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The New Yorker Makes a Shrine to Itself
The New Yorker was founded in 1925 as a humor weekly — a whimsical little Roaring Twenties bauble written largely by members of the fabled Algonquin round table for sophisticated urban readers. When its founding editor, the ribald Colorado-born newspaperman Harold Ross, died in 1951, the top job passed to the dour, buttoned-up William Shawn, during whose 36-year reign the magazine ballooned in size (thanks largely to lucrative ads from Tiffany, Bonwit Teller, and other spiffy Fifth Avenue emporia), acquired a staid, serious, often ex cathedra tone, and became a key staple of culturally aspirational postwar households in and around New York as well as in the nation’s more affluent suburbs.
So it’s simply bizarre to hear Remnick enthuse so nauseatingly over his magazine and, implicitly, over himself.
The relatively brief editorships of Robert Gottlieb, a longtime literary editor at Simon & Schuster and Knopf, and the celebrity-focused Tina Brown, who came to The New Yorker from Vanity Fair, were succeeded in 1998 by the reign of David Remnick, who has steered it through a tough era for high-end glossies and who remains at the helm as this relic turns 100.
It’s Remnick, as it happens, who’s at the center of Marshall Curry’s new Netflix offering The New Yorker at 100. In fact, the documentary is a veritable love letter to the guy. Which is unfortunate, because this film could have been an engaging overview of a century’s worth of reportage, fiction, poems, humorous essays, cartoons, profiles, and reviews of everything from books to movies to art, in addition to a fun look behind the scenes at the practical aspects of how such a product is put together, week after week.
Instead, it’s in surprisingly large part a slavering portrait of Remnick, focusing largely on his mind-bogglingly predictable politics — which is, admittedly, relevant, given that when he took over, The New Yorker became, above all else, a hard-core outlet for left-wing propaganda. Yes, it had always leaned left, but Remnick — the Princetonian son of a New Jersey dentist — dialed the leftism up to eleven.
Who’s Remnick? Perhaps his best-known book is The Bridge (2010), a 700-page life of Barack Obama for which “hagiography” is far too tame a word. In 2008, The New Yorker ran his admiring profile of Bill Ayers, the former terrorist and Obama mentor. As I noted in my own 2023 article about Remnick, Ayers told him “that his terrorism had been…harmless” and that “he’d never been particularly close to the Obamas.”
Nonsense on both counts — but Remnick passed it on to readers unquestioningly. Similarly, after the 2016 election, Remnick contrasted Obama, who he claimed had carried out his presidential duties with “discipline” and “rigor,” with the “impulsive” and “mendacious” Trump, who, he predicted, would “set markets tumbling” and “strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted.”
Nothing Trump has ever accomplished in the White House — not even the Abraham Accords — has led Remnick to rethink that prediction. Nor have the Biden administration’s disasters kept Remnick from extolling it. Like every other major left-wing outlet, The New Yorker under Remnick joined in the four-year-long pretense that Biden was compos mentis and was actually running things. In short, he’s an uncommonly loyal apparatchik. Without a narrative to parrot, one wonders, would he even know what to write?
We learn a lot about Remnick here — more than we want or need to know. He gets up early every day, drinks coffee, and exercises while listening to the podcast of Haaretz (Israel’s most left-wing newspaper). We see him playing guitar. He reflects on his life: “I’ve had incredible strokes of luck and incredible strokes of bad luck,” etc. We hear about his family’s health problems. And we’re treated to a clip of Charlie Rose calling him “the Michael Jackson of journalism.” Or was it Michael Jordan? In any case, ugh. Even in 2025, that kind of chill-up-your-spine vulgarity seems out of place in a documentary about The New Yorker.
But such vulgarity shouldn’t really come as a surprise, given that the executive producer of this thing is Judd Apatow — a man who’s famous both for his own dumb, reflexive leftism and for being Tinseltown’s long-reigning king of dumb, tacky comedy. Presumably it’s Apatow who’s responsible for crowding this film with celebrities — Sarah Jessica Parker, Jon Hamm, plus others I’ve never heard of — who gush over their favorite New Yorker cartoons. We also hear from Molly Ringwald (remember her?) and Jesse Eisenberg, both of whom have actually been published in its pages. And the narrator? None other than Julianne Moore. All this star power is apparently meant to make one thing clear: yes, The New Yorker may be serious stuff and kind of passé, but it’s also cool!
