Strange Matters is a magazine of new and unconventional thinking covering a wide range of subjects. We publish issues regularly in print and digital formats, and also publish new digital content on a rolling basis.
Strange Matters was founded in 2020 by a collection of co-editors with interest and training in a range of intellectual disciplines – literature, architecture, history, economics, the natural sciences, and computer science, among others. We are proudly living our socialist values as a 100% worker-owned and managed cooperative.
Our Mission
We started Strange Matters at a critical moment. Even as our global society finds itself confronted with problems of unprecedented scale and complexity, our various cultures have seemingly lost their ability to escape their received ideas and break through to new frameworks of thought and action. In science, culture, and politics alike, we’ve noticed a broad tendency towards groupthink, overspecialization, lack of communication across lines of difference, and a widespread retreat into the dead ends of quietism, fantasy, or authoritarianism.
We want this magazine to be a space where we can build tools to tackle the enormous problems we face collectively. What we need is a new kind of conversation: one that involves people from various walks of life and class or cultural background, that gets people with distinct experiences talking to each other about shared practical problems, that goes into the nitty-gritty of how we can build something new. Only a community like this can produce the knowledge and acquire the experience it will take to transform what we have inherited.
The Print Issue
In addition to publishing online essays continually, our print issue will come out a few times a year. It’s divided into three distinctive sections.
The Front Pages of our issues will house topics related to our core programme of incubating conceptual tools for a better future. It will cover practical questions across fields such as political economy, history, politics, and anthropology that have immediate and pressing practical and structural implications.
But we also want to build a space for bold experimentation and for exploring meaning in all of its shades and intricacies. Our Back Pages will be dedicated to culture, meaning, and things that bring us delight. It will be filled with profiles, reportage, poetry, fiction, visual art, essays, serialized novels or plays, philosophy, criticism of all the above, and much more.
Lastly, the middle of the magazine will house the Futon; a “resting spot” where readers can take a break with pieces that are playful, experimental, humorous, pensive, and most importantly short.
Organic Praise For Strange Matters
“Most left magazines begin with broadsides against capitalism, conservatism, or liberalism. There’s a little of all that here, but it gives you some sense of how original this project is that the opening salvo is directed mostly against the ‘partisans of epistemology.’”
~ JON BASKIN, Editor at Harper’s & Founding Editor of The Point
“I’ve read some of the work Strange Matters is preparing for their first issue and it’s incredibly vital stuff on the history and potential of the autonomous left, people should absolutely go support them.”
~ MIA WONG, activist, labor organizer, & co-host of It Could Happen Here
“The new magazine Strange Matters is already looking like a great contribution to the leftist media space – tackling complex questions of the political moment we’re in with intelligence and humor.”
~ Seriously Wrong podcast
“Injects some much-needed political economy realism into the thought-experiment dreamland of the Friedmanites.”
~ CORY DOCTOROW, science fiction author & futurist
“Great piece.”
~ ASTRA TAYLOR, filmmaker and writer
Masthead
Co-Editors
Frances Steere
John Michael Colón
Kyle Flannery
Steve Mann
Business
Steve Mann
Design
Frances Steere
