“Take a Closer Look at Your Concepts,” says the Drift. Reached by cellphone, Mr. Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, confirmed that Driftmania had certainly reached him.

“I might be an idiot to not learn one thing like The Drift,” he stated. “Within the historical past and tradition of this nation, small magazines can go on to have a giant effect, so that’s a part of my motivation as a reader. However, I’ve got a predatory motivation, too, which is that I’m at all times looking for writers for The New Yorker.”

“You already know what they used to say concerning the Partisan Assessment,” he continued. For an extended while in postwar center century America, they used to say that perhaps solely 5,000 individuals learned it, but that it was the right 5,000 individuals.

Additionally, Partisan Assessment’s contributors and editors additionally helped create the rowdy fantasy of literary New York—a gin-soaked milieu during which writers sparred nightly in a haze of cigarette smoke. They harbored long-running feuds with their ideological enemies, and so they knew tips on how to give a celebration.

There was a whiff of that bygone period, maybe, at a Drift author’s Park Slope residence just lately. The friends, a number of whom described the gathering for this text, performed a tableau vivant, an old-timey model of charades, during which contributors enact well-known works. One sphere featured a re-creation of Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” with one visitor holding a liquor bottle to recommend a telescope. Then came a debate, full of jurors, to find out which was the superior creator: Edith Wharton or Henry James.

Group Wharton won by a hair.

Both Ms. Barrow and Ms. Panovka grew up in New York and attended non-public faculties in Manhattan—Dwight for Ms. Barrow, Dalton for Ms. Panovka. At Harvard, Ms. Barrow studied English and ran The Harvard Advocate. Ms. Panovka, an English and philosophy major, edited one other scholar publication, The Harvard E-Book Assessment. It wasn’t till they graduated in 2016 that they realized that they had sufficient in frequent to stake a claim to the little lefty journal throne.