The New Journalism's Graveyard: Playboy

Playboy’s spine is gone. Forty years ago, when it sold seven million copies a year, the magazine used staples and its spine was a bruiser, thick enough to bulge out from the pile of magazines (Esquire, Look, Time) that my friend’s dad kept in the bookcase near his desk. Now there’s a skinny glued rectangle, the kind of thing you’d see on a fitness magazine. The old spine had authority. As a kid I didn’t understand about ad pages, but the message got through anyway: Playboy was the big time.