Every so often, a magazine has to change. You overhaul the fonts and the design; establish new columns and sections and voices; renovate the structure; invent new formats. And then the editor in chief (that’s me) sits down to write an editor’s letter like this one, explaining to readers why he’s asking them to accept something new. The last redesign of this magazine was in 2015, shortly after I became editor. A couple of days after the debut issue landed, I happened to meet Jerry Seinfeld at a party. I was introduced to him as the new editor of The Times Magazine. “Oh, yeah,” he said, squinting at me and nodding. “I read your editor’s letter.” This was a pleasant surprise. Editor’s letters, while occasionally necessary, are certainly the least interesting of the many things we publish. But here was Jerry Seinfeld, saying he’d read mine. And more than that, it seemed to have made some sort of impression on him, which I could see, by the way he cocked his head and glanced at the ceiling, he was now trying gamely to recall. “To be honest,” he said. “I thought you sounded pretty defensive.” He was responding to the reassurance I’d given readers that things would be “unusual, surprising and original but not wholly unfamiliar.” The goal back then was to give the magazine a more literary and artistic sensibility, make it a home for great writing and creative moonshots, and embrace the freedom that came with being off the news, but without changing things too much. “This magazine is 119 years old,” I wrote, “it did not need to be dismantled, sawed into pieces or drilled full of holes.” Eleven years later, the goal of this redesign was a little different. The magazine is now 130 years old, and the world into which it publishes every week is undergoing more change and disruption than at any point in its long history. Today, the formats we all work in are vast, complex and ever-changing. Long gone are the days where we can base our editorial decision-making around the mental picture of a reader at home in an armchair with the print magazine on their lap. The magazine has adapted well to all this change. We reach a larger audience than ever before, across print and digital formats. And most important, we continue to publish what I believe is the best collection of magazine journalism in the country, work that has led to seven Pulitzer Prizes in the past nine years. Still, a time of great change demands that we change as well. The goals of this redesign were to make the magazine a more dynamic digital and print product with some adjustments to its editorial strategy and architecture. We created new magazine columns and story forms that are more native to the digital platforms where we reach our largest audience; and we redesigned our print product to make it a more pleasurable, readable, engrossing experience. Editorially, the work you get from us each week will be more dynamic, with different types of stories and columns. We remain as committed as ever to deep narrative and investigative long-form features. But we will also be more responsive to news. You’ll find more visual journalism, more ideas journalism and more formal inventiveness. There will be more history and humor, more essays and photography, more criticism of all kinds. Recurring formats are a big part of any magazine, and we’ve focused a lot of our attention on how to make the most of them within the ecosystem of nytimes.com. Some of the new ones are The Context, a short analytical piece that places current events in deeper historical, political and intellectual context (The first Context column, by David Wallace-Wells, and the second, by Charlie Homans, are both about different aspects of the war in Iran); a revival of On Language, written primarily by Nitsuh Abebe (here are his first two columns, about the words “lethality” and “agentic"), I Did It, a column that gets inside the popularity of new consumer products (this week Amy X. Wang sampled a red-light mat); and The Way We Live Now, a photo portfolio that explores a new lifestyle through portraits of three subjects (this week, we looked at the influence of MAHA ideas among teenage girls). For the print reader, there’s also a new monthly section in the back of the magazine, the Culture Digest, where we’ll curate and condense highlights from the newspaper’s excellent cultural coverage you might have missed over the past month. Perhaps, at 130 years old, the magazine did need to be sawed into pieces and drilled full of holes — and then put back together in fascinating new forms. That’s what we’ve done, and the work is just getting started. THIS WEEK’S FEATURES ON THE COVER For the first cover with the new redesign, we wanted an image that conveyed the idea of a generation of young people ditching their phones. We loved the photographer Bobby Doherty’s idea to show a flower blooming from a cracked smartphone screen, since it also hints at the upsides many of these young people have experienced when they are not tethered to their devices. — Gail Bichler, creative director
COLUMNS
FROM THE ARCHIVES Gary Shteyngart Watches a Week of Russian TVAs mentioned by our editor in chief, Jake Silverstein, above, the last redesign of The New York Times Magazine was back in 2015. That first redesigned issue featured a diary by the writer and novelist Gary Shteyngart after he spent a week at a Four Seasons hotel doing nothing but watching Russian television: Here is the question I’m trying to answer: What will happen to me — an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child — if I let myself float into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? Will I leave New York behind and move to Crimea, which, as of this year, Putin’s troops have reoccupied, claiming it has belonged to Russia practically since the days of the Old Testament? Or will I simply go insane?
COMMENT OF THE WEEK From FreeThinker in Berkeley, Calif., on Nitsuh Abebe’s On Language column on the growing use of the word “agentic” by tech leaders in Silicon Valley: Nothing says agency like desperately following every corporate fad and jumping from one bandwagon to another. No mimetic people in the tech world, they all independently reached this position at the same time. That’s all for this week. Email us at magazine@nytimes.com with your thoughts, questions and feedback. Stay in touch: Like this email? Forward it to a friend and help us grow. Loved a story? Hated it? Write us a letter at magazine@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward this to you? Sign up here to get the magazine newsletter.
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