The Press Box - The December Issue: Can The New Yorker Survive Another Century?

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Welcome to the first in a monthly series of special episodes in which we take an in-depth look at a single subject and then interview a guest to help us understand that subject. This month’s subject is The New Yorker magazine and our guest is its editor, David Remnick. This month’s issue kicks off with a discussion between Bryan and David about Netflix’s new documentary on The New Yorker, ‘The New Yorker at 100,’ including what they both liked (02:54) and disliked about it (11:43). Next, they recall their first interactions with The New Yorker (16:08) and then dive into the history of the magazine (22:31). Bryan and David then contemplate some questions about the magazine, including, “If you were stuck on a desert island, whose New Yorker collected works would you pick?” (29:36), “What is your favorite New Yorker cover?” (36:31), "What movie or TV show to come out of The New Yorker would you pick?” (45:20), and more. David and Bryan finish their discussion by asking “Can The New Yorker survive another century?”(59:21). The December Issue winds down with an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick (1:11:17). He and Bryan discuss what it was like having a documentary crew around while he worked, what kind of news outlet he wants The New Yorker to be (1:15:43), how much he wants the magazine to be about the city (1:29:45), and so much more, here on the Press Box. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: David Remnick Producer: Bruce Baldwin Additional Production Support: Conor Nevins and Ben Cruz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Bruce Baldwin. David Shoemaker will join us in one second. This is a special episode of the press box that I am calling the December issue. To be followed by issues, that is special episodes, in January and February, and on and on. In these episodes, we are going to take a big, fun, sprawling, in-depth look at a single subject. And then we'll bring on a guest to help us understand that subject.

Our subject today is The New Yorker magazine. And our guest is David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker. In a time when most media outlets have the lifespan of a Mayfly, the New Yorker is celebrating its 100th birthday. There's a brand new Netflix doc that's going to be out on Friday about the magazine as part of that celebration. In that documentary, David Remnick calls the New Yorker a miracle. And what's miraculous isn't just the New Yorker still exists. this, it's that it is a media outlet with a collective memory.

It is and has always been the New Yorker. Today, David and I are going to review the Netflix doc. We're going to talk about the New Yorker's history and pick some favorite writers and covers and cartoons. Then I'll bring in David Remnick to talk about what the next hundred years of the New Yorker will be like. If I may sound like an editor writing an editor's letter for just a second, welcome to the December issue.

Can the New Yorker survive another? century. All right, David, let's start off the December issue by talking about this new New Yorker documentary that we got an early look at. It's called The New Yorker 100, directed by Marshall Curry. It's going to be on Netflix this Friday, December 5th. Curry and his associates embedded with the New Yorkers editors and writers and fact checkers and cartoon choosers as the magazine got ready to publish its 100th anniversary. And because we live in a certain age of a certain kind of Netflix documentary. We got celebrity talking heads

to Sarah Jessica Parker, John Hamm, Nate Parganzi. Were they all New Yorker contributors, by the way? Because there was a sort of reveal at some point the way through where like half of them were certainly New Yorker. Jesse Eisenberg or a couple others that were New Yorker contributors.

Or were some of them just super fans. Molly Ringwald's contributor. I like to think of Molly Ringwald and Sarah Jessica Parker's New Yorker adjacent celebrities. Sure. Part of the New Yorker extended universe, yeah. Yeah, they've never written a talk of the town piece, but they're

around. They're at the festivals. Sure. Let's start here. What did you like about the doc? It was light in a very good way. It made, it was, I feel like it captured the vibe of the New Yorker, if not exactly its spirit or ethos.

And, you know, it made you want to work there, which in a lot of ways is like the defining characteristic of the New Yorker, like more than you actually wanted to read it when you were in your 20s, you wanted to work there, you know? It just seemed like the sort of highbrow version of Mad Magazine or whatever. It's just like such an ideal place to spend their entire career.

I mean, certainly, we could quibble with the weight that certain things received. But the things that I probably would have had to edit out in my notes were things that were the most enlightening, the most kind of joyful parts of the whole thing, right? The cartoons, the, the operations manager, you know, I mean, some of it just, there, there was, there was, it was just so much sort of simple joy, which is not at all what I was expecting. I was expecting a lot more of the history, a lot more of the, I mean, they, they spent a decent amount of time on Hiroshima on Silent Spring, Silent Spring on in cold blood, plenty of time. But that's what I was expecting almost the entire thing to be. And instead, it was just sort of a pleasure. Do you like Nick Palmgarten, the staff writer,

hitting the streets of Manhattan to write a talk of the town story? Yeah, I thought that was great. And on the second watch, I noticed that he just sort of started off his bit by saying, like, all right, let's see if this works. Like, am I just, is he just doing this for the cameras? Is he, you know, did they just send him out there to be like a crash chest dummy? But, but yeah, it was, that was, it was, again, And I imagine that's not how most talk pieces take shape,

but it was like wonderful to imagine that that's how they all take shape, right? Just wandering through the streets. Yes, it's fun to think that there's this unbroken string of talk of the town writers. Yeah. Going back to Mark Singer and beyond that, who just were like, you know what? I'm going to hit the streets of Manhattan and see what I come up with. See what I can see who I can buttonhole and put in my notebook.

I actually emailed Nick Palm Garden and said, This resulted in a piece, right? And it did, in fact, result in a piece for the magazine. It was not just an on-camera experiment, though. They followed him around quite a bit. We get to meet a lot of people who make the New Yorker, as you point out. Staff writers like Hilton Owls and John Lee Anderson, Richard Brody, the movie critic. He was a treat.

Dude, that incredible beard. He looks like the kind of New York character that Joe Mitchell wrote about. Absolutely. true. Absolutely true. Years ago you wrote a piece about the crinkler, the person that's always like, you know, like crinkling their candy wrappers in the movie theaters. That's what I imagine the crinkler to be doing. There's this great moment where Brody is sitting down at his computer in the New Yorker office, presumably to compose a review and he fishes his reading glasses out of a Ziploc bag. I was like, this is a guy who sees a movie a day. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes more than

one he said in the, or sometimes multiple movies in a day according to his own, uh, sort of monologue. He was an incredible character. I love that he just, he like sprints away from movie theaters with his hood pulled up after every screening so he doesn't have to talk about it to any other human beings. And then apparently he came straight for the New Yorker offices where he has just like, like a hot desk. He just goes into one of the cubicles and again just kind of ignores everybody while he types away. Like they never showed him interacting with a human, you know, despite the fact the New Yorker office is presumably full of people that, that he is friendly with. that was he was he was really one of the highlights we see the critic caliphic celesne wandering around a record store

and he says my only job is to be interesting yeah he doesn't have a beat his only job is to be interesting that's one of the great lines yeah do you believe it uh that's a great question isn't that our job at the ringer yeah we don't really have his job but the new yorker um was he the one, I probably have this mixed up. Was he the one that said that like it's the great thing about the New Yorker is that they'll just like the readership is willing to follow you wherever you want to go? Sort of they have that sort of faith in you. I mean, I think that was the bigger point, right? That it's just like it's not about and they showed, you know, some of his great bylines, you know, on the on screen as he's having as he's discussing this. Um, presumably yes, he has a beat or at least

a, you know, he has to show up to the pitch meetings too. Uh, but yeah, I mean, I mean, I mean, I think as opposed to his life before the New Yorker when he was a music critic, now he can write about boxing, you know, he can write about politics. He can write about whatever it is. Carlson. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think my two favorite things about the doc is one, we got these really cool glimpses

of the magazine coming together. Yes. We see Rachel Syme, who I used to work with The Daily Beast, interviewing Carol Burnett over lunch in Montecito. By the way, I like everything about that sentence so far. for a profile and asking her these really interesting questions. Yeah. We see John Lee Anderson going to Damascus after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and walking around

a prison. There's a little moment where Andrew Morant's, another writer, is going to that Trump rally at MSG last year, that infamous rally, the floating island of garbage line. Yeah. And he's talking about his piece and he's like, you know, there was this Nazi rally at MSG in 1939. This Trump rally is not that. Yeah.

But it would be weird if I didn't mention it in the piece I'm writing. Yeah. So where should I put it and how should I handle it, which is a fascinating question. I went and looked up his piece. The eighth paragraph turned out to be the answer. Okay. He mentioned the 1939 Nazi rally. So that's fascinating.

And then I think the other thing that really stood out about the doc is it shows that the New Yorker is the result of an enormous amount of human capital. That's right. You mentioned the cartoons. Emma Allen's a cartoon editor. What a job that is. Dude, been in that post since 2017, and that sounds like,

tra la la la, la, la, I look at the cartoons and pick them out. Well, she says in the doc that she gets a thousand to 1,500 submissions a week. She picks 50 to 60 of them. and brings them to David Remnick. And then as we see in the doc, they have this mini editorial meeting five or six people sitting around

and Remnick looks at a cartoon and puts it in a basket labeled, yes, no, or maybe. One of the crazy things, I'm sorry if I'm cutting you off, but one of the crazy things about the documentary and I mean, you've spoken to Remnick, I can only,

for the sake of argument, I'll stipulate that this wasn't just staged for the documentary crew. But one of the most amazing things was to what degree Rimnik is like engaged in the micro in almost every department, right? I mean, it's one thing to be like, yeah, I'm the editor-in-chief. I'm going to have sign off on the cover. But it's another thing to be like, I need to just chuckle at every single cartoon or it's not going to be published. It's part of the essence of the New Yorker. Yeah. I was looking through Benegoda's book about the magazine.

And what's interesting is Harold Ross, the first editor of the New Yorker, had a similar cartoon meeting every Tuesday. Wow. And would issue instructions like, quote, make funnier. So what Remnick's doing. If only were that simple. Make funnier. So what Remnick's doing is a version of what the New Yorker's already done. And that's part of the magic of the place.

