“I think it would be fun to run a newspaper,” said Charles Foster Kane. But in the telling of Graydon Carter, there was no enterprise more engaging, stimulating, or fun than running a glossy, well-subsidized general-interest magazine at the turn of the millennium. In a droll, trenchant, and surprisingly affable new memoir, When the Going Was Good, Carter recounts his incomparable tour of duty at the helm of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, a period that roughly coincided with the last go-go period in American print media.

These days, the shine is off the job of running Vanity Fair, as we can see from the abbreviated reign of Carter’s successor, Radhika Jones, who will soon be calling it quits a mere eight years after taking over. Once, magazine editors clung to their influential perches for decades or even generations, but now it’s barely two presidential terms. No one understands this new normal better than Carter, who speaks in his memoir with misty-eyed melancholy for the page counts and ad revenues of years gone by. Even his title has an aspect of a backward glance.