The New Yorker at 100:

   Can there be another magazine in American history, perhaps the history of magazines in general, that can claim the unique combination of qualities that have made The New Yorker such an extraordinary success? With something like 1,230,000 subscribers and more than 21 million digital followers, it has thrived while many other general audience journals have declined or folded. Arriving forty-seven times a year, and now present even more relentlessly online, it never fails to contain an abundance of fresh material—original reportage, cogent opinion pieces, in-depth pro- files, trenchant reviews, arresting short fiction, wacky satires, accessible poetry, striking photography, as well as preview coverage of “what we are watching, listening to and doing this week.” And, of course, it features a choice selection of those inimitable “New Yorker cartoons,” cut out and posted on bulletin boards everywhere, anthologized in countless coffee table books, and good for at least one laugh-out-loud moment in every issue. To coordinate all of these moving parts, reacting rapidly to the latest news and scouting out the most recent cultural trends, and to do so at what is universally recognized at the highest level of quality, is no mean feat. In short, The New Yorker deserves the accolades that have accompanied its centenary, which the magazine has celebrated with the delicate balance of self-congratulation and self-effacement that has marked its long history.

There is, I want to argue, something else behind the unique role The New Yorker has played for a sizeable audience, which extends well beyond the borders of the great metropolis—that “town” whose “talk” we are privileged to overhear—that gives it its name. To get at what I mean, let me ask your indulgence to make a detour into my own personal connection, albeit oblique, with the magazine. That connection, I hasten to add, is not professional. I have never written for it nor have any of my books been reviewed in its pages. Aside from a few scattered mentions in articles, the occasional call from a fact-checker, and a few friends who have appeared in its pages, my relationship with the magazine is that of an ordinary reader, who has rarely missed an issue for something like the past seventy years.

Or to be more precise, it is the relationship of an ordinary reader who was romantically involved as a teenager with Nancy Tobey, the daughter of two of The New Yorker’s most notable long-time contributors. Her parents were Beatrice Szanton, who painted eleven covers for the magazine from 1959 to 1969, and Barney Tobey, a regular cartoonist for an even longer period, who contributed 1200 cartoons and sketches, as well as four covers of his own. Although not as famous as James Thurber, Charles Addams or Peter Arno, “B. Tobey,” as he signed his work, possessed a droll wit and visual grace that gained him a place in the magazine’s pantheon of most cherished cartoonists.

Nancy Tobey and I were students at the Bronx High School of Science from 1958 to 1961, meeting, if memory serves, in the advanced placement English class of the notorious Dr. Isabel Gordon, legendary for her demanding standards and unsparing scorn for students who failed to live up to them. We were sixteen when we started dating, in a pressure cooker environment where SAT scores were more important than social popularity. At the center of a surprisingly robust humanist community in a school dominated by future scientists, Nancy served as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, Dynamo , which published poets of distinction in our class like Lewis Warsh and Eric Felderman. She was small, slim, attractive, and explosively smart with the self-deprecating grace to avoid intimidating others. But I knew from the beginning I was punching above my weight, and in more ways than one. The Tobeys lived at the Kenilworth on Central Park West between 75th and 76th streets, a formidable beaux- art building, in a high-floor apartment with a stunning view of the park. Our building in the Bronx, near the Grand Concourse, was also across a park, Joyce Kilmer to be exact, but even if we had had a view of it, it would not have been as dazzling. The worlds from which we had come overlapped but were hardly congruent.

Nancy, to her credit, never indicated that she took the discrepancy seriously. We were perhaps too busy sampling the cultural riches of New York to compare the views from our apartment windows. I remember our hearing Miriam Makeba at the Village Vanguard, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck at the Met—my aunt and uncle gifted me their orchestra seats to avoid suffering through an evening of musical dissonance—and Louis Armstrong at Basin Street East. The last of these events followed our senior class prom at the Waldorf Astoria, which was perhaps the culmination of our high school years together. To mark the end, Nancy gave me copies of Nathaniel West’s apocalyptic Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust and Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, the latter inscribed “with feeling and with love, and don’t really understand this all—it becomes much.” In the yearbook, she wrote: “wish all to remember, love Nan.”

