Selected Essays | The n+1 Editors on the Intellectual Situation

On this bonus episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov about their new anthology of the best of n+1’s second decade, The Intellectual Situation.

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Transcript

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Jessica Swoboda  0:00  
Hey everyone, welcome to selected essays, a podcast series from the point magazine about essays you should read but probably haven't. Each episode, we'll be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. My name is Jess Swoboda, and I'm here with my co-host, Zach Fine.

Zach Fine  0:23  
This week, we have a special episode with Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov, who, along with Lisa Borst, are the editors of n+1. Dana and Mark joined us to talk about a new anthology called The Intellectual Situation: The Best of N+1's Second Decade, which gathers essays, fiction and reviews from the last 10 years of the magazine and features writers such as Andrea Long-Chu, Toby Haslett, Christine Smallwood and the Point's own Jesse McCarthy, among others. We spoke to Dana and Mark about what makes n plus one essays so distinctive and how each of them originally got involved with the magazine. We also looked at two of their favorite essays from the new anthology: "H." by Sarah Resnick, which was published in 2016, and "Not One Tree" by Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko, which appeared last year. 

Jessica Swoboda  1:09  
We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at thepointmag.com We'd love to hear from you, and also be sure to subscribe to The Point, the magazine that brings you content like this podcast. You can find a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners in the Episode notes.

Zach Fine  1:44  
Well, Dana and Mark, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Selected Essays.

Mark Krotov  1:49  
Thank you for having us. 

Dayna Tortorici  1:50  
Yeah, happy to be here.

Zach Fine  1:51  
So n+1 recently published an anthology of over 20 essays from the magazine called The Intellectual Situation: The Best of N+1's Second Decade. Can you tell us a little bit about the DNA of an n+1 essay and how it's changed in its second decade?

Dayna Tortorici  2:08  
So the typical n+1 essay tends to blend either memoir or original reporting with a sort of history or diagnostic view of a larger social or political phenomenon. So both of the essays that we're going to be talking about today do this, but that's been true of essays going back to the first decade of the magazine. I think we have a tag on our website called My Life and Times, which is an homage to an essay by Phil Connors called My Life and Times in American Journalism, and it's become almost a sort of inside joke that a lot of writers write about their strange and alienating experiences at their jobs, their weird jobs, for n+1, a kind of classic entry in this canon would be Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley. But I would say that that is that the kind of combination of memoir and and either theory or reporting is a kind of hallmark of an n+1 essay. What would you say?

Mark Krotov  3:08  
I think that's right, in a way, right? It's less, it's less any one sort of kind of like less one devotion, one kind of devotion to a particular set of formal concerns than it is, yeah, this kind of healthy juxtaposition and the sense of, you know, inside and outside simultaneously. So we're, you know, we're like any serious readers and editors, we're interested in in the interior lives of our writers, and that's what a lot of, a lot of the work in the magazine sort of boils down to. But we're also, you know, we really are interested in writers who can balance that with a kind of sense of, you know, external change in politics and in sort of larger contexts. I think that part of the fun task of putting this anthology together was actually trying to ask ourselves this very question that you're asking, Zach, which is like, what has changed about an n+1 essay? And in some ways, I feel like we are the least qualified people to make that determination, despite being two thirds of the editors of this book, partly because we're just so steeped in it. But I think that's something that we were attuned to and that we were interested in, sort of trying to at least pause it as a kind of tentative thesis, is that the magazine is that the kind of range of voices, registers, modes, tones, kind of multiplied over the course of the magazine's second decade. That's our sense. Certainly my experience encountering the magazine in college - I think the first issue I read was Issue five, my sense of it was like an incredibly there's a lot of range in it. There's a lot of sort of unexpected moments of humor. There's a lot of there's a lot of sort of intense dystopia. But you do get the sense of, like, really intense, not only cohesion, but a kind of a certain kind of tonal consistency, and maybe that's a little bit retroactive, but my experience of it in retrospect is of a thoughtful, melancholic, politically attuned, politically radical, but nonetheless saddened account of various kinds of you know, again, internal and external realities. That that's like overstating things completely. There's a lot of wild stuff in those early issues, but but our intuition, such as it is, is that in the in the later years of the magazine, that things have just gotten they've gotten a little weirder, they've gotten a little wilder. The number of contributors that we publish has grown, and so we've kind of wanted to follow them to, you know, ever stranger and more esoteric places, I think.

Zach Fine  5:47  
Before we dive into the particular essays you all chose, can you tell us about your individual involvement with n+1 and when you all started working for the magazine, just so we can get a sense?

Dayna Tortorici  5:56  
Yeah, sure, we're both lifers, in a way, I joined n+1 as an intern in 2010 and I've been involved with magazine pretty much ever since I joined as a co editor in chief in 2014 so I've I've cycled through many of the different jobs, day jobs that the nonprofit n+1 Foundation offers, but have been involved editorially, first as a volunteer editor and then on staff as an editor for the past decade plus.

