There are dozens of little intellectual journals that publish three or four times a year and are meant for a small, but non-specialized audience: I’m talking about The Yale Review, The Drift, The Baffler, The Believer, Liberties, and The Point, for example.
1) New blurb unlocked!!!! "With Phil Christman you're always in good hands." Thank you, seriously.
2) I'm obviously deeply biased. I love Hedgehog. The first several essays of mine that anyone gave a shit about all were published there (and, specifically, were all commissioned by B.D.M.). They've let me say things the way I want to say them, mostly, and they give me a harder time in copyediting than anyone else does. In every issue I read articles that are a) good and b) hard to imagine getting published anywhere else without changes that would make those articles boring. Basically, that's all I ask from a magazine. As a critic, in general, I'm pretty binary: this holds my attention or it doesn't. I'm a "I fuck with this and here's why"/"I don't fuck with this and here's why" critic rather than a "Here's why this is a 5.8 rather than a 6.7 let alone an 8.9" critic. ADHD, probably.
3) I think that the overall informing vision of Hedgehog is probably something to the effect that you can rally together critics of antihumanism from the left, the center, and the right. This probably can't work as a political project. "Humanism" is too many things, and it always takes on the coloring of its surrounding assumptions. I think you can get a good magazine/a spirited book club/probably some fun parties (I'm kind of a shut-in but for those who like good parties) out of it but no energy in a consistent direction. See also Plough, which at least has the coherence of being a Christian magazine (but Christianity also is chameleonic), and which also has ... a lot of articles by a guy with the absurdly on-the-nose name Phil Christman. Plough also usually has at least one article (by someone else) that I am glad to have paid for and, speaking of parties, it throws great, if rather wholesome, parties.
In this connection, I wonder what's going to happen to the Bulwark if/when Trumpism is decisively defeated (whatever that looks like). Does it become a center-left magazine that has an unusually large number of one-time "country club Republican" readers? (That's probably good for the country, in that as a leftist I'd rather have these people huddled in a political coalition where they spend most of their energy hating what's left of Trumpism than hating Mamdani as they mostly would've ten years ago, and it's also probably good for the magazine's long-term financial stability.) Does it splinter, as the Weekly Standard did? Does it merge with Liberal Currents? Does it try to revive Mitt Romney Republicanism and promptly die, at least as a magazine? I hope it does the first thing.
4) I will say that the variety and depth of the feedback that I get from readers who don't seem to be professional writers when writing for Hedgehog is extraordinary. More cranks, more lovely and thoughtful people, more people who are a bit of both (complimentary), from more states of the Union, than I've experienced writing for any other publication, except the one time I got into Harpers. Hedgehog's doing something right when it comes to cultivating a readership.
2) I agree. I think with magazines the choice is binary. Do you subscribe or not? Right now, I do not feel an urge to subscribe to THR.
3) But is antihumanism real? It just seems like a strawman construct. Can anyone name an antihumanist? THR claims this anti humanist tendency is pervasive and is present in every institution, but I am not convinced.
I love the Bulwark! It’s just like a centrist Slate. I don’t see why they can’t keep being that way once Dems are in power.
4) this is good to know! I am glad people are reading and enjoying this journal.
I'm honestly a little shocked that a magazine edited by humans would allow the claim of Chinese "orality" to stand when China famously only could unify over written language because regional accents could render the edges of the empire incomprehensible to the inner. And that's leaving aside the quite obvious fact that, as you observed, China produced a helluva lot of abstract thought and incredibly deep philosophical exploration.
Oh, and I also was shocked by how many things the Biden Admin did that were good and unexpected. I have to regard him as a failure, since the 2024 election went the way it did, and Gaza is unforgivable, but if I'm comparing him *to Presidents* I find him really hard to hate. Least bad of my lifetime, for sure.
I liked the first three years of Biden's presidency. The world was not in a great place at the time (pandemic, inflation, polarization, etc), and I think he responded to all that about as well as a president could. But when his whole project as a president was built on the idea "we can move on from Trump and return to normalcy," it's hard to look at that and say it was anything other than a failure.
I enjoyed this, and as always it's deeply enjoyable to watch you tackle the comprehension of a new source or type of writing, sum it up, and react to it boldly. It's what makes you a great critic.
