The New Yorker

Based on Wikipedia: The New Yorker

The Magazine That Refused to Be Corny

In 1925, Harold Ross had a problem with American humor. It was too folksy, too provincial, too eager to please the rubes. The existing humor magazines—publications like Judge and the old Life—struck him as fundamentally corny. Ross wanted something different: a magazine so sophisticated, so urbane, so thoroughly metropolitan that he could declare, with magnificent snobbery, that it was "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."

That manifesto became the founding principle of The New Yorker.

Ross launched the magazine with his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for The New York Times, and partnered with entrepreneur Raoul Fleischmann—who had made his fortune founding the General Baking Company—to bankroll the operation. They set up shop at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan, and on February 21, 1925, the first issue appeared on newsstands.

The early years were precarious. The magazine prided itself on cosmopolitan sophistication, but sophistication alone doesn't pay the bills. What saved The New Yorker was Ross's discovery that his anti-corny crusade could accommodate something more ambitious than witty remarks about Manhattan cocktail parties. The magazine could publish genuinely serious writing—fiction and essays that competed with the best literary journals—while maintaining its reputation for elegant humor. This combination proved irresistible to a certain kind of reader: educated, curious, willing to be entertained and challenged in the same sitting.

The Factory of Literary Giants

The roster of writers who published in The New Yorker during the twentieth century reads like a syllabus for American literature. Truman Capote. John Cheever. J.D. Salinger. John Updike. Dorothy Parker. E.B. White. Vladimir Nabokov. Alice Munro. Ernest Hemingway.

The list goes on and on, and it crosses boundaries you might not expect. Roald Dahl, better known for children's books about chocolate factories and giant peaches, published adult short stories in these pages. Stephen King, the master of horror, appeared here too. Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist whose surreal narratives have captivated readers worldwide, found a home in the magazine's fiction section.

One story stands above all others in terms of reader response. When Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" appeared in 1948, it generated more mail than any other piece of fiction in the magazine's history. The story describes a small American town's annual ritual—a lottery that ends with the winner being stoned to death by their neighbors—and readers were outraged, disturbed, fascinated. Many wrote in to ask where these lottery rituals actually took place, apparently believing Jackson had documented a real custom. Others canceled their subscriptions. The story had touched something deep and unsettling about conformity and violence in ordinary communities.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the magazine's ambitions came shortly after World War II, when John Hersey's essay "Hiroshima" occupied an entire issue. The magazine simply handed over all its editorial pages to Hersey's account of six survivors of the atomic bombing. No cartoons. No humor pieces. No "Talk of the Town." Just Hersey's devastating, meticulously reported narrative of what it meant to be in that city on August 6, 1945, when the world changed forever.

The Peculiar Institution of Fact-Checking

The New Yorker developed a reputation for something that sounds mundane but is actually quite rare: obsessive verification of facts. The magazine's fact-checking department became legendary, a kind of last line of defense against error that most publications couldn't afford or didn't bother to maintain.

The process works like this. Before an article is published, fact-checkers go through it line by line, verifying every claim that can be verified. Did this event happen on the date specified? Did the person actually say this quote? Is this street really in this neighborhood? Is that building really that tall? The checkers call sources, consult records, cross-reference details. They look for the kind of small errors that accumulate in journalism like plaque in arteries—not necessarily fatal individually, but dangerous in aggregate, eroding trust over time.

This practice reflects a broader philosophy about what magazines owe their readers. If you're going to publish long, ambitious pieces of journalism—the kind that take weeks or months to report and write—then you'd better make sure they're accurate. The commitment to fact-checking became part of the magazine's identity, something that distinguished it from newspapers (where deadline pressure makes such thoroughness impossible) and from other magazines (where the investment simply wasn't made).

The Visual Language

Open any issue of The New Yorker and you'll notice something immediately: the cartoons. They're scattered throughout the magazine, single-panel drawings with captions that range from obviously funny to puzzlingly oblique. This has been true since the first issue in 1925, and the tradition continues today.

The magazine has employed some of the most distinctive visual humorists in American history. Charles Addams created the macabre family that became "The Addams Family" television show and movies. James Thurber's shaky-lined drawings of bewildered men and dominant women became iconic. Saul Steinberg's "View of the World from 9th Avenue"—showing Manhattan looming enormous in the foreground while everything west of the Hudson River shrinks to insignificance—became one of the most parodied images in American visual culture.