Mark Krotov  6:30  
And I started as a kind of fake intern in late 2007 and gradually, you know, and sort of at some at some point, unclear to me, graduated to real intern that same fall.

Zach Fine  6:41  
When you say fake intern, you were just showing up at the office uninvited.

Mark Krotov  6:46  
That quality. It was very piecemeal. I mean, I think that in the magazine's early years, like, in any kind of, like, in the early years of any organization, there's just a lot of, like, a lot of kind of playful and cheerful flux, you know, people's, there's not that much there's not much money, there's not much of an edifice. And so people kind of like show up and do things, and I think there's something very nice and appealing to that. And a lot of folks who got involved with the magazine early kind of got involved in that, in that way. Even the way that Dana kind of like cycled through jobs speaks to that. But yeah, I was remembering recently how I went to pick up with my fellow intern, issue six from the printer in Pennsylvania, and Keith Gessen, one of our founding editors, kind of holding the magazine, and realizing, to his dismay, that it was too heavy and that the USPS was going to charge us to more money for, you know, for shipping it. But I think we got over that ultimately. 

Dayna Tortorici  7:39  
Wait, that was...

Mark Krotov  7:41  
That was the one that...

Dayna Tortorici  7:43  
I think that might have been a little earlier issue for but it was either issue four or issue six, where we realized to be able to qualify for media mail postage, we had to be under a pound or something, a pound and a half, and so that's what determined the upper limit of how many of how big. And okay, I see. I mean, we would have just let it go on forever, but yeah.

Mark Krotov  8:05  
Now we get nervous. Yeah, yeah. So I, kind of, I interned in 2007 and then, and then, kind of, you know, hung around in various informal ways. I was a book editor for a while, and worked published some n+1 writers and and worked with people, you know, associated with the magazine and then joined the organization in 2016 and became co editor in 2020.

Jessica Swoboda  8:26  
So why don't we turn to Sarah Resnick essay "H." to start? So can you say a bit about what it's about and why you selected it to discuss today?

Dayna Tortorici  8:36  
Yeah, sure. So this essay, which appeared in our winter 2016 issue of magazine, issue 24 is an essay by Sarah Resnick, a longtime contributor and former editor of n+1, about the opioid crisis grounded in the story of her relationship with her uncle who was a former addict, dependent on methadone, with whom she had a really complicated relationship. It was her father's brother. He lived in New York, and when she was a rather young woman, I think in her maybe late 20s or early 30s, I can't exactly remember, became kind of like his fiduciary representative, where, you know, he was living through like a pretty desperate, you know, impoverished life in the city, as many people do, dealing with drug dependency. And she became sort of responsible for his care and his financial solvency. And so the story of the essay really originated with her wanting to write about about harm reduction. You know, the the approach toward drug dependency that kind of Contra the AA model or NA model says, you know, abstinence, doesn't work for a lot of people, and only sort of plays in the hand of a punitive criminal justice system that incarcerates poor and sick people, and that if you look at people who are addicted to drugs as people with a kind of illness, the more reasonable and humane approach to care would be to reduce the harm, which often means actually, yes, helping people do the drugs that they're going to do anyway, instead of driving them into more obscure, dangerous situations where they're more likely To use a dirty needle or interact with people who are involved in violent crime and this sort of thing. So she was very interested in this specific type of harm reduction facility called a supervised injection site, or supervised injection facility, which I think was piloted in Vancouver. She's from Canada, and at the time of this, it had not yet been tried in the United States. I think now there is a supervised injection facility in New York City, and the program is going well. And so she wanted to write about this, to go check out this place where, basically there's a kind of clinic people can line up on the street in the morning to go, they take their street drugs, and then they go into this facility that's lined with mirrors. There's a lot of clean tools, you know, syringes, needles, etc, tourniquets. And under the supervision of, you know, kind of qualified medical people, they can shoot up heroin, any kind of opiate, any kind of drug, with the idea that they're more likely to do it safely there, and also that if they're having the kind of day where they think, you know, what I think today is the day that I could get clean, there's like, kind of the first step to a rehabilitation process right upstairs. And the argument for this is that, you know, actually, the way that drug dependency goes like it is really totally contingent and random. You never know what day you're going to be ready to just think, you know what today, I think I could actually try it. And so putting people in closer proximity to that opportunity to get well is worth, quote, unquote, helping people do drugs. So Sarah wanted to write about this. Originally wrote this essay in a kind of straightforward New Yorker style, and I brought it to the n+1 editorial board, and there was some feedback that was like, you know, this is very accomplished. It's very good reporting. But like, this could have been published in the New Yorker in 1999 like, what's her interest in this? Like, where does, where does she come into this? And we, you know, we talked about it. I was her editor, and she mentioned, like, well, you know, I have this I have this uncle. I have this relationship with him. And so suddenly, the sort of, the, why do you want to write this essay? Like, really, you know, some people want to write an essay because they want to be published in n plus one, or published anywhere. And it was very clear that she had this super deep, lived kind of investment in this story. And so she started to play around with this more unique structure that was kind of braiding watching the way that the United States was reporting on the opioid epidemic in the newspapers, reporting this story about the supervised injection facility, and then writing a kind of memoir piece about her relationship with taking care of her uncle, and that is what ultimately became this essay, H. And H, of course, stands for both heroin, and that's also the initial she gives to her uncle. His name didn't actually start with H, but she was kind of anonymizing him anyway. So, so that's the piece, and I think it's a really beautiful kind of haunting and deeply, deeply humane and complicated emotionally account of what addiction and harm reduction really means in the contemporary context, it's really difficult to write about what using drugs is and does to people, how it intersects with poverty, how it intersects with crime, and what it means to live a good life and health without kind of dipping into a kind of tactical policy argument about not wanting to give ammunition to the other side. And I think she just does it with so much grace and lucidity. I think it's just a marvelous essay. 

