Stack Magazines

Lina Fadel is one of the poetry editors at The Other Side of Hope, a magazine that centres around journeys in refugee and immigrant literature. It’s partly a literary magazine and partly a community project, because as she explains in this episode, it’s all about bringing people together and providing a platform for voices that wouldn’t otherwise be heard.

"I was just hanging out with my algorithm and it got a little claustrophobic..." Daniela Rodriguez is editor-in-chief, designer and illustrator of Superstars Only, a brilliantly personal magazine that she makes with her boyfriend Adrian Tiu and a few close friends in New York. As you’ll hear, Daniela is incredibly self-effacing and the magazine itself has a lovely lowbrow charm, but it’s also really quite experimental and exciting, and I was interested to hear her describing the process she goes through in making an issue, and the special magic that she feels print brings to the project.

Recorded live at the Shifting Landscapes event in London on Saturday 2nd December, this conversation features Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, executive editor of Emergence, and Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters, founders of Studio Airport and designers of Emergence. Emmanuel has been on the Stack podcast before speaking about making Emergence magazine at the meeting point of climate, environment, spirituality and humanity, and in this discussion we broaden the focus to encompass Emergence's podcasts, films, immersive exhibitions and more.

Grub Street Journal, a magazine about magazines, explores the resilience of print in the B2B publishing industry. The podcast discusses humanizing the magazine industry, the success of 'The Week' magazine, and the challenges of running a print publication. It also hints at upcoming episodes with industry professionals.

Zweikommasieben is the Swiss magazine that's obsessed with the contemporary musical moment. We delivered their 27th issue to Stack subscribers in August this year, and then the following month we invited everyone to join us for a conversation that digs into the details behind the making of the magazine. It was great to catch up with them, and to hear them reflecting on what it means to have spent 12 years trying to capture the present.

Recorded live on Tuesday 10th October at The Scrandit in Bristol, this podcast episode features four independent publishers speaking about the challenges and opportunities of combining left-wing politics and print. The conversation was moderated by Eliz Mizon, strategy lead for The Bristol Cable, and it featured Max Jeffrey, art director of Stir to Action, Erin Mathias, editor of The Paper, and Phil Wrigglesworth, editor and art director of Left Cultures.

I dropped into the Magculture shop in Clerkenwell to speak with founder Jeremy Leslie ahead of next month's Magculture Live event. This will be their 10th year of the London-based conference (they also run it in New York) and it was really interesting to hear his thoughts on the last decade of running the event, as well as the general state of magazine publishing at the moment. We also took the opportunity to geek out over some favourite new titles, running through a few of the magazines that have caught our eye recently.

Osman Bari is founder, editor and designer of Chutney, a magazine that provides a platform for underrepresented voices to tell stories about cultural identity, colonialism and migration. We met up to speak about his ideas behind the magazine, the influence of food on the title, and his own changing status of settler and immigrant, and how being in London affected the stories he wanted to tell.

Recorded in August 2023 for our Stack Magazine Club, this conversation with editors Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush explores Cake Zine, the magazine we delivered to our subscribers in July 2023. Telling the story of the literary food magazine so far, they explain how they started in the pandemic with their Sexy Cake issue, then released Wicked Cake in time for Hallowe'en last year, before switching to Humble Pie for this third issue.

The first issue of Te was published in 2021 and it caught my eye because it seemed to be doing something clever with food publishing: Its stories are about the different ways that ingredients can travel around the world, or the different values and associations that might be attributed to particular dishes, and so the whole thing seemed to be using the conventions of a food magazine as a sort of Trojan horse for telling stories about people and cultural anthropology. I assumed the second issue would use food in a similar way, but when I picked it up I realised that this was no longer a magazine about food, and the focus had switched to sound. Intrigued by the change, I spoke with founder and editor Michael Guo to hear about his thinking behind the project.