Nerve is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 online magazine

Online magazine

An online magazine shares some features with a blog and also with online newspapers, but can usually be distinguished by its approach to editorial control...

 dedicated to sex, relationships and culture. Founded by Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field, it publishes articles and photography. It also hosts blog

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

s, forums, and a section for personal advertisements. Nerve's CEO is Sean Mills. Regular and past contributors include Rick Moody

Rick Moody

Rick Moody is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of...

, Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories , and The O. Henry Prize Stories .-Life:Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky...

, Lisa Carver, Steve Almond

Steve Almond

Steve Almond is an American short story writer and essayist. He is the author of eight books.-Life:He was raised in Palo Alto, California, and graduated from Henry M. Gunn High School. He received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University. He spent seven years as a newspaper reporter,...

, Neil LaBute

Neil LaBute

Neil N. LaBute is an American film director, screenwriter and playwright.-Early life:LaBute was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Marian, a hospital receptionist, and Richard LaBute, a long-haul truck driver. LaBute is of French Canadian, English and Irish ancestry, and was raised in Spokane,...

, Kevin Keck

Kevin Keck

Kevin Keck is an American essayist and poet. His writing is largely autobiographical. He is best known for his collection of personal essays Oedipus Wrecked , which chronicles his sexual coming-of-age in a humorous style that is often compared to David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell...

, and Neal Pollack

Neal Pollack

Neal Pollack is an American satirist, novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He lives in Austin, Texas. Pollack has written six books: The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, Never Mind the Pollacks, Beneath the Axis of Evil, Alternadad, Stretch, and Jewball. He is a member of...

.

Nerve Media has produced several books, including The Big Bang: Nerve's Guide to the New Sexual Universe, Sex Etiquette, Full Frontal Fiction, The New Nude and Sex Advice From....

History

The site was founded in 1997 by Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field with the goal of creating a smart sex magazine that men and women could enjoy. It has subsequently evolved into a more general site about love and culture. Nerve is often cited as one of the few Silicon Alley

Silicon Alley

Silicon Alley is a nickname for an area with a concentration of Internet and new media companies in Manhattan, New York City. Originally, the term referred to the cluster of such companies extending from the Flatiron District down to SoHo and TriBeCa along the Broadway corridor, but as the location...

 success stories.

Mission statement

Nerve is a fearless and intelligent magazine about sex, relationships and pop culture. With cliché-shattering personal essays, interviews, reporting and criticism, we explore the predominant concerns of young men and women with peerless honesty and wit. Our mission is to apply the highest editorial standards of the print magazine world with the best online innovation to deliver (1) an editorial voice that doesn't exist anywhere else, online or offline, and (2) an interactive online experience that harnesses the creativity of our exceptionally clever readership.

Website features

Nerve content is divided into six sections.

1. The Features section includes: personal essays, fiction, dispatches (reported pieces) and “regulars” (recurring columns). Current "regulars" include I Did It For Science, My First Time, and The Nerve Debate.
2. The Advice section includes Miss Information, Sex Advice From..., a satirical look at other advice columns called Awesome Advice - Way to Go, and Dan Savage's syndicated column, Savage Love.
3. The Entertainment section includes film, music, books and television coverage.
4. The Blogs section includes Scanner (daily pop-culture coverage) and Tools of Attraction (personal style/design).
5. Dating Confessions, a user-generated collection of short posts regarding sex and romance.

Writers

• Erin Bradley
• Camille Paglia
  Camille Paglia
  Camille Anna Paglia , is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984...
  
  
• Spalding Gray
  Spalding Gray
  Spalding Rockwell Gray was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, performance artist and monologuist...
  
  
• Elizabeth Wurtzel
  Elizabeth Wurtzel
  Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel is an American corporate attorney, writer and journalist, known for her work in the confessional memoir genre. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.-Early life:...
  
  
• Neal Labute
• Naomi Wolf
  Naomi Wolf
  Naomi Wolf is an American author and political consultant. With the publication of The Beauty Myth, she became a leading spokesperson of what was later described as the third wave of the feminist movement.-Biography:...
  
  
• Jonathan Lethem
  Jonathan Lethem
  Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...
  
  
• Chuck Palahniuk
  Chuck Palahniuk
  Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...
  
  
• Joyce Carol Oates
  Joyce Carol Oates
  Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...
  
  
• Nick Antosca
  Nick Antosca
  Nick Antosca is an American author of literary fiction. He is the author of two novels: Fires and Midnight Picnic . Midnight Picnic was set to be published by Impetus Press, but the small publisher folded under financial pressure in the fall of 2008...
  
  
• Nan Goldin
  Nan Goldin
  Nancy "Nan" Goldin is an American photographer.-Life and work:Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Lexington, to middle class Jewish parents whose ideas, moderately liberal and progressive, were put to the test when on April 12, 1965 their eldest...
  
  
• Erica Jong
  Erica Jong
  Erica Jong is an American author and teacher best known for her fiction and poetry.-Career:A 1963 graduate of Barnard College, and with an M.A...
  
  
• Daphne Merkin
  Daphne Merkin
  Daphne Miriam Merkin is a literary critic, essayist and novelist. Merkin is a graduate of Barnard College. She also attended Columbia University's graduate program in English literature....
  
