Founded in 2023, The Dial is an online magazine of culture, politics and ideas, with a focus on local writing from around the world.

We aim to be a corrective for a sphere of English-language journalism that is growing perilously small: in voice, in ambition and in geography. 

The Dial offers readers a glimpse into the world beyond their borders, a monthly syllabus for understanding tumultuous times that challenges assumptions and presents new writing that delights.

Origins

We created The Dial to make space for daring writing unconstrained by geography. We see an opportunity to publish stories from the point of view of those on the ground—with the world itself as our center of gravity, rather than Brooklyn.

We trained as editors at The New York Review of Books, Politico’s European newsroom and The Atlantic, where we learned the standards of rigor, style and excellence that we bring to our work.

Scope

Every month, we release a new issue, each with a distinct theme; our pieces are topical and of the moment, but not pegged to the day’s news. We publish investigative journalism from on-the-ground reporters, essays and criticism, and the best fiction and poetry beyond the Anglosphere. 

We have published work from over 50 countries and are always looking to expand our geographic range. In addition to original reporting, we partner with publications around the world whose work we translate into English for the first time.

We are a nonprofit committed to paying journalists, writers and translators fairly. We do not base our rates on geography but on the best offer we can make to our contributors. 

Impact

We’re proud of the splash that our journalism has made: 

  • Our pieces have been cited, republished or co-published in The Guardian, BBC Radio, The New York Review of Books and Foreign Policy, among others. 

  • They have been translated into Norwegian, Spanish, French and Italian. 

  • This piece was cited in a German government report.

  • This one was short-listed for a True Story Award. 

  • This one is now taught at Harvard. 

  • Pieces in The Dial have led to book contracts and prizes.

For more information about our impact, you can read this report!

The first Dial

We take our name from The Dial, one of the world’s first little magazines, which was founded in 1840 as the progressive voice of a young nation. The Dial established a reputation for being on the vanguard of political and cultural conversation; it reinvented itself several times over the following decades, always looking outward. 

We are building on this history of conversation and literary invention with an international, 21st-century vision of The Dial inspired by our predecessors’ ambitions to found a “Journal in a new spirit.”

Masthead

Editor in Chief
Madeleine Schwartz lives in Paris, where she writes about the rise of the far right, urban politics and art fraud. Her work appears in The London Review of Books, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where she previously worked as an editor. In 2019, her article “The End of Atlanticism: Has Trump killed the ideology that won the cold war?” won the European Press Prize. She used the prize money to create The Ballot, a two-year online magazine about international politics. The Ballot published writers in over 40 countries, everywhere from Azerbaijan to Ukraine. This whet her appetite to publish more international reporting in a new magazine. She teaches journalism at Sciences Po.

Managing Editor
Mara Wilson oversees audience development and newsroom operations. She previously worked as an editor at The Atlantic, where she specialized in audience engagement. Her reporting has been featured in The Atlantic and Vice Magazine. She lives in Chicago.

Deputy Editor
Esther King is a journalist based in Brussels. She was a founding member of Politico’s European newsroom, where she edited features and op-eds and later led a team of journalists covering sustainability. She has reported on Europe’s response to the George Floyd protests in 2020, Belgium’s attempts to reckon with its colonial history and the crackdown on volunteers working with migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. She studied history and creative writing at Colby College in Maine and at the University of Cape Town, before attending the Columbia Publishing Course and working at a literary agency in New York. A dual citizen, she grew up in Brussels to American and German parents, and speaks fluent French and German.

Editors
Lindsay Gellman is a writer based in New York whose work focuses on uncovering patterns of harm in the health industry, and on the ethical treatment of vulnerable patient populations. She was a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to Germany, where she reported on predatory cancer clinics. Her investigations into unscrupulous Lyme-disease clinics, stem-cell treatment businesses, and fertility-coaching practices have appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, WIRED, and New York Magazine. She teaches nonfiction writing at Yale University.

Linda Kinstler is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. Her reporting and criticism on issues of memory politics, technology, law, and history can be found in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian and elsewhere. Her first book, Come to This Court and Cry (Public Affairs, 2022), is an investigation into denialism, historical revisionism, and judicial overreach in Eastern Europe. She is also a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley, where she has taught in the Art of Writing Program.

Julian Lucas is a writer based in New York whose work focuses on the representation of history in literature, games, and the visual arts. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an editor-at-large at Cabinet. His essays and reviews have also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s and The New York Times Book Review. He was a finalist for the 2020–2021 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

Ben Mauk is a Berlin-based writer and filmmaker. His work concerns borders, migration, asylum, and statelessness, and he has reported from disputed territories and conflict zones in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. His essays and investigations are published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, and the London Review of Books, among others. He is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist and his first documentary film, Reeducated, a co-production with The New Yorker about mass internment in China, won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Media. He co-founded and directs the Berlin Writers' Workshop.

Hannah Rosefield is an editor and writer based in London. She was book review editor at Harvard Review and, as a freelance editor, has worked for The Guardian Long Read and The Economist’s 1843 magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, The White Review, The Point and The New Yorker online, among other publications. She holds a PhD in English from Harvard University, where she taught literature, writing and journalism. 

Design Director
Lucy Andersen is a Brooklyn-based designer. She specializes in brand identities, websites, illustration, and book and editorial design.

Operations Manager
Carleen Coulter is a Berlin-based photographer, curator, and arts administrator. She previously worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was director of KN: Raum für Kunst in Kontext. Her photography appears in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. 

Copy Editor
Brian Ransom has edited fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics for The Paris Review, New York Review Comics, and Astra Magazine, among others. His own nonfiction has appeared on The Paris Review Daily and in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Fact Checker
Sujay Kumar is a journalist in Chicago. He is the managing editor of the Investigative Project on Race and Equity and he fact-checks for Columbia Global Reports and The Drift. He has worked as editor in chief of the Chicago Reader and as a culture editor at Fusion and The Daily Beast.

Board
Marc DaCosta
Jessica Henderson
Madeleine Schwartz

Advisors
Carroll Bogert
Joergen Ejboel
Ivan Krastev
Peter Pomerantsev
Christopher D. Shea
Alice Spawls
Richard Tofel
Diane Wachtell

Founding Donor
Beverly Rogers

Support
Open Society Foundations
The de Groot Foundation
The Miami Foundation (through NewsMatch)

The Dial is a nonprofit organization and is a member of Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers.

We adhere to the editorial independence and donor transparency policies of the Institute for Nonprofit News.