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[pensive music playing]
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[presses whirring]
[Jon] This is The Daily Show! I'm Jon Stewart.
We've got a great one for you tonight. David Remnick will be joining me.
He is the editor of The New Yorker magazine.
[studio audience cheering and applauding]
What an erudite crowd.
[audience laughs]
Celebrating their 100th year at The New Yorker,
and we'll be discussing the difference between umlauts and diaereses.
I can't believe you have to do the walk.
[woman] It'll be great. Are you going to wave?
Yeah. [laughs]
[Jon] Please welcome David Remnick! Sir!
[audience cheering and applauding]
[Jon] A hundred years of The New Yorker.
And this, a special treat. I don't know if you can see this.
It is their, uh, swimsuit edition.
["New York City" playing]
Mr. Dewey, Truman Capote from The New Yorker.
-The New Yorker? -Yes, The New Yorker.
Everyone loves the cartoons in The New Yorker.
♪ New York City I like New York City ♪
♪ New York City… ♪
[man 1] As hundreds of newspapers and magazines struggle to survive,
The New Yorker is doing just fine, thank you very much.
It's only 100 years old? Look what it's done.
[man 2] The New Yorker won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday
for long-form investigative journalism.
[woman] An article by a young chef named Anthony Bourdain
is rocking the restaurant world this week.
[man 3] Pauline Kael's reviews didn't just change movie criticism,
they changed movies.
♪ Like it ♪
♪ Like it, I like it… ♪
The New Yorker.
[reading]
[cricket chirping]
Oh, I get it. That's kind of funny.
For people like me from the Midwest,
pick up The New Yorker magazine and get a window into being a New Yorker.
I'm a writer for The New Yorker.
-It's a magazine-- -I'm familiar with The New Yorker.
♪ New York City… ♪
Tonight, the Defense Department is on the defensive.
It denies a report in this week's New Yorker magazine.
Controversy today
over the cover of the new issue of The New Yorker magazine.
[man 4] For the first time, The New Yorker is endorsing a candidate for president.
An editorial in this week's edition…
♪ My home in New York City… ♪
All you'll have for entertainment is that giant stack of New Yorker magazines.
[Michael] Oh, come on.
You and I both know I'll never read those.
♪ In this New York City ♪
[song ends]
-[indistinct chatter] -[car horns honking]
[pensive music playing]
[indistinct chatter and laughter]
[David] Emily, how are you? You're alive.
Hey, Louisa. How's everybody?
All right, we have a lot, so we should go with some quickness.
There have been a spate of stories about how rich people's favorite asset,
um, are dinosaur fossils.
Since 2022, there has been a major Adderall shortage.
[writer] I think we should do a profile of Koji Murata,
the inventor of the first ever wooden satellite, that is…
[David] Every great story we've done over the past 100 years
starts with a great idea.
Our writers follow these ideas wherever they may lead.
Our editors, working with their writers, of course,
then pick apart and polish every single sentence, every single word.
"…but there wasn't much editorial interference,
comma, at first." Do we need the comma after that?
[David] Then the piece gets sent to our fact-checking department
and goes through a process once compared to a colonoscopy.
We say that the cats' names are Tiger, Lover Boy, and Gummy Bear.
Um, is that correct?
The New Yorker is a miracle, okay?
The New Yorker is a publication
that publishes a 15,000-word profile
of a musician one week,
or a 9,000-word account from southern Lebanon
with gag cartoons interspersed in them.
Never a photograph on the cover, right?
Not a bikini, not a movie star.
And yet it succeeds.
The fact that this exists and is thriving,
and I insist that it's going to thrive not with one century but two and three,
that's amazing.
["Twelfth Street Rag" playing]
[Julianne Moore] Jazz Age, New York.
A city buzzing with financiers and flappers,
big bands,
Babe Ruth,
and over 30,000 speakeasies.
Enter Harold Ross,
the unlikely founder of The New Yorker.
A chain smoker with a talent for profanity,
Ross fell in with a group of semi-employed writers and humorists
who met daily at the Algonquin Hotel for liquid lunch and witty banter.
"All the things I like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening,"
one of his cohorts quipped.
And it was there that Ross and his wife Jane Grant
hatched the idea for a new kind of humor magazine.
It would be a weekly for Manhattan sophisticates,
they told people,
and not for the little old lady in Dubuque.
The irony was that Ross himself was a high school dropout
from a Colorado mining town.
But he recruited his clever friends to write cheeky articles
and cartoons about society and culture.
He hired a designer to create a distinctive typeface
and a mascot that poked fun at the magazine's refined air.
They jokingly named this pretentious dandy Eustace Tilley.
And The New Yorker was born.
[lively percussive music playing]
The 100 years that followed have been a story of survival,
of stubborn resistance,
bold changes,
and some of the most influential journalism,
fiction, and cartoons of the century.
-[music fades] -[telephone ringing]
[indistinct chatter]
[woman] So our 100th anniversary issue is coming up in a few months
and we have to find something special for the cover.
Until you have the cover, you don't know what the personality of the issue is.
You know, it's not something
that you can just slap on at the last minute.
[pensive music playing]
A cover needs to speak to the moment,
but also be a timeless piece of art
that should be able to be framed and put on a wall.
Frankly, chasing that week after week keeps me up with anxiety,
even after 30 years.
[presses whirring]
Before I came to The New Yorker,
I ran a graphics magazine with underground cartoonists.
I love working with artists who have each their strong point of view,
each a different style,
each different stories that they want to tell,
and that's what I'm trying to bring to The New Yorker.
For the 100th anniversary,
David Remnick came to me and said,
"We have to use Eustace Tilley from the first cover."
I had to bite my tongue not to say, "Oh, no!"
[laughs] You know.
I understand the impulse,
but I want to do something innovative and not done before.
So obviously, I have to figure out something.
[music fades]
-We'll see how this goes, man. [laughs] -[man] It'll be good.
[pensive music playing]
[Nick] The Talk of the Town is the beginning of the magazine.
It whets your appetite.
They're short pieces.
They're little vignettes or little reported pieces.
Each one tells a little story.
Maybe I go shoot pool with a rock band
or hang out with John Belushi's photographer.
Usually, these pieces are very self-contained,
but the one I'm working on now is more open-ended.
Okay.
You might have noticed that politics are really pulling people apart these days,
so I thought I'd go out and take the temperature of the city.
It's kind of a fishing expedition.
You never know. You go out and pound the pavement and…
see what the talk of the town is.
-It's Mark. Nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you.
-I'm a writer for The New Yorker. -All right.
I'm with The New Yorker magazine. You know it?
Once I turn on this mode where I'm looking for people
and interesting things in New York,
it's almost like I've been drugged or something.
Every person looks interesting to me.
It's just-- It's like a marvel.
-[dog barks] -[pensive music continues]
-That's your grandson. -Grandson.
-His little adorable face. -He's adorable. Yeah.
Can I talk to you for a bit about stuff? You want to talk to me?
-No. -You don't want to talk?
-No. Sorry. [laughs] -You sure? Come on, man!
[groans] Flop sweat. Let's go.
I'm a writer for The New Yorker magazine.
You want to talk? Can I ask some questions?
[man] I speak a little bit English.
[Nick] What's your language?
-[man] Mandarin. -I don't have any Mandarin.
[groans]
-Hi, my name is Nick. -[woman] Hi.
[Nick] I'm writing a piece about all the stress we're experiencing
over the political situation.
So, uh, what's your vibe?
How's your mood? You sleep at night?
Not really.
Do you have a divided household, by any chance?
Well, interesting you bring it up because we are…
I was talking about the guest list for Thanksgiving.
-You just walked into my talk piece. -[laughing]
[Nick] "How you feeling, NYC?"
"Will we tear ourselves to pieces,
or go on living imperfectly as we have done so many times before?"
We're really squeezing the stone, but…
I think there's a piece in it.
[music fades]
[man] For our 100th anniversary, we decided to do a series of videos.
We're having different writers, artists, um, thinkers come in
and get a personal history
through their experience of The New Yorker.
We have a chair from our original office.
It's from an original office table.
Ooh, nice. [chuckles]
They built them to last, boy.
This is one of the most comfortable chairs I've ever been in.
You see, we lost this art.
We lost the art of carving ass shapes into wood.
See, that's why this is so comfortable, but this is a lost art now.
-No one can do this anymore. -[whimsical music playing]
Do you happen to have a favorite cartoon
that you particularly love from over the years?
All of Emily Flake's cartoons.
My favorite, it's a woman in a circus
and she's reaching across and on the other side is a lion.
And I feel like it encapsulates my early twenties. [laughs]
Like, every guy was this lion.
One cartoonist I really like is Zach Kanin.
He has one, Sisyphus in the workplace.
It's just so funny to think of Sisyphus in the context of an office,
and he probably never completes the job.
The New Yorker cartoons always make you feel
like it's a bit smarter than you are.
The cartoons are always a little bit like this, right?
Oh, I love Roz Chast.
God, I love Roz Chast so much. I love her.
She touches me so much.
[parrot squawking]
[woman] Oh, brother! Do you hear her?
[parrot] Look at that bird!
"Look at that bird!"
[speaks gibberish] This is a little baby bird.
She likes The New Yorker.
She does.
It chews well.
Oh, these are posters, um…
They come from Ghana.
Yeah, that was… I think that might have been a wedding present.
Here's Charles Addams' scarf. Um…
It's, to me, just extraordinary.
He was the first cartoonist that I fell in love with as a child.
I'm very drawn to things that are very dark but also very funny.
Imagine today if they did it.
You'd get like, "This is completely unacceptable."
"I don't see why it's funny. It would hurt. It would burn."
"I know somebody who got burned by boiling oil."
"There was nothing funny about it."
[pensive music playing]
I never thought about doing anything else except drawing
from the time I was maybe three or four.
I think you don't do this job unless you really can't do anything else.
Just needs to be one person over here.
So I write ideas down all throughout the week.
They're like half--
They're just what I'm drawing.
Usually I get, I don't know, uh…
"Monkey clanging cymbals, hobby farmer,
debt ceiling, que sera sera,
uncanny valley, throuple."
I mean, they're just, uh, you know, ideas,
half-baked ideas. Um…
That's what I'm looking for.
I guess I draw, to a large extent, to make myself feel less alone.
Like, I'm not the only one who finds this so depressing
that I can barely get out of bed thinking about it.
-[car horn honking] -[siren wailing distantly]
[pensive music playing]
[David] I get up very early in the morning,
throw down a cup of coffee,
start listening to a podcast or three…
[Allison] Hello and welcome to the Haaretz Podcast.
…and get some exercise so I don't die.
I'm 65 years old.
When my feet hit the sidewalk in the morning,
I feel like Fred Astaire. It makes me instantly happy.
I grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey, across the river,
and I looked to New York growing up with a sense of yearning.
It was so tantalizingly close and yet so far away.
[key card beeps]
[Charlie Rose] Some have called him the Michael Jordan of journalism.
He began his career as a staff writer at The Washington Post,
where he later served as foreign correspondent in Russia.
[Moore] Before becoming the fifth editor of The New Yorker,
the Pulitzer Prize winner made a name for himself
writing in-depth profiles on subjects ranging from the Pope,
to Mike Tyson, to Bruce Springsteen.
Okay, let's do it. Yeah.
So a typical day might be planning meetings,
ideas meetings, meetings about politics.
The polls are up-to-date on Michigan for that piece?
Finance, personnel,
meet with one editor or another just to kibitz about a piece,
and making lots and lots of phone calls.
You weren't, at four in the morning, on Bourbon Street throwing up?
Checking in with writers.
Oh, my God. What would Hunter Thompson do?
1:30? I think I have 13 things before then.
Yeah, between now and then.
Oh, Phil Montgomery. I have radio pickups.
Fucking God.
Snyder says that he has learned…
[babbles]
Came in just a tiny bit high.
Today on The New Yorker Radio Hour… My voice sucks.
And of course, we have the 100th anniversary in February.
So there's a lot that needs to be figured out.
[laughing]
[woman 1] I think this is my favorite.
[woman 2] This one actually made me laugh out loud.
-[woman 1] This is… -[woman 2] It's really, really funny.
-Okay, it's gotta go. It's gotta go. -Yeah.
[woman 1] On a Tuesday morning,
I get anywhere between 1,000 and 1,500 cartoons in my inbox.
And then we end up buying anywhere between ten and twenty.
So 1,500 to ten.
-[lilting music playing] -[Emma laughs]
David constantly reminds me that I don't work in a coal mine,
so I'm not allowed to complain.
It's generally a mind-numbing task.
There are waves of amusement, delirium, depression.
[man on screen] Arms outstretched, repeat once more.
[Emma] Sometimes at cartoon 800, I have to take a break
and do Japanese calisthenics for three minutes and 30 seconds.
"I feel better since I stopped watching the news."
He needs to buck up.
[Emma] David, in the cartoon meeting, picks ten to twenty
out of the 50 to 60 that I've brought him.
I come up with all these psychological strategies
on how to manipulate David Remnick's mind.
[laughs] Uh, I don't know that they actually work,
and I would not necessarily recommend them to be peer-reviewed.
But, you know, I'll put a cartoon I know he's not going to like
in front of a cartoon I think he might like.
-What? -[laughing]
[Emma] So you set the bar low,
and then suddenly, he's like, "I love this."
And I'll be like, "Genius. You're so right."
[David] "Finally, we're together," says the woman to her dog.
"And I didn't know you were so handy with a…"
-Oh, Jesus. -Wait. I don't under--
-What? The dog killed the father. -Oh, and that's…
[Emma] You're meant to encounter the cartoons in the midst of long articles
that are often devastating, or slogs.
No offense.
Uh, but it's meant to be this thing that cuts through it and surprises you,
and offers this brief moment of respite and delight.
-[woman] He sees ghosts. -[group laughs]
[woman] This is good.
Okay. Half a gallon of milk plus cereal equals a psychopath.
Cereal plus the milk equals okay.
[Emma] Order of operations.
By the way, true.
-[Emma] Yeah. -You can't add cereal to milk.
Who would put milk in the bowl first? That's literally…
-I'd divorce Alex if he did that. -You know who would? Psychopaths.
[group laughs]
[David] It's amazing this is our job.
[lively music playing]
[siren wailing]
["Ida, Sweet As Apple Cider" playing]
[Moore] During its first two decades,
The New Yorker became the successful humor and literary magazine
that its founding editor Harold Ross had dreamed of.
From its dingy offices on 43rd Street,
he published essays that were fizzy and wry,
cartoons that were risqué and winking.
[soldiers marching]
But everything changed with World War II.
[engines droning]
[dramatic music playing]
After the bombing of Hiroshima,
the U.S. government banned the publication of any photographs
that showed civilian suffering.
So Americans were mostly in the dark
about what the people there had experienced.
But a young writer named John Hersey suspected there was a story
that needed to be told.
[John Hersey] I had talked with William Shawn,
who was then the second-in-command at The New Yorker,
and we had talked about doing an article on Hiroshima.
At that time, most of the writing had been about the power of the bomb
and how many buildings it could destroy and what a huge area it devastated,
and so on.
And so I went to Japan
and I began to look for five or six people whose paths crossed each other,
whose experiences had been vivid.
[Moore] The piece he produced revolutionized journalism.
It was nonfiction,
but written with the intimacy and drama of a fictional story.
[John Hersey] I think that fiction is much more powerful for readers
in looking at grand or terrible events,
because the reader can identify with a character.
[Moore] Hersey wove together the stories of six individuals
who were on the ground that day,
including a priest, a doctor, a factory worker.
[John Hersey] "At exactly 15 minutes past 8:00 in the morning,
Miss Toshiko Sasaki,
a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works,
had just sat down at her place in the plant office
and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk."
"There was no sound of planes. The morning was still."
"The place was cool and pleasant."
"Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky."
[Moore] The article was long, 30,000 words.
But it was so extraordinary
that Ross and Shawn decided to dedicate the entire issue to that one story.
-No cartoons, no fiction, no witty essays. -[pensive music playing]
It sold out within hours.
Albert Einstein requested 1,000 reprints to send to leading scientists.
It was read live without commercial interruptions
on American radio and around the world.
"At exactly 15 minutes past 8:00 in the morning on August 6th…"
[woman 1 on radio] "At exactly 15 minutes past 8:00 in the morning
on August 6th, at the moment…"
[woman 2 on radio] "100,000 people were killed by the atomic bomb."
[man on radio] "They still wonder why they lived when so many others died."
[woman 2] "…when so many others died."
[Moore] Harold Ross, not known for showering his writers with praise,
gushed to Hersey,
"Those fellows who said that Hiroshima was the story of the year
underestimated it."
"It is unquestionably the best journalistic story of my time,
if not of all time."
Hersey's piece radically altered the way
people around the world viewed nuclear weapons.
And it also helped transform The New Yorker from a light humor magazine
into a serious journalistic player on the world stage.
[protesters speaking indistinctly]
[man] There's something about, "History is happening,
and it's happening in your backyard," that I guess I'm just a sucker for that.
