Compact

Compact is an American digital magazine that launched in March 2022. It was co-founded by Edwin Aponte, a Marxist populist, along with Matthew Schmitz, a former editor at the conservative journal First Things, and Sohrab Ahmari, a journalist known for his conservative views. According to The New York Times, the magazine's editorial team is made up of individuals with a range of ideological perspectives, including Marxist feminists, conservative Catholics, and populists. The magazine takes a critical stance on liberalism, addressing it from both leftist and rightist viewpoints.

National

English

Online/Digital

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Ranking

Global

#178949

United States

#68439

Community and Society/Faith and Beliefs

#875

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Monthly visitors

Articles

The Rise and Fall of Urbit

1 week ago | compactmag.com | Adina Glickstein

During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, the privately owned realms of the internet became the obligatory venues for public life. As Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google saw their stock prices soar, I became more frustrated with how much of my time and attention was absorbed by Big Tech platforms. Even before the pandemic, group chats had grown into first-rate gossip venues and Zoom calls were displacing in-person meetings. Tech companies promised increased “connection,” but the reality was isolating.
The Anti-War Right Shouldn’t Give up on Trump

1 week ago | compactmag.com | Daniel McCarthy

Right-leaning critics of America’s wars are in despair today at the thought that President Trump has betrayed them. As soon as Israel launched its strikes against Iran last week, many anti-war conservatives and libertarians assumed America would inevitably be drawn in. By letting Benjamin Netanyahu start a war, they reasoned, Trump had as good as started it himself.
This Is Israel’s War

2 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Daniel McCarthy

The basic fact of the Israel-Iran war is that Israel is much stronger than its opponent. Iran’s retaliatory capabilities are limited, though not trivial. Not long ago, Hezbollah would have been the fiercest of those capabilities—but Israel dealt a crippling blow to Hezbollah months ago, and the ongoing war against Hamas has kept Israel alert to terrorist dangers from Palestine.
Class Warfare, LA Style

2 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Joel Kotkin

The most recent Los Angeles riots reflect, among other things, the response of immigrant activists to President Trump’s crackdown, and the latest resurgence of organized left-wing activism, which had been relatively quiet in the early months of the new administration. A less widely remarked factor, however, is the emerging and complex nature of class in contemporary America.
Frederick Forsyth, Man of Action

2 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Dominic Green

Frederick Forsyth, who died on June 9 at the age of 86, was a man of action—Royal Air Force fighter pilot, reporter in postcolonial Africa’s civil wars, even an MI6 spy—who became a novelist of action. Forsyth wrote thrillers—14 of them, as well as some short story collections, selling an estimated 75 million books. His first three novels are the classics: The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972), and The Dogs of War (1974).
Welcome to the Era of AI Doping

2 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Ryan Zickgraf |Ryan Smith

Earlier this month, Ohio State University unveiled its new “AI Fluency Program,” a campus-wide initiative designed to ensure that every student graduates fluent in artificial intelligence. Not merely familiar—fluent. The message is unmistakable: Using AI isn’t just permitted, it’s expected. Mastery of large language models is now a prerequisite for success, a kind of digital literacy for the age of optimization.
Elon’s Great Mistake

3 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Geoff Shullenberger

In a column published shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Compact’s editor-at-large Gregory Conti characterized the newfound alliance between MAGA populists and Big Tech oligarchs as an “anti-clerical coalition.” In the terms of the ancien régime, Conti explained, the Trump camp could be viewed as a united front of the second (nobility) and third (commoners) estates against the first—the clerisy made up of “the professional-managerial class and the HR departments, the...
The Ugly Side of the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’

3 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Patrick Brown

If you are inundated this fall with campaign ads alleging that “Republicans claim to support the working-class, but they cut food stamps for low-income kids to pay for a tax cut for millionaires,” just remember that outcome could have been avoided. There’s a lot in the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” that would make conservatives happy.
Walter Lippmann, Beyond Stereotypes

3 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Geoff Shullenberger

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual BiographyBy Tom Arnold-ForsterPrinceton, 353 pages, $35There is a genre of popular media history that traces the rise of the propaganda-saturated reality we now inhabit to the influence of particular individuals who had (or claimed to have) novel insights into major shifts in communication technology.
Germany by Other Means

1 month ago | compactmag.com | Clarke Micah |Peter Hitchens

Freedom: Memoirs 1954—2021by Angela MerkelSt. Martin’s Press, 720 pages, $40On a calm, cool September afternoon in 1939, an actual nightmare took solid form on the streets of the handsome town of Brest-Litovsk. I could say that Brest-Litovsk was in Poland, as it had been until that day. But it would not really be true. The town lies in those strange badlands where (if you are not murdered or deported by the latest invader) you may visit several countries in a lifetime without ever leaving home.