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The Culture of Loserdom

very so often some poor soul, casting about for conspiratorial material to salve their own mental confusion and anxiety about a shifting world, will note that I share a last name with one of the most famous families in magazine publishing, and pounce.

“We don’t need an elite out of touch Jew HATING media to tell us anything,” thundered a recent reply I got on X. “FFS, your own FAMILY publishes a bunch of fucking Jew hating scumbags all the time and supports them. It’s great that you are a billionaire nepobaby.”

Unfortunately for my interlocutors, but more unfortunately for me, I am not a billionaire nepobaby. My father was an endocrinologist in Sheepshead Bay, and my mother—though wildly creative, charismatic, and stylish, in addition to being a beauty with a wicked sense of humor—was his office manager.

I spent some time over the summer reading Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. The central character is my nonrelative Si Newhouse, the scion of a Jewish family that owned newspapers, who metabolized his adoring mother Mitzi’s eagle-eyed observations of New York City’s elite and overbearing desire to join their ranks into a magazine empire that would eventually control them. The book is dishy and fun, but also has real strengths—which are in how clearly constructed and lucidly written it is.

Among its many threads, I found myself especially interested in the story of Condé Nast’s internationalism. “When a country with an emerging capitalist economy developed a new upper-middle-class, Condé Nast was there to swoop in with its guides to a lavish lifestyle,” writes Grynbaum. “Luxury brands, themselves seeking a foothold in these regions, used the magazines to introduce their products to a fresh consumer base. Local readers felt affirmed that the likes of Vogue and Vanity Fair—world-famous emblems of the elite—considered the country worthy of attention and investment.…Well before the rise of luxury conglomerates like LVMH, Condé magazines were serving as an early adhesive for the global elite.”

It was instructive for me to read this story alongside Seth Barron’s article for this issue on the fate of the United Nations, which is rooted in a deeper question about the direction of the entire globe. As the vision for a body that would generate an internationalist utopia curdles into corruption, immorality, and a bulwark against Western values, all while America plummets into questions about how it wants to see its power used, the institution and what it once stood for is being called into question.

If you read between the lines of Seth’s piece, you’ll see the contours of a broader shift that has encompassed all aspects of our lives. By the 1990s and 2000s, “Vogue had spawned editions across Europe, Asia, South America, and the South Pacific,” Grynbaum notes. “[O]ne could do worse to trace the rise of global consumerism by dating the magazine’s subsequent outposts in China (2005), India (2007), and the Persian Gulf states (2017).” Similarly, one wonders if in hindsight we’ll also be able to trace the rise of the phenomena that have marked the 2010s and 2020s—not just technological disruption and populist demoralization but also the downgrading of aesthetics and an isolationism threatening to shade into nativism—in the decline of these tastemaking instruments.

Anyway, a decade before she died, my mother got herself an adorable little shih tzu to keep her company. By that point, I was already running Tablet, and people’s confusion about my own provenance tickled her to no end—so she named the dog Mitzi. For any of you out there keeping score, that’s as close as I ever came to being related to any Mitzi Newhouse.

September 2025

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