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Felker addresses the staff at New York, 1977

Outside of the magazine business, few have heard of editor Clay Felker (1925-2008). Some of this is the nature of the product; magazines tend to age like eclairs, and when was the last time you heard of a famous baker? But from 1963 to 1977, Felker’s weekly New York was always hot and fresh, and has lasted in the only way a magazine can: by imitation. It’s not a stretch to say that every mass-market glossy in America now devotes a portion of each issue to ripping off Felker’s signature moves (lifestyle coverage, compulsive trendspotting, in-crowd hauteur as a worldview). Felker was like Harold Ross, a smart kid from the sticks—but unlike Ross, he believed the hype. Just as Ross was a product of the days when journalism vied with acting as the least respectable job a intelligent person could have, Felker’s era was one where journalists began thinking they were part of the American elite, making up for their comparative poverty with (in their eyes) exquisite taste. But people obsessed with money and power are very different animals than those who choose to write for a living, something the writers forget at their peril—just ask Truman Capote. Felker was shown the error of his ways in 1977, when a group of investors led by Rupert Murdoch ousted him from New York.

At its best, Felker’s style of magazine journalism can be nothing less than exhiliarating, setting down for posterity something utterly real that has never been expressed in words before; at its worst it teaches people to commodify themselves. That’s bad for them, and bad for the rest of us, too. Felker’s New York is great, but thirty-plus years of imitation Felker has helped create a culture utterly in thrall to consuming and being consumed. The closest thing to Felker today isn’t in for-profit print, but at ad-free NPR; it’s This American Life‘s Ira Glass. Only in that anticommercial, super-sincere environment can unironic eccentricity unfurl its delicate petals.

Politics aside, Felker’s breakthrough has turned out to be an artistic dead-end; it is almost Joycean in how it has lured generations of bright young writers into working a played-out vein. Subcultures are fascinating, but there are only so many of them operating at one time, and many more lifestyle pieces to be written. Moreover, a trend or tribe is only interesting if it’s authentic, and the glare of the klieg lights has made everyone—from “helicopter parents” to the gelled-up denizens of the Jersey Shore—too self-conscious to truly tell us anything important. But Felker was there first, before irony had poisoned the well—and he had a kennel-full of top-dog writers to help him sniff out what was really going on. This appreciation by one of Felker’s lead huskies, Tom Wolfe, explains his greatness.