By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / December 1, 2025
Since editors Ava Hosseini and Kira Small — with the help of managing editor Grant Lindberg — started their seemingly modest endeavor to resurrect the underground newspaper, The Rag, that we published from 1966 to 1977 in Austin — ancient history, to most of you — their new zine, also tagged “The Rag,” has taken off like few could have imagined.
This week I’ve seen front page feature stories and meaty thought pieces about the importance of this new journalistic upstart. “Disillusioned UT seniors choose satire as a salve,” headlined the Austin American Statesman. With the subhead: “Pair revives 1960s publication forged in a similar fraught era.” “Counterculture magazine revived after nearly 50 years,” added The Daily Texan.
The head on an article in the San Antonio Express-News reads: “Disillusioned by UT, seniors choose humor over outrage — and revive 1960s-era newspaper.” “Why UT Students Are Reviving an Underground 1960s Newspaper,” headlined Texas Monthly in a substantive feature article — then, as a subhead, added, tongue firmly in cheek: “Instead of stalking our ex-boyfriends online, we started a newspaper.”
Some of The Rag’s founders, now nudging their 80s (don’t tell them I told you), offered encouragement and nuts and bolts advice, especially my colleague Alice Embree. We had a gathering of old and new at the editors’ home/office, which I attended. Alice was quoted in Texas Monthly, after watching Small speak to a group on the UT campus, “I was amazed at her courage to speak out, her energy.” Then she approached Small to offer help.
“Central to The Rag’s voice is its commitment to retaining the levity of the original — something that seems to come naturally to Hosseini and Small, “wrote Texas Monthly’s Sasha von Oldershausen. “Anger burns really quickly,” Small told her, “Humor is more sustainable.”
The San Antonio Express-News, in a photo cutline, said that “The Rag co-editors-in-chief Kira Small and Ava Hosseini run the revived University of Texas underground magazine out of their apartment in Austin. Started in the 1960s to combat censorship on campus, the revived left-leaning magazine describes current events with humor, quality reporting and witty drawings.”
From left: The original Rag‘s Richard Croxdale, The Rag‘s managing editor Grant Lindberg, The Rag’s co-editors Kira Small and Ava Hosseini. Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.
Lily Kepner, who writes for Hearst papers the Austin American-Statesman, San Antonio Express-News, and the Houston Chronicle wrote a feature piece that appeared in all three papers. In Kepner’s article, which covers the better part of two pages in the Statesman, she wrote: “The Rag — a countercultural, progressive magazine — first published Oct. 10, 1966 as part of a national underground syndicate of progressive magazines, seeking to counter the pro-Vietnam perspective. The inaugural issue, opposing the new conservative editor at The Daily Texan, combined advocacy, facts and humor in an attempt to rally the campus during an increasingly grave political moment.”
In 1972, Laurence Leamer, author of The Paper Revolutionaries, called the original Rag “one of the few legendary undergrounds” and historian John McMillian tagged The Rag a “spirited, quirky and humorous paper whose founders pushed the New Left’s political agenda even as they embraced the counterculture’s zeal for rock music, psychedelics, and personal liberation.” There would be hundreds of underground newspapers and Austin’s Rag, the first in the South, was among the most influential.
The Rag’s contemporary version could do worse than emulate such efforts in its own unique voice.
[Thorne Dreyer was the original editor of The Rag in 1966, soon joined by co-editor Carol Neiman. He has since edited the digital rebirth of The Rag — The Rag Blog — and the Rag Radio show which he hosts and produces on KOOP-FM in Austin. His latest books are Making Waves, published by the Briscoe Center for American History, and Notes From the Underground, published by the New Journalism Project.]
