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WHY WERE PEOPLE HELPING US? It couldn’t only have been because we were lying to them. In truth, they must have been doing it for the same reason we were doing it — because they wanted to. They were lonely people who wanted to get out of their apartments; they were skilled people whose skills were b…

Mitchell Cohen frequently lamented that we were a magazine without a movement. The mission remains. The movement? We hope to be there for it when it arrives.

[...] The institution itself mirrored the famous paradox of the contents of the magazine it put out: preponderantly liberal — or antimaterialistic, or spiritual, or muckraking, or even vaporously socialistic — writing physically sandwiched and financially supported by fancy advertising for extravag…

I played and sang those songs that evening with two or three kinds of embarrassment. First of all, it seemed merely socially a silly thing to be doing. Then there was the fact that we had been moved, we had not rolled the union on or stuck to it, we had not kept our hand upon the dollar and our eye…

If there is any one general theme here, besides the usual apocalyptic warnings about destruction of the magazine, it is the disavowal of ordinariness, as if ordinariness were the eighth deadly sin. The company is profit-making “but not in any orthodox way.” The publishers “went counter to almost ev…