About Civilization

Civilization

Civilization is a broadsheet magazine about life and culture in New York City, founded by designer Richard Turley in 2018, with Mia Kerin and Lucas Mascatello. The batch listing for this directory placed it in Washington, District of Columbia, but that is incorrect: the magazine is based in New York City, its website is civilizationnyc.com, and its entire subject is the experience of living in New York. It is a sixteen-page publication designed around a broadsheet newspaper format, with large, bold text and images, chaotic and densely packed design, and content organised around loosely connected concepts rather than conventional journalistic structure. Its first issue appeared in April 2018, its second later that year, its third in September 2019, its fourth in 2020, its fifth in March 2021 and its sixth in May 2022. It developed a cult following and wide critical attention out of proportion to its irregular schedule, and it also produced a mail-art campaign during the COVID-19 lockdowns and a radio segment, Civilization Radio, on NTS Radio.

Because Civilization appeared in print only intermittently, in six numbered issues across its first four years, it is best understood not as a conventional periodical but as a recurring art-and-design object in newspaper form, a future history of New York assembled from interviews, lists, collages and diaries.

Founding and Founders

The magazine was created in 2018 by Richard Turley, Mia Kerin and Lucas Mascatello. Turley, a graphic designer known for experimental editorial work and at the time an executive creative director at Wieden+Kennedy, initiated the project after becoming dissatisfied with what he found at the newsstand. Mascatello signed on, and filmmaker Mia Kerin joined the group, bringing a fresh perspective to the founding team. The editors said they created the magazine out of a belief that print was a form that could still hold readers in its grip, and that the meagre ambition of much current magazine publishing should be answered by a reminder of what magazines could do and how they could make readers feel. Turley also felt that many surviving publications had shifted their focus away from New York toward broader topics, leaving a lack of publications that actually focused on city life, the gap Civilization was built to fill.

A Reaction Against Digital Publishing

Civilization was inspired by the decline of print newspapers and magazines in favour of more transient and immaterial digital media. Its answer was deliberately physical and excessive: a jumbo-sized, black-and-yellow broadsheet, anachronistically heavy on text to the point that a single sheet was hard to take in at once. The sixteen-page magazine used large, bold text and images as a way of contrasting with the small text of phone screens and digital displays. One AIGA Eye on Design account counted no fewer than eighty stories in the first issue, squeezed into and spilling out of columns that ran against one another like a Times Square traffic jam, ranging from interpretive data graphics and abstract lists to long-form interviews. The editors described the method, only half jokingly, as a lazy, voyeuristic jigsaw puzzle asking how much could be got onto a page, and the result managed to feel both claustrophobic and expansive, like living in New York itself.

Format, Design and the Mascot

Pages were interspersed with text collages, cartoons, feature boxes and abstract lists. Each issue's content was built around loosely connected concepts and aesthetics rather than the structure of a typical journalistic publication, and issues included question-and-answer style interviews and other abstract pieces about life in New York City. The artwork for the first issue was made by Kurt Woerpel and the logo was designed by Paul Barnes. The publication's mascot wore a pair of Converse sneakers and was described variously as a moody daemon and as a squishy, cartoon putto, a figure that recurred through its visual identity. The design had limited hierarchy by intention: the editors said they deliberately made it hard to differentiate people from one another, eliminated the usual signals of importance, used no glossy finish and kept the space flat, so that the newspaper functioned as a shared space rather than a ranked editorial product. Civilization also sold custom T-shirts with segments of the magazine printed on them.

The Name

The editors originally considered several possible names, including Bored and two deliberately unprintable provocations, before choosing Civilization for its grandeur and pomposity. The stately title provided a satirical contrast to the magazine's topics, which often focused on the ephemera of life and the more extreme and depraved areas of the city and its society. The tone aimed at was casual, naturalistic and occasionally lurid, similar to podcasts and chatrooms, and inspired by the disordered and unpredictable nature of social media as much as by the chaos of the city itself. That contrast, between a name suggesting order and permanence and pages devoted to parties, messages, lists and street-level confession, became the magazine's central joke and its central method: a crowd of voices with no clear single message, arranged so that a reader could start or finish at any point.

