The New Yorker is
an American
magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism,
essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications.
Starting as a weekly in the mid-1920s, the magazine is now
published 47 times per year, with five of these issues covering
two-week spans.
Although
its reviews and events listings often focus on cultural life of
New York
City
, The New Yorker has a wide audience
outside of New York. It is well known in its commentaries on
popular culture and eccentric
Americana; its attention to modern
fiction by the inclusion of
short stories and literary
reviews; its rigorous
fact
checking and
copyediting; its
journalism on
world politics and
social issues; and its famous, single-panel
cartoons sprinkled throughout each
issue.
History
The New Yorker debuted on February 21, 1925, with the
February 21
st issue. It was founded by
Harold Ross and his wife,
Jane Grant, a
New York Times reporter. Ross wanted
to create a sophisticated humor magazine—in contrast to the
corniness of other humor publications such as
Judge, where he had worked, or
Life. Ross partnered with
entrepreneur Raoul H.
Fleischmann to establish the F-R Publishing
Company and established the magazine's first offices at 25 West
45th Street in Manhattan
. Ross edited the magazine until his death in
1951. During the early occasionally precarious years of its
existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan
sophistication.
Harold Ross famously declared in a 1925
prospectus for the magazine: "It has announced that it is not
edited for the old lady in Dubuque
."
Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon
established itself as a preeminent forum for serious journalism and
fiction. Shortly after the end of
World War
II,
John Hersey's essay
Hiroshima filled an entire issue. In
subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of
the most respected writers of the 20th and 21st centuries,
including
Ann Beattie,
John Cheever,
Roald
Dahl,
Alice Munro,
Haruki Murakami,
Vladimir Nabokov,
John O'Hara,
Philip
Roth,
J.D. Salinger,
Irwin
Shaw,
John Updike,
E. B. White and
Richard Yates. Publication of
Shirley Jackson's
The Lottery drew more mail than any other
story in
The New Yorker's history.
In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even
three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has
remained steady at one story per issue. While some styles and
themes recur more often than others in
New Yorker fiction,
the magazine's stories are marked less by uniformity than by their
variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic
narratives to the surrealism of
Donald
Barthelme and from parochial accounts of the lives of neurotic
New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras
and translated from many languages.
The non-fiction feature articles (which usually make up the bulk of
the magazine's content) are known for covering an eclectic array of
topics. Recent subjects have included eccentric evangelist
Creflo Dollar, the different ways in which
humans perceive the passage of time, and
Munchausen
syndrome by proxy.
The magazine is notable for its editorial traditions. Under the
rubric
Profiles, it has long published articles about a
wide range of notable people, from
Ernest Hemingway,
Henry R. Luce, and
Marlon Brando, to Hollywood
restaurateur
Michael Romanoff,
magician
Ricky Jay and mathematicians
David and Gregory Chudnovsky.
Other enduring features have been "Goings on About Town," a listing
of cultural and entertainment events in New York, and "The Talk of
the Town," a miscellany of brief pieces—frequently humorous,
whimsical or eccentric vignettes of life in New York—written in a
breezily light style, or "
feuilleton",
although in recent years the section often begins with a serious
commentary. For many years, newspaper snippets containing amusing
errors, unintended meanings or badly mixed metaphors ("Block That
Metaphor") have been used as filler items, accompanied by a witty
retort. And despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its
traditional appearance over the decades in typography, layout,
covers, and artwork.
Ross was succeeded by
William Shawn
(1951–1987), followed by
Robert
Gottlieb (1987–1992) and
Tina Brown
(1992–1998). Brown's nearly six-year tenure attracted the most
controversy, thanks to her high profile (a marked contrast to that
of the retiring Shawn) and the changes she made to a magazine that
had retained a similar look and feel for the previous half century.
She introduced color to the editorial pages (several years before
The New York Times also
did so) and photography, with less type on each page and a
generally more modern layout. More substantively, she increased the
coverage of current events and hot topics such as celebrities and
business tycoons and placed short pieces throughout "Goings on
About Town," including a racy column about nightlife in Manhattan.