Yeah. Yeah. Like the institutional legacy. I mean, you do, sometimes you do those things just because everyone did it before you. That's the way things are done. And there's also a sense with Remnick throughout that it's not so much his editorial vision that is guiding the New Yorker, but that he's a steward of the New Yorker's editorial vision. You know what I mean?

And so there's, it's not just like his particular sense of humor. It's him acknowledging that these cartoons that are. appropriate for the New Yorker are indeed funny. Here's what I didn't love about the documentary. I miss the OG New Yorker crowd. I'm not sure how you... The old guard, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm not sure how you make a New Yorker documentary

and don't have Adam Gopnik in it, or Susan Orlean in it, or Lawrence Wright in it. Mm-hmm. We know this from talking about movies, both narrative movies and documentaries about journalism, that it's really easy, to suggest journalism, and it's really hard to show what makes journalism great. Yeah.

I mean, it's even hard to show what journalism, with the process of journalism is. You know, they spent time with the fact-checking department. There was that whole sort of stance at the end where they talk about the looming deadline. We have to have this thing, you know, it's going to be hell on Monday, on Tuesday and Wednesday. It's got to be locked on Thursday, and then it all starts again, you know. But it's sort of just like paying lip service to it a little bit. It doesn't show you the hell. But yeah, I mean, it is.

I mean, to what you said specifically, it's hard to explain what makes journalism great. Like showing it, and this goes also to the people who weren't there. I mean, so much of journalism doesn't, isn't an active, isn't a thing that's worth filming. You know, it's, it's an odyssey of the mind, right? It's, it's not, it's not like a particularly active thing. They did a pretty good job of making, of highlighting the active, parts though. Yeah, I think it's a series of small moments. Like there's a moment at the New Yorker

probably happens more than once a week where Remnick looks at a piece or a sub-editor looks at a piece and says, this just isn't working. Yeah. Or you didn't get it. And then a phone is picked up. And the writer gets that message and gets this look on his face like, oh my God, this is going to require a lot more work than I thought it did. True. And then they're going to go back and rewrite it. And those small decisions, right, those little things, that's how you get from really good to really great. Yeah. Also from just the, you know, the publication process point of view, I would have loved someone just hitting the page count every month. When that, when what you're describing happens, it's like, okay, well, we need 12 more pages.

where, you know, and how big is the, well, to use the baskets from the cartoon, you know, from the cartoon section, how deep is the maybe stack, right? So like if you, if a piece drops off, if two pieces drop off, or how many pieces are sitting right there waiting to jump in? And what happens to those pieces if the opportunity disappears? I mean, I'm sure when you, there's some relief in publishing a weekly that it's easier to say not quite yet to somebody if the piece isn't working, right? this will still have some currency next week the week after. It's not a monthly, you know, certainly on a quarterly where there's one shot or nothing. But yeah, it's just amazing to think, it's amazing to think how much literature is like sitting in the Brimnix, on the Brinick's desk and never gets published. It's also if you watch this, Doc, you could be forgiven for thinking that the New Yorker of 2025 is a magazine made with computers. Mm-hmm. rather than a media company that has a festival and has podcasts and is trying to fight through the very strange media environment of 2025 just like everything else.

Well, yeah, I actually thought about that during that. For someone who is, for someone, for such a micromanager, it's kind of weird that they didn't have Remnick in a conversation about what's leading the website today. you know like wouldn't that be interesting to you just like how does that how does the how does the philosophy convey i mean obviously well they they do publish original stuff on the website but a lot of that stuff is is magazine content that you know that's a leading site but that's really interesting to me as well as a modern modern reader or remnik's a podcaster like oh how's he coming up with questions for you know whoever's sitting in front of him whatever politician i'm glad we got the moment of him hating his voice.

Welcome to podcast world. We've all been there. Wait till you get on the video tier, Remnick, and you're going to hate a lot more than just your voice. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, but you're right. I mean, there was a lot of substance that was kind of omitted in favor of, you know, visual.

Do you remember when you first started reading The New Yorker? I remember the first piece that I remember reading in The New Yorker, or there might have been some before, but my first real memory was a short, story by Lisa Todayo that is what's called oh god what was it it was from her book animal but it would have been published in early 2000 um because that's when i was like first taking creative writing classes and and when you take creative writing classes at university in in central texas what that means is like it's your first exposure to a

imagining a broader, a wider world, or at least a northeastern world, you know, America, United States world. It's like, wait, this, if I, if I want to do this, then this now shapes the path of my life. And the Todayo story, I think, was seminal because it was, if memory serves, it was her first publication. Or at least that was the story that we told ourselves and the idea that you could go from relative anonymity to being published in the New Yorker to presumably famous writer, you know, next was part of the, the, the, the mystical allure of the whole thing. What about you? What was the first thing you read? Well, it's funny you say early 2000, because that was me too, an hour and a half down the highway in Austin. And I remember getting

my hands on an issue and I was eating lunch by myself. and I opened the magazine and there is a Tad friend profile of the screenwriter Ron Bass remember Ron Bass 80s, 90s. Not to be confused with a pro wrestler Ron Bass. Not the outlaw Rod Bass.

This is the guy who wrote Rain Man and my best friend's wedding. And I opened this profile and I'm reading it and the pros, as all Tad Friend Pros is, is funny and worked over and just, you know, brings you along gently as if he is, you know, leading you along by your, by your collar through the piece. And I'm just like, oh my gosh, you know, and it's he's able to get into this idea that

Ron Bass has mastered the Hollywood system, but is not exactly Billy Wilder. Yes. Yes. This is not, you know, this is not one of those kind of Hollywood profiles. It's complex. It's interesting. that was that was the first thing that I remember the second thing was oh my goodness this piece is really long yeah New Yorker stories have gravity and I mean that in the planetary sense of the term absolutely

like you read the piece and you feel like you know everything even if the writer has gone to this enormous pruning process and is wearing that knowledge very lightly yeah that's the New Yorker to be. Yeah, that's, that's right. You know, there's some, obviously the New Yorkers worked in the very, in whatever the endth degree of long form is with some of like magazine length features. But there's still a sort of editorial control even over the very long pieces. This is not just like we publish what was turned into us. It's there's still, it still seems to be in almost every instance the right shape. It's just what the right shape would be in another magazine, if not constricted by,

you know, by whatever your other editorial concerns are, how many ads you have, how many pages you have to run, you know, like what else you have to publish that month. It is. There's big, when you're reading a profile like that, especially a profile of, and I haven't read that Ron Bass piece, or I don't remember having read it. But it's a sort of piece that could almost be a talk of the town piece. You know, I mean, just the pitch. And the fact that that goes for however many, 5,000, 8,000 words is just sort of a wonder.

Do you remember what part of the New Yorker you read first when you started reading the magazine? Like when I got to new, well, I mean, like when we lived in D.C. In the very early 2000s, the New Yorker was a presence in our lives. I think, you know, the real routine didn't hit until I got to New York, um, shortly thereafter. If there was a, if there was a feature story that by subject matter or by, you know, hype had that I desperately, you know, that was that I really wanted to read, I would go there first. But usually I would start with talk of the town, breeze through the, the, the, wait, what's, what are the, what are the, what of the, what are the, about town?

and then, you know, just kind of start trucking through. Sometimes I go straight to the book. I kind of considered the reviews and the features sort of one and the same in terms of like, you know, ranking their priority to my reading. You didn't fast forward to the Anthony Lane movie review, which was no, I wasn't. A way to read the New Yorker in those days. No, no. I mean, I know that you did. I know your reference for Anthony Lane.

And I would certainly, I mean, he turned some of the best. best phrases in, you know, movie writing history. Ice skating all over the page in those days. But I generally like to read a review after I've seen a movie. If I'm confident that I'm going to see it and if I'm not, why am I reading the review unless it's just someone's told me that it's just a work of art? Those days in New Yorker had two movie critics. There were Anthony Lane weeks and they were David Denby weeks.

Yeah. And I felt when I was a young journalist, I was. was an Anthony Lane person because he wrote these just unbelievable leads and the prose was so funny and so precise and so amazing. And then I aged into being a David Denby person. Yeah. Like I could chart my not only the candles on the birthday cake, but becoming an older journalist by becoming a David Denby person. I suspect I'm not the only person for whom that is true. I'm sure it is. Let's talk a little bit about the New Yorker's founding. The New Yorker has only had five top editors in its 100 year history.

They are Harold Ross, William Sean, Robert Godley, Tina Brown, and David Remnick. Yes. What the Pittsburgh Steelers are to head coaches, the New Yorker magazine is to top editors. Yes. Harold Ross founded the magazine in 1925. He was editor for 26 years until his death. Remnick says in the dock that the New Yorker is a miracle. Harold Ross is the first miracle of the New Yorker.

And again, Yagoda's book about town. It's very good on this. Born in Colorado, Ross bounced around as a newspaper man. Yeah. On stars and stripes during World War I. Comes back to New York and becomes a member in good standing of the Algonquin round tape. Mm-hmm. And decides, with his then-wife, Jane Grant, maybe I should found a magazine.

And maybe some of my friends from the Algonquin should write for it. Yeah. that's the original conception of the New York. And do you know the famous Harold Ross line about the New Yorker's founding? I do, but you can say it. The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. No offense to Dubuque. It's sort of brilliant, especially when, I mean, if you take it at face value,

that that's sort of the ethos of a lot of the other magazines out there. it's brilliant for him to identify that like clearly this wasn't the business model but like if we just get New York, if we just get literary New York, we're already doing better than a lot of the other magazines that are national, you know,

that there's so many people in this city. There's so many smart, you know, literary people in this city or literate people in the city, then that's our audience. We just got to get a lot of them. And you go to notes this too, that's, you know, as much of a declaration of sensibility as anything else.

