A fashion publicist was recently talking to me about T, the style magazine of the New York Times, whose fabulously enigmatic editor, Hanya Yanagihara, announced in March that she would be stepping down to pursue opportunities in theater. “T is a brochure for how to be tasteful,” the publicist said, calling it their “gold-standard recommendation source” for “where to go or what’s interesting.” They added, “I could not tell you a story I’ve read in it, though.”

They are hardly alone. T is neither widely read nor broadly relevant, and under Yanagihara it hasn’t tried to be, instead reflecting her hyperspecific tastes and interests: avant-garde sculptors, Milanese apartments, all things Japan. (One travel issue was structured around how different cultures relate to rice.) The weird thing is it worked, remaining well respected in rarefied arts and style circles and an attractive destination for luxury advertisers who want to reach the affluent, educated Times print subscriber in a safe way (Chanel doesn’t exactly want to run ads alongside a story on the Iran war) and are drawn to Yanagihara’s eclectic vision. “Hanya is a very unique personality,” said another publicist. “My clients claw over being in the publication.”

T has a “halo of sophistication that we benefit from,” said Times assistant managing editor Sam Dolnick. And it makes money, the last piece of the Times that is still an advertising-oriented editorial product while the rest of the paper goes all in on a subscription-revenue model. “It’s an important part of our business,” he said. “The advertisers who are in T Magazine are fighting to be in T Magazine.” This gives T its raison d’être and makes Yanagihara’s successor a subject of interest both inside the organization and out. But T’s success also raises questions about the Times’ other magazine, The New York Times Magazine, whose future is murkier.

The two magazines began as one. Historically, the Times magazine, known colloquially as the Sunday magazine, was a showcase for photography and writing with the kind of stylishness, length, and subjectivity that had no home in the more buttoned-up daily reports. For a long time, it was the highlight of the enormous wad of paper that landed with a thud on subscribers’ doorsteps every weekend. It also became a place for a certain kind of advertiser that preferred the magazine to the paper, particularly the Style pages in the back of the book. In the early aughts, those pages became their own magazine, T, and the luxury advertisers followed.

Yanagihara, who declined a request for an interview, took over as editor in 2017, but she had a sideline as a novelist, having published the mega–best seller A Little Life two years earlier. That sideline is now closer to the main act: She was involved in a stage adaptation of A Little Life that premiered in London’s West End in 2023. She’s also producing a play in New York “that will require fundraising, which would clash with the Times’ ethics policies,” according to Puck’s Lauren Sherman.

She had already raised eyebrows among the rule-following Times crowd for repeatedly covering her close friend Daniel Roseberry, creative director of Schiaparelli, and for collaborating on a collection with Valentino. But T is so separate from the rest of the operation that none of the ethical boundary pushing seemed........

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