Nancy went off to spend the summer studying, for some obscure reason, advanced physics classes at Choate before starting her freshman year at the University of Chicago, while I worked as a summer camp counselor before beginning at Union College in Schenectady. I kept the letters and cards she sent while we were separated, which still have the freshness and immediacy they conveyed at the time. Her tone was invariably breathless, hurried, intense, at once exacerbated by and exhilarated with the challenges of a high-octane life. One from that summer at Choate begins: “Sorry for the immense delay in answering yours, but there is no no no time here, no time—it’s a sink and swim type of thing with no flying yet, with no even breathing. We all march along in these impossible courses, and crack up on the stairs at the dorm from lack of all.” And it ends: “Learning immense amt’s of Phys and math and what I don’t know wont know wont ever know. Am mostly tho fantastically happy here, honestly working for once and happy for the first time in my life, really working.” Another, from the following summer, when she had some sort of internship at, of all places, Seventeen magazine, expresses the opposite emotion: “There is Nothing to be done here. The girls all talk, ceaselessly, about marriage, sex (They talk as if they’re on the Good side of the line), men, food, clothes, cooking, apartments, etc. Great. Great experience. Great everything. Waste of time, boring, not that lucrative. So everyone’s happy.”

The pursuit of an elusive happiness, it seems, was an abiding issue, although there was clearly a rush of it conveyed in a card sent at the end of her freshman year at Chicago, an environment she had found uncongenial: “(No apologies for my horrible correspondence because I’ll see you so soon )—but I must tell you the NEWS: I’m going to Radcliffe in Sept. At last. And I’m staying in N.Y. to earn $ all summer, which is going to be horrible and hot & I hope I’ll see lots of you—yes?” Transferring to an east coast school meant that our attenuated long-distance relationship would be tested, and it soon was when Nancy came to Union in the fall of 1962 to spend that semester’s raucous blow-out weekend with me. Still at that time an all-male college, Union periodically sponsored concerts by major entertainers—that year it was Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan—followed by wild parties at the many fraternities on campus. The idea was to crash as many as possible, where beer flowed freely, loud bands played, and inhibitions were relaxed.

To cut to the chase, it didn’t work out. The reason is hinted at in the letter Nancy sent after she returned to Cambridge, which concluded “Incidentally, I’m as stiff as a board—all over—from my ‘twisting.’ Maybe next time I’ll listen to Daddy.” No need to go into the details, but neither of us at the age of eighteen was ready for a more mature relationship. What in retrospect all this has to do with The New Yorker I will try to explain shortly, but there is an epilogue to the story. After that unsuccessful weekend, we didn’t see each other until our 25th High School reunion in 1986. By that time, I had settled into the comfortable, safe life I had always wanted—a wonderful marriage with a remarkable woman, the literary critic Catherine Gallagher, sharing dual careers at a distinguished university and a couple of terrific kids—while Nancy was still en route. The description she left in the brochure accompanying the reunion reads: “single—no children….career, interests and life have all been quite dramatic! Film-making (writer & and on crew) for some years—Dramatic and comedy writing—lived almost half the time in Italy for the past 4-5 years, where I write, do art, drink cappuccino, etc.”

The lure of Italy, as it turned out, was irresistible. Several of her mother’s New Yorker covers had been of casual scenes in Italian towns— one amusingly showing a travel agency with ads for trips to America—and there seems to have been a long-standing family fondness for its cultural riches. Many years later, the Metropolitan Museum in New York would mount an exhibition of the Italian Old Master Drawings collected by her older brother David and his wife Julie, who also endowed a fellowship in Renaissance Studies at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence. Nancy was to spend the rest of her life in Rome, where she honed her talents as a painter, producing several vivid expressionist portraits rendered with emotional intensity. By then, she had changed her name to Natasha Tubelskaya, a gesture that was perhaps a conscious effort to start afresh in a life energized by a restless quest for something always out of reach.