Speaking of showbiz figures, the documentary vouchsafes us a few minutes with New Yorker scribe Rachel Syme, who specializes in celebrity profiles, and whom we see here interviewing Carol Burnett at an upscale eatery in Montecito. Syme, a chirpy young airhead who speaks “up-talk,” solemnly explains to us that “celebrity journalism” isn’t “frivolous.” Au contraire: it allows her, as a practitioner of the art, to probe “how culture is made, the myths that we want to tell about ourselves, how artists strive to get where they are…. I love thinking deeply about those things.” Hearing Syme talk took me back to my days on the high-school newspaper.
We also see Remnick meeting with Ronan Farrow — now there’s a blast from the past — to discuss his current project. It’s about Elon Musk, about whom Remnick is predictably snide: Musk is “working on … efficiency?” he sneers. A solemn Farrow tells us “My beat is power” and deplores that “in the current political environment” — and we know what that means — “there’s a lack of respect for the press.” Good! Because all you people do is carry water for the Dems. Farrow serves up some more phony earnestness: “It is a brutal time for investigative journalism … I think informing people is the one hope we have.”
To be sure, the documentary does contain some historical material. No, there’s no mention of John Updike, Shirley Jackson, or other legendary New Yorker fiction writers. We do get the obligatory couple of minutes about 9/11. (No word about Islam, naturally.) We’re reminded that The New Yorker was once written for white Manhattanites — and that James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (1962) helped change that. What the documentary doesn’t admit is that The New Yorker is now DEI central, a publication to which, as I noted in my recent review of A Century of Fiction at the New Yorker, 1925-2025, white males need not bother submitting short stories.
The documentary does explore several famous books that started as long New Yorker articles. Among them is John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” (1946), which proved that when given what would come to be recognized as the classic midcentury New Yorker treatment — i.e., wear the reader out with endless particulars — even the nuclear destruction of a major city can be made to sound dull. Then there was Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962), which ended the use of DDT — thus (although the documentary doesn’t mention it) increasing the population of mosquitoes, and hence the spread of malaria.
Special attention is accorded to “In Cold Blood” (1965), Truman Capote’s powerful tale of a real-life Kansas murder. How much outright fiction did Capote slip into his supposed “nonfiction novel”? This became a hot question immediately after the book’s publication, but a marginal manuscript note by Shawn, included here, indicates that he wondering about this matter even before the Capote issue went to press: “How know?” Shawn scribbled apropos of some purported fact. “No witnesses? General problem.”
Over the course of the film, we see bits of several staff meetings. Everybody on the staff looks as if he or she works for The New Yorker. What do I mean by that? I’m not sure. It’s something about the way they dress, the way they carry themselves, the look in their eyes. The smugness, I guess. The sense that they aren’t struggling to ascertain the truth but to push a jointly held creed. Also, they look lots younger than their Shawn-era predecessors. One detail, perhaps important: I’ve never heard so many men with vocal fry.
In any event, they all plainly share Remnick’s politics. You might think some intellectual diversity would be desirable at such an institution. Nope. We see Nick Baumgarten, who writes the “Talk of the Town” column, approaching pedestrians, asking them how politics — i.e., MAGA — are “pulling [them] apart these days.” When one female Manhattanite from Central Casting starts whining in predictable fashion about her Thanksgiving guest list (she’s got vocal fry, too), Baumgarten happily replies, “You just walked into my ‘Talk’ piece!” Meaning that he’s just found somebody who’s coming from exactly where he’s coming from, and who, when he quotes her, will elicit nods of recognition from innumerable readers who are also coming from where he’s coming from. Which is to say that The New Yorker these days isn’t about informing or illuminating — it’s about reflecting back to the subscriber base a comforting, familiar image of themselves and their world views.
Later, we accompany Baumgarten’s colleague Andrew Marantz as he covers Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally of October 24, 2024. We’re shown the usual images of MAGA world, carefully curated to make Trump voters look like cretins: a middle-aged white man dances idiotically outside the venue; nearby, another middle-aged white man parrots what, in New Yorker world, is considered heresy — the notion that Trump really won in 2020; inside, a clownishly dressed Hulk Hogan bops around onstage waving a gigantic Trump flag.
“I’m interested in knowing why people believe what they believe,” asserts Marantz. He’s traveled all over the U.S., he brags, to talk to Trumpites. Then why, one wants to ask, do you and your fellow New Yorker contributors still seem so clueless about it all? Admit it: you’re not really interested in knowing the truth — only in giving your readers ersatz confirmation of their own prejudices. Here’s a radical idea: why not have an actual Trump supporter writing about Trump supporters?