Zach Fine  14:36  
That's amazing. So her uncle was not even in the first draft of the piece?

Dayna Tortorici  14:40  
No, not at all. Okay, yeah, wow. And that actually another is another kind of classic component of the n+1 essay that I think I picked up from, from one of the founding editors, Keith Gessen, who I learned a lot from, which was that he always kind of wanted to scratch under, you know, whatever was compelling someone to write something was like, But why this, and why you? And some it didn't always turn out that the answer to that question was so interesting that it had to be in the essay. But a lot of the time it was the it was the story. And so I think that part of why you see the personal in n+1 writing so much, is that that's sort of where the heat is, and we just have this sort of natural attraction to, you know, where is this thing? Where is the writing most alive? Where does this really cut closest to the bone?

Jessica Swoboda  15:29  
And in the passage you selected, those qualities really come to the fore. Can you read that aloud for us please?

Dayna Tortorici  15:36  
Yeah, sure. I should also, you know, mention that the part that's about her uncle is written in the second person, and so you kind of understand that she's she's talking to him. "You resent me now I'm trying to help you budget your money. You are spending your entire monthly payment within the first week. When your next deposit comes, I transfer it into the account you cannot access. Every week I allow you one quarter of your stipend, after deducting your bills and rent, but you won't stop texting me asking for more money. I try to reason with you, explain why you need the budget. I try putting my foot down, which amounts to ignoring your texts. You say you are buying a lot of $5 bootleg DVDs. Hitchcock is your favorite, but you forget that I know how to do math and you are not interested in any of the solutions I come up with: a cheap computer, an internet connection, Netflix. Every time I say no, I know I'm passing judgment on you, on the things you desire for yourself. Your collection of Adidas sneakers is by now substantial. What you prioritize. I am measuring you against an ethic of responsibility, a conception of the good life that I do not want to force you to share. I can recognize this, but I can't hew my way out of the irony that accepting your irresponsibility only shifts the burden onto me, and this too seems unjust."

Jessica Swoboda  16:53  
What do you make of Resnick formal choice to put the whole piece in the second person? 

Dayna Tortorici  16:58  
Well, it's not the whole piece, it's it's just this piece, but it's a significant part of it. And, you know, the second person is a kind of classically fraught, formal choice. I think a lot of writers use it as a sort of substitute for the first person, as a way to almost interpolate the reader into being themself, like you go to the store and you do this, is their way of saying, I go to the store and I do this, but you are me because you're reading the story. What's so moving about it here is that there is an obvious, direct addressee that is not a reader. And so you actually, instead of being kind of conscripted into identifying with the you who is secretly the writer, you are identified directly with the I, with the writer, and share the responsibility for the you, which is this other person. And so I think the way that I think that it's a way to kind of draw the reader into the kind of almost not perfectly consensual intimacy that this sort of caretaking arrangement has put her in, like you resent me now, like you could almost have that apply to the reader, to being stuck with this experience of having to follow along with this, these authorial choices, or conversely, being stuck with this difficult subject, this uncle who suddenly you have to take care of and follow along with. And that, that is what I think makes the choice so compelling to me, is how it sort of dramatizes the sort of uneasy intimacy and power dynamic in that kind of care relationship.

Zach Fine  18:49  
Something that Jess and I were also really interested in was Resnick's role in the essay, and the way that she's kind of negotiating with her own I don't want to say complicity, but she talks about wrestling with her savior complex, and how, and how that kind of factors into her role in helping her uncle. And I'm curious how much of that was brought out in the editing process. If you remember, about whether it was a decision to ask Resnick to say more about what was at stake for her in this.

Dayna Tortorici  19:18  
You know, it's been a long time now, so I don't remember, but you know, Sarah is, as is evident from what's on the page here, an incredibly perceptive and self reflective person. And I think that the sort of drama of co-dependency, of resentment and generosity that is always in play when you're this kind of person. Was something she was very conscious of from the beginning. And as someone who wants to write truthfully, I think she felt - I would not be surprised if it was very important to her to make sure that kind of every shade of that emotional spectrum was was represented, that she wasn't painting herself as some kind of hero, that it was evident that there was something in it for her that she couldn't quite put her finger on and yet, she was also being, in some ways, taken advantage of. That's just so much what the sort of I mean, anyone who's in Al Anon or has been in a kind of co-dependent relationship will tell you like, it's such a it's such a real part of what living with somebody with a problem like this is like and I think she just, there's no substitute for experience with something like that. And I think she just just carries it over to the page remarkably well.