It all, however, ended with an awful suddenness in February 2002, when a fire broke out in her apartment/studio in Rome. According to the reports in the Italian papers the next day, the pompieri could not approach the building in time to reach her because of a phalanx of double-parked cars. She was only fifty-six. I was able to obtain a modest catalogue of her work on eBay but have no knowledge of its reception or any reports of the expat life she had built in Italy. The dramatic genre of that life was revealed at its end as a romantic quest or perhaps a tragedy, with a touch of the absurd that Nancy, with her ability to laugh at the contingencies of existence, might have appreciated.

I don’t want, however, to impose meaning on a life that only intersected with mine for a very limited period, but rather to do my best to honor her “wish all to remember” and so hold off for a moment that fading into the oblivion we all inevitably suffer. The story of our relationship—or more precisely, my own perception of it then and now—is also, I think, relevant for the point this essay hopes to make about the abiding appeal of The New Yorker. To begin an explanation, it may be instructive to recall Dwight Macdonald’s notorious broadside against it in Partisan Review back in 1937, titled “Laugh and Lie Down.” Only a dozen years old and still under the guidance of its shrewd, feared, fastidious founding editor, Harold Ross, the magazine had yet to move entirely away from its original goal of being “for and about the Manhattan upper crust.” Eustace Tilley, the “butterfly dandy,” who became its mascot, was not yet entirely a figure of ironic fun, and no anti-elitist guilt prevented the announcement that “the old lady from Dubuque” was decidedly not its target audience. Although a few years later Macdonald would himself write for the magazine and fiercely defend it against snarky put-downs by the likes of Tom Wolfe, at that time he was still a Trotskyist firebrand, righteously indignant at what he read in its pages and between its lines. The New Yorker’s tone, he charged, was that “of a cocktail party at which the guests are intelligent but well-bred. No subjects are taboo, so long as they are ‘amusing.’ But, as any experienced hostess knows, too earnest handling rubs off the bloom. Moderation in all things, including humor.” Its attitude towards the arts, moreover, smacked of superficial Park Avenue dilettantism: “The chief quality of New Yorker criticism is its amiability. Since to Park Avenue, art is important chiefly as a means of killing time, what is required is not critics but tipsters.” Rather than hovering about the fray, as a dandy might flatter his location to be, “The New Yorker’s position in the class war, however, is not so simple as its editors would have us believe. Its neutrality is itself a form of upper-class display, since only the economically secure can afford such Jovian aloofness from the common struggle. In times like these there is something monstrously inhuman in the deliberate cultivation of the trivial.” The most explicit expression of its intended audience was in the advertising it attracted, which catered to the refined tastes of a monied elite—remember, this was the height of the Depression—who were looking for distraction from the ever-looming threat of boredom.

Macdonald finished his screed with a shrewd observation about the context in which the magazine was created: “The New Yorker owes its present dominance to the fact that it is the only important vehicle for the humor of the urban intelligentsia. From the Civil War to the World War, the dominant school of humor based itself on the small-town culture of the hinterland. Humorists like Artemus Ward and Bill Nye attacked the big bourgeoisie of the East in their cultural outworks at the same time as their political allies, the populists, attacked the East in its economic citadel: Wall Street. The War destroyed the populist position in humor as in politics.” Although not the first to rebel against the prevailing cornball sensibility—The Smart Set , proclaiming itself “A Magazine of Cleverness,” was already on the scene in 1900, and Vanity Fair followed in 1914—The New Yorker was the most consequential of the new breed.

Much, of course, had changed by the late 1950’s, when my brief interlude in the distant orbit of the magazine began. The clever snobbery of the early years, influenced by the Algonquin Round Table, one of whose members was Ross, had been for the most part sidelined. John Hersey’s ground-breaking report about the Atomic Bomb, “Hiroshima,” had taken up an entire issue in 1946, marking what a later account—also in The New Yorker—called “the end of the magazine’s founding era and the beginning of its maturity.” Now the journalism could focus on serious topics written with the intent less to amuse and distract than enlighten and trouble. The ground was seeded for later classics like Hannah Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1963), Mark Danner’s on the massacre in El Mozote (1993), and Seymour Hersh’s on Abu Ghraib (2005). A platform could be given to gifted Black writers like James Baldwin, who previewed parts of The Fire Next Time in “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in 1962. Contributions from women, which had been rare during the Ross years, the occasional piece by Dorothy Parker notwithstanding, became routine, as those of us who grew up on Shirley Jackson, Mary McCarthy, Janet Flanner, Arlene Croce and Pauline Kael can well attest.

