The Beginning 

Somewhen in the interim between December 8, 1999, and January 26, 2000, an anomaly showed up on the Brown Daily Herald’s masthead. Somehow, Brooks King and Dara Cohen had been taken from the “assistant editor” and “staff writer” sections and erroneously written down as the magazine editor and assistant magazine editor of “post-.” Post- what? Post- what indeed. Today I’m bringing you what I did, post-that, to find out.

This all started when I decided I needed to know how old post- is. Throughout the year, I’d checked off my friends’ birthdays, marked the occasions with cakes and dancing and trips to bookstores, but my best friend, post- magazine, wasn’t one of the names remaining on my ever-shortening list. Unacceptable! Furthermore, how was I to know if post- could take driving shifts on our cross-country roadtrip? Vote in the midterms? Buy a bottle of rum or even, perhaps, rent a real rental car?

My world reoriented around my newfound priority number one: find the year of post-’s birth. I nudged a few editors, called up a few websites, and ultimately found my way to post-’s Issuu site, where after 83 seconds of looking, I promptly texted our dear EIC with “I might be wrong but I think this year is 20 years of post-?”

I was wrong. Apparently we can’t decide whether to publish one volume a year or two, and thus my math, based on a collection of online issues rudely interrupted in 2015, was somehow incorrect. I turned to sources outside of my post- home. Braving the waters of the Brown Daily Herald’s digital repository, I boldly vowed to go where no post-it had gone before. Fathoms below, after an hour of downloading copy after copy of Heralds of yore, I found it. Volume 1, Issue 1: February 4, 2000. Triumphantly armed with a blurry screenshot of the cover, I declared victory. Our first day of production this semester was February 4, too, and thus, this year felt apt to make into a post- anniversary. Please ignore the extra year and join me in celebrating this beautiful magazine’s twenty-fifth.

Twenty-five years ago, post- looked different. It featured multiple arts calendars, music reviews, band interviews, and theater criticism, and not a whole lot of creative nonfiction personal narrative. Heading into this article, this worried me. Would I still find post- valuable after learning about its original mission and the ways in which we’ve changed?

The Interview

Somewhat to my surprise, the emails I pulled off BrownConnect+ were live, and they led me to some of post-’s original editorial team. They even wrote me back.

Dramatis Personae

Brooks King ’02 – the original post- EIC 

Dara Kay Cohen ’01 – post-’s OG assistant editor

Hamish Chandra ’01 – post-’s first and maybe only dining editor

Megan Rooney ’01 – a member of The Herald’s 110th board looking for change

Wow. I managed to get King, Cohen, and Chandra on the phone as a group, and spoke to Rooney separately. As Cohen said on our call, “With post-, you could just call people up! And ask if they’d talk to you for a story.” Here I was, live, doing the very same thing. Admittedly, they called up Phyllis Schlafly (really?) and Dan Savage, but post- has evolved with the years.

The Name

The most- pressing question for the founders of post- was clearly the name. I was baffled to hear from contemporary post-its at a recent production night that they didn’t know what the name stood for. Obviously, I did. It was what the people at the Herald made afterward! When they were done writing the news at the end of the day! Or it was because it was printed, you know, in the last pages of the Herald, after the regular stories. While the latter reason was true in 2000, the original editorial crew didn’t make a single mention of the insert’s physical location. Instead, Chandra, post- dining editor extraordinaire, told me that post- was a product of the University, a nascent Modern Culture and Media department, and the students thereof who were deconstructing -isms left and right. Post- was post-colonial, post-modern, post-structuralist, post- whatever it needed to be. Post- was “sort of because of the Washington Post.” The hyphen was because they were “up in our MCM shit, to be honest.” Fun fact: Chandra, who was up in his MCM shit, wouldn’t let writers use the word “authentic” in restaurant reviews. But post- was a commentary arts mag, and it was saying something. Or whatever. Maybe it was just better than “Torque” or “&SomeCider,” which were apparently the other two frontrunner options.

But in a more real sense, Rooney said, distinctly naming post- was also about a fresh start for the magazine component of the BDH. In the preceding years, post- had spent a few years called 195 Angell; before that, Good Clean Fun; and even before that, Fresh Fruit. Awesomely, Fresh Fruit might even have been distributed to other New England colleges in the seventies and eighties…so there’s lots of room for post- to grow. King cited 195 Angell as “too much nerdy humor,” and the 110th editorial board, helmed in part by Rooney, wanted to make it more current and cool. According to King, “Megan took me into the back office and was like, we want you to take over the magazine with Dara who you’ve never met.” “My roommate,” Cohen interjected. “Who’s so cool and you’ve never met but you’re gonna have to take a leap of faith and gonna roll with it,” King said. If that’s not a recipe for a fresh start, I don’t know what is. 

While the team wasn’t necessarily surprised to hear that there was still a magazine run out of the BDH, they were a little shocked to learn that it’s still called post-. And for good reason—post-’s twenty-six-years-and-counting is more than double the span of any previous iteration of a Herald magazine that I’ve heard of. It’s something to chew on. 

Making It

I asked this group of original post-its for their memories, big dreams, and bits of unfinished business, and here’s what they had to say: King interviewed Phyllis Schlafly, who wouldn’t take any of his bait, Cohen interviewed the NYT ethicist of the day, and Chandra wrote a strip club breakfast review, truly doing journalism as no student had ever done it before. Rooney’s metric of success for the magazine at the time was that it would be a “pleasure to look at, and a pleasure to read.” They didn’t remember everything—Cohen claimed total amnesia for some of post-’s founding, and Rooney remarked that “it’s funny how you think you’ll remember everything forever, especially important things, but then twenty-five years pass and you don’t remember anything.” I wonder what I’ll recall in 2052.

The Point (not the tavern) 

post-, the “cooler little sister of BDH” (King), was supposed to be a little subversive, a little more co-ed. The most post-y thing I heard, I think, was Chandra’s repetition of the phrase “weird little twist” when describing what made something fit for post-. He explained that it taught him how to write journalism, or nonfiction as we might say, that still has a point of view. And although post- has changed significantly over the years and covers vastly different topics, post- has a weird little twist. We might call it a point of view.

Formerly, post- filled a more specific niche of reviews and cultural event press that the internet has since subsumed, but it’s always been a somewhat longer-form, creative, riskier place to try new things compared to the BDH. I was told by the group that they thought of it as kind of cheeky, kind of sincere, and very, very earnest. Rooney told me the team was “so persnickety, so specific, so self-conscious, but we really meant it.”

So while post- rarely features interviews at this point and no longer runs restaurant reviews or timely theater criticism, I’m comfortable saying we’re still post-. We’re earnest. We really mean it-.

This Week In Numbers (aka “TWIN,” my favorite short-lived post- section)

1

the number of days since midsemester and coincidentally the number of days this week I’ve thought about moving somewhere tropical

22

the font size of the numbers in this first reincarnation of TWIN since 2001

2

the number of siblings in a pair of twins

1

the number of jeans in a pair of jeans

7

the number of men you need to ask to find one that knows Fancy Nancy

97,016

the smallest number of dollars Brown’s tuition will ever be again

4

the number of remaining false springs for Brunonians to misplace hope in

0

the number of 24-hour libraries at our R1 research university

6

the socially acceptable number of texts to send in a row without a response (I hope)