Zach Fine  20:51  
One thing you said is that about the earliest iteration of the essay was that it could have possibly been a kind of New Yorker piece in terms of just, its level of reporting and kind of media coverage. But I'm wondering if there's anything about the final version, about its not only about its formal qualities, but about its political stance. That moved it from being a kind of New Yorker style essay to something that would be distinctively n+1 in terms of the subtlety of its politics and its position and argument.

Dayna Tortorici  21:22  
Yeah. I think so. I think that, you know, I can't, I can't totally speak to how the New Yorker makes decisions about this, but I do feel like there's a kind of cleaner line and what they publish between memoir material and reporting in that like it's not that you can't have memoir. You can you can have Ariel Levy, you can have Emily Witt, but it's not sort of interwoven in the same way with the more sort of straightforward reported like Rachel Aviv style pieces. And I think the coexistence of both of those things, and then this third element, which is this kind of media offering, as she's just describing herself reading the newspapers, that, to me, feels very n+1. And I think does this sort of added dimension of both of these things being allowed to be in the same piece introduce another political dynamic? Yeah, I think so. Because I think that it's clear that she's kind of advocating for it in some way, and that kind of advocacy is not allowed in a more straightforward, um, journalistic outfit.

Jessica Swoboda  22:30  
So Mark, why don't we turn to the other essay you chose to talk about, "Not One Tree." What's it about? And why did you select it?

Mark Krotov  22:39  
Yeah, the essay, which is by a writer Grace Glass, which is a pseudonym, written with another writer named Sasha Tycko, is about the occupation of of a forest in southeast Atlanta, which is in the process of being turned into an Atlanta Police Department, like a large training facility, which sort of quickly got the pejorative nickname Cop City. The plans for this facility kind of go back a few years, but, but it was really kind of, you know, the kind of the work on it really began in earnest, sort of shortly after the George Floyd rebellion in like 2021, and very, very quickly, attracted a group, a kind of diverse group of opponents, some kind of like local environmentalists, some, some, you know, just like folks who had been going to that forest for years, sort of informally, just hanging out there and then, and a group of, a group of like local and then eventually to national anarchists that you know, that oppose construction on the grounds of, you know, on kind of anti carceral grounds, on environmental grounds, and and sort of this movement that began in these very kind of small, modest ways of people actually occupying the forest and and trying to sort of make it their own and making it safe for you know, kind of like to leaving it autonomous and keeping the cops away, first, sort of in small ways, and then and gradually in kind of escalating ways, as the as the cops, you know, kind of developed like a larger presence, and started bringing in, you know, a lot of military grade machinery. And eventually the Georgia Bureau of Investigation got involved, and, you know, and it became this, like Cop City sort of became in in the years between, I would say the George Floyd rebellion and, and the protest movement after, after October 7, Cop City was really the kind of the focal point, in some ways, of the, you know, of a kind of American protest movement, and it had had a real, sort of international resonance. What was interesting and exciting about this piece is that is that it's written kind of from within, but maybe, let's say, not completely from within. So when I first heard about it, before it existed, I kind of spoke to one of the authors about it, and, and, and it was clear that that one of the authors was already very, was very present in the forest, almost from the very beginning. They were living in Atlanta, and, and, and, it sort of had a had a kind of academic interest in what was happening, but also just a personal stake, because they were hanging out with people who who were involved in the in the encampments, very, very early on. But also they were not like, you know, there's some people who were in that forest for months at a time, in kind of various in various iterations, and that was not quite the experience of these writers. So they were sort of, they spent a lot of time there. They worked in the kind of informal kitchen, they brought supplies and so on. But they were sort of in and out. They weren't like permanent, permanent residents, as it were, and and so that was already interesting. So you on one hand, you get this kind of, you know, in just as Dana says about this kind of interesting writer, kind of writing journalism, but also performing a kind of advocacy. We're very attracted to the sort of instability and borderline on safety of that position, right? That's like a, it's a kind of a, it's a, it's a state in a situation that mainstream journalism kind of rejects by default. And that's exactly what makes it interesting to us. So we already had this element here. But then also, you know, what we ended up having were these just unbelievable sentences, you know, these kind of pages and pages of remarkable description of of of the forests, kind of natural life, but also of the life of the protesters, you get a sense of how, you know how a kind of anarchist movement actually takes shape in the most granular way, how, how the kitchen is built, how a bridge is built, how water is being brought in from from outside the forest to inside. How you know how the people who are kind of like dumpster diving out in Atlanta, how what they find can actually make its way back into the forest, how the kind of defenses are built up against the events, against an increasingly powerful police presence. And, you know, it just seemed like this uncanny combination of things. You know, you the great essays you really in a certain way, can't assign, I think you they just have to, you can hope for them, and you can kind of have conversations about them, but in some sense, they really have to come into being. And here I felt like my, my main job was just to, you know, for a while, to just get out of the way and let the thing, let the thing be written, and then eventually to kind of get to work, actually, working very, very closely with Sarah Resnick, who is the, you know, who was an extremely important editor on this piece, kind of bringing it, taking it down a little bit in scale. It's a very, very long essay. It's one of the longest essays we've ever published. And still, it was a lot longer when it first came in and so, and there were kind of obvious, you know, there were just obvious kind of questions of length that we had to entertain, but then more interesting and complicated questions about, what should the balance of history and reportage be in this essay? What should the balance of kind of nature writing and more kind of, like, straightforward political theorizing be in this piece, what should, you know? What are the sort of various relationships between inside and outside? To be a little reductive, and that, you know, the sentences were kind of incredible all the way through. I didn't really have to do very much on that, but this, but, but getting the kind of sequence right, I'm in Atlanta myself, so there were certain points of familiarity that I had with the essay that I wanted to make sure we weren't taking for granted, because, you know, other readers were not going to have that context. But also, like, I really kind of have come to have so little patience for this kind of standard, for the sort of data dump model where you have this, like, opening section of an essay that's kind of interesting and intriguing, and then there's a section break. And then it's like, 40,000 years ago, you know. And then we kind of work our way up to the present. 

