Word: yorkerism
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...YORKER is probably the only magazine in America that does not publish a masthead, the theory being that readers are supposed to know who's who on the staff. So, of course, when the magazine reached its 50th birthday with last week's issue, it did not actually announce the occasion on its cover, or anywhere else in the magazine. That sort of self-promotion is for other magazines: for The New Republic, whose cover logotype recently sported a superimposed "60th Year" in colored ink; for People, whose publisher spends a full page in the current issue celebrating the magazine...
...masthead, no birthday announcement. But The New Yorker is probably right about that, readers do know what's going on. The magazine quickly sold out at all three Harvard Square newsstands last week, proof that sophisticated aesthetes saw the February 24 issue for what it was: a silent collector's item. It was fat with the work of such New Yorker deities as E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, Brendan Gill, John Updike and Pauline Kael--some of them dragged from retirement for this circumspect celebration. That was a clue, of course all of those whimsical hot shots, together in one issue...
...Yorker ran those lines in its first issue, and again on its 25th birthday. To the aesthete who reached page 134, then, it was a simple Q.E.D: this was the 50th anniversary issue...
...course, the 50th anniversary issue didn't exactly take readers by surprise. For weeks there had been rumblings that it was coming, that this was the big year. In early February, veteran New Yorker writer Brendan Gill published a thick volume called Here at The New Yorker, a sort of semi-official biography of the magazine. Every review carefully noted that it was a 50th birthday, ode to The New Yorker, and in the reviews, the magazine enjoyed an almost embarrassing free ride. Critics tripped over each other to salute The New Yorker's prestige, to rhapsodize about its cerebral...
...nowhere in this avalanche of praise, and nowhere in Gill's book, is there mention of an unpleasant reality, something that those lucky enough to buy the 50th anniversary issue discovered as they turned its elegant, ad-riddled pages. The New Yorker has become--maybe it's always been-boring. The "Talk of the Town" section with its plural-voiced inanities, the epic profiles of dull people, the humor pieces heavier with syrup than satire--this is what fills The New Yorker. Get rid of the cartoons--the work of Lorenz, Geo. Price, Charles Addams--and there is not much...