Word: yorkerism
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...supercilious, Oscar Wilde face, with a nose that richly deserved tweaking. It adorned a new publication called The New Yorker, and the smart money said of face and magazine, as Dorothy Parker had once said of a pair of amorous gorillas: "I give them six months...
Half a century later, the smart money has vanished into depressed stocks and inflated currency. And The New Yorker has survived-no, flourished. The upstart has become an establishment, the iconoclast an institution. In his anniversary thesaurus of anecdotes, Here at The New Yorker (TIME, Feb. 24), Brendan Gill describes his 40-year career at the magazine as "playing the clown when the spirit of darkness has moved me and colliding with good times at every turn." It is a deceptive portrait of The New Yorker; like a shaving mirror, it gives only part of the picture. Once upon...
Those words did not always apply to The New Yorker. Santayana once wrote: "All problems are divided into two classes, soluble questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which are insoluble." For many years the magazine took that epigram seriously. Through the Depression and even through the war, Harold Ross, the magazine's legendary founder, preferred not to confront moral issues. "His old dread," recalled the owlish humorist James Thurber, "that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly 'grim,' afflicted his waking hours and his dreams...
Under Ross, the magazine was a unique, unstable amalgam of laughter, arrogance, politesse and information. "If you can't be funny, be interesting," he instructed his staff. To that end The New Yorker set a tone that Critic Malcolm Cowley described as nostalgia mixed with condescension. It acted as if the weekly party-to which the reader was always extended an invitation-would never...
Backstage, some of his staffers called their new editor "the Iron Mouse" because of his self-deprecating manner and his irresistible whim. Slowly, meticulously, that whim widened The New Yorker's concerns and investigations. The world that the reader now entered became far more real and gritty, far less trivial and debonair. To the untutored eye, The New Yorker was the fixture as before; the magazine's makeup remained unaltered. The glittering Van-Cleef & Arpels brooches, the Boehm porcelains, the Rolls-Royces and Mercedes still whispered their seductions from the sidelines. But, incongruously, in the columns that threaded...