A lover of magazines might discover just a few good causes to concentrate to AFM, a brand new publication about intercourse and relationships. It’s visually enjoyable and full of wonderful writing. It’s additionally the most recent in an extended line of magazines to exist solely due to the largesse of a tech firm.
AFM stands for each “A Fucking Journal” and “A Feeld Journal”—that second one a reference to the courting app that’s funding the enterprise. Feeld began its life in 2014 particularly to facilitate threesomes. It was initially known as 3nder, pronounced “Thrinder,” which rapidly led the corporate to obtain a trademark-infringement grievance from Tinder. (Rebranding might need been a good suggestion anyway, as some initially perceived each the identify and the app itself to be corny and embarrassing.) Feeld bought a classy makeover final 12 months, then labored by way of some main technical glitches and is now often called an all-purpose courting app with a uniquely broad vary of choices for figuring out one’s sexual and relationship preferences. It stays particularly fashionable with individuals searching for nonmonogamous connections.
To increase its cultural cachet, the app is now becoming a member of many different tech firms and venture-capital-funded start-ups which have spun up media shops in recent times. Beforehand, these publications have tended to not have protracted life spans. The buzzy, VC-funded baggage start-up Away had {a magazine}, Right here, that quietly stopped publishing in 2020. The direct-to-consumer mattress model Casper launched Woolly (after folding one other on-line publication, Van Winkle’s); it didn’t final. Greenback Shave Membership funded the favored web site MEL till 2021 after which simply stopped; Snapchat funded the favored web site Actual Life till 2022 after which simply stopped. There have been magazines by Airbnb and Uber and Bumble, and now there usually are not. Tech will get into magazines for time, not a very long time.
Nonetheless, for journalists who’re staring down a crumbling media enterprise—one which teeters on the sting of “extinction” due to anemic site visitors, a poor advert market, and burned-out readers, as Clare Malone argued in The New Yorker earlier this 12 months—this association is healthier than nothing.
AFM is co-edited by Maria Dimitrova, a longtime Feeld worker who beforehand created the corporate’s U.Okay.-based literary journal, Mal, which ran for 5 points, and by Haley Mlotek, who has held many roles in media, together with because the editor of The Hairpin, a feminist web site that folded in 2018, and as an editor at The Village Voice, the legendary alt weekly that collapsed in 2017 however just lately has been resurrected as a largely on-line property. Mlotek utilized for a copywriting job at Feeld within the fall of 2022 to complement her freelance-writing earnings, and the corporate emailed her again to ask her to edit {a magazine} as an alternative.
“I’ve a whole lot of expertise working for actually great, beloved, for my part wonderful publications that simply not exist,” she advised me. AFM is 2 issues without delay: {a magazine} and an promoting marketing campaign for Feeld. Mlotek stated she’s hopeful that this mannequin is a minimum of as sustainable as anything. She gestured at a historical past of publications being funded by single companies or manufacturers, citing European malls that produced their very own magazines starting within the late 1800s. AFM’s title can be a direct reference to the irritating state of the media trade, Mlotek defined. Clearly it’s about intercourse, however it is usually a reference to how wild beginning {a magazine}, of all issues, is true now: It displays “the frustrations and the dangers and the joys of attempting to provide a print publication at this second in time,” she stated. “It’s a joke, however it’s so critical.”
Feeld has no plans for AFM to make any of its personal cash. The one adverts within the first situation are in-kind adverts for different magazines, together with n+1 and The Drift. The concept is extra that it’s going to “carry again a little bit of romance to courting,” Dimitrova advised me, which could naturally assist Feeld’s enterprise. It is a process that a whole lot of courting apps are scuffling with: The expertise of utilizing a smartphone to search for intercourse and love has began to really feel numbing and hopeless to many individuals. The courting app Hinge additionally just lately debuted a web based zine that’s extra explicitly a advertising marketing campaign—love tales written by cool writers, together with R. O. Kwon and Brontez Purnell, accessible through QR code on the subway—presumably with the identical aim. In a lot as AFM is usually a profitable advert for Feeld, it is going to counsel to its readers that Feeld is the app for inventive people who find themselves deeply considerate, imaginative, humorous, and good—that utilizing the app is not going to make an individual really feel as if each potential match may be a bot, an fool, or a freak.
The primary situation of AFM has contributions from quite a lot of distinguished writers, together with Tony Tulathimutte, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Allison P. Davis. Lots of the contributors, the editors stated, are Feeld customers themselves; a few of the poetry within the situation, together with “Self Portrait because the Tree of Data (a.ok.a. Trans Poetica),” by Delilah McCrea, was chosen from open submissions solicited immediately within the app. A reported function on masculinity and bisexuality, written by the novelist Fan Wu, sourced interview topics from Feeld. It’s a wholesome mixture of attractive stuff, candy stuff, and critical stuff—one photograph essay of individuals of their properties preparing for dates and one accompanying a information to creating your personal latex.
A humorous work of fiction by the author Ashani Lewis is made up of a number of distinct “breakup fantasies,” together with one about ending a relationship with somebody by tossing a intercourse toy they gave you right into a physique of water and watching it drift away. An essay by the 96-year-old filmmaker James Ivory, about coming of age in Palm Springs and later spending a night hanging out round Truman Capote, is each gossipy and shifting. The standout piece is a dead-eyed essay by the author Merritt Tierce, recounting her years of makes an attempt to get a TV present made about abortion. (“The manager vp of tv stated, Nicely, ‘abortion anthology’ shouldn’t be one however two phrases no studio needs to listen to.”)
The primary AFM cowl star is the artist and musician Juliana Huxtable, who will DJ at a launch occasion in Brooklyn this week. The journal shall be distributed within the U.S. and the U.Okay. in the identical locations the place you should buy another intellectual cultural or literary journal, and it’ll even be accessible for buy on-line. Requested whether or not individuals might subscribe to it, Dimitrova stated no.
She and Mlotek have already got plans to start out engaged on situation two. But, although she didn’t state as a lot, Dimitrova appeared conscious that you just by no means can inform how lengthy the cash will hold coming. Issues typically change. “You recognize,” she stated, “every situation is its personal miracle.”
