[1][3] Sunkara credited his politicization to his reading as a teenager: from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm he developed an interest in Leon Trotsky, reading his autobiography and Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography, before progressing to the New Left, including thinkers such as Lucio Magri, Ralph Miliband, Perry Anderson and the journal New Left Review.

By the summer of 2010, he was preparing to return to his studies and inspired to create the magazine, which launched online in September of that year and in print at the beginning of 2011.

[1] Sunkara described Jacobin as a radical publication, "largely the product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieus like Dissent or New Politics".

[6] In late 2014, he was interviewed by New Left Review on the political orientation and future trajectory of the publication[1] and in March 2016 was featured in a lengthy Vox profile.

[6] He has appeared on the PBS Tavis Smiley program, MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes, and the FX show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.