Dayna Tortorici  29:07  
We used to call that the in-the-19th-century problem. Oh, yeah, yeah. Probably many colors should be, like, excitingly big in the 19th century.

Mark Krotov  29:17  
Exactly. And, you know, and I get it because it's like, you know, it's very hard to kind of do a couple different things at once, and especially if you, if you have, if you're interested in a sort of particular historical context for something, you got to deliver that information somehow. But here I was, like, extremely attuned to the fact that we could not, like, we could not make a single kind of cliched move. There's certain kinds of pieces that, maybe, because they're buttoned up, or more straightforward, they actually allow for a certain for, you know, a larger there's, there's more latitude to to kind of hit the beats. I really didn't want to hit any beats here. I wanted the whole thing to be just like, totally surprising. And the only reason I was able to even have that wish was because the authors were, you know, right there with us. And, you know, and I should say, too, just before, kind of, you know, getting into reading is that, you know, they it's not enough to say that the descriptive work that they perform in this essay is remarkable, and that the kind of analytical work that they do is sophisticated. There's also an incredible amount of research in this piece, pages and pages of research that were cut, but research that was sort of, you know, historical in nature for the most part, that really kind of brought out the incredibly kind of suggestive and complicated parallels between the fight against, you know, the fight around the forest now, and the kind of various fights around the forest that had happened in the preceding 150 years of Atlanta history, and, yeah, and that. And it just that that stuff takes a lot of work. So I just wanted to acknowledge it, because it can feel, yeah, it's not, it's like, I don't want to seem blithe and kind of passing over all the stuff that was cut, because it was really good stuff too.

Jessica Swoboda  31:01  
Can we turn to one of those past rich passages. I think the one you selected is especially great, and I highlighted it as well throughout the course of my reading process.

Mark Krotov  31:12  
That's great, absolutely. "For all the talk about autonomy, sometimes you want to be of use. Is this what's so enlivening about the week of action? We are happy to see our friends, of course, but it's something more, and they sense it too, a subtle reorientation of our body to other people, to abstractions like work and time. We chat while we work with young strangers. Exchange biographies and motives and meanings. They mostly say they came to the forest to learn from militant struggle at the crossroads of racism, ecocide and the forces of social control, and then laugh when we say that we're here because we love the logistics, but it's true: for a few transcendent instances this week, we feel like a gnat and a swarm, a spontaneous, collaborative choreography unfolding around us. Again. We are exhilarated by the rush of it's not exactly solidarity, but something even stranger and more miraculous, closer to goodwill. There's no money in the forest. People share what they have and borrow what they don't. Something clicks about gender and number. Everyone just presumes without asking, that others are all they/them, because assembling here is something like a we/us, which feels both Lost and Found, long forgotten and newly mockishly recovered."

Jessica Swoboda  32:20  
Yeah, I think I highlighted this passage because it captures, I felt like the various threads of the essay and the various tenants that it's challenging at the same time. But why did you select it, Mark?

