Why We Launched the Print Renaissance
Palladium kickstarted a new wave of print media. The printed page is not obsolete, but the antidote to an increasingly ephemeral, frenetic, and exploitative online reading experience.
Four years ago, in the spring of 2021, we launched the first print edition of Palladium Magazine with PALLADIUM 01: Governance Futurism. Since then, we have published eighteen more print editions containing some of the most influential and groundbreaking essays written this decade, luxuriously packaged and accentuated with beautiful, haunting art. When we announced 01, the reaction from many people was skepticism—who launches a magazine in the internet age? But, as 2025 nears its end, a growing list of otherwise-online publications and organizations have followed our lead and begun issuing physical copies of their own works, including magazines ranging from Arena Magazine to Works in Progress. Since it was Palladium that sparked this new wave of print media, it is worth explaining why we did it and why we continue to support the printed page.
Every quarterly print edition of Palladium features up to to ten of our best long-form essays, interviews, and on-the-ground reports, some previously published digitally and some coming out first in print. Although Palladium is a quarterly magazine, each edition does not cover the latest news and trends of the season, but is organized around an important and timeless theme: for example, our most recent edition is PALLADIUM 19: Long History, which looks at the growing genetic and archaeological evidence of a deep human prehistory of violent, organized, and even settled societies rather than undifferentiated small tribes. Other editions have covered artificial intelligence, biological enhancement, foreign policy, religion, the environment, space technology, and more. (If you aren’t already, become a Palladium member here to receive our print editions.)
The purpose of this thematic selection is to ensure that each edition of Palladium not only stays relevant long into the future, but becomes more relevant as it is proven prescient in light of new events, and therefore worth re-reading time and again with fresh eyes. These are not discardable rags whose only future value might be as a historical curiosity. They are intellectual, moral, and sometimes even spiritual guides to the transformative societal and technological issues facing us at the dawn of the Third Millennium.
We have taken care that they are built accordingly: each edition uses thick paper, firm binding, and quality ink that will let every letter, photograph, and art piece breathe in your hands for years to come. Text is just one part of the Palladium reading experience. Every edition is filled to the brim with evocative, memorable, and original works of art that bring the ideas and arguments of our contributors to life, and peppered with handpicked photographs and captions in the classic tradition of encyclopedias and other visual reference works.
Even when they are not being read but sitting on the coffee table, in the bookshelf, or at the office, every print Palladium serves as a conversation-starter, a token of social affiliation, a potential high-brow gift for a friend or colleague, and a reminder of the profound responsibility we share to understand and improve governance in our society. Our goal is to cultivate you, our readers, into long-term supporters and give you an elegant collection of these works for abiding reflection and admiration.
Print media needed no defense prior to the advent of the internet, which allowed words and images to be shared at greater speeds, in greater quantities, and at lower costs than ever before. Publishing on paper seemed like it would obviously become a quaint relic of the past. But as the internet itself has aged into being a legacy institution, its persistent drawbacks have become clear alongside its well-known advantages: the very same technology that allows so much more content to be made and shared has driven that content towards ephemerality, simplicity, and “presentism,” the tendency to focus on short-term events and factors over the influence of the past and potential of the future. Unlike print editions, the internet has proven vulnerable to link rot, retroactive censorship, and content getting paywalled or taken offline capriciously, never to be seen again.
Essentially no online platform or medium has been totally immune to this “slopifying” effect. Whole ecosystems of deep online thinking, like the old Blogosphere, have been effectively annihilated without replacement. Using the internet has never felt more like watching TV—mindlessly “doomscrolling” short-form text and video is just the “couch potato” of yesteryear reinvented with mobile rather than stationary screens. At this point, the question is not whether our screens are making us stupider, less discerning, and more forgetful, the question is just how much, and how bad the downstream effects are.
There is no algorithmic solution to this problem, because it is the predictable result of optimizing for users’ attention, which will remain the fundamental lifeblood of any online platform or media for the foreseeable future. The only solution to the problem is to reinsert watchful human curation into the loop between reader and content, and for readers to intentionally, consciously choose to donate their minds and money to media which elevate rather than enervate their thoughts and senses. By design, these will be less viscerally, momentarily stimulating. That is the point—and proof it is working.
In comparison to the cacophony of fleeting and irrelevant content available nowadays, it is not just print media but even dedicated online publications that seem obsolete. In a sense, they are—but only if you assume the purpose of a publication is to compete for attention online. The purpose of a publication is rather to build up a tradition of knowledge between writers and readers alike, and provide a socially legitimate and clearly-telegraphed way for new members from the rest of society’s intellectual landscape to join.
The ultimate goals are not to make the biggest financial profit or get the most impressive engagement metrics, but to experiment with new ideas, advance our collective knowledge, and bring our society’s thinking closer into line with reality. Our beautiful print editions sit at the heart of this strategy, incentivizing contributors to write words worth immortalizing in print, giving our readers access to this new vein of thought in governance, and allowing us to fund our crucial work without relying on ads or succumbing to the forces driving our literary culture to the lowest common denominator.
Subscription Member
$60 per month. Subscription to quarterly Palladium print editions.
Supporting Member
$200 per month. Priority invites to events and out-of-print editions of the magazine.*
Sustaining Member
$1000 per month. Gift of a complete print collection, private calls with our editorial team and other select benefits*
*All members also receive benefits of lower tiers. New subscribers will receive upcoming quarterly print editions. PALLADIUM 19: Long History ships internationally. Our print publication is a quarterly newsletter that informs members about our public interest research, reporting, and analysis.
We ship our print editions worldwide. Donations to Palladium Magazine are tax-deductible in the United States. Memberships are also tax-deductible. Print editions of PALLADIUM are gifts for our members and donors and are not, nor ever will be, for sale.
If you cannot or do not wish to receive print editions, you can still support Palladium monthly by subscribing to this newsletter here. You can make a large donation to Palladium here. If you wish to make Palladium a part of your philanthropy or strategic giving, contact us here.
Sincerely,
The Palladium Editors