For sure. Because he was reading, he meaning Ross, was reading humor magazines at the time or general interest magazines that had humor pieces. And he felt they were way too broad. Yeah. That they weren't funny because they were trying to please the masses. Which is always the critical error. But yeah.

Yeah. So it's like, what if we have jokes, have humor pieces that would impress those people at the Algonquin Roundtable? Mm-hmm. Find enough readers that are on that. same wavelength. Yeah. And yeah. And even if the readers are, you know, not Algonquinworthy themselves, there's an aspirational aspect to it, which is sort of the bread and butter of the New Yorker for so many years. Absolutely. The cartoons are the, I mean, I know we'll get into this more.

But I was never even a big cartoon guy as a guy who made a lot, who's made a lot of cartoons in my life. I didn't focus in on those, although I read probably most of them in passing as I was reading the issues. But it's like that episode of Seinfeld about the cartoons, about the joke they didn't get. It's like the cartoons is less about the, I mean, they almost function more as just a metaphor for the magazine. There's this sort of aspirational quality to like, I want to be the sort of person who gets this sort of joke.

Yes. Yes. And if, you know, Ross has come up with this sensibility that still lives in the magazine to some extent, the cartoons are continuing it and amplify. line. This is how we roll. This is our sense of humor. It's funny because the Dubuque line is so famous, but Ross actually wrote a prospectus that contained that line that has a couple of paragraphs, I think, that actually explain the New Yorker now quite well. I read these to you. The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor

will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, and that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk. Ross continues, as compared to the newspapers, the New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic. It will print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal, nor sensation for the sake of sensation. Its integrity will be above suspicion. It hopes to be so entertaining and informative as to be a necessity for the person who knows his way about or wants to.

It's crazy how, again, as a prospectus, how just ridiculously aspirational that all is, and then how that all sort of came to be, right? Yeah. A hundred years later. If you got that pitch from a wannabe media mogul now, you would just laugh, you know? Nice try. What are you going to do? Yeah. Start a podcast network. Oh, man. That's really great.

Ross had a lot of things going for him. He had really strong people working for him, including Catherine Angel. Mother of Roger, later, Catherine White, wife of E.B. Oh, God. He handled fiction. He had E.B. White, who was an ad man who started writing notes and comment. Like every great editor, he had a great spidey sense for finding talent. James Thurber, the cartoonist Charles Adams, would you go on and on, the people that came into the magazine during the Ross years,

and then that sensibility that we talked about. So even though he was embedding in those early years, elements of the New Yorker that exist now, the profile, the cartoons, the fiction, it was that sensibility and his ability to find people that shared it that made the New Yorker the New York. Yeah. Yeah, it's easy to think. It's easy to look around the Algonquin roundtable

and say, hey, guys, why don't we do a thing? But actually, like, the process of editing a magazine, of building a roster, of creating that sort of sensibility is much more complicated. And the fact that he was able to pull it off is really impressive. Yeah, and the sensibility of Ross extended to humor. It extended to facts. Like, he was obsessed with facts.

You go to rights. Again, what does the New Yorker, now other than being obsessed with facts. It's nothing, right? That's absolutely true. The satire part is interesting, too. I would love to go back and read, you know, the first decade of the New Yorker and see which things are like tagged as satire.

Because there's an element to which, I mean, there's a, there's a way in which you could easily look at talking to the town pieces often as satirical, you know, but I, but it would be, but it's a, it's a pretty broad descriptor. let's do some lists because if the new yorker is known for anything david it's power rankings if you were stuck on a desert island with one new yorker writer's collected works oh god um that's really really tough i have favorite new yorker writers that i don't know if they would i have favorite new yorker writers that are that are probably not the answer to Let's hear some of them.

I mean, I like Burke Bildjord a whole lot. But he has two sort of slim books on the American South that are just sort of, you know, biblical to me. I mean, obviously Remnick would have to be way, way, way up there. I think so. Dang. Susan Orlean and her. There's just so many. If we go back, Lee.

I mean, what do you say? Oh, Leap. I mean, I have. the collect works of Liebling, I'm like, you know, not to within arm's reach of me at all times, like, for sure. Also, the Thurber Carnival, which is one of the most inexplicable books that you always find to use bookstores. But anyway, um, uh, God, I don't know. What's the right answer, Brian? I thought long and heart about this. And it's an impossible question, but here's my tentative answer to an impossible question. I want somebody who's taking me places. Yeah. It's not somebody writing behind their desk.

I want somebody who's funny, but I also want somebody who's serious. And I want pros that fee on this desert island, David, during this thought experiment, that feels very rereadable. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, very adorned prose gets a little old, you know, as we get into year 15 in the middle of the Pacific. So I think the answer to the question is Calvin Trillet for me. Oh, that's a great one.

Yeah. Yeah, because you'd have murder stories, you'd have his profile of Ed and Buchanan, you'd have all kinds of things. You'd have funny pieces. You'd have pieces about food. I think, I think he's the right answer. Yeah. Yeah, that's really good. That's really good.

I mean, I would go, I didn't say John McPhee. I mean, John McPhee is absolutely one of my favorite ones. And I have, I think I own his collected works. and so much of that, almost all of that was published in New Yorker. But it's a little bit, you want some more of a sort of variety on the desert island. And so that's,

Trelland is a really, really good one. I was going to say McPhee's a fantastic answer to the question. I don't know how many belly laughs. McFee's like picking the Rolling Stones as your, as your Desert Island, you know, musical. I was going to say album.

but like musical act. It's just like the best thing about the Rolling Stones is like you can just listen to that forever and find something beautiful all the time. But it's like at some point do you want a band that like just cranks a pop song once an album or something just so you can like, you know, just change the mood up. You want someone that, you know, it's, it's there's a there's a, there's a absolutely delicious monotony to what McPhee does. The New Yorker writer, journalists of our generation most wanted to be.

the people in our generation who they wanted to be from a New Yorker um they probably i mean there's two schools of thought right there's the sort of like there's the the legendary living legend style writers and there's the kind of younger class of real the people you really aspire to be i mean that would be when we were coming up yeah it's the last 25 years i mean like gladwell Malcolm gladwell was the mythical beast that was sort of 100% on the list Was that have been like David Granary? Also on the list.

Gosh, who else? I think Lawrence Wright's on the list. Oh, God, yeah, absolutely. Although Lawrence Wright always seemed like, like, potentially 70 years old at all times to me when I would read him. You know, like he was. No, no, no, not in the best style. He just was at he just had such sort of like platform and self-assurance that it just

and absolutely. Command, yeah. And the, and the subject matter. too. It just seemed like, well, this is a, this is someone with a giant career behind them, more so than ahead of them. Turned out it was both behind and ahead of him. No, it turned out, I mean, he was a baby compared to what I imagined him to be, you know? Who else is on the list? I know I'm missing.

For certain journals of our generation, I think William Fenigan was probably on the list. Yeah, I love, love that stuff. I never got into the surfing stuff, but his book, Cold New World is wonderful, and he could go in 100 different directions as well. honorable mentions Remnick himself, Anthony Lane, Emily Nussbaum on television. Oh, yeah, uh-huh. Inspired a whole generation of critics. Absolutely she did.

I mean, she was just sort of, I would say one of one, but the copycat started so quickly almost that it was like she was never quite alone. But yeah, absolutely, Emily Nussbaum. Gia Tolentino's probably on the list, but I'll think of that as next generation. That's not the generation. She 100% is on that list for the generation that follows.

The New Yorker writer you have not gotten into, but someday hope to get into. I think if I could just, if I could just understand what the Thurber Carnival was all about. James Thurber is on my on my Sunday list. Absolutely. I could put the whole fiction section really onto that for me. Someday I will read John Cheever. I will read those John Cheever books. I bought it used bookstores. Yeah.

Yeah, they should just give you that hardcover copy. of the collective stories of John Cheever as you like cross the border into New York City, you know? It's just like here's your here's your gift bag. God, I don't who is God, who is the best New Yorker writer that I don't feel like I've read enough of? I mean, I know this is probably heresy, but I don't feel like I'm as well versed in Adam Gopnik as I should be. I felt like I read him sort of on demand, like when one of his pieces was being particularly talked about

or something like that. He's another one who would be on the list of collected works on the Desert Island. He does exactly what I said. Takes you places and you laugh. Dude, I don't know. I don't know outside of that. That might be my answer.

All right. I need you to put on your ringer art godhead here. Okay. What is your favorite New Yorker cover? Okay. Well, there is a lot. obviously. I mean, I could like tear through. Damn. I could say a bunch of them that would not probably raise anybody's eyebrows. I mean, I'm a comic book guy and there's been a lot of good comic book covers. Oh, by the way, Daniel Klaus or how close, however you say his name, when he would, when he first popped up in New Yorker would have been early 2002 or first half in 2000. That was definitely, I definitely got my hands on that issue. But I was going to, but I was going to. to say I'm an arts bugleman guy.

