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MAGNIFIED NOBODY Nobody is a magazine that strive
s to tell stories about everything else. Its co-founders Sami Emory and Tessa Love tell us why stories often overlooked are the ones they are most passionate about. – Why did you decide to create Nobody and how did you come to know each other in the first place? Where did the intriguing title come from? T & S: Back in 2018, we were both new to Berlin and looking for friends. We met through a writing group of sorts and late one winter night, we found ourselves at a bar, just the two of us. We didn’t know each other that well at this point, and so we naturally reverted to a safe topic: the depressing state of the media landscape. This in turn led to us expressing our mutual frustration over the difficulty of getting the kinds of stories we wanted to work on out into the world. Eventually, we discovered that both of us had latent dreams of starting an indie magazine, but – for various reasons – had never taken the plunge. By our third drink, that realization turned into a decision: to start that magazine together and create a space for those stories – the slower kind, more focused on the emotional; on everyday experiences. We came up with the name Nobody that night, partly based on the fact that we ourselves were a couple of nobodies, but also because it encapsulated that same ethos: that a good story is worth telling, whether there’s a big name attached to it or not. Writers are pretty famous for coming up with ‘Big Plans’ over a few too many drinks in the back of smokey bars, but something about this idea just stuck. So while it did take us a while to get our first issue out in the world, it was a project we both really believed in: it wouldn’t let us quit. We just kept working on it – across continents and throughout a pandemic – and became close friends in the process. 46