A new letters-to-the-editor page and the addition of authors’
bylines to their "Talk of the Town" pieces had the effect of making
the magazine more personal. The current editor of
The New
Yorker is
David Remnick, who took
over in 1998 from Brown. The magazine was acquired by
Advance Publications, the media company
owned by
S.I. Newhouse, in 1985.
The magazine played a role in a major literary scandal and
defamation lawsuit over two articles by
Janet Malcolm about
Sigmund Freud's legacy, that appeared in the
1990s. Questions were raised about the magazine's
fact-checking process.
Since the late 1990s,
The New Yorker has taken advantage
of computer and Internet technologies for the release of current
and archival material.
The New Yorker maintains a website
with some content from the current issue (plus exclusive web-only
content). Subscribers have access to the full current issue online,
as well as a complete archive of back issues viewable as they were
originally printed. As well,
The New Yorker's cartoons are
available for purchase online. Using techology developed by
Bondi Digital
Publishing, a complete digital archive of back issues from
1925 to April 2007 (representing more than 4,000 issues and half a
million pages) is available on nine DVD-ROMs or on a small portable
hard drive.
A New
Yorker look-alike, Novy Ochevidets (The New
Eyewitness), was launched in Russia
in
2004. It folded in January, 2005 after five months of
circulation.
In September 2007, the magazine announced that longtime poetry
editor Alice Quinn was leaving and, as of November,
Paul Muldoon, an Irish native and U.S. citizen,
would be taking over what
The Chronicle of Higher
Education called "one of the most powerful positions in
American poetry".
According to an article about the transition in
The New York
Times, "The magazine has sometimes been criticized for
publishing the same poets repeatedly and playing favorites, but Ms.
Quinn said that 85 percent of what she published came to her in the
mail 'with little or no notice'. She said that the magazine
regularly received more than 600 poems a week."
Cartoons
The New Yorker has featured cartoons (usually
gag cartoons) since it began publication in
1925. The cartoon editor of
The New Yorker for years was
Lee Lorenz, who first began cartooning in
1956 and became a
New Yorker contract contributor in 1958.
After serving as the magazine's art editor from 1973 to 1993 (when
he was replaced by
Françoise
Mouly), he continued in the position of cartoon editor until
1998. His book,
The Art of the New Yorker: 1925-1995
(Knopf, 1995), was the first comprehensive survey of all aspects of
the magazine's graphics. In 1998,
Robert
Mankoff took over as cartoon editor, and since then Mankoff has
edited at least 14 collections of
New Yorker
cartoons.
The New Yorker's stable of cartoonists has included many
important talents in American humor, including
Charles Addams,
Charles Barsotti,
George Booth,
Roz Chast,
Sam Cobean,
Helen E. Hokinson, Ed Koren, Mary Petty,
George Price,
Charles Saxon,
David Snell,
Otto Soglow,
Saul
Steinberg,
William Steig, Richard
Taylor, Barney Tobey,
James Thurber,
Richard Decker and
Gahan Wilson.
Many early
New Yorker cartoonists did not caption their
own cartoons. In his book
The Years with Ross, James
Thurber describes the newspaper's weekly art meeting, where
cartoons submitted over the previous week would be brought up from
the mail room to be gone over by Ross, the editorial department,
and a number of staff writers. Cartoons would often be rejected or
sent back to artists with requested amendments, while others would
be accepted and captions written for them. Some artists hired their
own writers; Helen Hokinson hired James Reid Parker in 1931.
(Brendan Gill relates in his book
Here at The New Yorker
that at one point in the early 1940s, the quality of the artwork
submitted to the magazine seemed to improve. It was later found out
that the office boy (a teenaged
Truman
Capote) had been acting as a volunteer art editor, dropping
pieces he didn't like down the far edge of his desk.)
