Introduction
Adam Moss Introduction grew up during the golden age of magazines. It was the late Isixties. I was eleven. My parents were charter subscribers to New York magazine, and I remember flipping through one of the early issues, which I had picked up out of boredom, and find- ing myself unexpectedly excited. The magazine was sardonic, a little bratty, and very smart, and I, an ordinary misfit with out- sized curiosity, didn’t take long to realize it was much more enter- taining than television (which had been occupying all of my downtime; for a budding adolescent with nothing but downtime, that was a lot of television). The writing inNew York was showy and funny. It had what I later understood magazine people called “voice”— also swagger and, crucially, confidence. And because that was my first experience with magazines, those were proper- ties I associated with the form. The writers— Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin— were in many ways big names, almost as big as their subjects: Richard Nixon, Leonard Bernstein, and Joe Namath, to name a few. I eagerly awaited each new piece of cultural assassination (that’s what this kind of magazine did at the time), and when a new issue arrived, I would cackle at the sarcastic headlines on the cover, feel connected to the thrilling counterculture that was going on outside my personal purview, and grow, issue by issue, more sophisticated. xii Introduction But it wasn’t just New York. My parents were friends with an ad guy who used to get magazines for free, and they were piled high in his den: Rolling Stone, Ramparts, Harper’s, and Esquire.
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