134 Tenth Avenue, Now Voyager

“I hope never to have a Slack,” Hélène Garneau Werner, the managing editor and cofounder of the brand-new magazine Now Voyager, tells me. Her colleague Emily Yang, head of operations, agrees: “We don’t need a Slack, because everyone is here.”

Here—that is, their office—is not easy to find: One must thread through a narrow hallway at the back of a Chelsea gallery, Les Ateliers Courbet, that ends in a theatrical archway opening onto a large, high-ceilinged room lit by a clerestory. One visiting writer, the investigative journalist Christo Grozev, likened the experience of finding the office to a scene from the spy show The Americans. When I came to visit, I was stumped. Seeing the apparently empty design gallery, I gave up and retreated to Urbana Cafe on the corner. There I ran into Nicolas Niarchos, Now Voyager’s other cofounder, as he was buying coffee for himself and an intern. He bought a coffee for me, too.

Unlike me, the staff finds their way to the office most days of the week. They appear grateful to be there. A cluster of Gen Z interns volunteered that they detest remote work. “It’s so lonely and depressing,” said Lola Horowitz. “I love commutes—I read the whole time,” added Raphaela Gold. “I kind of dread online work; it’s terrible,” said Lindon Clarke. “I am traumatized after two years of school online.”

Launched this spring, Now Voyager is a child of The New Yorker. Niarchos and Werner met as fact-checkers there. When The New York Times wrote up Now Voyager’s inaugural launch party, the reporter underlined that it was full of New Yorker people, making sure their photographer singled out a half dozen of them for nice portraits. Like any progeny, Now Voyager has embraced some traits of its parents and rejected others. Rigorously edited longform narrative journalism the team is all in on. Corporate trappings, less so. The New Yorker has an extremely organized and active Slack. Its editors put together its issues in the Condé Nast offices in the upper reaches of the 104-story Freedom Tower, whose commanding views of Manhattan place the staff far above the city on their nameplate. It “feels antiseptic,” said Werner. “There is some tension between the space and the people working there.”

Now Voyager is on a ground floor, with no view or even—apart from the clerestory—windows. The furniture is a medley of antiques and hand-me-downs, such as the Albers-style rug made in Afghanistan under the sofa. Niarchos’s north star is Literary Review’s Soho office in London, where he interned in college and the books are piled so high, he says, “you feel like the floor is going to collapse—it’s not even Dickens, it is beyond Dickensian.” Now Voyager’s floor appears quite stable, but given that the staff has only been there five months, there are a surprising number of objects: a postcard rack, bottles of wine and champagne in the corner (left over from a party attended by the likes of Arianna Huffington), a big wicker desk, plenty of Now Voyager duffel bags (ethically sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and a lot of paintings.

Most of the paintings are by the magazine’s art editor, the Italian artist Malù Dalla Piccola-Niarchos—also Nicolas’s wife. Malù found Now Voyager’s space—she knew the gallerist and initially wanted it for her own studio but determined that it was too large. So her studio is now in a smaller room just on the other side of the arch that doubles as a private office and breakout room. This is the first time Malù has worked in publishing, and she tells me she loves it. In her role as art editor, she tries to complement the text by commissioning an artist from the country where each article is set. For a piece about Pietrangelo Buttafuoco—the right-wing polemicist and president of the Venice Biennale—she found a Venetian painter, Vittorio Marella, who met Buttafuoco in person to make live sketches before returning to his studio to make a series of original paintings that ran in the magazine. Malù paints portraits of all the contributors herself, running them as a set near the beginning of each issue. The original portraits now sit on floating shelves in the office—there is an aspiration that they will eventually form a giant grid covering an entire wall, an idea that Nicolas says would be “a little impractical and quite expensive.”

