Introducing Café Américain - A Magazine Against the New Normal
Welcome to the fight for civilization
As many of you know, I have spent the last 8 months or so doing the work.
After working as a freelance journalist for a whole range of predominantly German language magazines and journals – from Die Weltwoche to more sophisticated ones like Schweizer Monat –, struggling financially, and not finding any real job in this business, during a surreal vacation at the Dalmatian coast last summer, I decided I wanted my own mag.
I was tired of pitching. And I was tired of being told that my article had been accepted for publication in bigger outlets like Tablet mag, only to find myself being pushed to the sidelines in the magazine’s Substack newsletter due to “internal communication problems”.
The Shellenberger Free Speech Alliance that brought me in touch with a lot of great and then, not so great people (and I don’t mean Mike Shellenberger who in hindsight seemed one of the few intellectually sincere people in the group), and which strangely disintegrated before my eyes, has ironically been a great leverage for the idea. I teamed up with Craig Snider of the Snider foundation who I met through Mike. He seemed up for it, and I needed some money. We got along well – he is a Conservative Jew, perhaps the only group of people right now to be fully trusted politically – but then it turned out after a few meetings he didn’t think publishing was his biggest interest. We stayed in touch though. The Switzerland-US divide didn’t make it easier to get financed and there were clear judicial obstacles for funding.
But the idea was clear: to launch a magazine against the New Normal. Against the normalization of the persecution of dissent, the normalization of the attack on civil liberties like free speech, against the unhealthy hegemony of the woke and biopolitical security left. I have asked some of my friends from London if they were up for starting a mag with me: without significant funding, without a great technical backup team, without offices, never mind coffee-making interns. And my friends – Daniel Hadas who is a US-born lecturer of Old Greek and Latin at King’s College, and my even older friend George Hoare who I met through being on the Bungacast pod a couple of times – were up for it. So we started, with only a certain (to be sure, pretty high) level of commitment to keep us going.
Through my German dissident connections, and my brief excursion to the editorial team of new German political magazine Casablanca I had simultaneously been in touch with some German intellectual luminaries. Hence the name for my own mag: initially, I planned a loose cooperation between the German Casablanca mag and the English-speaking Café Américain – remember that “everybody comes to Rick’s”. But then I also left Casablanca as an editor – I soon realized that building a mag is not really a part-time job easy to juggle with other editor part-time jobs on the side. But I didn’t leave Casablanca without teaming up with their editor-in-chief Lukas Sarvari who turned out to be an amazing web designer. I had already been much impressed with his simple, but extremely clever design for the German mag and especially his careful deliberations of the harmony between form, intent, and content.
And after 8 months of really hard work, strong coffees, endless Zoom struggle sessions and backs-and-forths on design and article content, political affiliations, and digging for authors who have something interesting to say (not as easy as it sounds!), we’re here.
Welcome to cafeamericainmag.com!
The first issue has been launched on April 5, 2024.
Featuring pieces by Toby Green on scientific modelling as a social problem, Spanish musicologist Eva Moreda Rodríguez, game theorist and free speech-advocate Chris Bateman, international relations specialist Tara McCormack, David Moulton who writes about the AIDS-Covid-connection, the debut from our music contributor David Polansky (on the legacy of his favorite band Grateful Dead, and one of my fave bands, too!), pieces by the editors, and many others.
And the best: the first issue is completely un-paywalled. So have a look and subscribe to our Newsletter. Or make a real ass subscription. Or donate. We are thankful and happy to have us join the team in any way you can. For this fight, as I see it, is a fight for civilization itself.
Wow, congrats! I’m heading over there to have a read. I enjoyed reading about the journey that led to this monumental project. I very much enjoy your writing.
Congratulation, simply it is great and yes, it is the fight for civilization!