The New Yorker Radio Hour - Celebrating 100 Years: Jia Tolentino and Roz Chast Pick Favorites from the Archive

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Staff writers and contributors are celebrating The New Yorker’s centennial by revisiting notable works from the magazine’s archive, in a series called Takes. The writer Jia Tolentino and the cartoonist Roz Chast join the Radio Hour to present their selections. Tolentino discusses an essay by a genius observer of American life, the late Joan Didion, about Martha Stewart. Didion’s profile, “everywoman.com,” was published in 2000, and Tolentino finds in it a defense of perfectionism and a certain kind of ruthlessness: she suggests that “most of the lines Didion writes about Stewart, it’s hard not to hear the echoes of people saying that about her.” Chast chose to focus on cartoons by George Booth, who contributed to The New Yorker for at least half of the magazine’s life. You can read Roz Chast on George Booth, Jia Tolentino on Joan Didion, and many more essays from the Takes series here.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Listen, I am not one for anniversary journalism or even birthdays. You reach a certain age, and it's hard to remember what all the fuss is about. But when you reach 100, well, at 100 you get to make a fuss. And the debut issue of the New Yorker magazine appeared on newsstands dated February 21, 1925. Throughout this year, we're going to be celebrating the centennial in many ways. And one of them is to highlight a few of the gems from the New Yorkers archive. And we've asked some of our writers to pick a piece that means something special to them.

And so we'll start off today with Gia Tolentino, who's the author of the best-selling book, Trick Mirror. And Gia picked a story by one of the great genius observers of American life, the late Joan Didion. Joan Didian. One thinks of the Stingray, the Moherthrow, and the typewriter, Bloodshed and Laurel Canyon. the decaying summer of love. It's always a surprise to remember that the neurasthenic empress of American nonfiction once turned the terrifying gimlet of her attention

to Y2K-era fan blogs and Kmart cake-toppers for a defense of Martha Stewart. The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of feminine domesticity, but of female power. Of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and still in her apron, walks away with the chips.

Joan Didion's essay on Martha Stewart, read for us by an actor, and I'm here with staff writer Gia Tolentino. Gia, tell me why you pick this story out of so many thousands that we've published over 100 years. Why Joan Didian and why this piece about Martha Stewart? This is published in the year 2000, and three years later, Martha Stewart gets indicted for securities fraud,

and four years later, Joan Didian starts writing the year of magical thinking. Her memoir about losing her husband and daughter. Yeah. And so their entire sort of 21st century image is defined by things that have not happened yet, but are almost about to happen when this piece comes out. And so I find it just this amazing thing that exists. And it remains surprising to me that she decided to take the song. Wait, can you actually, can you give me the goss?

Like, can you tell me how did it happen? I think we threw ideas at Joan Didion constantly hoping for the best that we would get lucky once in a blue moon. And for some reason, she bit on this. Well, do you think you know what the reason is when you read the piece? I think when you read the piece. When you read the piece, when you read the piece, she's really interested in this kind of domestic god-godess notion. You could bottle that chili sauce. Neighbors say to home cooks all over America. You could make a fortune on those date bars. You could bottle it. You could sell it. You can survive when all else fails. I myself believed for most of my adult life that I could support myself and my family

in the catastrophic absence of all other income sources by catering. I think when you read this piece, you get why she accepted this assignment because she loves Martha Stewart. I don't think... Did you? No. No. You know, both Martha Stewart and Joan Didian are fascinating figures to me that I could never feel an entire kinship with because two things. They are both perfectionists on the surface, something that I can't quite connect to. And there's a real steel. There's such a genteel perfection in ease. But behind it, there's like a little bit of blood. There's some sense of kind of violence. I mean, she kills her own Thanksgiving turkeys, right? Like there's, and with Didion, too, there's this icy, icy, icy, like control and coldness behind

these perfect, gorgeous, you know, impeccable sentences and surfaces, and one gets the impression reading it that Joan Didion connected to Martha Stewart because of this. What she was analyzing was another woman that had made a career out of flawless surfaces at a cost. To her critics, she seems to represent a fraud to be exposed, a wrong to be righted. She's a shark, one declares in salon. however much she's got, Martha wants more. And she wants it her way and in her world,

not in the balls-out boys' club realms of real estate or technology, but in the delicate land of doily hearts and wedding cakes. Of the pieces that John Dinian wrote for the New Yorker, there was some reporting pieces from California. The other critical piece that she wrote was about Ernest Hemingway and about Hemingway's sentences and perfectionism of sentences. A defense of perfectionism. Exactly. What a link between Martha Stewart and Papa Hemingway.

Well, it's funny. I think so much of this piece, most of the lines that Didigan writes about Stewart, it's hard not to hear the echoes of people saying that about her. Of people being like, she's like, can't you tell she's a shark? And it's almost like Diddy is saying, yeah, I know. We all know. This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills. This is a story. about a woman who did her own IPO. This is the woman's pluck story. The Dust Bowl story. The burying your child on the trail story. The I Will Never Go Hungry Again story.

