Publication To Be Name Later: Resilience

Welcome to Publication to Be Named Later. Seriously, welcome. You made it here, to whatever place of vulnerable peace that is allowing you to enjoy a sports quarterly by a motley crew of writers, illustrators and editors. I hope you enjoy it — the zine, of course, but also the fleeting luxury of being able to sit and read and soak in something new and un-proven and exciting. Publication to Be Named Later — which, I must stress, will never be named later — is a child of the shitscape that was 2020. Its origins can be traced back to a series of Zoom calls among several now-former staffers of a website called SBNation.com. We’d all just been furloughed, and very much needed to figure out what we were doing next. We talked about doing a newsletter, website, Patreon, etc. We settled on a quarterly, the least au courant option possible, but the one that felt the most right. The idea was, essentially, to be a roving pirate ship for a bunch of suddenly out of work sports writers who were wading out into a chaotic environment. We’d have a rotating masthead so that we could pull in as many different people onto our deck as possible. The number of people associated with this issue of PTBNL is much larger than what you see within the pages. Contributors have hopped on and off as personal circumstances changed, and there are several more people helping behind the scenes. You won’t see their names in the credits, but they’re there, and this enterprise could not have happened without them. From a personal perspective, it has been a thrill to get to work with my friends again, as well as meet brilliant writers who weren’t part of the SB Nation ecosystem. From the beginning we’ve said that we’d like PTBNL to become a refuge for weird, inclusive and wonderful writing of any origin. I can’t wait to see who else this pirate ship picks up along its journey. But for now — RIGHT now — I’m going to try to find my peace. Every-one involved with this issue went through a lot, far too much to enumerate, to bring this to you. The theme of the issue is resilience. I don’t think that needs much explanation. Please enjoy. Sincerely, Louis Bien Editor in Chief, PTBNL Issue #1