The New New Partisan
Before coming over to the Press, my fellow editors Tim Marchman and Jon Leaf and I spent much of the preceding year and a half launching and maintaining New Partisan, a Web site and labor of love dedicated to politics, culture and the arts. We had in mind a site (and eventually a print magazine) in the spirit of the late and lamented Partisan Review. Particularly, we wanted a forum open to people of all or no ideologies, and one that didn't impose rigid limitations on form-a place where Marxists and paleo-cons, fictional travelogues and photo essays could lay cheek-and-jowl, or even slip one another the tongue. Or the finger. And that's not to mention sportswriting, comics and all sorts of other brilliant rubbish.
Our crew included: A former AP bureau chief inclined to reminisce about nipple shots in 1940s films; a maddened ex-poet in the business of gentrifying Ramallah, and a cranky-before-his-time young critic whose other outlets included the Times; an embittered book clerk going on about St. Augustine and the cyclists; a former speech-writer for Mayor Giuliani, and an editor at the London Observer; too many famous cranks to list (Mugger included); a brilliant and successful painter who dropped out of the art world and moved to New Paltz to continue his work in peace, and a brilliant if paranoiac illustrator in the habit of sending us unsolicited naked photos; our friends; our enemies, and a guy on a first-name basis with the president who'd nonetheless call to schmooze twice daily at length; a highly-prescient if utterly crazed commune-grown leftist; a dope-smoking biographer of world-class economists, and a senior economist at Princeton University Press; Honore de Balzac; Walker Evans, and a contingent of crackpot and crack-shot commentators and letter-writers.
New Partisan's now under the able editorship team of Press contributing writer Hannah Elka Meyers and rakish man about town Salvatore Borriello. While I will continue to be involved as an (occasionally) contributing editor, it's their baby now. Drop in once in a while; you'll be glad you did. And dig around-there are hundreds of articles to peruse, many of them first-rate and the least of them interesting, and new ones added several times each week.
I'll let the new editors' work speak for itself, but my hope is that NP, which was founded for no good reason at all, continues on, passing through the hands of various people and taking on a life of its own, distinct from the direction that any one group might take it in. There's enough ambition in the world-we're glad to have created one thing that exists only to be interesting.