n+1 was founded in 2004 as a little magazine with big ambitions that would treat literature, culture, and politics as inextricable concerns. Within a decade, it went from a pipe dream in a Brooklyn apartment to “the bellwether of a new generation of literary intellectuals” (Harper’s Magazine)—an essential publication known for discovering talent and marking the cutting edge of political and cultural discourse.

Twenty years in, the magazine’s impact on American intellectual life remains undiminished. The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade collects twenty-four era-defining essays, short stories, and reviews published by n+1 between 2014 and 2024. Featuring a murderer’s row of 21st-century writers and thinkers—including Andrea Long Chu, Anna Wiener, Tobi Haslett, Tony Tulathimutte, A. S. Hamrah, Sarah Resnick, Ari M. Brostoff, Elizabeth Schambelan, Jesse McCarthy, Gabriel Winant, Dawn Lundy Martin, and writer-editors Dayna Tortorici, Nikil Saval, Mark Krotov, and Lisa Borst—The Intellectual Situation is a gateway drug to the vast, heady, and impossibly variegated world of n+1. Whether examining the Bernie Sanders campaign or start-up culture, trap music or contemporary sexual politics, the George Floyd protests or the Covid-19 pandemic, the entries in this definitive anthology capture how the US’s premier intellectual magazine met an extraordinary moment in history.