If Manhattan was still ground zero for the magazine, its sensibility had moved across Central Park to the Upper West Side. Saul Steinberg’s celebrated cartoon, “A New Yorker’s View of the World,” which was on the cover in 1976, is tellingly from Ninth Ave, not Park. Now a more inclusive, casual, and—it can be said frankly—less WASPish sensibility reigned. Ross’s successor William Shawn and two out of three of those who followed were assimilated Jews, and over the years, the magazine welcomed a Who’s Who of American Jewish writers into its pages. While not sabotaging The New Yorker’s commitment to wit, satire and outright silliness—Woody Allen, Larry David and the cartoonist Roz Chast, after all, made regular appearances—they often introduced a note of moral high-mindedness that had been absent in the early years (think of all those reviews by George Steiner). And as in the case of contributors like Philip Roth, they could combine the two. Although it took a while before the genteel antisemitism of the prewar era was fully obliterated—H.L. Mencken, whose distaste for Jews was notorious, wrote something like fifty pieces for the magazine between 1934 and 1949—no turning back the clock was possible.

Much more can be said about the subtle ways in which The New Yorker came to embody the successful upward cultural mobility of American Jews in the 20th century. One way to approach it would be to compare its history with that of another group of (mostly) Jewish gatecrashers, who had their moment at virtually the same time, the New York Intellectuals. Despite their shared identification with a specific urban location, both were engines of the cosmopolitan de-provincialization of American culture. The blithe Jazz Age, upper crust tone of The New Yorker, however, was never entirely muted, while the New York Intellectuals often boasted a CCNY pedigree, where students were, in Vivan Gornick’s words, “smart, poor, overachieving: Jewish. Not, however, cultivated.” Ironically, the more plebeian origins of the New York Intellectuals did not prevent them from casting their lot with the aesthetic avant-garde against vulgar kitsch—to cite Clement Greenberg’s familiar dichotomy—while the patrician roots of The New Yorker somehow sanctioned a more forgiving attitude towards popular culture, which has only grown over the years.

Their histories, nonetheless, intertwined. Dwight Macdonald’s Partisan Review 1937 attack followed by his rapprochement with the magazine captures the complexity of their dynamic, which allowed a handful of other writers, such as Mary McCarthy, to play on both teams. A crossing of political sentiments over the years—many New York Intellectuals, spurning their early anti-Stalinist leftism, turned into neocons, while The New Yorker grew more progressive—was one reason they remained wary of each other. Despite later New Yorker accounts—by Louis Menand, among others—of New York Intellectual luminaries, such as Norman Podhoretz and Lionel Trilling, they seem to have kept a wary distance, and rarely have their overlapping histories been explored in any depth.

Were such an interlocking narrative to be written, it would inevitably include Irving Howe’s 1963 essay on “Hannah Arendt and the New Yorker” in Commentary, published shortly after her reporting on the Eichmann trial had aroused enormous controversy among those grappling with the meaning of the Holocaust. Howe began by noting his reluctance to share the attitude recently expressed in a New Republic critique of James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which mocked “the incongruity between Baldwin’s passionate outcry and the sumptuous advertisements surrounding it.” To Howe, this smacked of intellectual snobbery and a failure to recognize the value of reaching an audience much larger than any little magazine might boast.

