The Editorial Choices That Shaped Culture: What 25 Magazine Covers Reveal About Pre-Algorithm Curation

The New York Times T Magazine convened five experts to debate the most influential magazine covers of all time. Read the full conversation here and see all nominations here.

The panel: Gayle King (Oprah Daily editor at large, CBS Mornings co-host), David Remnick (The New Yorker editor), Adam Moss (former editor of New York Magazine and The New York Times Magazine), artist Martha Rosler, and Patrick Li (T Magazine's creative director). They met in May 2025, spent hours arguing, and produced an unranked list of 25 covers spanning American magazines from 1916 to 2018.

What emerged wasn't nostalgia. It was a case study in how editorial curation functioned before algorithmic feeds.

What Made These Covers Matter
The panel couldn't agree on what "influential" meant. Some argued for aesthetic innovation (Erwin Blumenfeld's abstracted Vogue face, 1950). Others prioritized cultural impact (Ellen DeGeneres's Time coming-out cover, 1997). Still others valued editorial courage (Newsweek's "Women in Revolt," published the same day female staffers sued for discrimination, 1970).

The covers that made the final list combined visual craft with cultural timing: George Lois's Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian for Esquire (1968), shot weeks after Ali refused the Vietnam draft. National Lampoon's darkly satirical hostage dog (1973). The New Yorker's black-on-black 9/11 towers (2001). New York Magazine's 35 Cosby accusers (2015).

Each required someone to make choices about what audiences should see, how they should see it, and why it mattered.

The Personal Context
For those of us who grew up with magazine subscriptions, this wasn't abstract. Magazines were how you discovered things you didn't know to look for. Wired taught me technology as philosophy. Premiere showed me film as industry and art. The many I subscribed to became an education in visual storytelling and editorial voice.

The critical difference from today's feeds: you couldn't skip what didn't appeal to you. You confronted images and ideas you might not have chosen. That friction created unexpected discovery.

Why This Matters
The T Magazine conversation functions as a time capsule of pre-algorithmic media. Before personalization engines, before infinite scroll, magazines demonstrated that how you present an idea matters as much as the idea itself.

The panel debates what's actually lost. Not just a format, but a specific kind of cultural mediation. When editors made choices, they created shared reference points. When millions saw the same cover simultaneously, it became a cultural event in ways algorithmically distributed content rarely achieves.

The question isn't whether magazines will return in that form. They won't. The question is whether the principles behind great magazine covers (intention, craft, surprise, risk) remain relevant when everyone is both creator and curator.

They do. Smarter creativity means knowing what to amplify and what to resist.

The iconic and era-defining work of Milton Glaser

Just as what is arguably his most iconic and well-known work gets updated (perhaps ineffectively) and a new anthology of his work is released, The New Yorker has a comprehensive profile on Milton Glaser by Adam Gopnik:

No art director’s work was more influential or instantly identifiable than that of Milton Glaser. The extent of that style, which adorned books and records and movies—and is revealed in a new anthology from Monacelli, courtesy of Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber, titled simply “Milton Glaser: Pop”—is astounding. Glaser was famous as the co-founder and original design director of ‘New York’ and as a creator of two images that helped define two decades. One was the 1966 poster of Bob Dylan that showed him with snakelike hair blossoming into a skein of rainbows. The other was the 1976 “I❤️NY” logo—which was commissioned by the State of New York but promptly adopted as a local symbol of the city, and, being keyed to the city’s unexpected revival, is the closest thing there has ever been to a logo that changed social history.

But Glaser’s real achievement lies in what the book lays out: a breathtaking empire of imagery that encompassed both decades and more. Anyone who came of age in the sixties and seventies will be astonished to discover that so much of the look of the time was specifically the work of Milton Glaser and Push Pin Studios, which he founded with Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel and then oversaw.

Reading the above intro to the profile I can’t help but wonder, is that the last time the graphic design on a poster or a logo had that much impact and influence?

Tech as Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium

The report Tech as Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium, presents findings from a field scan commissioned in 2019 by the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Ford Foundation and the Knight Foundation:

This report is the result of a two-year research initiative exploring the multifaceted creative practices of artists who engage with digital technologies. The research examines the creative infrastructure supporting tech-focused artistic practices and provides insight into the existing challenges and opportunities faced by artists and organizations working at the intersection of arts and technology.

