Nobody chronicled the 1980s like Tina Brown. And her chronicling of the decade helped to reshape American culture.
Brown re-invented Vanity Fair for the modern era, and her controversial stint at The New Yorker brought a new approach (and photographs … and more readers) to the legendary magazine.
“Her editorial appetites were fierce; she raked in news and new writers and cash,” writes Nathan Heller in The New Yorker. “Some people found her style unsettling, and her victories did little to alter that judgment. Brown’s legacy remains controversial not because her success is in question but because, for some, too much was lost in her kind of success.”
“One of Tina’s gifts as an editor was that she saw the American cultural hierarchy for what it really was: not a hierarchy of taste at all, but a hierarchy of power that used taste to cloak its real agenda,” writes current New Yorker and former Vanity Fair writer John Seabrook in his book Nobrow.
Brown later founded The Daily Beast, establishing a legacy in the digital age.
Now, Brown is in the news again, both with a new book that looks back at her time in New York in the 1980s, and the news that she had warned Hillary Clinton’s campaign about Harvey Weinstein.
We talk to Brown about her life and legacy, and the future of magazine journalism.
GUESTS
Tina Brown, Former editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Daily Beast and Newsweek; author of a new book, “The Vanity Fair Diaries (1983-1992)”
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