September 2026

Naomi Kanakia has a fascinating new piece on her Substack where she applies her style of no-bullshit, see-through-the-mythology, count every penny analytical lens to the world of the little magazine (i.e. .N+1, The Point, The Drift, Jacobin, The Baffler, etc. - i.e. all heirs to Partian Review).

It’s great! I love it. But I’m unpersuaded by her overall assessment of the function of the little magazines. She writes:

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these journals … feel like transient entertainment for a certain type of person—an aspiring intellectual—to read on the phone or to browse on their toilet. They are a space for individual circles of writers—scenes—to constitute themselves and to create community around shared ideas. And this community tends to get built most strongly by dismissive polemics where they shower…

My guest on the show today is writer Ann Manov, the artist formerly known as personality girl and the author of a recent essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Republican Machines: Can the GOP save the humanities?”

In it, Manov goes back to her alma mater, University of Florida, to report on the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, perhaps the best known of the growing number of schools and centers around the country, typically at state universities in red states, dedicated to some mix of the great books and what has come to be called “civic thought.” On their website, the Hamilton school says that it teaches “the ideas and habits of thought that founded our country and sustain our free society.”

This is the shiznit