Common Hours is an independent online magazine founded in 2025 to do one thing: long-form, careful reporting on the parts of life that move too slowly to make the daily wire feeds. We publish weekly across eight sections and gather each year's pieces into three quarterly issues.

We named the magazine after a line of Thoreau's: if I am not myself today, I shall be myself again at the end of a hundred common hours. We took it to mean that there is a kind of ordinary attention that, sustained over time, becomes something else. That is what we try to give the people and places we cover.

The magazine is run by a small editorial collective, the Common Hours Editorial Trust, which is constituted as a non-profit publisher. Decisions about coverage, accuracy, and editorial direction are taken by the trust independently of any commercial interest. We do not run display advertising. We are supported by reader subscriptions to the Sunday note, by occasional foundation grants, and by sales of an annual print anthology.

We publish under five named contributors who together edit and write the magazine. You can read about each of them on the contributor pages. Pieces are commissioned, reported, edited, fact-checked, and published in roughly four-week cycles. We are slow because the work asks it of us.

We hold ourselves to three standards we have written down in three short documents. Our editorial policy describes how we commission and fact-check. Our style guide describes what we mean by sentences. Our ethics statement describes what we do not do.

If you have a piece of work you think belongs here, you can write to us at editor@common-hours.co. If you have a correction, the same address.