Civilization #1 Edited by Richard Turley, Lucas Mascatello and Mia Kerin Self-published, 2018

eading the first issue of (2018), I felt something like relief after telling myself it didn’t want to be read. Newspaper is already uncomfortable—an extreme medium, with its walls of text on pages proportionate to none. It is impossible to hold, let alone finish: a confusion of stories, recklessly arranged, with a 24-hour shelf life. Filled to the margins with interviews, infographics, listicles, statistics, cartoons and more, ’s 16 broadsheet pages are too much, though I suspect it loves its impossibility as the joke of its soul. Co-editor Richard came from “looking at the few [print] magazines and newspapers that remain,” and concluding that they all “look the same.” He expressed wanting to give its readers a total experience of New York City—“scattered moments in the city, what people are talking about, what they experience”—but the end result is a publication that seems more intent on winning circulation as a fashion object than as a text. Its impossible readability lies less in its unruly form or ambitious scope than in its insularity and self-commodification.