Bread and magazines

Sarah Leonard is editor-in-chief of Lux magazine. In honor of announcing a joint $1,000 essay contest with Lux about THE WAY WE WORK, Sarah came on Tasteland to discuss having a leftist, print magazine in 2025 and teaching her students that politics can exist offline. Keep scrolling for a link to the full episode.

Daisy Alioto: Dirt is not in print, Lux is. How are you feeling about print at this moment?

Sarah Leonard: I think people really like it. A lot of us grew up reading magazines and associate it with having time to think by yourself or share something with a friend and not be bombarded with garbage all the time, which I think is how we feel online. I think that as people are experiencing internet culture as mostly a bad, painful, embarrassing, and exhausting experience, people are getting curious about print again. At the same time, from a business standpoint, it's actually kind of a terrible idea. The costs are just monumentally larger. But it comes with a lot of fun elements and an excuse to do a lot of events. And we found that our readers really like in-person events a lot. 

But yeah, from a business perspective, the magazine industry was built on print advertising. That basically doesn't exist anymore. If you want to print something, you have to get subscriptions, but you also have to fundraise. It's impossible not to. But in terms of how people react to print, it’s extremely positive and lovely.

DA: What is the breakdown of the overall pie of your operating budget, what's the fraction coming from readers versus elsewhere?

SL: It's about half and half. Fundraising is an interesting endeavor because some of it is applying for grants that go to journalism projects and support writers. But we have such a specific politics and such a specific point of view that the people who are going to donate to us in any consistent way, it has to really appeal to them. They have to share some of our politics or it's just not going to be compelling to them. 

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THE WAY WE WORK

DA: What are the demographics and qualities of your audience? 

SA: It's so cool to know the Dirt reader or the Lux reader and feel like your people have found you. What I've seen so far is that the audience skews young, so a lot of people in their 20s, diverse across a lot of different axes, definitely skews queer. When we do public events, friends bring friends. But we're also kind of intentional about it. 

For example, last issue, we had a big cover story on policing gender in sports, which is tied to the attacks on trans athletes right now, but goes deeper into the history of testing cis women to see if they're “women enough” or have been masculinized by sports. And on the cover of the magazine, we used a photograph of Brooklyn rugby, which is a team in New York City that's inclusive and very popular. And there are other inclusive teams in New York City that people play on recreationally, but quite seriously. So we reached out to the sports teams and we're like, “come to the party” and people did. It's these ways of not just covering something, but also making sure that coverage gets to the people who it would be relevant to and doing an event that expands on it. 

DA: Is there a piece that you're particularly proud of publishing at Lux? 

SL: Yeah, there are a lot of pieces I feel that way about actually. One I'd point to is a piece on restorative justice. The justice system deals horribly with questions of sexual violence. So we need to have these processes of restorative justice that we run ourselves. But we had a pitch from a writer who had been an organizer in restorative justice processes for organizations and lefty groups for years. And she was like, “look, like there are pros and cons to this. Like this is an important type of process that I believe in and it has serious limitations too.” And she wanted to write about that in a place where she knew that those ideas would be taken seriously and in good faith by both the editors and the readers. You can't publish that in The New York Times because then you're just asking for like a million people with no stake in this to be like, “ha ha, yeah, your radical weird thing isn't working.” 

Francis Zierer: I was really curious to ask you about your NYU course, the politics of new media, how the internet works, and for whom. 

SL: I love my students. They were all born at a time when they can be on social media from birth. They are integrated into the platforms very early on in a way that I could not have been. And so I learned from them a lot about that experience for one thing. 

There are a lot of stereotypes about Gen Z and about young people in general that they are just addicted to their phones and don't want to participate in real life. My experience with the students is they are aware that the platforms that they're using and the ways they communicate have problems. And what they experience is actually a lot of anxiety. People also make fun of this generation for being very anxious, but they're all born using platforms that millions of dollars have been poured into to make young people anxious so they will buy things, and stay on the platforms. My students are aware of that. 

When I started teaching the course 10 years ago, they were all really optimistic about technology and they wanted to work at Google and Facebook. And so part of my course was really showing them a different point of view on tech, that there was a heavy surveillance component, for example. But now they all come in super cynical about tech and politics. 

They don't know what politics would look like offline. So my role has kind of shifted in relation to them. It's not really about disillusioning them anymore. In fact, I've been trying to find ways to bring in conversations about how political activity or just like one's activity as a citizen or as a participant in public life can happen in ways that are not completely tied to platforms and the tech industry, which is strange because it's a new media course. So I'm trying to teach them about the internet, but it also becomes about talking about what the internet can't do and what you have to do somewhere else. 🍞

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SARAH LEONARD ON TASTELAND