Stack Magazines

"I hope it makes people feel good..." Harriet Fitch Little is editor of Kinfolk magazine and editor-in-chief of Kindling, the new title published by Kinfolk to explore the subject of bringing up children. In this conversation she explains how the Kinfolk team ended up making a magazine about raising kids, how the pandemic played its part, and why it was particularly important that Kindling remained an open and non-judgemental magazine.

"American football is a reflection of America – good and bad..." Shawn Ghassemitari is editor-in-chief and creative director of Spiral, the magazine that takes a creative look at American football. I was really interested to hear about his reasons for making the magazine – his parents immigrated to the US from Iran in 1978 and he speaks about the sport as a way of assimilating into American culture, and also as a way of reflecting all elements of that culture, both good and bad.

"Things are going to be weird for the rest of our lives..." Peter McCain is the creative director and editor-in-chief of Batshit Times, the New York-based satire and arts magazine that released its first issue in April last year. That first issue was themed ‘Quarantine’, and when I read it I assumed the whole project was conceived in response to the pandemic, but as he explains in this conversation, there are lots of other things he’s much more worried about.

"We just wanted to know – what do people care about now?" Lea Kloepel is editor of Synchron, the magazine she launched earlier this year with her boyfriend and art director Johannes Farfsing, and which stands out as one of the strangest and most striking magazine launches I’ve seen for a long time. It's dedicated to exploring contemporary visual art and fiction, but it does so in a way that is brilliantly inventive and entirely its own – Lea's explanation of the origins of their weirdly organic typography is one of my all-time favourite examples of geeky magazine design obsession!

"Juggling is just playing – it should talk to everyone..." Florence Huet is the founder and editor of Yana, an extraordinary magazine about juggling that is on a mission to combat the stereotypes and assumptions about what it means to juggle. It's packed full of geeky references that Florence explains in this conversation, helping to open up even further a magazine that had already totally caught my imagination.

"We all wear clothes – we all have something to say about them..." Abigail Buzbee and Ryan Hunt are editor and art director of Novella, an experimental fashion magazine that takes a handmade, literary approach to its subject. In this conversation they explain why they were so excited to play with the conventions of the fashion magazine, and how at the start of the project they actually didn’t intend to make a magazine at all.

"You go mad if you don't do anything here..." Agnese Zile is creative director and editor-in-chief of Nork, the magazine she started as "an ode to the north", but which has evolved over the years to become a broader exploration of the world, though still with a distinctly dark perspective evocative of her adopted home in Tromsø. In this episode she talks about her reasons for changing the magazine, the challenges of independent publishing, and the strange lure that keeps pulling her back to publishing this labour of love.

"I can't just put this on a hard drive – I have to do something about it..." Mari Oshaug is editor-in-chief and publisher of Bikevibe, the magazine that sets off for a different city each issue and reports on the cycling culture it finds there. Mari started the magazine in 2014 by accident – she was on holiday in Tokyo and found herself taking hundreds of photos of the bikes she saw on the streets, and realised that she wanted to actually do something with the pictures rather than just store them away and never look at them again. In this episode she talks about building her team and what they look for in the cities they cover, as well as the obvious problems that coronavirus has thrown in their path.

Marketa Kinterova is editor-in-chief of Fotograf, the long-running Czech magazine of photography and contemporary art. We delivered their ‘New Utopias’ issue to Stack subscribers in August this year, and in this conversation we get into some of the things that I really love about this brilliantly provocative and avant-garde magazine.

"You can't wait for other people to change things for you..." Afsaneh Rafii is founder and editor-in-chief of Icarus Complex, the magazine that takes an in-depth look at the issues surrounding climate change. In this episode we go right back to the start to speak about her initial impulse to make a magazine, through the process of publishing a first issue and her realisation that while she’d been working on that, several other groups of independent publishers had also been creating the launch issues of their own magazines about climate change.