This issue of New Left Review follows the launch of Sidecar, a short-form online companion to the journal. ‘Don’t tell me nlr has reinvented the blog, twenty years on’, remarked a wag on Twitter. The form, in fact, is so protean and amoebic that each iteration has a character of its own. For the left, the heroic age of the blog lies in the darkest years of the Bush–Blair era, when isolated figures like Mark Fisher typed their thoughts by plasma light—a genre continued in high style in France today by Frédéric Lordon at La pompe à phynance. As soon as print magazines began to publish new material on their websites, each took on its own style. At the London Review of Books, Thomas Jones has run a carefully curated chamber version of the paper from deepest Umbria since 2009; contributions are quizzical, ruminative, often autobiographical. At the other end of the spectrum, journals like Jacobin and n+1 make a categorical distinction between ‘magazine’ and ‘online’. At Jacobin, there is a sharp contrast between the thematically structured quarterly magazine, with its high-gloss aesthetic, and the pell-mell publishing of its online section which turns out over thirty items a week, of varying though often impressive quality, mainly focused on the immediate concerns of the American left. At n+1, coverage is again largely domestic, but here the conventional relation of paper to pixel has been upended; in recent years, the most arresting and original work is often to be found online.