Whatever happened to Slate?

A lot of magazine have changed their audience over the years. For example, Cosmopolitan started out in the 19th Century as a family magazine, then became a literary magazine, and then in 1965 under titanic editrix Helen Gurley Brown it became the magazine for the young secretary who wants to steal her boss away from his wife and kids. Lately, Cosmo has gotten all woke, like Teen Vogue and, weirdest of all, Forbes.

Slate.com was founded in the mid-1990s when Bill Gates hired his favorite editor, 1980s wunderkind Michael Kinsley, to create the perfect Internet-only center-left opinion magazine.

And they came pretty close. It made addictive reading in the late 1990s.

Kinsley was succeeded by another smart Jewish “neoliberal” guy, Jacob Weisberg, who in turn was succeeded by yet another Kinsley clone, David Plotz.

Eventually, Slate hired a gentile woman to edit it and I started reading it less often.

Looking at it now, it appears to now be aimed at women. For example, it features huge amounts of Advice:

So, it’s not Kinsley’s Slate anymore.

But, on the upside, Slate appears to be aimed at smart liberal women who … amazing as this may seem in 2024 … like men, and might even be happily married to a man.

So, times being what they are, it could be a lot worse than it is.