A timely companion to former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s 2025 memoir, When the Going Was Good (which I previously reviewed), is the same year’s Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America, by Michael Grynbaum. Empire of the Elite covers much of the same ground as Carter, but with a journalistic detachment and a consideration of the Condé Nast publishing business’s other flagships, including Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, GQ, Anna Wintour’s Vogue, and the reinvented Vanity Fair run by British expatriate Tina Brown in the 1980s. Grynbaum has written a detailed and thoughtful history of the American magazine industry at its pre-internet peak, although, like Graydon Carter, he skims over the ultimate implications of its demise.

“Never before had so much cultural influence been concentrated under one roof,” the author states at the outset, “and it will never happen again.” Bought by the Newhouse newspaper family in 1959, the brand was struggling since its inception under entrepreneur Condé Montrose Nast during the Gilded Age of the early Twentieth Century, until the new boss’s playboy son Samuel Irving “Si” Newhouse began to quietly sink more of his fortune into the fashion, arts, and lifestyle publications which were barely breaking even for the company. In the decades on either side of the millennium, these titles grew to become synonymous with glamour, prestige, and sophistication, at least among their core audience and advertising base. By 1992, writes Grynbaum, “Si was now the sovereign of this elite, his will carried in the fiefs of fashion, entertainment, and celebrity by regents like Anna Wintour. Increasingly, the American zeitgeist was produced, packaged, choreographed, and marketed by the forces of Condé Nast.” Not until the emergence and eventual ubiquity of the internet in the new century did the money dry up and the party die down.

This is true across the board, of course, and the profligacy and hubris Grynbaum catalogues in the privately owned Newhouse stable (lavish budgets and indulgent perks for staff and subjects, no matter that the bottom lines were red as often as black) were only slightly more excessive than that of other publishers, record labels, and movie studios of the time. Most of Condé Nast’s competitors on the newsstands were also caught short when the world went online; the glossy, ad-heavy likes of Vogue and Vanity Fair just had further to fall. But the Newhouse magazines’ commercial ascent uniquely coincided with the conspicuous consumption sanctioned during the greed-is-good presidency of Ronald Reagan – likewise, the fixation on fame and “buzz” that characterized The New Yorker under Tina Brown developed just when sensational stories like the OJ Simpson trial had simply become too visible for highbrow institutions to ignore. “Tina’s approach was giving elite Americans permission to think seriously about subjects that the old version of the magazine had rarely deemed worthy of deep consideration: tabloid scandals, hit sitcoms, right-wing demagogues, porn stars,” Grynbaum observes.

In this sense, the printed pillars of the Condé Nast line were only indicators of larger trends: the shrinking middle class and the rise of a new-money aristocracy, and a social currency measured as much by attention as by wealth or political authority (a top-selling GQ issue of 1984 featured a brash young real estate tycoon named Donald Trump on its cover). But Grynbaum’s epilogue doesn’t devote much space to the backlash this has engendered. He describes the conflicts around diversity and representation that roiled editorial offices over the years, but gives only a paragraph or two to the consequences of the magazines’ trademark celebration of affluence. After the 2008 financial crash, he acknowledges, “The elites whose lives were romanticized, packaged, and sold to the masses by Condé as exemplars of American success were suddenly being recast as villains amid a populist surge.” No doubt.

Yet it’s not just that the struggling poor came to resent the opulent rich. Surely figures like Tina Brown, Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour, and Si Newhouse himself embodied the now-discredited roles of media “gatekeepers,” policing the boundaries of acceptable thought and taste according to their own rarefied standards. Little wonder that, since their downfall, any idea from the flakiest fad to the ugliest conspiracy theory can gain public traction precisely because the grandees of Condé Nast would never have anointed it buzz-worthy. At one point, Empire of the Elite lists a two-page roster of names and notions which prospective hires were expected to recognize before being invited on board, e.g. Richard Avedon, CAA, DKNY, Fassbinder, La Dolce Vita, Courtney Love, Pink Flamingos, The Seventh Seal, Cindy Sherman, Stonewall, and William Wegman. The Condé test – a quasi-official guide to what the chattering classes were allowed to chatter about – exemplifies the intellectual snobbery and cultural exclusivity of a bygone age, the troubled aftermath of which we are now all living in.

For what it’s worth, I scored about 70 percent.