Thursday, February 6, 2025

Andrea Long Chu

ANDREA LONG CHU is the book critic at New York magazine Her nonfiction book Females was a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in n+1, New York, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, The Drift, and Jewish Currents. She lives in Brooklyn.

- Contributors' Notes, The Best American Essays 2022.

Jewish Currents

https://jewishcurrents.org/

Founded in 1946, Jewish Currents is a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture on the Jewish left and the left more broadly.

https://jewishcurrents.org/about. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.

The Drift

https://www.thedriftmag.com/

About

The Drift is a magazine of culture and politics

https://www.thedriftmag.com/about/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.


4Columns

https://4columns.org/

4Columns is a website of arts criticism aimed at a general audience. Its title refers, quite literally, to what you’ll find there each week: four new columns, each with a distinctive voice and perspective. Together, they offer a complex and compelling view of contemporary culture, from film to literature to theater to the visual arts.

“To justify its existence,” Charles Baudelaire said of criticism, it “should be partial, impassioned, and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view that opens up the widest horizons.” Following Baudelaire’s lead, 4Columns treats criticism as a literary genre in its own right—one in which singular passions ignite public discourse. The criticism it publishes functions as a conversational gambit, a piece of fan mail from the most exacting of admirers, maybe even a breakup note.

4Columns’s mainstay is the thousand-word review—a length that both enables critical reflection and demands writerly rigor. Centered, but not moored, in the New York scene, 4Columns reflects the cosmopolitanism of today’s culture through the sensibilities of a similarly diverse group of contributors. The site’s flexible, modular framework supports a multiplicity of styles, approaches, and ideas. It, further, maintains meaningful distinctions between artistic disciplines while accommodating the hybrid nature of much contemporary practice. 

Launched at a moment when the Internet is increasingly the dominant outlet for critics and criticism, 4Columns exploits the resources of online technology but avoids one of the blogosphere’s most prevalent shortcomings: the poor payment of writers. 4Columns nurtures excellence by compensating its contributors fairly. It also counters the web’s information overload and tendency to foster hyperspecialization by focusing on four well-chosen works a week, bringing together writing on varied cultural forms within a single venue. Combining sophisticated analysis with broad accessibility, 4Columns insists on art’s capacity to serve as something shared, even—perhaps especially—when it is the object of criticism.

https://4columns.org/about. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.

Chronicle of Higher Education

https://www.chronicle.com/

The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Since its founding in 1966, The Chronicle has grown to serve millions of educators, administrators, researchers, and policymakers who rely on its insights to lead, teach, learn, and innovate. The Chronicle’s independent newsroom – the nation’s largest dedicated to covering colleges and universities – is home to award-winning journalists and data analysts with a passion for serving audiences with indispensable news and actionable insights on issues that matter.

Our history.

The Chronicle, a privately owned, independent news and information organization, was founded in 1966 and originally owned by a nonprofit, Editorial Projects in Education. EPE sold The Chronicle in 1978 to Jack Crowl and Corbin Gwaltney, and The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc. was formed. Gwaltney bought the entire company in 1990, and until his death in July, 2019, was co-chair of its board of directors, along with his wife and current chair, Pamela Gwaltney.

Artforum

https://www.artforum.com/

Artforum is the magazine of record for the contemporary art world and holds the unique roles of institution and foremost tastemaker of the industry. Established in 1962, it is often the first to identify artists whose work comes to define eras, delivering the highest level of critical discourse to an international audience. Artforum’s artists’ projects, reviews, and critical essays on contemporary visual culture including coverage of film, music, architecture, performance, and media provide rigorous, diverse, and provocative perspectives on cultural trends of our time.

Crazyhorse · swamp pink

https://swamp-pink.charleston.edu/

history

Nearly twenty years ago, Crazyhorse found a home at the College of Charleston. Between then and now, we’ve taken great pride in publishing exceptional writing. For a time, admittedly, our objective seemed clear and singular. We have arrived at a place where the holistic nature of what we do—the symbolic properties of what we are and the foothold of power we possess in literary visibility and representation—has come into necessary and long overdue focus. Not only does the history of our magazine and its name, by its very presence, carry the weight and consequence of an oppressive history, so too does the silence and inaction of our collective in all the years leading up to the present.

Our magazine was founded in Los Angeles in 1960 and titled after the Lakota Chief, Crazy Horse. In the years that followed, it traveled to Murray State in Kentucky, then the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, before finally arriving in Charleston. None of these institutions are geographically significant to Crazy Horse or the Lakota people, nor, to our knowledge, are any of the individuals who shepherded the magazine through its many phases, culturally or racially entitled to the use of Indigenous language. Our name is and always has been an act of exploitation.

In the fall of this year, we will publish our final issue, then begin anew under our new title, swamp pink. Swamp pink is a perennial member of the lily family, indigenous to the Carolinas. In 1988, swamp pink was federally listed as a threatened species due to environmental encroachment, development, and the introduction of invasive species.

Though we hope that the disavowal of our longstanding appropriation of Lakota culture will be a step in the direction of a more equitable and inclusive literary landscape, we know that it is, at most, the repudiation of an inexcusable wrongdoing and, at least, a gesture. This is not our moment to have, just as it was never our name to assume.

As a masthead and as a magazine, we are eager for the opportunity to promise ourselves to a fundamental regeneration. We are proud of the voices we’ve showcased over the years, writers and minds we admire, and we are indebted to the art they’ve given life to in each and every issue. Moving forward it is paramount to us that our magazine not only platform and celebrate diverse voices but do so with the interests of folks for whom the stakes of equity are highest, to whom the distance between where we are and where we want to be is most intimately known, as our bellwether. Beyond interrogating the power of our name, we vow also to disrupt the power structures inherent to our institution—from our masthead to the words within our pages. We are not beginning a conversation; we are merely endeavoring to shoulder our own weight in one that is ongoing.

As our community, we hope you’ll feel encouraged to share your thoughts, ideas, and criticisms with us. Thank you for your readership, your creation, your imagination—both of art, and of its decolonization. We are open and listening, and know that there is no stasis in revision, nor restitution.