The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glamour

In the mid-1980s, an office executive attempted to show Condé Nast editorial director Alexander Liberman, who joined the magazine empire in 1943—the year that one of the foundational concepts for artificial intelligence was articulated—how to use a new digital system. “‘Computers!’ Alex declared, with his usual haughty flourish. ‘It’s just a phase.’” As New York Times media correspondent Michael M. Grynbaum makes clear in his elegiac new history Empire of the Elite, it was no phase.