Carter Vance writes the magazine's deepest narrative profiles. His pieces typically run between four and six thousand words, and he tends to sit with his subjects across multiple sittings rather than try to extract a profile from a single afternoon. He is unhurried in voice and unsentimental in posture; he treats the reporting process less like an interview and more like a slow patient watch.
Bylines
Three writers carry the magazine. Each files under their own name. Each retains editorial control of the pieces they write. The masthead is small on purpose.
Imogen Reilly is the magazine's culture critic. She writes about music, books, the visual arts, and the places where they collide with technology and capital. Her pieces sit at the intersection of criticism and reportage, and they tend to ask harder questions about taste, scene formation, and authorship than the field is generally comfortable with. She is suspicious of consensus and patient with ambivalence.
Soraya Halim covers the founders, scenes, and ecosystems of Asia for Frontier Bylines. Her dispatches range from Chiang Mai to Seoul to Singapore to Bangalore, and she tends to write the kind of feature that begins with a long scene in a specific room and slowly widens out into something structural about the region. She speaks four languages and writes in two of them.