Last night as I paged through the new issue of the New Yorker, dated 26 November, I felt like I was reading a dispatch from the one-percenters who run the American economy, take far more than their fair share of American income, and lately have ruined American politics.

Let me state first that I love the magazine. I have been reading it for more than 55 years, since I learned to read partly by looking at its cartoons with my grandmother in her garden. My beginning as a writer was reading the articles of John McPhee when I was teenager. I’ve subscribed to the magazine for decades, and once tried to get a lifetime subscription. My heart still lifts when I find each week’s edition in my mailbox.

Today I consider its reporting one of the four essential things to read to understand the state of the nation, the other three being the Atlantic, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The New Yorker especially has set the agenda in certain areas, with Jane Mayer’s reporting first on official US torture after 9/11 and then, more recently, on the role of rightwing money in American politics. Ronan Farrow’s revelations about sexual assaults by powerful men have also brought about the beginnings of a change in our culture.

But as I paged through the magazine I saw something else. Every few pages there was a contradiction, a message from another America. Those were the advertisements. Reading them is like receiving dispatches from the oligarchy. They are prettied up, to be sure – they are not the oligarchy as it is, but as it would like to see itself. But they describe the state of our culture all too well. Future historians may do well to pay more attention to them than to the news columns of the magazine.

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It’s not just the New Yorker that has such advertisements, of course. The New York Times magazine has even more aimed at the wealthy, especially multimillion-dollar apartments. But I don’t find any reason to read it. The Atlantic’s advertisements are far more representative – the issue that arrived just today has offerings about cars, liquor, watches, even a mattress company and a college seeking to raise its profile.

By contrast, the New Yorker’s advertisements seem to me to be a journey into the psyche of today’s American oligarchy. Take this 26 November issue. The cover is a Roz Chast cartoon about Thanksgiving, warm, clever and bittersweet as she always is. But flip the page and on the obverse side is the first transmission from the oligarchy, an advertisement for a champagne that, we are told, is “chosen by the best”. This resonates with a theme members of the oligarchy love, which is that they are the best people. That is, they think they are loaded with money because they earned it, not because they are lucky or because they work in the corporate finance sector at a time when the illness of the American political system has enabled that sector to socialize its risks (think of the 2008 bailouts) while keeping its profits to itself. That’s why they also need “the best books” (on page 6) and “the world’s best non-iron, high-performance dress shirt”, as seen on page 20.

Back to the front. One page after the champagne ad, we see a photograph of a smiling older white man, with the caption, “He loves helping kids. So he gives.” He calls on the reader to “give something back to the world”. My blood pressure rises when I see ads like this, because it goes to the larger problem of charity in America nowadays. If the system worked as it should, and if rich people paid their fair share of taxes, then the rest of us wouldn’t need to beg them to peel off a piece of their income and toss it back to the people.

I think about this every time I am in New York City and see the names of rich people and their businesses on public places. Yes, I am glad to see a park or skating rink open and running. But it saddens me to see it is done by one-percenters turning back a tiny percentage of their gains to the public.

The next full page ad is a wordless statement from Gucci. It is just a photograph of a couple of people looking bored. I don’t know if they are celebrities or if I should recognize them. But then this ad isn’t trying to speak to me.

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By contrast, the next big advertisement is a notice from Fidelity Investments. This is the sole full page ad in the issue that strikes an off-key note. It carries nearly 200 words of copy, and that’s even before the required small type at the bottom that no one reads. The message is a bit sweaty – are you prepared for a comfortable retirement? In its busy-ness and its tremor of financial anxiety, it feels a bit downscale, especially following that plummy silent page from Gucci. It even mentions, if you look closely, old age income from social security. Awkward.

But the full page ad that set me off on this tear came on page 10, when a relatively young man – his bearded thirty-ish face illuminated as he stares off to the side – is shown behind the capitalized headline “GREATER IS ELEVATING THE FAMILY NAME INTO AN ICON.” The text below, from a trust company, explains that, OK, you have your “business ownership and personal wealth”, but now you have to move up to the next step, “build something that lasts”. Not only is being comfortable no longer the goal, being wealthy is no longer enough. Even oligarchs have to keep running.

I could go on. There’s an advertisement from “America’s Biopharmaceutical Companies” (p 23) designed to remind us that they fight diseases, but it simply reminds me that Americans pay outrageous amounts for prescription drugs, and that my own healthcare provider, Aetna, last year raked in a net profit of $1.9bn.

The issue’s first two-page ad is for the “Mastercard Black Card”, offered in funereal colors, with no explanation of its benefits, except that it is a “luxury card”. I guess if you have to ask what the benefits are, you can’t afford it.

The magazine ends with another one-two punch: On the back is a Gucci-like notice from Hermès. On the inside of the back cover is an advertisement from Wells Fargo, the bank most notable for a recent scandal in which its employees created 2 million fake bank accounts for clients without their consent. But the ad, of course, isn’t about that. Rather, it tells you that the bank can “help you build the future”.

Because, I guess, the oligarchy already has taken care of the present.