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About our content

InTheFray is a nonprofit magazine that seeks to bring people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs together through the power of journalism and art. By publishing exceptional writing and multimedia, we hope to bring to light stories of cultural interchange, human rights, politics, and other pressing concerns of our time. Our writers and artists tell unique and often personal stories that can't be found elsewhere. We do not ask them to consider advertisers or other directives; they are asked only to tell the truth as they see it. This freedom allows our over 50,000 readers to learn more about their worlds — and each other — as they explore InTheFray's articles and images.

Like the people profiled in its pages, InTheFray Magazine has a personality and style all to its own. Some magazines toss their articles into a mishmash of generic categories — news, commentary, art/photography, cultural criticism, travel writing, book reviews, and so on. InTheFray publishes all these kinds of content, but we’ve taken the time to work out some organizing principles that reflect the magazine's mission and spirit.

Below are some brief explanations that should help you navigate the various channels and departments of InTheFray. For more information about the magazine, visit our About page. Of course, if you still have questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to email us.

Happy reading!

—The Editors


CHANNELS

IDENTIFY, the magazine's news channel, publishes first-hand reporting that plays to the strengths of our style, which is simultaneously grassroots and global in nature. You could call it "hometown feel with a bite": IDENTIFY stories are deeply rooted in local communities and experiences, but they draw from the particular to illuminate broader trends in our nation and in the world.

IMAGINE, our literary channel, focuses on the world of art and culture. Here you’ll find original short stories and poems, reviews of books, films, performances, and events, and arts-related features.

INTERACT, the magazine's commentary channel, wades right into the fierce public debates over issues ranging from democracy and war to belonging and alienation. In this channel you'll find exclusive interviews and essays featuring the voices of prominent and provocative thinkers. INTERACT also publishes a wide array of personal essays — demonstrating through the vivid experiences of people like and unlike ourselves that the personal is indeed political.

IMAGE, our visual channel, puts a human face on the predicaments faced by communities across the world: terrorism, dislocation, protest, isolation. Here we publish photo essays and multimedia works that encourage reflection, stir outrage, or inspire resistance. Through a mixing of the beautiful and the grotesque, the sacred and the profane, IMAGE celebrates human emotion and visual innovation.

We also have two editorial cartoonists whose work appears regularly in IMAGE. Tak Toyoshima is the creator of the Secret Asian Man comic strip, the country's first widely printed comic strip featuring an Asian American leading character. We also publish The Boiling Point, a political cartoon by Mikhaela B. Reid.

DEPARTMENTS

Over the years, InTheFray has added several departments to its roster: the ACTIVIST'S CORNER interview section, our BLOGS, the NEWSWIRE of recommended articles and links, the OFF THE SHELF book review section, and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: NOT SO FOREIGN TRAVELS, our interdisciplinary travelogue section.

ITF ACTIVIST'S CORNER is devoted to helping our readers learn more about how they can make a difference in our world, in ways both big and small. Each month the ITF ACTIVIST'S CORNER features an interview with a different activist, loosely defined. Our goal is to highlight a diverse array of activist strategies and voices, providing readers with the information they need to get connected. If there is an activist you’d like to see ITF interview, please submit that person's name and, if possible, his or her contact information by using our contact form.

OUR BLOGS are updated daily by a team of columnists who write about topics ranging from Iraqi reconstruction to rising home costs to trips to the movies. Our bloggers pose provocative questions about global issues and highlight stories that are often scantily covered in the mainstream media.

THE NEWSWIRE, featured on our site's front page, has a rundown of recommended articles from Digg.com, recommended sites from del.icio.us, and recommended videos from YouTube. Our editors suggest links that provide intelligent and humorous perspectives on the themes of the magazine.

LISTINGS are announcements about events, exhibitions, fellowships, and other news of note for our readers. 

OFF THE SHELF is the magazine's book club in cyberspace. Our reviewers discuss a mix of old and new books, both fiction and nonfiction.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL DIRECTORY is a list of organizations that share our values and that we want our readers to know about.

In THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: NOT SO FOREIGN TRAVELS, our writers, photographers, and artists examine issues of belonging and identity (personal and national) while traipsing through lands and cultures more or less distinct from their own. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS publishes perspectives from both travelers sojourning abroad and immigrants making new homes, with an eye toward subverting the standard travelogue formula — that is, approaching a country halfway across the globe as something more than a home to strange cuisine and peculiar customs, questioning notions of the "exotic" and "foreign," and reconsidering our own status as outsiders.

Finally, our long-running EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK offers an introduction to the month's content written by InTheFray's editors.