A Chronicle’s Recipe

There are (let us try to imagine a plausible number) nine hundred highbrow magazines in America today, ranging in size and influence from The New York Review of Books to The Puget Sound Journal of Structural Criticism (surely there is such a thing; if not, it will come). How, in this welter, is it possible to create a review of thought and art that is distinctive? Chronicles of Culture, a forty-page, bimonthly review, now three years old, thinks it has the recipe.

Get away from Manhattan. It is the perception of everyone that most nationally marketed opinions are generated by an intellectual establishment located in New York City and its allied territories and fiefs. It is the perception of Chronicles of Culture that most of the opinions thus generated are destructive and wrong-headed. Accordingly, Chronicles has exiled itself, physically as well as mentally. The magazine is put together in Rockford, Illinois under the aegis of the Rockford College Institute, Rockford College being a small, stubbornly independent Christian institution. Contributors take their geographic freedom seriously. Chronicles rebukes the Chicago Tribune as often as the New York Times, and reviews Chicago theater.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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There are (let us try to imagine a plausible number) nine hundred highbrow magazines in America today, ranging in size and influence from The New York Review of Books to The Puget Sound Journal of Structural Criticism (surely there is such a thing; if not, it will come). How, in this welter, is it possible to create a review of thought and art that is distinctive? Chronicles of Culture, a forty-page, bimonthly review, now three years old, thinks it has the recipe.

Get away from Manhattan. It is the perception of everyone that most nationally marketed opinions are generated by an intellectual establishment located in New York City and its allied territories and fiefs. It is the perception of Chronicles of Culture that most of the opinions thus generated are destructive and wrong-headed. Accordingly, Chronicles has exiled itself, physically as well as mentally. The magazine is put together in Rockford, Illinois under the aegis of the Rockford College Institute, Rockford College being a small, stubbornly independent Christian institution. Contributors take their geographic freedom seriously. Chronicles rebukes the Chicago Tribune as often as the New York Times, and reviews Chicago theater.