New Yorker: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2024

This lavishly designed hardcover collects some of the most important articles published by the Asian American magazine Giant Robot, as well as memories from contributors and readers. “We were just writing about stuff we liked,” Martin Wong, the magazine’s co-editor, said. “We weren’t trying to define anything or change anything.” By the fourth issue, Giant Robothad graduated from a D.I.Y. stapled-and-Xeroxed zine to a standard-size, nationally distributed magazine with a full-color cover. What attracted people from the mid-nineties through 2011, when Giant Robot published its final issue, was its mixture of arrogance—the sense that it was made by people with a strident sense of taste—but also curiosity. Reading it, you got the sense that anything was worth reviewing—snacks, books, movies, seven-inch singles, Asian canned coffee drinks—and everyone was worth interviewing, if only so that you could learn a little more about the world around you.