Welcome to the new New Inquiry.
Thanks to our readers, supporters, fans, and trolls. Without you we wouldn't have had the confidence to scale up our operation. We hope you will enjoy what we’ve done. A lot of work went into it and we're proud of the result.
All our content will remain free on the site. And there will be a bunch more of it. But TNI's contributors, editors, and staff have all developed an unfortunately expensive addiction to eating every day. Some of us have relatively severe coffee and/or cigarettes and/or alcohol habits. We like making TNI—but stores are insisting we pay for their food with money.
In our continued efforts to actually pay our staff and contributors, we present to you The New Inquiry Magazine: A monthly collection of new and past content organized around a common theme. We hope you will support our project by subscribing for $2/issue to receive each New Inquiry Magazine as a beautifully designed, e-reader-compatible PDF on the first Monday of every month.
To put this amount in context:
A beer and a shot of whiskey during special hours at the right bar goes for $5. We tip because we're not assholes, so that's $6. A subscription pays for 4 beers and 4 whiskeys a year, or enough to get 1.5 TNI staffers tipsy.
In the New York area, electricity goes for around 20 cents a killowatt-hour. Running a lightbulb for an hour takes .06 kWh or 1.2 cents. Each monthly subscription pays to light a TNI contributor's lonely paper-strewn room for 166 hours and 40 minutes – nearly a whole week!
There are 3 cups of flour in a loaf of bread and 450 calories in a cup of flour, which makes 1350 calories to a loaf. There are 20 cups of flour per 5 pound bag, which retail at 2 for $5. That's 8 cents a cup, and 24 cents a loaf. That's 11,250 calories per month per subscription (not counting water, yeast, salt, or cooking gas.) The brain alone consumes a calorie every 3.5 minutes, so the monthly revenue from a subscription provides enough flour to keep a staffer's brain physically capable of thinking for just over 27 days.
You see where we're going with this.
The easiest way to support The New Inquiry is to subscribe to the magazine. If you want to double your donation, subscribe a friend to the magazine. If you want to give us even more money, visit our support page. We'll try and figure out some other compelling reasons to pay us later. There will not, however, be tote bags.
In brief: Your readership makes The New Inquiry worth doing, your subscription makes it possible.
Yours,
Editors
The New Inquiry