Well, there is a there is a sort of modern famous one or relatively modern of the Hasidic man kissing the dark-skinned woman that I thought that is just sort of like compositionally perfect and powerful. Great, a brown era cover. Yeah. And there was one that was more that I don't love. It's just like a piece of art, but there's, uh, that he did one of, um, a policeman.

like a Coney Island shooting range, which would have been right around 2002. That was just really sort of impeccable. I mean, my aesthetic is not sometimes just like the straight up cartoony style that the New Yorker

sometimes has. But when it works, it just really, really, really works. I'm trying to think if there's anything outside of the Spiegelman, the Spiegelman, I've read that I really, I mean, there's some absolutely beautiful ones. There's a one, let me check my, oh, there's a theater hopped one of the overhead view of

lower Manhattan with all the lights. It's like black with just like yellow lights shining. What else? Oh, one more. Adrian Tomey, the misconnections one, whereas the girl sitting on the subway, we were reading the book, looking out the window to see a young man reading the same book and they sort of exchange looks. That sort of encapsulates the, you know, New York and your 20s experience more than anything else. And in so many ways, it's not, the experience wasn't like

we're holding the same book for so many of us. It was, we're both holding the New Yorker. You know, it's like trying to find not just your partner, but trying to find your place in New York through the New Yorker magazine. It's funny in the doc, Francoise Mouli, who's been art director since 1993 says New Yorker covers should be able to be framed and put on the wall. Which is a different approach than pause for emphasis, every other magazine in America. Yes. Like a couple of weeks ago when they had their big profile of Zeran Mamdani, Eric Latchez profile, the cover of the magazine was a dog jumping into a pile of leaves.

It's fun to imagine what New Yorker covers would be like if they were made like the covers of other magazines? Oh, yeah. Would you have tease some of those famous New Yorker pieces, some of those McPhee pieces you talk about on the cover? What would have been the cover line?

Oh, my gosh. It would be, it's funny because the illustrated covers in so many ways, it's just like a statement. It's like, it's just like the cartoons. It's like the poems. It's like, it's like,

we do this because we've always done this, you know? And it's, it's, in some ways, like a statement. secret handshake. It's like, oh, you know, if you know the New Yorker is, then you will appreciate that this is what they do. But it does, but it has managed the same time to sort of like insist upon this level of sort of editorial integrity, right? That like, you can look inside at like the lovely photos they now take and imagine what that that, that, one of those photos of

Mamdami or whoever, Mom Donnie or whoever you want to point out would have been, could have been on the cover. What would be the, the artful? you know, tasteful version of, of a magazine cover. Oh, just a black and white photo with really sort of not minimal or maybe no text at all, you know, I mean, just something like that. But it would probably, it might lead, lead more people to grab it off the newsstand. But what's made the New Yorker so, you know, such an institution over the years is, no, you grab the New Yorker because the New Yorker is there, right?

Not not because, oh, I want to read about our new mayor. spy wants to the prank printed the new yorker's masthead the new yorker did not have a masthead if they had really wanted to go another step they would have done new yorker cover lines bill bradley opens up to john mcby all right that's your favorite how big is the new yorker masthead i think pretty massive looking at this documentary i mean there's so dude there's so many people there

how many people they said there was like and like you said the people they omitted back checking department. Yeah. I mean, like you said, the people that they omitted just lead just makes you think, well,

this is not a, this is not a staff you could wrap your arms around. You know, it's just, it's so huge. You use the phrase human capital. It's totally true.

Anybody that works in journalism knows that if you can afford the human capital, just to send one of your writers out wandering around Washington Square Park in search of a story that will take up

approximately like half of a column of space in the magazine. then you have a lot of human capital to spare. Right? Here's another New Yorker question. What is the most overrated New Yorker cover? You're not going to do this to me.

I am. Only because it's so highly rated, it's New Yorkistan. I'm just not a fan of the New Yorkistan cover. I don't think it's unsmarted or whatever, although I think some of the names just sort of trail off at some point. it's more of just the idea that I mean the conceit is what gets people going but that's not really my that's not really my aesthetic and I know that I know the story behind that I know how many prints of that one you you repeat you said the line about how you know the cover should be able to be hung on the wall that hangs on that that's probably their number one bestseller in terms of thing you know covers it hang on people's walls came out December 2001 so after 9-11 yeah when all of a sudden America is trying to learn about the stands. Yes.

Designed by Myra Coleman and Rick Meyerowitz, just so we can get credit here to the most overrated New Yorker cover. No, common is absolute force of nature. But it is just not my aesthetic. I always like to think like if that was going to hang on my wall, what size would that hang on my wall? That would be like, or would you prefer to have the magazine, the framed magazine on your wall or a poster of just the art without the header, you know, without the other definition, masthead on your on your wall that's definitely like i put the i put the magazine on the wall i would not put a poster of it all right last question for the art god who is your favorite new yorker cartoonist i know this is sort of sacrilege but even as an art god i don't split them out that

much um even as an art god uh i mean i like i've looked at i mean i like the collections of some of the old ones the george booths the um i mean ross i mean ross Um, Ross Chast is, is, like an actual living legend. She's in the documentary. We see her at home with all her birds.

I know. It's absolutely amazing. The, the self-assurance with which she left-handedly illustrates straightly, with pin directly on paper, um, is really incredible.

I mean, she might be the best of all time. She, I mean, her, her, I mean, the funny thing is,

there was a point in the documentary where she, where she, where she, um, goes through she like pulls out a scrap of paper that just has some like she says half baked ideas they're like raw ideas there's nothing but it's just

the idea of something that might at some point like emerges an idea but you can just for people who haven't seen the doc yet is uncanny valley thruple yeah I thought that was two separate things but go on I'm combining things here I do want to see that regardless literally as I was going to say in Rosstras hand

but like literally in Rosstrasn, you can almost get, you almost laugh. You know, it's just like you can start to see you can just imagine the, and this is so many mixed metaphors, you can imagine the broad outlines of like what that would be and you're like, oh no, that's a good idea because she's so great.

Barry Blit is another legendary one. I don't know, there's, there's so many. All right, here's another question. If you had to pick one movie or TV show to come out of the New Yorker, this is an incredibly long list and I'm going to give you some nominees here. Yeah, give me some nominees.

Adaptation with Merrill Street playing Susan Orlean. So good. Tar with Adam Gopnik playing himself interviewing Kate Blanchett on stage. Capote. A story that was also rendered in the movie infamous and, of course, also in the movie In Cold Blood. Have you ever seen Mrs. Parker in the vicious circle from 1994? No, I've never seen it. This is a fascinating movie.

It's not great. But it is very pleasant to watch. I think it'd make a great TV show if they redid it now. Jennifer Jason Lee is Dorothy Parker. Campbell Scott is Robert Benchley. Love Campbell Scott. Robards is Harold Ross. Yeah.

That's another good one. Charles Adams's cartoons have given us the original Ams Family TV. Oh, we get to count the Adams family. Okay, I was going to ask. Come in of The New Yorker. The Barry Sonnenfeld movies. And now Wednesday on Netflix. Annie Pruse broke back Mountain Ran in the New Yorker.

1997. Okay. Excerpts of the unbearable likeness of being ran in the New Yorker. It's not a good movie. Wes Anderson's the French dispatch.

Mm-hmm. Is a Valentine to the New Yorker. I'm sure they would have loved to have gotten Wes Anderson as a talking head if he were not constitutionally opposed to being a talking head. Yeah. Coyote versus Acme,

which apparently we're going to finally be able to see. That was an Ian Frazier humor piece from 1990. Mm-hmm. Meet Me and St. Louis was based on Stories in the New Yorker by Sally Benson. Wow. Here's another one. Sarah Polly's first movie away from her.

Yeah. That's based on an Alice Monroe story that ran the New Yorker that Polly happened to see in the magazine. Bright Lights Big City. Based on the Jay McInerney novel. McInerney was a New Yorker fact checker. And I haven't seen Joe Gould's Secret with Stanley Tucci as Joseph Mitchell. I love Joe Gould's Secret. I mean, that feels almost like a guilty pleasure for some reason.

I mean, I think adaptation is the right answer here, especially, I mean, it has a lot of power separate from just the Susan Orlean piece. There's a lot, it's a much, it's a much more layered, obviously, movie than that. But I think that's that's sort of what makes the literary aspect of it, the New Yorker aspect of it kind of, it's just so perfect. It wouldn't have worked for any other magazine the same way. And best portrayal of a New Yorker writer in a movie, I'm going to go with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote versus Adam Gobnick. as himself. It's a close race. Let's talk about the two modern editors of New Yorker.

One of them, of course, is Tina Brown, who Remnick says in the documentary comes in like a comic. Comes in after a comparatively dreary period of New Yorker history. Yeah. And again, we're grading on a curve. Robert Gottlieb was the editor before her, and then there were the final years of William Sean when he's trying to pick a successor and can't pick a successor in the magazine kind of drifts away a little bit.

in comes Tina who'd been editing Vanity Fair and she brings in photography. Yeah. She brings in edgy illustrations like the great one that ran in her very first issue in 1992 where you've got this punk sitting in the back of a handsome cab as it goes through Central Park, right? The punk being Tina, metaphorically speaking.

Again, not my style, but beautiful cover. I mean, it's absolutely perfect. Her magazine feels immediate rather than stately. And if you read Michael Grinbaum, It's a great book about Condi Nast. Tina had a thing called The Hot List. Yeah. And apparently or reportedly,

Tina and company were spending $1 million a year to hand-deliver the New Yorker on Sunday to a select group of opinion makers. Magazine comes out Monday, but if you were on the hot list, you got it on Sunday. Wow. And the hot list included Bill Clinton.

Al Gore, Grandbaum writes, every living U.S. president. There were piles of New Yorkers on Sunday put in the House of Representatives and Senate cloakrooms. It's a brilliant idea. And of course, all the bookers of television shows. Yeah. Because Tina wanted to get writers on television. She changes the chemistry of the place in so many interesting ways. I was reading last night that speaking of Charles Adams, when the Adams family television show came out,

William Sean, who was editor at the time, prohibited any Adams family cartoons from running in the magazine. Huh. Because it'd be very uncouth to have this, you know, silly television show and then us running cartoons. Oh, right. Like we were, you know, in some kind of business deal with ABC. Right. Deina would have been all about that. Oh, yeah.

