It has been six short years — and yet unfathomably long years — since we first launched Nerve on June 26, 1997. Six short years of wringing raw, mordantly honest writing and photography out of some of the great young talents of our day.

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Six short years of debauched, sometimes exhibitionistic parties, spanking machines, televised streaking, dalliances with lumbering media conglomerates, and ever-shifting stratagems for expansion. Meanwhile, it has been six long years of eating dinner at our desks, scraping by on the munificence of private investors, and, more recently, building real and growing revenue streams that should sustain an increasingly interesting, wry and raucous publication for decades to come.
    When Genevieve Field and I dropped the sandbags almost seven years ago, we had no idea what we were in for. Thank God. Our obliviousness to the obstacles — that age-old advantage of the young — made it possible to start an improbable magazine and persevere, cheerfully unaware of the successive market realities that we would barrel into like Johnny Knoxville in a shopping cart.

The first three Nerve employees: Joey (Nerve's first designer), Genevieve and Rufus, sitting on the set used for the original Nerve homepage.

    What propelled us was our conviction that a smart magazine about sex — one that appealed to women as well as men — was culturally possible. And then there was the polar incentive: the job that I had before founding Nerve was gradually killing me. At the time, I was an editor at a small book publisher known for humorous cookbooks and meditations for overworked cats. It was clever fluff, soulless and marketable. It was a good job that I was fighting a losing battle to care about. It wasn't so much unpleasant as deadening, anesthetizing, as if Novocain were being gradually injected into my heels, causing me to lose sensation in shins, knees, thighs, and on up.
    This has always been my greatest fear — not poverty or terrorism or death but rather complacency, drowsy comfort, losing sentience in incremental voluntary concessions. Resisting this suburban American anaesthesia was part of Nerve's original mandate — not celebrating sex or edgy music and film per se, but rather celebrating the fact that we all eat, sleep, piss, shit, and fuck. This is extraordinary and a big, fat common denominator that binds us all on some level. Astronauts see human commonality in the image of a blue, borderless planet, Catholics in the Virgin Mary, and we see it in two grimacing people on all fours, vibrating like a paint mixer.

Rufus sleeping away on Long Island, where Nerve's offices moved for a week in 1998.

Anyway, just as launching Nerve was a form of professional shock therapy for us six years ago, part of our mission as a magazine — and we are just beginning this enterprise — has been to function as a cultural smelling salt, a slightly less deodorized portion of American media.
    Returning to the narrative, in late 1996 Genevieve and I had on the one hand this idea for a magazine — clearly indulgent, farfetched and unconstrained by normal business planning — and on the other hand an all-too-rational fear of failure. The consequences of launching Nerve, even if it worked, were obvious: My family would be traumatized, any future in politics would be shot (not that I had any plans, but it's always nice to fantasize), and I would be flat broke for a long, long time.

Generic debauched party, circa 1998.

    Six-and-a-half years later, it's safe to say these fears have been borne out: my family members are either traumatized, in denial, or under thirty; we did subsist on canned split-pea soup for a good four years; and it's fair to say that even the most whimsical midday thought about a career in public service has been fully extinguished. These are things that I expected. Less expected was that I would hurt my then-girlfriend's feelings by writing about bad sex, suffer amnesia during a live interview on CNN, offend Christy Hefner over lunch in Chicago, expose my blurry willie to viewers of 60 Minutes II and lose a distribution deal with AOL Latin America because of a leaked story that ran in the New York Post entitled "AOL Gets in Bed with Smut."
    Every bit as surprising has been the emergence of online dating — Nerve Personals — as one of our core revenue streams, in addition to advertising and Nerve Premium subscriptions. It was part of our business plan in 1997, but we didn't foresee how central it would be to our survival and growth. We have spun off a separate company, Spring Street Networks, that powers online personals for hundreds of media companies — definitely not something we would have predicted even a few years ago.
    I am most grateful that we are still here making trouble — putting out a magazine every day that is genuinely different from the rest of the pack, and providing a community for the interesting collection of people who read it. Though we haven't issued a press release in a couple years, we have been profitable for about a year now, gradually adding new content and features as our revenues grow. I think Nerve has never been better — it's less pretentious, sassier, bolder in its cultural coverage, and every bit as irreverent.

Em, Lo, Rufus and Alisa in the "Nervemobile," which is currently "in the shop."

This is entirely because of our wildly talented and dedicated team — all I take credit for, at this juncture, is finding them.
    Nerve is also changing, as all magazines must. We are broadening our purview and readership, publishing a magazine that's out to make a dent in American culture. Six years ago we were hungry to prove that we could put out a serious literary and art photography magazine; today that's an important part of the mix, but we are also upping the dosage of funny, hot, and occasionally (brace yourself) useful features — in short, straddling high and low culture like an eager farmhand.
    It's been a great ride, bumps notwithstanding, and six years later, I think we are hitting our stride. As always, please send us your thoughts, whether confessions, manifestos, harrumphs or hallelujahs. Thanks for reading, double thanks to those of you who have subscribed, and I hope you'll join us for another rollicking half-dozen years.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rufus left his reliable salary and position as an editor and director of new media at Cader Books, a publisher of bestselling humor and entertainment titles, in order to co-found Nerve in 1997 with Genevieve Field.      Before working at Cader, he was managing editor for two years at August House, a publisher of contemporary storytelling and folklore. Earlier still, he was book review editor at The Free Press in Little Rock, Arkansas. His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Baltimore Sun and The Wall Street Journal, among other places. He graduated from Brown University in 1991.