The Mildred Pierce story. The story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail. Show the men. The story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men. Gee, you mentioned that Martha Stewart hit a bump, shall we call it. She was convicted on charges related to insider trading investigations,

and she spent several months in prison. But when she got out of jail, she rebounded like crazy. Could Joan Didion have written the same profile of Martha Stewart just a few years later? I'm so glad that she didn't, right? It would have been much more complicated. That's why this piece is so good, is this piece can just be about the question of image versus reality, perfectionism versus the price you pay for it on the inside,

which is this current running underneath it. It's a question of, you know, a woman that is succeeding on a woman's terms with ambition that can outpace that of any man. What do you make of it? What do you call it? How does that woman herself understand it? And how do other people relentlessly misinterpret it? It's nice that it can just be about that. It can be about image versus what's under it. Didion ceded the best line in her piece to an anonymous internet user who wrote about Stewart in a summation that could be applied to both. She seems perfect, but she's not. She's obsessed. She's frantic. She's a control freak beyond my wildest dreams. And that shows me two things. A, no one is perfect. And B, there's a price for everything.

That's from Joan Didion's essay and Martha Stewart, headlined, Everywoman.com. Excerpts were read for us by actor Amy Warren, and Gia Tolentino wrote about Didion's essay, and you can find both pieces at New Yorker.com slash takes. That's New Yorker.com slash takes, T-A-K-E-S. More in a moment. We also asked the cartoonist Roz Chast for her take on the magazine Centennial, and Roz wanted to write about one of her illustriest forebearers, the late George Booth, who contributed cartoons to the New Yorker for decades and decades,

half its life or more. Booth is known for his dogs. He was for sure the world champion dog cartoonist. But that doesn't really do justice to him as an observer of us humans. Like Ross Chast herself, George Booth drew a world full of stressed-out slumpy people dealing with the weirdness of everyday existence. Here's Roz Chast. A woman is having a yard sale.

This front lawn and the side lawn are just covered with crap. Busted washing machine, chair that's like all in tatters, maybe some exercise machinery and a million bottles. And, you know, just like what you see when somebody has like a particularly large and junky yard sale, And this couple is kind of looking, and the caption is, there's more inside. But it's just so great.

It's so great. Oh, there's tires. George Booth was a beloved cartoonist for the New Yorker for many decades. I think George Booth brought a different world into the, New Yorker cartoons. It was definitely not New York. It was definitely not so-called sophisticated people going to the theater or, you know, wearing fashionable clothing or anything like that. They were from a small town, someplace in the United States, just going about their very, very strange business of grocery shopping or taking baths or some.

sort of situation where a miniature horse is running around the living room for some reason. One of the things that I love about George Booth's cartoons are the drawings themselves and the attention to all of the details that set the stage for the joke. One of my favorite examples of this is this cartoon of his of this father in a car with his two doofy sons crammed all into the front seat. They're in a parking lot of a grocery store. And meanwhile, the mother, her grocery bag, has dropped on the ground. Everything is rolling away. The bag tore. The grocery cart is smashed into a parking meter. And two rabid-looking dogs are barking at her. You know, there's clearly this like grocery store, post-grosses.

grocery store crisis going on. And the father is saying to the sons, one of you boys, go help mom with the groceries. It's just the greatest drawing. George and I met in the offices at the New Yorker in the, oh, I'm guessing it was sometime in the mid-80s. Back in the day, people brought their work in in person. And so that's when I met George Booth.

He was tall and kind of goofy looking. He sort of reminded me of his cartoons. I was in awe of him because I loved his cartoons for so many years. And I have to say that when I first started, some of the old guys didn't want to talk to me. I think maybe because I was very young, maybe because I was female, maybe I think also they didn't like my work. It was just too different from what they were doing.

But George was always nice. And he was a great lapper. He laughed at his own stuff. He laughed at other people's stuff. And he was so true to himself, you know, from the beginning to the end, that to me that was, you know, encouraging. It was like, you know, you follow. your guide, you know?

The piece of his that just knocked me out was Ip Gis-A-Gal. It's a two-page episodic sort of story. It's not just one panel with a funny line. It's an actual story about Ip. And it's all in this kind of caveman dialect that he made up. The first panel is this caveman with his friends, and Ipp is saying, Humwampa Go.

He wants a girl. First he pets this creature with spikes on his back, and he says, Esnop Go, tis a hig. And then the next panel is, he's looking at some giant, like, it's a mini dinosaur or a giant lizard. I don't know. It's hop girl. Tiss a lizard.

And then he sees a girl. And he goes, snorp? And she's like looking at him like, what is happening? And the girl just starts throwing rocks at it. It's a croctron girl. And it's clear from reading it. It's like, it's a rock throwing girl. And her arm is just like windmilling around,

just throwing these rocks at this guy. And then he like slings her. over his shoulder and goes, I'm aikedasa Croctran girl. He's saying, I like that rock-throwing girl. And then the last panel is Ip with

the cavewoman person, and he's patting her, and he's going, go, and they're surrounded by little cave babies. I just loved his work so much. I loved

it for its unique point of view, always funny, never cruel, kind of off the wall. Very inspiring. He was great. You can find Roz Chast on George Booth, as well as Gia Tolentino on Martha Stewart by the great Joan Didion, and much more at new yorker.com slash takes. New Yorker.com slash takes. And you can subscribe to the New Yorker at our website.

as well, New Yorker.com. We'll be sharing many more takes on the New Yorker Centennial in the weeks to come. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. Happy anniversary and see you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow,

Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. And we had special assistance this week from Jonathan Mitchell. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.