Several of the magazine's cartoons have climbed to a higher plateau
of fame. One 1928 cartoon drawn by
Carl
Rose and captioned by
E.B. White shows a mother telling her daughter, "It's
broccoli, dear." The daughter responds, "I say it's spinach and I
say the hell with it." Three years later, the Broadway musical
Face the Music featured a musical number named "I Say It's
Spinach". The
catch phrase "
back to the drawing board"
originated with the 1941
Peter Arno
cartoon showing an engineer walking away from a crashed plane,
saying, "Well, back to the old drawing board."
The most reprinted is Peter Steiner's 1993 drawing of two dogs at a
computer, with one saying, "
On the Internet,
nobody knows you're a dog." According to Mankoff, Steiner and
the magazine have split more than $100,000 in fees paid for the
licensing and reprinting of this single cartoon, with more than
half going to Steiner.
Over seven decades, many hardcover compilations of cartoons from
The New Yorker have been published, and in 2004, Mankoff
edited
The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, a 656-page
collection with 2004 of the magazine's best cartoons published
during 80 years, plus a double CD set with all 68,647 cartoons ever
published in the magazine. This features a search function allowing
readers to search for cartoons by a cartoonist's name or by year of
publication. The newer group of cartoonists in recent years
includes Pat Byrnes, Frank Cotham, Michael Crawford, Joe Dator,
Drew Dernavich, J.C. Duffy, Carolita Johnson, Zachary Kanin, Farley
Katz, Glen Le Lievre, Michael Maslin, Ariel Molvig, Paul Noth,
David Sipress, Mick Stevens, Julia Suits, Christopher Weyant and
Jack Ziegler. The notion that some
New Yorker cartoons
have punchlines so
non
sequitur that they are impossible to understand became a
subplot in the
Seinfeld episode
"
The Cartoon", as well as a playful jab
in an episode of
The Simpsons,
"
The Sweetest Apu".
In April 2005 the magazine began using the last page of each issue
for "The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest." Captionless cartoons
by
The New Yorker's regular cartoonists are printed each
week. Captions are submitted by readers, and three are chosen as
finalists. Readers then vote on the winner, and any U.S. resident
age 18 or older can vote. Each contest winner receives a print of
the cartoon (with the winning caption), signed by the artist who
drew the cartoon.
Politics
In its November 1, 2004 issue, the magazine broke with 80 years of
precedent and issued a formal endorsement of Presidential candidate
John Kerry in a long editorial, signed
"The Editors", which specifically criticized the policies of the
Bush administration. The magazine
endorsed
Barack Obama in another long
editorial, signed "The Editors" in the October 13, 2008 issue,
criticizing both
George W. Bush and
John
McCain.
Films
The New Yorker has been the source of a number of movies. Both
fiction and non-fiction pieces have been adapted for the big
screen, including:
Flash of
Genius (2008), based on a true account of the invention of
windshield wipers by
John Seabrook;
Away From Her, adapted from
Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over The Mountain," which
debuted at the 2007
Sundance Film
Festival;
The
Namesake (2007), similarly based on
Jhumpa Lahiri's novel which originated as a
short story in the magazine; The Bridge (2007), based on Tad
Friend's 2003 non-fiction piece "Jumpers;"
Brokeback Mountain (2005), an
adaptation of the short story by
Annie
Proulx which first appeared in the October 13, 1997 issue of
The New Yorker; Jonathan
Safran Foer's 2001 debut in The New Yorker, which later came to
theaters in Liev Schreiber's debut as both screenwriter and
director,
Everything is
Illuminated (2005);
Michael
Cunningham's
The
Hours, which appeared in the pages of The New Yorker
before becoming the film that garnered the 2002 Best Actress
Academy Award for
Nicole Kidman;
Adaptation (2002), which
Charlie Kaufman based on
Susan Orlean's
The Orchid Thief,
written for
The New Yorker; Frank McCourt's
Angela's Ashes, which also appeared, in
part, in The New Yorker in 1996 before its film adapation was
released in 1999;
The Addams
Family (1991) and its sequel,
Addams Family Values (1993), both
inspired by the work of famed New Yorker cartoonist
Charles Addams;
Brian De Palma's
Casualties of War (1989), which began
as a
New Yorker article by Daniel Lang;
The Swimmer (1968), starring
Burt Lancaster, based on a John
Cheever short story from
The New Yorker; In Cold Blood (1967), the widely
nominated adaptation of the 1965 non-fiction serial written for The
New Yorker by
Truman Capote;
Pal Joey (1957), based on a
series of stories by John O'Hara;
The Secret Life of Walter
Mitty (1947) which began as a story by longtime New Yorker
contributor James Thurber;
Meet Me in St. Louis
(1944), adapted from
Sally Benson's
short stories.
