Introducing GEN

Hello out there! And welcome to GEN, a new publication we created to help you (and ourselves) better understand the powerful forces reshaping our world.

You say it like this: /jen/. As in GENesis. GENerate. GENuine. GENius. (Fine, that last one doesn’t really work, pronunciation-wise, but let’s not get hung up on that.) Also, and this part is just bonus, “gen” is an obscure British slang word for inside-ish information, e.g. “I’ve got the gen on that.”

So, what is GEN? It is a bold, lively, and modern publication built around the thematic pillars of politics, power, and culture, and it’s situated squarely at the heart of the national conversation. GEN is about the biggest stories of the day, not the fringes, and we are by no means trying to do everything here. We are sense-makers, not news breakers. We are focused on stories that illuminate the many ways in which our world is changing, especially stories that relate to the shifting gears of power. And while we are nonpartisan — you will find a wide range of perspectives in GEN — we are interested in progress and the things that impede it.

We are launching with a collection of stories that represent the full range of the world according to GEN. Lexi Pandell dives deep into the story of right-wing troll Jacob Wohl and the oil heiress he recruited to falsely accuse Robert Mueller of rape. Amanda Knox looks at the lessons the media hasn’t learned about covering cases like her wrongful murder conviction and four years in an Italian prison. Alex Pappademas dissects the recent eruption of Generation X nostalgia. Meghan Daum, one of many provocative, must-read columnists who will appear regularly in GEN, explores wokapitalism, her term for corporate America’s enlightened opportunistic interest in “inclusive” marketing. Michael Pollan checks in to clarify his position on decriminalizing magic mushrooms. And we’re very proud to publish a gorgeous, heart-splitting excerpt from Suketu Mehta’s This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto.

You may notice something about that group of writers: They swim in different streams and write with different voices. That’s deliberate. GEN will not have a house voice. We want it to read and feel like a loud, never-dull gathering of your most interesting and least predictable friends. A cacophony of dynamic voices, all competing for and earning that rarest and most precious thing on the internet in 2019: your attention.

When we asked Google if “gen” means anything, one of the “how it’s used in a sentence” examples was, “As everything is finalized, I can gen you up properly.” I love that. We’re looking forward to GENing you up properly, today and every day.

And if you like what you see, you can stay up to date on what we’re publishing by hitting the FOLLOW button on the top of the GEN homepage.

Thanks for being here,

Brendan Vaughan
Editor in Chief, GEN