Word: yorkers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...current scarcity of humor and fiction, which he sees as symptomatic of the times: "The problem is to find enough that fits our standards." Fiction can range widely from I.B. Singer's shtetl in Poland to the adulterous suburbia of John Cheever. But there is a recognizable New Yorker kind of story. It usually involves a middle-class woman who registers a sad little recognition after some incident in which not very much happened...
When abuse by length comes up, the name of Elizabeth Drew quickly surfaces. In two issues last fall, her coverage of the presidential campaign ran on each time through more than 25 New Yorker pages. Another article, threading its way through the usual glossy ads (as exemplified by the fox jacket for $6,795 at Bloomingdale's, the eight-day chronometer for $17,350 at Tiffany), stretched for 59 interminable New Yorker pages. Drew was allowed to indulge in that slackest kind of writing, the day-by-day journal. Anyone not intensely interested in politics could hardly be expected...
Drew, like many of the present generation of New Yorker reporters, writes pile-on sentences that mock the magazine's pride in being well written...