With increasing inescapability, our attention, time, and modes of communication are captured, converted into data, and sold. And the product that we receive in return displays a world increasingly less human. 

As consumers, we have witnessed the decay of media and human input alongside everyone else. As humans, we have felt an emotional toll being wrought upon us collectively. It’s often diagnosed as a sort of nihilism or apathy. Whatever we want to call this feeling, this resounding sense of isolation, when intensified, stifles our belief that original forms of expression or dissidence can happen, or even matter.

Some sixty years ago, the moral giant James Baldwin penned an argument against this feeling, which he named despair. Baldwin saw countless “victims of that universal cruelty which lives in the heart and in the world.” While the context of Baldwin’s despair was born from a markedly different political and cultural world—and, in some ways, that which afflicted Baldwin pales to the sophistication of technology and degree of political decay which constricts us in the year 2025—we see the same creation and re-creation of cruelty. 

However, our “knowledge that human beings are more important than real estate” informs us to meet despair with a human will. “To bring water to this desert,” Baldwin instructs us, “we should attempt to examine despair.” The editors of The Mirror share Baldwin’s belief that our words and creations, when centered on our values of justice and compassion, are responses to this despair.

So, how do we make sense of despair? What forms can hold this experience? Long-form essays like Baldwin’s. Critical and honest reflections that center the writer’s subjectivity. Reporting that admits facts, narratives, and subjects are inherently decisions made by its author. Candid and personal conversations. Recommendations and reviews that come from people’s personal archives rather than algorithmic technologies that attempt to outwit us. 

We hope to house these essays, criticisms, and the concerns of cherished voices—works which contain the same generative, humanistic force of Baldwin’s moral prose.

We invite you to take a look in The Mirror and contribute to this project. 

Contribute to our project by submitting your work here.

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– Caleb and Sylvie