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I'm a Believer in the Believer

The people who brought you McSweeny's are now publishing a new magazine called The Believer. In the March 2003 inagural issue, editor Heidi Julavits offers The Believer as an antidote to snark, or the hyper-ironic belittling tone that permeates so much of society.

I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit's sake—or, hostility for hostility's sake...I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community...

This magazine consists mostly of book reviews and interviews. Interspersed are short, one-page, ode-like essays on various semi-banal items; each month features a tool, a mammal, a motel, a light and a child. These are hard to explain, but for instance, last month's tool was the STANLEY TOOLS Magnetic Wall Stud Finder 47-400. The writing is playful, but serious. The authors and editors care about the books and people that are the subjects of their articles. Examples include: a two part tribute to Jerry Lewis, a treatment of Frank Herbert's Dune as a prophecy for our world today, a celebration of detective novels, a conversation between Salman Rushdie and Terry Gilliam and a report from the campaign trail of Howard Dean. Plus, there are interviews with people as diverse as philosopher Richard Rorty, funny man Andy Richter, hip-hop artist ?uestlove, writer Jamaica Kincaid and (in the current issue) Dave Eggers interviews David Foster Wallace.

The Believer's goal is to feature and appeal to people who (as George Orwell puts it, and Julavits quotes) are "neither highbrows nor lowbrows, but elastic-brows." We can all use some eyebrow exercise once in a while.