The history of magazine has also been portrayed in film: In
Mrs. Parker and the
Vicious Circle, a film about the celebrated
Algonquin Round Table starring
Jennifer Jason Leigh as
Dorothy Parker,
Sam Robards portrays founding editor Harold Ross
trying to drum up support for his fledgling publication. The
magazine's former editor,
William
Shawn, is portrayed in
Capote (2005) and
Infamous (2006).
Style
One uncommonly formal feature of the magazine's in-house
style is the placement of
diaeresis marks in words with repeating
vowels—such as
reëlected and
coöperate—in which the two vowel letters indicate separate
vowel sounds. The magazine also continues to use a few spellings
that are otherwise little used, such as "focusses" and
"venders".
The magazine does not put the titles of plays or books in italics
but simply sets them off with
quotation
marks. When referring to other publications that include
locations in their names, it uses italics only for the
"non-location" portion of the name, such as the Los Angeles
Times or the Chicago
Tribune.
Formerly, when a word or phrase in quotation marks came at the end
of a phrase or clause that ended with a
semicolon, the semicolon would be put before the
trailing quotation mark; now, however, the magazine follows the
universally observed style and puts the semicolon after the second
quotation mark.
The magazine also spells out the names of numbers, such as
"twenty-five hundred" instead of "2500," even for very large
figures.
The New Yorker's signature display typeface, used for its
nameplate and headlines and the masthead above
The Talk of the
Town section, is Irvin, named after its creator, the
designer-illustrator
Rea Irvin.
Audience
According to the
Audit
Bureau of Circulation, The New Yorker has 1,011,821 subscribers
in 2009. In contrast to its title, The New Yorker is read
nationwide with 53% of its circulation in the top ten U.S.
metropolitan areas. According to Mediamark Research Inc., the
average age of the New Yorker reader in 2009 is 47 (compared to 48
for news magazine subscribers, and 46 for the nation). The average
household income of New Yorker readers in 2009 is $109,877 (the
average income for a U.S. household with a subscription to a news
magazine is $92,788 and the U.S. average household income is
$74,656) .
Also according the
Audit
Bureau of Circulation, The New Yorker's renewal rate (the
percentage of subscribers who renew their subscription each year)
is 85%--one of the highest reported rates in the industry.
Mediamark Research Inc. reports that readers spend, on average, 81
minutes each week reading The New Yorker.
Eustace Tilley
The magazine's first cover illustration, of a
dandy peering at a butterfly through a
monocle, was drawn by
Rea
Irvin, the magazine's first art editor. The gentleman on the
original cover is referred to as "Eustace Tilley," a character
created for
The New Yorker by
Corey
Ford. Eustace Tilley was the hero of a series entitled "The
Making of a Magazine," which began on the inside front cover of the
August 8 issue that first summer. He was a younger man than the
figure of the original cover. His top hat was of a newer style,
without the curved brim. He wore a
morning
coat and striped trousers. Ford borrowed Eustace Tilley's last
name from an aunt—he had always found it vaguely humorous.
"Eustace" was selected for
euphony,
although Ford may have borrowed the name from Eustace Taylor, his
fraternity brother from
Delta Kappa
Epsilon at
Columbia College of
Columbia University.
