The real threat to reading isn’t the time we spend hanging out, it’s the time we spend online.

I don't think much about the issues after they come out. I like it when people like them. Often, when people have criticisms, I find myself agreeing with them. I think some issues are stronger than others. I hope we're getting a little bit better, overall, issue by issue.

It used to be that you would go into a writing program and what you would learn was how to write a short story. You would pick up the magazines and you would be taught from the magazines how to write a short story. Nowadays student writers are learning to write novels because that market is gone, so the ones who are drawn to the form are doing it really for reasons of their own and that's really exciting.

In general, short stories are less read than before, they're less published than before and, not surprisingly, they're less taught than before.

A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation.

For me the question that you have to ask, about any magazine, is whether it's needed, whether it's publishing things that no one else could publish, or publish equally well. So there's that.

I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms.