How to tell the difference between T magazine and NYT Magazine

Did anyone else read that crazy Eugenides JFK Jr. essay?

I went to see The Drama last night by myself but walked in already knowing the premise, which I think was a good combo. Otherwise, it would absolutely have been far too bleak to process alone! Overall very funny and upsetting all at once, which I generally prefer to the other major Norwegian filmic octave of sad and upsetting.

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Here are some quotes I enjoyed recently:

“Most of his clan had inherited the freckled, rabbity Kennedy looks. John, lucky in everything, had received the enhancing admixture of dark, French Mediterranean, Bouvier blood.”

^^That’s Jeffrey Eugenides, he of one of the great modern campus novels, dipping back into that mode by sharing his recollections about going to Brown with JFK Jr. (one imagines an assigning editor at The New Yorker feverishly sending a giant BCC email in March asking, “DOES ANYONE HAVE A GOOD PERSONAL JFK JR. STORY, PLEASE”).

The college memories are fun; the writing about JFK Jr.’s crash less so, somehow feeling soapier than anything Ryan Murphy could have done. I guess you could forgive that after learning about a spooky tie between our sweet prince and Eugenides’ dad, who also died crashing his own plane a few years before JFK Jr; both men had earned their certifications from the same place?

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“T is a brochure for how to be tasteful … I could not tell you a story I’ve read in it, though.”

So says a fashion publicist giving Charlotte Klein the general impression held of The New York Times’ T magazine; now that Hanya is departing her editorship there and the paper’s other glossy, The New York Times Magazine, just did a redesign, it seems no one’s that much clearer on how the newspaper should leverage both magazine properties.

Mostly it’s apparent that no one internally is able to really articulate the difference between the two; I’m happy to help in this respect and put forth two frameworks: Think of T as being for the spending elite and NYT Mag is for the thinking elite, or, better yet, NYT Mag being for the boys and T being for the girls and the gays. Some other good nuggets in that piece on Timesian career movies — I forgot Parul has been back at the Grey Lady since 2024 and also learned that Noreen Malone, once a major New York mag lieutenant, is about to join NYT Mag after editing on the newspaper. (“Why doesn’t the NYT just poach more New Yorker editors?” asked a friend in a group chat, re: which we imagined that David Remnick possibly does the Weapons stick thing to you if you even think about defecting. It’s the only explanation why no one does!)

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“I don’t want to sound self-righteous at all … But I feel like I’m living a righteous life.”

That’s Patrick Radden Keefe in his NYT profile, otherwise continuing a publicity tear that the lit it girls would only dream of, when asked about whether journalists matter in the age of A.I., apocalypse, etc. Fantastic answer/worldview that doesn’t over-conflate the moral “duty” of being a writer with the inherent dignity of the work; it reminded me of Sophie Haigney mulling over in her NYT piece on how everyone wants to seem “high-agency” but no one seems to care to what end, values-wise: “Agency is about action, but it tells us nothing of direction.” One cannot deny that PRK absolutely qualifies as a master doer of things, or how that aspect alone is kind of the least interesting thing about him.

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“How I came to know the song is almost irrelevant information at this point, eclipsed completely by the experience of loving the song on my own terms, creating my own memories with it. The song just came to me, from somewhere, populating seamlessly in a stream of consciousness. A stream of consciousness, otherwise known as an algorithm.”

^^Eliza McLamb (the only musician with an interesting Substack by far) wrote about Chaotic Good, a digital marketing agency for musicians that has figured out how to game the rules of the increasingly algorithm-obsessed industry by manufacturing fake fan accounts and thereby virality. It’s excellent pairing with Willy Staley’s rant on memery as pop culture, which goes long on the phenomenon of brainrot, AKA “the hijacking of your frontal lobe by the incentives of the platform.” It really is crazy that a handful of tech companies have just changed the incentive structure for music, thinking, life, everything…

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Finally, an IRL rec for you: Film at Lincoln Center is hosting an amazing retrospective of Tony Leung films at the end of the month. Tickets went on sale for members on Friday, so I spent all weekend fussing over whether or not I should spring for a membership just to have a chance to see at least one of the screenings (the in-person Tony Q&A, obviously, sold out immediately); the quintessential New York rule being that whatever you think you’re a fan of, there are 2,000 people at minimum who are going to be more hardcore about their fandom than you. Imagine my delight on Monday when the public sale went live, and there were tickets to be had galore.

I snagged four for Cyclo (Trân Anh Hùng hive let’s talk), two for Hero, and one for The Grandmaster. There are still a bunch of screenings with tickets left (though all during the week day): I hiiiiighly recommend Lust, Caution (horny period piece) and Infernal Affairs (with the haaaandsome Andy Lau) in addition to the WKW usuals. Good luck!