Interview with Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka, Editors of The Drift Magazine

Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka graduated from Harvard College and are both alumni of the Harvard Advocate; Barrow—former President, and Panovka—Fiction Board member. Following their graduation in 2016, the two were inspired to start The Drift after noticing the shortcomings of leftist discourse following the 2016 election.

As its name implies, The Drift responds to the times and reacts to them. Since its launch in 2020, the magazine has garnered significant national recognition and a dedicated readership. The magazine has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Nylon, and Harvard Magazine. But even as they grow out of their darling status, The Drift remains committed to being an intellectual arm for critically engaged inquiry around culture, literature, and politics.

In their development of The Drift, Barrow and Panovka prioritized building a magazine based, first and foremost, on ideas. Their online submissions page makes clear what it wants — “socially engaged cultural criticism; class-sensitive analysis” –what they don’t want — “anachronistic historical critiques; thoughts on Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault; personal essays” — and what they’re bored by — “your love life; Twitter; therapy; cancel culture; chalking it up to neoliberalism; chalking it up to late-stage capitalism.”

We were first introduced to Barrow and Panovka in January 2025 at their Issue 14 launch party at Skinos, located in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City.

We sat with the two for a virtual interview on March 6, 2025. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Roxy Hreb: You once stated that you wanted to be this “intellectual arm” of the leftist resurgence. What exactly does that mean to you?

Kiara Barrow: Around the time we were incubating the idea for The Drift and the first issue, we had the sense that people were not thinking things through really rigorously. This was during the first Trump administration, when there was a lot of shock, and a lot of very righteous anger and disgust about what was happening. As a result, there were a lot of quick, knee-jerk reactions: “This is bad. This is bad. This is bad. Here's what we have to do to respond.”  We felt that it was important to pause and say, Okay, what is the context for this? What is the historical precedent? Who are the thinkers we should be engaging with? What are the more deeply informed conversations we should be having before we respond in the moment? We wanted to provide that slow, steady thinking. Everything The Drift publishes goes through a very long editorial process. We have a pretty big team of editors who have all read, thought with, challenged, and pushed back on a writer’s argument. By the time we publish a piece, the point of view that's represented has been tested. We're proud of that.

Rebecca Panovka: In the first Trump administration, we saw that mores, and the language that was acceptable to use at least on the left, were changing overnight, and we worried that there’d be a backlash. In that moment, we thought that the best way to strengthen the left, and to protect it from that backlash, was to create a forum where we could think through those changing mores, and all the new language—and try to figure out what was rigorously thought through and what wasn’t.

KB: We wanted to be a publication that is tough on the left in service of making the left better. There was and is so much discourse happening on Twitter, so much discourse happening on podcasts. Meanwhile, there are fewer and fewer magazines all the time—fewer and fewer outlets for serious criticism, long-form essays, and fact-checked journalism, especially for younger and emerging writers. Part of the idea of doing a slightly old-fashioned intellectual magazine is to bring some of that back into a world that is increasingly leaving it behind.

HENGZHI YANG: I’ve noticed your pages are full of different formal inventions. How does the form, as criticism always tells us, act as content in your pages? Why the insistence on publishing mainly longer forms of essays? And how do you think the other forms of prose in The Drift—for example the  “Dispatches” and “Mentions” sections—change the way your writers and readers engage with the content? What was the thinking behind creating these different sections?

KB: It was very important to us that the magazine be, at its core, long-form essays and criticism. We felt we were surrounded by smart young people who were great writers but were only being offered to do short pieces for the online portion of other magazines, or short reviews. There aren’t many places where you can pitch a major argumentative essay on an important topic. The bigger magazines typically cannot afford to take a chance on younger writers in that way, so we really wanted that to be core to what The Drift was doing and providing. That was the section that we worked on and built up first, and it took us some time to remember that a magazine needs a table of contents with different sections and different types of features.

As for Mentions, we felt that there are a lot of publications that do a great job with relatively straightforward, long-form reviews. We were taken with the idea of something short and digestible and fun and a little bit lighthearted and quippy that was not trying to be a comprehensive review of something.

RP: And the idea for Mentions came out of this project Kiara had done independently, and not really for The Drift at all.

KB: Yeah, I was injured in the spring that we were first starting to talk about The Drift. I was on crutches and mostly at home, and decided to start a little Instagram account where I was reviewing the things that I was consuming in my boredom. I was calling it the Broken Leg Review of Books—the BLRB. I was just being silly to entertain myself, and Rebecca was also entertained.

RP: That's still the idea for the Mentions section. We don’t want them to be standard reviews. We want this very specific, sharp, not super serious tone.

KB: And maybe it's one concession to the internet — to do something that's easy to screenshot and post and circulate.

RH: One of the most striking parts about The Drift to me is your delineation of taste in “What We Want,” “What We Don't Want,” and “What We're Bored By,” specifically what we're bored by. I think that's such an interesting contrast to what we don't want. First off—I want to know your thoughts on Heidegger, Nietzsche and Foucault! I'm kidding. What is this distinction between boredom and what we don't want? What does it mean to not be boring?

RP: I'm not personally bored by Heidegger, Nietzsche, or Foucault. I studied social thought and intellectual history in college, and wrote my master’s dissertation on Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. But when we started out, we felt like there were a lot of places where essays on how great thinkers spoke to the present moment were being published, and we wanted to do something different at The Drift.

