"This special issue of Common-place explores food. It particularly investigates the production and consumption of food during the age of experiment, that period between 1820 and 1890 in the United States after the soil crisis of the early nineteenth century disrupted customary agriculture and before scientific agriculture became institutionalized nationally in the system of experimental stations legislated into being by the Hatch Act (1887)."

"Can you blame us for being a defensive lot, we lovers of early American literature, when all about us we see America's political Founding Fathers (and sometimes Mothers) celebrated like rock stars, on t-shirts, in miniseries, and, most enviably, with best-selling biographical tomes? What about our literary Founding Fathers (and Mothers)? Anne Bradstreet? Edward Taylor? Charles Brockden Brown? Don't they too deserve a little name recognition: at least a spot on CSPAN or a line-drawing portrait on a bookbag? We who cherish early American books and writers come by our defensiveness honestly. It is a long-standing American intellectual tradition, pioneered by fine American literary minds like William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, each of whom in his own way responded to that stinging question posed by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review in January 1820: "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?""

"I’ll go one step further - there are server-side software engines that can be used to stitch together PDFs from HTML files, so you could allow your reader to custom-build a magazine to their own specifications from your stock of stories and articles, and then buy a unique printed version. If nothing else, it would mean you could avoid paying for a magazine which contained a story by an author whose work you just don’t enjoy."

[noting this in particular for the publishing business model it shadows]

"It's the 2000's version of redbaiting. Pick a few wildly unrepresentative outrages, and tar an entire system with them. (If the article were entitled “Is the Ivy League Still Worth It?,” it would at least be a little closer to honest.) Moving from outrage to outrage, without even a feint towards actual analysis, the piece is obviously intended to generate self-righteous, undifferentiated anger. And the taxpayers who feel that anger direct it at the public sector, where it damages the reasonably-priced majority."

"Content may want to be free, but it doesn’t always want to be big."

On the magazine...

Copyright renewals for periodicals