David Remnick on 100 Years of The New Yorker

AMANPOUR: Now, The New Yorker magazine turns 100 and it is celebrating in style with a new Netflix documentary that takes us behind the scenes, which follows staff as they produce the anniversary issue. From seminal pieces such as John Hersey’s 1946, his recently released film, Hiroshima Report, to satirical cartoons, the magazine has been a pillar of quality journalism and has remained so relevant for 100 years. Here’s a clip from the trailer.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think almost everyone who works with The New Yorker is obsessed in some way.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It’s a little bit like whack-a-mole. You think you’re done, but all these little things keep popping up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We fact check everything that is published in the magazine.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, cartoons get fact checked.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The cat’s names are Tiger, Loverboy and Gummy Bear. Is that correct?

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AMANPOUR: David Remnick is The New Yorker’s longtime editor and he’s joining Walter Isaacson to reflect on his precarious beginning to its significance today.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And David Remnick, welcome back to the show.

DAVID REMNICK: Thanks for having me, Walter.

ISAACSON: For the hundredth anniversary of the New Yorker, you had Netflix come do a documentary on you putting together the hundredth anniversary issue. And one of the things in the show is they asked celebrities to say, little vignettes about when was the first time you encountered the New Yorker. Let us show the clip and then I’m gonna ask you that question.

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SARAH JESSICA PARKER: We actually didn’t have very much money <laugh>, but we did have a New Yorker subscription.

 

NATE BARGATZE: I think the first time I heard about The New Yorker was on Seinfeld. They had a great episode where Elaine did not understand one of the cartoon captions. 

 

JESSE EISENBERG: You know, I grew up in New Jersey and was very kind of like starry-eyed about all things New York. The first time I ever heard of The New Yorker as and understood it to be this important magazine was in an episode of the Animated Show, the Critic. “Bravo, Mrs. S.” And I remember just thinking, oh, that’s the New Yorker. It’s this important thing.

 

RONNY CHANG: I don’t know how I knew about it, but it’s just there. It’s, it’s, it’s one of those institutions. It’s like saying like, when did you first hear about the Statue of Liberty?

 

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ISAACSON: So let me ask you, when did you first encounter the New Yorker?

 

REMNICK: In my father’s office., My father was a dentist in suburban New Jersey at a very small practice. And on Saturdays and Sundays it was obviously closed. And I’d go down and read Highlights magazine and Time Magazine and Life and Look. And I encountered this thing that I didn’t understand very readily. There was a magazine that had drawings on the cover and gag cartoons, and in those days, lots of advertisements. And I didn’t quite get it, Walter, to be honest with you. And even when I was a teenager, my favorite magazines were the infinitely cooler Rolling Stone. And I liked The Village Voice a lot. Esquire was where this was all happening. I got to the New Yorker and got to understand it and get a feel for it when I had a teacher in college who wrote for the New Yorker.

 

ISAACSON: And that would be, of course, John McPhee, right?

 

REMNICK: That’s right. John McPhee, who these days is 93. And we worked together at the New Yorker. And you know, he even made me into one of his fishing buddies. Life works in strange ways.

 

ISAACSON: And you call the magazine a miracle. Why is that?

 

REMNICK: I think it’s a miracle – first of all, most publications, if they’re lucky, if they’re lucky, have a moment in time when they’re important or they catch the zeitgeist in some way. To be on the cover of Time Magazine, I needn’t tell you, at a certain period in American history, was an astonishing thing. Life Magazine had a moment because of its visual nature that preceded television. But when TV came along, Life was eclipsed.

So to have something last a hundred years at a very, very high quality with the prospect of lasting a lot longer, that’s something quite unusual in American culture. And newspapers – obviously, the New York Times has this – so we’re celebrating a centenary year and celebrating some of the things that have been published in the past. But a lot of time has been spent thinking about what’s gonna be ahead for us.

REMNICK: You’ve only had five editors in, in those hundred years. Totally amazing. And I think my first encounter with the New Yorker, believe it or not, is I had a favorite book my father had called The Years with Ross by James Thurber. And it talked about Harold Ross and how his personality imprinted the DNA of the New Yorker. Tell me about that founding editor.

 

REMNICK: Well, Harold Ross was a newspaperman from out West. Like all great New Yorkers, he’s somebody who made his way here.

 

ISAACSON: And worked on The Item in New Orleans where I worked.

 

REMNICK: That’s right, that’s right. And I think he bounced around. He must have been in a newspaper every six months. He really bounced around a lot in the old style. But he came to New York and he had ideas for all kinds of things, shipping news. And, and then there was this one idea to have a kind of funny cosmopolitan newspaper magazine and mainly comic, Walter, at first, mainly comic. And he got a family, the Fleischman family that made money in yeast, to put a few dollars behind this cockamamie idea. And at first it was a big flop. It did, it was not good. And it was a financial failure as well. And they almost shut the thing down. And Harold Ross, who was a bit of a card player and a bit of a – he was familiar with the bottle occasionally in an all night poker game, nearly lost the whole thing. Nearly lost the whole thing. So it’s a miracle that it lasted to 1926, much less 2025.

