Radhika Jones on Change
In Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics
Welcome to Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of Editing. This season, in a series of live conversations, Merve Emre asks the smartest and savviest editors how the sausage gets made. What happens behind the scenes at a magazine? How does an idea become a book? And how do you work with those strange and difficult creatures we call writers?
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From the episode:
Merve Emre: For the past seven and a half years, Radhika Jones has been the editor in chief of Vanity Fair. When she agreed to come speak with me for “The Art of Editing,” I was imagining we would talk about the annual Hollywood Issue or whether the magazine had another scandalous exposé of Cormac McCarthy up its sleeve. But one week before our conversation, she announced that she was stepping down. This made her an especially exciting guest – the first on this podcast who could reflect on the entire arc of her editorship. We spoke candidly about the challenges and opportunities presented by a publication focused on celebrity in an age of unprecedented media exposure and about her plans for the future.
For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.
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Radhika Jones is the fifth editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. She previously held senior editorial roles at The New York Times, Time, and The Paris Review. She also was the managing editor at Grand Street, an editor at Artforum, and the arts editor of The Moscow Times, where she began her career. Jones holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia, where she has also taught courses in writing and literature. Born in New York City, she grew up in Cincinnati and Ridgefield, Connecticut.
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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf
The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.
