An excerpt from Scribble Scribble, 1976:
The new porn has nothing to do with dirty pictures. It’s simply about money. The new porn is the editorial basis for the rash of city and local magazines that have popped up around the country in the past ten years. Some of these magazines are first-rate—I am particularly partial to Texas Monthly—but generally they are to the traditional shelter magazines what Playboy is to Hustler: they have taken food and home furnishings and plant care and surrounded them up with just enough political and sociological reporting to give their readers an excuse to buy them. People who would not be caught dead subscribing to House & Garden subscribe to New York magazine. But whatever the quality, the serious articles in New York have nothing to do with what that magazine is about. That magazine is about buying plants, and buying chairs, and buying pastrami sandwiches, and buying wine, and buying ice cream. It is, in short, about buying. And let’s give credit where credit is due: with the possible exception of the Neiman-Marcus catalog, which is probably the granddaddy of this entire trend, no one does buying better than New York magazine.