In January 2006, The New Leader stopped print publication, an early omen to The Christian Science Monitor. But this eighty-five-year old magazine continues to publish bimonthly in the form of PDF on their website. In its heyday, The New Leader was the first to publish Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” alongside other great cultural and literary figures as diverse as George Orwell, James Baldwin, Bertrand Russel, and Arthur M. Schlesigner, Jr. A brief history available on their website tells us that they “proceeded on the assumption that a sophisticated audience wants to be exposed to the opinions, analyses, and reportage of respected writers, regardless (or perhaps because) of their not always being in lockstep agreement.”
The (Old) New Leader
M. Rebekah Otto
M. Rebekah Otto lives in Berkeley, CA. She grew up in Chicago. Her current interests include her new nine-to-five, vintage wallpaper, and Evan S. Connell. Also, she's the former Books Editor of the Rumpus.