[band playing lively tune]
I've always been interested in why people believe what they believe, always.
I don't know if "enjoy" is the word, but I do find it really compelling
to go meet people
who I sometimes have very little in common with.
I know he's gonna win.
He won already twice. He's gonna win again.
Whether they give it to the man is a different story.
[Andrew] I went on the road to see Tucker Carlson do his road show.
I went to Budapest to go to CPAC there.
I went to Southern California to hang out with some alt-right meme peddlers.
I do think the job is to collect
the best version of their story that I can.
-All right. -Have you guys been doing it since 2016?
Uh, no.
[Andrew] To a lot of people, The New Yorker means kind of hoity-toity.
You know, you're just this snobby thing.
For example, The New Yorker has a style guide
that dictates that you have to put the accent on the E in "élite."
And so I… [chuckles] …often find myself in places
with people who will give me quotes
like, "All you elitist motherfuckers, you don't understand the first thing
about this country."
I'll write the quote, we'll say "élitist motherfuckers,"
but we'll put a little accent over the E in "élite."
And I'm like, "I think that we've proved their case a little bit," you know?
[rock music playing over speakers]
I think one thing that people who really viscerally despise Trump never understand
is the fun, the community, the camaraderie.
People are going to those shows like they're seeing Phish or something.
[crowd cheering and applauding]
Are you ready to make history tonight and make some Liberals cry?
[Andrew] I don't want to lose sight of the extent
to which politics is about making people feel stuff at a really simple gut level.
[all chanting] USA! USA! USA!
[Andrew] I think part of the goal
is to give readers some kind of portal into what it feels like
to be at a Trump rally.
Ideally, maybe you can transcend that and say not only,
"What does it feel like in the room?" but "What does it mean?"
So one of the challenges with reporting on the Madison Square Garden rally
was the specter of this Nazi rally
that had happened at Madison Square Garden in 1939.
And that's just a challenge as a reporter
to go, "Okay, I'm in a room with tens of thousands of people
who are really enjoying this show."
If I then write about it in the context of a Nazi rally,
am I calling them all Nazis?
I don't see no stinking Nazis in here.
If I don't write about the context of the Nazi rally,
am I letting everyone off the hook for this context that should be there?
"On February 20th, 1939,
the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi group based in New York,
held a rally at Madison Square Garden."
"They billed it as a mass demonstration for true Americanism."
"The backdrop behind the stage was decorated with American flags
and a floor-to-ceiling portrait of George Washington."
"Trump's 2024 rally wasn't a reenactment of the 1939 rally."
"History doesn't repeat."
"But when a nativist demagogue talks about 'an enemy within'
and 'foreigners poisoning the blood of our country,'
it would be strange if no one drew the comparison."
It was a really big deal in our house. We actually didn't have very much money,
but we did have a New Yorker subscription.
I think the first time I heard about The New Yorker was on Seinfeld.
They had a great episode
where Elaine did not understand one of the cartoon captions.
This cartoon in The New Yorker. I don't get this.
Me neither.
And you're on the fringe of the humor business!
[audience laughs]
You know, I grew up in New Jersey and was very starry-eyed
about all things New York.
The first time I ever heard of The New Yorker
and understood it to be this important magazine
was in an episode of the animated show The Critic.
I think you media jackals are a pack of filthy, muckraking scum.
I hate you all,
except for you good people at The New Yorker.
Bravo, Mrs. S.
"Bravo, Mrs. S."
And I remember just thinking,
"Oh, that's The New Yorker. It's this important thing."
I don't know how I knew about it, but it's just there.
It's just one of those institutions.
It's like, "When did you hear about the Statue of Liberty?"
-[birds cawing] -[siren wailing distantly]
Dude, some of these records are so nostalgic to me,
but it's not the ones people would think. It's this!
Japanese Noise was my shit in high school.
[employee] And now it's so hard to find.
There's a famous flexi disc limited run where they burnt them all on the beach.
So I started my career as a music critic,
but in 2008 when I came over to The New Yorker,
I didn't really have a beat.
It was just, "We think you could write interesting stories for us."
And I remember that first Monday,
and going into the office, which at that time was in Times Square,
and sitting down and being like, "Shit, now what?"
[pensive music playing]
My only job is to be interesting.
One of the blessings of writing for The New Yorker is the idea
that you have a curious readership that's willing to go where you take them.
The story could be about anything.
And part of the bargain with the reader is,
"I'm going to make this fun, so stick with me."
So tonight I'm going to do what I often do,
which is go see some music.
[pensive music continues]
[man] The main things I cover at The New Yorker are things
related to science, medicine, health care.
Today, I'm working on this space medicine piece in Utah.
As more and more people are going to space,
what do we know about what happens to their bodies?
[man 1] You're gonna want to have your straps on tight.
[Dhruv] I was trying to figure out a way to make some of the issues of space health
come to life.
[indistinct chatter on radio]
I love figuring out how to tell the story of something that's very complex
in a way that is going to be appealing for the reader,
that they learn about these things almost by accident.
There's a lot of moisture in the sand,
so it creates that crinkly look right there.
[indistinct chatter]
[lilting music playing]
[Kelefa] Hey!
I think part of The New Yorker's identity
is that you can send someone into some other world and report back.
For me, that goes back to growing up as a punk rocker,
and that was the first thing I really loved when I was 14 years old.
The idea that you can go through a trap door
and there's this other world
where other people are doing other stuff, that's an intoxicating feeling to me.
Are you guys ready to freaking party, baby?
I've always loved that The New Yorker has this highbrow reputation,
that it's supposed to be a fancy magazine,
because that makes it more fun for me to come in
and write about Jay-Z or boxing or country music,
and they're going to set it in that New Yorker typeface.
And so part of the goal is to figure out how to keep that fanciness
while also keep the magazine from seeming too old-fashioned.
-[Dylan Marlowe singing indistinctly] -[audience cheering]
[Kelefa] "Punk taught me to love music by teaching me to hate music, too."
"It taught me that music could be divisive,
could inspire affection or loathing
or a desire to figure out which was which."
[Dhruv] I had always wanted to write for The New Yorker.
This is the black bean burger.
The idea that you'd put ideas out into the world
and that would change the way that someone thinks about a problem,
that is very appealing.
We have cilantro here, dill, parsley.
[Dhruv] My primary job is I'm a physician.
I was practicing in New York City during the pandemic
and basically wrote a series of dispatches.
Since the pandemic has waned,
I've really been able to expand the types of things that I write about.
"A freezing wind howled as we drove over rough terrain."
"I squinted into the distance,
imagining the vast expanse of untouched land
that the first humans on Mars will find."
I think almost everyone who works at The New Yorker is obsessed in some way,
and I felt drawn in by that obsession.
[man] I've probably watched a movie a day for the last 40 years.
You know, in a way, it's kind of simple.
You know, there's something banal about criticism,
which is you watch a movie and you write about it.
Um…
But I never know what I'm going to write.
Hey! Hey, look out!
[Richard] Once the movie is rolling, I have no idea where I am.
The movie takes possession of me and the audience doesn't exist.
I don't exist for the duration of the film.
What kind of place is this that I…
They won't let me see him.
[Richard] While I watch a movie, I take notes furiously.
The problem isn't taking them, it's reading them afterward,
after having written them in the dark.
[whimsical music playing]
When a movie is over,
the last thing I want to do is to talk with people.
I run out of the theater with my coat over my head
so that I don't have to talk with my fellow critics.
I want to hold the experience in, not even think about it.
I just want to have it work on me.
They say that people who drink three cups of coffee a day
prolong their lives by a decade.
I think I'm verging on immortality with the amount of coffee I drink.
Without coffee, nothing gets done.
I wish I never had to write a negative review,
and I am always conscious that there are people involved.
I always say that it takes two years to make a movie,
it takes two hours to watch it,
and two minutes to demolish it, or, on Twitter, two seconds.
And so I feel a fundamental need to be respectful.
"The heart of the review is emotion, the stirrings of the soul."
"It's not a matter of critics taking themselves seriously,
but of taking art seriously."
There's a lot I liked about it, but it's right on that borderline
of being like ten other stories…
-Yeah, I'm not sure-- -…in terms of what happens in it.
Yeah, I'd be kind of borderline in favor.
[woman] In the course of a year,
we get somewhere between seven and ten thousand submissions,
and we publish 50.
They're coming from agents. They're coming from publishers.
They're coming directly from writers. They can come any way.
You know, it's not very hard to find my email, apparently.
[pensive music playing]
[David] It's a pretty rare thing that magazines even remotely like ours
have fiction.
