It’s a sign of our times that it takes a documentary on a 20-something-year-old OTT platform with over 300 million subscribers worldwide to remind us of the importance of a print magazine that began exactly 100 years ago in New York and still has only 3% of its number of subscribers (its digital subscribers form around 4% of its total base).
The irony would not be lost on David Remnick, the 65-year-old editor of the magazine, whose end goal nevertheless remains razor-sharp: not numbers, but a magazine that must always be “great and humane.”
At a time of great misinformation, disinformation, and a preponderance of unverified news, good investigative journalism is needed more than ever — and The New Yorker remains one of its dependable — and elite — bearers. (It’s never “naive” in The New Yorker; it is “naïve,” with the diaeresis.)
Immersive, time-consuming reporting; writerly imprints; high art; comedy and caricature with dark twists; literary fiction; and a system of intense fact-checking that is often compared to a colonoscopy — the work that goes into making the weekly magazine is immense, and forms the subject of a new documentary, The New Yorker at 100.
In it, director Marshall Curry follows Remnick and the editorial team as they bring out the hundredth-anniversary issue (it came out in February; the film was shot earlier this year), as if in a bid to ask a singular question that holds great value for all of us who read: Why is The New Yorker still alive?
After all, the magazine’s digital subscribers (468,100) are still way behind behemoths like The New York Times, and other popular magazines such as Newsweek and Life stopped printing in 2012 and 2000, respectively. Magazine culture, everyone seems to agree, is dying. And, perhaps, therein lies The New Yorker’s superpower: its ability to reinvent itself time and again, making technology work in its favour. The OTT platform is no challenger; Instagram is no enemy of attention spans.
In the 1990s, British-American editor Tina Brown killed The New Yorker as we knew it, and introduced its new credo, making “the sexy serious, and the serious sexy.” This disruption of the old rules still defines a lot of the work at the magazine even now. Under her, the magazine hosted flashy parties. Brown did away with unwieldy approaches to everything in the magazine and hired young writers like Malcolm Gladwell, Hilton Als and a young foreign correspondent from The Washington Post, David Remnick, who succeeded her as editor in 1998, when he was 40 years old.
In 2016, under Remnick, The New Yorker began to go digital and build a strong presence that remains steady and loyal. Remnick seems good-natured but exacting and hard to please.
“I want the literary, journalistic, and artistic achievements of The New Yorker to be at the highest level, whether that is John Hersey in 1946 writing about Hiroshima, or James Baldwin in the 1960s writing about race, or Seymour Hersh and Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer’s investigations in our day. At the same time, I want the magazine to speak with a sense of humanity, as well as rigour,” he said. The tough bit, he said, is “to stick to your principles even as you are accommodating new technologies and making them work for you.” It’s more easily said than done, he admits.
Like any storied organisation, The New Yorker too has had its share of renowned writers and editors who shaped journalistic practices in the 20th century.
Founded by Harold Ross during New York’s Jazz Age, the idea was to create a fizzy humour magazine for “Manhattan sophisticates.” As a team, he had semi-employed writers and humorists who used to find creative epiphanies over liquid lunches. They published cartoons about society and culture and created a mascot, Eustace Tilly, who poked fun at the magazine’s own refined air. American critic and author Louis Menand, winner of the Pulitzer for his book The Metaphysical Club, once wrote, “The New Yorker started as a hectic book of gossip, cartoons, and facetiae.”
Over time, it turned into something far more interesting and successful. It carried more well-written profiles, non-fiction longform articles, and genre-defining pieces that reinvented journalism in a post-war society.
For instance, a profile of Adolf Hitler by Janet Flanner from February 29, 1936, began boldly with: “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer, and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaler, non-smoker, and celibate.”
Physicist Albert Einstein once requested a reprint of 1,000 copies of the August 31, 1946 edition to be sent to the leading scientists of the day. Here’s why: he wanted as many people as possible to read the 30,000-word piece by John Hersey, titled “Hiroshima: I — A Noiseless Flash,” which was about six individuals who were on the ground the day America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.
The note that prefaced the edition read:
“To our readers:
The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.
— The Editors.”
Hersey went to Japan after the bombing, at a time when the American government banned publishing photographs that showed civilian suffering. No doubt, this piece altered the way many viewed nuclear weapons.