Mark Krotov  32:36  
Well, it's funny. I only this only kind of occurred to me, as Dana was reading from H. But, you know, both of these essays actually have like, you know, kind of interesting, interesting personal pronouns. You know, the the second person in H is a kind of, you know, is an odd and extremely suggestive and rich choice, as Dana talked about. But here there's this first person plural that is, on one hand, extremely literal. It's written by two people. And so that just seems like the natural, right choice, though, in fact, that's not always the case, right? You get certain co written pieces that subsume the identity of the co writers entirely, or they might, you know, actually like name the different authors and at kind of moments when those inflection points have to happen. So there's that that seems very interesting. But then, of course, this, this first person plural, you know, as this passage suggests, is kind of more it's more complicated and it's more expansive. It is, you know, truly collective, right? It's collective in the sense of being about the people in the forest, the people kind of working together to stop, to stop Cop City, but also maybe even the larger collective right, of all the kind of, that enfolds all the kind of political possibility that might emerge from this movement. So that I found was, you know, that that just seemed very sort of interesting and and fun to me. But I also, gosh, I just think this, this passage in particular, describes so beautifully, and so originally, this, this feeling of of the excitement of organization and the excitement of collectivity. And, you know, that's a, that's a that's a topic that's important to us. There's a lot in, you know, there's a couple pieces in, in the intellectual situation, in the book, that are about organizing. That's just a, you know, it's an issue that we return to again and again because, you know, because we, we believe it should be front of mind. But the pleasure of that, of that sort of organization can sometimes be occluded because you just have to deal with all the all the difficult shit, and all the kind of the painful, the painful parts of getting people in a room and getting them to talk to one another and start something. But here, you know, this is a this is a moment in the. Piece before some of the bad shit really happens and so, and I love that it kind of captures in pure, almost blissful form, how how moving it can be to sort of work together in this way. 

Dayna Tortorici  35:13  
One of the things I liked so much about this essay was just like how deftly it just sort of like danced on that line between, it's not even between, like sincerity and irony even. It's just a sort of like a kind of earnestness without piety that is so difficult to find in any kind of political movement writing. And I think that in there's another section in this essay where the authors talk about the kind of anarchists that they encounter in the forest, or, you know, how all of them have the same crass tattoo. And there's that one line, "we need the outside agitators. They're nice." There's just like such an incredible familiarity with the world that they're writing about without any of the disdain, and it's like that, that tension is held throughout the whole thing, and it just it, it elicits so much trust for me as a reader, like I kind of know that I'm not, I'm not, like, heading down a weird Kool Aid path with somebody who's just, like, got movement-pilled and like, hasn't kind of come out of the manic phase yet. They're just, they're so clear eyed, it's amazing,

Mark Krotov  36:28  
But neither is it the path toward any kind of renunciation. Yeah, I think we, you know, we do want to publish committed writing, it  is important to us. I mean, in a way, the Sarah resnicks piece is an example of that too, right? It advocates for a pretty radical, you know, intellectual and political position that still doesn't have anything, anything close to, you know, kind of mainstream acceptance, except in like and even in the small pockets where, where it's had some impact, there's been some retrenchment, you know, but these are things that we believe are important to advocate for and important to sort of take a take a strong stance on. But the path to that stance, the path to that advocacy, is, is we, you know, we believe that that that can really be the fun part. There's a sort of fetish for, you know, widespread intellectual fetish for either-or-ness or evenkeeled-ness or irresolution that I think none of us is especially interested in, probably because we've spent our, you know, childhood and adult lives reading in that mode. But at the same time, we want to honor complexity. And I think that this, this essay, is full of, as Dana says, is full of these kind of self interruptions and corrections and switchbacks on the level of the sentence and the paragraph and the section and the essay itself, that that, you know, aim to ultimately kind of paint a more complex picture, and a kind of increasingly complex picture as time goes on, without ever losing sight of the of the brightness of the objective.

Dayna Tortorici  38:00  
It's small adjustments. It's not the kind of like - but then, but of course, but also, don't forget this - it's not that kind of like, hemming, hawing, position jockeying. It's just these, like, small refinements that, like, anytime you think that you, like, kind of have their number and like, are like, Oh, I know what that is. I know what they're talking about. They're just not. You can't really peg them for any one thing, in a way, incredibly compelling.

Zach Fine  38:28  
The question of tone was one that I was I was talking about with Jess, because today I was teaching, and I taught the "Why is everything so ugly" essay in my class. And the students were so divided about the tone of the essay, and they read it completely differently. And we started off the conversation here today with Mark saying something about the melancholy, the sad and the n+1, and then Dana, a minute ago, talking about earnestness without piety. And I guess I'm just wondering if there is a way to kind of characterize the n+1 tone, even if we use this essay as a kind of exemplar of it, about how it seems to encompass a lot, there's a lot of tonal variety there. But I'm wondering if we could even kind of distill it down to just a few words of what that tone is.

Mark Krotov  39:20  
Well, first I have to know what your students said about these.

Zach Fine  39:25  
Okay, one half of the room thought that it was - I want to be clear about something. They all really loved it, and they all believed it, and thought the argument very persuasive. One half of the room, though, thought that it was kind of not angry, but kind of fervent and charged, and more kind of charging. And then the other half thought it was kind of funny or wry, and so there was a kind of one the one half thought it was kind of heated, and the other half thought it was a little bit more kind of cool and wry in its assessment. And so I, which I thought was a very different it was pretty split in the room. And so I wasn't really. Sure how they went split in those two directions, but I'm curious how you, as one of the authors of that piece, might be able to characterize that piece or or the one essay we're talking about here.

