Other (Available at

Confounded Books) $6

Other was started in June by a group of San Francisco writers who "set out to create a magazine for people whose identities and ideas are never listed next to checkboxes on forms." It's published three times a year, with the apparent aim of rethinking art, politics, and cultural criticism; and although still on the left--critical of global capitalism, American consumerism, and militarism--the magazine searches for new ways to challenge the regressive tendencies and ideologies of the right. To accomplish this, many of the writers in Other first demolish traditional leftist critiques of the right, showing how the old left was often misguided, or how its thinking has lapsed into laziness. With the old left dynamited, Other's writers begin to reconstruct a brand-new left in the cleared space.

But this definition of the magazine is not entirely fair, since Other is not so unified in its agendas, interests, and investments. For example, the second issue has an article by Doug Henwood, whose 1997 book Wall Street was to Clinton-era prosperity (and the capital of that prosperity--New York City) what Mike Davis' book City of Quartz was to Reagan-era prosperity (and its capital--Los Angeles). Henwood is a veteran leftist intellectual, and his short essay on American poverty ("The New Other America") is by no means exceptional. Like most of Henwood's writing, it offers a sound explanation of how poverty is officially defined and increasingly deepened in the richest society on earth.

In the same issue, however, there's an essay called "Battle Hymns of the Impotent," by the young and uprising Marxist critic Joel Schalit, who examines the substance of the brief burst of antiwar songs that appeared on the web during the gloomy days leading up to World War III--as Schalit calls the Iraq Attack. He rightly believes that, though loaded with honorable motives, none of these protest songs (or MP3s) hit their mark. His approach (criticizing traditional and simplistic leftist gestures) is more representative of the new kind of criticism or politics that Other would like to establish.

Also in the second (and latest) edition, there is a short and entertaining examination of '70s horror films, a comic rant against those who worship NPR, and speculations by contemporary sci-fi writers on the future of war. In a word, this smart little magazine is about "whatever, man."