When magazines mattered

I'm reading New York Days by Willie Morris, his memoirs of his time at Harper's where he was editor-in-chief in the 1960s. What is striking is how much cultural influence magazines had then. Norman Mailer covered the 1965 march on the Pentagon for Harper's; most of Armies of the Night first appeared in that magazine. Tom Wolfe was becoming Tom Wolfe in Esquire at the same time. Joan Didion was chronicling the 1960s and California for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. The New York Review of Books was launched and quickly became "the chief theoretical organ of radical chic." Commentary under Norman Podhoretz zigged (New) Left and then zagged right into neoconservatism. In Cold Blood debuted in The New Yorker before it became a best seller.

A lot has changed in forty years. Magazine titles have proliferated, but their collective heft has fallen. Magazine stories are, by their very nature, ephemeral. Once, though, it was possible for a story to roil the intellectual waters for a few weeks, maybe even a few months. Now even the biggest cover story is forgotten in only a few days. It is as though the 24/7 news cycle makes us structurally incapable of remembering anything we said or wrote or read three days ago.

In his book The Muse in the Machine, David Gelernter notes that "thinking is primarily, overwhelmingly remembering". If memory now plays little role in our public discourse, how much thought is really in the "national conversation"? Maybe, to cadge a phrase from Lionel Trilling, there is no real thought there at all, just "irritable mental gestures".