Some cartoons transcended their original publication to enter the language itself. In 1928, Carl Rose drew a cartoon (with a caption by E.B. White) showing a mother telling her daughter, "It's broccoli, dear." The daughter responds, "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." The phrase "I say it's spinach" became a catchphrase, expressing stubborn refusal to accept an official explanation. Three years later, Irving Berlin wrote a song called "I Say It's Spinach (And the Hell with It)" for a Broadway musical.

Peter Arno contributed the phrase "back to the drawing board." His 1941 cartoon shows an engineer walking away from a crashed airplane, plans tucked under his arm, saying to himself, "Well, back to the old drawing board." The expression entered common usage as a way of acknowledging failure and the need to start over.

But the most commercially successful cartoon in the magazine's history came much later. In 1993, Peter Steiner drew two dogs sitting at a computer. One says to the other, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." According to Bob Mankoff, who served as cartoon editor, Steiner and the magazine split more than one hundred thousand dollars in licensing and reprint fees from that single image. It captured something essential about the strange new world of online identity—the way the internet allowed people to present themselves as anyone, or anything, they chose to be.

The reputation for obscure humor became a cultural joke in itself. A Seinfeld episode called "The Cartoon" devoted a subplot to the characters' inability to understand what a New Yorker cartoon was supposed to mean. The Simpsons took similar jabs. The magazine leaned into this perception by launching a caption contest in 2005, inviting readers to supply punchlines for captionless cartoons. The feature acknowledged that finding the perfect caption is genuinely difficult—and that ordinary readers might sometimes do better than the professionals.

The Parade of Editors

Harold Ross ran The New Yorker for twenty-six years, from its founding until his death in 1951. He established the magazine's editorial standards, its tone, its peculiar mixture of levity and seriousness. He was also, by all accounts, a difficult person—demanding, irascible, prone to firing people and then hiring them back.

His successor was William Shawn, who led the magazine from 1951 to 1987. If Ross was volatile, Shawn was the opposite: pathologically shy, soft-spoken to the point of near-inaudibility, uncomfortable with conflict. But he presided over some of the magazine's greatest achievements, including the publication of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem," her controversial analysis of Adolf Eichmann's trial and the nature of what she called "the banality of evil." Shawn also brought in critics like Dwight Macdonald and Kenneth Tynan, expanding the magazine's range of cultural commentary.

After Shawn came Robert Gottlieb (1987–1992) and then Tina Brown (1992–1998). Brown's arrival was particularly controversial. She had previously edited Vanity Fair and brought a more aggressive, celebrity-focused sensibility to the genteel corridors of The New Yorker. She introduced photography to the editorial pages—previously, the magazine had relied entirely on illustrations and cartoons. She added color. She increased coverage of current events and pop culture. She commissioned shorter, punchier pieces alongside the traditional long-form reporting.

Old-guard readers howled. This wasn't their New Yorker. Brown had violated the sacred traditions. But she also boosted circulation and brought the magazine to a younger audience that might otherwise have considered it a relic of their grandparents' generation.

David Remnick took over in 1998 and remains the editor today, making him one of the longest-serving leaders in the magazine's history. Under his stewardship, The New Yorker has won eleven Pulitzer Prizes since 2014, when magazines first became eligible for the award. Remnick himself is a former reporter for The Washington Post who won a Pulitzer for his book about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lenin's Tomb.

The Magazine Goes Online

For most of its existence, The New Yorker was a physical object: pages bound together, delivered to subscribers, displayed on newsstands. The internet changed that, as it changed everything.

The magazine began publishing content online in the late 1990s, but the real transformation came in 2014, when it opened up its archives to online access and launched an ambitious website with a paywalled subscription model. Web editor Nicholas Thompson explained the goal: "What we're trying to do is to make a website that is to the Internet what the magazine is to all other magazines."

This was a significant statement. It meant The New Yorker intended to maintain its standards of quality—the long-form journalism, the rigorous fact-checking, the distinctive voice—while adapting to a medium that often rewards speed and brevity over depth and accuracy. The tension between those values continues to play out across digital journalism, but The New Yorker has largely managed to preserve its identity online.

Subscribers can now access not just current issues but the complete archive of back issues, viewable as they were originally printed. Every cartoon ever published in the magazine is searchable and available for purchase. The digital edition preserves the layout and design of the print magazine while adding the convenience of electronic delivery.

