I wish I could say I discovered Jacobin at Occupy Wall Street, or while canvassing for Bernie Sanders, or at some other event that would categorize me as your average millennial who became a socialist in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. But I didn’t.

By the time Jacobin launched, I had finished college and moved to Europe to escape the grim American job market and equally grim American political landscape. None of its early issues showed up on my radar, despite following Occupy and the literature around it closely.

In fact, the first Jacobin article I remember reading is a 2012 piece by Gavin Mueller about Sex House, an obscure satire of reality TV produced by the Onion that I was a fan of at the time. I had heard of the magazine prior to that, but it was a critical reading of a YouTube series informed by autonomist Marxism that finally got me to sit up and take notice. Impressed by the well-crafted prose and the novelty of a socialist magazine producing an intelligent discussion of nerdy internet humor, I quickly subscribed and eventually was even asked to write a few articles myself. Though I was grateful for the opportunity to pivot away from the more sectarian socialist politics I was engaged in at the time, only later did I grasp to what extent Jacobin would redefine what it meant to be a socialist for my generation and, hopefully, many more to come.