HeyJaredWoman of Letters
I write about the Great Books, classic literature, and the contemporary publishing world.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 15
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 6, 2026
Latest issues
The Point (opens the original)
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Like I said last week, The Point is the best of these little magazines.I have to say, the magazine world is so funny, because people whisper their opinion as if it’s a shameful secret. Several people have said to me, “Actually, I think The Point is the best.” They’ll even frame it as a collective secret, “My friends all agree The Point is better than The Drift.”I’ve had conflict with one of the editors of The Point, Becca Rothfeld, so I approached it last, because I am human, and I was certain I
The Case for Greatness (opens the original)
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Last Sunday, I was browsing the New York Times and saw an article about how a mother regretted sending her daughter to a bad school. I read the piece, riveted. It was about an affluent Black mother who’d chosen to send her kid to poor and majority-Black public schools for elementary and middle school, and then discovered that her daughter was woefully unprepared for high school. At one point, after requesting a folder of her daughter’s completed assignments, the author realizes her daughter does
The Function of the Little Magazine (opens the original)
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For the last four months, I’ve been investigating a type of quarterly journal known as the ‘little magazine’ or the ‘intellectual journal.’These journals have tiny circulations—N+1 has a print circulation of 12,000 and they get 2.5m pageviews across their whole website (for comparison, Woman of Letters got 2m pageviews last year)—but they seem to carry a lot of societal prestige. N+1’s founders were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/among-the-be
The Underground Man (opens the original)
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Dean was a twenty-two year old boy who wanted to be a great author.He also hated himself. He just felt a toxic stew of anger and self-loathing and pain and loneliness. And he knew the only way to break out of that trap was to make great art. Because if you were a great artist, then all your flaws were excused. If he could somehow transmute this horrible stuff inside him into a novel that was good, then everything would be okay.But his current novel, entitled The Underground Man, was a problem fo
The Aesthetics of Degradation (opens the original)
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Sometimes an editor wants to generate viral heat for their publication, so they find a frustrated writer and they assign this person to review the novel of a much-more-successful rival. The editor understands the frustrated writer in question, and they subtly give the writer permission to really say anything they want—anything at all—about the work in question. If the editor is lucky, the frustrated writer works himself into high dudgeon and rhetorically demolishes the more-successful rival. The
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