✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Editor's Note — House House Magazine

househousemagazine.com · 2,301 words · saved by 1 readers

TO START A NEW criticism magazine today means first to admit failure. This is beyond the simple truth that to begin anything is to pronounce the death of something else. (Often, it is an old self, a predecessor, or a status quo disguised as some terminus)—Realistically speaking, the genre of cultural criticism has just not been very triumphant in the past two decades. We are forced into a "grassrooted-ness". There is no institution. No establishment. No idol. Who even is the audience for a new magazine? Who is going to hear the falconer? Some of the most respectable literary quarterlies and biennials can barely hold on to their few thousand subscribers. It is not a surprise when sometimes the amount of submissions even surpasses the total readership. (A certain very popular literary journal for poetry, for instance, has a print size of just above 20,000 and publishes around 300 poems annually from approximately 100,000 submissions). While more and more young people read only within the

SPRING/SUMMER 2025 What is Cultural Criticism Today?: On Culture, Care, and Sensibility Hengzhi Huang Yang “ A writer cannot withdraw into himself…” —Maurice Blanchot TO START A NEW criticism magazine today means first to admit failure. This is beyond the simple truth that to begin anything is to pronounce the death of something else. (Often, it is an old self, a predecessor, or a status quo disguised as some terminus)—Realistically speaking, the genre of cultural criticism has just not been very triumphant in the past two decades. We are forced into a "grassrooted-ness". There is no instituti

Explore this link on the map →

related reading