But when it came to Arendt on the Eichmann trial, where it was a matter of challenging her reporting and the problematic implications she drew from it, Howe contended there was a deeper problem. Although many critics had decried her factual errors and tendentious interpretations, The New Yorker did not print a single rebuttal or open a debate about the issues themselves. Wanting to avoid the “grubby” quarrels that marked the little magazines, such as his own Dissent, where “real” intellectuals engaged in endless combat, it presented itself as somehow above any fray that might break out. For Howe, the results were disastrous: “One would surmise that its editors regard Miss Arendt’s articles as ‘literature,’ quite as they might regard Baldwin’s article. A terrific piece, a great story: you don’t argue with literature. What we face here, then, is a difficult problem: a problem in social controls, in the nature of modern journalism and the peculiar powers it enjoys, in the new forms of mass culture that flourish in our sophisticated age.”

In the sixty-two years since that was written, much has changed and much remains the same at The New Yorker. It no longer seems an anomaly that articles of substance, often with a political edge, appear regularly in its pages, or that it has found a way to have an expanded impact in our age of alternate media, podcasting, and an accelerated news cycle that the little magazines of the New York Intellectuals, only some of which survive, can only envy. Even its covers often now make pointed political statements, which can generate controversial discussions of the kind that would have been avoided during the magazine’s earlier incarnations. Under the editorship of David Remnick, the boundary between quality journalism and academic scholarship has grown more porous, as evidenced by his interview with the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin on the Russian-Ukrainian war. It would be dubious to characterize, as Howe did in 1963, much of what it publishes, however polished its prose, as mere “literature,” let alone the “amusing” idle chatter that Macdonald had excoriated back in 1937. The doomed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s “Prison Diaries,” published in The New Yorker a few months after his death in February 2024, may evoke Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, but it is anything but a literary reworking of an actual experience.

And yet, it remains true that the luxury ads for Rolexes, Chanel Jewelry, Regent Seven Seas cruises, Hermès fashions and the like, still litter the pages of The New Yorker. Nor, despite the smattering of letters to the editor first allowed into its pages during the editorial reign of Tina Brown, has Howe’s observation about the lack of serious argumentation in its pages, unlike in the journals of The New York Intellectuals, been refuted. One might say that the attitude of the dandy, aloof from “grubby” squabbling and gazing at the world with ironic hauteur, still haunts its pages, subtly expressing an enduring mandarin sensibility despite the engaged intention of many of its articles. That sensibility resonates well with what Walter Benjamin once called the “étui-man,” referring to the small, exquisitely ornamented cases that elegant ladies and the occasional gentlemen once used to hold personal items. “The étui-man,” he wrote, “looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world.”

Well-ornamented comfort, in fact, is what The New Yorker has long provided with its unique mixture of high seriousness and whimsical humor, rigorous aesthetic standards and ads for luxury commodities, insightful investigative journalism and gossip about the glitterati of the day. Despite its political content, it subtly reassures its readers that no matter what may happen, it won’t really happen to “us.” This effect is produced, inter alia, by the magazine’s artful juxtapositions, which go beyond well-placed cartoons lightening the mood of somber articles or deflating profiles. Take, for example, the Talk of the Town in a recent issue, which begins with a resounding condemnation of the first weeks of the second Trump presidency by David Remnick himself. His opening salvo is uncompromisingly grim: “It was one thing to anticipate this prolonged political moment; it has been, these past weeks, quite another to live it. Each day is its own fresh hell, bringing ever more outrageous news from an autocrat who revels in his contempt for the government he leads, for the foreign allies who deserve our support and for the Constitution he is sworn to uphold.” Immediately below it is a very different piece by Zach Helfand, whose opening words seem almost to parody Remnick’s alarmist tone: “Everywhere you look these days, norms are collapsing, rules are disappearing, and chaos prevails among the elites. Last week, the Yankees decided to eliminate their long-standing ban on beards.” Let’s not panic, The New Yorker tacitly advises its readers; there is still enough distraction in the world to take our minds off the awful things that are also going on, which we will nonetheless continue to report.