Even as Marantz professes to be interested in understanding Trump voters, he notes, as many other leftist hacks did at the time, that Nazis held a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939. He pretends that that event provides “context” and that it poses a “challenge” to him “as a reporter.” How so? “If I write about [the Trump rally] in the context of a Nazi rally, like, am I calling them all Nazis? If I don’t write about the context of the Nazi rally, am I letting them all off the hook for this context that should be there?”
Of course, Marantz chooses to provide the “context,” and we’re presented with a generous passage of his article in which he draws this preposterous comparison. (What he doesn’t mention, needless to say, is that MSG was also the site of a 1931 Communist Party rally, a 1947 “U.S.-Soviet Friendship” rally, and the 1992 Democratic Party Convention, among thousands of other political, entertainment, and sports events over the decades.)
At the documentary’s center is a sequence in which we see the staff sweating out Election Night 2024 — and exhibiting their Trump-hate at full strength. They already have a cover ready in case Kamala Harris wins: a flattering illustration in which our first female president, clad in a jacket bearing images of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Obama, and others, looks supremely smart, strong, decisive, heroic. And for Trump? There are several cover options, all degrading. In one, he’s shown being inaugurated by Hulk Hogan.
Need I say that Remnick & co. are all devastated when Trump wins? One editor laments, “We can’t shape reality.” (No, but you sure do try, don’t you?) Remnick babbles about how “the people feel defeated” — as if “the people” hadn’t just elected the dude. Another editor grumbles about the president of Argentina: “Milei. Crazy guy.” We see Remnick at his computer, banging out his own take on the election, in which he imagines voters “ris[ing] from the couch of gloom” and ponders “the perils of life under authoritarian rule.” In the end, for the Trump-wins cover, they choose a black silhouette of the returning Führer — an echo of the magazine’s post-9/11 cover, in which black outlines of the Twin Towers were shown against a gray background.
The only parts of this film that were of real interest to me — and they made up about 15 minutes of its running time — had to do with the nuts-and-bolts specifics of putting a periodical together. I enjoyed spying on the editorial meetings at which every article was read aloud and every word scrutinized (“Do we need that comma?”). I liked the segment on the fabled Fact Checking Department, although even here one staffer managed to work in a Trump dig (in a time of lies, he said, it means something to care so much about the facts).
And I got a kick out of the material about the magazine’s quaint rules involving diaeresis marks (naïve, coöperate), its preference for some British spellings over their American counterparts (traveller, focussed), its continued refusal to treat teenager as one word (at The New Yorker, it’s still teen-ager), its insistence on capitalizing Internet (this, one editor caviled, “makes us look antiquated”), and its insistence on placing an acute accent over the first “e” in elite. In a rare moment of charming humility and self-insight, one staffer notes that when conservative interviewees accuse The New Yorker of being “elitist,” the reporter in question is obliged to spell it élitist, thereby, as he acknowledges, proving their point.
Perhaps The New Yorker’s most famous cover of all time was Saul Steinberg’s 1976 cartoon “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” which showed the Manhattan streets in detail but only vaguely hinted at the locations of every place beyond the Hudson. At the time, the drawing could well have been taken as a genially self-critical jab at the magazine’s — and the island’s — parochialism. Forty-nine years later, the New Yorker bubble is more isolated than ever from red-state America and from those parts of the world that don’t look to Brussels and Davos for guiding wisdom.
So it’s simply bizarre to hear Remnick enthuse so nauseatingly over his magazine and, implicitly, over himself: “The New Yorker is a miracle, okay?” he says into the camera. Its story, he contends, is one “of survival, of stubborn resistance, of bold changes.” And its readers? They “want fairness and fact checking and a sense of decency and they also want some media outlets that aren’t knuckling under” (as if any legacy media are “knuckling under” to Trump!). The New Yorker, he concludes, “has a soul. It has a sense of decency” — there’s “decency” again — “and purpose and quality…. If that sounds sanctimonious, I do not care.” No, it doesn’t sound sanctimonious. It sounds deceitful. Or deluded. Or both?
READ MORE from Bruce Bawer:
No Mommie Dearest, She
The Real Josephine Baker
The Sandersons Fail Manhattan Shows How Radicals Have Captured Western Institutions
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