We cover art, culture, business, tech, science and spirituality, relationships, governance, and beyond, because change is occurring at all levels: The individual, family, community, city, nation, and the world.

When building community, we aspire to help people genuinely and authentically connect.
We hope to create infrastructure for long-term resilience, both within our communities and by means of our articles.
When we distribute information, we seek to be thoughtful, explanatory, and solutions-focused.
We publish material that teaches rather than triggers.
We celebrate art, beauty, love, optimism, openness, innovation, and play.

We believe in interdependence and intersectionality, while simultaneously supporting individual freedom and self-expression. We believe that no problem is too big and no issue is too small to be addressed with optimism, empathy, and human brilliance.

At The New Modality, we're interested in covering the following things (but we aren’t limited to them)…

• Arts & Culture: 
Immersive, participatory, and game-inflected art;
Digital and internet art;
Psychedelic culture;
Maker culture;
Emerging arts & culture institutions like Burning Man and Meow Wolf.

• Science: 
Philosophy of science;
Paradigm shifts and adventures in epistemology;
New research related to our other topics;
Extrapolations of science, and science fiction.

• Spirituality: 
Notions of enlightenment, mysticism, and the divine, and
The histories of such notions.
Generally, we focus on direct personal experience and syncretism.

• Technology:
The impact of tech on society;
Emerging tech;
Humane tech;
Civic tech.

• Alternative Relationships & Family: 
Co-living;
Co-housing;
Co-parenting.

• Sexuality: 
Polyamory and other forms of consensual non-monogamy;
BDSM;
LGBTQIA;
And even (!) perspectives on cisgendered monogamous heterosexuality (!).

• Business: 
From startup culture to new business models and systems.

• Philanthropy: 
Community philanthropic models;
Philanthropic innovation;
Philanthropic efforts related to our other topics.

• Society: 
Our relationship with the interconnected world, of which we are all a part;
Emerging political ideas and economic models, like basic income.

If that list excites you so much that you want to submit your ideas ASAP, you can do that here! (Or sign up for updates.)

We also host events.  Our pre-pandemic events were focused on San Francisco and New York. Now we're working on our virtual events and they are going to be awesome — stay tuned :). We are also open to eventually having events elsewhere. If you want to volunteer to work on events with us, get in touch!

Values: A note from the founder

My name is Lydia and I founded The New Modality. As the founder, I anticipate that we’ll spend the first few years mostly trying to survive. I also anticipate that survival will be challenging!

It helps when I keep the ultimate vision in mind: To create something beautiful that truly serves The New Modality community. As part of that service, I want to keep our processes transparent and our channels open, even when it's difficult. So, although this will sometimes make our lives harder during the difficult startup years, I want to go the extra mile to stay clear about our values and to stay open to feedback and ideas.

Hearing feedback gets harder as the audience gets bigger. I know that from experience. Right now, our audience — The New Modality community — is nascent and I’m closely in touch with most of it. In the future, I won’t be able to stay so closely in touch with the community's extremities. Yet I want to stay aware, and more importantly, to stay accountable. I want to both hold and to deserve the trust of our community.

There are various methods that publications use for this — advisors, editorial boards, Codes of Conduct for events, and the like. Social media accounts can help with accountability, too, though that’s hard to manage at scale. We’ll use those strategies (our Catalyst group is similar to an editorial board, for example), and we will also strive to tell you everything you never wanted to know about how we structure our stuff, in our desire to be transparent!

Realistically, however, this all boils down to continuous listening coupled with an ongoing commitment to humility — and we need to ensure that people trust us enough to tell us what they think. I hope to deserve your trust, so you will help keep us accountable for values like:

• Truth: We will tell the truth. 

This might sound simple, but it’s not, especially when creating organizational processes to ensure that we tell the truth at scale.

As part of our commitment to truth, we will clearly and publicly document our fact-checking and epistemological processes. We're doing this because an article about personal spirituality may have a different fact-checking process, with a different approach to epistemology, when compared to an article describing a new scientific paper. We hope to be very clear about empiricism and show how conclusions are reached about both.

• Respect: We will respect the people and communities we cover and serve. 

Empathy is one of our core values, and one way to show empathy is to speak respectfully of people, even when we disagree with them. We’ll also respect our contributors by being transparent about our pay rates and other processes that affect their work.

As part of our commitment to respect, we’ll do our best to get articles about specific identities, perspectives, or communities reviewed by outside readers with expertise in those things pre-publication. We hope to document this process, too. 

• Stewardship: We will use sustainable practices, preferably regenerative ones. 

“Regenerative” is a word often found in conservation circles, referring to pro-environment practices that build up an ecosystem, rather than simply failing to harm it further. (Another way of thinking about this is to “leave this world a little better than you found it,” as Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell reportedly said.)

As part of our commitment to stewardship, we hope to use carbon-neutral paper for the print magazine, and will document the process. We also hope to do our best to avoid industry practices that harm readers’ trust in the media ecosystem, like misleading clickbait headlines, because those things mess up the ecosystem for everyone — even if those practices are common. And we’ll document that, too.

We’re just getting started. Want to help? Send us your pitches, ideas, tips, thoughts, and feedback (or once again, sign up for updates).

P.S. Also! Please consider subscribing or buy Issue One via our online Backerkit store :)