 | |
| Categories | Literary magazine |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jeffrey Kittay |
| First issue | 1990 |
| Final issue | 2001 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Lingua Franca was an American magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia.
| | |
| Categories | Literary magazine |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jeffrey Kittay |
| First issue | 1990 |
| Final issue | 2001 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Lingua Franca was an American magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia.
The magazine was founded in 1990 by Jeffrey Kittay, an editor and professor of French literature at Yale University. Kittay, as the New York Times reported, "saw a niche for vivid reporting about the academic world and especially about its many personal feuds and intellectual controversies." Kittay told the newspaper, "I was an academic who was very, very hungry for information about what made my profession so alive, where people became passionate about abstract ideas." [1] Describing the magazine's impact years later, in the New York Observer , Ron Rosenbaum wrote that "It soon became a much-talked-about phenomenon inside and outside academia." [2] In November, 2000, on the journal's tenth anniversary, the Village Voice commented that "Lingua Franca's influence on nineties magazine culture has been so strong, it's sometimes hard to remember that it was unique in academia when it began." [3]
In a 2002 retrospective article, Andrew Delbanco wrote about the magazine that "It ran stories about everything, from a historians' quarrel over the efficacy of the 1960s student movement, to a dispute among anthropologists over whether cannibalism ever existed, to the fight between the Harvard biologists E.O. Wilson and Richard Lewontin over the extent to which genes control human behavior, to the question of whether dissertation advisers should sleep with their students." [4]
Contributors included editors and writers who went on to careers at The New Republic , Time , Slate , The New York Times Book Review , The Nation , The Economist , The London Review of Books , the Washington Post , and The New Yorker : Peter Beinart, Lev Grossman, Fred Kaplan, Robert S. Boynton, Warren St. John, Jonathan Mahler, Jennifer Schuessler, Matthew Steinglass, Daniel Mendelsohn, Laura Secor, Hillary Frey, Lawrence Osborne, Caleb Crain, Rachel Donadio, Jeet Heer, Corey Robin, Chris Mooney, James Ryerson, Emily Nussbaum, Clive Thompson, and Adam Shatz. As cultural critic Ron Rosenbaum wrote in The New York Observer , "The kind of writing about ideas that once found a home at Lingua Franca has since — with the assistance of many talented Lingua Franca alumni, both writers and editors — succeeded in changing the face of serious journalism for the better." [5]
Jeffrey Kittay served as the magazine's editor-in-chief. For its first year, the editor was Peter Edidin. From 1991 to 1994, Lingua Franca was co-edited by Judith Shulevitz and Margaret Talbot. In late 1994, Alexander Star became the editor, [6] joined by Emily Eakin. The New York Times critic A.O. Scott served as a senior editor, as did New Yorker features editor Daniel Zalewski. [7] Historian and journalist Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland , began his journalism career as an intern there, later becoming associate editor.
Lingua Franca was where the Sokal Affair — a parody of academic practices and post-structuralist language — was first revealed; [8] Lingua Franca editors later produced a book of selected papers on the subject, The Sokal Hoax, published by the University of Nebraska Press.
The magazine halted publication during the 2001 economic downturn, after a financial backer withdrew support. New Yorker editor David Remnick told The New York Times, "That is terrible. I really enjoyed it — I always found something fascinating to read in that magazine, and not infrequently something that I wish we had had for The New Yorker." [9] The company behind the magazine declared bankruptcy in April 2002. [10] Later in 2002, editor Alexander Star assembled an anthology: Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca, published by Farrar Straus Giroux.
In 2006, at age 19, Aaron Swartz wrote a program to put up a mirror archive of the magazine on the web. [11]
Lingua Franca received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence (under 100,000 circulation) in 1993. [12] The magazine was nominated again in 1994, 1996, 1998, and 1999.
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science is a 1994 book about the philosophy of science by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt.
Alan David Sokal is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
Jack Hitt is an American author. He has been a contributing editor to Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, This American Life, and the now-defunct magazine Lingua Franca. His work has appeared in such publications as Outside Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Mother Jones, Slate, and Garden & Gun.
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.
In the fields of philosophy, the terms obscurantism and obscurationism identify and describe the anti-intellectual practices of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject. The two historical and intellectual denotations of obscurantism are: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge — opposition to the dissemination of knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity — a recondite style of writing characterized by deliberate vagueness.
Social Text is an academic journal published by Duke University Press. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, Social Text has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment. Each issue covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture. The journal has since been run by different collectives over the years, mostly based at New York City universities. It has maintained an avowedly progressive political orientation and scholarship over these years, if also a less Marxist one. Since 1992, it is published by Duke University Press.
Ronald Rosenbaum is an American literary journalist, literary critic, and novelist.
Robert Adams Gottlieb was an American writer and editor. He was the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker.
Alex Ross is an American music critic and author who specializes in classical music. Ross has been a staff member of The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His extensive writings include performance and record reviews, industry updates, cultural commentary, and historical narratives in the realm of classical music. He has written three well-received books: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), Listen to This (2011), and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020).
n+1 is a New York–based American literary magazine that publishes social criticism, political commentary, essays, art, poetry, book reviews, and short fiction. It is published three times each year, and content is published on its website several times each week. Each print issue averages around 200 pages in length.
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Rivka Galchen is a Canadian-American writer. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008 and was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is the author of five books and a contributor of journalism and essays to The New Yorker magazine.
Jonathan Galassi has served as the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is currently the Chairman and Executive Editor.
Wells Tower is an American writer of short stories, non-fiction, feature films and television. In 2009 he published his first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned to much critical acclaim. His short fiction has also been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Vice, Harper's Magazine, A Public Space, Fence and other periodicals. In 2022, he wrote the screenplay for the feature film Pain Hustlers, starring Emily Blunt and directed by David Yates, which was bought by Netflix for $50 million.
Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.
Judith Anne Shulevitz is an American journalist, editor and culture critic. She has been a columnist for Slate, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic.
James Miller is an American writer and academic. He is known for writing about Michel Foucault, philosophy as a way of life, social movements, popular culture, intellectual history, eighteenth century to the present; radical social theory and history of political philosophy. He currently teaches at The New School.
Maureen McLane is an American poet, critic, and professor. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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