For the New York Times I reviewed Michael M. Grynbaum’s new book Empire of the Elite: Inside Conde Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America:
We may be facing a future without magazines, at least glossy ones, and passing into an era of disembodied media entities — an unholy maelstrom of websites, YouTube channels and, worst of all, podcasts. But the golden age of American magazines was very shiny indeed. In “Empire of the Elite,” Michael M. Grynbaum, a media reporter at The New York Times, has written a lively if elegiac chronicle of Condé Nast, the parent company to Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker, among several other titles, too many of them now defunct.
The book sketches its birth and early decades; its acquisition by the self-made newspaper magnate Samuel I. Newhouse in 1959; the dramas and triumphs of its fat decades under his heir, Si Jr.; and finally the deaths (Allure, Details, Domino, Lucky, Portfolio and Self all shuttered; the younger Newhouse himself gone in 2017 at age 89) and diminishments of this century, including the humanitarian crisis that resulted when the unlimited office supply of Orangina bottles was cut off.
You can read the rest here.