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 Pandemic's Impact on Arts Attendance: Report from the NEA

The Arts Participation Patterns in 2022, is a report released by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) analyzing the results of the 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA).

The report explores how American adults participated in various arts activities over a 12-month period ending in July 2022, including attending arts events, creating art, reading books, and consuming art through digital media. The document highlights key findings, demographic differences in attendance rates, and provides an overview of the survey's methodology. The report also examines trends in arts participation, particularly in comparison to previous SPPA surveys conducted in 2017 and 2012.

One of the most striking findings is the overall decline in arts attendance. Compared to 2017, the rate dropped by almost six percentage points.

Attendance at performing arts events not specifically listed in the survey actually rose. This category, which encompasses genres like rock, folk, country, rap, hip-hop, comedy, improv, magic shows, and circus acts, saw participation grow to 21 percent of adults. This suggests a potential shift in audience preferences towards more diverse and non-traditional art forms.

The survey also highlighted the growing influence of social media in promoting arts events. Over 17 percent of adults reported first learning about an event they attended through social media, while 15 percent learned through friends, neighbors, or coworkers. This underscores the importance of digital platforms for arts organizations seeking to connect with audiences and build excitement for their programming.

Book readership, unfortunately, continued its downward trend. Fewer than 50 percent of adults reported reading any book in the past year, a decline of four and six points from 2017 and 2012, respectively. Novels and short stories experienced a particularly steep drop, with the reading rate diminishing by 17 percent over the past decade. This decline is concerning, raising questions about the future of literature and the factors contributing to this trend.

While the 2022 SPPA reveals a mixed landscape for arts participation, it offers valuable insights into the evolving ways Americans engage with the arts. The data underscores the resilience of art making, the growing importance of digital platforms, and the potential shift in audience preferences towards more diverse and accessible art forms. As the arts sector continues to recover from the pandemic, understanding these trends is crucial for developing strategies to promote participation and ensure the arts remain a vital part of American life.

How much is 'smarter' worth?

Seth Godin: 

Smarter about the process, about the effects, about planning. Smarter about leadership, about management, about measurement.

How much is smarter worth?

In my experience, smarter is almost always a bargain, something you can buy for a lot less than it's worth.

Indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world

Sam Leigh in The Guardian:

It would be a cliche to say that indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. But unsung they generally are: no indexer usually expects or receives credit by name in books where everyone from the font designer to the snapper of the author photograph tends to get a solemn shout-out. And heroes they are, too: the index is, in any nonfiction book, more useful than almost anything else in the apparatus. It is a map of the text; a cunningly devised series of magical shortcuts that can in the good case save a scholar many hours of work, and in the bad one save a bookshop-browsing cabinet minister from having to buy a former colleague’s memoirs.

What You Read Matters More Than You Might Think

Psychology Today: 

A study published in the International Journal of Business Administration in May, 2016, found that what students read in college directly effects the level of writing they achieve. In fact, researchers found that reading content and frequency may exert more significant impacts on students’ writing ability than writing instruction and writing frequency. Students who read academic journals, literary fiction, or general nonfiction wrote with greater syntactic sophistication (more complex sentences) than those who read genre fiction (mysteries, fantasy, or science fiction) or exclusively web-based aggregators like Reddit, Tumblr, and BuzzFeed. The highest scores went to those who read academic journals; the lowest scores went to those who relied solely on web-based content.