LiP magazine
Encyclopedia
LiP: Informed Revolt was an award-winning 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:
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
as a zine
Zine
A zine is most commonly a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images. More broadly, the term encompasses any self-published work of minority interest usually reproduced via photocopier....
, 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
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva , is a philosopher, environmental activist, and eco feminist. Shiva, currently based in Delhi, has authored more than 20 books and over 500 papers in leading scientific and technical journals. She was trained as a physicist and received her Ph.D...
, Tim Wise
Tim Wise
Timothy Jacob Wise is an American anti-racist activist and writer. Since 1995 he has lectured at over 600 college campuses across the US...
, Julia Butterfly Hill
Julia Butterfly Hill
Julia Butterfly Hill is an American activist and environmentalist. Hill is best known for living in a -tall, roughly 1500-year-old California Redwood tree for 738 days between December 10, 1997 and December 18, 1999...
, Mark Crispin Miller
Mark Crispin Miller
Mark Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New York University, and the author of the book: Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform...
, Martín Espada
Martín Espada
Martín Espada is a Latino poet, and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.- Life and career :Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York...
, Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit is a writer who lives in San Francisco. She has written on a variety of subjects including the environment, politics, place, and art....
, David Solnit, Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is an American academic, educator, feminist activist, and writer.Born in San Antonio, Texas, Dunbar-Ortiz is of partial American Indian background. She spent most of her youth growing up in the rural community of Piedmont, Oklahoma...
, Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978, where he established himself as a performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art...
, Jeff Chang
Jeff Chang
Jeff Chang is a Taiwanese male singer, who performs sentimental Mandarin pop ballads.Chang was born in Yunlin, Taiwan. He started off his showbiz career by winning a singing competition while in college...
, damali ayo
Damali ayo
damali ayo is a conceptual artist, author, comedian and performance artist. Her books use satire and humor to engage the reader in an examination of American culture. Her art ranges from assemblage, painting, installation, and solo and participatory performance. She also started a...
, Chip Berlet
Chip Berlet
John Foster "Chip" Berlet is an American investigative journalist, and photojournalist activist specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the United States, particularly the religious right, white supremacists, homophobic groups, and paramilitary organizations...
, Michael Eric Dyson, Mary Roach
Mary Roach
Mary Roach is a columnist and popular science writer. Raised in Etna, New Hampshire, she holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Wesleyan University and currently resides in Oakland, California...
, Boots Riley
Boots Riley
Boots Riley is an American musician, vocalist, writer, and public speaker most known for being the front man and producer of The Coup as well as the front man for Street Sweeper Social Club.-Biography:...
, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is a San Francisco-based author and activist. She has written two novels, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly and Pulling Taffy , and is the editor of the non-fiction anthologies Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity , That's Revolting! Queer Strategies...
, Heather Rogers, Timothy Kreider, Iain Boal
Iain Boal
Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of technics and the commons, based as an independent scholar in the San Francisco Bay Area.He is one of the founders of the Retort collective, an association of radical writers, teachers, artists, and activists, which has existed in the Bay Area for the past...
, Jeff Conant, Neal Pollack
Neal Pollack
Neal Pollack is an American satirist, novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He lives in Austin, Texas. Pollack has written six books: The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, Never Mind the Pollacks, Beneath the Axis of Evil, Alternadad, Stretch, and Jewball. He is a member of...
, Neelanjana Banerjee, Antonia Juhasz
Antonia Juhasz
Antonia Juhasz is the Director of the Energy Program at Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights non-profit organization. She is a policy-analyst, author and activist....
, Bruce Levine
Bruce Levine
Bruce E. Levine, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has been in practice for more than two decades.Levine's most recent book is Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite...
, Josh MacPhee
Josh MacPhee
Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator and activist living in Brooklyn, New York. MacPhee graduated from Oberlin College in 1996 and spent eight years as an artist and activist in Chicago, Illinois where he established a distribution system called justseeds in order get more radical art projects out to...
and Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
.
The magazine also regularly featured excerpts from contemporary and historical authors, including Susan Faludi
Susan Faludi
Susan C. Faludi is an American feminist, journalist and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee thought showed the "human costs of high finance".-Biographical...
, Mary Roach
Mary Roach
Mary Roach is a columnist and popular science writer. Raised in Etna, New Hampshire, she holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Wesleyan University and currently resides in Oakland, California...
, Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California. Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing modern civilization and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He holds a B.S...
, Eduardo Galeano
Eduardo Galeano
Eduardo Hughes Galeano is a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist. His best known works are Memoria del fuego and Las venas abiertas de América Latina which have been translated into twenty languages and transcend orthodox genres: combining fiction, journalism, political analysis, and...
, Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDuke is a Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for vice president as the nominee of the United States Green Party, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. In the 2004 election, however, she endorsed one of Nader's opponents, Democratic...
, Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
, Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen, Mark Crispin Miller
Mark Crispin Miller
Mark Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New York University, and the author of the book: Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform...
, Voltairine DeCleyre, Robin D.G. Kelley
Robin D.G. Kelley
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is a professor of History and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. From 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University...
, Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
, Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allison is an American writer, speaker, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.-Early life:Dorothy E. Allison was born on April 11, 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina to Ruth Gibson Allison, who was fifteen at the time. Ruth was a poor and unmarried mother who worked as a...
, Eduardo Antonio Parra, Liza Featherstone
Liza Featherstone
Liza Featherstone is an American journalist and journalism professor who writes frequently on labor and student activism for The Nation....
, Doug Henwood
Doug Henwood
Doug Henwood is an American journalist who writes frequently about economic affairs. He publishes a newsletter, Left Business Observer, that analyzes economics and politics from a left-wing perspective, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.- Early years :Henwood was born in Teaneck, New...
, Christian Parenti
Christian Parenti
Christian Parenti is an American investigative journalist and author. His books include: Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis , a survey of the rise of the prison industrial complex from the Nixon through Reagan Eras and into the present; The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America...
, Leslie Savan, Mark Zepezauer, John Ross
John Ross (activist)
John Ross was an American author, poet, freelance journalist, and activist who lived in Mexico and wrote extensively on its leftist political movements....
, and Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
.
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:
Reviews of LiP: Informed Revolt
- "Funny, refreshing, intelligent and outrageous!" — Historian, activist and author of A People's History of the United States, Howard ZinnHoward ZinnHoward Zinn was an American historian, academic, author, playwright, and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964-88 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United...
- "In an era when most political magazines in the U.S. ranged from the tepid to the tedious there was LiP, fearlessly delving into the essential topics of our times and mapping the way to a revolution you'd actually want to join." — Patrick Reinsborough, co-founder of the smartMeme Project and co-author of Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World (PM Press)
- "Marvelous! Nothing comes close to it in the culture today." — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historian, retired professor and author of Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie
- "It's tough, smart, and takes no prisoners. Read everything in it!" — Andrei Codrescu, poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio
- "Creative, with flair and substance." — Michael Albert, editor of ZNet, co-founder of Z magazine and author of over a dozen books, including Parecon: Life After Capitalism
- "A Pandora's Box in magazine form; every issue came bearing new surprises." — Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, community organizer, activist, educator and author of 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures
Core Editorial, Production and Long-term Contributing 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 BitchBitch (magazine)bitch, whose tagline is feminist response to pop culture, is an independent, quarterly magazine published in Portland, Oregon with more than 50,000 readers. bitch magazine is one branch of the reader-supported non-profit organization bitch media...
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.
- Jo Ellen Green Kaiser (Publisher, 2004) - Freelance editor and publishing consultant, co-editor of Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call to Justice (Jewish Lights).
- 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" - UtneUtneUtne is a village in Ullensvang municipality in Hardanger, Norway. It is home to the Utne Hotel, Norway's oldest hotel in continuous operation, founded in 1722....
Award Nominee and "Best Content E-Zine" South by SouthwestSouth by SouthwestSouth by Southwest is an Austin, Texas based company dedicated to planning conferences, trade shows, festivals and other events. Their current roster of annual events include: SXSW Music, SXSW Film, SXSW Interactive, SXSWedu, and SXSWeco and take place every spring in Austin, Texas, United States...
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 CensoredProject CensoredProject Censored is a non-profit, media criticism and investigative journalism project within the Sonoma State University Foundation. It is managed through the School of Social Sciences at the university....
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 CensoredProject CensoredProject Censored is a non-profit, media criticism and investigative journalism project within the Sonoma State University Foundation. It is managed through the School of Social Sciences at the university....
Award: "Native Energy Futures: Renewable Energy, Actual Sovereignty, and the New Rush on Indian Lands," (Brian Awehali, Summer 2006)