had penetrated into a circle of acknowledged ruin.” The word ruin there was so amazingly good and well placed—“acknowledged ruin.” And maybe it was that I gave it a special inflection as I read it aloud, but I don’t think so. My daughter said, “Oh, that’s good.” Right at that moment. She liked and she was excited by the very same phrase in the story that I’d been excited by. It seemed so reassuring to know that there is sometimes an absolute moment in a story that many people will independently discover and remember, even across generations, and that this may have been one of those moments. I wished I had told him that in a letter. And now I’ll never get to tell him that. So I tell it to you. With sorrow. Thank you.
(2009)
David Remnick
D avid Remnick is fifty-two. He’s got all of his hair, which is black, and he’s got an office with quiet brown carpeting and a desk made of a slab of grainy black wood and a fat-rimmed yellow ceramic cup that holds his pens and his pair of scissors. He’s smart and quick to laugh, and if you sit in one of the square soft chairs in his office, he remembers things about your life that you barely remember. He likes baseball and The Wire and A. J. Liebling and spaghetti with squid ink sauce. You might feel jealous of him except that he works too hard and nobody else would want that kind of constant hellish weekly pressure. His wife, Esther Fein, is a writer, and he’s got three kids. He’s the fifth editor of The New Yorker, which may be the best magazine ever published.
I’ve met Remnick a few times, briefly. Once was at a party where he was chatting about boxing to the novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Another time was in 2001, at the National Magazine Awards. That year his magazine won four awards, including the award for general excellence. Remnick kept striding up to the podium as we applauded him, wearing an impeccable blue suit and David Mamet-style glasses,and each time he found some new way to be abashed and thankful, as he was handed yet another copper-colored trophy designed by Alexander Calder, the mobile-maker. (It’s called an Ellie and it looks like several modernist boomerangs glued together.)
The awards are deserved, but they don’t convey how consistently good his magazine is. Remember, it’s a weekly. Every Monday it’s in the mail, or in the newsstand, or on a little flat screen, reassuring a million subscribers that things are still pretty much under control in the transatlantic world of letters. There are always at least a few funny cartoons, and one absorbing piece about something or another, and perhaps a brilliantly dismissive movie review by Anthony Lane, who sharpened his pencil at the Independent before Tina Brown, Remnick’s predecessor, lured him away. I confess I don’t read it all—few can—but let me just say it right now: The New Yorker is one of the three great contributions the United States has made to world civilization. The other two are, of course, Some Like It Hot and the iPhone. Maybe you have your own list. But it’s likely The New Yorker will be on it somewhere, because the magazine has been sharp and witty since the 1920s, angling unexpected adjectives in place with winning exactitude.
Its tone, from the outset, was, as John Updike described it in an onstage interview with Remnick, “big-town folksy.” E. B. White was one of the early sources of the style—along with James Thurber and Joseph Mitchell, and an alcoholic named John McNulty, who wrote stories about regulars at a bar on Third Avenue. Later there was Maeve Brennan, from Ireland, who wrote beautiful unfurling paragraphs about living in cheap hotels in the city, using as her byline “The Long-Winded Lady.” Brennan was evidently a littlecrazy toward the end, as writers tend to be, but in her “Talk of the Town” prose she is extremely sane and full of kind attentiveness.
And there were the cartoonists—Peter Arno, who liked drawing high-breasted
(2009)
David Remnick
D avid Remnick is fifty-two. He’s got all of his hair, which is black, and he’s got an office with quiet brown carpeting and a desk made of a slab of grainy black wood and a fat-rimmed yellow ceramic cup that holds his pens and his pair of scissors. He’s smart and quick to laugh, and if you sit in one of the square soft chairs in his office, he remembers things about your life that you barely remember. He likes baseball and The Wire and A. J. Liebling and spaghetti with squid ink sauce. You might feel jealous of him except that he works too hard and nobody else would want that kind of constant hellish weekly pressure. His wife, Esther Fein, is a writer, and he’s got three kids. He’s the fifth editor of The New Yorker, which may be the best magazine ever published.
I’ve met Remnick a few times, briefly. Once was at a party where he was chatting about boxing to the novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Another time was in 2001, at the National Magazine Awards. That year his magazine won four awards, including the award for general excellence. Remnick kept striding up to the podium as we applauded him, wearing an impeccable blue suit and David Mamet-style glasses,and each time he found some new way to be abashed and thankful, as he was handed yet another copper-colored trophy designed by Alexander Calder, the mobile-maker. (It’s called an Ellie and it looks like several modernist boomerangs glued together.)
The awards are deserved, but they don’t convey how consistently good his magazine is. Remember, it’s a weekly. Every Monday it’s in the mail, or in the newsstand, or on a little flat screen, reassuring a million subscribers that things are still pretty much under control in the transatlantic world of letters. There are always at least a few funny cartoons, and one absorbing piece about something or another, and perhaps a brilliantly dismissive movie review by Anthony Lane, who sharpened his pencil at the Independent before Tina Brown, Remnick’s predecessor, lured him away. I confess I don’t read it all—few can—but let me just say it right now: The New Yorker is one of the three great contributions the United States has made to world civilization. The other two are, of course, Some Like It Hot and the iPhone. Maybe you have your own list. But it’s likely The New Yorker will be on it somewhere, because the magazine has been sharp and witty since the 1920s, angling unexpected adjectives in place with winning exactitude.
Its tone, from the outset, was, as John Updike described it in an onstage interview with Remnick, “big-town folksy.” E. B. White was one of the early sources of the style—along with James Thurber and Joseph Mitchell, and an alcoholic named John McNulty, who wrote stories about regulars at a bar on Third Avenue. Later there was Maeve Brennan, from Ireland, who wrote beautiful unfurling paragraphs about living in cheap hotels in the city, using as her byline “The Long-Winded Lady.” Brennan was evidently a littlecrazy toward the end, as writers tend to be, but in her “Talk of the Town” prose she is extremely sane and full of kind attentiveness.
And there were the cartoonists—Peter Arno, who liked drawing high-breasted
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