November magazine began as a one-time project of ten longform interviews to be published online from July to November 2020. Its editorial staff is comprised of artists, editors, and writers with varied backgrounds bringing decades of diverse experience with an equal commitment to process-driven thinking. At the time, the editors observed a crucial lack of critical, generative, and in-depth conversations on aesthetics, race, and economy, among other themes. The result was Volume 0, which featured a range of cultural luminaries, from Adrian Piper to Frank Wilderson III to Hal Foster.

Because we viewed this beta version of the site as a prelude to our current website, we decided to title the Volume as “0.” And because these interviews were widely circulated and praised (dubbed “cerebral” by The New York Times), we decided to continue our work—to extend it beyond the initial ten pieces. November continued into 2021 as the magazine’s readership expanded significantly. It became a nonprofit, growing to produce new volumes incorporating essays and roundtables on themes of architecture, technology, gender, disease, and race.

Our mission is to enrich public discourse. We cultivate a rigorous and intimate study of how culture influences our larger social, political, and economic experiences. The rigor of November’s editorial approach to digital publications and public programs is complemented by our values of intimacy, process, permanence, and peer-to-peer relationships. Through these organic movements between contributors and editors, ideas are continually set in motion, picked up, and added to. In this sense, November is both a map and an archive of our cultural present and possible futures.

—November Eds.