The Current - The New Yorker magazine turns 100

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

The New Yorker magazine is 100 years old this week — no small feat in a struggling news industry. The magazine’s editor, David Remnick, tells Matt Galloway about the role of longform journalism in an increasingly fast-paced world, and how his publication is covering Trump 2.0.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from

CBC's Uncovered, available now. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, it's Matt here. Thanks for listening to The Current, wherever you're getting this podcast. Before we get to today's show, wonder if I might ask a favor of you if you could hit the follow button on whatever app you're using

There is a lot of news that's out there these days We're trying to help you make sense of it all and give you a bit of a break from some of that news, too So if you already follow the program, thank you And if you have done that maybe you could leave us a rating or review as well The whole point of this is to let more listeners find our show and perhaps find some of that information that's so important in these really tricky times. So thanks for all of that. Appreciate it. And on to today's show.

These are grim times for the media. Trust in institutions is diminishing. The President of the United States has called the media the enemy of the people. Newspapers and magazines are vanishing daily. And so our attention spans. And yet, in the face of that, there are stories of daily and so our attention spans. And yet, in the face of that, there are stories of endurance and survival and even thriving. This week, the New Yorker magazine celebrates its 100th anniversary and this morning a blockbuster double issue comes out,

featuring everything from a profile of Mike White, creator of the TV show The White Lotus, to a story about birds learning how to migrate with the help of a human who flies with them. There is also a Netflix documentary on the magazine set for release later this year. Since its creation, The New Yorker has only had five editors. David Remnick is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, staff writer, current editor of The New Yorker. He joins us now.

David, good morning. Good morning. How are you? I'm well. A hundred years is a huge achievement. It's a little rough on the knees after. When it launched in 1925, the founding editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross, described The New Yorker as a 15 cent comic paper. What is it in 2025, do you think?

It's something much different than that. It's definitely funny at times, but it also widened its aperture over time to include quite serious things, with culture and politics and reporting from all over the world. So it's a much broader thing than it started out to be in 1925, that's for sure.

The fact that it exists is impressive, given the fact that he almost lost it in a poker game, is this correct? That's absolutely right. So he started the magazine in February 1925 and by May his investors were saying, you know, Harold, we were selling about 3000 copies of this thing and it's not really taking off. Maybe we'll, you know, shut it down in the summer, bring it back in the fall, and that's always the beginning of the end. And at the same time, he lost $25,000 in a poker game in one night and $25,000 in 1925

is a hell of a lot of money. But all the same, the main investor, Raoul Fleishman, whose family had made a fortune in, and I kid you not, in yeast, somehow kind of bucked himself up and they got through the summer and they started becoming better. It became a better magazine. The reporting became less jokey and there was an excellent account of the Scopes Monkey Trial down South and it really found its footing. And it's really with the second world war, to be honest, Matt, where the magazine

kind of came into its own. Very rarely does any organization immediately within five seconds find out what it is and what it can be in the culture. And it took the New Yorker some time. When you imagine your audience, who do you think the New Yorker is for in 2025? Well, it's for your listeners.

I mean, it's for people who are curious about the world, who want to know more about who this president is that wants to make you a 51st state, but at the same time also want to know more about who this president is that wants to make you a 51st state, but at the same time also want to learn about how culture is developing and the arts and they want to laugh and they want to live a deeper, fuller, more informed life. And for the price of a cup of coffee a week, you can subscribe to The New Yorker and do that. I mean, I know that sounds incredibly immodest, but it's something that I'm completely devoted to

and believe in. You have an app, there is a podcast that you host, there is a website that posts exclusive content on the website, but you still print a magazine. Why do you still print a magazine now? Well, I think a lot of people like it that way. I think a lot of people like the physical manifestation of a magazine or a book.

There are even some people now who still listen to vinyl records. I'm not one of them, but we want to be there where you want us to be. In other words, if you want to read us in print, there we are. If you want to read us on your desktop or listen to us on your headphones, there we are. We want to be where you want us to be.