In this case, I wonder if your ultimate complaint doesn't presume a level of unified vision rare in a magazine? Even one run by a think tank with a clear mission. For a magazine to have a really unmuddled and prescriptive vision and ALSO to publish consistently well-written things is a very tall order indeed. For it to work you need either a really ideologically unified coterie of writers who also happen to all be skilled and reliable journalists, or a dictator-like central editor of the kind H.L. Mencken preferred and was (he wrote: "A magazine, like a government, is a living thing, and it must have a soul. That soul can only be the soul of a single man. If it is the soul of a committee, it is a soul that is dead."), or the magazine must create the illusion of unity by farming out topical fiefs to sub-editors or regular contributors who dictate policy on that topic (which creates apparent unity from outside despite internal disunity). Maybe every good magazine should adopt one of these patterns to be it's most incisive self, but almost always (in my experience as editorial staff on three different mags, freelance contributor to others—including Hedgehog, once, despite being personally quite far from their stated ideological orientation—and long-term reader of ~50) there are tradeoffs either in literary quality or ideological coherence. All of which is just to say: maybe your critique is right, but if we adopt "unmuddled aims" as the standard of excellence for little magazines, the vast majority won't make the cut.
As I'm typing this, though, I'm asking myself why am I acting so defensive of little magazines? What's wrong with high standards like the one you endorse here? High standards are good. So never mind. But still, I pecked this all out on my phone and even went and dug through my notes for a specific goddamn quotation, so I'm clicking post, lol.
You’re probably right. Right now I am reading The Drift, which has very strong coherent aims, but the result also feels unsatisfying. I think I just want each journal to have a product that they know is good, that they are willing to stand behind. With the drift, that product is their fiction. But I felt like Hedgehog didn’t really have any articles they had put a lot of time into, which they really believed in.
"Their ambiguous, indecipherable approach is probably necessary for their own long-term stability."
Is this nostalgic conservatism the political equivalent of the old Cosmo "last 10 pounds" and "five sex positions that will drive him wild?" Vague aspirations that keep the buyers coming because they sound good and like something they should do? Except you can't sell those five sex positions as long as you can sell politics because at some point your back gives out...
I enjoyed this. There should be more reviews of journals (I've done it myself a couple of times for poetry magazines). You're right that it's very hard to work out what to read if you don't already know the journal well. Your comment about Biden made me laugh. I actually really liked the Teresa May / Jeremy Corbyn combination in the UK. I admired both of them in different ways and thought they were a pretty good balance in an old school Anglican vs Dissenter fashion. Very 18th century. But this is not a very popular view. (It was also really funny that May obviously voted against Brexit but had to try to see it through, while Corbyn obviously voted for it and had to pretend to be against it.)
I was looking for recent commentary on humanism, so I bought that issue. I’m still picking through it with the idea of writing a short essay on it. One book I read that falls in this discussion is Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity by Omri Boehm.
Nitpick: the Greek phonetic alphabet was derived from the Phoenician writing system—but the Phoenicians used an abjad, not an alphabet. No vowels. The Greeks invented the first *complete* alphabet. The reasoning usually goes, as per Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, that this further intensified written language's abstraction from the act of speech and from the immediacy of the the lifeworld. No guesswork. No sounding out the consonants of an unfamiliar text to infer the vowels in between.
I don't think there's *necessarily* any cultural chauvinism in observing that someone like Aristotle was availing himself of a novel cognitive technology that was not yet widespread. If you compare the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus to Aristotle writing out the Metaphysics, they exhibit totally different casts of mind. So does Plato—he was of an earlier generation whose intellectuals hadn't interiorized the written text as profoundly as Aristotle (think of Xennials and Zennials in terms of how their sensibilities and patterns of thought were molded by digital tech).
I wouldn't go so far to say that what Aristotle was up to was *better* than what his contemporary Mencius was doing. Different cultures, different circumstances, different concerns, different goals. But philosophy is like any other work in that the tools we employ determine the way we go about it.
That’s the story, but how believable is it that vowels made such a huge difference? The argument is that the alphabet led unfailingly to science, philosophy and abstract thought. I don’t really buy it.
"Unfailingly" isn't how I'd put it. Whatever the hell happened in Greece in the fourth century BCE that engendered the Western intellectual tradition was a concatenation of factors we can never completely know. But the entrenchment of a literacy relying on a written language that exteriorized every phoneme of the spoken language was a variable in play. How large or small a variable it was compared to the Greek intellectual classes' interiorization of literacy per se is a matter of speculation. I tend to think it wasn't an altogether insignificant factor—but there's no way of knowing for sure.
