It was OK to start with literature and art. As long as you said what you meant, and what you really thought on reflection (subject to later correction), then if you spoke honestly about anything you would be striking a blow. The magazine started with just $8,000, which four of us had pooled, plus $2,000 we extracted from friends and relatives in $20 subscriptions, sold on the basis of 100 copies of a prototype issue we had xeroxed and stapled. When we sold our first official issue in 2004, the meaning of n+1 as a title was simply that we’d try to document, or discover, one next step in every action that people said was settled, solved, or complete. One more step forward in the arts, in fiction, in government, in dance, in dating, in economics. We weren’t afraid of steps to the side, either, on the diagonal.

[....]

The truth that appears to me now is how much continuity there is in small literary and intellectual magazines in America. Some decades leave the feeling that you may be the last one left. When we started, we felt lonely, and as if we were picking up obligations from giants.

—n+1 founding co-editor Mark Grief over at New Statesman on a renewed place for little magazines in American today