Mark Krotov  40:10  
No, that's wonderful. I mean, you know, it's, obviously, it's the easy way out. But I think they're both, you know, both groups are right. I'm interested in what, you know, yeah. I mean, I think part of what Lisa Borst and I were interested in trying to enact in that piece was this kind of, to me, a classic n+1 collision of, you know, serious, sometimes angry assessment with, with a kind of necessary humor, but also a kind of necessary, sort of like distance from from that anger, not because one wants to kind of believe in one's anger less, or one's outrage or one's critique, but just because one wants to find kind of creative and novel and playful ways to deliver it the, I mean, to my mind, the hallmark of the intellectual situation in the magazine, which was, you know, has stayed. It's taken a lot of different forms. It's not, you know, there's a lot of variety, but ultimately, there's a lot of humor in that section.

Dayna Tortorici  41:08  
You should explain what that section is. 

Mark Krotov  41:11  
Yeah. So the opening section of every issue, The Intellectual Situation is, is kind of like, you know, it's an essay, or a series of essays, that is typically unsigned. It's written from the editors, and that sort of intervenes in some aspect of contemporary cultural or social or political life. And, you know, sometimes it's like, pretty straightforward, like in our, you know, in our current issue, it's about, you know, it's about Biden and the Democrats and the war on Gaza. But sometimes it's about astrology, as in a brilliant in a brilliant piece from, from this issue that Sarah Resnick essays in that the Dana wrote, and, you know, but, but the like, there's a certain understood self consciousness about the fact that you kind of elevate issues so that one has to sort of like engage with them in the same way that one would engage with questions that are obviously, you know, kind of more traditionally serious, so that there's already kind of this, like, fun playfulness. Right from the jump, you kind of force the reader, not force but you ask the reader to really pay close attention to something that that you're interested in, and then, you know, and then once that opening gambit is established, then it's really about, well, like, what kind of, what kind of conversation Do you want to have with the reader? What kind of, what kind of reaction do you want to generate? How do you want them to navigate this problem? Right? And I think that changes every time, because the nature of the problem is different every time. In this case, in a way, it seems so kind of stoner stupid to say, well, everything is so ugly now, but we were interested in that precise, in the precise truth of that stoner stupidity. Because it just like it is true, but okay, but you can't, you know, obviously you're not going to just get away with being merely declarative. And so, you know, what are the kind of, what are the paths toward some kind of, like, consensus or agreement, or at least, strong kind of evidence gathering on that front? And it occurred to us that, you know, that this kind of, the there's this, like, rich history in this, in this section of humor and of irony and of and of silliness to mine and to draw. And so we felt like we hadn't done that in a while. And so that was just so the tone started to kind of like, open itself up and, you know, and Lisa had the great insight that that this should, that the piece should actually be a journey, right? If we're talking about something that's like, essentially purely visual, that any reader of the piece can kind of ultimately intuit in their own surroundings. Then, then the writer, the writers of the piece, should take a trip to and I think that like...

Zach Fine  43:57  
I'll just say that all the students love that component of the essay they loved, they loved the scenes of, you know, we swipe our metro card, you know, the I think that really, it's a wonderful touch in the piece.

Mark Krotov  44:08  
We kind of only realized, I think, late in the piece that, or late in putting together the intellectual situation, the book that that said that piece, and Not One Tree, the Cop City essay, they closed the book. And so, you know, it sort of became funny and interesting to us that the last two pieces in the magazine are both co written and kind of play with this first person plural, you know, that's not to say that like total, you know, you know, kind of individual de individuating collectivity is the future of the magazine. But that did feel, that felt revealing to us somehow. And I hope that the readers, readers of the book will kind of take that as some kind of challenge, even if we quite can't quite figure out what that challenge is yet ourselves. I've totally failed to answer your question about what makes an n+1 essay.

Dayna Tortorici  44:54  
Funny, smart. Mad.

Mark Krotov  44:55  
Funny, smart, mad.

Dayna Tortorici  44:58  
Kind of sad. Wanting something better.

Mark Krotov  45:02  
Wanting something better, yeah, I think that nails it.

Zach Fine  45:05  
That's great. That's five. That's good, perfect.

Mark Krotov  45:08  
Yeah, we'll take it.

Jessica Swoboda  45:10  
So there's so many changes happening in media these days and in the literary world in general. And so what do you see as n+1's role in these coming years, in this changing landscape? 