Issues One to Five, 2018 to 2021

The first issue was published in April 2018 and the second later that year. The third issue was published in September 2019, the fourth in 2020 and the fifth in March 2021. Reviewing the fifth issue for Magculture, Jeremy Leslie praised its absurdist tone, high word count and design, culminating in a centrefold cosmic imagining of New York in 2021, with multiple reference points and diversions pulling the reader through a quasi-religious mapping of the internal and external experience of being a New Yorker. Benjamin Hart in Intelligencer described the magazine's range as including everything from a digressive diary by Darcie Wilder to a pictorial chronicle of a house party and a history of the Weather Underground's accidental 1970 bomb explosion in Greenwich Village. Thomas Gorton in Dazed called the debut issue a scattershot yet all-encompassing approach to capturing the intensity of life in New York, while Ruby Boddington of It's Nice That noted that its busy design forced readers' eyes to move around the page to process its ideas.

Fashion, Mail Art and Radio

Civilization's influence travelled beyond print. Content and imagery from the magazine were used by fashion designer Junya Watanabe for his Spring 2020 collection, bringing Turley's broadsheet graphics to the runway. During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, the magazine launched a personalised mail-art campaign, sending artworks through the post to New York residents, on the reasoning that mailing letters was a more interactive and tactile medium for a locked-down city. The campaign was inspired by correspondence artist Ray Johnson, a pioneer of mail and postcard art. Writing in The Guardian, Alex Needham observed that unlike the magazine, which expressed cacophony, the letter campaign expressed intimacy, one person trying to reach another across the divide. The magazine also produced Civilization Radio, a bimonthly radio segment on NTS Radio, extending its crowd-of-voices method into broadcast form.

Issue Six and Artificial Intelligence

The sixth issue, released in May 2022, was based around a concept of unlikable, repellent, horrible, ugly content and unswerving negativity. It had a deliberately crowded and fragmented aesthetic, and over half of the issue was generated through artificial intelligence. Turley explained the decision as a way of including the collective consciousness represented by AI, trained on multitudes of people's fears and insecurities, and likened the ambition to making a dead end rather than impressing an audience; coverage in Dazed described the generated contents as spanning hate lists, girl texts, breakup messages and similar fragments of online life, and felt the edition perfectly conveyed the feeling of being terminally online, evoking the sensation of falling deep into a web wormhole. In Print magazine, Steven Heller found a navigational method within the madness of its sixteen pages, with at least a dozen articles trailed on its front and back covers and reference numbers directing readers to continuations. Turley cited Lou Reed's 1975 album Metal Machine Music as an inspiration for the issue's refusal of conventional pleasure.

Reception and Cult Following

The magazine developed a cult following and was well received by critics despite, or because of, its difficulty. Rachel Tashjian in GQ suggested that some of its appeal stemmed from its physicality and niche circulation. Dazed described it as an anarchic countercultural diary of the city, and its makers, interviewed there, characterised its approach as diarist rather than editorial: an archive of ideas that would normally fall by the wayside, like all of one's open browser tabs printed on one broadsheet. Its scarcity was part of the effect; readers encountered it as an event rather than a subscription routine, and design critics including Heller, who first wrote about it in 2018, returned to successive issues as benchmarks of anti-grid, text-first editorial design. That reputation rested entirely on six broadsheet issues and their offshoots in fashion, mail art and radio, rather than on circulation in the conventional magazine sense.

Place in Magazine History

Civilization occupies a distinctive place in recent American magazine history as a print-first, New York City publication created at the height of digital publishing's dominance, by a designer who believed the surviving magazine market had become too timid. It revived, in exaggerated form, traditions of the underground newspaper and the artists' broadsheet: flat hierarchy, collage, transcription-like interviews, lists and confession, updated with the rhythms of social media and, in its sixth issue, of machine-generated text. For this directory the essential correction to the batch record bears repeating: Civilization was a New York magazine in subject, base and address, founded in 2018 by Richard Turley with Mia Kerin and Lucas Mascatello, published in broadsheet form from April 2018 through its sixth issue in May 2022, with its website at civilizationnyc.com. Its afterlife through the Junya Watanabe collection, the COVID mail-art campaign and Civilization Radio shows a magazine functioning less as a business than as a recurring cultural gesture, which was, by its founders' account, precisely the point.