  
• William T. Vollman
• Joycelyn Elders
• Jay McInerney
  Jay McInerney
  John Barrett McInerney Jr. is an American writer. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; and The Last of the Savages...
  
  
• JT Leroy
  JT LeRoy
  Jeremiah "Terminator" LeRoy was a pseudonym created by American writer Laura Albert. The name was used from 1996 on for publication in magazines such as Nerve and Shout NY. After his first novel Sarah was published, "LeRoy" started making public appearances...
  
  
• Tao Lin
  Tao Lin
  Tao Lin is an American writer. He was born of Taiwanese parents and grew up on the East Coast of the USA.He is the author of two novels, Eeeee Eee Eeee and Richard Yates ; a novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel ; a short story collection, Bed ; and two poetry collections, you are a little...
  
  
• Brian Fairbanks
• Mary Gaitskill
  Mary Gaitskill
  Mary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories , and The O. Henry Prize Stories .-Life:Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky...
  
  
• Robert Olen Butler
  Robert Olen Butler
  Robert Olen Butler is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.-Early life:...
  
  
• Sylvia Plachy
  Sylvia Plachy
  Sylvia Plachy is a Hungarian/American photographer.Plachy was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her Czech Jewish mother was in hiding in fear of Nazi persecution during World War II. Her father was a Hungarian Roman Catholic aristocrat and she was raised in his faith.Plachy's family moved to New York...
  
  
• Charles Simic
  Charles Simic
  Dušan "Charles" Simić is a Serbian-American poet, and was co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.-Early years:...
  
  
• Sallie Tisdale
• Yusef Komunyakaa
  Yusef Komunyakaa
  Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who currently teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly...
  
  
• Norman Mailer
  Norman Mailer
  Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
  
  
• Jonathan Safran Foer
  Jonathan Safran Foer
  Jonathan Safran Foer is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close...
  
  
• Rick Moody
  Rick Moody
  Rick Moody is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of...
  
  
• Andres Serrano
  Andres Serrano
  Andres Serrano is an American photographer and artist who has become notorious through his photos of corpses and his use of feces and bodily fluids in his work, notably his controversial work "Piss Christ", a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported...
  
  
• Mary Karr
  Mary Karr
  Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club...
  
  
• Emily Farris
• A.M. Homes
• Michael Medved
  Michael Medved
  Michael Medved is an American radio host, author, political commentator and film critic. His Seattle, Washington-based nationally syndicated talk show, The Michael Medved Show, airs throughout the U.S...
  
  
• Amy Bloom
  Amy Bloom
  Amy Bloom is an American writer. She has been nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.-Biography:...
  
  
• Marge Piercy
  Marge Piercy
  Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.-Biography:...
  
  
• Alice Sebold
  Alice Sebold
  Alice Sebold is an American novelist. She has published three books: Lucky , The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon .-Early life:...
  
  
• Lisa Carver
• Kevin Keck
  Kevin Keck
  Kevin Keck is an American essayist and poet. His writing is largely autobiographical. He is best known for his collection of personal essays Oedipus Wrecked , which chronicles his sexual coming-of-age in a humorous style that is often compared to David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell...
  
  
• Jonathan Ames
  Jonathan Ames
  Jonathan Ames is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs. He was a columnist for the New York Press for several years, and became known for self-deprecating tales of his sexual misadventures. He also has a long-time envy of boxing, appearing occasionally in the ring...
  
  
• Ryan Sloan

Books

• Smut: Volume 2 (2009)
• 2033: The Future of Misbehavior (2007)
• Naughty Crosswords: Nerve.com Presents Fifty Sexy and Outrageous Puzzles (Spiral-bound) (2006)
• Sex Advice From... (2006)
• Position of the Day (2003)
• The Big Bang (2003)
• Classic Nasty: More Naughty Bits (2003)
• The Lisa Diaries (2002)
• The Naughty Bits (2001)
• Full Frontal Fiction (2000)
• The New Nude (2000)
• Nerve: Literate Smut (1998)

Television

An HBO special called Nerve.com: Downloading Sex premiered in 2001 and still airs periodically on HBO.

Print magazine

Nerve published a bimonthly print magazine from 2000 to 2001. The magazine attracted subscribers, but had difficulty achieving significant newsstand sales, in part due to distribution and racking issues. The magazine's sexual content made non-endemic ad sales a challenge, and the lack of advertising revenue led to a suspension of publication after six issues.

Nerve Personals

Although they originated on Nerve, the personals are now part of a larger network of over 100 websites and print publications.

Audio CD

Nerve released a spoken-word CD in 2000 called Sweet and Vicious. It featured Nerve content being read by authors and actors, including Parker Posey.

Awards

• 2006 Webby Award Nominee, Best Copy/Writing
• 2005 National Magazine Award Finalist, General Excellence Online
• 2005 American Photography 20 Award (2)
• 2004 Forbes "Best of the Web" Selection
• 2004 American Photography 20 Award (2)
• 2001 GLAAD "Outstanding Digital Journalism" Award
• 2001 Webby Judge's Award, Print and Zine
• 2000 Webby People's Voice Award, Print and Zine
• 2000 National Magazine Award Nominee, Online Design
• 1999 Entertainment Weekly’s "30 Most Beautiful Sites" Selection