That list of “what we’re bored by” and “what we want” evolved from the call for pitches we wrote about a year before The Drift launched. At the time, we didn't have a ton of connections in the media, so we sent an email to all the people we knew who were at all interested in literary things. Once we’d published our first issue, we felt it would still be important to us to allow anybody to pitch us, so we posted those lists on our About page. It's meant to be fairly tongue-in-cheek.

KB: It became a bit of a shorthand for understanding our tone, but people have definitely interpreted it in all different ways.

RP: A lot of the “What We Don't Want” list is geared towards subjects we thought academics and intellectuals would want to pitch us on. We wanted to be a place where academics and intellectuals could write about other topics. “We're Bored By” is mostly jokes, but things that we thought were already a little bit too much in the discourse. We especially didn't want people's personal essays.

RH: Why no personal essays? How has your relationship with the “I” changed in writing and editing?

RP: Our basic rule has always been: we're happy for the “I” to come in, but it shouldn't be the connective tissue between the disparate elements of a piece. If the only thing holding together Nietzsche and X news event is the fact that the writer has read about both, that's not a strong enough connection. That can be done really beautifully, but often it can be a bit lazy. Instead of leading the reader through an argument, the writer is telling them a set of things they happened to think about.

KB: It's always been very important to us that The Drift is, first and foremost, a magazine of ideas. That's not at all to say that ideas can't be conveyed through a personal lens or through the use of personal experience or personal narrative, but I think that it really helps hone an argument when the whole piece is resting on it; when there isn't a personal shortcut or device to fall back on.  That tendency is maybe a little bit more dominant among writers who are just starting out and figuring out their way in. We want to help push those writers to do slightly more challenging things.

RH: You’ve talked about the injection of theory into reactions to modern day events. Going back to the mission of the magazine being in an intellectual space for the left, how do you see this use of theory coming into leftist culture? Do you think it's over-intellectualized?

KB: It certainly can be. I think that's where the “We Don't Want” and “We’re Bored By” lists come in. They’re in part a reaction to the over-intellectualizing — in an academically-coded way — that relies on the use of a lot of jargon or words that you would find in graduate seminars. Part of the line that we try to walk is maintaining a serious level of intellectual inquiry, but also writing in a way that feels accessible. Anyone who picks up the magazine and who is willing to spend a little bit of time and energy engaging with it will hopefully be able to get something out of it and not feel, Oh, well, I'm not familiar with this or that word or text, and so I have no idea what's being said here. Anyone who's written for us can tell you we will be crossing out words like “neoliberalism” and writing, “Say what you really mean here.” We try to make sure there isn't a secret syllabus for Drift pieces that you have to be familiar with before you can engage with our work.

HY: The Drift is so great at building a scene in New York. How do you see that locality play into the magazine? Do you find building a scene important? Was that something you were trying to do with the launch parties?

KB: We launched during COVID, at a time when obviously no one was in person, and the community that started to grow up around The Drift was purely on the internet. Twitter was much more robust than it is now, and a lot of people found us that way and were in dialogue with The Drift that way. We had about a year and a half to two years of growing that online audience before anyone could gather. So by the time we were able to start having parties, everyone was really excited to be out, excited to have new events to go to and new publications.

It's not something that was exactly top of mind for us at the very beginning. The Drift has always been about the editorial work first. We absolutely love that people love to come out for our parties and hear readings and celebrate the magazine. It's great. But it's also very, very important to us that the magazine stays somewhat separate from that, and that the two don't have a lot of direct influence on each other — that every issue is filled with contributors who do not live in New York, and even some who have never been to New York.

RP: We want to make sure that nobody gets an advantage by coming to our parties. If you meet us at a party, it does not help you whatsoever. Show up if you want to meet other young literary people. I know a lot of people have made friends at Drift parties, but they’re not key to the production of the actual magazine issues. I remember the two of us got a drink with somebody who had offered to give us advice about starting a magazine, and one of the first things he said was, “So, what are you gonna do for the parties?” And we were like, “we have to throw parties? We thought we were starting a magazine.” Fast forward six years, and we're throwing parties all the time.

Rapid Fire

Inspired by The Drift’s submission guidelines, “We Want, We Don't Want, What We’re Bored By.”

RH: MFAs.

RP: Bored.

KB: Definitely bored.

RH: Modernism.

RP: Definitely, we like modernism.

RH: Autofiction.

RP: Essays about autofiction, at this point, I'm bored. Autofiction itself… depends.

RH: Manifestos.

RP: Don't want to publish, always enjoy reading.

RH: The Lower East Side.

KB: Bored.

RH: Bushwick.

RP: Bored.

KB: I don't know, maybe I'm back around. Was bored, ready to rediscover?

RH: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

KB: Nostalgic.

RP: Was bored, now nostalgic.

RH: Twitter.

KB: Oh man, bored.

RP: Depressed by how boring it's become.

RH: Gertrude Stein.

RP: Like.

KB: Neutral.

RH: Lionel Trilling.

RP: Oh, thumbs up.

KB: I love Lionel Trilling, love Diana.

RP: Sincerity and Authenticity made a big impression on me in college.

RH: Diagnosis?

RP: I don't want a diagnosis.

KB: I like a diagnosis because I like to know what's happening. I don't like the mystery of not having a diagnosis.