(12:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

"If boredom is a moment of danger, I just fell out a fifth-story window into an abandoned mineshaft full of quicksand."

N+1 strives for seriousness (or thinks it does) to compensate for the many little magazines that don’t. Unfortunately, that means it can poison the well in a way that a quirky amusement like McSweeney’s could never dream of. A McSweeney’s reader may be wasting his time, but he doesn’t really think he’s reading a valuable reflection on policy, morality, or culture. An n+1 reader, however, may believe that the magazine’s strain of pseudo-thoughtful logorrhea is the same thing as real argument—the kind that takes a side and proposes what to do. (Isn’t this, after all, the same demographic that regarded John Kerry’s tortuous illogic as “nuanced thinking”?)

Even so, it seems inevitable that n+1 will recede from view [...]. It will fail less because of its obnoxious hype machine than because, as the world’s troubles become more dire and more immediate, nobody’s going to turn to the Kunkels for the answers. A civilization declining within and attacked from without can’t afford to ponder its fate in the same glib, nugatory way that it ponders “trends in network comedy.” So nobody will turn to n+1. They’ll just wonder, one hopes, why they ever made such idols of Progress and Thought—without a moment’s attention to where they were going or what, if anything, they were thinking.

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