And I'm perfectly aware that there is some portion of our readership
or our subscribers who don't look at the fiction at all.
Fine. But I also know that there's a portion of our readership
that that's what they care about the most.
About a year and a half ago,
David Remnick came to me and said, "For 100th anniversary,
how about we do an anthology of fiction, short stories? What would you put in it?"
There are more than 13,000 stories
published in the lifespan of The New Yorker,
and this book contains 78.
EB White, Dorothy Parker…
[David] John Updike, Philip Roth…
[Deborah] JD Salinger, Jamaica Kincaid.
It just keeps going. I actually could read any name on this list
and it wouldn't elicit a reaction.
-[David] David F. Wallace, Eudora Welty… -[Deborah] Shirley Jackson, John Cheever…
-[David] Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith… -[Deborah] Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow…
-[David] Haruki Murakami, Junot Díaz… -[Deborah] Annie Proulx, George Saunders.
[David] The writer whose work we feature in our upcoming anniversary magazine
is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
[audience cheering and applauding]
"I have always longed to be known, truly known by another human being."
To celebrate The New Yorker's 100 years of being a magazine,
they will publish an excerpt from my new novel, Dream Count.
"Because it was during lockdown that I began to sift through my life
and give names to things long unnamed."
Fiction is the most glorious form of all the arts.
[laughs] I'm not biased, of course.
"But what did…"
Literature makes it possible
for us to know there are multiple points of view.
This kind of imaginative leaping into somebody else's experience,
because it just…
Sometimes I feel there's something apocalyptic about the world we live in,
and I think that literature is that small beam of hope.
Writing fiction is the love of my life.
It's the thing that gives me meaning. It's…
[sighs] It's the reason I'm here.
When I came to the U.S., very quickly, it became clear to me
that The New Yorker was where you wanted to be published.
Yeah, I mean, The New Yorker is The New Yorker.
And The New Yorker knows that it's The New Yorker.
So…
People accuse The New Yorker of elitism.
But I think conversation about things being considered elitist
leans into a kind of anti-intellectualism
that is sweeping across this country
and is bad for this country and is bad for us.
What are we saying? Are we saying that it's so elitist,
it should not write about art and literature and politics
in a way that is complex and thoughtful?
If that is elitism, then we need more.
We need more.
-[indistinct chatter] -[telephones ringing]
[lilting jazz music playing]
[man] Hey, Bruce.
I've been here 46 years.
It's a long time, but not long enough.
[man] What's your job here?
If the electricity goes out, if the air is not on,
all of that is run through me.
If a person needs a piece of paper or a printer, that's all on me.
If a person needs a computer fixed, that's all on me.
And that's me.
Right there with the long black hair.
We started at 25 West 43rd. That's the first New Yorker.
It had this really old feel to it, like the 1950s.
There was a very old group of gentlemen here.
The walls were stained with cigarette smoke.
Couches that you sat on, and the dust comes up from them
when you sit down, right?
When we moved the first time,
we went to the basement and found what was down there.
It was loaded with old papers and material,
old proofs and old fiction edits.
It was like the world had forgotten that people had worked on these pieces,
but here's the work.
And I started to just hoard
any material that people were discarding that I thought we should keep.
I'm not a pack rat. I just didn't want to get rid of it,
because I thought there was history in here.
It's the first adding machine from The New Yorker.
It's basically a Buick.
These are all first editions of New Yorker writers.
And the spots are the little drawings that you would see on a page.
So basically pieces of art that artists did.
The detail and the work in it is crazy good.
Okay.
-[sighs] -[pensive music playing]
I worked with four out of the five editors at The New Yorker so far.
But did not work with Ross.
[Moore] In the years following World War II,
The New Yorker entered a new era.
Its hard-charging founder, Harold Ross, died of lung cancer
after 26 years at the helm…
and was replaced by his deputy, William Shawn.
Though painfully shy,
Shawn was fearless as an editor.
Some staffers called him the Iron Mouse,
and he pushed the magazine to report stories that were controversial
and confronted the powerful.
One day in 1958, Shawn got a pitch
from an award-winning writer and biologist named Rachel Carson.
She wanted to figure out why thousands of birds had died
after the spraying of the insecticide DDT.
At the time, DDT was used indiscriminately
on crops, lawns, and even inside homes.
Its manufacturers insisted it was safe,
but Carson wanted to investigate.
With Shawn's support, she began conducting field studies,
interviewing experts,
and digging into the complex science.
But as she worked, Carson kept a secret from the world.
She was dying of breast cancer.
Multiple surgeries and painful treatments sometimes left her in a wheelchair.
But she pressed ahead with her work.
And finally, after four years, she submitted a draft to Shawn.
When "Silent Spring" was published as a three-part series,
Carson's prose transformed science into literature.
"Over increasingly large areas of the United States," she wrote,
"spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds."
"And the early mornings, once filled with the beauty of birdsong,
are strangely silent."
[dramatic music playing]
It was published as a book, became an immediate bestseller,
and sparked a national debate about the danger of chemicals
to humans and animals.
Have you asked the Department of Agriculture
to take a closer look at this?
Yes, and I know that they already are.
I think particularly, of course, since Ms. Carson's book, but they are.
[Moore] But it also sparked a backlash.
Carson was attacked by powerful chemical companies.
The major claims in Ms. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring
are gross distortions of the actual facts.
[Moore] Carson, by this point wearing a wig and barely able to walk,
defended her work before Congress and the press.
Unless we do bring these chemicals under better control,
we are certainly headed for disaster.
[Moore] Some companies threatened to sue The New Yorker,
but Shawn refused to back down.
Carson died less than two years after the publication of Silent Spring.
But though she never got to see it,
her work would help bring about the Clean Air Act,
the Clean Water Act,
and the birth of the modern environmental movement.
Years later,
Shawn would articulate the magazine's simple philosophy this way.
[William Shawn] We say what we think about things.
This is what we truly believed.
And if this is what we believe, we should say so.
[indistinct chatter]
[woman] Hey, Valerie.
Would you be able to forward us that Harris campaign thing
about Puerto Rican turnout?
-[Valerie] I'll Slack it to you now. -[woman] Okay, thank you.
I didn't want to bother you while…
Ah! [laughs softly]
Okay! Let's get some people drunk.
-[Andrew] Hey there. -[David] How's it going?
[Andrew] It's okay. Um…
In Dearborn, it's a hardship assignment 'cause it's hard to find a beer,
but there is a lot of hookah.
Can you not drink too early in the evening, please?
-[laughs] I'm just saying hypothetically. -Okay. What are you hearing?
Nobody knows anything, you know?
[David] We're very prepared.
We have a live blog and lots of people all over the place.
But what we don't know,
it's one of those hinge moments in history.
We don't know what will happen. Certainly not at this hour.
If she wins, we have this from Kadir Nelson.
Inscribed in her jacket are Obama, Shirley Chisholm,
Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Frederick Douglass,
all kinds of figures that arguably are resonant
in that progress of history.
And when it comes to Trump, the mood is rather different.
[laughs]
There's Trump being inaugurated by Hulk Hogan.
And, uh…
here's an incredibly cheerful sketch.
And Elon Musk crashing into the Oval Office.
And here's one.
"Take one tablet by mouth once a day for four years."
[tense music playing]
[indistinct chatter]
[man 1 on TV] Here is the electoral vote count at this hour.
Donald Trump has 90 electoral votes.
Kamala Harris has 27 electoral votes.
Okay, Florida is not happening. Have we realized that now?
He's leading.
I don't know if it's a miracle
that she would win at this point, but she'd really be…
She's down a couple of touchdowns.
[somber music playing]
[woman 1 on TV] Trump is now the projected winner in Michigan.
[woman 2] NBC news projecting that Wisconsin was won by Donald Trump.
[man 2] Donald Trump will win in the state of Pennsylvania.
[indistinct chatter]
All right, let's work on that. Okay. Thank you.
[Françoise] It's not what I expected for tonight,
but he chose this.
Mm.
It's hard to believe,
but we can't shape reality.
We can only reflect it.
[somber music continues]
[man on TV] …Carolina. Demographically, they're very similar.
You can even say…
[David] "After the tens of millions of Americans who feared Trump's return
rise from the couch of gloom,
it will be time to consider what must be done."
"One of the perils of life under authoritarian rule
is that the leader seeks to drain people of their strength."
"A defeatism takes hold."
My concern the second time around is that people feel defeated.
I don't think somebody in this job,
much less the more important job of citizen,
can give in to that.
Despair is the unforgivable sin.
So, no.