I mean, I never recover. We're leaning in, baby. That's funny. you know, people would say, well, you know, this is distasteful about some of the things she's on it. She had a great quote. I've always believed in lapses of taste. That's great. The other day I had Susan Orlean on the show, and I asked her, what were Tina's methods for motivating writers?

Terror. I love Tina, and she was a fantastic editor and a great influence on me. And I'm very grateful to have having worked with her. she kept people off balance. It was very much, you know, rather than the coach who tells you're great, she was sort of the coach that left you wondering, am I great or am I horrible? Am I going to be fired or am I the best?

And I think that she never wanted anyone to be too comfortable, too complacent, feeling like, oh, you know, this is easy. I can do this in my sleep. There was always this sense of I need to keep proving myself. And it drives you to achieve at a pretty high level. It's not easy to live with. And some people couldn't tolerate it. And there were times when I felt like I just can't handle this much pressure. But I also did some of the best work that I'd ever done. And I think that it was that motivation of feeling like I want to show Tina that I'm really good. Because the alternative is maybe I'll get fired.

Terror, David. It's the greatest motivator. Yeah, that's really incredible. It's a little bit different than how Tina's portrayed in the documentary, which is just like the mother hen of a happy crew of young mothers. It wasn't how she was portrayed at the time. And it's funny because I worked for her years later at The Daily Beast. I always found that the media caricature of Tina was basically true.

She did have a really short attention span, both for ideas and sometimes for people. but the caricature was also incomplete. She did have a great appreciation for writing. And she had a bigger or more broad idea of what made a great story than she ever got credit for. And it's interesting. She's, you know, she's the kind of person that would make Susan Orlean Philterra and then also publish a Susan Orlean piece about going on the road with a gospel group. in the south. That feels like a piece that could have run in the New Yorker in any era.

Yeah. But it worked in Tina's era as well. She had a lot of defections, Garrison Keeler, Jamaica Kincaid, George W.S. Trow. There's a great story there where Trow, who is the author of Within the Context of No Context, resigned. And Tina's note back was, I am distraught at your defection,

but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught. You and I've spent so much time talking about the Washington Post going through this transition. Yeah. With the new people running the place. And, you know, it's funny. Like, those people left the New Yorker during the teenage years. She also says in the documentary that she fired 70 or 80 people during her very relatively short time there.

Well, I think she doesn't get credit for it. She got a lot of great work out of people that were already associated with the magazine. Orlean, Adam Gopnik, Mark Singer, John Seabrook, Roger Angel, of course, doesn't go anywhere. Yeah. She names Rick Hertzberg executive editor. He was first hired by the New Yorker in 1969. Oh, wow. And then Remnick comes in as a staff writer, Lawrence Wright, Malcolm Gladwell.

We mentioned Anthony Lane, Hilton Hales. So much talent comes in. So she is editor from 1992 to 1998. And then in 98, David Remnick comes out of it. Tina Brown suddenly announces she's leaving to start Talk Magazine with Harvey Weinstein. Let it. Let's be honest. How many issues have talked did you own?

Did you buy off the newsstand? Just the one? I bought the first one. And when I found it in my office a couple of years ago, I had filled in the subscription card with my college apartment address and never mailed it. It was still inside the magazine. But it created so much noise, I had to go buy the magazine. I was like, I want to see what's in this thing.

Remnant Becomes Editor in 1998. That's the same year his book about Muhammad Ali, King of the World came out. he's been in the seat 27 years making him the second longest tenured New Yorker out of behind only William Sean who was in the chair for 35 years his magazine's interesting because the quality and currency of Tina's New Yorkers there

with fewer house fires yes you think back at the the subjects they've covered extraordinarily well 9-11 the post 9-11 world including the Second Iraq War. Thinking of George Packer and Cy Hirsch and others there,

the Trump administration. He's also maintained this unbelievably deep bench of talent. I don't know where Ian Parker fits in in the New Yorker staff writer power rankings. But every time Ian Parker comes out with the story, I'm like, damn, that was good. Yes. Yes, absolutely true. Yeah, I mean, you just, you read, you know,

you look at it and still this unbelievable bench. We know how Tina changed the New Yorker. I asked Susan Orlean. How did Remnick change the magazine? David, I feel kept sort of all the best lessons from the past. I think from Tina, he embraced the idea that the magazine shouldn't be this kind of marginalized, coisseted sort of quiet little publication, but rather that it needed to be in the moment and, you know, in the here and now, that there was still plenty of room for those stories

that were not hinged on the daily news. But Tina moved the magazine into conversation with the present moment. And David absolutely kept that while also really honoring and supporting the idea of the past that this was first and foremost a magazine that featured excellent writing. that it was important to have good reporting, but it needed to be told in the most sort of refined, sophisticated, intelligent way. He, you know, he's contended with a different economy, and he also took what had been,

I don't even know if the website existed before David. I can't remember, but it certainly was a very kind of minimal website. And seeing the future and seeing the idea that the web would grow enormously, he really made it not this kind of stepchild of the magazine, but a very equal, active part of the magazine. I mean, it was tough in the beginning. Nobody wanted to write for the website because everyone thought it was kind of like the minor leagues.

And David really elevated that. And, you know, the reality is in this period of time, websites, obviously, have become as important or more important than physical printed magazines. and newspapers. But he navigated that really seamlessly and made it not just an equal partner with the print magazine,

but kind of expanded its unique properties. That brings us, David, to our final question, and in many ways, our animated question here. Can the New Yorker survive another century? the website was in fact created on Remnick's watch in 2001 if you read Grinbaum's book you know that Condé Nass web strategy was the dog's breakfast

yeah they did as bad a job as possible bracing themselves to the new media environment Remnick comes in and the New Yorker has a website and then it has a website that doesn't just have the magazine but has a kind of parallel publishing art Yeah. The New Yorker Festival, which is so important to the New Yorker survival, is founded in 2000. Now it's been ripped off by outlets from MS now to Crooked Media.

Yeah. You go on the New Yorker's website. They now have a game, the mandatory word game called Shuffle. I'm going to check that out. I have a few theories here for you about the New Yorker in this new media environment. one is that it hasn't been as easy to loot things from the New Yorker as it has been from other outlets. Think of all the looting that's gone on, right? We got on the New York Times webpage and you can see Donald Trump shaking the hand of the new Japanese prime minister.

You can see that on the New York Times homepage. You're like, why would I ever need to watch network news? Yeah. Which was the only place that could show me footage like that. Pretty pictures of celebrities. which powered Vanity Fair and GQ to a great degree for so many years. You can see those online now. Yeah.

Probably harder for the web to replicate the things that you found in the New Yorker. That's, yeah. Well, and maybe the New Yorker's greatest commodity is, you used the word command earlier, but it's just this sort of, you know, decades of, of, of, of admiration, of control over, of identity, I guess I should say, right? And the feeling that like an Anthony Lane review, like everything in the New Yorker, it's not going to tell you what to think, but it's going to kind of help you learn, help you understand how to think about the thing they're talking about.

And it's almost impossible for anything, any institution much bigger than like a blog to have that sort of, that sort of. impact just from cover to cover or from, you know, top of the web page to the bottom. I was trying to think about this question. What feels anachronistic in the New Yorker right now? No, there's nothing inacron. Well, I mean, there's a lot of it. The talk of the town, maybe?

Oh, like the existence of it. I mean, you could say the type the typeface feel an agronistic, you know, on purpose. Illustrations. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say so much of it is deliberate, the cartoons, whatever. The covers, there's so much of it that's, that's, that feels. is anachronistic.

But in terms, outside of just the sort of aesthetic anachronism, the target, talking to town for sure compared to the front of the book of any other comparable magazine. Oh my God.

But a lot of that stuff exists. Some of that stuff exists on the New Yorker website now. You know, they have like consumer goods and shit. Yeah. I mean, like they have other stuff. Remember when the front of the book

of every magazine was suddenly vaporized? Yes. Like, you know, GQ is like, Like, hey, you wake up in bed next to somebody here's how to scramble the perfect eggs. Yeah. This sucks in the print days. And it really sucks now.

But yeah, that's probably the, I mean, that's probably the most. I mean, also just the like the about town section for what is functionally, like not just a local magazine. Right. I mean, it's been it's been overhauled considerably. But again, you know, they outlasted the village voice. So now that's where we. They did indeed. Another idea for you, the slowness with which the New Yorker moved to the web probably help them in a way.

Absolutely true. Because they were able to preserve their New Yorkerness. They didn't have to be as invested in the arguments about what's free and what's not and, you know, like where the paywalls lie. And also just where the, you know, like where the line between online and physical magazine exists. There's that. And I also think the cheap traffic chasing that so many outlets did, including so many newspapers. Oh, yeah. Where you just, you know, it's like, do we need every publication in America to tell us what Stephen Colbert said last night?

Yeah. Is that crucially important? And when papers started chasing traffic like that, it became really difficult to tell what the paper was about or what the news outlet was about. Their identity just got blurred in such a way. And I felt that didn't happen to the New Yorker. Remnick also hired a gang of internet savvy people. We mentioned Tolentino, Isaac Chotner. Oh, yeah.

Jay Kang, our Grantland friend, Kyle Chaka. Richard Brody, weirdly enough for a biographer of Goddard seems to understand how to write for the internet. Absolutely, he does. And you think, like, here's this parallel cast, right? Because Remnick is also hiring at the same time, Ben Tau, Ronan Farrow, Jonathan Blitzer, Benjamin Wallace-Well as Andrew Morantz, people that could have written for the New Yorker in a previous era. But he's also hiring people that just understand the web, that understand that.

And I think that was important too. And my final note really is this. I mean, we talk about all the times we see these publications around us just crumbling into dust. Yeah. That the most important thing you can have now as a publication is a relationship with your readers. Yep.

