A well-crafted portrait of a publishing house whose fortunes reflect those of the magazine industry as a whole.
New York Times media writer Grynbaum looks under the hood of the Condé Nast publishing dynasty.
Condé Nast—the person, not the empire—was a Missourian who came to New York at the invitation of a college classmate, Robert Collier, to work on the family-owned magazine. Collier’s soon became a haven for contemporary stars like Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Nast worked similar magic on Vogue, “barely solvent and barely read beyond a handful of drawing rooms on Fifth Avenue.” His business model, “class, not mass,” was, as Grynbaum notes, perhaps counterintuitive, but it captured the aspirations of readers at the end of the Gilded Age. When Condé Nast’s stable of magazines went up for sale, it was eventually acquired by the Newhouse family, “an afterthought in the power centers of Wall Street, Washington, and Hollywood,” and turned over without much enthusiasm to Si Newhouse, while his younger brother controlled the much more lucrative newspaper portfolio. Si, by Grynbaum’s account, worked the old Condé Nast formula, retooled for the age of Reagan—not for nothing did he found a magazine called Self, which spoke perfectly to the self-absorbed 1980s. He hired working- and middle-class youngsters—Graydon Carter, Tina Brown, David Remnick, Art Cooper—to make of magazines like GQ, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair a celebration of cultivated leisure, paying a king’s ransom in salaries and perks. He also, like the founder, brought in huge talents such as E.L. Doctorow, Tom Wolfe, and Susan Sontag to appear alongside movie and pop-culture stars. As Grynbaum notes, it worked for a while—Remnick even made the New Yorker profitable—but now the empire is crumbling, with its CEO declaring, “This is no longer a magazine company.”
A well-crafted portrait of a publishing house whose fortunes reflect those of the magazine industry as a whole.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781668003916
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Another chapter in a long fight against inequality.
Building on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which this year drew 280,000 people to rallies in red and blue states, Sanders amplifies his enduring campaign for economic fairness. The Vermont senator offers well-timed advice for combating corruption and issues a robust plea for national soul-searching. His argument rests on alarming data on the widening wealth gap’s impact on democracy. Bolstered by a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed campaign finance limits, “100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion” on 2024 elections. Sanders focuses on the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, describing their enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans and big social safety net cuts, as the “largest transfer of wealth” in living memory. But as is his custom, he spreads the blame, dinging Democrats for courting wealthy donors while ignoring the “needs and suffering” of the working class. “Trump filled the political vacuum that the Democrats created,” he writes, a resonant diagnosis. Urging readers not to surrender to despair, Sanders offers numerous legislative proposals. These would empower labor unions, cut the workweek to 32 hours, regulate campaign spending, reduce gerrymandering, and automatically register 18-year-olds to vote. Grassroots supporters can help by running for local office, volunteering with a campaign, and asking educators how to help support public schools. Meanwhile, Sanders asks us “to question the fundamental moral values that underlie” a system that enables “the top 1 percent” to “own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent.” Though his prose sometimes reads like a transcribed speech with built-in applause lines, Sanders’ ideas are specific, clear, and commonsensical. And because it echoes previous statements, his call for collective introspection lands as genuine.
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217089161
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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