Our mission

Kitchen Sink, the magazine for people who think too much, is a non-profit, quarterly print magazine that explores thought, art, culture, identity and politics. It is the premiere program of the Neighbor Lady Community Arts Project, an Oakland-based arts organization.

Founded by a community of writers, artists and editors in 2002, Kitchen Sink is a magazine dedicated to embracing and exploring the contradictions we find in all parts of our lives. Rather than obsess about these contradictions, we're working together to challenge our assumptions about the world, and expand our sense of ourselves, our community, our culture and politics.

Kitchen Sink provides an original take on whatever makes us think. Our music, art and film sections present essays rather than reviews. We also ponder the sustenance found in food, sex and god. Our political and social journalism challenges the status quo of liberal and conservative ideas alike. Although we readily admit we are consumers of ideas and culture, we hope that Kitchen Sink is not simply "content," or a consumer product: We aim to carefully examine what we put into our heads. And we encourage you to do the same.

Initially, Kitchen Sink was a magazine we made for ourselves and our friends. Now we ask you to join us in creating a forum for a growing community of artists, thinkers and editors who hope to confront and explore the world in which we live.

Let us know what you're thinking. We'll definitely return the favor.

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KS Magazine Sections

Louder Than Words
The mission of this section will be to contribute to a thoughtful discourse about music that focuses on its inherent worth, its potential for personally-assigned value. We listen to music as we engage the world, and we resist the commodification of what interests us, even as many of us are hooked on collecting and accumulating albums. We'll talk about music, not CD's; we'll write about bands, and the ways we hear them.
editor: Jeff Johnson

Reverse Angle
We strive to encompass a wide scope of filmic and digital entertainment - from movies to television to animated shorts - via well-written features, intriguing news briefs, sharp commentaries, humorous jabs, and interviews with both up-and-coming and established key figures. There will be even-handed coverage of mainstream and independent films; classic, cult and current movies; recent video releases and television shows.
editor: Sam Hurwitt

Untitled
The Kitchen Sink art section provides exposure to and discussion of the visual arts through essays, articles, stories, and interviews about and written by local and national artists. Additionally, we investigate the art world from a variety of perspectives and translate the visual experience of art through the occasional personal essay.
editor: Jen Loy

Paper City
The focus is not on the book business, or on trendy books that everyone's reading on the train. Rather, this section turns its lens on writing: practitioners, craft, habits, origins. Our interviews do not focus on the selling features of a text, but rather on the author's process. We investigate how ideas are born and brought into fruition, the influences authors have on one another, the way that other media (music, film, television, fine arts), politics and the mores of society feed into what people write. Rather than running reviews, we re-examine classic literature from a contemporary perspective, in order to understand and explain why forgotten books are still relevant. We also focus on authors in translation, writers who are still relatively obscure, and we question what makes a book "good" or even "readable". We examine how writing is taught, from elementary school through graduate programs, in order to understand how the seeds that usher new writers into the world begin to bear fruit.
editor: Elka Karl

R:evolution
Our politics and culture section delivers well-researched features on local and global matters. We want to investigate and expose malfeasance, wherever it happens; to hold power accountable to the people in this democracy; to hold the leaders accountable to their theoretical bosses.
editor: Jeff Johnson

Sex, Food and God
SFG explores the personal acts and material goods that sustain and enrich our lives. With humor, intelligence and rabid curiosity, Kitchen Sink examines sex, food, spirituality, travel and material goods with the intention of informing, entertaining and motivating the reader.
editor: Stephanie Kalem

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The Neighbor Lady Community Arts Project

NLCAP is a 501(c)3 nonprofit public benefit corporation dedicated to the promotion of the literary, visual and performance arts communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the coming years, we plan to promote these communities through programs including, but not limited to: