In 1990-91, “PC” emerged as the greatest threat to America since the last greatest threat to America. Richard Bernstein kicked things off in late October 1990 with his New York Times exposé of “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct,” and within the next six months, almost every major newsmagazine had weighed in on the rampages of the New McCarthyism and the fearsome Thought Police of the campus left. Newsweek, New York magazine, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic—every single one of these outlets published long essays that would not have been out of place in Commentary or the National Review. Jerry Adler’s cover story for Newsweek was especially monitory, pointing out that if the PC commissars had their way, “it would not be enough
for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she would be expected to ‘affirm’ their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke.”
I assure you that this is a real actual quote.
It was the Atlantic essay, though, that was the tipping point for me, because it was written by now-convicted felon and perennial pathological liar Dinesh D’Souza. At that point, I decided to try to weigh in with a critique of these shoddy and hysterical pieces—but where could I send it? I was a second-year assistant professor nobody had heard of, and most of the places I could imagine submitting my essay had already declared themselves for the Other Side. Turning to a colleague who had published a few things in Harper’s, I asked his advice for submitting there. He graciously gave an editor a heads up, and my essay actually got read—and promptly rejected, on the grounds that this “PC” stuff was a tempest in a teapot and would soon blow over. (When, months later, it became clear that the tempest was not in fact blowing over, Harper’s published a very smart essay on the subject by Louis Menand.)
I then sought advice from a friend who knew people at the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and lo, within a few weeks my essay was the cover story for the Village Voice itself. I knew I had one of the luckier breaks in the history of luck. Because if the Voice had turned the essay down, I probably would have folded the tent and gone back to my travails on the tenure track. I couldn’t think of too many other places to send it.
The Village Voice is long gone, of course, as are so many alternative weeklies that adopted its model, from the New England Phoenix papers (Boston, Providence, Portland, Worcester) to Norfolk’s Port Folio to Minneapolis’s City Pages. Along the way, we weathered the Great Magazine Die-Off in the wake of the crash of 2008 and the withering away of the blogosphere of the aughts. But then we also witnessed the emergence of new venues for independent writers: good old-fashioning print journals like n+1 and The Point, and then an array of online magazines in the model of the Los Angeles Review of Books, founded in 2011 by Tom Lutz. For many years, Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle ran Avidly under the banner of the LARB, as well. Sharon Marcus and Caitlin Zaloom founded Public Books the following year.
Late-twentieth-century independent journals still exist, of course; I am thinking chiefly of The Baffler (Thomas Frank and Keith White, 1988) and McSweeney’s (Dave Eggers, 1998). Online, The Millions was founded by C. Max Magee in 2003 and thrived for over two decades (though it seems to be quiet over there these days). And I am not forgetting that whip-smart feminists like Lindsay Beyerstein, Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, and Jill Filipovic survived the collapse of the blogosphere and are still working away. But you get my point. It’s a precarious landscape out there, and I sometimes feel as if we’re all huddled over fires in oil cans with fingerless gloves while the billionaires and their minions destroy one legacy media institution after another.
And even though I’m old and tenured (hey, not only that! I’m now on “phased retirement,” which means I will gradually fade away), I still try to keep track of what the young’uns are doing. But I was totally surprised when, four months ago, Ed Simon hailed me on the Book of Faces and invited me to submit something for this here thing. Though Pittsburgh is just down the road, I had no idea that there was something called the Pittsburgh Review of Books. I had spent the first few days of 2026 lamenting the demise of the terrific alt-weekly Pittsburgh City Paper, which, I see, has swiftly arisen from the ashes to which all the Phoenixes have succumbed. But of this PRoB I was unaware.
I’m grateful for the gig, of course; even in my mid-sixties I still have the attitude of the struggling musician who’s always looking for a good venue and hopes to be invited back. But this is not about me. It’s about Them.
You know who They are. They’re the people waging campaigns against Black professors or writing tendentious accounts of their former academic workplaces or publishing even more tendentious reports on the alleged politicization of the humanities and social sciences. Of course, they have their own network of venues, Quillette and UnHerd and The Free Press and Persuasion, where they can reliably report on their persecution by the woke mob, and those venues will never lack for funding. But when someone needs to respond to Them—to publish a nuanced account of Jason Arday’s complicated life, or a nuanced account of what’s been going on for the past few years at Bates College, or a searingly pissed off response to the Boghossian Report, we have to turn to places like Byline Times (founded in 2019), The Drift (founded in 2020) or The Defector (also 2020). Or, perhaps, to the Pittsburgh Review of Books.
You know the speed at which this stuff moves. Back in 1991, it was sufficient to publish an 8000-word essay in the Village Voice three or four months after the Atlantic platformed D’Souza; that counted as a reasonably rapid response. I simply didn’t want to send my essay to an academic journal that would publish it a year or two later. (As it happened, the Yale Journal of Criticism was willing to publish a heavily revised version the following year! True fact.) But in the year of Moloch 2026, when (to quote Bo Burnham), the backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun usually begins on the afternoon of the day a thing begins, we need media outlets that can try to set the story straight online, in real time. Outlets like this one.
But I don’t want to suggest that PRoB is useful only, or even primarily, as a place for pushback against the people colluding with Trumpist assaults on universities and white supremacist assaults on Black professors. That’s great, but there’s so much more to life—and independent publishing. There’s the great Third Person Limited podcast with Nathan Pensky and Mason Stockstill (OMG they landed an interview with John Fucking Sayles!). The Summer Non-Beach Read Club, devoted this past summer to Gertrude Stein’s famously unbeachy The Making of Americans. Essays on local poets Erin Murphy and Robin Becker. And of course editor Ed Simon’s more-or-less monthly work in The Foundry. Like LARB and Public Books, it’s a cornucopia for people who still care about art and literature and thinking and culture in general.
Long live this here thing, and many things like it. They keep hope alive in dark times.