No! [laughs]
That's not, um…
That's impermissible.
[man] We're about to watch the assumption in office
of a president who will try to reset the world.
Everything else feels…
sort of inconsequential.
And it will inform so much of what happens in other countries. So much.
Yeah.
[David] Jon Lee. [chuckles]
-How are you, babe? Super. -How are you?
-It's been too long. -I know. It has.
So I haven't read about South America, but I will, right?
Yeah. We have a draft and I'm doing some adds.
It's Milei.
-Yeah. -Crazy guy.
And how was he with you?
[Jon Lee] In the 26 years now that I've been with The New Yorker,
I've been the war guy, or, you know, one of them.
And I was in a lot of the conflicts we've seen.
You know, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria.
[poignant music playing]
My father was in the Foreign Service.
And I grew up in nine countries, a lot of them fairly edgy places.
It's what led me into journalism. I wanted to live the history of my time.
What's on your mind for doing next? There's like…
-Mm. -I have to tell you, we're in a state of…
-Suck? [chuckles] -[laughing]
You know, we have to cover the world and pick our spots and pick them well.
So tell me what's on your mind.
[Jon Lee] The New Yorker doesn't have a budget like The New York Times,
we have a much smaller budget and staff.
But David has always been supportive of the idea
that we get out into the field and witness history with our own eyes.
-[ominous music playing] -[car horns honking]
[man on radio] Dictator Bashar al-Assad fled Syria this week,
as rebels swept into Damascus,
ending his family's 54-year reign.
[Jon Lee] "Two days after the Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad fled his palace,
I arrived in Damascus to witness the beginning of a profound reckoning."
"A long campaign of internal violence
had suddenly given way
to an edgy, surreal peace."
When I report a story,
I like to smell it, feel it, taste it,
and convey that to the reader.
That's the reporting I like to do.
Assalamu alaikum.
"One afternoon in Damascus,
I visited one of Assad's most notorious prisons."
[man speaking in Arabic]
[interpreter in English] I miss you, my love.
[Jon Lee] "We met a young man
who spent 15 months in the military intelligence prison,
and he reenacted one of the horrific experiences he endured."
[poignant music playing]
"The guards seemed to have made no effort to hide their abuses."
"I came across a huge pile of photographs taken by prisoners after interrogation."
"For many, it was likely the last image of them before they died."
It's not so hard to rip apart a society if you set your mind to it.
-[wind blowing] -[trumpet playing poignant melody]
[man] What do you think of having different artists
draw different kinds of 100s for the spots?
Or do you prefer just a classic Eustace? Maybe this is better.
[woman] I will say that I love this progression.
-Eustace from cradle to grave. -Yeah.
[man] The core of understanding The New Yorker
is that there's always this tension between the past and the present.
The magazine has its finger on the pulse of what's happening now,
but the magazine itself really hasn't changed much visually
since 1925.
I remember when I came here, I wanted to introduce non-lining numbers.
Non-lining numerals mean that, for example,
when you publish a number "1926,"
the nine is going to loop down a little bit.
It won't be all lined up, so it feels a little more elegant.
But it took weeks to convince the powers that be
that that was a good shift.
-Look at this. -Oh, look!
So a lot of this you've seen already. Maybe just like start from the front.
The magazine has a style guide about…
all kinds of things.
Where and when to use the diaeresis, and how to use commas,
or our own sometimes unusual spellings.
Sit, sit, sit.
With the 100th anniversary coming up, it seemed like a good idea
to open up a discussion
about some of the issues that have accumulated,
like barnacles to the side of the ship.
But what are the things that we're secretly…
we've come around to and we accept as tradition,
that maybe is worth reconsidering?
Well, one that comes up a lot is "teenager."
-[woman 1] Yeah. -[woman 2] The hyphen in "teenager."
[man1 ] The spelling-out of numbers.
[man 2] I would argue capitalizing "Internet."
We are an outlier, and it makes us look antiquated.
One subject that has come up for decades and decades is the following.
"I'm worried that I won't be able to write in my voice."
When I have very occasionally had that experience,
it's 'cause they're bad writers.
[group laughing]
So this ended up on the front page of The New York Times.
They couldn't resist.
Why is it on The New York Times? I couldn't say.
Maybe it was a slow news day.
[whimsical music playing]
I think The New Yorker to me is still
this awe-inspiring, impenetrable institution in my head.
Like, even having had stuff in it,
I still feel like, "Ooh, me? Thank you."
First time you see your name in the New Yorker font,
it's the biggest ego trip.
I would say that I was more excited about that
than I could ever be about, like, winning an Academy Award.
Although I haven't won an Academy Award, so maybe I'll get back to you on that.
I felt so honored to be included in the magazine.
These writers are the writers that are at the forefront
of thought and literature in our culture.
Then I laugh a little bit,
'cause I can't believe I got a piece in there
about Marv Albert, the sports announcer.
It was my first piece published in The New Yorker.
It felt like I'd won a Make-A-Wish thing. Like, "We're going to publish your piece."
It all felt like, "Maybe I'm very sick and no one's telling me."
[music fades]
[acoustic guitar playing pensive blues music]
[David] I take a guitar lesson every Sunday.
It's something I do really badly and I don't care.
It's a complete escape.
It's not writing, it's not reading.
It's not being an editor.
It's just-- That's a vacation for me.
My father was a dentist, had a small dental practice in New Jersey,
and got quite sick in his fifties.
He got Parkinson's and was unable to continue practicing.
And my mother, Barbara,
unfortunately got sick when she was very young with MS.
And so I had two disabled parents pretty rapidly.
[softly] Um…
I miss them.
Yeah. I love that picture.
I've had incredible strokes of luck and incredible strokes of bad luck.
And I think that's probably the human condition, if you're lucky.
Professionally, the gods have treated me well.
But yeah, my parents were disabled
and my daughter, our youngest, is profoundly autistic,
and, um…
[poignant music playing]
[scoffs]
…and that can't help but shape
the person sitting in front of you.
How that affects the way I look at The New Yorker?
I guess there's no question that it's shaped my temperament.
Well, I want The New Yorker to be two things.
I want it to be great.
I want it to be humane.
[car horns honking]
[pensive music playing]
[Moore] Roughly four decades after its founding,
The New Yorker was publishing a range of voices,
but it managed to ignore the lives of over a million New Yorkers
who were living alongside its acclaimed writers and editors.
The magazine had published some pieces by Langston Hughes
and one story by Ann Petry.
But for the most part,
when Black people appeared in the magazine,
it was as servants,
porters,
and racist caricatures.
In 1961,
the civil rights movement was gaining momentum,
and The New Yorker's editor William Shawn asked a young novelist
named James Baldwin to write something for the magazine.
The entire weight of the republic teaches you to despise yourself.
[Moore] Baldwin handed in one of the most powerful essays
ever written about race.
The piece was searing and unflinchingly honest.
"I became," he wrote,
"during my 14th year,
for the first time in my life, afraid."
"Afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without."
The essay revolved around his visit with Elijah Muhammad,
leader of the Black nationalist Nation of Islam.
The Caucasian people, but their real name is the devil.
[audience cheering]
[Moore] Baldwin explored the complicated swirl
of rage and pride and pain he felt as a Black man,
and he confronted the magazine's mostly white readers directly.
He wrote, "The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country
simply cannot be overstated,
however unwilling white men may be to hear it."
The response was explosive
and letters of praise poured in,
but one writer expressed disappointment
that the essay ran alongside a Virginia whiskey ad
showing a racist tableau.
Baldwin's article became the foundation for his classic book, The Fire Next Time,
and it catapulted him into the national spotlight,
making him a leading voice in the fight for racial justice.
[music fades]
[pensive music playing]
[man] "Twenty-two years ago, when I was 14,
I was given James Baldwin's second collection of essays,
Nobody Knows My Name."
"The dust jacket of the book featured a photograph of Baldwin
wearing a white t-shirt and standing in a pile of rubble in a vacant lot."
"I had never seen an image of a Black boy like me."
"Baldwin looked as if he could have been posing in my old neighborhood."
"In fact, I began to pretend that the photograph of Baldwin was of me,
and that the book's contents were a record of the life I had longed to lead."
I was first exposed to The New Yorker through one of my gay mentors
who gave me a subscription, and, um…
it was the thing that I waited for.
It was a variety of voices about not only the city I loved,
but the world that I didn't know anything about,
and I was hooked.
It was just something for me, actually. It felt like something for me.
Um, and…
that experience for a kid is singular.
To see my name in The New Yorker,
it's stupefying,
because you're suddenly looking
like the language of all these people that you've loved.
