Magazines That Work

1. No magazine should include more than 50pp of work. It should be able to be consumed in one concentrated sitting.

2. No magazine should have a run longer than three years. Magazines should be understood to be ephemeral.

3. A magazine should be the stage for one rather focused idea, or a handful of related themes, rather than a synthetic pulp absorbing everything it touches.

4. A magazine should be issued at least quarterly, to keep its conversation alive.

5. A magazine should be portable, and tend toward smaller formats. Ideally its distribution will be hand-to-hand.

6. A magazine's print runs should be small: no more than 500 copies, and no reprints for at least five years after publication.

7. A magazine is still a fetish object, but its borders needn't necessarily end at the page. It can be germinated publicly in the laboratory of a blog, for example, and pruned at an arbitrary moment when the concentration is right, to maximize the effect or arrival (however accidental) of an idea.