Hi. This is Lydia. I founded this magazine, The New Modality. There used to be an entire magazine website here. You may be wondering why there is no longer a magazine website here.

I launched NewMo, as it came to be called, in late 2019. Then the pandemic happened while we were in the thick of producing the first issue. I am grateful and proud that the team managed to ship Issue One despite the challenges of 2020.

People have described Issue One as “genius,” “evergreen,” “a work of art,” and a “Bay Area cult classic.” There are still copies left — you can buy copies of Issue One here.

The pandemic short-circuited my original plan for the magazine, which is a bummer, because I still think it was a good plan! Sadly, Fate had other ideas. After the confusions of 2020, I took time off to research potential futures for the organization. During my research, I met someone, he asked me to marry him and have his children, I had a baby, and we did not in the end get married, but my son is wonderful. The engagement was high-profile and so was the breakup, and all of this consumed my bandwidth for a while.

A few years after Issue One, I announced that I was working on Issue Two. Then, immediately after I made that announcement, I received an opportunity to work on a huge project with an established media company. For most of 2024 I worked on that project, while caring almost full-time for my toddler.

Meanwhile, throughout all these ups and downs, this poor website gamely labored on, despite the weight of its outdated software. The formatting on many pages decayed over time. The articles stopped looking beautiful online, though they still look beautiful in print!

So… the old NewMo website is now officially retired. If you’d like to read past articles from Issue One then I’m afraid you’ll just have to buy the physical magazine 😉 Also, I sometimes repost past work on my personal Substack newsletter. If there’s a specific article from Issue One whose text you think should be back online, feel free to let me know. I’m easy to find on social media, etc.

At this point, it has been so long since Issue One that, whenever Issue Two happens, it may appear under a new title. If you want to stay in the loop and be the first to hear about what happens next — even if I re-name the magazine — then you can sign up to the magazine’s email list here (this is separate from my personal newsletter, Solar Light). You can also follow the magazine on Twitter/X @newmodality (this is separate from my personal account). And you can pre-order Issue Two here.

If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to the magazine, you can do that online here. (If you work for a company that matches donations, you can have your donation matched using Benevity software. Find us under our nonprofit partner, “Independent Arts & Media,” within Benevity.) If you happen to be a major funder with the ability to make large donations, drop me a line! You could make the difference of when and how I keep publishing.

Thank you, so much, to everyone who’s supported my work over the years.

Lydia Laurenson
Twitter/X • Bluesky • Instagram • Solar Light

This page was last updated January 2025.