On behalf of abjads, though: when the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions were altogether inert in the West and in Greece, a culture using an abjad (Arabic) kept them alive, built upon them, and helped thinkers in the West make sense of them later on. And it was a mathematician writing in Arabic who invented algebra—a magnificent feat of abstraction. So written vowels aren't necessary for doing philosophy and science effectively. By the same token, the Byzantine Greeks of the same period were doing their writing with a phonetic alphabet, but not producing much of value in the domains of science or philosophy—so nor are vowels sufficient.
Though I have something of a technological determinist streak, I've got my limits.
Yes this particular article in the hedgehog review made much stronger claims than you’re making here :) I enjoyed the article bc it was so certain of itself, but that same certainty is why I said it didn’t quite hold up.
I'm glad you enjoyed the piece. if you are truly curious about how those little vowels could do such big work, try my other piece for THR, From Memory to Innovation, at https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-evening-of-life/articles/from-memory-to-innovation. as for china, I talk about that in my 2015 two-parter for Arion (also a very good small mag), which I cite in the current essay. on balance, I'd rather have a fired up reader like you who disagrees than an indifferent one who buys it all sight unseen. so many thanks!
That college town essay is fabulous, thanks for directing me to it. I'm also in the process of trying to decide what literary journal (or journals?) I'd like to regularly give my money to, so this is a really well-timed project for me. Looking forward to more!
"It is so frustrating to read pages and pages of these critiques of other people, but there’s no sense of how the author would actually do it differently."
Agreed. But isn't that largely the point of writing those kinds of critiques? That we're hoping someone else will get off their ass and do it for us?
An especially frustrating part of the pattern is that when new projects do arise, when someone has gotten up to work, the interest in the new projects is very limited between launch and success: there's a deep valley of death.
That is true. I was just at Startup Week, where NC ranks well in discovering things but except for NC State is pretty bad at translating those into the market. That phrase, 'valley of death,' was everywhere.
One example was airlines. The approval process for new parts and designs is so onerous that local inventors are targeting the repair market because repairing an existing plane part that's already in service and has a history reduces the amount of data required.
The repair-first strategy has an interesting historical track record, some definite successes. Are you familiar with it in Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs for instance?
I remember seeing a short film demonstrating her insight that people sit wherever the sun is (whether they're aware of it or not), but I've not read much else.
Np. Cities and the Wealth of Nations involves a theory of economic development called import substitution development and has a case study of how Japanese industry began to grow by creating domestic repair industries for foreign machinery. Might be interesting! Short and an easy read as econ texts go.
When I was in India there were a lot of old foreign machines there, clanking away, and I remember wondering how they got fixed when they broke down. Surely nobody in the building country (Europe or wherever) was coming out to work on them.
I wish when AI is discussed people would always remember its tremendous cost to our planet in terms of energy and water consumed. Is the ability to compare your score to the Wordlebot really worth it?
Excellent review. Themed issues are tricky; in my opinion, they work better when the theme is distilled into a thesis statement or a question (e.g. is 'x' dead?) as opposed to a topic (e.g. 'x'). With the latter, you get one of three things: (1) a writer who actually has something to say on 'x', (2) a writer who twisted and bent and contorted their piece to be relevant to 'x', (3) a writer who made themselves sit down and manufacture a take about 'x'. In my mind, the biggest pro of a themed issue is the design. I've seen a theme drive some beautiful, cohesive aesthetics in a magazine, across the cover, illustrations, and layout.
Excellent review. Themed issues are tricky; in my opinion, they work better when the theme is distilled into a thesis statement or a question (e.g. is 'x' dead?) as opposed to a topic (e.g. 'x'). With the latter, you get one of three things: (1) a writer who actually has something to say on 'x', (2) a writer who twisted and bent and contorted their piece to be relevant to 'x', (3) a writer who made themselves sit down and manufacture a take about 'x'. In my mind, the biggest pro of a themed issue is the design. I've seen a theme drive some beautiful, cohesive aesthetics in a magazine, across the cover, illustrations, and layout.
Unless it's a pretty well-known publication like The New Yorker or the LRB or something, I tend not to think of a journal as a whole, so this was really fascinating! I think it can be hard for journals because they probably feel like they need some kind of theme or guiding philosophy to hold them together and create a "sales pitch" for prospective readers that's more than just "this is a collection of good writing," but that can limit a lot of artistic freedom.
1) New blurb unlocked!!!! "With Phil Christman you're always in good hands." Thank you, seriously.