Now Voyager is not The New Yorker’s first child—another notable offspring, Wigwag, was set up in 1988 by a splinter group of staffers objecting to the Condé Nast acquisition and the sacking of longtime editor William Shawn. One of them was the copy editor Mary Norris. She eventually returned to The New Yorker, where she befriended Niarchos and gave him a few of her prized Blackwing Pearl pencils, which sit sharpened in a mug next to his computer. Wigwag positioned itself as having a regional, folksy focus. Now Voyager is going the opposite direction, targeting cosmopolites. The magazine has correspondents on every continent except Antarctica and has hosted reader parties in Paris and London, with plans for further gatherings in Nairobi, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. Niarchos says it is for “people who travel, who want to know about the world.” As a globetrotter who speaks six languages; has reported pieces for The New Yorker from Ukraine, Western Sahara, Sudan, and Yemen; and was once detained while on assignment in the Congo, Niarchos may be describing himself. Werner—who lifted the magazine’s name from the second and final line of Walt Whitman’s “The Untold Want”— adds that she and Niarchos want to break free from an American geopolitical framing so that they can take stories on their own terms.

Now Voyager is a bimonthly and its print circulation is currently about two thousand. A subscription costs $160 a year and much of that probably goes into making the object itself: The magazines are perfectly bound, and each has the heft of a book. Issues are printed by Park Communications in London and take about a month to come back to New York. The office doubles as Now Voyager’s American distribution hub. Every other month a pallet shows up on Tenth Avenue and the whole staff, including Niarchos and Werner, lug boxes in and then package and address each copy before flagging down their local USPS driver to pick them up.

Now Voyager could probably afford to pay someone else to address the issues. It has a room full of full-time employees and pays its writers rates ranging from $1 to $1.50 a word for reported work. The magazine is a nonprofit with important early supporters including the McCormick Foundation. Niarchos, the grandson of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, also concedes he is providing start-up support with some family money—albeit, he underlines, not from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which has made grants of billions of dollars to support public projects such as a New York Public Library branch just off Bryant Park and a cultural center in Athens, both named after the foundation.

When I came through, Niarchos sent me a link to a twenty-eight-page essay by Régis Debray from the New Left Review titled “Socialism: A Life-Cycle.” In it, Debray argues that print publications played a crucial role in the growth of socialism: Producing and distributing a physical object creates a natural alliance between intellectuals and labor. Debray points out that socialists Jean Jaurès, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Lenin were not just writers and editors but also ran publications for which they did their own typesetting and distribution.

So does mailing their own issues re-create Debray’s ancient compact between typesetter and editor? “Absolutely,” Niarchos tells me. “It’s good for the soul.” Is Niarchos creating an incubator for socialism? “I don’t think it’s an incubator for socialism.”

Now Voyager is also a child of the Yale Daily News. I first met Niarchos when I drove InDesign as a production editor for the paper. Niarchos edited a weekly cultural insert called scene, and—though they later renamed the section WEEKEND—the people who made it were exactly that. Their office featured a typewriter, bottles, and a funky ’70s couch. (When they eventually redesigned the space and got a new couch, Niarchos chose the shade of red.) Their party schedule often made the more serious News writers, bound for prestigious careers at prestigious newspapers, fear that we might miss a close.

Werner also went to Yale but stayed clear of scene and the News. She later studied cello at Juilliard before joining The New Yorker. She tells me that so far Now Voyager has hit all its production deadlines, but it is clear that some of the scene spirit carries over. To advertise a recent launch party, Malù, who is also a performance artist, helped make an Instagram reel wherein she painted a mask with the magazine’s logo, “n v.” Humor editor Colin Stokes (also a New Yorker alum) wore it as he took confession from a gnome. At the party, interns sat in a booth, diligently taking turns donning the mask and collecting confessions. Werner is not quite sure what to do with them.

If I had to make a confession, it’s that I’m concerned about Now Voyager’s long-term viability. Wigwag managed to achieve a circulation of two hundred thousand, yet it only survived for three years, going belly up in 1991. It is hard to imagine Now Voyager summoning a readership sufficiently large to keep this improbable marriage of fine art and international investigative journalism afloat. That said, if there is already one thing the magazine has in spades, it is clearly imagination.

Now Voyager already has its own children, in the literal sense. Malù and Nicolas just had twins. Malù, however, assures me she will not be gone long: “Since the magazine is also a baby, it’s not as if I want to take some time off.”