The New York Times Magazine

• 1. Introduction

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  The New York Times Magazine first landed in readers' hands on the 6th of September 1896, and it carried something the newspaper had never printed before: photographs. That single issue marked a turning point not just for the magazine but for American journalism itself. The man behind the change was Adolph Ochs, the paper's new owner, who was undertaking a sweeping overhaul of the Times that year. He banned fiction, comic strips, and gossip columns from the paper, and he created a serious Sunday magazine as part of his effort to rescue the Times from financial ruin. What followed was more than a century of ambitious journalism, landmark photography, beloved columns, and literary experiments that would each in turn reshape what a newspaper supplement could be.

• 2. The Ochs Transformation

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  Adolph Ochs inherited a newspaper in trouble and responded with a vision ambitious enough to carry it into the next century. The Sunday magazine was central to that vision. In its earliest form, the magazine was not an insert but a section of the broadsheet paper itself. Within a year of its founding, the magazine published a 16-page spread of photographs documenting Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The source describes this as a "costly feat" that produced a wildly popular issue and helped establish the magazine's reputation. The willingness to invest in sweeping visual projects was a signal of what the magazine intended to be: something more than a supplement, something closer to its own publication. That ambition drew the kind of contributors who would define the magazine's identity for decades.

• 3. A Forum for Ideas

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  W. E. B. Du Bois and Albert Einstein both appeared in the magazine's early pages, alongside sitting and future U.S. presidents. The editor most responsible for cultivating this tradition was Lester Markel, described in the source as an "intense and autocratic" journalist who oversaw the Sunday Times from the 1920s through the 1950s. Markel believed the magazine should be a forum for ideas, and the contributors he attracted bore that out. Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams all published pieces there during his tenure. When the Times launched its first op-ed page in 1970, the magazine began moving away from that concentration of editorial writing. The gravitational center of the publication was shifting toward its columns, which would become institutions in their own right.

• 4. The Column Tradition

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  William Safire, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, began writing "On Language" for the magazine in 1979. The column addressed English grammar, usage, and etymology, and it built a following large enough that by 1990 it was generating more reader mail than anything else the magazine published. Two decades later, in 1999, the magazine introduced "The Ethicist," an advice column written by humorist Randy Cohen. It quickly became, in the source's words, a "highly contentious" part of the publication. By 2011, Ariel Kaminer had replaced Cohen, and Chuck Klosterman took over in 2012. Klosterman departed in early 2015, after which a trio of writers handled the column together: Kenji Yoshino, Amy Bloom, and Jack Shafer, using a conversational format. Shafer left three months later, and Kwame Anthony Appiah assumed sole authorship in September 2015. Alongside "The Ethicist," Rob Walker's column "Consumed," focused on consumer culture, debuted in 2004.

• 5. The Puzzle Page

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  Will Shortz, the host of the puzzle segment on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, edits the puzzle page that runs in each Sunday issue. The Sunday crossword measures 21 by 21 squares, compared to the standard weekday grid of 15 by 15 squares, and the source notes it is typically intended to be as difficult as a Thursday puzzle. In American culture, the Sunday crossword has become an icon. Shortz rotates in other puzzle formats as well, including diagramless crosswords and anacrostics. The puzzle page sits alongside the poetry feature, where U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey selects and introduces poems weekly; contributors have included Tomas Transtroemer, Carlos Pintado, and Gregory Pardlo.

• 6. The Funny Pages Experiment

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  In the issue dated the 18th of September 2005, an editors' note announced a new section called The Funny Pages, described as a literary space intended to "engage our readers in some ways we haven't yet tried." It ran three recurring formats: the Strip, which serialized a multipart graphic novel over several weeks; the Sunday Serial, a genre fiction serial novel; and True-Life Tales, a humorous personal essay from a different author each week. The Strip hosted works by Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, Seth, Megan Kelso, Daniel Clowes, Jason, Rutu Modan, and Gene Yang, running chapter counts that ranged from 17 to 30 installments each. The Sunday Serial ran novels from Elmore Leonard, Patricia Cornwell, Scott Turow, Michael Connelly, Michael Chabon, Ian Rankin, John Banville writing as Benjamin Black, and others. At least five of those serials were later published as books with added material. True-Life Tales ended on the 8th of July 2007. The Funny Pages drew criticism for being unfunny and excessively highbrow; a 2006 reader poll on Gawker.com found that 92% of 1,824 voters answered "No" when asked whether they had ever found The Funny Pages funny.

• 7. Expanding the Brand

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  In 2004, the magazine launched T, a standalone style supplement edited by Deborah Needleman that appears 14 times a year. Two years later came PLAY, a sports magazine published every other month, and KEY, a real estate magazine appearing twice a year. In 2009 the magazine launched a Qatari Edition as a standalone publication. In September 2010, Times editor Bill Keller brought in Hugo Lindgren, formerly of Bloomberg Businessweek, to lead the Sunday magazine. Lindgren moved quickly to build his team: he hired Lauren Kern, who had been executive editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, as deputy editor, then brought in Greg Veis from TNR.com to edit the front-of-book section. In December 2010 he added Joel Lovell, formerly a story editor at GQ, as another deputy editor. In 2014, Jake Silverstein, who had led Texas Monthly as editor-in-chief, took over from Lindgren. Beginning in 2024, the magazine began publishing condensed versions of in-depth interviews in parallel with the podcast The Interview, hosted by David Marchese and Lulu Garcia-Navarro, with episodes typically running 40 to 50 minutes.