LiP magazine

LiP: Informed Revolt was an award-winning American alternative magazine that took on various incarnations after its founding in 1996 by former Britannica.com Books (and later, Technology) editor Brian Awehali. It began in Chicago as a zine, distributed mostly at local bookstores and coffee shops, then began publishing online in 2001 before eventually evolving into a full-format North American periodical in 2003. It was run by an all-volunteer staff until 2007, and was devoted to politics, culture, sex and humor, and took a satirical, analytical, and often biting approach to what it called "a culture machine that strips us of our desires and sells them back as product and mass mediocracy."

Contributors to the magazine included activists, cultural critics and literary figures, including Vandana Shiva, Tim Wise, Julia Butterfly Hill, Mark Crispin Miller, Martín Espada, Rebecca Solnit, David Solnit, Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jeff Chang, damali ayo, Chip Berlet, Michael Eric Dyson, Mary Roach, Boots Riley, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Heather Rogers, Timothy Kreider, Iain Boal, Jeff Conant, Neal Pollack, Neelanjana Banerjee, Antonia Juhasz, Bruce Levine, Josh MacPhee and Christopher Hitchens.

The magazine also regularly featured excerpts from contemporary and historical authors, including Susan Faludi, Mary Roach, Derrick Jensen, Eduardo Galeano, Winona LaDuke, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen, Mark Crispin Miller, Voltairine DeCleyre, Robin D.G. Kelley, Albert Camus, Dorothy Allison, Eduardo Antonio Parra, Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, Christian Parenti, Leslie Savan, Mark Zepezauer, John Ross, and Noam Chomsky.

LiP: Informed Revolt ceased publication in 2007. An anthology of the magazine's best collected works, Tipping the Sacred Cow: The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt was published by AK Press in 2008.

In an interview published on ZNet in October 2007, editor Brian Awehali was asked what the magazine and anthology were trying to communicate, and answered:

I describe the magazine and book as 'a literary fusillade devoted to a marvelous revolt for the overthrow of miserabilism.' I could have also described our chosen target as the crippling mass apparatus of dichotomized, linear, alienating and anthropocentric white supremacist patriarchal capitalist oligarchy, but for me, and for the magazine's approach, "miserabilism"—a Surrealist trope—is just a less tedious, more sufferable way to effectively describe the same complex of ideas.

Our primary emphasis was on divergence. LiP was meant to be a vehicle for imagining how to get a better world, using a variety of premises, especially unusual or unfamiliar ones (regardless of left/right orientation, though most of ours fell on the left), while avoiding common limiting assumptions. We deliberately avoided any programmatic focus, and instead spent most of our efforts challenging unfounded assumptions, and examining the propositional content, coercive framing, or simple illogic of prevailing (or in some cases emerging) political discourse.

Editorial and production team members

• Brian Awehali (Founder/Editor/Designer, 1996–2007) – Freelance journalist and editor of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt (AK Press)
• Lisa Jervis (Editor-at-Large, 2004–2007) - Founding co-editor of Bitch magazine and author of Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating (PM Press)
• Tim Wise (Race Editor, 1999–2007) – Anti-racist activist and writer, and author of many books, including White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press), Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge), and Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (City Lights Publishers)
• Timothy Kreider (Contributing Illustrator – 1998–2006) – New York Times contributor and satirical cartoonist, essayist and creator of several collections of work, including The Pain - When Will It End? (Fantagraphics) and the forthcoming collection, We Learn Nothing (Free Press, 2012).
• Erin Wiegand (Managing Editor, 2004–2007) – Writer, editor and North Atlantic Books project manager
• Colin Sagan (Production Coordinator, 2004–2005, designer 2006–2007) – Co-founder of Quilted, a cooperatively-run consulting, graphic design and web development company based in Berkeley, CA and Boston, MA.
• Silja J.A. Talvi (Co-Editor, 2001–2003) – Multiple award-winning journalist, senior editor at In These Times magazine, and author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press)
• Jessica Clark (Co-Editor, 2001–2002) – Editor-at-large to In These Times magazine and director of the Future of Public Media project at the Center for Social Media
• Jeff Conant (Senior Contributing Editor, 2004–2006) – Writer and international development and ecology activist and author of several books, including A Community Guide to Environmental Health (Hesperian Foundation) and A Poetics of Resistance: the Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency (AK Press)
• Kari Lydersen (Contributing Editor, 1998–2005) – former Washington Post correspondent and author of Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-U.S. Immigration Policy in the Global Age (Common Courage)
• Danny Postel (Contributing Editor, 1998–1999) – Commentator, former Britannica.com philosophy editor, and author of Reading Legitimation Crisis in Iran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism (Paradigm)

Awards and nominations

LiP: Informed Revolt received the following awards and nominations:

• 2002: "Best Online Culture Coverage" – Utne Award Nominee and "Best Content E-Zine" South by Southwest People's Choice Award
• 2004: "Best New Magazine" Utne Award Nominee
• 2005: "Best Culture Coverage" Utne Award Nominee and "Best Political Magazine," East Bay Express
• 2006: Two Project Censored Awards: "Brave New World: Surveying Privacy in the Age of Surveillance," (Anna Samson Miranda, Winter 2004) and "Trust Us, We're the Government: How the U.S. Government Stole $137 Billion of Indian Money" (Brian Awehali, Winter 2004)
• 2007: Project Censored Award: "Native Energy Futures: Renewable Energy, Actual Sovereignty, and the New Rush on Indian Lands" (Brian Awehali, Summer 2006)

References

External links

• ZNET author Q&A: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz interviews Brian Awehali about the publication of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt
• Utne - "Shelf Life," article about the demise of Clamor and LiP magazine
• LOUDCANARY - blog of LiP founder and editor Brian Awehali, containing full contents of the extended online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt (anthology)