In 1958, the magazine published “Silent Spring,” written by biologist and writer Rachel Carson, in three parts, about the toxicity of DDT, a common disinfectant used at the time. Carson was attacked by powerful chemical companies. She had to defend her work in front of the US Congress and the press, and her work is instrumental in birthing the modern environmental movement. The piece also created a genre in itself, transforming science into literature — a genre with illustrious practitioners over the years including Dr Atul Gawande (whose New Yorker articles on costly care informed former US President Barack Obama’s push for the Affordable Care Act).
By 2016, Remnick had a big challenge on his hands: to reinvent The New Yorker for the digital-first world. On its 90th birthday, the magazine got its weekly online radio show, produced in conjunction with WNYC. Soon after, the first instalment in a new Amazon Prime TV series, The New Yorker Presents, released. The anthology was a success, bringing the pages and personality of the magazine to life in six half-hour episodes. A story headlined “A Valuable Reputation” (2014) by writer Rachel Aviv took the video team to the childhood home of activist-biologist Tyrone Hayes, to the heart of South Carolina, where Hayes, as a child, was obsessed with frogs and other amphibians and reptiles. Hayes, who studied the effects of the herbicide Atrazine and concluded that it mutated the reproductive organs of frogs, attracted ire and backlash from the company manufacturing Atrazine. In another story, comedian and actor John Turturro enacted “Last Session,” in which a comic attempts to end his sessions with his therapist of 20 years.
“The New Yorker was, for decades, a rather stately weekly. And it took us time to discover how, at once, to continue doing those pieces that require a lot of time, but also add to the picture a sense of metabolism for more daily offerings, whether it’s about politics or the arts,” Remnick said.
“The original idea of Harold Ross for the magazine remains eccentric, doesn’t it? And yet it works, even as it evolves. Print will last as long as readers, or some readers, want it in that form, but we are also very much a digital operation, as well as audio and video, as well.”
After the digital products were rolled out and dedicated teams were hired for them, Remnick was quoted in the British daily Independent: “We do short things online, we do short things in print, but we’re also publishing every single week pieces that range from 6,000 to 15,000 words. When I first started going to meetings with web people (and I was usually invited as the mainstream-media stegosaurus), one of the evangelical beliefs of the early web was that no one was going to read anything of any length anymore. And I think that’s bullshit. Our younger readers are coming to us to read those very pieces.”
The new documentary just made available on Netflix ignores the economic adversities that the magazine faces, and instead focuses only on the characters who populate its newsroom.
“They are an unusual group — brilliant, funny, quirky, creative. I was nervous when I began the film because writing a magazine isn’t necessarily cinematic. But I was very happy that we were able to find stories and characters who really pop,” said Curry.
Writers Nick Paumgarten (Talk of the Town), Kelefa Sanneh (Music), Jon Lee Anderson (War and Conflict), film critic Richard Brody, art critic Hilton Als, contributing writers Ronan Farrow (Power) and Dhruv Khullar (Science, medicine and health) describe their jobs: “I smell it, taste it, feel it and convert that to the reader,” says Anderson, one of the magazine’s strongest war correspondents ever.
Farrow, whose investigative reporting on powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein exposed decades of sexual-abuse allegations, triggering the #MeToo movement and earning him a Pulitzer Prize, is shown arduously cross-checking with sources for a follow-up to his 2023 piece in the magazine, “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule” (on how the US government came to rely on the tech billionaire and then struggled to rein him in). “Right now, in the current political environment, there’s a lack of respect for the independence of the press. And a willingness to attack reporters for reporting,” he says.
We also see old-timer Bruce Diones, the magazine’s office manager of 46 years (who gleefully directs the camera towards an immaculately preserved Buick typewriter used by some of its early writers).
Curry’s camera captures art editor of 30 years Francoise Molly showing us why a piece of art in the magazine speaks to the moment and is also timeless. We see staff cartoonist Roz Chast hunker down in her apartment, showing how she translates dark to funny, or why she draws in the first place: “to make myself feel less alone.”
Remnick is front and centre along with his writers and artists. Author of books that range from Russia’s post-Communist history to the life of pugilist Muhammad Ali, The New Yorker at 100 zooms in on Remnick’s personal history. He narrates his brush with “incredible strokes of luck and incredible strokes of bad luck,” describing his childhood in New Jersey looking at New York across the Hudson with yearning, living with parents with premature neurological disorders, and then with his “profoundly autistic” daughter. He responds to one of my questions about his experience with illness and disability around him: “I hope it has made me more empathetic, but that’s for others to judge.”