The report (available here) shares detailed findings; identifies challenges; and ends with recommendations for different stakeholder groups, including funders, arts practitioners, policymakers, and educators. Of particular interest to me is the section addressing artists creating projects within and between virtual worlds using extended reality technologies to create completely new forms of art experiences never seen before.

The following essays were commissioned as a companion to the report:

“Recoding the Master’s Tools: Artists Remake Systems of Oppression and Extraction in Technology” by Vanessa Chang

“How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity” by Agnes Chavez

“Teaching the Co-Creators of a New Economy from Lincoln, Nebraska” by Megan Elliott

“Artist Perspective: Building Afrocentric Technoculture and Community” by Ari Melenciano

“Space, Time, Sustainability, Community: Giving Digital Artists What They Need” by Stephanie Pereira

“How the Arts Sector Can Support Transformational Technology” by Omari Rush

“Funder Perspective: Broadening Support for Arts and Technology” by Eleanor Savage

“Future World-building Depends on Artists and Collaborative Networks” by Kamal Sinclair

“Where Is the Public Discourse Around Art and Technology?” by Hrag Vartanian

“A Call-to-Action in STEAM Education” by S. Craig Watkins

Building the next computing user interface

Craig Grannell, writing for Wired UK, delves into Apple’s announcements during the recently concluded World Wide Developer Conference and what role they may have in making audio the next big user interface:

This infatuation with audio is also a refreshing change in a world routinely obsessed with what you see rather than what you hear. We’re so often informed about innovations in AR and VR, dazzling environments and visual immersion. But voice UI and audio are just as important –and, in some ways, more so when you consider Apple’s reasoning regarding focus and clarity.

Much of what you can glean from AR you can get from audio, and with fewer distractions. An always-on AR overlay can be disruptive and in your face. It changes how you experience and interact with the world, in a not necessarily positive fashion. Audio input, by contrast, is fleeting and focused. It enhances the concept of mindful and meaningful tech use, in context, unlike equipping all humans with a heads-up display. Bose tried something similar with its Frames audio glasses, but couldn’t stay the course.

A counterpoint argument is that Apple Glasses are long-rumoured and may appear in the near future. But, even then, it’s the union of the senses combined with the foundations Apple is laying that will make them all the more powerful. Apple is being considered about the audio layer to the point than if visuals are added, the company will have a big advantage over rivals trying to do everything at once – or, worse, multiple organisations attempting to combine fragmented resources to achieve the same goal. Plus, importantly, Apple has that sense of focus.

While Grannell focused on audio, the work Apple is doing for accessibility across all their devices and operating systems is what resonates with me. In a special 10 minute session titled Accessibility by design: An Apple Watch for everyone Apple engineers and designers highlight their approach to accessible design, iteration and community engagement.

I suggest you watch the whole session, but if you prefer you can jump ahead to around the 6 minute mark, where you can see the Apple Watch team addressing this question ‘could we create a completely gesture-based human-to-computer interaction?’ and see what they achieved using four very simple hand gestures to fully control the watch, which feels like an evolved version of hand tracking for head mounted displays.

That pursuit of “gesture-based human-to-computer interactions” sounds very much like the development of a new user interface. Between the accessibility features on AirPods Pro with spatial audio and the accessibility features on Apple Watch and the many years of accessibility design work, Apple appears to be introducing features that are helpful to many right now, while simultaneously getting everyone used to those features and how they work. In the process creating the human interface for spatial computing.

The simple genius of a good graphic

In a talk that's part history lesson, part love letter to graphics, information designer Tommy McCall traces the centuries-long evolution of charts and diagrams -- and shows how complex data can be sculpted into beautiful shapes. "Graphics that help us think faster, or see a book's worth of information on a single page, are the key to unlocking new discoveries," McCall says.

In a talk that's part history lesson, part love letter to graphics, information designer Tommy McCall traces the centuries-long evolution of charts and diagrams -- and shows how complex data can be sculpted into beautiful shapes. "Graphics that help us think faster, or see a book's worth of information on a single page, are the key to unlocking new discoveries," McCall says.