Flavorwire

Jesse Pearson, one-time editor in chief of provocative youth culture magazine Vice, has started a new project: Apology, a literary magazine featuring everything you’d expect (fiction, literary nonfiction, photography, cultural criticism), but with a progressive, zine-like vibe and the benefit of Pearson’s underground taste and connections — the first issue boasts contributors like Rivka Galchen, Le Tigre’s Johanna Fateman, and Ryan McGinley. It’s meant as both a move forward for Pearson and a hopeful tug at the skinny pant legs of his former acolytes.

Indeed, as Pearson tells The New York Times, the magazine’s name is partly “a reference to the classical idea of apologetics… It’s my apologia against what I see as the problematic state of magazines today, both big and small. Am I being coy by not naming names? Yes. And I apologize for that.” But it’s also an apology for Vice itself, in a way. “It’s me apologizing for having been a part of this culture that rose up around Williamsburg in the early 2000s,” he admits. “It’s me wanting to move away from that. To kind of make amends for what it was all about.”

“I guess what I’m talking about is moving out of the hipster ghetto,” Pearson said. “Can I make the semicolon interesting to people who used to be into the kind of stuff I did at Vice? Because I really want to be able to.” Oddly enough, we have faith.

Read the entire article at The New York Times.