Michael Grynbaum — Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America - with Ashley Parker

For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good life in America. The brilliant, complicated, striving characters behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest, and many other titles manufactured a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped consumer habits, cultural trends, intellectual attitudes, and political beliefs the world over. Condé's billionaire owner Si Newhouse and his stable of star editors, photographers, and writers were the gatekeepers who decided what and who mattered, and they offered those opinions to tens of millions of readers every month. They were the ultimate influencers--before social media changed everything. The magazines crowned celebrities by the dozens, patronized creative talent much as the Medicis had underwritten Renaissance artists, and supercharged opulent events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, which came to rival any fete that Louis XIV ever hosted at Versailles. The book is full of fresh behind-the-scenes reporting about a plethora of boldface names and sets out to explain how Condé Nast established itself as a de facto American aristocracy, anointing an elite and dictating the culture they presided over.The colorful story of Condé Nast at its zenith and the profound way it influenced how Americans aspired to look, eat, decorate, date, marry, and even think, has never been examined deeply. Empire of the Elite is the first book-length history of an empire whose publications refashioned American notions of prestige, whose editors became celebrities themselves, and whose diminution offers a cautionary tale of class, hubris, and technological change, even as its aesthetic and ethos remain influential to this day.PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668003916?ic_referral=X8IawU6qCsfr8uCwZyJBbangy40jItq61ACN4eZFJEMwM6MQXdykwKmu-PXVV9n5Lb0mMn13h0a1LzqyX-bhHJizf_jVdceTBp5IBQFbGudjXM281mACp0GoG8fdHQNikJrdojUMichael M. Grynbaum is a correspondent for The New York Times, where he covers media, politics, and culture. Since joining The New York Times as a staff writer at age twenty-two, he has reported on three presidential campaigns, two New York City mayors, and the 2008 financial crisis. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in history and literature, and lives in Manhattan.Grynbaum is in conversation with Ashley Parker. Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, Parker—a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner—spent eight years at The Washington Post, where she covered all four years of Donald Trump’s first presidency, was White House bureau chief during President Joe Biden’s first two years, and covered the 2024 presidential campaign as the senior national political correspondent. Before that, she spent more than a decade at The New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress. She is also a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.