Each quarterly issue of Pipe Wrench features a great longform story surrounded by a constellation of pieces springboarding off it. You might read 6,000 words on an idea you’d never thought about before, and then find a piece of short fiction, a playlist, and a personal essay. A comic. A reading list. A poem. A piece of tech.

Think of it as a dinner party where all the guests are really fucking sharp. Someone fascinating tells a great story; it’s passionate and unexpected and thought-provoking. And all the other fascinating guests grab onto the bits that resonate with them or inspire them or irritate them and spin the conversation in a dozen new directions.

Then make that an online magazine. Make it an online magazine where contributors are paid fairly, where industry-leading contracts are created in partnership with the National Writers Union, where facts are always checked, where innovative membership and masthead models are trying to find a new path forward for independent publishing, and where those with more subsidize those with less so there’s never a paywall.

That’s Pipe Wrench. Learn more:

Thanks for asking! Three reasons.

1. You use a pipe wrench to take things apart so you can see what’s gunking up the works. And then you use it to tighten things back up and make them stronger, so the water flows faster and freer. We all need pipe wrenches, real and figurative.
2. The greatest music video of 1985, for A-ha’s “Take On Me,” prominently features an angry motorcycle sidecar racer chasing the hero-slash-lead singer with an enormous pipe wrench. Everything about that sentence makes us happy, and we should all work on things that make us happy.
3. As A-ha taught us, pipe wrenches are useful for offensive and defensive maneuvers as well as plumbing. We need critique. We need to unpack history. We need to learn what we can from people who have come before us. We also need new things: voices, ideas, ways of being.