How, in conclusion, does this all relate back to the personal anecdote with which I began this essay? Although it is hard to sort it all out more than sixty-five years later, I must admit that Nancy Tobey’s family connection with the auratic magazine added something extra to the allure she had for my teen-age self as a real person. The world it conjured up was one of sophistication, taste, wit, quality, and material comfort without ostentation—in short, what Pierre Bourdieu would later describe in his study of Distinction as that of a “cultural aristocracy,” which for some outranked the older aristocracies of blood and treasure. It was, I can now see, in some vague sense the world of Benjamin’s étui-man. What seems clear in retrospect is that while I was enticed by the chance to enter that world, Nancy, having been to the manor born, was yearning to escape it. Or more precisely, to experience something more intense than the life reflected in a whimsical B. Tobey cartoon. While I was starting my Bildungsroman, she was impatiently attempting to burst the bounds of the genre, forsaking the rewards of sublimation for something rawer and more vital.

One way to interpret that dichotomy would be to excoriate retrospectively my teen-age self as an aspiring cultural parvenu, dazzled by a fantasy of “making it” that paralleled in a slightly different register—and with less ultimate success—the journey a few years earlier of Norman Podhoretz from Brooklyn across the river to Manhattan. Podhoretz’s account of that journey was, of course, much ridiculed at the time by the very people whose company he had so desperately wanted to join. So my never having a chance to emulate his success by entering the magic circle of The New Yorker, let alone writing a tell-all memoir of how I did it, can be accounted a blessing. Still, the modest anecdote I’ve recounted in this essay does open a ticklish question. For Nancy, it suggests, had the courage to pursue an authentic quest for a life of self-discovery unencumbered by the superficial trappings of a world she had known from early on, while I did not. She chose the path of vissi d’arte and was willing to risk its dangers, while I opted for a New Yorker subscription and the security of tenure in the academy.

It is hard to deny the truth in this telling, but it is perhaps not the entire truth. For despite the irreducible traces of its original gentrifying snobbery, The New Yorker ultimately revealed an ability to serve as a redoubt of many of the worthwhile values so much under siege in today’s world. It is sobering to remember that Benjamin’s antagonist to the étui-man is what he called “the destructive character,” who “knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away.” Benjamin was drawn to “the destructive character,” whose antinomian, apocalyptic, anarchistic instincts he shared.The New Yorker, in contrast, has never catered to “destructive characters” set on speeding the decay of a dying civilization, but rather to those invested in preserving something of value in what we have inherited, indeed reveling in the best of it. Perhaps it is the grace of eloquent, precise, jargon-free prose or the integrity of checking facts and supporting in-depth investigative journalism. Perhaps it is the understanding that even in the grimmest of times, it is possible to find relief in humor and wit. Perhaps it is the weekly glimpse of extraordinary artistic creativity in literature, the visual arts, dance, music, and theater, assuring us that we are not descending into the standardized, mind-numbing sameness of the culture industry.

Shadowing these virtues, it must be admitted, are the costs of the elitist condescension that critics of the magazine have always lamented. No matter how often Eustace Tilley is self-mockingly reimagined—my favorite is R. Crumb’s punk “Elvis Tilley” gazing at an adult video handout—he retains much of the hauteur conveyed by Rea Irvin’s original 1925 image. No matter the periodic efforts made to purge the magazine of its scorn for the less educated—including, alas, those delicious “Block that Metaphor!” fillers that mocked awkward writing—it unapologetically demands a level of cultural literacy that even infuses its cartoons, often leaving the uninitiated bewildered. It is thus worth recalling Dwight Mac- donald’s observation that the humor displaced by The New Yorker in the 1920’s had been the populist variety coming from small-town America that had prevailed before World War I.

Populism, of course, has made a comeback, in league with a destructive character driving a Tesla truck and wielding a chainsaw, clearing the ground for a potential dystopia. Patronized old ladies from Dubuque, it turns out, can carry a grudge. Many of the safe spaces that secured the cosseted existence of the étui-man— elite universities, top law firms, the mainstream press, museums, public media and humanities centers, not to mention the bond market—are now under great pressure. It is perhaps only a matter of time before the vindictive MAGA gaze, already directed against Harvard, The New York Times, CBS, NPR, the Smithsonian, The Atlantic, the NEH, the NEA, and the Kennedy Center, will fall on The New Yorker, whose criticism and ridicule of Trump has been as relentless as that of any other mass media organ in America. Indeed, it would seem that no better representative of the arrogance of the liberal coastal elites so despised by Red State America could be fashioned.