And certain media have different advantages. I think the physical beauty of print is quite extraordinary. I never see on the subway anymore, on the train, people with a big broadsheet newspaper. I think that's really gone away. But I do see people with the New Yorker on the subway in all its forms. I ask you this as an editor, is there something about discoverability that is different in a magazine than online? And I say this because there are things that I have found in the magazine,

something that I might not have been interested in at all, I thought, and then I read it, and suddenly William Finnegan is one of my favorite writers because he wrote a piece about surfing and then I buy his book. I mean, I might not have seen that on the app, but I stumbled across it in the magazine. Do you know what I mean?

I think if that works for you, then it works for you. I, you know, I, there are some people that have been raised on reading everything on the phone and that works for them. So I just want to be, have the New Yorker available to you any way you want. And right now it's become possible so that pieces can be read to you. I don't, me personally, that's not my thing.

I would rather read it myself, but there are people that much prefer to listen to a piece being read to them while they're commuting in the car or on the subway or whatever it might be. You said to Seth Meyers just before the election that we live in such a world where nothing registers. How do you break through with long form journalism in the time of hot takes and social media and algorithms

and the machine determining what it is that we think you would be interested in. I think probably, it's not that I wanna take back that remark, but I think something, things can register, but it's very hard to do in the noisiness of the world that we live in, in the speed of the world that we live in. And so in order for things to register they have to be of enormous quality and

what we're devoted to with the New Yorker is writing that is Immensely clear Beautiful fact-checked and and so that there's an appeal there that really makes a difference I there's there's definitely a lot of junk in the world. There just is. All of us at one time or another during the course of a day, lend ourselves over to that junk, whether we're flipping through a TikTok somewhat mindlessly, or it can be fun.

I don't doubt that, just like junk food. We all eat junk food once in a while. But there has to be in a life time for thinking and beauty and humor that is a cut above. And this is not a matter of snobbery. It's just a matter of effort and devotion and care. And I have to believe in this world and I devote my work life to it, my colleagues do too, that there are a lot of people

who want to know more deeply about the world they live in. They wanna explore the lives of other people, not just themselves. They want to change, they wanna laugh, they wanna see the world, even from their chair at home. Does that noise seem louder now in the first three weeks of Trump 2.0? Where it seems like every day

there is an announcement of something or several announcements. I think you know that's true. I think you know that's true. And I know that our noise is spilling over into your fine country. I mean, I must tell you, it's really disturbing. It's really disturbing to see an American president

behaving like this and it's our job to discuss it clearly, to report on it deeply and accurately and make some sense of it. Even if it seems in the moment without sense. What would you say to people who say that that's not enough of a job? That your job now is not just to report on things and be a voice of record as accurately as you can,

but that you need to be the resistance, that you need to, in this unprecedented moment you called in 2016, the election of Donald Trump, nothing less than a tragedy for the American Republic, a tragedy for the constitution and a triumph for the forces of authoritarianism, misogyny and racism. That was in 2016. And there were people who- That was on election night of 2016, you know, just an hour or two after he was elected.

And like everybody in this world, I've gotten things wrong in my life or made mistakes or I got that right. I'm afraid I got that right. It gives me no pleasure to say. But I think the function of the New Yorker and the press is the way I see it, is not to be leading on the barricades, but to inform people. And that is a hugely complex, difficult task. It's complicated enough.

It's not enough for us to just scream and yell, Trump is terrible, this is awful. There needs to be a marshaling of a clear picture of the evidence and not like in a court case, but in fair journalism. I want conservatives as well as liberals and people on the left and the right to read The New Yorker and maybe go away from a piece saying,

you know, I don't necessarily agree with this, that, or the other thing, but I feel that I was treated with respect and somebody was respecting my intelligence and my point of view, and maybe that changes that reader. What does that word fair mean in that context? Cause that can carry a lot of water. Yeah, sure.

