A flipbook asks you to turn pages that were designed for paper. That can be handsome. It is also a poor way to keep a public record. The page you want is trapped between the page before it and the page after it, and the only way through is the same gesture, over and over.
Frontpage is a room instead. The door is the masthead. The lead story is the table everyone sees first. The sections are the adjoining rooms, and the archive is the shelf you can walk to without asking anyone to rewind the issue. If you arrived for one piece, the address in the browser is the piece. You can send it to someone. You can come back to it next week and find it still there.
We kept the things a printed issue does well. There is a volume, a date, and an edition name, because a magazine should feel like it showed up on a particular morning. What we refused is the idea that the cover is the product. The product is the reading: a headline, a dek that tells you whether to stay, a byline, and a body set in a measure you can actually follow on a phone.
A document is hard to search, slow on a small screen, and awkward to correct. A page can be updated when a name is wrong or a date slips. A heading can be a heading, so someone listening to the page can move by section instead of guessing where the next column starts. That is not a feature list. It is hospitality.
If you are here for the first time, start with this piece, then the contents. If you are back, the earlier issue is two clicks away. Write when we get something wrong. The letters page is not decoration. It is how a publication stays honest.