Or perhaps the MAGA culture warriors will reckon instead that it is worth preserving at least one cultural étui as a safe space to reassure its inhabitants that they can still find a haven in an increasingly heartless world, where the impending disaster won’t happen to “us.” For if they succeed, pace the ghost of “block that metaphor,” those inhabitants will be following George Orwell’s resigned recommendation to retreat “inside the whale,” exchanging security for actively resisting the crimes being committed outside. If so, this reasoning might conclude, it will be possible to tolerate an occasional “nasty” cover, snarky cartoon or hostile editorial attack from an institution that poses no real threat.

This attitude may well underestimate the reach and power of the magazine. But however The New Yorker fares in these increasingly parlous times, it has every reason to celebrate its centenary of achievement, which has earned lots of laurels, but no inclination to rest on them. Its history is a palimpsest of many different layers, some more laudable than others, that has produced a unique combination of tradition and innovation. Part of its abiding allure, I would argue in conclusion, is evident in the role it played in the imaginary of my teen-age self, as a beacon of cultural distinction, urbane wit, and worldly de-provincialization. Although it remained unachievable in concrete terms when my relationship with Nancy sputtered to its end, it has been vicariously relived every time a copy of the magazine arrives. Because it continues to stir inchoate aspirational feelings—dare I compare them to that green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby , also celebrating its centenary this year?—the magazine has managed to transcend the smug complacency of its dandiacal origins. And it has also increasingly broadened the selection of writers it publishes and the issues it addresses, while never undermining the quality of its product. Unforced diversity and inclusion, we might say, accom- panied by excellence. Not a bad formula for another century of pursuing the American Dream as imagined from the perspective of Ninth Avenue. Nor for resisting the American Nightmare that threatens us all, even those encased in their velvet-lined étuis or seeking refuge inside the whale.

Notes

1 Not everyone, however, has been enamored of them. See, for example, Matthias Wivel, “New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity,” The Hooded Utilitarian, October 12, 2013: https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/10/new-yorker-cartoons-a-legacy-of-mediocrity/

2 See, for example, Anthony Lane, “This Old House: The New Yorker Through Memoir,” The New Yorker, May 12 and 19, 2025. The Wikipedia article on the magazine lists something like thirty-three books and five films about it.

3 For a selection of his cartoons, see B. Tobey, B. Tobey of the New Yorker (New York, 1983). A later exhibition of his work at the New York Public Library occasioned a warm tribute in the September 13, 1998, issue of the magazine written by Richard Merkin, who notes that “his currency was a compassionate comprehension of what makes this village of ours tick.” Tobey’s work was also shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Grolier Society and Princeton University.

4 Dwight Macdonald, “Laugh and Lie Down,” Partisan Review, IV,1, December, 1937: The New Yorker Criticism: Laugh and Lie Down - Dwight Macdonald - eNotes.com

5 Charles McGrath, “How Harold Ross Created The New Yorker,” The New Yorker , February 12, 1995: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/02/20/harold-ross-profile-the-ross-years

6 Dwight Macdonald, “Parajournalism II: Wolfe and The New Yorker,” The New York Review of Books, February 3, 1966: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/02/03/parajournalism-
ii-wolfe-and-the-new-yorker/ He mentions his earlier critique and notes that despite its nasty tone, “a few months later Shawn asked me to do an article. I did three and in 1951, I became, at his invitation, a staff writer.”

7 Nicholas Lemann, “John Hersey and the Art of Fact,” The New Yorker, April 22, 2019: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/john-hersey-and-the-art-of-fact

8 For an account, see Andrew Silow-Carroll, “10 Jewish Highlights and Controversies
from 100 years of The New Yorker,” NY Jewish Week, February 24, 2025: https://www.jta.org/2025/02/24/ny/10-jewish-highlights-and-controversies-from-100-years-of-the-new-yorker One would also have to examine the role played by Lillian Ross, who joined the magazine in 1945, wrote for it frequently and became Shawn’s long-time lover.