That goes beyond, here are some words, please read them and pay us for the, the privilege of reading. Yeah. It has to be something almost like friendship. We care about

you, the publication. You are meaningful to us. You are a character in our lives. The people that write for you are not just bylines, but we have an investment of them. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And the New Yorker just lugged that

into the 20th century. Yeah, I mean, the consistency of all these years of being the New Yorker allows new generations of readers, you know, for the future generations of Bryans and Davids to sort of climb on board seamlessly, you know, I mean, it's, it, the relationship

with the reader is almost automatic, you know, if you, it, well, dependent upon your investment in it, you know, it doesn't take reading the New Yorker for a year or even six months to understand the New Yorker. You just, it just sort of is, it, it is what it is. I mean, it's just, it's just a miraculous thing. You know, that was, that was a line, I think it's the very beginning of the documentary where Remnex says the New Yorker is a miracle when trying to describe the New Yorker.

And it's true in so many ways. You know, it's hard to put into words why their online strategy has succeeded, you know, but, but it's equally hard to put into words, why a magazine-length feature on the, you know, dropping of the nuclear bomb succeeded. You know, like it's, the sort of inexplicableness of the whole thing is, is the power of it. And it's,

it continues to be powerful now. And will it last another century? I mean, it would be kind of wild to bet against it, you know, because it just, it sort of seems, it's like all of its idiosyncrasies have served to,

like you said about the web, but it's the same as the covers. We've discussed it. It serves to sort of insulate it from to the choppy seas, you know, and certainly, you know, the amount of money that they make. I mean, there was no part in the documentary about like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the number of, with the, with the amount of of of manpower they have, there's certainly a whole bunch of money being, you know, bandied around. They're just sort of insulated from the. uncertainty of the publishing world. And if you're insulated from it, you can continue to do

what the New Yorker set out to do from day one, which is just like publish good writing, you know, to be a necessity, you know, to be something that like people, that that target audience will always want to pick up. And it's pretty great. To be hardheaded about it, I would say insulated for now. Sure, sure.

It's as long as they're insol. I mean, but I think the question is more about their insulation. than about their like editorial conviction. You know what I mean? Sure. I felt the New Yorker will end before it becomes talk magazine or whatever. Well, they would certainly hope so.

But I would just, you know, you think now it's like, you know, the Yorker has David Remick's podcast, they have a culture and a political podcast. You know, is there a future where they have lots of different kinds of podcasts? Would that change the identity of the magazine even if Adam Gopnik were hosting the podcast.

That's an interesting question to me too. Because I was thinking like, what are the holes, you know, of the Remnick era? Like, what would you look at and say, well, they, you know, they didn't do that as well as they did other things? I'm trying to think about this. It was like TV before Emily Nussbaum. They were a little slow to embrace this idea that TV was increasingly where the action is in culture. Yeah. You know, American politics, I think they've done a good job that there's been,

I'm trying desperately not to, out of the words, Ryan Liz, one more time on this podcast. But, you know, there's been, you know, they used a lot of people in that department, I think. Now Susan Glass are, you know, writing every week on the website and the aforementioned shot are doing interviews. That's, you know, probably a lot there now. But, you know, you think of like,

you're in this world where the answer for everyone, not just the ringer, but the New York Times opinion pages has been start a new podcast. you know what's the new yorker version? It's incredibly hard to do at a at a place that's about writing. I mean, obviously the ringer has seen a lot of this happen because But the question is like who, you know, do people want writing, right? And how much do they want it and how belong?

See, but I think didn't Remnick say something? Isn't there a line from Remnick about how the web that, you know, long New Yorker features is not what the web, the internet was built for or whatever? He did. He said that early. when they were at an early version of the website. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not trying to hold him with that, but I think that's exactly wrong. I mean, I think that there's like the distinction as we, you know, as technology advances, the distinction between what's online and what's not sort of

stop, sort of blurs. And I think, you know, I don't hang out in New York as much as I used to, but you're anecdotally that no one's reading anymore. You know, no one's carrying the New Yorker.

around on the subway. Not everybody, like they used to. But, you know, and I don't physically carry the New York around with me that frequently either. But I read a whole lot of it on my, you know, iPad on my phone or whatever. I mean, and then the longer the story, the better, you know, I think that it's, I just think, I think that they're sort of reporting, their sort of writing is weirdly perfect for an internet, at least when you're ready to slow down just a tiny bit. I've got just the guy, David, who can provide some answers to these questions.

His name is also David. He's David Remnant, the editor of the New Yorker. Here he is. Let's start here, David. How did you find the process of having a documentary crew film your edit meetings and phone calls with riders and even your morning sessions on the exercise bike? Yeah, I think at first I thought it was going to resemble something like that test you get every five years after a certain age, if you know what I mean.

I do. But in which the greatest words in the English language are, I'll see you in another five years. It turned out to be okay. It was a little daunting. You know, I've spent my life on one side of the notebook, as it were, right? And you're the one asking rude questions or nodding patiently while vacuuming up the status detail in the room. And, you know, so you know some of those techniques and tricks, although they're a little different for documentary filmmakers than reporters in print. But Marshall Curry is an intelligent filmmaker, and I had seen his documentary about Newark politics called Knife Fight.

Did you ever see that? About Cory Booker. About Cory Booker and his, on the way up, and he was opposing. this guy Sharp James, who was a, you know, like, you know, I grew up in Jersey and every, I think every mayor of Newark that I grew up with went to jail or got in trouble with the law until Cory Booker came along. And it was a really interesting film and very intelligently done. So I thought, you know, okay, it's not going to be everything I love. It's in his hands, but it's an intelligent enhance and somebody who seemed to understand the New Yorker, which was important.

Did you want to show people something about how the New Yorkers put together every week? Well, look, it's a complicated animal that only got more complicated as time went by. When I started as editor in 1998, we put out a weekly print magazine with maybe a dozen pieces in an issue and a lot of gag cartoons and a cover. That was it. That's what we did. It was very complicated and fact-checked and edited unto a fairly well and pieces that ran quite long sometimes. And there's a lot of work. And that was what our reputation was based on, you know, journalistically and morally and all the rest. And then along came the internet, we had to figure out, you know, how do we take a pass on

it entirely like some places did, I think very, very unwisely? Or do we try to take stock of what this offers and see what we can do with it? And I think it was harder for us than newspapers, because the metabolism of a newspaper is already pretty fast, at least on a daily basis. We were a weekly, and a very stately one too. You know, we weren't, you know, it wasn't like news week or time or something like that. So it took a while. It took a while to figure it out.

And the same goes with audio and video. want to make use of this and get the best of it, but we also want to make it our own, if you know what I mean, make it work for The New Yorker. First version of your website was in 2001. There must have been resistance inside the magazine to going online. There was. It wasn't so much resistance to going online, but like there was resistance to how much to invest in it. There were writers that thought, this is not what I came to the New Yorker for.

there was the notion that this is what other people did, not us. It's, by the way, totally understandable. Totally understandable. You know, I came from the Washington Post to the New Yorker to do something different. And so I understood that. Remember, I was a writer at the New Yorker for six years under Tina Brown, and then instantly became the editor, which was another bizarre story. So I understood where the writers were coming from.

It's interesting, too, because now, you turn on the New Yorker website and you find a column from Washington from Susan Glasser. You'd find an Isaac Chotner interview. All told, what kind of news outlet do you want the New Yorker to be now? Well, I work under the presumption, Brian, that our readers and our listeners and all the rest are reading the news, their daily news, their hourly news elsewhere. You know, whether the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or some other outlet. And obviously, you know, social media fills our eyeballs and brains for better and often for worse, too. So I don't ever think that the New Yorker reader is only reading the New Yorker, only looking at the New Yorker.

That goes without saying. And I still think that the core of what we are, the core of our reputation, the core of our efforts, tends to be on these longer, deeply reported pieces. But it is true that our metabolism has changed in certain parts. Susan Glasser does write a terrific Washington column. Isaac does, you know, do these informative, sometimes aggressive, but always very informed interviews and lots of other people, Kyle Chaker.

We have a lot of daily offerings as well as the, you know, the longer pieces that come out both in print and online. Do you read every word in the print magazine every week? More than once. Do you read every word that's published online? I do, but sometimes I get, because of the metabolism of everything, sometimes I get to that, you know, a little later in the process. I, look, I, it back in the day, there was this image of the kind of all-knowing, you know,

or occasionally queenly, regal editor, like as if a magazine or a publication had a single intelligence from which everything branched. And I just think that's baloney. I have really intelligent colleagues who know things that I don't know.

We're not nearly as well. You know, Daniel Zelowski or Henry Finder or, you know, all kinds of people. Mike Luo, who has a newspaper background for coming from the New York Times, very, very different people. So it's much more collaborative than I understood the New Yorker to be back in the days of William Sean, where things really did to a large extent funnel through him in a very singular way. Decisions flowed downhill. Yes, and they still do.

I mean, I'm still in the position of yes and no, at the very least. And so there's that too. It's just a lot more of territory to cover. We're in a very different technological year than 2001 and even when 2015 and even than 2020. What does the New Yorker need to do better do you think to compete in the media world of 2025? Well, the whole thinking, I believe, for the New Yorker is to both absolutely recognize the need for change all the time, particularly as it's suggested by. technology, but never ever to lose sight of who we are, what we are, and what we're about. And I mean that in literary and journalistic terms, and I mean that in moral terms.

And I know that sounds kind of high-minded, but I don't care. I think you have to have some principles in terms of what you want to be about. And so the values of accuracy may slow us down. I have no doubt of that. We don't move as fast as in the speed of social media. And for good reason, we want there to be this home for fact-checking, reconsideration, fairness, argument, all these values that seem terribly quaint in the era of not just Donald Trump, but yelling in screaming and and and so much else.

