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The Brooklyn Rail has long been a critical forum for arts reviews, interviews, and essays. The monthly journal covers experimental culture across architecture, art, art books, books, dance, fiction, film, music, theater, poetry, and more. Since October 2000, the Rail has published 248 issues, with over ten thousand different contributors. The journal is read by people on every continent and distributed to over two hundred locations across 39 US states. Across platforms, the Brooklyn Rail reaches over three million people each year.

In 2020, we expanded into digital programming and introduced the New Social Environment (NSE) lunchtime conversation series over Zoom, featuring conversations with artists, poets, musicians, activists, and more, including Doris Salcedo, Henry Threadgill, Joe Bradley, Martin Puryear, Cecily Brown, Etel Adnan, Julie Mehretu, Peter Brook, Yvonne Rainer, Nikki Giovanni, and David Byrne. There have been over 1,100 episodes of the NSE, with over one million viewers tuning in to watch it live and in our archive.

Our ongoing curatorial project “Singing in Unison” will open its tenth iteration on October 17. Since the exhibition series started in 2022, over two hundred artists have been featured. More than two dozen live performances across music, dance, theater, and poetry have been presented in conjunction with the exhibitions, including Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu’s cooking performances, with their graduate students from Columbia University, which have become a staple of the curatorial practice.

To celebrate our anniversary, we’ll be launching our brand new and dynamic website later this month which will revolutionize the way the Brooklyn Rail’s content is experienced, including improved mobile readability, greater access to our massive archive, and relational reading features that will provide information on key figures and moments in our world of the arts and humanities.

For 24 years, our beloved journal has remained free—it is only through the support of our community that it’s possible. Your donation goes directly to provide fair wages to our staff, and compensation to our writers, and programming, including free distribution of the print journal, daily live programming, and curatorial projects.