Tilley was always busy, and in illustrations by Johann Bull, always
poised. He might be in Mexico, supervising the vast farms that grew
the cactus for binding the magazine's pages together. The
Punctuation Farm, where commas were grown in profusion, because
Ross had developed a love of them, was naturally in a more fertile
region. Tilley might be inspecting the Initial Department, where
letters were sent to be capitalized. Or he might be superintending
the Emphasis Department, where letters were placed in a vise and
forced sideways, for the creation of italics.
He would jump to the
Sargasso
Sea
, where by insulting squids he got ink for the
printing presses, which were powered by a horse turning a
pole. It was told how in the great paper shortage of 1882 he
had saved the magazine by getting society matrons to contribute
their finery. Thereafter dresses were made at a special factory and
girls employed to wear them out, after which the cloth was used for
manufacturing paper.
Raoul
Fleischmann, who had moved into the offices to protect his
venture with Ross, gathered the Tilley series into a promotion
booklet. Later, Ross took a listing for Eustace Tilley in the
Manhattan telephone directory.
The character has become a kind of
mascot for
The New Yorker, frequently appearing in its pages and on
promotional materials. Traditionally, Rea Irvin's original Tilley
cover illustration is reused every year on the issue closest to the
anniversary date of February 21, though on several occasions a
newly drawn variation has been substituted.
Covers
"View of the World" cover
Saul Steinberg created 85 covers and
642 internal drawings and illustrations for the magazine. His most
famous work is probably its March 29, 1976
cover, an illustration titled "View of the World from
9th Avenue," sometimes
referred to as "A
Parochial New
Yorker's View of the World" or "A New Yorker's View of the World,"
which depicts a map of the world as seen by
self-absorbed New Yorkers.
The
illustration is split in two, with the bottom half of the image
showing Manhattan's 9th Avenue, 10th Avenue, and the Hudson River (appropriately labeled), and the
top half depicting the rest of the world. The rest of the
United
States is the size of the three New York City blocks and
is drawn as a square, with a thin brown strip along the Hudson
representing "Jersey"
, the names
of five cities (Los Angeles
, Washington,
D.C.
, Las Vegas
, Kansas City
, and Chicago
) and three states (Texas
, Utah
, and
Nebraska
) scattered among a few rocks for the U.S. beyond
New Jersey. The Pacific Ocean
, perhaps half again as wide as the Hudson,
separates the U.S. from three flattened land masses labeled
China
, Japan
and Russia.
The illustration—humorously depicting New Yorkers' self-image of
their place in the world, or perhaps outsiders' view of New
Yorkers' self-image—inspired many similar works, including the
poster for the
1984 film Moscow on the Hudson; that movie
poster led to a lawsuit,
Steinberg
v. Columbia
Pictures Industries, Inc., 663 F. Supp. 706 (
S.D.N.Y.
1987), which held that
Columbia
Pictures violated the
copyright that
Steinberg held on his work.
The cover was later satirized over by
Barry
Blitt for the cover of the New Yorker on October 6, 2008.
The cover
featured Sarah Palin looking out of her
window seeing only Alaska
and in the
very background Russia [5459].
The March 21, 2009 cover of
The
Economist, "How China sees the World," is also an homage to the
original image, but depicting the viewpoint from
Beijing's Chang An street instead of
Manhattan.
"New Yorkistan"
In the December 2001 issue the magazine printed a cover by Maira
Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz showing a map of New York in which
various neighborhoods were labeled with humorous names reminiscent
of Middle Eastern and Central Asian place names and referencing the
neighborhood's real name or characteristics (e.g.
"Fuhgeddabouditstan," "Botoxia"). The cover had some cultural
resonance in the wake of
September 11
and became a popular print and poster.
Controversial covers
Crown Heights in 1993
For the 1993
Valentine's Day issue,
the magazine printed a cover by
Art
Spiegelman depicting a Black woman and a Hasidic Jewish man
kissing, referencing the
Crown
Heights riot of 1991. The cover was criticized by both Black
and Jewish observers. Jack Salzman and
Cornel West describe the reaction to the cover
as the magazine's "first national controversy."