2) I'm obviously deeply biased. I love Hedgehog. The first several essays of mine that anyone gave a shit about all were published there (and, specifically, were all commissioned by B.D.M.). They've let me say things the way I want to say them, mostly, and they give me a harder time in copyediting than anyone else does. In every issue I read articles that are a) good and b) hard to imagine getting published anywhere else without changes that would make those articles boring. Basically, that's all I ask from a magazine. As a critic, in general, I'm pretty binary: this holds my attention or it doesn't. I'm a "I fuck with this and here's why"/"I don't fuck with this and here's why" critic rather than a "Here's why this is a 5.8 rather than a 6.7 let alone an 8.9" critic. ADHD, probably.
3) I think that the overall informing vision of Hedgehog is probably something to the effect that you can rally together critics of antihumanism from the left, the center, and the right. This probably can't work as a political project. "Humanism" is too many things, and it always takes on the coloring of its surrounding assumptions. I think you can get a good magazine/a spirited book club/probably some fun parties (I'm kind of a shut-in but for those who like good parties) out of it but no energy in a consistent direction. See also Plough, which at least has the coherence of being a Christian magazine (but Christianity also is chameleonic), and which also has ... a lot of articles by a guy with the absurdly on-the-nose name Phil Christman. Plough also usually has at least one article (by someone else) that I am glad to have paid for and, speaking of parties, it throws great, if rather wholesome, parties.
In this connection, I wonder what's going to happen to the Bulwark if/when Trumpism is decisively defeated (whatever that looks like). Does it become a center-left magazine that has an unusually large number of one-time "country club Republican" readers? (That's probably good for the country, in that as a leftist I'd rather have these people huddled in a political coalition where they spend most of their energy hating what's left of Trumpism than hating Mamdani as they mostly would've ten years ago, and it's also probably good for the magazine's long-term financial stability.) Does it splinter, as the Weekly Standard did? Does it merge with Liberal Currents? Does it try to revive Mitt Romney Republicanism and promptly die, at least as a magazine? I hope it does the first thing.
4) I will say that the variety and depth of the feedback that I get from readers who don't seem to be professional writers when writing for Hedgehog is extraordinary. More cranks, more lovely and thoughtful people, more people who are a bit of both (complimentary), from more states of the Union, than I've experienced writing for any other publication, except the one time I got into Harpers. Hedgehog's doing something right when it comes to cultivating a readership.
1) You’re welcome! What you do for them is great.
2) I agree. I think with magazines the choice is binary. Do you subscribe or not? Right now, I do not feel an urge to subscribe to THR.
3) But is antihumanism real? It just seems like a strawman construct. Can anyone name an antihumanist? THR claims this anti humanist tendency is pervasive and is present in every institution, but I am not convinced.
I love the Bulwark! It’s just like a centrist Slate. I don’t see why they can’t keep being that way once Dems are in power.
4) this is good to know! I am glad people are reading and enjoying this journal.
I'm honestly a little shocked that a magazine edited by humans would allow the claim of Chinese "orality" to stand when China famously only could unify over written language because regional accents could render the edges of the empire incomprehensible to the inner. And that's leaving aside the quite obvious fact that, as you observed, China produced a helluva lot of abstract thought and incredibly deep philosophical exploration.
Oh, and I also was shocked by how many things the Biden Admin did that were good and unexpected. I have to regard him as a failure, since the 2024 election went the way it did, and Gaza is unforgivable, but if I'm comparing him *to Presidents* I find him really hard to hate. Least bad of my lifetime, for sure.
I liked the first three years of Biden's presidency. The world was not in a great place at the time (pandemic, inflation, polarization, etc), and I think he responded to all that about as well as a president could. But when his whole project as a president was built on the idea "we can move on from Trump and return to normalcy," it's hard to look at that and say it was anything other than a failure.
I enjoyed this, and as always it's deeply enjoyable to watch you tackle the comprehension of a new source or type of writing, sum it up, and react to it boldly. It's what makes you a great critic.
