ROL's New Era!

Announcing Our Expanded Editorial Team

Dear Republic,

We’re excited to announce a new era in The Republic of Letters! It’s been very fun, but also kind of lonely, to edit The Republic of Letters in the solitary way it’s been edited so far, and now we have an Entire Editorial Team.

Please give a warm ROL welcome to the following new editors:

AARON LAKE SMITH — Executive Editor. Aaron grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. He worked at GQ and senior edited the VICE print magazine for some years and these days lives in Stockholm, Sweden. His interests are the South, the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the outsider literature of the periphery. He dislikes John Cheever intensely. He has written for Harper’s, Jacobin, Vice (print), American Affairs, Al-Jazeera, as well as for many other little journals that no longer exist. He wrote about Maxim Gorky for The Republic of Letters and writes the Substack Empty Railroad Gulch

GRETA DIECK — Associate Editor. Greta studied Global Studies at UC Berkeley and now lives and writes in Washington, D.C. She is a reformed hagiographer of David Foster Wallace but still loves Infinite Jest (though she prefers social to hysterical realism). She’s currently reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and is avoiding looking at the copy of Ulysses sitting on her desk. She recently wrote about Nabokov and autofiction for The Republic of Letters and writes the Substack Woodchips.

TIBER WORTH — Associate Editor. Tiber holds degrees in Humanities (Yale) and Continental Philosophy (Warwick). He is interested in religion and religions, racket sports, and Wallace Stevens. His favorite Carl Theodor Dreyer film is Ordet, he is currently reading Elaine Scarry’s Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and he lives in Brooklyn.

They join the Founders of The Republic of Letters:

SAM KAHN — Editor in Chief. Sam writes the Substack Castalia and edits for Persuasion. He has worked as a producer for Netflix, Showtime, A&E, Paramount+, etc, written for publications including Compact, Quillette, UnHerd, Dissent, The New Atlantis, ARC, and written ten novels and fifty plays. He lives in Kyrgyzstan for some reason.

DAVID ROBERTS — Senior Advisor. David writes the Substack Sparks from Culture by David Roberts. He is a zealous fan of his family, his Shih Tzu, all things Substack, NYC (lifelong resident). He had a forty year career in finance, is now a writer.

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The core qualities of The Republic of Letters are unchanged. We are committed to being a new type of magazine — genuinely democratic, always playful, always treating art and ideas as matters of life and death, always giving voice to writers who may not have access to more traditional publications, and always allowing writers to write in their own way.

To that, we’re adding new components. We’re giving breadth to an honestly very talented editorial team and working in a more team-like way across the ever-expanding publication. We’re becoming more professional, with a tighter editorial schedule, more debates, more interviews, more room for more classic, magazine-style commissioned pieces, and with more features to come. Our response rate to e-mails will soon approach 100%. The likelihood of whole sections disappearing simply because the editor forgot about them will shrink; and the ever-present risk of sending out mass e-mails to “The Repubic of Letters” will diminish also.

We’d really like to thank you for being part of the publication’s journey up to this point — to the 100+ contributors, to the 6,000+ subscribers, to the 50+ paid subscribers, to the commenters, to the lurkers, to Beau P. Steelying, who e-mails us every time he’s about to go on a bender, and to those of you whose fingers are just itching, itching, as you read this to switch your subscription to paid and who have given in to that overwhelming temptation by the end of this sentence, thank you to all and look forward to the New Era!

-ROL