Atypical is an experimental magazine about people and communities building a more creative, more inspiring, more just future.
In 2014, I started an online publication run by students. Over two and a half years, we published digital pieces on films, academic anxiety, immigrant culture, and public policy. We discussed technology and feminism and standardized testing. There were a lot of things I could have done better, but I was sixteen, and I cared about one thing: I knew great writers with ideas worth listening to, and more people had to hear them.
I still feel the same, and the stakes are only higher. I’ve met so many more creative and inspiring people around the world working on a universe of problems and ideas too expansive to enumerate. Yet we find ourselves in an even more fragmented, more noisy Internet with even less room for beautiful, moving ideas, in a world ever more starved of them.
I’m particularly fascinated by the intersection of great stories, boundless creativity, and inspiring technology. Projects like Hundred Rabbits, a digital creative studio operating on a sailboat. Stories like this one about a plane that accidentally circumnavigated the world. For me, Atypical is a search for stories that inspire me, and hopefully you, to create and build and live more thoughtfully.
If I’ve learned one thing since my first go at this game, it’s that people are the indivisible atom of change. People have ideas, and people make them happen. People work together to move on from the old and create anew. And like all good ideas, Atypical will have people at the center. People who imagine these projects and write these stories.
Atypical is an experimental place for these experimental ideas. And like all experiments, Atypical will change constantly. But this is how we’re starting – with people and ideas at center stage, in search of spectacle that inspires.
If this excites you, please follow along by subscribing. And if you have a story to share, respond to our open invitation.