[laughs] You know, I was hooked.
I see about two, maybe three art shows a week.
This is the Bowery.
I love these…
figures of the children.
What I love about art and art-making
is the wildness of spirit and the unexpected.
So that requires a kind of optimism,
um, that, despite world events and catastrophes,
that the human spirit will remain.
[pensive music continues]
Throughout the city,
there's beauty…
if you're paying attention and really looking.
[music fades]
-[drill whirring] -[indistinct chatter]
[hammer thudding]
[man in French] That's a very beautiful Sempé.
It's signed.
[Françoise in English] To celebrate the 100 years of the magazine,
we're installing the original art
for over 100 covers
to show how the artists themselves
catalyze what's in the air,
or, I suppose, capture the moments when they happen.
So this is Kadir Nelson, and it's an oil painting.
And he did this during COVID.
The best images,
they're a departure point for you, the reader's emotion.
And that happened with the 9/11 print.
[somber music playing]
I was with my husband,
and we were actually on our way to vote.
And as soon as we stepped out,
we saw people running past us
that were covered in white ash.
And then we saw the second tower just fall,
like, right in front of our eyes.
My assistant was like, "Oh, Françoise, the office called."
"David Remnick wants to talk to you about a new cover."
I was talking to another mother.
I said, "I have to go to the office to find a magazine cover."
And Elise, my friend, also a mother,
immediate reaction was like, "A cover? A cover for a magazine?"
"I'll tell you what to do for a cover. Do nothing! Do no cover."
And that actually resonated with me.
[somber music continues]
I happen to be married to Art Spiegelman, the artist,
and he said, "You should do black on black."
"You should do the towers black on a black background."
And I got to the office,
sat at my computer, drew it,
and as soon as I saw it, I realized, like, that is the answer.
To signify what was lost by showing the absence of it.
-[music fades] -[indistinct chatter]
[Françoise] For the anniversary cover,
we've come up with an idea that I think might work.
The only way to show you this is to actually do it,
um, with dummies. So--
-That's why I smell the rubber cement. -Exactly. I know you told me--
Kids in my school used to get high on this stuff.
So what I'm suggesting to you--
Is not to get high on rubber cement.
[Françoise] We're going to use the original Eustace on the outside,
and then have a variation on it,
and then have another variation on it.
I mean, it's more complicated in terms of production, but…
-But that's not my problem, it's yours. -Exactly.
Sold. Let's do that.
-Yes! -I think that's more--
Why are you so, like…? Yeah, what a setup.
-Um… -[laughs]
This is kind of fun.
-Isn't it nice? -Yeah, it's not what I expected.
[seagulls cawing]
[lilting music playing]
[woman] Some people think that celebrity journalism is frivolous.
I mean, it's not war reporting.
But for me, how culture is made,
the myths that we want to tell about ourselves,
how artists strive to get where they are,
those are stories that are universal to me and interesting.
I love thinking deeply about those things.
Okay.
Some people say The New Yorker created "the profile,"
that they actually came up with the word "profile" to describe
this very specific kind of reporting,
where it's like one-on-one with journalist and subject,
creating a mini-documentary of their time together on the page.
I remember David sending me a text
that just said something like, "How about Carol Burnett?"
Which, you know, the only answer to that is yes, exclamation point.
She's certainly one of the funniest women who ever came down the pike.
Will you welcome, please, the hilarious Carol Burnett?
-[audience cheering] -[band plays fanfare]
Carol Burnett, first of all, icon.
You're fun. What do you do when you want to let your hair down?
-Assuming it is your hair. -I take it off.
[audience laughs]
[Rachel] I am interested in women in comedy,
women in entertainment,
women who forge territory that nobody has ever forged before.
Carol is all of those things.
-So nice to see you. -[Carol] It's good to see you.
[Rachel] So, Carol, I'm going to turn this on.
So you're on the record now.
-[Carol] Okay. [laughs] -All right.
Um…
-We're at Lucky's. -Yeah.
-How often do you come here? -Once a week.
[Rachel] When you start writing a profile, you go back and read
pretty much every interview they've ever done.
Sometimes you'll read their memoirs. And in so doing,
you find that there are certain anecdotes and quotes that they've repeated
thousands and thousands of times.
And so I always try to find follow-up questions to those exact things.
Something to push people out of their comfort zones,
out of their grooves.
Did you ever go see an analyst?
No.
-Only once when my daughter was on drugs. -Mm.
Yeah.
[Rachel] You can't think about if they'll love it. You never can.
My mentors at the magazine have always taught me,
"If you think they're going to love it, then you're barking up the wrong tree."
Um, you hope that they find it accurate.
-Being a woman… -Mm-hm.
I couldn't be Jackie Gleason, I couldn't be Sid Caesar.
They would say, "This stinks. Fix it."
I would go, "Could you guys come down and help me?"
"I'm not really doing this right."
[Rachel] Your wiles.
[Carol] It was a way not to get them to call me a bitch.
What would've been the worst to happen if people called you a bitch, Carol?
Would have just…
-Well, I didn't want that reputation. -Hm.
[Rachel] So much about being an interviewer is listening.
You have to listen for the words under the words.
What are they really trying to say, what are they thinking?
What's preoccupying them?
Did you experience your mother as being really witty and smart?
-She's very smart, very witty… -Mm.
-And very sad. -Mm.
She had all these dreams and, uh…
none of them really came true.
[Rachel] I find the writing process to be the most difficult part of the process,
for sure.
I personally don't have any friends who are writers who sit there
every minute of the day, and they're like, "I love this!"
"I'm having the time of my life."
I am really terrified that this looks like I'm Carrie Bradshaw.
Like, "Couldn't help but wonder,
was Carol Burnett the funniest woman ever born?"
I really need a cigarette if I'm gonna do the authentic thing.
I mean, Carrie carries around The New Yorker.
[man] In one of the movies, her book gets a bad review.
"Until the talented Bradshaw is better able to grasp
the complexities of married life,
she would be better advised to explore the vow of silence."
-[man laughs] -Wow, that's gotta… That had to sting.
[whimsical music playing]
[Jon Hamm] On Mad Men, we had a lot of original magazines from the time.
We had Life magazine, Time magazine,
we had Newsweek, and The New Yorker.
And that was the glory days of magazines, for sure.
The physical act of holding and carting magazines around
in your tote bag or your backpack is just gone.
And I don't see as many people reading on the train.
I just see people on their phones.
Maybe they're reading The New Yorker, but it's pretty upsetting.
Again, the wonder of magazines, which is a bit lost in the digital era,
with the kind of doomscrolling now, you don't have the kind of…
physical beginning and end of something.
With doomscrolling, there is no end.
I didn't invent the Internet. If I did, it would have an end.
[music fades]
[indistinct chatter]
[Richard] This is a very exciting event at Film Forum.
To celebrate The New Yorker's centenary,
they're going to be putting on a program of movies
that have some relation to The New Yorker.
[film scores playing]
The series includes Brokeback Mountain, which was a short story in The New Yorker.
Addams Family Values is, of course, based on the cartoons by Charles Addams.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is based on a story by Milan Kundera.
Adaptation, in which New Yorker writer Susan Orlean is a character.
Another film connected to The New Yorker is Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch,
in which actual New Yorker writers are transformed into fictional characters.
Bill Murray's character plays a version of Harold Ross,
the founding editor of The New Yorker.
[knocking on door]
A message from the foreman. One hour to press.
You're fired.
[Richard] And tonight, they're showing In Cold Blood,
based on Truman Capote's famous work.
It is very hard to imagine the impact that Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" had
on The New Yorker and on literary life in America.
Truman Capote invented true crime writing at the very highest level.
[intriguing music playing]
[Moore] In 1965,
The New Yorker published a blockbuster four-part series
that became a best-selling book and a hit movie.
[dramatic music playing]
[announcer] In Cold Blood.
[intriguing music plays]
[Moore] It would be one of the most celebrated pieces
ever published by the magazine.
But also one of the most controversial.
The author, Truman Capote,
had been hired by The New Yorker when he was 17
to fetch coffee and run errands.
He soon became known around the office for his charming gossip and bad behavior.
He was supposedly fired for posing as a staff writer
and insulting poet Robert Frost.
But editor William Shawn was impressed by his writing.
So years later, when Capote pitched a story
about a gruesome murder in a Kansas farmhouse,
Shawn got behind it.
This new adventure of mine, this experiment,
is what I call the non-fiction novel.
A non-fiction novel being a genre
brought about by the synthesis
of journalism with a fictional technique.