 

ISAACSON: He said this magazine wasn’t for the little old lady from Dubuque. I think I was reading in The Years with Ross, they had a cartoon where they had to have Harold Ross go apologize to his aunt from Dubuque at a hotel. Why? What, what did he mean by that? And is that still what the magazine’s about?

 

REMNICK: I think he meant that he wanted that magazine to be for a very particular community. It was a really – it wasn’t even, the community didn’t even extend to Brooklyn or the Bronx. It was a very Manhattan Jazz Age idea, meant to be a very small publication. It’s since expanded. It’s expanded in its seriousness and its reporting and its length and its ambitions. I don’t think Harold Ross imagined a magazine that would break the Abu Ghraib scandal or Hiroshima by John Hersey. Those that came infinitely later. I, my, by the way, I just want it on the record that I’m happy to have anyone in Dubuque reading the New Yorker. It’s for whoever, whoever has eyes to see and read. So I’m I’m much the, my attitude about that I don’t share with Harold Ross.

 

ISAACSON: Harold Ross is succeeded by his deputy for many, many years. William Shawn, Mr. Shawn, to everybody. And he did not seem to have a great sense of humor, but he had a feel for the long form, right?

 

REMNICK: He did. I mean, he was Ross’s deputy for a long time. And just as, just as Katherine Angell who became Katherine White introduced really top level fiction to the New Yorker, William Shawn played an instrumental role in bringing deep reporting to the New Yorker. The apotheosis of this was John Hersey’s piece about Hiroshima, Rachel Carson on pesticides and, and James Baldwin on race and so on. So it also shows you that a, a magazine, a publication, really any imaginative process that’s not just individual is a collection of intelligences that come together. And I think a good editor is not somebody that believes that he or she has the answer to everything and the only person who’s generating ideas,

 

ISAACSON: You mentioned John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and I was at the New York Public Library. That’s what I do for fun. And that’s where your archives are. And they have a display, I’m sure you know, of all the archives. And I saw on the wall the most amazing letter. I actually took a photograph of it and it says, “Dear Bill, do you think you could tolerate four parts on Hiroshima? I can’t say of my material on the bombing that it’s wonderful, but it is sobering, moving and newsy.” First of all, I can’t imagine anybody calling Mr. Shawn “Dear Bill,” but also the rest of that letter, that was amazing leap.

 

REMNICK: It was at that time, and it’s a leap that’s since been taken innumerable times. You know, very often a reporter will come back from wherever he or she has been, and they have a story to tell that is beyond the imagining of any editor or even, you know, the current media. In his case, he had witnessed something that had not been publicized at all, except in the most abstract terms. The atomic age had begun, but the human cost of it on the ground had not been seen in the United States. 

 

So we are at a point now, Walter, where still foreign journalists are not allowed into Gaza. And yet at the same time, we’ve seen a lot, innumerable images because of, for all the reasons we know, because of the phone, and God bless them journalists in Gaza and bless the memory of those who have been so horribly killed, that was a different world. That was not a world of social media and videos on your phone. And Hersey brought that human news to the United States, and it made international news. It had incredible resonance.

 

ISAACSON: In this Netflix documentary. Tina Brown, your predecessor plays a big role and talks about having to really kind of dust it off and sweep out some of the cobwebs. Tell me what she did.

 

REMNICK: Well, you know, you wanna be careful at any given moment in time that you’re not just admired, but actually read. Right. And, and I think there comes a time in the life of any longstanding publication where you can fall into habits or self-satisfaction. There’s no question that the New Yorker was publishing terrific things during late Shawn and during Bob Gottlieb’s reign, but Tina had an outsider sense of how to shake things up. We’re not the same people. I don’t know that we’d make every, absolutely every editorial decision the same, of course not. But I, you know, I worked for her as a writer and I was very much behind this idea of shaking things up. And she – I’ll be perfectly honest, she made my life a lot easier coming in.

 

ISAACSON: And so when you came in, she made your life easier, maybe by shaking things up. What did you feel you had to change and what, what’s your mark you’re putting on it?

 

REMNICK: Well,I, you know, it’s been 27 years, Walter, to be honest, and I might be the worst judge of whatever my term is ’cause I’m sort of in the thick of it, in the way you don’t always see backwards very well when you’re looking forward all the time. But certainly one of them has to be, how did the New Yorker accommodate to the modern media age? How did it take on the internet and audio and video, just the different velocity and how do we exist in the world? What is our voice in it? That’s all taken a lot of attention and a lot of work.