So the challenge then is to maintain those values, but at an increasing speed, even if you're a step slower than some, because the world's just moving on a time. Sometimes I don't want to be a daily op-ed page. You know, there are other places for that. I do, I want people to be thrilled by things they didn't expect to get.

Do you know, Brian? In other words, the job of a lot of publications is to give you what you expect, right? I would be very disappointed if I were a business person and I got Bloomberg and I didn't get the stock prices or the analyses or all the things that I have to rely on Bloomberg or the business pages of the journal to get. The New Yorker is, for the most part, a publication on a daily basis and a weekly basis. and more of the unexpected. Now, over time, I would be disappointing myself, much less the readers, if I didn't have excellent coverage of, say, politics.

But on the other hand, when you get the New Yorker online in print or however, it's not the front page in the sense of the newspaper. I was at a newspaper. I know what newspapers are all about. And by extension, the websites of newspapers. I get that. You know, I don't want to turn the New Yorker into something that it isn't.

And the very sustaining thing for me, and I think for my colleagues, too, is that when we are at our best, our readers are happiest. In other words, they don't want us to dumb it down. They don't want us to kneel. They don't want us to cheapen ourselves and yet to have Caslon type and urban headlines. they want us at our very best. And that was true when, you know, Hersey and Carson and Janet Malcolm were publishing.

And it's true today when Patrick Keefe and David Grant or Rachel LeVeeve were publishing or Vincent Campa or whoever you like. How long will it make sense for the New Yorker to publish a physical magazine? As long as the world tells us that it wants it. you know, if 100% of our readers tell us we only want it online, well, that's something that we'll have to consider down the line,

but it's not the case now. I think if you're, you know, I don't want to judge everything by the number one train as it hurdles downtown with my commute. But I never see anybody schlepping a newspaper anymore. Ever, ever, ever, ever. Not even a tablet.

I don't know the last time I saw somebody, you know, skilled in the art of folding and refolding a broadsheet newspaper. That's a lost art kind of like, I don't know, throwing darts or something. But I do see people reading the New Yorker in print on the subway sometimes. And I also, I'm delighted to see them reading it online.

So time will tell. What's the biggest way Donald Trump's election in 2016 changed the magazine? Do we have four and a half hours? Well, look, I think that we are kidding ourselves if we don't understand that these are unusual days, and I'm downplaying it. These are days in which the President of the United States is aggressively and seriously, not just in opposition to the press, but aggressively so. It's not just calling a reporter piggy, which is disgusting. It's also sitting next to the leader of Saudi Arabia and excusing the murder of a journalist. This is unconscionable.

And this kind of thing happens all the time. It happens so often, Brian, that it's not big news. It doesn't register. Imagine Barack Obama or George Bush. or, you know, for whatever you might think of them in their various ways, imagine them doing that. So there are many aspects of the Trump presidency that we have to take real stock of, both in our behavior and also in our writing. But it is an era of hostility to the press that I, and I, you know, I lived through Nixon.

I was very young, but I lived through Nixon. It's nothing by comparison. It's like Watergate every day. After 2016, a lot of publications benefited from this flood of subscriptions. And even if those were not resistance publications, a lot of the people subscribing were doing so as an act of resistance. Do you think of the New York? That's our story. I don't think that's our story.

What happened as much earlier at a time when my friend Nick Thompson was at the New Yorker who's now at the Atlantic, we it was very obvious to us that the future economically if the New Yorker could not rest on display advertising it's just you know the display advertising reached his peak at the new yorker i think in 1967 1968 right the post-war boom that went on for 20 years you know had the ramifications of travel agencies and liquor and department stores and all those places that needed, you know, an audience to reach. And the world began changing. The media began changing.

So by the time I came along in 1998, you know, first of all, we were losing money. But the advertising picture was, you know, there were some bumps because of the tech boomlets, various, you know, inflations and deflations. But it was very obvious that we had this great loyal readership that was subscribing for a pittance. And at a certain point, and it's already a long time ago, we basically had to go to the subscriber implicitly and say, look, we, to support this thing where we send John Lee Anderson to the ends of the earth and Ben Tao to eastern Greenland and where he lives with the dogs for two weeks and pay people's decent salaries and make this go as a business, not to become Apple, not to become, you know, soaring, but to be a healthy enterprise. that it would depend more on subscriptions, vastly more on descriptions. So when I started, we were 20% of our revenue was subscriptions. Now it's 80%.

And we're very healthy. And we're doing quite well this year was, you know, terrific. And it's all because of the quality of the work that the people at the New Yorker do. And because of this wonderful happenstance that our readers want us at our very best. subscription basis growing. And we charge a healthy price for that. And that helps us go. Early in your 10-year-as editor, you found yourself covering the 9-11 attacks,

the second of rock war, Abu Ghraib, which Cy Hirsch reported on in the magazine. Did that change your idea of what the New Yorker could do that period? I think, you know, not really in the sense that the New Yorker, in previous eras, certainly with the beginning of the Second World War, took on very, very dramatic things in the world in our way. I think John Hersey's Hiroshima piece in 1945 was the capstone of the Second World War coverage that really changed the New Yorker and made it more serious and more deeply reported publication of its time. Sy Hirsch had written for years before Abu Ghraib.

And I'll tell you this, the key thing to know is that, you know, editorial freedom as such at the New Yorker and the support as such that I never asked anybody's counsel on publishing that, not, not sign your house, not any executive. And that's been the case with everything, whether it's Me Too pieces by Ronan Farrow or anything that has that kind of valence. And that is extremely encouraging. You know, the ownership and the executives who are behind this for whatever dramas we might have from day to day

are extremely supportive. And that has maintained in this very rocky Trump era. And that's not ubiquitous. I mean, you only have to look at what's happening at some of the networks. and some of the some publications have gone a different way. I remember hearing you tell a story from that period where Hirsch would have a scoop and he'd call you up and say Remnick, it's worse than you think. Always. Every phone call began with it's worse than you think and I'm cleaning up his language.

The New York Times, David, in a lot of ways, has pulled back from being a newspaper that covers New York City. How much do you want the New Yorker to be about the city? That's a great question, Brian. I, you know, you're absolutely right. When the New Yorker began in 1925, it was, it wasn't even a New York magazine. It was a Manhattan magazine. It was a jazz age, sophisticated, midtown, fizzy. You know, you could, you know, you could see the flappers dancing in the background.

And as time went by, it broadened out. So we have readers. Now, I think we have more readers in California than we do in the state of New York, probably because of, you know, there's a few more big cities in California. We have the one big, big city in New York. So we, our staff is here. Our, you know, our Angelovision is here. And the great joke, of course, is the Saul Steinberg cover that, you know,

shows this kind of very near-sighted view of the world with Manhattan being the center of the universe. But we send people all over the world and all over the country. But it is true that we, there is, there's a New Yorkness to the magazine and to the publication, and that's where we live. So we can't help to be invariably quick to a story like, well, for example, Zoran Mandani. You know, Eric Latch covered that magnificently. And we'll go on covering that very closely, probably with more attention than we do Cincinnati, I admit it, or Denver or wherever. forever. Let's get to those places too.

There you go. You'll get there. Your footlo's correspondence will find their way there somehow. Cincinnati is pretty good. There you go. Here's a 2025 question. What's it like being a podcaster? You know, I've been doing this for 10 years, and I should be asking you the same

question. I really enjoy it. And one of my deep dark secrets is I grew up as an adolescent insomniac. And I just would listen to weirdo radio all through the nine. you know, talk radio, phone in radio, people with UFO theories, Long John Nebel. I mean, you know, I ain't young, so I, you know, I have the memory of all this stuff. And I was always intrigued by it. And then it, you know, obviously we're now in this podcast era that's full of things that seems so fresh and so new. But when I listen to Joe Rogan, for example, I could be listening to Long John

Nebel at 2 o'clock in the morning on WMCA, you know, 40 years ago. You know, So I'm completely intrigued by its informality and its directness. So in some ways, it's the opposite of writing. Writing is very worked on to achieve its voice sometimes. This is somewhere between writing and just a casual conversation. Obviously, it's not either one of those two. It's somewhere in that interstices in between. I really love it.

And I listen to a lot of, you know, when I get tired of reading late at night, it's time for a podcast. I listen to you guys quite often. That's very nice. Other things. I think of the interview you did with RFK Jr. in 2023. You could have written a piece about him, and that would have taken a particular format. Yeah. But it had a certain quality when you're going back and forth on a podcast.

I guess it went off the rails in the way that most conversation, with him go, and I'll tell you something that I didn't really discuss. So I have three kids, and my third is really severely autistic. And so if that's the case, you learn a lot about autism. You know, you make a, the stakes are high. So if you're like me and my wife, you, you just learn a lot. You learn, in fact, maybe more than you want to know. And so I know inside out, all the business about vaccines, And he is just dangerously spreading this nonsense about vaccines that's been discredited over and over again by, and this, of course, will make it sound diminishing, but the medical establishment across the board. And I told myself, going into that interview, you know what, let's not get into that part immediately, if at all.

I wanted to, first of all, not lose my shit, to be perfectly honest with you. I never do. I'm not conflict-oriented. I don't believe in, for me at least, I don't believe in the, you know, one-upsmanship version of interviewing. But I, you know, I just found, and not surprisingly, he was so self-revealingly, let me be polite, misinformed on so many things,

and yet so confident and sure of himself. And remember, this was before we knew he was going to be a figure of such major policy consequence. He was just seemingly a kind of marginal running for president. But as it turned out, his appeal appealed to Donald Trump And now here he is.

Here we are. Doing terrible damage every day. As an editor, you always wrote a lot of stories. Yeah. Not just editor's letters, but ambitious reported stories. Why write that much? I love doing it. You know, I'm not really good at the beach.

