Fast Times in the Magazine Business
In this week’s New Yorker—the so-called Style Issue—I have a Books piece about a new memoir, by Graydon Carter, called “When the Going Was Good.” Carter co-founded Spy magazine, in the nineteen-eighties; briefly edited the New York Observer, from 1991 to 1992; and then, for twenty-five years, edited Vanity Fair, where he started the magazine’s well known Oscar Party and other glamorous, high-profile activities.
Carter, in his book, holds this period to be a golden age for the craft and the business of magazine-making. Was it? Over the years, I have somehow ended up as The New Yorker’s commentary chronicler of the rise and fall of the genre of work that we do. (Below, my pieces on the memoirs of a previous Vanity Fair—and indeed New Yorker—editor, Tina Brown, and on the longtime New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael.) Carter’s book is filled with anecdotes of excitement and excess in both creative and material forms, and includes characters from Dominick Dunne to Princess Margaret.
I took the essay as an occasion to think about creative life in a difficult moment: what it means, and how to prevent it from fading away.
“Leave with Dessert,” The New Yorker, March, 2025: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/24/when-the-going-was-good-graydon-carter-book-review
Sidecar: “Bold Type,” The New Yorker, November, 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/how-tina-brown-remixed-the-magazine
Sidecar: “What She Said,” The New Yorker, October, 2011: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/24/what-she-said
Que reste‐t‐il?
Nathan