The Drift

About The Drift

The Drift is a New York-based literary magazine of ideas, publishing essays, criticism, short fiction and poetry three times a year in print alongside a stream of online content. Founded in June 2020 by Harvard graduates Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow, it emerged from the dislocation of the pandemic era as a self-described forum for young writers who felt hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing media discourse. In the years since its launch it has become one of the most talked-about small magazines in American letters: the New York Times has called it the lit mag of the moment, its launch parties at venues like the Jane Hotel have become media events in their own right, and its editors have set out to build an institution rooted in socialist-feminist ideas and long-form literary ambition. The magazine's website, thedriftmag.com, hosts both its paywalled online articles and information about subscriptions to the print edition.

Founding and Origins

The Drift was founded in June 2020 by Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow, two friends who had graduated from Harvard College in 2016. Both had been shaped by the elite literary pipelines of New York City: Panovka, the daughter of corporate lawyers Alexandra Korry and Robin Panovka, attended the Dalton School, studied English and philosophy at Harvard and edited The Harvard Book Review; Barrow attended the Dwight School, studied English at Harvard, ran The Harvard Advocate, and went on to work as an editor at Penguin Press. The two had been planning a magazine for some time when the coronavirus pandemic arrived, and they decided to launch in the middle of it. Their first issue appeared on June 24, 2020, carrying a pugilistic letter from the editors that announced the magazine as a response to an establishment that had, in their view, fumbled its responses to the pandemic and chaotically reordered its mastheads.

The founders have said they were inspired in part by leftist podcasts such as Red Scare and Chapo Trap House, and they told the New York Times that they aspired for The Drift to be the intellectual arm of the leftist resurgence of the previous several years, figuring out what comes next after the Bernie Sanders era for readers awakening to leftist radicalism. From the start, the magazine positioned itself in the tradition of the socialist little magazine, with cover designs modeled on the early-twentieth-century socialist publications The Masses and its successor The Liberator. Every Drift cover follows strict rules drawn from that heritage: the design must be based on an existing cover from one of those archives, use a solid background, and feature a repeating visual element such as smokestacks, horses or ladders.

The Founding Essay and Editorial Vision

In their founding letter of June 2020, Barrow and Panovka wrote that they were committed to offering a forum for young people who had not yet been absorbed into the media hivemind and did not feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse. The letter went viral within literary circles, arguing for a magazine in which socialism and feminism do not entail moralizing, in which political wars are not fought on cultural battlefields, in which an essay is not an excuse for self-indulgence, and in which there is more to the media than endless recursive analysis of the media itself. The editors have described their project as grounded in the tradition of socialist feminism, and they have consistently sought work by writers still early in their careers.

The editorial vision has remained remarkably stable since that launch: The Drift publishes long-form essays and criticism alongside short fiction and poetry, with an emphasis on ambitious arguments that run to several thousand words. Panovka has said that young emerging writers rarely get the chance to make a really ambitious argument in a 3,000- to 5,000-word space, and the magazine exists to preserve that space. Its issues are organized around tongue-in-cheek retrospective headers; the first issue's sections were titled "About the Pandemic" and "Not About the Pandemic," while the tenth issue used "Saving Face" and "Face Value." The magazine has been compared frequently to n+1, the earlier Harvard-graduate-founded literary journal, though The Drift's editors have tried to distinguish their project through its explicit leftist political commitments.

A Pandemic Launch

The Drift's beginnings were shaped directly by the COVID-19 pandemic. The founders had originally planned to put the magazine into print from the start, but when the reality of the lockdowns sank in, they scrapped the print plan and decided that their first four issues would appear online only. Much of the material for the first issue had been written before the pandemic, and the editors went back to the drawing board, commissioning new pieces that addressed the new reality while keeping some of the original material under the wry banner of "Not About the Pandemic." They had also been planning a launch party that could not happen, and instead built their audience almost entirely online during the first year.

The early months were personally difficult for Panovka: her mother entered hospice care shortly after the first issue appeared, and she left New York to be with her family, temporarily scaling back her involvement with the magazine; her mother died on September 29, 2020. Despite that hardship, the first issues found a large and engaged readership among people stuck indoors and hungry for new arguments. Barrow later reflected that the timing, after the initial shock of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, proved very opportune: readers were online, indoors, and interested in reading something new and arguing about it. The magazine quickly became known for its sharp polemics, including a widely shared takedown of the "romantasy" publishing genre that went viral.

The Move into Print

After its online-only beginnings, The Drift established a triannual print edition, publishing three issues per year. The print magazine is the center of the operation, supported by subscriptions that now form the bulk of the publication's revenue, alongside paywalled online articles. The magazine operates on a small budget with a four-person staff, supported by more than a dozen stipended and freelance team members; the assistant editor and managing editor are salaried, while Barrow and Panovka themselves draw stipends and continue outside work, with Barrow remaining a book editor and Panovka writing freelance. The covers of the print issues have become a signature of the brand, drawing their strict design rules from the socialist press of a century ago.