My life is a little circumscribed. My wife and I are a family because of what I just described. So it's not a real possibility for, for, you know, what ordinary people do, which is like go on this thing called vacation. And I really pour myself, 95% of myself at least, into all that goes into editing the New Yorker. But I particularly like getting on an airplane

or just going somewhere, and lately it's been a lot to the Middle East. And learning something new, trying to make sense of it with some, modesty and but some clarity and and making sense of it in prose I the I love here's the thing Brian I love the activity of journalism the actual the doing of it in in all its manifestations I love it and so I don't write nearly as much as I did when I was a writer for Tina Brown at the New Yorker or as a Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post or all the other things I did to the post.

But to cut it off immediately and completely, I wouldn't like that very much. Susan Orlean wrote in her recent memoir that you and her had offices next to each other. And she would always smell your cigar smoke. This is a, this is, and I love Susan. But if I smoked one or two cigars like an idiot, it was a lot. and she imagines it as if it were, you know, Gleeson's saloon. I'm totally undrue. I'm just imagining you filing a piece.

I'm doing a little fact checking here. I'm doing a little fat. I haven't smoked a cigar in 25 years. Last year, David, semaphore reported that Remnick has, quote, increasingly mused to peers about his inevitable departure. Yeah. What's your thinking about how long you want to be editor of New York? I don't do that much musing. I, look, I am perfectly aware that I'm.

i'm not 40 years old um i just celebrated a 67th birthday and i i don't want to do anything that's bad for the new yorker you know i'm i'm very healthy um knock on the available wood and i love doing this job i love my colleagues um in it in in the in the right way you know not not mistaking it for family. I can't stand when people say, that's just a misbegotten thing. But I have immense regard and affection for and devotion to all of my colleagues. I've been very, very lucky that way. But, you know, they'll come a time. And you want to make sure that that the New Yorker has a future. I think William Sean's New Yorker, was glorious, but I think he had a very, very hard time imagining the New Yorker without him

or him without the New Yorker. And that with all the respect in the world to him, and he was probably the greatest editor of the 20th century, I think that was a flaw. And that's certainly not a flaw or a mistake I want to repeat. How did Trump winning reelection last year affect your thinking about retirement? Well, I would put it this way. it certainly made me focus my attention on the, on the task of hand.

You mentioned working at the Washington Post. You know that more than 100 writers and editors and other employees of that paper have left over the last year and change. Post has lost hundreds of thousands of. I think Jack Goldberg has hired almost all of them. Well, at least 98 out of the 100. But we hired, you know, we brought in Ruth Marcus,

my old pal, Mark Fisher, just had a terrific piece by Cash Patel. I would say this. I wish the Washington Post well. I see, you know, the problems there. It's disappointing. I'm sure it's most of all disappointing to a lot of people of the Washington Post who want to do good work

and at the highest level. Because these institutions, as great as they are, they're also not as precious as they are. They're innately, everything is fragile, right? Human life is fragile. Institutions are fragile. if Donald Trump has taught us one thing, it's that. That these things that we sometimes take for granted are fragile.

And we have to do everything we can to support what's best about them. So when they had their crack up and people started campaigning to not subscribe to the post, I didn't agree with that. I didn't agree with that at all. I wish them the best. their problems are, you know, fairly obvious. And the reasons for them are fairly obvious. And they've been well written about.

Claire Malone has written about it quite well for the New Yorker. But I only wish them well. I'm talking about the reporters and the editors. You were a sports writer earlier in your channel there? I kind of missed that, Brian. How did writing sports inform the rest of your career? Well, I have to say it's changed a lot. I was in a sports department at the Washington Post that featured Tony Cornizer, Michael Wilbon, John Feinstein, Christine Brennan, Dave.

Thomas Boswell, and on and on. And George Solomon was the kind of ringmaster of all of us. And, you know, I was making, I don't know, 18 grand running around the country. I missed that and the other thing. I loved it. I wouldn't have done it for more than I did. I did it for a couple of years. really liked it. I do see in sports writing a phenomenon that it's really changed. The possibility of

writing, you know, you look back at Gay Talisa's profiles of, say, Floyd Patterson or Roger Angel's profiles in the New York are about baseball players. I don't think those are possible anymore because athletes have made the calculation, first of all, they make so much more money. They need you like a hole in the head and they feel that it can only go wrong for them. And so what happens is, you know, they give their little quotes in the locker room and so on. Once in a while, they'll have a cup of coffee with a reporter and they call that a profile or but, you know, these guys are way more walled off. And so what you get on, you know, Netflix and, you know, you get, get a lot of these documentaries that are, the athletes are in control of your own image.

And you see these cameramen walking backwards as the great lordly athlete dressed in, dressed to the nines, strides through the bowels of, you know, this arena or that. And it's, it makes the hagiography of 50s newspaper reporting look utterly, utterly contemptuous. And I miss that. I must say I miss that kind of sports writing and access. The same thing in show business. You know, would it be possible for Gay Talese to write about Frank Sinatra

the way he did? When it happens, it's considered a mistake. Right? When Michael Schulman writes about Jeremy Strong and he writes an honest profile, which by the way, reveals Jeremy Strong to be an incredibly devoted actor

and artist. people go bad shit as if it was a great betrayal or a Rick job. In fact, it's not. It's just actual life. Yes, the question is always, how did this happen? How did this ever get into print? I once had my eyes fixed on for myself to write a profile of LeBron James. I was really excited about it.

And a friend of mine who knew him put me together with him for a dinner. an off-the-record dinner with LeBron and Maverick Carter, somebody else from his team. It was incredibly pleasant. I gave LeBron my Ali book called King of the World. And he put it on his Insta stories. I thought, I'm in, man. This is happening. I'll be out in L.A. really soon.

No problem. Within three days, his comms guy was in my office telling him, we can't do this. Why would we do this? why would we do this? You know, if we want to get our message out, we'll do social media. And if we want to tell our story, our story, we'll get, you know, a ghostwriter and make a big deal with Random House and tell it direct. In other words, they don't want any mediation because it can only go wrong in their view. Again, I sound like I'm bitching in money.

This is the reality and it's in show business. It's in, and as a result, the only real coverage you get very often of celebrities is so negotiated, so attenuated, so distant that it's just, you know, disappointing. A couple quick ones before you go. You still watch boxing? You know, less than I did, my colleague Cala Vassano is the boxing maven at the New Yorker, but here and there, here and there. He's doing a piece now.

that he's going to take me. I've never seen, you know, what's really popular now is not boxing, right? UFC. You bet. I've never been, so I'm going to go. You're going to go to a UFC event, it's at Cajside. Do you think I'll go to hell? Well, you might run into Donald Trump, so bring your questions ready.

I went to, I went to see Pachio Mayweather in Las Vegas, and I want you to know that Donald Trump was five rows behind. Wow. Yeah, he wasn't president yet, though. I was going to say it says something about you. Sent something about my seatmate who had really good seats. Before you took over the magazine in 1998, who was your favorite New Yorker writer to read? Well, I love A.J. Liebling, who wrote about the Second World War, about food, about the fights.

I adore A.J. Leaping. I'm a huge Janet Malcolm fan. and my teacher, I have to put in there too, John McPhee. You know, and the New Yorker was lucky enough to publish James Baldwin, so that ain't chuppliver either. No. It's a long list, is what I'm saying, Brian. How does your method of motivating writers differ from Tina, your predecessors? Oh, I don't know.

I just, Tina was very encouraging to me. I have to say, you know, I, I, I did write a lot for her. You'd have to ask her whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. But, you know, she was extremely, you know, peace would come out. And I would get a note from her and it was extremely encouraging. I learned from that. I learned, I send a lot of notes of, you know, thanks and encouragement because I think you should. But I learned that from Don Graham when he was running the Washington,

post. Don Graham would clearly sit down on a Friday evening and have a glass of wine and write 20 notes. And if you've got one of these grammograms, I still haven't. They're in my desk drawer, you know, from 1987 or something. I think it's writers, you know,

yes, they get paid, but it ain't private equity money. And they deserve to be read with with real attachment and gratitude. And I try to do that. All right.

Finally, I love to take a reporter like you and find the most unlikely story they've written. Uh-oh. May I nominate your 1997 New Yorker profile of Howard Stern? Hats off.

I would have picked that too. Whom you called Sophie Portnoy's other son, by the way, terrific line. That had to be a Tina assignment, no? You know, you're a very smart guy. Tina and I had a kind of rolling arrangement. I might not be the best prose writer in the world. I don't know, certainly not.

But I do have a metabolism. So Tina could never fault me for not writing enough. Maybe I wrote too much. I don't know. But at one point, and of course I knew who Howard Stern was. And by the way, Howard Stern then was not the Howard Stern now. Howitzer now is the magisterial interviewer of Bruce Springsteen and, you know, and Paul McCartney, and he's all very soft and nice.

And he's good at it, by the way. Back then, he was quite something else. And Tina didn't know him from a hole in the wall. She had no idea if he was. And I'd been talking about him. And that really, she, in my description of him, she got interested in a hurry. And she said, asked me to do a profile.

It was not on my, it was not on my to-do list before that. And Howard didn't give me a hell of a lot of time. I really had to work. I really had to work to make that thing work. Oh, God, I'll go back and look at it. How is it? How does it read, Brian? Is it any good?

It reads, it reads pretty well. All right. That's the highest compliment I've ever gotten in my life, but I'll take it. I noticed that you've never put it in any of your collections, though. You know what? You guessed right. David Ramnik, the documentary comes out Friday, December 5th, tell Usest Tilly, happy birthday for us.

And thanks for coming on the press pod. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much, Brian. Be welcome.