The New Playboy Reveals (Almost) Everything and Stands for Nothing

With its debut annual print edition, the magazine fails to stir

A new print edition of Playboy, featuring Lori Harvey | Credit: Playboy / Greg Swales

It arrived with a thump on my porch and the banging of the delivery man on my front door. And just like that, I was in possession of the much ballyhooed newly revamped Playboy magazine that has returned to print—annually, at least. As far as I could tell from an internet search, no one else had written about what the magazine was like, outside of the stuff from a Playboy press release. I tore open the package.

Once upon a time, Playboy mattered. In December 1953, founder and editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner published the first issue with Marilyn Monroe as the centerfold. In the decades that followed, the publication became as well known for its naked Playmates as it was for its enthusiastic championing of free speech. Some people even read it for the articles. With the advent of the internet at the close of the 20th century, though, Playboy lost its footing. Sex had gone digital. It was tough to compete.

My earliest memories of Playboy date back to my childhood when I spotted a stack of issues in a wicker basket in a combination laundry room/bathroom on the first floor of my grandparents’ house. Presumably, the magazines belonged to my grandfather. With the door locked, I studied the pictures, considering the nudes sprawled on the pages. Is this who I would grow up to be? I wondered. The idea was attractive. These women had a sexual power that seemed to draw men—and me—into their vortex.

Several decades later, when I was in my twenties and living in Los Angeles, I got a job working for Playboy TV. For five years, I was an on-camera reporter for “Sexcetera,” a 60 Minutes-inspired, documentary-style program in which myself and a half dozen other reporters traveled around the world reporting on sex-related subjects. (Or, as I put it at the time when I was asked what I did on the show, I talked to the camera while people had sex behind me.) I went to a handful of parties at the Playboy Mansion—which was a magical place, where monkeys screamed, and flamingos picked their way across the lawn—and met Hef.

So, in recent years, I was saddened to watch the iconic Playboy that I knew flip, flop, and flounder. In 2016, Playboy stopped publishing nudes, which I hated. In 2017, the magazine brought back the nudes, which I liked. In 2019, Kylie Jenner appeared in the magazine, which seemed inevitable. In 2020, Playboy announced it would no longer publish a print edition, throwing in the towel on the matter altogether. Then, last August, it was revealed Playboy would return in print, but only annually.

Which takes us to today. The new print edition of Playboy features Lori Harvey, who is the daughter of Family Feud host Steve Harvey and an internet personality with nearly five million followers on Instagram. Personally, I didn’t find this to be a particularly inspired choice. I suppose I’d imagined they’d pick someone who had a kind of edge, who conjured up sexuality in a way that felt fresh, like, say, Julia Fox or Doechii or Alexa Demie. Instead, we got Harvey at a Pasadena mansion pretending to be the Playboy Mansion, which, now that Hef has died, is owned by someone else.

The magazine also showcases the 2025 Playmate of the Year. As of this writing, she is nowhere on the internet identified, and while the publicist who sent me the magazine didn’t request I withhold her identity, I won’t name her here as as spoiler. She will be announced on February 8, as part of the lead up to Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans. You can see a teaser of her here. And, yes, there is nudity in Playboy, yet again. The PMOY and a few other models featured therein are tastefully naked. And there’s even a double-sided foldout poster of the 2025 PMOY that you can tear out and affix to your wall, as readers did in the good old days, if you’re feeling nostalgic.

As for the articles, which, let’s face it, no one reads this magazine for, they are largely unremarkable and mostly forgettable. The confused Editor’s Letter by editor-in-chief Mike Guy articulates the magazine’s struggle to find its footing in a half-print, half-digital sex-and-porn-ified world where adult content is so prevalent and so extreme, one risks slipping in all the masturbatory excretions sprayed across the virtual floor. “Just as Playboy was frustrated with the conservative norms of the ’50s, we want to challenge them now, too,” he writes. Promising! “The internet—OnlyFans, TikTok, and the rest—has stolen sexuality and fed it into the meat grinder of the attention economy,” he concludes. “We’re doing our part to steal it back.” Great!

So, what does that look like? Not much, I considered as I paged through this Playboy. From Harvey, we get this novel insight: “I’ve always believed that beauty starts with self-care.” A long listicle of “25 Things to Do Before the End of the World” includes “Go on a Safari in … Texas,” “Listen to Scott Galloway” (no), “Buy a $26,000 Toy Race Car,” “Become a Pod God,” and “Buy Your Own Whiskey Barrel.” Hef’s Playboy was about the politicization of sex. Guy’s Playboy is about its commodification.

The fine idea of naming J.B. Smoove the new Playboy Advisor was genius, but it leads to a series of boring questions and answers. A Q&A with country singer Eric Church is skip-worthy. There’s a story about bachelorette parties I suspect exactly no one will read. There’s a reprinted, edited version of President Donald Trump’s February 1990 Playboy interview that reads more like PR than speaking truth to power (Playboy: “But you do enjoy flirtations?” Trump: “I think any man enjoys flirtations, and if he said he didn’t, he’d be lying or he’d be a politician trying to get the extra four votes.”) There’s a story about The Satanic Temple, a piece about cheating in the digital age, a Playboy Interview with the already overexposed Nikki Glaser, a feature about antisemitism, and a trip to a thoughtcrime conference, among other articles. All that said, there are a couple stories worth reading: Magdalene Taylor’s “The Rise of the Beta Male,” which considers young men who get turned on by getting rejected, and Rosecrans Baldwin’s “Eyes Wide Open,” which is about modern-day sex clubs.

Mostly, though, the new-new-new Playboy is a magazine that wants to be Esquire and Maxim and Whatever Will Sell When Porn Is Free Online. Editorially, it offers up a view from nowhere, its unarticulated, nonexistent messaging signifying nothing. The only insight one can surmise from this magazine-as-cultural-artifact is that when one seeks to steal sex back from the internet, one will inevitably fail.

The tragedy here is what could have been. Last fall, PLBY Group, which owns Playboy, declined an unsolicited $100 million-plus takeover offer from Cooper Hefner, one of Hef’s sons with Kimberley Conrad, and his investment firm, Hefner Capital. Previously, Cooper was chief creative officer and chief of global partnerships at Playboy Enterprises. For Cooper, Playboy is more than a magazine. “‘This effort is about safeguarding a legacy built over decades, ensuring that the creativity, values and cultural relevance that defined Playboy are not lost,’” he told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the attempted acquisition. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.

Instead of a return to the vital importance of the Playboy of yesteryear, we got more of what we have already. It’s a vision of sexuality devoid of heart and soul, wholly lacking in ideas or politics, a commodity driven by a single-minded mission: increasing value for shareholders. In other words, people who love(d) Playboy are fucked.

Susannah Breslin is a freelance journalist and the author of a memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, and a short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? You can follow her on X, Instagram, and Threads. She lives in Los Angeles.