A Juicy Chronicle of the Fat Decades at Condé Nast

We may be facing a future without magazines, at least glossy ones, and passing into an era of disembodied media entities — an unholy maelstrom of websites, YouTube channels and, worst of all, podcasts. But the golden age of American magazines was very shiny indeed. In “Empire of the Elite,” Michael M. Grynbaum, a media reporter at The New York Times, has written a lively if elegiac chronicle of Condé Nast, the parent company to Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker, among several other titles, too many of them now defunct.