Mark Krotov  45:20  
I think it's a few things, I think that in some ways, you know, it seems like kind of odd thing to say, but, you know, I think by some metrics, it's kind of a healthy time for for media own in the sense that there's a lot of variety, you know, there's a lot of new magazines cropping up that we're sort of excited to read; the Substack revolution, you know, is a kind of mixed bag in certain ways, but it's certainly the case that I have access to, like a wider variety of, you know, really kind of hyper specific, kind of topically inflected insight from a broad range of writers, probably more so than I have since, like the great blog era of the early 2000s that feels like a good thing. At the same time, there is, like, you know, a kind of inescapable path toward conglomeration, you know, at the top, and with, you know, with kind of with larger publications being, you know, kind of like being forced into a position where there are more things to more people, and thus, you know, and producing more, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but ultimately, like converging on, you know, on a kind of monochromatic quality that I think will only continue because of, you know, at least for media organizations that that are subject to certain kinds of, like, you know, financial and corporate pressures, that leaves a lot of space in the middle, you know, I think there's just we, we're certainly not. A lot of people consider m plus one to be sort of more established than we feel it is. It still feels like pretty wire and string to us after 20 years, and it still feels like a very personal and idiosyncratic project that has to be kind of made and remade every time we start an issue, and every time we put a book together. And it just feels incredibly it still feels very sort of dynamic and open ended and exciting to us. But the fact is that, having been around for a long time, having managed to not fold, and in fact to grow and to and to kind of introduce, really an extraordinary range of writers into into a mainstream, or at least a semi mainstream, we now have sort of certain responsibilities toward continuity, right? And so the you know, the baseline thing that we have to do is just to keep going and to keep kind of doing what we do best, which is to, you know, which is to kind of continue to find new writers and hopefully make interesting and creative homes for them and let them publish in more exciting and strange and risky ways than they might in other places. Maybe some of those writers will be snatched up by bigger publications or get book deals, and that's great, but we just, you know, we want to keep, like, finding and cultivating these people, but at the same time, I do think that on the level of, you know, on the level of idea and on the level of style, they're just, you know, I certainly don't feel As if, you know, I think there were a few years ago. I think I at least felt some kind of anxiety about the fact that, you know, it's just like there was this, like, incredibly kind of dynamic moment for left publishing and, you know, and like, you could just like whatever, kind of, like socialist vision, one kind of concocted late at night. There it would be, you know, like the next day, and Jacobin or something, and it would be pretty like, it would be readable, and it would be sort of widely shared, and, and there's something very cool about that, but I don't necessarily think that that's quite the kind of landscape that we inhabit now. I think that, you know, smaller, more careful, more you know, kind of editorially involved publications are real, kind of custodians of certain kinds of, like, radical ideas, and in a way that feels very old fashioned, but also kind of newly modern. And so that feels like some a role that we just will continue to play. I think both of the pieces that we've selected today kind of speak to that. But also, yeah, I mean, just on the level of style, I think that there, you know, I feel that there's a real, there's just so much pressure put on editors. And, you know, across across media today, I think that editors are, you know, I think a lot of media organizations consider editors essentially dispensable and and thus lay them off. And I think that when editors are not laid off, they're basically asked to operate on a kind of acquisitions model, where they're really sort of bringing stuff in, whether it's books or articles and essays, rather than kind of cultivate, you know, cultivating talent and sort of working closely with writers, but also cultivating the craft of editing. And I see us as being kind of stubbornly militantly opposed to that, that model. We really care about the craft, and as long as we are around, we're going to keep caring about it. And we institutionally, we want to, you know, we're very interested in finding new ways to to help kind of younger editors develop that craft, and to make sure that there's some kind of like that for all the kind of great literary dissemination that we're doing, that we're interested in doing, that there's a similar kind of professional dissemination that's happening too. Not that we're like, I don't consider ourselves terribly, you know, professional as an organization, in a good way, but I do think we have certain very, very serious commitments to, yeah, to the work, you know, and and we really want to make sure that that that those commitments are not, that we're not sort of isolated in those in those commitments, everybody wants to do their best, you know. And everybody wants to kind of continue doing the work as much as they possibly can, and so that the challenge is really to kind of, like as much as possible, fight off those pressures, both kind of as a single magazine and then and then collectively, you know, across the across the ecosystem.

Dayna Tortorici  51:15  
Yeah, that was exactly what I was going to say about editing. I think we want to continue to represent the tradition of little magazines and publications period that are deeply invested in the collaborative work of editing and what can be accomplished in a collaborative editorial process that can't be in a sort of one man shop of a Substack. Which to be clear, I'm with Mark. I enjoy my niche Substack subscriptions, but I think the quality of artistry and ambition that you can accomplish with an experienced editorial team is unmatched, and so we're gonna, we're gonna be the standard bearer for that for as long as we can. 

Zach Fine  52:07  
Thank you so much. Mark and Dana, the new volume, The Intellectual Situation, is great. Jess and I really enjoyed reading the essays. Thank you all so much for joining us. 

Jessica Swoboda  52:16  
Yeah, thank you so much. 

Dayna Tortorici  52:17  
Thank you so much for having us.

Mark Krotov  52:18  
Thank you for having us.

Jessica Swoboda  52:20  
Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of Selected Essays. We'd like to thank John Trevaskis for editing the podcast, and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits for contributing the original music as always. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, please subscribe to The Point there's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at the point mag.com We'd love to hear from you until next time, listeners.