2008 Obama cover satire and controversy
"The Politics of Fear," a cartoon by Barry Blitt featured on the
cover of the July 21, 2008 issue, depicts then presumptive
Democratic presidential
nominee
Barack Obama in the
turban and
salwar kameez
typical of many
Muslims,
fist bumping with his wife,
Michelle, portrayed with an
Afro and wearing
camouflage trousers with an
AK-47 assault rifle slung
over her back. They are standing in the
Oval
Office, with a portrait of
Osama Bin
Laden hanging on the wall and an
American flag burning in the fireplace in the
background.
Many
New Yorker readers saw the image as a lampoon of "The
Politics of Fear," as the image was titled. Some of Obama's
supporters as well as his presumptive Republican opponent,
Sen. John McCain,
accused the magazine of publishing an incendiary cartoon whose
irony could be lost on some readers. The New Yorker's Editor,
David Remnick, said: "The intent of
the cover is to satirize the vicious and racist attacks and rumors
and misconceptions about the Obamas that have been floating around
in the
blogosphere and are reflected in
public opinion polls. What we set out to do was to throw all these
images together, which are all over the top and to shine a kind of
harsh light on them, to satirize them," citing the excesses in the
image to rebuff the concern that it could be misunderstood, even by
those unfamiliar with the magazine. Obama, in an interview on
Larry King Live shortly
after the magazine issue began circulating, said "Well, I know it
was
The New Yorker's attempt at satire... I don't think
they were entirely successful with it..." But Obama also pointed to
his own efforts to debunk the allegations portrayed in the New
Yorker cover through a web site his campaign set up: "[They are]
actually an insult against Muslim-Americans, something that we
don't spend a lot of time talking about.""
Later that week,
The Daily Show's
Jon Stewart continued
The New
Yorker cover's argument about Obama stereotypes with a piece
showcasing a montage of clips containing such stereotypes culled
from various legitimate news sources. The
New Yorker Obama
cover was later parodied by Stewart and
Stephen Colbert on the October 3, 2008,
cover of
Entertainment
Weekly magazine, with Stewart as Obama and Colbert as
Michelle, photographed exclusively for the magazine in New York
City on
September 18.
New Yorker covers are not always related to the contents
of the magazine, or only tangentially so. In this case, the article
in the July 21, 2008 issue about Obama did not discuss the attacks
and rumors, but rather Obama's political career to date.
The
New Yorker later endorsed Obama for president.
See also
Books
- Ross and the New Yorker by Dale Kramer (1951)
- The Years with Ross by James
Thurber (1959)
- Ross, the New Yorker and Me by Jane Grant (1968)
- Here at The New
Yorker by Brendan Gill
(1975)
- About the New Yorker and Me by E.J. Kahn (1979)
- Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S.
White by Linda H. Davis (1987)
- At Seventy: More about the New Yorker and Me by
E.J. Kahn (1988)
- Katharine and E.B. White: An Affectionate
Memoir by Isabel Russell (1988)
- The Last Days of The New Yorker by Gigi Mahon
(1989)
- Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by
Thomas Kunkel (1997)
- Here But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New
Yorker by Lillian
Ross (1998)
- Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of
Editing by Ved Mehta (1998)
- Some Times in America: and a life in a year at the New
Yorker by Alexander Chancellor (1999)
- The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at
Midcentury by Mary F. Corey (1999)
- About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made by
Ben Yagoda (2000)
- Covering the New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers from a
Literary Institution by Francoise
Mouly (2000)
- Defining New Yorker Humor by Judith Yaross Lee
(2000)
- Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker, by Renata Adler (2000)
- Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross
edited by Thomas Kunkel (2000; letters covering the years 1917 to
1951)
- New Yorker Profiles 1925-1992: A Bibliography compiled
by Gail Shivel (2000)
- NoBrow: The Culture of Marketing - the Marketing of
Culture by John Seabrook (2000)
- Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and
Art (2003)
- A Life of Privilege, Mostly by Gardner Botsford
(2003)
- Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker by Angela
Bourke (2004)
- Let Me Finish by Roger
Angell (Harcourt, 2006)
References
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