Most magazines and journals have highs and lows, but n + 1 can always be counted on for substantive and provocative reading. The eight issues so far have been keepers.
Twice a year, from their offices in Brooklyn, the editors and writers of n + 1 put together a dozen or so essays, reviews and interviews that are hard to beat for clarity and originality.
Editors Keith Gessen (left) and Mark Greif and their associates, who include the novelist and essayist — and journal co-founder — Benjamin Kunkel, take nothing on the pop cultural or political scenes for granted.
The writers have an uncanny way of printing pieces that make you rethink Marx, gay marriage, the “Neuronovel,” and “Sex and the City.” You can’t guess what you might see in the next issue, but you can be pretty sure it will be well worth reading.
I’ve mined a few nuggets from the latest issue, a couple of graphs from “Gentrify, Gentrify” (or “Whose fault was Park Slope?”) on the way that the work of urban renewal icon Jane Jacobs has been misunderstood:
“The bible of gentrification was a book that would come to be assigned in every urban history course in the country: Jane Jacobs’s brilliant ‘The Death and Life of American Cities.’ But in the new urban context, it seemed lost on everyone that Jacobs was writing about the lingeringly industrial, racially mixed (if not exactly integrated) city of 1961…She had not imagined white collars replacing blue ones, and white people driving out black neighbors…Jacobs’s vision of self-regulated communities and small neighborhoods (has given) ideological cover to a vision of city life she had explicitly rejected: white-collar, service-economy cities oriented almost entirely toward consumption.”
“…Everywhere, skilled manual work had vanished, and the old factories and 
warehouses were turned into yet more condos. But now the ‘back to the city’ movement buckled under a terrible irony: the children of the pioneer gentrifiers could not afford to live in the neighborhoods their parents had ‘cleaned up.’”
“…But the mailrooms of the white-collar cities could employ only so many recent college graduates; and not even the metropolis dreamed of by the most Panglossian of gentrifiers could consist exclusively of bike-riding, cupcake-eating financial analysts. Gentrification had no jobs to offer — only Jane Jacobs-style ‘neighborhoods.’”
The n + 1 people are accessible as well as smart and hold public forums on a fairly regular basis. Tomorrow at 7 p.m., Gessen, Greif and other contributors will be talking about Issue 8 in a free gathering at lower Manhattan’s McNally Jackson Bookstore, 52 Prince St.
For more details go to www.nplusonemag.com/n-1-events
