When Zan Boag and Antonia Case showed up at the 2013 Byron Bay Writers' Festival with a new philosophy magazine, they printed 10,000 copies and hoped for the best. They sold out — the bestselling item in the festival's history. The premise of New Philosopher sounded almost comically ambitious: a quarterly, ad-free magazine that would bring Peter Singer, Noam Chomsky, and Booker Prize winners together with cartoonist Michael Leunig and working academics, all discussing the fundamental problems of being human. No ads, no clickbait, no dumbing down.
Each issue orbits a single abstract noun — Freedom, Love, Perception, Health — and the design is as much a draw as the writing. The American Institute of Graphic Arts called it an approachable yet intelligent publication; Complex named one of its covers among the coolest of the month. In 2019, Stack Magazines awarded it the overall Magazine of the Decade, beating every indie title published in the 2010s across every category. Not bad for a philosophy quarterly from the Australian coast.
The growth has been remarkable. New Philosopher expanded from Australia into the US, Canada, and the UK, then launched Korean and Chinese editions. A special joint edition with The New York Times in 2019 featured Martha Nussbaum and other contributors. Boag and Case also opened Poet, a philosophy bookstore in Hobart, and launched Womankind, an ad-free women's magazine that quickly became the third-bestselling fashion title on Australia's leading magazine platform — behind only Marie Claire and Vogue.
In a media landscape where so much content is, as Boag puts it, junk food for the mind, New Philosopher insists that 10,000 words on the nature of freedom, printed on beautiful paper with no sponsor in sight, is exactly what the world is hungry for. The sales figures suggest he is right.
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