When we began Current Affairs in 2015, a lot hadn’t happened yet. January 6 and October 7 were just ordinary days of the year. Donald Trump had only just announced his first presidential campaign, and the idea of Bernie Sanders being taken seriously as a presidential contender was still wishful dreaming among leftists. Personally, I was a graduate student feeling useless and adrift, having just concluded three years feeling useless and adrift as a law student. The magazine was, essentially, a frivolous side project I made on my computer. I got a stack of other magazines from a newsstand and tried to teach myself how to design a magazine. Issue 1 came out looking good, and brought enough money to fund issue 2, and things just continued from there. Now we’re on Issue 50, we’re well-established, and we have a cute little office in New Orleans. Our loyal subscribers have made it possible for a print magazine to succeed at a very difficult time for media generally. So first off, thank you!

To celebrate Issue 50, we've commissioned a special wraparound panorama for the cover from one of our amazing artists, Chris Duffy, that incorporates characters from many of our previous issues, from Bigfoot to the famous Smoking Cat:

We are also doing a raffle for a lifetime subscription (among other exciting prizes). Donate $50 to celebrate our 50th issue and you'll be entered to win! CA is a 501c3 nonprofit with NO advertising so we depend entirely on your subscriptions and donations to keep this work going. Winners will be announced this Friday, Nov. 1. 

The occasion of our 50th issue provides a good chance to look back over, and reflect, on what we've managed to build with your help. It's a pretty extraordinary archive. Still, I am always reluctant to pick up old issues of Current Affairs. For one thing, I am too preoccupied with what’s going to be in the next issue (and how late it is) than to spend time mulling over what was in the last one. I also inevitably immediately spot a small, irritating typo that we missed before the issue went to press. (Nothing more crushing for an editor than to see a typo that it’s too late to do anything about.) 

But it’s interesting to look back at Issue 1 of Current Affairs from eight years later. (It’s available free on our website.) The graphic design is much less professional (I was a complete amateur), and much of it was lifted from Spy magazine. We didn’t have the stable of contributing artists we have now, so it was illustrated with recycled vintage advertisements and stock photos. We didn’t have any readers to start, of course, but I wanted a “letters to the editor” section and drafted some letters under fictitious pen names (E.g., “To the editors: I had been led to believe that this was a periodical dedicated to contemporary philandering, of which I am a casual aficionado. Extremely disappointed with what came in the mail instead.”) Starting around Issue 11, we introduced our unique photographic Table of Contents feature, in which every article is represented by a different physical object.

It was originally just a one-off, but it was so much more interesting than an ordinary table of contents that I didn’t want to disappoint people by going back. I’ve shot them on the seashore, in a bar, in front of a cathedral, and all kinds of other places. I built one out of Lego and in another commissioned custom cupcakes, each of which was decorated to represent an article in the issue. We put a lot of work into the Table of Contents, and I’m convinced that if the National Magazine Awards had a category for Most Original Table of Contents, we’d kick the New Yorker’s ass every year.   

The mixture of politics and goofy satire was well-established at the outset, so you’ll find my essay on prison memoirs next to fake ads for Tony Blair’s “Dictatorship Counseling Services” and Socialism pills (the cure for Affluenza!). From the outset, we were angry. The magazine mocks the New York Times, libertarians, Elizabeth Gilbert, Stalinism, Jonathan Franzen, and the drone industry. It’s equally vicious toward both Bill O’Reilly and Ta-Nehisi Coates, which in retrospect shows a lack of discernment. Back then, we loved blowing spitballs, even at fellow leftists. In issue 4, after a reader said “Current Affairs is great, just don’t disagree with them or they will be really mean to you,” we actually produced a list of everything we had criticized in the first issue, which ranged from “the entire field of sociology” to “the president of Uzbekistan.” Over time I feel we’ve developed a better sense of which targets deserve what level of criticism, when to wield the scalpel and when to wield the sledgehammer.

I was 26 when Current Affairs started, and it shows a bit. The magazine has since matured somewhat, I think without losing its bite or joie-de-vivre. When I look back at Vol. I, Issue I, there are some things I actually miss, such as the little sidebars with digressions, and think we should consider reintroducing them. It’s striking how much hasn’t changed, though. The wonderful writer Yasmin Nair was with us from the start (her coruscating review of Gilbert’s Big Magic is still a delight to read). The basic mission to provide left political and cultural analysis that was fun and readable and to intersperse it with little “amusements” like an adult Mad magazine is something we roughly achieved at the outset. I am pleased with how unashamedly stupid some of it is; one of the central messages of Current Affairs from the first moment was that it’s okay to have fun. 

Current Affairs began as a hobby, but we soon become swept up in the currents of history. Soon after we launched, it became clear that Trump was a serious presidential contender. At the time, pundits were dead certain that he couldn’t possibly win an election and were making all kinds of hubristic predictions. “HRC was the best candidate against Trump: her strengths make the most of his weaknesses,” Paul Krugman wrote in October of 2016. “Trump won’t win Michigan, and I am frankly offended that people think this is even a possibility,” said Jonathan Chait of New York magazine the day before the election. (Whoops.) I will always be proud that Current Affairs was one of the only voices (along with filmmaker Michael Moore, food writer Mark Bittman, and a few others) to warn that Trump was in fact very likely to beat Hillary Clinton. In early 2016, I published an article arguing that Bernie Sanders was the Democrats’ only hope against Trump. We argued throughout the election season that Democrats were failing to recognize the roiling anti-establishment anger in the country and that their complacency was suicidal. 

