At the end of the go-go nineties, in the same year that Glass-Steagall was rescinded, the New York Times Magazine invited former Letterman comedy writer Randy Cohen to pen a column called “The Ethicist.” The feature’s success revealed the spirit of the era.

On the one hand, there was our general anxiety that the prosperity of the time was vacuous and undeserved. On the other hand, a serious column on ethics would have missed the mark. Cohen’s comedic touch and the irony of doing a “Miss Manners” column on the weighty topic of ethical conundrums struck just the right balance. If you were one of the fortunate getting rich e-trading or taking your start-up public, the least you could do is tip waiters with the utmost probity.

But as the scandals of the aughts piled on top of each other — Enron, WorldCom, the Iraq War, Halliburton, torture, Gitmo, liar’s loans, Madoff, financial piracy, drone assassinations, gross inequality, precarity, and the threat of environmental apocalypse — “The Ethicist” became absurdly out of step. Sure, Cohen occasionally devoted inches to the weightier problems of the day, but for the most part he stuck to his bread-and-butter topics: the rules of condominium parking, how far to push your child in the private-school meritocracy, and the requirements of being an upstanding co-op member. In 2011, the redesigned magazine, under new leadership, mercifully put Cohen to pasture.