388 Atlantic Avenue, Jacobin

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. There are 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. First, he made another contrarian decision. He bet on print, taking the same set of pieces he had published online and packaging them into a physical issue, which appeared to acclaim in early 2011. Second, Forbes arrived and established a clear visual identity. He originally reached out to Sunkara during the 2011 Occupy protests to design a T-shirt and quickly took charge of the quarterly’s graphics. He put the revolutionary Haitian leader Toussaint L’Ouverture’s profile on the magazine’s winter 2012 cover, creating Jacobin’s answer to the New Yorker’s Eustace Tilly; he ran brash graphics like Ikea-style instructions for how to build a “Giljotin.” He gave the magazine, Sunkara tells me, “a look and feel that contrasted very significantly with other left-wing publications.”

And Forbes built almost all the furniture in the office, right there in the office. Associate publisher Chris Crawford remembers that when he first started working for Jacobin, “you would hear him sawing shit in the storage room—with one of those Japanese handsaws.” The furniture designs came from the 1974 book Autoprogettazione? by Enzo Mari. An Italian industrial designer, communist, and admirer of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, Mari wanted to empower people to look upon mass-produced furniture more critically and to build their own instead. The designs in the book are very crude, using only horizontal, vertical, and diagonal members, no joinery, and simple materials. Is Forbes a carpenter? “No— well, my dad is a carpenter, I guess, and my maternal grandfather was a coffin builder.” Where did he get the wood? “Home Depot.” In 2014 Jacobin had 7,000 subscribers and was financially ready to make its first full-time hires, Forbes among them, and pay rent on a small room at the very back of 388 Atlantic Avenue, a three-bay, three-story 1920 brick building measuring about twenty- five feet wide and a hundred feet deep. The landlord purposefully offered cheap rents to left-wing groups—even today Jacobin pays about $6 a square foot. Its neighbors included the Indypendent, Right to the City, and the Marxist Education Project. Forbes’s first pieces were three small desks, each 40”× 21”.

Two years later, Jacobin gained new prominence as an outspoken proponent of Bernie Sanders and critic of Hillary Clinton. In the two months after the election of Donald Trump, the magazine picked up 16,000 new subscribers, reaching a circulation of 32,000 by its first issue of 2017. Jacobin rented the adjacent space at 388 Atlantic Avenue, knocking down the wall to make one long room, and had nine people working in it together. Then it took over the last room on its side of the hallway and made it into a storage space. Forbes cannibalized the first desks to create shelves and made new, larger desks. Finally, in 2019 the magazine annexed the two rooms on the opposite side of the hallway. A profile in the Columbia Journalism Review, published that year, cited a print circulation of 40,000.

The day of my visit, Forbes and Crawford want to tell me about Jacobin’s first major election survey, of 1,000 Pennsylvania voters, which the magazine conducted in conjunction with the Center for Working-Class Politics and YouGov. The survey demonstrated that clear economic appeals to the working class would resonate better than Kamala Harris’s vibes-based platform. It also demonstrated that Jacobin—which primarily publishes commentary— was ready to do the hard (and expensive) work of discovering new facts. The survey formed the basis of an article by Milan Loewer published on Election Day with the subject line: “If Kamala Harris loses today, this is why.” The author wanted to go harder and predict outright that Harris would lose, but Sunkara insisted—to his regret—on the “If.” Nevertheless, six days and about a dozen more election pieces later, Jacobin announced it had broken its all-time web traffic record.

Even while the magazine positioned itself to play a major role in the postelection conversation, the office itself was quiet. Since the pandemic, almost all the editors work remotely. Many are based in other cities. In fact, when I visited I confirmed the address twice because Google listed it as permanently closed.

According to Sunkara, by design Jacobin never had much of an office culture: “We all worked on very distinct parts of the publication—we did not necessarily need to be in the office to collaborate or even look over proofs the way you would imagine magazine work.” Sunkara wants “individuals to operate as independently as possible. You don’t have to wait for a manager’s OK before you can commission a piece—you have to be able to just do it. That is more or less the philosophy. To create as little friction as possible in workflows.” So why do they even have an office? According to Sunkara: the Postal Service. “We have been at the same address for more than a decade— not to give our landlord too much leverage, but we have literally produced millions of things that have that address on them.” Jacobin cleared $4 million in revenue in 2022. Would it consider fortifying its address by simply buying the place outright? Definitely not, says Sunkara: “We are a socialist outlet, so our capital needs to be constantly working—having an asset that is that fixed would be a bad use of funds.”

So the place feels a little like a house museum. Most days, says Forbes, “I’m the only one who works here anymore. No one is ever in the original room.” Sunkara now works full-time as the president of the Nation magazine, but he retains his role at the top of Jacobin and keeps a desk in said room. Overlooking the desk are four Communists in light boxes left by the previous tenant, the Brecht Forum. “I definitely have no problem working under the watchful eye of Marx, Lenin, and even Trotsky and Ho Chi Minh,” he tells me. “No qualms.” All in all, the office is of a piece with the magazine itself: crisp, bold, socialist with a sense of humor. Did Sunkara play a role in its design? “This is the division of labor thing. I do not think I had a word of input. One hundred percent Remeike. I have just enjoyed it for the last decade.”