As you’ve no doubt aware, we’re having our annual fundraiser. Personally, the Monthly has been extraordinarily generous to me, both in giving me opportunities to write (and be edited, an increasingly rare experience), and in allowing me the companionship of the best journalists in the business.
But I think the proudest I’ve ever been to work here was when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates on how journalism was in the days before the internet really took off:
That was at a time when I was still completely a creature of print, and the Monthly was the only place that really allowed me to do what The Atlantic allows me to do now. When my friend Prince Jones was killed, it was the Monthly that gave me space to take a hard, reported look at the police department. It was the Monthly that gave me its cover to consider the decline of Louis Farrakhan as a political force. The New Republic would not have done that. No other magazine I pitched was at all interested in anything about Farrakhan, beyond his anti-Semitism. They just did not care.
As he says, the Monthly has pretty much always been a labor of love, creaking along on dedication and table scraps. And there’s a place for a little institution like that, even these days when there are a lot more places to publish the writing Coates was talking about (and at least here we don’t publish advertorials). Can you spare a few holiday bucks?
Thanks.