In this case, I wonder if your ultimate complaint doesn't presume a level of unified vision rare in a magazine? Even one run by a think tank with a clear mission. For a magazine to have a really unmuddled and prescriptive vision and ALSO to publish consistently well-written things is a very tall order indeed. For it to work you need either a really ideologically unified coterie of writers who also happen to all be skilled and reliable journalists, or a dictator-like central editor of the kind H.L. Mencken preferred and was (he wrote: "A magazine, like a government, is a living thing, and it must have a soul. That soul can only be the soul of a single man. If it is the soul of a committee, it is a soul that is dead."), or the magazine must create the illusion of unity by farming out topical fiefs to sub-editors or regular contributors who dictate policy on that topic (which creates apparent unity from outside despite internal disunity). Maybe every good magazine should adopt one of these patterns to be it's most incisive self, but almost always (in my experience as editorial staff on three different mags, freelance contributor to others—including Hedgehog, once, despite being personally quite far from their stated ideological orientation—and long-term reader of ~50) there are tradeoffs either in literary quality or ideological coherence. All of which is just to say: maybe your critique is right, but if we adopt "unmuddled aims" as the standard of excellence for little magazines, the vast majority won't make the cut.
As I'm typing this, though, I'm asking myself why am I acting so defensive of little magazines? What's wrong with high standards like the one you endorse here? High standards are good. So never mind. But still, I pecked this all out on my phone and even went and dug through my notes for a specific goddamn quotation, so I'm clicking post, lol.
Thanks for the essay!
You’re probably right. Right now I am reading The Drift, which has very strong coherent aims, but the result also feels unsatisfying. I think I just want each journal to have a product that they know is good, that they are willing to stand behind. With the drift, that product is their fiction. But I felt like Hedgehog didn’t really have any articles they had put a lot of time into, which they really believed in.
"Their ambiguous, indecipherable approach is probably necessary for their own long-term stability."
Is this nostalgic conservatism the political equivalent of the old Cosmo "last 10 pounds" and "five sex positions that will drive him wild?" Vague aspirations that keep the buyers coming because they sound good and like something they should do? Except you can't sell those five sex positions as long as you can sell politics because at some point your back gives out...
I enjoyed this. There should be more reviews of journals (I've done it myself a couple of times for poetry magazines). You're right that it's very hard to work out what to read if you don't already know the journal well. Your comment about Biden made me laugh. I actually really liked the Teresa May / Jeremy Corbyn combination in the UK. I admired both of them in different ways and thought they were a pretty good balance in an old school Anglican vs Dissenter fashion. Very 18th century. But this is not a very popular view. (It was also really funny that May obviously voted against Brexit but had to try to see it through, while Corbyn obviously voted for it and had to pretend to be against it.)
I was looking for recent commentary on humanism, so I bought that issue. I’m still picking through it with the idea of writing a short essay on it. One book I read that falls in this discussion is Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity by Omri Boehm.
Nitpick: the Greek phonetic alphabet was derived from the Phoenician writing system—but the Phoenicians used an abjad, not an alphabet. No vowels. The Greeks invented the first *complete* alphabet. The reasoning usually goes, as per Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, that this further intensified written language's abstraction from the act of speech and from the immediacy of the the lifeworld. No guesswork. No sounding out the consonants of an unfamiliar text to infer the vowels in between.
I don't think there's *necessarily* any cultural chauvinism in observing that someone like Aristotle was availing himself of a novel cognitive technology that was not yet widespread. If you compare the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus to Aristotle writing out the Metaphysics, they exhibit totally different casts of mind. So does Plato—he was of an earlier generation whose intellectuals hadn't interiorized the written text as profoundly as Aristotle (think of Xennials and Zennials in terms of how their sensibilities and patterns of thought were molded by digital tech).
I wouldn't go so far to say that what Aristotle was up to was *better* than what his contemporary Mencius was doing. Different cultures, different circumstances, different concerns, different goals. But philosophy is like any other work in that the tools we employ determine the way we go about it.
That’s the story, but how believable is it that vowels made such a huge difference? The argument is that the alphabet led unfailingly to science, philosophy and abstract thought. I don’t really buy it.
"Unfailingly" isn't how I'd put it. Whatever the hell happened in Greece in the fourth century BCE that engendered the Western intellectual tradition was a concatenation of factors we can never completely know. But the entrenchment of a literacy relying on a written language that exteriorized every phoneme of the spoken language was a variable in play. How large or small a variable it was compared to the Greek intellectual classes' interiorization of literacy per se is a matter of speculation. I tend to think it wasn't an altogether insignificant factor—but there's no way of knowing for sure.
On behalf of abjads, though: when the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions were altogether inert in the West and in Greece, a culture using an abjad (Arabic) kept them alive, built upon them, and helped thinkers in the West make sense of them later on. And it was a mathematician writing in Arabic who invented algebra—a magnificent feat of abstraction. So written vowels aren't necessary for doing philosophy and science effectively. By the same token, the Byzantine Greeks of the same period were doing their writing with a phonetic alphabet, but not producing much of value in the domains of science or philosophy—so nor are vowels sufficient.
