”).

Then usually one editor will take the lead on collating notes and communicating them to the writer. (We generally try to avoid overwhelming a writer with too many notes from too many editors—nobody wants to sort through a google doc full of contradictory comments.) At that point, it’s kind of up to the editor and writer to decide on how they want to do things. Some writers like to talk on the phone a lot, or exchange chatty texts through the revision process; some people prefer to receive a big memo and then be left alone for a while. We’re always trying to be more attentive to specific writers’ needs, and to do what needs to happen to make writers feel supported, especially since nobody is getting paid very much and so the big thing we can offer is a positive editorial experience. To that end, one thing we’re pretty insistent on, internally, is being as specific as possible with edits we give: so, we really try to avoid vague directives like “let’s make the introduction shorter,” and instead, you know, actually go in and do the work of cutting, or whatever it is that needs to be done.

How often do you publish writers who haven’t yet had their work published? Again, we’d love examples!

AB: All the time. Almost all of my examples above are, intentionally, of authors who did not publish or did not publish very much previously. If we think your idea has real merit (not a low bar mind you) and there’s some evidence the author can write (an even higher one), we’ll probably give it a shot.

MOR: It really depends — it can be a few times a year, or a dozen, or fewer. We don’t publish that many pieces overall, so even a few times a year is a meaningful percentage. We don’t have a quota; we have a sensibility, which means that we regularly turn down work from established writers and read all work with an open mind. If someone sends us something extraordinary, we don’t tend to care whether they’ve published before (except to be excited to help them achieve that milestone). That’s the whole point of having an involved and time-consuming submission-reading process, and one reason it can take some months to hear back from us.

LB: I would say this happens with medium frequency. We’re probably more likely to publish a truly first-time writer online than in print, although plenty of people have had their very first bylines in the magazine: the writer Will Tavlin, for example, hadn’t really published anywhere (other than our college alt-weekly <3) until n+1 ran his huge investigation into the history of digital projection. (Will’s second n+1 contribution, on Netflix, is now our most-read piece of all time!) I can think of a few other recent print contributors—the great short story writers Paul Soto and Nicholas Hamburger; Grace Glass, co-author of a magisterial essay about the Stop Cop City movement; Victoria Uren, an ultra-talented critic and multihyphenate—whose first big pieces appeared in n+1. And those are just from the past few years—really since its first issues, n+1 has taken a lot of pride in launching new writers, and in fulfilling that small-magazine function that Trilling described as “keeping the new talents warm until the commercial publisher is ready to take his chance.” Issue 2, for example, contained what I believe was the first published piece of writing by the now-universally-adored Elif Batuman. It was a 20,000-word essay about scholars of Isaac Babel—where else would she have taken that thing?

KB: The majority of our contributors have not published before working with us, and many others have published only shorter pieces, or online-only pieces, or academic pieces. For examples, look no further than any of our issues. An excellent one is Jordan Thomas, an anthropologist and firefighter who hadn’t written publicly before he contributed a great essay on California wildfires and the history of fire suppression to our second issue, in 2020. After writing for us, we connected him with an agent, and he sold a book based on the piece. Riverhead published that book, When It All Burns, last year, and then it was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. I can’t guarantee this will happen to you if you write for us, but we will try our very best.

Any closing advice for writers who hope to be published by you?

AB: Good Point pieces make good points that haven’t been made, at least not in quite that way, before.

MOR: Always read the magazine you’re submitting to. (This is true everywhere, but it’s especially true for a magazine with a strong editorial identity like TYR.) Keep writing new things and reading widely; read work you don’t especially like and figure out what might be working about it, too, alongside the work you love. And if you get a positive note from an editor — a “please do try us again” — take it seriously. But don’t resubmit the same day; wait until you have a piece you’re really proud of. We’ll remember you.

LB: Mostly echoing Meghan here, but I can’t think of too many qualities that our thousands of contributors have in common, except for the shared fact of knowing what they’re talking about. To me, the great appeal of the n+1 voice, to the extent that there is such a thing, is this kind of rangy, loose, easy authority—an un-pompous erudition that’s generous rather than showy, inviting rather than alienating. (The Intellectual Situation, which is nearly always written in the first-person plural, is where we try to literally invite the reader into this voice, via this enfolding “we.”) Anyway, that’s all to say: the ideal n+1 writer reads a lot, and so my advice is to do the same!

KB: Great advice all around here. The kernel of a strong Drift essay is often the nagging sense that everyone is talking about something but they’re missing an essential aspect of it—some important angle or bit of historical or political context is being overlooked, for example, or the critical consensus on something is either too positive or too negative, or the mainstream take was arrived at too hastily and too sloppily—and you are uniquely situated to help rectify that. We look for pitches with arguments that genuinely surprise and challenge us, intelligently articulating something that we have maybe sort-of noticed but not quite been able to pin down. As far as fiction and poetry, there’s really no substitute for reading what we’ve already published in order to get a sense of our taste.