About This Journal

There is a subject that every human being on earth has direct, daily, lifelong experience of, and that almost nobody has ever written a serious sentence about. We thought that was strange. We still think that is strange.

The usual treatment is one of two registers. The first is the snigger — quick, cheap, and over in a second. The second is a kind of elaborate silence, which is not really silence at all but an enormous and exhausting amount of social work, performed by everyone, all the time, and never acknowledged.

Neither is very interesting, and neither is remotely proportionate to how much of your life this occupies.

So this is a magazine. It has essays and reporting and a lexicon and a criticism section. It has an orchestral instrument with eight voices, none of them sampled. It has an assessment that will tell you which historical fart you are and issue you a placard about it.

Everything here is written straight. The joke is not that we are pretending to take it seriously. The joke is that once you actually do take it seriously, it turns out to be about architecture, and class, and honesty, and marriage, and who in a room is allowed to be embarrassed — and that is much funnier than a snigger, and it lasts longer.

A note on accuracy

The essays that make factual claims mean them. The ones that quote people generally do not — our correspondents, our critics and our oral-history subjects are inventions, and where a piece is fiction we would rather you worked that out in the first paragraph than the last.

The chemistry is real. The dog was real. Everything at Versailles is a guess.