We're sitting around a nice wood table scattered with paper, notebooks, a couple of iMacs, and a digital projector. The editorial staff of the Internationalist is meeting about their spring issue.

"We need another mini-feature," one editor says.

"I can get an interview with a member of the Ugandan Parliament," another says.

"What about that jai alai story?"

"There's this woman in the Israeli Army but everything has to be vetted."

"There's a Tom Berenger movie called The Substitute with a jai alai scene—if we can work Tom Berenger into our magazine, we've done our job."

Everybody laughs.

An editor mentions a submission he got about wrestling native Mongolians. "I've done that!" shouts the Internationalist's public relations director. At first, I think she's joking. She is 23, slight, and well-dressed. It's impossible to imagine her wrestling Mongolians. But she's serious. "They like to body slam Americans."

Six students at the University of Puget Sound put out the first issue of the Internationalist in October 2003. It was 80 pages long and, like serious student publications, full of big features and senior theses. Now the magazine is a quarterly with a website, www.internationalistmag.com, updated weekly. Five of the six founders—plus 17 newcomers—worked on volume three, issue two of the print edition, which hit college campuses last week. It is 64 pages long and cushions serious content—a feature on microlending, an essay about Turkey/EU relations—with amusing news shorts. Did you know that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has his own talk show? Or that people only have a 50 percent chance of reaching orgasm with cold feet, compared with an 80 percent chance if their feet are warm?

Now distributing 25,000 copies on 150 college campuses around the country, the Internationalist is maturing into subtlety, humor, and color—which isn't to say the volunteer staff doesn't take itself, and its mission, seriously.

"I get home from work at 3:00 a.m. and start writing e-mails to contributors," said senior editor Haley Edwards (who pays rent as a cocktail waitress). "Then it's 4:30 a.m. and I have to get up early the next morning and I wonder why I care so much. I don't know why, but I do—I really, really care."

Her fellow editors say they work "at least 40 hours a week" on the magazine, while holding down day jobs—assistant detective, bartender, movie theater employee, personal assistant, tutor. They sleep in their Pioneer Square office during crunch time.

The magazine pays its costs—but not its staff—with ads for colleges, study-abroad programs, and publishers. A few staff members with zero advertising experience put together a great ad package, including note cards with weird facts about global issues and an offer of a cheeky Internationalist "prebate" paid in Myanmar kyat. Then they started cold calling. The current issue includes ads from the Peace Corps and Red Cross.

After the meeting is adjourned, I ask lingering editorial staffers about the future. They've come a long way in two years—what are their most extravagant fantasies?

"To get paid," someone says and the room erupts in laughter. Then they start riffing: building a massive network of study-abroad students who can report on breaking international news, beginning a fellowship program, podcasting, bridging rarefied academic journals and the general reading public.

They've already received some hate mail. "Oh yeah," one staffer says, citing their piece "How to Murder Your Neighbors: A Guide to Genocide." A thousand pages of earnest social justice verbiage doesn't put an arrow through the heart as effectively as the deadpan, step-by-step advice to "act quickly" and "deny, deny, deny." If I overemphasize their humor, it's only because that's what I love about this fledgling, but sophisticated, effort. Its writers are smart and serious, but their playfulness sets them apart from vacant "college lifestyle" magazines and drearily tendentious student publications.

The magazine's self-description, stated in its masthead, begins: "We promote programs that encourage discussion and debate about global issues and ideas." It ends: "And yes, we also want to entertain you."

The Internationalist hosts its winter issue release party at ToST on Fri Dec 9 at 8 pm. The magazine is a nonprofit, so you can write the $7 cover off your taxes.