Moira Weigel was finishing her PhD in comparative literature and film studies at Yale when she noticed that, without really meaning to, she had started writing about technology. The shift coincided with a move to San Francisco, where her husband Ben Tarnoff had taken an engineering job. Tarnoff, a Harvard graduate and author of two books on American history, was writing for The Guardian, Jacobin, and Lapham's Quarterly. Weigel had just published Labor of Love, a book about the invention of dating. Together, in 2017, they founded Logic — a print magazine about technology and power, edited from the Bay Area by people who worked in tech but refused to accept its default narratives.
The founding team was rounded out by Christa Hartsock, a Developer Fellow at Code for America who brought in writers from her feminist coding networks, Jim Fingal, and art director Xiaowei Wang — all Harvard alumni, though their backgrounds ranged from engineering to literature. The first issue, titled "Intelligence," had a print run of 500 copies. They had to turn away thirty people from the San Francisco launch event. Weigel, who needed a piece from a Harvard law professor who wasn't answering his emails, sat in on one of his seminars and asked him point-blank in front of the class. "Be shameless," she later advised aspiring editors at a Stanford talk.
Each issue was organized around a single word — Intelligence, Sex, Justice, Scale, Failure, Play — explored through essays, interviews, fiction, and visual art that refused to separate technical knowledge from political analysis. The writing was witty, erudite, and grounded in the daily reality of people who built, maintained, and were affected by the systems they critiqued. A four-part conversation with an anonymous data scientist sat alongside an essay by UCLA's digital humanities coordinator on the different standards women in tech are held to. Stanford's Mark Greif described the magazine's voice as carrying a "knowingness" — an interdisciplinary fluency that made complex ideas feel urgent rather than academic.
In partnership with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Logic produced a book series including Voices from the Valley, an anthology of anonymous interviews with tech workers that Wired praised for making its subjects come alive even in anonymity. The magazine operated on the counterintuitive principle that print, not digital, was the only sustainable model for a small magazine — a lesson learned from studying n+1, The Baffler, and The New Inquiry. For a publication born in the heart of Silicon Valley, the insistence on paper over pixels was not a contradiction but a statement of values: that the most important conversations about technology deserve the permanence and attention that only print can demand.
Explore Logic at <a href="https://logicmag.io/" target="\_blank">logicmag.io