MMK: Lowbrow brilliant is the most fun one to fill because that's so much of what I'm consuming on a day to day basis. We're saying this book, this opera, this television show, this is the thing for these two weeks.īH: If you say that highbrow brilliant is your favorite quadrant to fill out, it also makes you sound like an asshole.
But highbrow brilliant is much, much harder to fill, I think because that's the one where you're making like a very serious designation on behalf of New York magazine. Like, highbrow despicable things are so obvious, right? There's a zillion of them we live in the age of Donald Trump. MMK: I could give you the inverse, which is that highbrow brilliant is the most difficult one to fill. And I'm really looking forward to fighting over whether TikTok is highbrow or lowbrow, and where you park things like that on the Matrix.ĭo you have a favorite quadrant to write for? MMK: Something I'm most looking forward to is incorporating more internet culture into the Matrix.
I'm not so nice.īH: You know what? I'm not so nice either. I think we're both judgemental people, but in a nice way, in a good way. I mean, I think speaking for myself, the reason I probably got this is because of my opinionated and judgemental nature in Slack that I think somebody took notice of and perhaps on Twitter as well. Madison's on the Taylor Swift beat, I'm bringing some sports knowledge into this that has been lacking for the last eight years. MMK: Yeah, one time we robbed a bank together and it went really well.īH: That was a dry run. Why do you two make a good team?īH: I think we bring complementary skills to the job. $15 at Amazon At some points in its history, the Matrix has been created by a single editor, other times it’s been done by a pair. it's hyper-specific, almost hyper-scientific, pseudo-scientific really, which is what's fun about it, right? There's a real joy being like, "Oh like red onions can give you salmonella." And part of the bottom left corner being: "Attack of the red onion." MMK: It's also this perfect distillation of what we do page after page. So I don't want to emphasize too much that writing the Matrix is a weight crushing us because doing it this last week for the first time was really enjoyable. I've been making this joke a lot, namely once the announcement was made to our colleagues, but I just keep saying I'm looking at the job as sort of more Matrix doula than anything else.īH: With the weightiness, there's a lightheartedness that goes along with that. MMK: It's sort of terrifying, but also very fun. What do you think about taking on that role? Here, the duo chats with T&C about why they're a good team, the hardest quadrant to fill, and the pressures of crafting the "deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies." By nature, this position requires being an arbiter of culture. So to be taking that on, definitely it felt weighty," Kircher tells me over the phone, with Hart adding: "But also really cool, just had to get that in there." "After Milton Glaser’s logo, the Matrix is arguably the most recognizable thing about the magazine and the most iconic thing we do, she said ever so humbly. "I had to concoct a matrix covering the last half century- 200 items total-which was included as a gatefold, an amusingly impossible task which everybody second guessed, and I probably should have retired from the gig then." "Somehow, over time, the Approval Matrix ended up being the embodiment of the spirit of the entire magazine, to the point that our anniversary book in 2018 was titled Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable: Fifty Years of New York Magazine," he tells T&C via email. Since 2004, New York Magazine has been plotting culture into quadrants on its back page-and for the past eight years, editor Carl Swanson has served as the curator of that Approval Matrix, weighing in on everything from wine for cats (highbrow despicable) to the hairstyles of PBS's Victoria(definitely brilliant, but right on the line between highbrow and lowbrow) to Michelle Obama's "Turn Down For What?" Vine, in which she dances with a turnip (lowbrow brilliant).
The axes are iconic: highbrow, lowbrow, despicable, brilliant.
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