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Still Alive

Still Alive (opens in a new tab) came about because of a joke. My sister-in-law Erin Somers had a bit on Twitter, about how there ought to be a magazine about people who you may be surprised to learn are still alive.

These might be older figures, but they could just be people you haven’t thought about for a long time, or perhaps people (or things) that have taken a few rough bounces. It was a simple conceit. In early 2023, Erin, my wife Bailey, their sister Molly, and my friend Paul Brophy set about making it real. Over the next two years, we published three print issues, built the website and the shop, created some fun merch, threw one great party (opens in a new tab), and published some writing that I still can’t quite believe. (Had you told me that this joke was going to lead to an original Anne Carson poem (opens in a new tab) or connecting with the filmmaker and photographer Michael Galinsky (opens in a new tab), a personal hero of mine since I bought Half-Cocked, his low-budget road movie from the ’90s, I wouldn’t have believed you.)

The Still Alive home page: the wordmark across the top, the current issue’s cover and contributor list at left, article cards at right.
The Still Alive homepage, with the prominent and winking wordmark.

I designed the logo and the website. The wordmark is a slab with an exclamation point, so that even if the magazine was real, it was clear our tongues were at least a bit in our cheeks.

The site went through a couple of directions before it landed. It keeps the print structure: this was a print-first magazine, so contributions are grouped by issue. But you don’t have to pick an issue to read anything, because the home page is one long scroll. Each issue’s cover and contributor list hold in place while its articles scroll past, so you always know which issue you’re in, and each issue links straight to the Shopify shop.

The home page scrolling: the issue’s cover and contributor list held in place at left while article cards scroll past at right.
The cover and issue description hold while the articles move, a subtle approach to emphasizing the relationship between an issue and its contents

It was a blast, and I’m still really fond of what we accomplished.

We collectively decided after the third issue that we were ready for a break: the effort of writing, laying out, printing and distributing was a bit much. (Was it a coincidence that these were the years after Twitter’s sale when it became particularly toxic, and no longer a useful platform to drive traffic to external publications? Probably not.) So we stepped back.

But in the Spring of 2026, there was one more gasp. Still Alive linked up with the platform and publication Dirt (opens in a new tab) to publish a one-off issue with a different, tabloid-newsprint form factor. For this one, I handled all the print layout, and really let the form factor guide the approach. Instead of gloss and color of the three main issues, the spring ‘26 issue took cues from alt weeklies, for both its design and its tone. Funny headlines wouldn’t have made quite as much sense in the main issues, but in a newsprint artifact like this, they fit right in. The issue’s existence was its own kind of joke: this kind of thing is still alive.

A stack of the newsprint supplement: the Still Alive wordmark above the coverlines — Psychoanalysis, Snoopy, Mennonites, Much more! — over a photo of Freud with his chow.
The spring ’26 supplement, on newsprint with Dirt: Freud very much dead, but psychoanalysis is still alive.