The Business Behind the Culture

In 1985, Advance Publications—the media company owned by the Newhouse family—acquired The New Yorker for two hundred million dollars. At the time, the magazine was earning less than six million dollars annually. It was, in financial terms, a prestige acquisition rather than a profit-seeking investment. The Newhouses owned Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other Condé Nast publications; The New Yorker added cultural credibility to their portfolio.

The magazine publishes forty-seven times per year, with five of those issues covering two-week spans. This schedule allows for the kind of editorial planning that daily or weekly publications can't manage—giving writers more time to develop pieces, fact-checkers more time to verify them, editors more time to polish them.

In 2018, the editorial staff unionized, forming the New Yorker Union. They signed their first collective bargaining agreement in 2021. This represented a broader trend across digital and legacy media, as journalists sought formal protections in an industry undergoing constant upheaval.

A Magazine's Influence

The New Yorker inspired imitators almost immediately. The Brooklynite ran from 1926 to 1930, trying to do for Brooklyn what Ross's magazine did for Manhattan. The Chicagoan attempted a Midwestern version from 1926 to 1935. Paris got The Boulevardier from 1927 to 1932. None survived, but their existence testified to the power of Ross's original model: the sophisticated urban magazine that combined humor with serious writing.

Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist, argued that The New Yorker deserved credit for building an audience for modern literature. By publishing challenging fiction alongside cartoons and cultural listings, the magazine made literary experimentation accessible to readers who might never have picked up a purely literary journal.

Tom Wolfe, the journalist and novelist, offered a more ambivalent assessment. He described the "New Yorker style" as "one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode, constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the magazine's pale-gray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause and appository modifier." It's a devastating description, but also somehow admiring—recognizing that the magazine had developed a voice so distinctive it amounted to its own literary dialect.

Taking Sides

For most of its history, The New Yorker maintained a studied political neutrality. The magazine published political commentary and investigative reporting, but it didn't tell readers how to vote. That changed on November 1, 2004, when the magazine endorsed John Kerry for president over the incumbent George W. Bush.

It was the first presidential endorsement in the magazine's seventy-nine-year history. The decision reflected a judgment that the Bush administration's conduct—particularly the Iraq War and its approach to civil liberties—required the magazine to abandon its traditional stance. Since then, The New Yorker has continued to publish endorsements in presidential elections, joining the tradition of newspapers and magazines that formally recommend candidates to their readers.

Whether this represents a gain or a loss depends on your perspective. Supporters argue that the magazine's reporting gives it special insight into political questions, and that readers deserve to know what the editors think. Critics argue that endorsements compromise the magazine's credibility as an impartial observer, turning journalism into advocacy. The debate continues, but the precedent has been set.

The Puzzles and Games

In recent years, The New Yorker has expanded beyond articles and cartoons into puzzles and games. In April 2018, the magazine launched a crossword puzzle series, starting with a Monday crossword and later expanding to include Friday puzzles and cryptics. The puzzles are written by a rotating group of thirteen constructors and integrate the magazine's cartoons into the solving experience—a characteristic touch that connects the new feature to the magazine's visual traditions.

In July 2021, the magazine introduced Name Drop, a trivia game posted online on weekdays. In December 2019, it hired its first puzzles and games editor, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, formalizing what had become a significant part of the magazine's offerings.

These additions reflect the competitive landscape of digital media, where publications must offer multiple forms of engagement to attract and retain readers. The New York Times built a successful subscription business partly around its crossword and games; The New Yorker is following a similar path, adapting the tradition of newspaper puzzles to its own sensibility.

What Makes It Last

According to a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center, The New Yorker, along with The Atlantic and Harper's Magazine, ranked highest in college-educated readership among major American media outlets. This demographic profile has remained consistent across decades: the magazine appeals to educated readers who want long, carefully crafted pieces rather than quick hits of information.

What explains this durability? Partly, it's the accumulated prestige of nearly a century of publication—the magazine benefits from name recognition and a reputation that took decades to build. Partly, it's the consistency of the product: despite changes in editors and ownership, The New Yorker has maintained recognizable standards of quality. The fact-checking remains rigorous. The fiction remains ambitious. The cartoons remain distinctive.

But perhaps the deepest explanation is that Harold Ross's original insight still holds. There's an audience for sophisticated writing that doesn't condescend, for humor that doesn't pander, for journalism that takes the time to get things right. That audience may have shifted from Manhattan sophisticates to educated readers across the country and around the world, but its fundamental desires remain the same: to be entertained and informed by people who respect their intelligence.

The old lady in Dubuque might be a subscriber now. Ross, one suspects, would be appalled—and secretly pleased.