Style.com shitposting and Bon Appetit's meltdown.
A new podcast by a former Conde Nast employee.
Good morning everyone. I’m going to be reporting from Long Island for most of the summer starting this week. So if you have any strange characters in the Hamptons that you think I should befriend, or events that you think I should attend, or magical homes I should walk through, please email emily@readfeedme.com
Today’s letter includes: a new podcast about when “Conde Nast when it was still a creatively indulgent, problematic place to work,” Gracie Abrams is using hair accessories to signal a new musical chapter, an anonymous tip about that Refinery29 relaunch, and the matcha conversation is getting loud.
📱 Have a good tip? Text the anonymous Feed Me Hotline : (646) 494-3916 📱
Last Friday afternoon, I got a text from an unknown number. The sender was
, who wanted to tell me about a new project he was working on. He described it as a “series of ultra-short, experimental podcasts about what it was like to work at Conde Nast when it was still a creatively indulgent, problematic place to work.”Mark sent me a Spotify link to the show, aptly titled The Nasty, that only we knew about — I guess today’s newsletter is the official announcement. The first episode is about what people did or didn’t talk about in the Conde Nast elevators: carrots for lunch, the Twitter account anonymously reporting on employees, and commentary on each other’s outfits.
“Bon Appetit was a result of a longstanding company culture of exclusion and homogeneity that started in 1917 and continued. I spoke to HR execs who said they’d be arrested now for the hiring practices they used in the 80s and 90s.”
If 2025 has delivered one message about New York’s media industry, it’s that the fun is over. There’s a deep nostalgia running through my newsfeed this year: everyone wants to talk about what life was like for Anna, and Carolyn, and Keith, and Graydon, and S.I., and caviar, and jets. We get it.
I was curious why Mark, who currently works at Puck but spent his entire career in the media industry, wanted to add fuel to the nostalgia fire. Below is a conversation we had over the weekend.
I'm doing a book club with Michael Grynbaum for his new book about Conde Nast, Empire of the Elite, this summer. Graydon Carter's When the Going Was Good came out earlier this year. There's this theme of intense nostalgia for New York in the 90s that we're seeing in this year's most popular media (Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Keith McNally, Anna Wintour). What did you think was missing from the conversation that made you want to make this audio series?
Anyone writing about the business at that time, and Conde Nast in particular, makes the same connections: magazine’s domination of the pre-internet culture, the elitism and exclusivity that were baked into the Conde Nast model, the indulgence of the place, etc. But what I felt was missing was about the people who worked there and how their lives were transformed.
Because if you were a middle class kid from an unremarkable American suburb, working at Conde Nast was a path to a semi-glamorous New York life. It put you closer to the flame. You would know the right people, go to the right places, meet and even collaborate with your heroes. If nothing else, Conde Nast made editing a magazine look like the most fun job in America.
And then there’s the demographic cruelty of showing up in New York in 2007 with your portfolio or the clips from your college newspaper and your dream of working at a magazine, and getting the unmistakable sense that you’d just missed the party. What’s worse, is that you could glimpse just enough to know that the party had been awesome and now it was over. I wanted those kids to hear about the party from the people who made the most of it, who had the fun while it lasted.
Graydon Carter, Linda Wells, and Jim Nelson are all part of the show. Do you think they look back at this golden age of Conde Nast fondly?
Yes, there’s not a lot of bitterness among the EICs I spoke to. They know how good they had it. They were given everything they needed to make the best magazine they possibly could: the resources, the staff, the time, the support, the creative freedom. They got to make their dream magazine and they all know what a gift that was. That would never happen today.
As Gourmet’s Ruth Reichl told me, the message from Si Newhouse was clear: “Give me the best publication you can possibly imagine. And then when I decide I don't like it anymore, I'll fire you. And you know, who could ask for more than that? Very few people ever get the chance to do that.”
Do you have a white whale story about Conde Nast that you haven't gotten anyone to discuss or unpack yet?