9 For a reckoning with his very mixed legacy, see Joan Acocella, “On the Contrary,” The New Yorker, December 1, 2002: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/on-
the-contrary

10 Vivian Gornick, “The 176-Year Argument,” New York Review of Books, April 24, 2025: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/04/24/the-176-year-argument-vivian-gornick/

11 See, for example, George Packer, “Irving Kristol’s Long, Strange Trip,” The New Yorker, April 15, 2009: https://www.newyorker.com/news/george-packer/irving-kris-
tols-long-strange-trip#:~:text=Kristol%27s%20essays%20of%20forty%20years,of%20
the%20deterioration%20to%20come.

12 Louis Menand, “Regrets Only,” The New Yorker, September 22, 2008: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/09/29/regrets-only-louis-menand “The Book that Scandalized the New York Intellectuals,” The New Yorker, April 22, 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/the-book-that-scandalized-the-new-york-intellectuals…
Menand also wrote a tribute to the New York Review of Books’ editor Robert Silvers when he
died, “Lunch with Bob Silvers,” New Yorker, March 21, 2017, which revealed a chummier relationship between the two worlds: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/lunch-with-bob-silvers
Diana Trilling was the subject of another piece by Tobi Haslett, “The Feuds of Diana Trilling,” The New Yorker , May 2017, 2022: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-feuds-of-diana-trilling

13 Irving Howe, “Hannah Arendt and The New Yorker,” Commentary, October, 1963: https://http://www.commentary.org/articles/irving-howe/the-new-yorker-and-hannah-arendt/ Howe’s disdain for The New Yorker did not begin then. In a 1961 tribute to Ernest Hemingway, he wrote “Nothing more cruel has happened to an American writer than the Lillian Ross interview in a 1950 New Yorker: a smear of vanity and petulance that only a journalistic Delilah would have put into print.” “Hemingway: The Conquest of Panic,” The New Republic, July 14, 1961: https://newrepublic.com/article/134794/hemingway-conquest-panic

14 Most notably, Barry Blitt’s 2008 Barack and Michelle Obama fist-bumping in the Oval Office, 2016 Trump in a woman’s bathing suit and tiara, and 2023 “race for office” with Biden leading a gaggle of elderly politicians using walkers. The first cover controversy seems to have been Art Spiegelman’s Hasidic Jew and Black woman kissing in the 1993 Valentine’s day issue, which was an ironic comment on the Crown Heights riot of recent memory.

15 David Remnick, “How the War in Ukraine Ends,” The New Yorker, February 17, 2023: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/how-the-war-in-ukraine-ends

16 Alexei Navalny, “Alexei Nalvalny’s Prison Diaries,” The New Yorker, October 11, 2024: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir

17 In an earlier column—“Intellectual Family Values,” Salmagundi, 140 (Summer, 2004)—I described my own experience of this practice when Partisan Review waited several years to publish a critical piece I did on Hannah Arendt until it could generate a response from Leon Botstein in the same issue. We then had a second round of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals.

18 For evidence of its abiding allure, see Hilton Als’s rhapsodic review of the exhibition of Black dandyism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Brothers of the Cloth,” The New Yorker, June 9, 2025.

19 Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” (1931), in Selected Writings, vol. 2. 1927-1934, eds, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass, 1999), p. 542.

20 David Remnick, “Disgrace,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2025, p. 15.

21 Zach Helfand, “Leviticus Bros,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2025, p. 16.

22 As Menand tells us in “The Book That Scandalized the New York Intellectuals,” Podhoretz “had published his first piece in Commentary when he was twenty-three, his first piece in Partisan Review when he was twenty-four, and his first piece in The New Yorker when he was twenty-six.” I reviewed for Commentary when I was twenty-five, and published essays in Dissent a year later and Partisan Review the following year….and started my personal subscription to The New Yorker around the same time.

23 I want to make clear, however, that if we take in Benjamin’s claim that “the destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative,” Nancy Tobey cannot herself be assimilated to his model.

24 George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Gollancz, 1040). Orwell was over-reacting to the compromises he loathed in the engaged, leftist literature of the 1930’s.