n+1

1970 is an inauspicious year for a young heterosexual feminist to launch an ambitious career of promiscuity.

Honoring Peter Mayer, founder of Overlook Press, one of “the stars of book publishing,” a person who trusted young staffers to take risks and break free of big publishing’s conventions as they learned the ropes, and who yelled a lot.

Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk — they look a lot like the villains they fight. When did superheroes switch from working for justice to running a protection racket?

While the familiar shopping mall formula is suffering in the US, malls in Latin America are booming, since online shopping hasn’t overtaken traditional commerce. Unfortunately, malls’ chic, air conditioned offerings have profound consequences in Mexico City, where street vendors, city parks and plazas have always had a central role in the fabric of life, and the informal economy employed more people than multinational chains.

“Halls of fame and records and medals and posters belong to fans. Athletes do not mythologize the body in this way. What they do is navigate decay.”

In Brooklyn, historically black Bedford-Stuyvesant has been experiencing rapid gentrification: “As a new order has emerged, the ghosts of the previous one are everywhere, but their echoes are getting smaller, snuffed out by the tides.”

“Hockey has no reason for being. Rather, hockey’s one of those things that give reason to being.”

You are not wrong for thinking the situation in Syria is complicated: The very essence of the proxy war is its complication. “It would be foolish to think of the conflict as one big Rubik’s cube in need of solving” writes Rich Beck in the latest issue of n+1, “because the complexity itself is part of the problem — the best thing to do with the Rubik’s cube would be to throw it against a wall.”

On reality, writing, publishing, fiction, non-fiction, Doris Lessing, and femininity: a writer muses on writing that impacted her, and what it means to write fiction at all.

An excerpt from “A Trip to Tbilisi,” a 2015 work of graphic reportage from journalist, activist, and artist Victoria Lomasko’s visit to the Georgian capital. Her work, drawn live on the scene, focuses on figures on the fringes: migrants, the LGBT community, juvenile prison inmates, sex workers.