Though I have something of a technological determinist streak, I've got my limits.
Yes this particular article in the hedgehog review made much stronger claims than you’re making here :) I enjoyed the article bc it was so certain of itself, but that same certainty is why I said it didn’t quite hold up.
I'm glad you enjoyed the piece. if you are truly curious about how those little vowels could do such big work, try my other piece for THR, From Memory to Innovation, at https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-evening-of-life/articles/from-memory-to-innovation. as for china, I talk about that in my 2015 two-parter for Arion (also a very good small mag), which I cite in the current essay. on balance, I'd rather have a fired up reader like you who disagrees than an indifferent one who buys it all sight unseen. so many thanks!
That college town essay is fabulous, thanks for directing me to it. I'm also in the process of trying to decide what literary journal (or journals?) I'd like to regularly give my money to, so this is a really well-timed project for me. Looking forward to more!
"It is so frustrating to read pages and pages of these critiques of other people, but there’s no sense of how the author would actually do it differently."
Agreed. But isn't that largely the point of writing those kinds of critiques? That we're hoping someone else will get off their ass and do it for us?
An especially frustrating part of the pattern is that when new projects do arise, when someone has gotten up to work, the interest in the new projects is very limited between launch and success: there's a deep valley of death.
That is true. I was just at Startup Week, where NC ranks well in discovering things but except for NC State is pretty bad at translating those into the market. That phrase, 'valley of death,' was everywhere.
One example was airlines. The approval process for new parts and designs is so onerous that local inventors are targeting the repair market because repairing an existing plane part that's already in service and has a history reduces the amount of data required.
https://news.ncsu.edu/2026/01/healing-composite-lasts-centuries/
The repair-first strategy has an interesting historical track record, some definite successes. Are you familiar with it in Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs for instance?
I remember seeing a short film demonstrating her insight that people sit wherever the sun is (whether they're aware of it or not), but I've not read much else.
Np. Cities and the Wealth of Nations involves a theory of economic development called import substitution development and has a case study of how Japanese industry began to grow by creating domestic repair industries for foreign machinery. Might be interesting! Short and an easy read as econ texts go.
When I was in India there were a lot of old foreign machines there, clanking away, and I remember wondering how they got fixed when they broke down. Surely nobody in the building country (Europe or wherever) was coming out to work on them.
This 2023 article in the issue themed 'By Theory Possessed' schooled me on the the journey of Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School to today's New Right, and got me to subscribe to THR. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/by-theory-possessed/articles/from-frankfurt-to-fox
I wish when AI is discussed people would always remember its tremendous cost to our planet in terms of energy and water consumed. Is the ability to compare your score to the Wordlebot really worth it?
Excellent review. Themed issues are tricky; in my opinion, they work better when the theme is distilled into a thesis statement or a question (e.g. is 'x' dead?) as opposed to a topic (e.g. 'x'). With the latter, you get one of three things: (1) a writer who actually has something to say on 'x', (2) a writer who twisted and bent and contorted their piece to be relevant to 'x', (3) a writer who made themselves sit down and manufacture a take about 'x'. In my mind, the biggest pro of a themed issue is the design. I've seen a theme drive some beautiful, cohesive aesthetics in a magazine, across the cover, illustrations, and layout.
Excellent review. Themed issues are tricky; in my opinion, they work better when the theme is distilled into a thesis statement or a question (e.g. is 'x' dead?) as opposed to a topic (e.g. 'x'). With the latter, you get one of three things: (1) a writer who actually has something to say on 'x', (2) a writer who twisted and bent and contorted their piece to be relevant to 'x', (3) a writer who made themselves sit down and manufacture a take about 'x'. In my mind, the biggest pro of a themed issue is the design. I've seen a theme drive some beautiful, cohesive aesthetics in a magazine, across the cover, illustrations, and layout.
Luv luv luv HEDGEHOG.
Unless it's a pretty well-known publication like The New Yorker or the LRB or something, I tend not to think of a journal as a whole, so this was really fascinating! I think it can be hard for journals because they probably feel like they need some kind of theme or guiding philosophy to hold them together and create a "sales pitch" for prospective readers that's more than just "this is a collection of good writing," but that can limit a lot of artistic freedom.