 

ISAACSON: One of the tensions I saw in that Netflix thing was about, you know, being very modern, but also being very traditional. And is one of your writers talking about having to quote somebody as saying “elite mother something or other” 

 

REMNICK: Yeah, but with the accent aigu over the –

 

ISAACSON: Yeah. And so they said, he said, yes, they actually ran the word, but they made me put the accent aigu on the “elite.”

 

REMNICK: Yeah. This is Andrew Marantz, and he says it maybe by putting that accent, it proves their case that we are such, you know, that phrase.

 

ISAACSON: One of the most iconic aspects of the New Yorker is the magazine’s cover, of course. And I wanted to do a clip we’ll see of the arts editor, editor, longtime arts editor. Right? Francois Moulley, is that how you say her name? Discussing what goes into deciding the cover. So here, let’s look at this clip.

 

REMNICK: Sure.

 

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FRANCOISE MOULY: Until you have the cover, you don’t know what the personality of the issue is. You know, it’s not something that you can just slap on at the last minute. A cover needs to speak to the moment, but also be a timeless piece of art that should be able to be framed and put on a wall. Frankly, chasing that week after week keeps me up with anxiety even after 30 years. 

 

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ISAACSON: What are your elements where you say, yes, that’s the one?

 

REMNICK: Well, it has to work the way a grenade works, right? You can’t, if you have to explain it for five minutes, what’s going on, or you have to have explanations about why this may or may not be good. It doesn’t work. It has to work immediately. It has to work immediately. Now people interpret a joke or an image in different ways, and that’s fine. In fact, it’s great. But if you’re sort of puzzling over it as if it were an obscure Escher drawing or something like that, that doesn’t quite work then there’s a problem. And so Francois and I are – I mean, it’s basically a two person operation. She’s generating ideas all the time and sketches. And then she comes to me and we discuss what we like and what we don’t like. And once in a while, if I’m on the fence, I’ll take that sketch around the office to, you know, a few people that I trust, or will put pressure on my presumptions and we’ll make a decision.

 

ISAACSON: One of the things that happens in this documentary is you always walk in the halls being with people in the office, the meetings. How important is it in this day and age to be back in the office, so to speak?

 

REMNICK: Look, I know there’s lots of discussion about that in lots of workplaces, including my own, but I think it’s important. I think it’s important. I think it’s okay that there’s some more greater flexibility than there was pre-pandemic, but the act of being in the same room with somebody, of bumping into people and having casual conversations that you didn’t expect to have, is infinitely better than the business of, you know, texting someone: Can we talk later? And it’s just not as spontaneous or nor is it as productive. This is a collaborative piece of work. Writing is not. Writing is some poor soul all alone in her office or room, wherever it is, trying to apply mine to the matter of what’s in front of them. That’s hard work. But in terms of the making of a publication, the online version daily, the weekly version, the mix, what the mix is of things, the ideas that we will be visiting six months or a year from now, that to me, really benefits by being in rooms together with other human beings. It’s amazing to think that this is under such challenge, but I think time is gonna bear that out.

 

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RONAN FARROW: There aren’t that many places that do this kind of super labor intensive, super confronting journalism. I mean, they’re not activists, but they are fearless when the facts support it. 

 

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ISAACSON: One of my favorite things in New Yorker, of course, is “Talk of the Town,” and it’s evolved. And one of the great writers was EB White, who mastered that art. And my favorite is something he wrote, which is, “we received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.’” Now it’s a beautiful piece. He writes very sort of dry and clever, but it’s also about democracy. And that still seems to be one of the causes of the New Yorker.

 

REMNICK: It absolutely is. And I, I’m glad you brought that up because of, look, I watch your show, and I think you, you could say the same of, of your program is that democracy, to say the very, very least, is under great challenge now. It’s under great challenge from, above all, the President of the United States. And that’s not just something to say, that’s something to do rigorous journalism about fair-minded, rigorous, accurate journalism. But democratic institutions are – including your own by the way, Public Television – are under assault, and it is, we are duty bound as a democratic institution ourselves, to stand up for it and do the work that we’re supposed to be doing at the highest level, tirelessly and without compromise. And when I say without compromise, I don’t mean once, you know, just kind of in some sort of a vitriolic way, but to do the work of reporting.

I was on a panel about journalism the other day, and I looked around and I realized that the lion’s share of people at the table were not anybody that had taken out a notebook in 10 years. They had things to say, they were commentators, they were talking heads, they were comedians. But at the heart of this enterprise of journalism is reporting, finding out what is true, what is hidden, and bringing it to light and applying the real standards of truth as best you can in a given time, knowing all the while you will fail, at times. You will fail. And we should be honest about our failures as well. But that is at the center of our work too. We’re not the only ones, to be sure. Not even remotely. But I’m, you know, that’s my – if that sounds sanctimonious, then I don’t really care.

 

ISAACSON: David Remnick, thank you for joining us.

 

REMNICK: Thank you, Walter.