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.

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.

The Grift: Maria Konnikova's new podcast

Maria Konnikova's new podcast:

Welcome to The Grift, a show about con artists and the lives they ruin. Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova takes us to the darker side of human nature and deceit. Ten stories about card sharks, cult leaders, art forgers, impostors and more. Why do we fall for them time and time again?

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.

A Few Words About That Ten-Million-Dollar Serial Comma

The New Yorker's Culture Desk:

Nothing, but nothing—profanity, transgender pronouns, apostrophe abuse—excites the passion of grammar geeks more than the serial, or Oxford, comma. People love it or hate it, and they are equally ferocious on both sides of the debate. Individual publications have guidelines that sink deep into the psyches of editors and writers. The Times, like most newspapers, does without the serial comma. At The New Yorker, it is a copy editor’s duty to deploy the serial comma, along with lots of other lip-smacking bits of punctuation, as a bulwark against barbarianism.

While advocates of the serial comma are happy for the truck drivers’ victory, it was actually the lack of said comma that won the day. Here are the facts of the case, for those who may have been pinned under a semicolon. According to Maine state law, workers are not entitled to overtime pay for the following activities: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.”

The issue is that, without a comma after “shipment,” the “packing for shipment or distribution” is a single activity. Truck drivers do not pack food, either for shipment or for distribution; they drive trucks and deliver it. Therefore, these exemptions do not apply to drivers, and Oakhurst Dairy owes them some ten million dollars.