The New Yorker’s 100th Celebration: Video Of Interest… David Remnick On The Daily Show
Here’s The New Yorker‘s editor, David Remnick on The Daily Show, talking New Yorker history and current politics with Jon Stewart.
Nice seeing Eustace Tilley there too!
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Great Book: The Complete Book Of Covers From The New Yorker: 1925-1989
Back in the late 1980s, when Knopf was about to publish this weighty tome, I was sitting at a kitchen table in upstate New York with a several fellow New Yorker contributors, and a few non-contributors, including Jules Feiffer (he didn’t begin contributing to the magazine until 1992). I mentioned to the table there was a book of New Yorker covers coming out soon. Feiffer howled, in his humorous way: “A book of New Yorker covers! Who would buy that?!” Well…I would, and did.
The book was, I believe, a wonderful gift from The New Yorker itself. I turn to it several times a week, either while researching, or just for enjoyment. Long ago, Lee Lorenz, the former New Yorker art editor, pointed out the book’s one error to me: George Price, who had one cover, was left out of the Index. His cover is, thankfully, included in the collection.
Besides being a fabulous and handy (though heavy) research tool it is also an historical marker in the magazine’s now one hundred year timeline. Just a few years after its publication, the magazine’s art department would undergo an unprecedented change. Under the newly appointed editor Tina Brown (who arrived in 1992), the position of art editor would be split into several positions: cartoon editor, art editor, and illustrations editor, with the art editor now responsible for the covers. It was at this point that the primary source of the cover art — the magazine’s cartoonists, who contributed over 60% of the published covers from the magazine’s birth — was replaced, nearly wholesale, by illustrators new to the magazine (the magazine’s cartoonists in 2025 make up perhaps 4% or 5% of the cover contributors). The switch resulted in a new approach to the magazine’s cover art, editorially, with current events more often than not featured as part of Ms. Brown’s hunt for “buzz.” John Updike, who wrote the Foreword to The Complete Covers book said this, in part: “Whatever it [The New Yorker cover] is, it is not quite like anything else that art and commerce have brought forth; if it didn’t exist, we would not know that it could.” Here then, in this Complete Covers collection are covers not designed to scream from the newsstand, nor make headlines — it’s a reminder of New Yorker times past.