First issue's cover with dandy Eustace Tilley, created by Rea Irvin. The image, or a variation of it, appears on the cover of The New Yorker with every anniversary issue. |
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| Editor | David Remnick |
|---|---|
| Categories | Politics, social issues, art, humor, culture |
| Frequency | 47 per year |
| Total circulation (2011) |
1,035,579[1] |
| First issue | February 21, 1925 |
| Company | Condé Nast |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New York City |
| Website | www.newyorker.com |
| ISSN | 0028-792X |
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast. Starting as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.
Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside of New York. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, 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 politics and social issues; and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue.
Contents |
The New Yorker debuted on February 21, 1925. It was founded by Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine different from corny 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."[2]
Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon established itself as a pre-eminent forum for serious fiction literature and journalism. 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, Eudora Welty, and E. B. White. 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 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. Writers like Kurt Vonnegut said that The New Yorker has been an effective institution for getting a large audience through the learning process required for appreciating modern literature.[3]
The non-fiction feature articles (which usually make up the bulk of the magazine's content) cover 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 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. There is no masthead listing the editors and staff. And despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its traditional appearance over the decades in typography, layout, covers and artwork. The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by S.I. Newhouse, in 1985.
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.
Wrote Tom Wolfe about the magazine's style: "The New Yorker style was 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."[4]
As far back as the 1940s the magazine's commitment to fact-checking was already well known.[5] Yet the magazine played a role in a 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.[6] As of 2010, The New Yorker employs 16 fact checkers.[7]In July, 2011, the magazine was sued for defamation in United States district Court for a July 12, 2010 article written by David Grann.[8]
Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has used the Internet to publish current and archived material. It 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. In addition, The New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase online. A digital archive of back issues from 1925 to April 2008 (representing more than 4,000 issues and half a million pages) has also been issued on DVD-ROMs and on a small portable hard drive. More recently, an iPad version of the current issue of the magazine has been released.
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 its November 1, 2004 issue, the magazine for the first time endorsed a presidential candidate, choosing to endorse John Kerry over George W. Bush.[9] They continued this in 2008, endorsing Barack Obama over John McCain.[10]
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, Peter Arno, Charles Barsotti, George Booth, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Sam Cobean, Leo Cullum, Richard Decker Helen E. Hokinson, Ed Koren, Mary Petty, George Price, Charles Saxon, David Snell, Otto Soglow, Saul Steinberg, William Steig, Richard Taylor, James Thurber, Barney Tobey and Gahan Wilson.
Many early New Yorker cartoonists did not caption their own cartoons. In his book The Years with Ross, 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.)[11]
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".[12] The catchphrase "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."[13][14]
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.[15][16]
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, P.C. Vey, Zachary Kanin, Farley Katz, Glen Le Lievre, Michael Maslin, Ariel Molvig, Paul Noth, Barbara Smaller, 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.
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 the intermittent windshield wiper 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 (2006), 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 adaptation 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; Boys Don't Cry (1999), starring Hilary Swank, began as an article in the magazine, and Iris (2001), about the life of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, the article written by John Bayley for the New Yorker, before he completed his full memoir, the film starring Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent; 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; and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), adapted from Sally Benson's short stories.
The history of The New Yorker 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).
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, preëminent 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 more commonly 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. It also spells out professional sports leagues with periods, e.g. N.B.A.
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.[17]
The body text of all articles in The New Yorker is set in Adobe Caslon.[18]
Notwithstanding 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 The 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 $50,233).[19]
Also according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, 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. reported that readers spend, on average, 81 minutes each week reading The New Yorker.
The magazine's first cover illustration, a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle, was drawn by Rea Irvin, the magazine's first art editor, based on an 1834 caricature of the then Count D'Orsay which appeared as an illustration[20] in the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The gentleman on the original cover, now referred to as "Eustace Tilley", is a character created by Corey Ford for The New Yorker. 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, Tilley was a younger man than the figure on 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.
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,[21] 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 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.[22]
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.[23]
Hired by Tina Brown in 1992, Art Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for ten years but resigned a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The cover created by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly for the September 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker received wide acclaim and was voted in the top ten of magazine covers of the past 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors, which commented:
At first glance, the cover appears to be totally black, but upon close examination it reveals the silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly darker shade of black. In some situations, the ghost images only become visible when the magazine is tilted toward a light source.[24] In September 2004, Spiegelman reprised the image on the cover of his book In the Shadow of No Towers, in which he relates his experience of the Twin Towers attack and the psychological after-effects.
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.
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.[25][26] The cover was criticized by both black and Jewish observers.[27] Jack Salzman and Cornel West describe the reaction to the cover as the magazine's "first national controversy."[28]
"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.[29]
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,"[30] citing the excesses in the image to rebuff the concern that it could be misunderstood, even by those unfamiliar with the magazine.[31][32] In an interview on Larry King Live shortly after the magazine issue began circulating, Obama 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.""[33][34]
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.[35] 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.[36]
New Yorker covers are not always related to the contents of the magazine or are 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.
One thing we used to talk about – when I was out in Iowa – was that the limiting factor is the reader. No other art requires the audience to be a performer. You have to count on the reader's being a good performer, and you may write music which he absolutely can't perform – in which case it's a bust. Those writers you mentioned and myself are teaching an audience how to play this kind of music in their heads. It's a learning process, and The New Yorker has been a very good institution of the sort needed. They have a captive audience, and they come out every week, and people finally catch on to Barthelme, for instance, and are able to perform that sort of thing in their heads and enjoy it. I think the same is true of S. J. Perelman; I do not think that Perelman would be appreciated if suddenly his collected works were to be published now to be seen for the first time. It would be gibberish. A learning process is required to appreciate Perelman, although it's very easy to do once you learn how to do it. Yeah, I think the readers are coming along; that's a problem; I think writers have tried to do it always and have failed because there's been no audience for what they've done; nobody's performed their music.
| Wikisource has a list of copyright renewals:
The New Yorker
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