[Moore] Capote claimed that he was combining the rigor of journalism
with the narrative style of fiction,
similar to what John Hersey had done with Hiroshima years before.
But soon after "In Cold Blood" was published,
some critics began questioning Capote's reporting.
[man on TV] One local critic said, "Capote has always been a fiction writer."
"He is still a fiction writer."
[Moore] They doubted he could have remembered the long conversations
he quoted word for word without notes or recordings.
I have the auditory version of a photographic memory.
[Moore] William Shawn had flagged his own concerns
during the editing process.
Next to a passage describing a private conversation
between two characters who would later be killed,
Shawn had scrawled in pencil, "How know?"
"No witnesses? General problem."
[intriguing music continues]
-[studio audience applauding] -[Dick Cavett] Sir.
[Moore] Capote faced questions about his work for decades.
The really central question is,
are we supposed to read these things as fiction or not?
You seem to have devised a way to have it both ways now,
so that nobody really knows how to have you, so to speak.
Are you meaning that I'm taking something factual
and then fictionalizing it?
Because that's not what I'm doing at all.
-Hm. -I don't fictionalize it in the least.
[Moore] Capote eventually did acknowledge he invented the final scene,
a graveyard conversation between a detective
and the murdered girl's best friend.
Shawn later said he regretted publishing "In Cold Blood,"
and over the next decades,
the magazine ramped up its fact-checking process
to try to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
-[music fades] -[telephones ringing]
[woman] Okay. And so the morning of the execution date,
two of you would be placed in a holding cell
near the death chamber. Is that right?
[in Arabic] We say you invited Jon Lee over for a cup of tea.
-Was it coffee or tea? -[pensive music playing]
[man in English] We have 29 people
working in the fact-checking department, including me.
We're not just here to get the names and dates right,
though that stuff is incredibly important.
We're here as a stand-in for the reader.
We are always thinking about the context behind a story.
[woman] Erica did not have any teeth,
I'm assuming because of just dental issues in the jail.
Uh-huh.
[Fergus] Everything might be right,
but it might just feel unfair.
[man] What you do is you print out the piece,
and you would underline everything that could be a fact.
It ends up being almost every word.
I guess sometimes the verbs, like "is," might not be checkable.
But then you're like, "Oh, is this person still alive?"
Then it might have to be "was."
And then you'll reach out to the subjects and the sources.
[woman] I wanna make sure we have right
the way you answer the phone when someone calls.
I have, you would say,
"Good afternoon, Sparks Steakhouse. How can I help you?"
Does that sound right?
[Fergus] We fact-check everything published in the magazine.
Covers, cartoons, poems, fiction.
-Yes, cartoons get fact-checked. -[music turns whimsical]
We had a cartoon that had a penguin,
and the caption was something like, "We prefer the term Arctic-Americans."
Some people wrote in, fairly,
and said, "There are no penguins in the Arctic, they're in the Antarctic."
It kind of ruins the joke if there are no penguins in the Arctic.
[Fergus] One cover that, to my great shame,
I let an error slip through,
it's an image of a hot dog vendor lying on a beach.
I was like, "Okay, I'll check and see
whether the shadow of his umbrella is plausible."
"Yes, the shadow is plausible, and I have exerted
all of my fact-checking ability on this cover."
Cleared. Nothing wrong with it. We publish it.
The guy's got two right feet.
Worse than two left feet because we could have made a joke about that.
Just didn't notice.
Terrible!
People love to catch the fact-checkers.
What we will hear very often is the same phrase,
is, "I never thought the New Yorker's vaunted fact-checking department
would stoop this low."
I don't think I've ever seen that adjective used anywhere else,
other than in a letter complaining about an error.
Like, who uses the word "vaunted"?
Mouaz told Jon Lee that an agent of the regime
had killed his family's pigeons.
[Fergus] The job definitely requires a thick skin.
You have to be able to deal with people being unhappy with you.
And they've got good reason to be unhappy, often.
They're about to be represented, sometimes in an unfavorable light,
in a national magazine.
You said that if people come in and talk shit about Trump to you,
you pull up a document that you've made that goes through times when he's lied.
Is that right?
[Fergus] Certainly, it's a bewildering time politically.
There's been a loosening of the idea that politicians should tell the truth.
And that's made us redouble our commitment to what we do.
Personally, I find it incredibly galvanizing.
It feels like the best antidote to the torrent of outrageous lying.
You know?
What better antidote than that to really take care,
to pay attention, and get our facts correct?
-[man] Hello. -Hey, how are you?
-How are you? -What's going on?
-It's great to see you. -Good to see you.
[man] I stumbled into a relationship with The New Yorker
as I was investigating Harvey Weinstein,
and had come to believe that Weinstein was a serial predator,
but hadn't been able to get this published
because a lot of media outlets had been intimidated.
But David saw my work and said, "Yeah, you can finish the reporting here."
So I think we've got a logical slate.
We're going to do these little updates on spyware.
Then I'm basically all Elon.
Are people near Elon Musk leaky?
Well, one of the interesting things we're going to have to contend with
is the circle of people who were leaky last time
are now going to be less leaky.
For me, my beat is power.
And right now,
vast political forces are handing power over to tech billionaires.
Elon Musk… is the richest person who ever lived,
and now he's going to be in charge of, wait for it, efficiency?
[Ronan] Yeah.
There aren't that many places that do
this kind of super-labor intensive, super-confronting journalism.
I mean, they're not activists,
but they are fearless when the facts support it.
[pensive music playing]
Hello there, it's Ronan. Thank you so much for getting back to me.
I'm working on this follow-up on Musk, and…
Right now, in the current political environment,
there's a lack of respect for the independence of the press.
And a willingness to attack reporters for reporting.
That all contributes to a really frightening atmosphere
for reporters and for sources.
So I would really appreciate what you just discussed,
if you're game to send some of those documents and thoughts,
off-the-record.
Being a source in a high-stakes investigative story
is a difficult, serious thing because it can be very dangerous.
I've had stories where I have communicated with a source
only on a burner phone that I purchased with cash
at an anonymous mall far from where I live.
But the moment of getting a big break in a story,
it's this… chef's kiss moment that every reporter dreams of.
But also it's freighted with stress
because it does up the ante for the need to get the story right.
Thanks again for this. I'll be in touch.
Okay, bye.
It is a brutal time for investigative journalism.
But I still believe fiercely in the power of information
because I think informing people is the one hope we have.
[lively music playing]
I pride myself on trying to read, go cover to cover,
because my goal is to learn about stuff I didn't already know.
[man] So it's like a very completist way of--
Yes, it's a completist way, but I can never complete it.
The New Yorker is a tough… You know, it's for smart people.
It's a lot of words. I don't know if you've heard my thoughts on reading.
I like the idea of reading.
I even buy books.
But these books are the most words.
And they don't let up!
Every page, just more words.
[audience laughs]
How about you put some blank pages in there?
Why don't you let me get my head above water for two seconds?
[audience laughs]
-[birds singing and chirping] -[siren wailing]
[lively music playing]
[Moore] As The New Yorker entered the 1980s,
things were ripe for change.
William Shawn, who'd been the editor for 30 years,
was now well into his seventies.
And people joked about the magazine's stodgy style
and its 20,000-word articles on things like the history of rice.
Readers were aging, sales were declining.
And in 1985, SI Newhouse swooped in.
It's official. A man named Newhouse now owns The New Yorker.
He paid $168 million for it.
The directors of the highbrow magazine have agreed to sell out
to S.I. Newhouse Jr.,
whose communications empire includes 29 newspapers, Parade magazine,
and Random House.
[Moore] Twenty months later, Newhouse shocked the literary world
by pushing out William Shawn.
And in 1992, he fired Shawn's replacement, Robert Gottlieb,
and brought in a controversial new leader,
the brash, British, 38-year-old editor of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown.
The editor of this magazine,
Vanity Fair,
has just been named the editor of this magazine,
The New Yorker.
[Moore] Critics worried she would turn the magazine
into just another glossy tabloid.
I say to all those people who are worried
that The New Yorker will lose its standards,
wait and see, because you don't know me yet,
and you don't know my commitment to quality, perhaps,
but you will find The New Yorker only gets better.
[pensive music playing]
[Moore] The magazine threw flashy parties
and published issues dedicated to movies and fashion.
They also broke serious news,
turning over an entire issue to a harrowing exposé,
a massacre in El Salvador by US-trained troops.
Brown said, "Our job is to make the sexy serious,
and the serious sexy."
She recruited a new crop of young journalists,
including Malcolm Gladwell,
Jane Mayer,
Hilton Als,
and a young writer from The Washington Post
named David Remnick.