So for example, if you're writing a piece about the death penalty, Larry Wright has a long narrative about women on death row in Texas who are being ministered to by a small group of nuns. It's the most extraordinary piece in this issue. It's called Sisterhood. And it's not a diatribe one way or the other about the death penalty. I think Larry's heart is definitely against the death penalty and he makes that plain in

the piece. But at the same time he doesn't stint on describing how these women got where they are today. And he does it with enormous human empathy, but that's a very hard thing to do, considering some of the crimes that these women have committed. But at the same time, he's trying to describe where they came from, how they got there, what their treatment was as a child. It's the never-ending attempt to get beyond sloganeering. It's the attempt to create life and all its, to describe life in all its complexity and fullness.

That's what I mean about fairness. Not on the other handism, not like, oh, there's anti-fasc. Not on the other handism. Not like, oh, there's anti-fascism and on the other hand, there's fascism. I know that argument and I know why that's wrong and banal. But I'm talking about something else. I'm talking about respecting the reader's intelligence. I'm Dena Temple-Reston, the host of the Click Here podcast from Record of Future News. Twice a week, we tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world.

And these days, our digital world is being overrun by hackers. I was just targeted by a nation state. And they range from reflective. It's a crime, bro. And I live with that every day. To ruthless. Do you feel guilty about it? No, not really. Click here from Recorded Future News. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Can I talk about the environment that you're operating in right now? Sure. The historian,

Timothy Snyder has talked about that idea of do not obey in advance in his book on tyranny. Um, and that quotation is circulating widely now because of what you're seeing with ABC news, settling a lawsuit with Trump, the head of the FCC launching an investigation into national public radio and PBS. Um, you have the parent company of CBS looking

at that it might settle a suit with Donald Trump. What does all of that signal to you? Well, a number of things. First of all, I want to say this. I won't do it. I won't do it. This is a promise I make to our subscribers and our readers that the leadership of the New Yorker

is devoted to the end, doing our jobs properly the way they must be in a liberal democracy. You will not kiss the ring. No, that's not our job. That's not our place in life. I think now you're asking me why it's happening. I think there are a number of reasons. One of them is you have, if you're looking at it from a kind of historian's point

of view or an economic historian's point of view, what you have is media entities that are owned by gigantic conglomerates is not a big deal. So to fork over $15 million to settle a lawsuit so they can get rid of it and continue having decent relations with the government and not get attacked by the Trump administration through lawsuits and further lawsuits and whatever other levers that the administration has. And this is a administration spiritually built on vengeance. Well, then they're gonna make that deal.

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. He paid $250 million for the Post. That's pocket change. The Post is a very small part of his empire. His empire is built around Amazon. If he withdraws a potential endorsement of Kamala Harris, as he insisted the paper do, he wants to dodge problems with the US government

for Amazon. So, you know, that is at the heart of this. The heads of huge businesses want to avoid having bad relations with a often vengeful US government. Where does that leave us, the public, as we are trying to sift through the moment? Well, the risk of being self-serving, it leaves us with depending on The New Yorker,

The New York Times, and other publications and media outlets that do not kiss the ring. Now, I wanna say this about something like the Washington Post. The newsroom of the Washington Post is filled with people who do their jobs and do it well, despite what the ownership has done lately, which is deeply unfortunate.

So I'm not counseling people to stop reading the Washington Post or to, you know, abandon complete attention from all these other places, but to be aware of what's going on. You know, I lived in the Soviet Union as it was collapsing for four years. I have had some experience in witnessing these dynamics in both directions and I refuse

to lose faith. I mean, we're still, however challenged, however difficult, however much an emergency this is, we are still capable of turning things around. There's an election in less than two years in which things could change quite markedly. Donald Trump is not forever. Just the last point on this, and you mentioned inventions. Do you worry Donald Trump and Elon Musk were calling out journalists by name

on social media this weekend saying they should be fired? Do you worry they'll come after you? What happens happens. What happens happens. I'm doing my job and I'm going to continue doing it. That's the end of that. Let me ask you about something else that you personally have written about extensively in the magazine and that's what's happening in the Middle East.