The rise of Sanders was the other big story of 2016. Even leftists, for the most part, didn’t anticipate it. We were so used to left candidacies being quixotic and hopeless (see: Nader ’00, Nader ’04, Kucinich ’04, Kucinich ’08, Stein ’12) that it came as a shock, even to Bernie himself, when he began to take off and become seriously competitive. Bernie’s emphasis on getting people’s basic needs met (free healthcare, free college, good pay, etc.) resonated strongly with millennials who had been so frustrated with Obama-era neoliberal Democrats that they had launched the Occupy Wall Street campaign.

But all the warnings printed in Current Affairs could not change the course of history. Bernie lost, then Hillary lost, and we got four years of pure pandemonium, in which seemingly every day the president committed some new abominable act or introduced some cruel new policy. Environmental and labor regulations were torn up, the immigration system was made even more cruel, and the rich were handed a big fat tax cut. It all ended in the severely botched handling of a major public health crisis, which it turns out is not the sort of matter you want to put a reality television star in charge of. 

If you look back over our issues from the Trump years, you’ll see that actually, we talked comparatively little about Trump compared with other political publications. I did write a book about him based on our Current Affairs coverage, Trump: Anatomy of a Monstrosity, which was released on Inauguration Day in 2017. But one of the duties we felt Current Affairs had was to try to get people to remember that there are more things in heaven and on Earth than whatever nonsense Donald Trump did (or tweeted) on any given day. We used the magazine to have the conversations we wished were being had. So we wrote about Prince, Hawaiian history, North Korean graphic design, modern architecture, the lessons of World War I, utopian novels, psychedelic drugs, Motown music, the Green New Deal, transphobia, endangered fish, the fast food industry, shopping malls, drones, Charlie Chaplin, and The West Wing. We covered every topic under the sun and even some that aren’t under the sun (such as a piece I did on why I think aliens exist). You can look through our “Index” page to see the remarkable range of subjects we’ve dealt with across thousands of articles. Because we tried to keep away from the 24-hour news cycle, if you want to trace the history of the past eight years through picking up back issues of Current Affairs, you can’t do it nearly as well as you might with old copies of The Nation. We deliberately tried to avoid being too “topical” and “newsy,” but that’s precisely why the magazines hold up relatively well today and are still a lot of fun to read. (Try going into our archive, which is available free online!) There are a lot of easter eggs and fun surprises, and I think we were quite prescient on a lot of stuff—we loathed Elon Musk long before his right turn and acquisition of Twitter, for instance. We built up an audience in part because of our famous long “takedown” pieces critiquing odious public figures (Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Pete Buttigieg, etc.) but we’ve actually published on an extraordinary range of topics, including Jeff VanderMeer’s investigation of the destruction of Florida wildlife, Ciara Moloney’s excavations of forgotten films, Lauren Fadiman on codes of etiquette, Ben Burgis on central planning, Briahna Joy Gray’s “How Identity Became a Weapon Against the Left,” Rob Larson’s dissections of free market economic ideology, Jag Bhalla’s exposes of the “greedocracy,” Marina Bolotnikova’s superb writing on animal welfare, Arjun Byju’s look at traumatic mass shooter drills in schools, and the wide-ranging work of my editorial colleagues Lily Sánchez and Alex Skopic. Plus much more, including coverage of fashion, board games, journalism, Brazilian politics, the Iraq war and more, and interviews with some of the world’s most vital thinkers and activists from Rashid Khalidi to the late Barbara Ehrenreich. 

Some of the changes we’ve witnessed over the eight years of our existence have been deeply depressing. Bernie Sanders lost twice, of course, and his movement dissipated. That moment when both Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. were ascendant felt full of such promise, like we could perhaps have a political system that cared about and served the interests of the people. It was not to be. The trajectory of media has been alarming in itself. Our early articles would be read, discussed, argued about. But over time, people read articles less and less. TikTok videos are the way to reach people now, and they of course don’t allow for the same level of depth. Twitter, always a cesspool, is now crawling with neo-Nazis who would once have been kicked off. These are anecdotal observations, but public discourse does seem to have changed for the worse since our early days, when it seemed like there was a much greater hunger for substantive articles that made complicated arguments. I feel as if nowadays, fewer and fewer people even think it’s worth bothering to have a political discussion. They feel so powerless that there’s no point debating anything. That’s my read of the “zeitgeist,” at least. Am I wrong? Write to us! (We used to get a lot more angry letters to the editor. What happened to those? Again, I think people just stopped bothering to make counterarguments to anything.) 

I hope we can change all this. I want us to start talking about Medicare For All and the Green New Deal again and pushing forward plans for fixing the worst crises facing humankind, which have not gone away. We need to reenergize the left. And Current Affairs will always be a magazine that believes it can be done. If you look over the past 49 issues, you’ll find that while we covered a lot that was dark and depressing, we have never countenanced hopelessness. Our pages are filled with good cheer and encouragement, because we believe resignation and cynicism are simply not acceptable options. This magazine has always had a utopian streak—in fact, I’ve now published two “utopian novels” myself, Echoland and My Affairs—and we’re not ashamed of it. (Also: there have been at least six other spin-off Current Affairs books including one for babies!) We believe the good life can be given to all. We will never be “doomers.” It’s still possible to bring good things into the world. Heck, the success of Current Affairs itself is proof enough of that. We were told we’d never last, but here we are 50 issues in and we’ve got an amazing base of loyal subscribers and a network of phenomenal writers and artists who work to make this one of the most visually exciting and intellectually vibrant magazines in the world. (At least I think so, and many of our readers say they agree.) With your help, this is just the beginning. The magazine will keep getting better. And hopefully, so will the world. It’s hard to keep believing in that sometimes, when one’s government is engaged in supporting crimes against humanity and is clearly indifferent to the climate peril that we are being plunged into. But we have confidence in the capacity of our fellow human beings to unite and build a world worth living in. Onward!