She changed the look of the magazine as well.
For the first time, they began running photographs
and hired one of the world's most famous photographers,
Richard Avedon, onto the staff.
She made the covers edgier and urgent,
and she welcomed controversy.
In February 1994,
Brown committed an act of blasphemy,
replacing Eustace Tilley,
who'd been on the cover of every anniversary issue
for nearly 70 years,
with a modern twist, drawn by R. Crumb.
Traditionalists were appalled,
but Brown insisted she was just opening a window
and letting fresh air into a stuffy institution.
[Tina Brown] This is Sorel.
It says, "For Tina, who gave life to Eustace."
And it shows me…
waking up Eustace Tilley from his slumber.
I never got this whole Eustace Tilley thing.
I found Eustace Tilley profoundly irritating.
I thought they should have jettisoned it, you know, in 1935.
So these are all my bound copies,
and of course the first one,
October 5th, 1992.
The Ed Sorel cover.
I wanted my first cover to be done by Ed Sorel.
I just said, "Do something which announces that we're new."
And then he comes in with this picture of a punk in a hansom cab,
and it was so clever.
It was what everybody thought.
I was this wrecker, the wrecking ball.
-And they weren't actually wrong. -[lively music playing]
I let go of 71, I think it was, people
over the course of two or three years, and I hired 50.
Tina hired me when I was seven months pregnant,
which was also highly unusual at the time,
which was fantastic.
[Tina] It was almost like a matriarchy.
This group of women, we all had young children, actually,
so it was like a secret society,
in which we had each other's backs, you know?
Like, I knew the names of all their nannies.
[David] Tina is, in some ways, a comet.
She comes in and she changes things.
It was controversial sometimes, but mostly she was right.
The magazine needed desperately to change.
[Tina] After six and a half years at The New Yorker,
I felt that the business side of The New Yorker was slow.
We needed to be expanding in a lateral fashion.
And I remember writing to SI Newhouse
a note saying that we should have a production arm
to do documentaries, to do books and movies,
even maybe a radio show.
He just said, "Tina, stick to your knitting."
[chuckles]
I thought, "Okay." That got me very irritated indeed.
I thought, "Well, maybe it's time for me to move on here."
[poignant music playing]
She got this offer that was, in retrospect, lethal.
[Harvey] It was my idea to create a magazine
that could be a place as a center of thought.
That's the best thing I ever came up with.
The rest of it is Tina Brown.
[David] She got this offer to go into business with Harvey Weinstein,
of all things, to create this thing called Talk magazine,
which was not only going to be a magazine, but it would produce movies and all that.
[crowd cheering]
Thank you all for coming to open Talk.
It was probably the dumbest thing I ever did in my life.
So she left suddenly, you know?
July of '98, gone.
And so there was no editor.
And so SI Newhouse cast around very briefly.
They offered me this job.
And an hour later, I stood in front of the staff and all my colleagues,
and they clapped a little bit, and we went to work.
All right, let's do it.
Dexter's closing today.
-[woman] And Twilley today. -[David] And Twilley.
So today is, uh…
I have no idea what today-- Today's Thursday. Apparently.
We'll start closing pieces, in fact, right now for the anniversary issue,
which is a week and a half away.
This is great.
It's a hell of a lot of work. I hope everybody's still standing.
All right, thanks.
The flurry of closing will be next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
And then it's got to be done by Thursday.
[man] And things seem like they're on schedule?
Basically on schedule.
[lively music playing]
Okay, so I just tend to go around person by person.
And I'll start, and then go to you, and we'll just do it like that.
[Susan] Every piece in The New Yorker
goes through a process called the closing meeting,
where the editor and the writer sit down with a copy editor, the fact-checker,
and go over the piece line by line.
I guess I just want to, um… We have "TV's first collusion."
Should it be "collision with the counterculture"?
I think "collision" sounds like it was almost accidental,
whereas it was a really market-driven thing.
It's a little bit like whack-a-mole.
You think you're done, but little things keep popping up.
-[Dhruv] Want to start? -Yeah. Let's do it.
I didn't have much on the first page.
It can be a stressful experience.
Thinking about, "Did I document this clearly enough?"
"Did I get every detail correct?"
"Mason suggests that humans could one day modify their genes."
Just to make clear he's not suggesting that we do it…
-Right now. -…today.
Okay, I think we should say who the secretary is at some point.
-[man] Yeah. -Um, but…
[Andrew] They can go for hours and hours,
and you sometimes have to order out.
It's not done till it's done.
In the checking section of the office, there used to be this sign that said,
"Better perfect than done."
"Al Franken's mocking."
We need a goofier word there, so I'd like to say "ridiculing."
When a closing is over, I always have this enormous satisfaction
that we have this system, this time-honored system that works.
[man] We did it.
Nice job, guys.
-Congratulations. -[Dhruv] Really amazing.
[Andrew] All right, thanks, guys.
[lively music playing]
Okay, so fiction, that would be set up like this, with a little header here.
So it's not doing the type on the image, as we usually do,
but a more classic layout.
And then we'd love for spots to do a history of Eustace Tilley.
How many thousands of Eustace Tilleys are we going to have? Just wanna know.
[siren wailing distantly]
-Should we do it in there? -They wanna do it in your office.
It's 242 degrees.
The very last thing we do
before sending an issue to press is review the dummy book.
Oh, this is great.
We check the graphics, we check the layout,
and we get a chance to really see what the magazine is going to look like
when it shows up in people's mailboxes.
You just want the clarity of the cartoon, the clarity of that.
But it's also a moment where you can take a nice deep breath
and appreciate what you've got.
It takes a lot. It takes a lot of people.
It takes a lot of argument. It takes a lot of discussion.
-But it's worth it. -["Welcome to New York" playing]
Great. Well, that was easy.
♪ Welcome to New York ♪
♪ It's been waiting for you ♪
♪ Welcome to New York Welcome to New York… ♪
[Moore] In February 2025,
The New Yorker celebrated its 100th birthday.
It marked the occasion with a special double issue
destined to be read and reread,
or perhaps added to that ever-growing stack in the corner.
[man 1 on TV] This marks The New Yorker's 100th anniversary.
[woman] The New Yorker is 100 years old.
[man 2] …which is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
People want to find out more than just ridiculous tweets,
and they want to know what's going on,
and they want fairness and fact-checking and a sense of decency,
and they also want some media outlets that aren't knuckling under.
[audience cheering and applauding]
[Moore] They gathered for a celebration.
These creative, curious, tenacious,
quirky, borderline obsessive individuals.
They gossiped and laughed and toasted each other,
well aware that they stand on the shoulders
of the giants who came before.
["Welcome to New York" continues]
During the magazine's early years,
founding editor Harold Ross was approached by a writer
who wanted to quit.
Ross responded,
"This thing is a movement and you can't resign from a movement."
[David] And I know exactly what he means.
It's not just… this thing that comes out once a week or every day online.
It's… It has a soul.
It has a sense of purpose and decency and quality.
It should be self-questioning. It should learn from experience.
It should be capable of changing its mind.
But it is a movement. It is a cause for high things.
If that sounds sanctimonious, I do not care.
♪ Welcome to New York It's been waiting for you… ♪
[David] Hi. Hey, everybody.
-Diego, you want to go first? -Sure.
[Diego] I think we should do a piece about the rise of the tax credit.
It's not quite sexy enough maybe for a magazine?
♪ Welcome to New York It's been waiting for you ♪
♪ Welcome to New York Welcome to New York ♪
♪ Welcome to New York It's been waiting for you ♪
♪ Welcome to New York Welcome to New York ♪
♪ It's a new soundtrack I could dance to this beat ♪
-♪ Beat ♪ -♪ Forevermore ♪
♪ The lights are so bright But they never blind me ♪
♪ Me ♪
♪ Welcome to New York It's been waiting for you ♪
♪ Welcome to New York Welcome to New York ♪
♪ Like any great love It keeps you guessing ♪
♪ Like any real love, it's ever-changing ♪
♪ Like any true love It drives you crazy ♪
♪ But you know you wouldn't change Anything, anything, anything ♪
-♪ Welcome to New York ♪ -♪ It's a new soundtrack ♪
-♪ I could dance to this beat ♪ -♪ Welcome to New York ♪
♪ The lights are so bright But they never blind me ♪
-♪ Welcome to New York ♪ -♪ New soundtrack ♪
♪ I could dance to this beat ♪
-♪ Welcome to New York ♪ -♪ The lights are so bright ♪
-♪ But they never blind me ♪ -♪ Welcome to New York ♪
♪ So bright, they never blind me ♪
[song fades]