The Hypocrite Reader publishes reportage, criticism, history, sociology, theory, creative non-fiction, manifestos, leaks, analysis, popular science, synthesis, wedding announcements, and Viking-themed erotica. Just because something doesn’t fit into any of those categories doesn’t mean we won’t publish it.
WRITING
We are currently assembling our June issue, “Hide and Seek.” Please send article prospectuses to hypocriterdr@gmail.com, preferably by May 28th. A prospectus is a paragraph or so explaining what your article is going to be and giving an approximate word count. If we don’t already know each other, it would be helpful to have a few sentences about you, including any areas of expertise and previous writing experience, but no need for a full cover letter or anything like that. At the Hypocrite Reader we practice activist editing and pay our writers only in sincere appreciation.
...MORE ABOUT THE JUNE THEME, “HIDE AND SEEK”
If you haven’t played peek-a-boo with a baby lately, you definitely should. (If you don’t have access to a baby, others have generously donated images of their babies to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ERDeCNFmH8.) From an adult’s perspective, the game is cute the way, say, watching a kitten try to attack its reflection would be cute, but it’s also something more. What’s the baby doing, after all? A psychologist would say: he’s getting wise to object permanence. (The object drops out of view but--there it is again!) A psychoanalyst might say: he’s learning to deal with loss. (Things may leave for a while, but they do come back.) But what they’re both missing, what’s really fun to watch, is the infant’s joy. He’s so happy every time the object comes back into view.
The baby’s learning to play from one side a game he’ll one day play from both sides: he’s learning to organize the pleasures of concealment. We all like to find what has been hidden, and sometimes we hide in order to be found. The story of being a person has sometimes been told as a sort of radical hiddenness: you’ll never really figure them out, they’ll never understand you, we’re all too inner and secret and deep to ever be at home. But maybe these are only the limit cases—the case of the child who hid so well that the others gave up looking for her and went home for the night. Ordinarily, concealment isn’t such a disaster; it has pleasures of its own, the possibility of discovery among them. Ordinary social life, both public and intimate, takes place neither in total opacity nor in radical communication but in the movement between them—in a game of hide and seek.
We’d love to see articles on these topics among others:
- a history of nudity
- Jonah’s attempt to escape God
- the old marital practice of sharing a diary (as Tolstoy and his wife did)
- being “coy”: what is required for a sexy sexual politics of consent?
- Nietzsche on truth as a woman
- “coming out”
- guerilla warfare as analogy for ____
- quiet children
- the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies
- lying in order to be caught, making someone guess your secret
- police surveillance
- privacy in the public sphere
- Twenty Questions, “Never Have I Ever,” and other games of revelation
- flirtation and the process of undressing
- confessions, false confessions, true lies
- veils and the unveiled (in philosophy and elsewhere)
- why in God’s name Nabokov screws with his readers the way he does
- unreliable narrators and how they’re shown to be so
- Ahab and the Whale
- how exactly do we search for terrorists?
- basements
ILLUSTRATIONS
If you’d like to provide thematically appropriate illustrations for a future article (photographs, collages, digital art, etc.) please send us a sample of your work at hypocriterdr@gmail.com. If we like you, we’ll suggest an article in the upcoming issue for you to illustrate.
MONEY
Thanks for the thought! Possibly at some point we will start accepting your money, but for now we require that you enjoy our magazine for free.
WEDDING ANNOUNCEMENTS
We no longer publish wedding announcements.