Via Ankush, Radar's takedown of New York magazine is pretty brutal. I've always found the publication to be an exceedingly enjoyable guilty pleasure, and quite fun if you remember that all of its editors will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Indeed, I'm hard-pressed to think of any single institution that has done more to normalize the gaping inequality in this country, particularly among the media elites and upscale audiences that subscribe. As Radar says:
New York's most egregious sin is that it's aimed at such a narrow sliver of the city. It's become the bible of the ultra-entitled New Yorker, the kind of person who would actually spend $200 on a doorknob described in the magazine as a bargain. The Plate-U coffee table featured in the Strategist a few weeks ago, described with words "thriftiness can be elegant," can be had for $1,800, or the balance of a month's salary after taxes for a family that earns New York's median household income of $43,393. There's nothing wrong, of course, with pitching a magazine at ludicrously wealthy people desperately trying to fill the holes in their lives with grapefruit-and-vodka-pedicures. But New York is, after all, a city and not a colony of hedge-fund managers. A magazine that purports to capture the life of a teeming and mixed-up metropolis ought to at least occasionally acknowledge the fact that very few people who live there are served by a chart detailing the caloric content of a $250 nine-course tasting menu at Per Se.
Unlike self-conscious wealth porn like The Robb Report, New York attempts to normalize its hedonism, suggesting that the lifestyles of the highly-educated and extremely wealthy define the metropolis, rather than merely exist within it. In doing, it repaints extreme wealth and cultural capital as the norm, at least for its readers, and subtly spins poverty and money problems -- at least of the unglamorous sorts experienced by people who aren't artists and professional interns -- as vaguely abnormal, or even contrary to the city's spirit.
