Word: yorkerism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that The New Yorker isn't as good as it used to be, and is developing some perilous habits, requires arguing with success. The magazine's guaranteed circulation, now 480,000 copies a week, is the highest in its 55-year history. Securely fat and prosperous, The New Yorker is gaining advertising pages while many other major weeklies are not. In its lordly way, the magazine offers no special rates or short-term subscriptions, never invites the reader to "bill me later." Editorially, too, The New Yorker courts writers, not readers. Even the word reader-as in "Would...
...magazine in which the reader is only an onlooker has to be pretty special, and The New Yorker is. Too special for many, who dislike its cozy affectations and mannerisms. But those who do admire it, or who once did, regard it as the gathering place of the best writing and cartooning in America, a final arbiter of sophistication. With such feelings, the current magazine generates two kinds of strong responses: an admiration that comes close to uncritical leniency, or an angry sense of betrayal that it has become windier, more boring, less inspired and more complacent than it once...
...magazine so bedazzled by its own tradition-repeating every February its original cover of a dandy, Eustace Tilley, eyeing a butterfly through a monocle-The New Yorker has changed a lot. There have been two New Yorkers. The original reflected its founding genius, Harold Ross. ("Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire," the prospectus said. "It will hate bunk," and would not be "edited for the old lady in Dubuque.") Its clever, brittle style survived the Depression but seemed frivolously out of sync when World War II began. So, war coverage was introduced, culminating...
That was only the beginning. When Ross died and was succeeded by Shawn in 1952, other lengthy reports, some of them prescient, began to appear: Rachel Carson documenting environmental destruction, James Baldwin warning whites of The Fire Next Time. No longer resounding with gaiety and wit, The New Yorker had become a serious magazine with cartoons. For a time, in its outrage over Viet Nam and Nixon, The New Yorker abandoned ironical urbanity and bared its anger. Older readers protested not only the opinions but the shrillness, and for the first time the magazine's circulation fell...
does not draw blood, it is perhaps because Trillin, now a New Yorker staff writer, seems to be writing benevolently with his nose pressed against the office window, looking in. For good or ill, satire requires both savagery and familiarity. The amiable Trillin has been away too long to give the shiv a final twist...