By the summer of 1976, New York Magazine — eight years old, a steady if not wildly profitable business — had found its editorial groove and was roaring along. That June, it published Nik Cohn’s “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” which within days was optioned for a film project that became Saturday Night Fever. (Years later, the author admitted that he’d made most of it up.) A few weeks after that, Norman Mailer wrote a mammoth cover story about the CIA. And in August, our man Tom Wolfe uncorked maybe his most sweeping piece of pop sociology yet: a long, digressive observation about the emerging solipsism of the baby-boomer generation, noting the rise of encounter groups and self-actualization and of weird new belief systems like Scientology or the tenets of the Esalen Institute, not to mention the increasing influence of born-again Christianity. He managed to tie together all sorts of threads — rampant divorce and the popularity of swinging, the Great Awakening of the 1740s and the Second Great Awakening of the late 19th century, the Oneida utopianists and the teachings of Max Weber — and get them all down to two letters. Me! 

Looking at the discourse of our era, you could easily argue that baby-boomer selfishness still holds America in a pretty tight grip (although, arguably, millennial self-care is coming up fast behind it). Consider, just for a single example, the four baby-boom presidents we have elected: one self-sabotaging womanizer, one born-again alcoholic in recovery, one who spent his youth searching for meaning and found it in cool-toned optimism, one narcissist kook with conspiracy-theorist tendencies. All conform to variations on the “Me Generation” typology.

It’s ironic that the ground was shifting under New York at this moment for faintly related reasons. Just weeks after this story appeared, Clay Felker — the magazine’s founder and Wolfe’s longtime editor and comrade — had his magazine bought out from under him. His own indulgence arguably had done him in — he spent too much money on a California spinoff called New West, and he had a real knack for antagonizing the finance guys on his board of directors. They were quite happy to cash out when Rupert Murdoch came in and made them a generous offer, and by the end of the year, New York was his. (He kept it, quite profitably, until 1991.) Most of the top editors and writers quit in solidarity right after the sale. Wolfe subsequently took most of his journalism to Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, apart from a few excellent exceptions. More about those in our final installment of this newsletter cycle next week.

Till then, here’s “The ‘Me’ Decade.” Read it and look within.