Founded in June 2020, The Drift is a relatively new left wing journal from the US offering and excellent mix of long-form essays and cultural criticism, short fiction, poetry, interviews, dispatches and 'extremely abbreviated reviews'.
To give you an informed idea of where this magazine is going it's probably easiest to read The Drift's amusing submission guidelines:
'We want: sharp, surprising interventions; socially engaged cultural criticism; class-sensitive analysis; pieces that point out what’s being avoided or talked around in politics, media, arts, or even academia; upbeat cynicism; un-self-serious screeds; generous takedowns; entries from the margins; fiction; poetry; 150-word reviews of books/ films/ TV shows/ art/ ephemera.
We don't want: anything that toes a party line (any party, any line); highbrow name-dropping; attacks on easy targets; straightforward longform reviews narrowly focused on a single book or movie; dispatches from The Right Side of History; finger wagging; false binaries; anachronistic historical critiques; thoughts on Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault, [insert theory-bro icon here]; hot takes on the latest 24-hour Twitter scandal; term papers (or anything that could conceivably be turned in as a term paper); Marxist critiques culminating in statements about the base and superstructure; personal essays.
We're bored by: your love life; Twitter; therapy; cancel culture; chalking it up to neoliberalism; chalking it up to late-stage capitalism; AI panic; ChatGPT; trad Caths; Dimes Square; whatever’s on Netflix; greenwashing; performative pessimism; girlbosses, and misogynistic critiques of girlbosses; memes; Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, and their imitators; New York; wokeness; anti-wokeness; trauma; gender essentialism; the political and psychological effects of social media; zoomers and sex; cable news; Elon Musk; hot girls; lifestyle choices; contemporary fiction.'
