Uncompromising and uncompromised.

Protean Magazine is an independent, non-profit political and literary periodical that publishes an annual print edition. On our website, we also publish new work—critical essays, news analysis, reviews, interviews, and poetry—on a weekly basis, all of which is free of advertisements and free to read. Protean’s mission is to promote incisive and affecting criticism, journalism, literature, and art for the political left.

Each issue of Protean Magazine in print is constructed thematically to help our readers parse and weigh the moral and political urgencies of the present. In print and online, we publish work that examines and dissects sociopolitical and cultural ideas by employing critical, investigative, literary, and lyrical techniques.

Maintaining our integrity necessitates an unflinchingly counterposed orientation towards power. We believe there exists a moral imperative to contest a catastrophically unjust status quo. In concert—these things are directly related—we also oppose the reign of corporate-dominated distraction.

We do not believe in compromising our position by adopting an ad-driven, (ostensibly) “free” content model. We derive our funding solely from the generosity and care of our everyday readership—without corporate sponsors, advertisers, elite funders, or angel investors. Doing so allows us the editorial independence to publish authentic, quality work that remains free of undue influence.

Despite the many proclamations of the death of print, and of readership in general, we know that a thoughtful, curious reading public still persists, and in greater numbers than is often supposed. These readers are seeking interpretation: trenchant readings of what they rightly sense are the historically convoluted, morally hideous ideologies that rule the present. That need is far from sated by the offerings of an often-noxious and delusive present media environment.

We launched Protean in 2018. As we put it at the time in our launch statement: “Protean Magazine is made for those who are seeking ways to live meaningfully while sifting through the moral wreckage of our time.”

This remains an apt description. This vital need for remediation—and correspondingly, the threat to human collectivity and individual consciousness alike—has only grown more pressing since then; in fact, it has become outright dire. As such, we will continue to publish work to that effect, and we hope you’ll join us in supporting our writers and bringing their thinking into the world. ♦

 

Protean Magazine is a production of the Protean Collective.

The Protean Collective is a distributed group of leftist writers, journalists, academics, and artists who operate democratically.

MASTHEAD

Publisher: Steven Monacelli
Editor-in-Chief: Tyler Walicek
Associate Editor: Jake Romm
Art Director: Slug
Poetry Editor: Dominick Knowles
Website: Printer Scanner Studio

Protean is a certified 501(c)3 nonprofit. We are entirely reader-funded and ad-free, and we pay all contributors fair compensation for their labor.

As an explicitly leftist non-profit operation, our focus is on the quality of our publications and their significance for our readership—not profit margins. We sell magazines and raise funds only so that we can pay our contributors to create high-quality work.

We do not believe that anyone should be asked to work solely for “exposure.” We pay each and every one of our writers, poets, and artists, committing up front to a fair and mutually agreed-upon rate for labor. We do not ask writers or artists to work on spec, and we pay up front, before publication—a rarity in the field.

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