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 being channeled into corporate or otherwise uninteresting work. We were all in our mid- to late twenties — we had seen a bit of the world and knew we didn’t like it. We had seen others make things and knew we could make them just as well if not better. We had seen some of the people we most admired come out in favor of the invasion of Iraq, or get hoodwinked by various transparently phony cultural projects, or start writing down to some imagined audience, rather than up to the audience that actually existed (or so we believed). We did not have a clear political project (we were “leftists,” but there were many things we didn’t agree on), but we did have a clear cultural project, to try to connect our politics with our literary tastes. It’s not clear, though, that the specifics of this project were what interested other people, or us. Often it felt like simply the idea of a project — any project — was enough. It was fun and interesting and sometimes incredibly frustrating to work with these particular people. And it was interesting to try to build an independent cultural institution where one had not been before.