Publishers Noted: In which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher.
“The thing you are writing on—I built by hand,” Remeike Forbes, creative director of Jacobin, tells me on an October afternoon. We are in the oldest part of Jacobin’s office, and I am taking notes on a standing desk that he built. There are busts of Trotsky, Lenin, and Lincoln and three framed photographs of the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti playing chess on the wall. A red ceiling soffit proclaims, “SOCIALISM IN OUR TIME.”
This year marks Jacobin’s tenth anniversary at 388 Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill, the only office the magazine has ever had. Well, the only proper office. Jacobin started in 2010, and for its first four years it was run out of the apartment of its founder—then just twenty- one—Bhaskar Sunkara. Sunkara built the magazine to serve a contrarian premise: At a time when socialism was widely considered a pejorative, Jacobin would be an outspoken champion on its behalf. After a rocky online-only launch, Sunkara got two big breaks. Firs…