You wrote several long pieces on Israel, on Benjamin Netanyahu, on the leader of Hamas. After the 7th of October, you said, the only way to tell the story is to try to tell it truthfully and know that you will fail. Yeah. What did you mean by that? Well, if you're interested in that part of the world, you know that the level of partisanship

runs very deep. It's very, very difficult to reach readers and get beyond their narratives of what is and what should be. And it's very hard for human beings, all of us, to accept that two things can be true at the same time that seem to be true, that the attacks of October 7th were hideous in all the ways we know. And at the same time, it is also true that Palestinians have faced injustice for an awfully long time.

And I could go on and on and on and on. It seemed to be contradictory in some people's minds. So it's very difficult. So what happens is a lot of the telling of this story, for all the reasons we know, leaves out the contradictions, leaves out the complexities in one form or another, whether it's a purely right-wing Israeli narrative or an ardent Islamist narrative or, to me, this is what a liberal mindset

means. It's not about orthodox liberalism as it's a political strategy, but rather the liberalism of being able to hold all kinds of things in your mind at once, because that's what the world is. The world is immensely complex, and to admit that the world is complex is not an excuse for failing to make sense of it, or to make decisions, or to be for or against something. But I think a writer trying to describe what's happened in the last year and a half, much less the last century, in Israel and Palestine, is duty bound to let that complexity and those contradictions into the way

he or she is telling the story. Which is in some ways, I mean, again, not to beat self-serving, but it's the kind of thing that a long, deeply reported piece would allow people to do, not just shout at each other, but think of those complex and live in those complexities. Yeah, look, I think it's even imperative. I think you understand my feelings about the political career of Donald Trump, but at the

same time, it's also very important to know how he appeared on the scene and why he has succeeded the way he has in so many ways. And while I'm criticizing him, it's important to look, for example, at the weakness of the Democratic Party and the mistakes that have been made at the top of that party. Why do you still love the job that you do?

It's a great question. I love this activity. It's not just that I think it's, I'm very high-minded about it. In the last 10 minutes, I've been super high-minded about it because those are the questions you asked. No, but also, you host a podcast where you talk to Liz Cheney and you talk to Olivia Rodrigo. Do you know what I mean?

There's a line between all of that. Well, it sounds like you have a similar job. I mean, and isn't it, it's an absolute privilege. And, you know, as an editor to be able to work with the writers and the artists and fellow editors that I do is an unbelievable privilege and still as an occasional writer to get on an airplane and go somewhere

and try to make sense of somebody or something, and to call on people to tell me the truth and to call on the trust of readership, it is an unbelievable privilege to do that. And I don't wanna let the readers of the New Yorker down. What will we learn about the process from this documentary that is being made through now? It's kind of like all the president's men

with fewer typewriters maybe or something like that. But I don't know, what are we gonna see? Well, look, this is not my project. We did what we asked so many people to do for us, which is we've opened the door to a documentary filmmaker and we'll see what he and his folks make sense of the New Yorker at a certain period of time. I think the film, so far as I can tell,

simply by the time they've been around, is built largely by what we were talking about, which is the period of the return of Trump to the White House. They were certainly filming us on election eve and they even came to my apartment and watched me watching the unforgettable inauguration. But they've also been out in the field

and for example, they sent a crew to Syria to watch John Lee Anderson report on Syria. They sent a crew to Syria to watch John Lee Anderson report on Syria. They sent a crew to Houston to watch Drew Kular report on the space program. So my guess is almost as good as yours on this. We'll see. I have to let you go, but I was thinking,

who would David Remnick, who is he still trying to land as an interview? And the only person I could think of was Bob Dylan. You know, I think it might be for the best that I reach my end with that white whale still swimming out of reach. You've been in his office, but no interview yet. Yeah, well, that's kind of mean of you to bring that up.

Because it was a great piece that you wrote about being there, but not being there at the same time. Hey, Matt, I'll leave that one to you. And by the way, if it happens for you, good luck, because he's not easy. That would be the white whale for you though. I think so, yeah. A hundred years is a long time for anything,

but it's great to see something evolve and change and still be vital and urgent. David, thank you very much for this. Congratulations. I appreciate it. All the best. David Remnick is the editor of the New Yorker magazine. The magazine celebrates its 100th anniversary this week.