The print issues are celebrated with launch parties that have become events in the New York media calendar, drawing crowds of several hundred people to venues such as the Jane Hotel and receiving coverage in The Atlantic and New York magazine. Barrow has noted that the magazine's parties, like its open submissions inbox, are open to anyone, even as attendance has become a marker of belonging to the younger literary scene. The founders' next ambition, they have said, is a real office: they have outgrown what can be accomplished while meeting in one another's apartments. They have also expressed the hope of building something durable, saying they would like the magazine to be around in ten years and in thirty years, an institution rather than a moment.

The David Zwirner Partnership

In September 2022, the mega-gallerist David Zwirner announced that he would provide multi-year funding to The Drift as part of an effort to fund a new generation of writers. Barrow told ARTnews that the magazine would remain editorially independent and would not become part of David Zwirner Books, and the editors have frequently reiterated that independence claim. The funding has nonetheless been consequential: it allowed the magazine to raise its pay rates for writers, to hold fundraisers in the gallery's spaces, and to commission interviews with acclaimed exhibiting artists such as Barbara Kruger. Zwirner's son Lucas had already been a contributor to the magazine's second issue, and he has described the galleries as seeing the publication as a likeminded partner, arguing that magazines like The Drift are essential to a healthy culture of discourse.

The partnership has also attracted criticism from commentators who see a tension between the magazine's socialist-feminist branding and its dependence on wealth generated by the contemporary art market. The editors' response has been that the arrangement preserves editorial control while giving a small magazine the resources to pay contributors better and to keep publishing ambitious long-form work. For a publication whose revenue comes substantially from subscriptions and paywalled articles, the donation provided a margin of stability that few little magazines enjoy, and the magazine has continued to publish pointed critiques of capitalist culture even as its largest backer sits at the center of that culture's most lucrative marketplace.

Contributors and Notable Work

The Drift has published work by a generation of writers who have gone on to wider recognition. Its contributors have included the journalist and author Malcolm Harris, whose work on American capitalism and the tech industry appeared in the magazine's pages, and the novelist Zain Khalid, whose fiction has been singled out by critics as among the strongest of his generation. An excerpt of Stephanie Wambugu's debut novel Lonely Crowds appeared in Issue Fifteen. The magazine's pieces have been selected for anthologies including The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Science and Nature Writing and the O. Henry Prize, and its contributors have been finalists for the National Book Award.

The magazine's editorial apparatus extends beyond its two founders. Its associate editor Lake Micah, who has also worked as an assistant editor at Harper's, has been part of the magazine's public life, and the staff includes a managing editor and assistant editor plus a wider team of stipended and freelance workers. Submission is open, and the editors have built the magazine around discovering writers outside the established pipelines. The issues mix long reported essays, cultural criticism, fiction and poetry, and the online site publishes interviews and dispatches alongside the print content. Its about page touts the anthology selections and award shortlists as evidence of the magazine's literary standing, even as its polemical edge keeps it at odds with the institutions that confer them.

Cultural Impact and Reception

Few literary magazines of the 2020s have generated as much commentary as The Drift. The New York Times profile that called it the lit mag of the moment placed it at the center of a broader revival of the little-magazine form, and the editor-in-chief of Harper's has praised it publicly. Its parties, its tote bags and its combative editors' letters have all become part of the mythology of the young literary scene in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Critics of the project have argued that its radical posture sits uneasily with its establishment connections and gallery patronage, while its defenders reply that the magazine's value lies precisely in the writing it publishes: long, strange, ambitious pieces that have nowhere else to go.

The magazine has also drawn comparisons to Partisan Review, the fabled literary and political journal that ran from 1934 to 2003, with commentators noting that The Drift's self-mythologizing rhetoric and polemical verve belong to a long tradition of little magazines that claim to stand outside the culture even as they help define it. Whether The Drift develops a distinct aesthetic to separate it from predecessors like n+1 remains an open question, and some critics have pressed the editors on whether the magazine genuinely welcomes writers who do not conform to the politics of the well-educated, left-leaning milieu from which it sprang. The editors' answer, in practice, has been to keep commissioning work that surprises them.

Reading and Subscribing

The Drift is published three times a year in print, with new issues announced on thedriftmag.com and celebrated at launch events in New York. The website also carries online-only articles, interviews and dispatches, some of which sit behind a paywall, and subscriptions to the print edition account for most of the magazine's income. Readers can find submission guidelines, archives of past issues and the editors' letters on the site, along with merchandise such as the Drift tote bags that became a fashion staple of the younger literary set. The magazine remains headquartered in New York City, where its editors continue to work out of their apartments while planning for a dedicated office.

For a magazine founded as an outsider's challenge to the media mainstream, The Drift has traveled quickly into the center of the literary conversation, and its editors are now preoccupied with the question of how to keep it outside that mainstream while building something that lasts. Their stated goal is to remain true to the founding principles, to publish new writers and surprising ideas, and to preserve the long-form essay as a space for ambitious thought. Whether it becomes the institution its founders hope for will depend on the same things that made it matter in the first place: the quality of the arguments, the nerve of the writers, and the willingness of readers to keep arguing about it. Visit thedriftmag.com for the latest issues and subscription information.