Woke Up This Morning And You Got Yourself A Mag

If you read today's encomium to "The Sopranos" from New Yorker capo David Remnick—"the richest achievement in the history of television"—you'd be hard-pressed not to see certain parallels between Remnick's history of the show with the history of a certain magazine we all know and love. Here's the translation.

Around the time of Tina Brown's departure as editor of The New Yorker, in 1998, a humble newspaperman who has been on the magazine's staff, "reluctantly" visits S.I. Newhouse, chairman of Conde Nast. His name is David Remnick and he has spent a lot of time reporting on Russia. David works as a "modest journalist," as he all too self-deprecatingly informs the owner; in fact, his interests extend to the back of the book, "pop music criticism" from Elizabeth Wurtzel, sports coverage from Chip McGrath's kid, line-editing, sushi lunches, and extensive holdings in Steve Martin humor pieces, Bruce McColl covers, and gabaGopnik. But installed as the head of the New Yorker magazine family, he has been suffering from panic attacks. Business is uneven. His associates and his staff writers lack focus. Kurt Andersen resents his authority.

Bill Buford worries that he'll curtail the fiction editor's access to comely assistants. And his predecessor, the Medea of the East Side, never loved him (and may yet give the Weinsteins signal to have him whacked). The pressure is really something. Just recently, he tells Newhouse, he was short of breath, tingly inside—"It felt like ginger ale in my skull. But, you know, I'm not crazy like Kinsley."

REMNICK: The morning of the day I got the job, I been thinking. It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came in too late for that, I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.

NEWHOUSE: Many Nasties, I think, feel that way. That's why there's so much turnover.

TONY: I think about Robert Gottlieb. He never reached the heights like me. But in a lotta ways he had it better. He had his people. They had their standards. They had pride. Today, whadda we got?

NEWHOUSE: Something close to profitable. Or else it'd better be soon.

And so began David's quest for a renewed sense of family, heritage, coherent truths, mental health, and a prime cut of the subscription market. The New Yorker, the richest achievement in the history of general interest magazines, sails on after nearly a decade with Remnick at the helm. It has been with us a long time—longer than the Bush Administration (and nothing seems more interminable than that).

In his first year in charge, Remnick played the Brown role, slightly refined and with a highbrow lightness to his staff changes. He had not yet achieved the Godlike air of untouachability that would come with fifteen thousand ASME awards. We'd yet to glimpse his innovations, and his accent was more British, less Yiddish.

Nevertheless, to an astonishing degree the characters and the ideas—comic, dramatic, and social—in the New Yorker were in place from the start. Even though its creator, Remnick never had the luxury of a Murdochian unlimited budget, he has rarely faltered (unless you consider the Caitlin Flanagan thing, which, let's face it, was a massive fuck-up, and its a good thing she ended up in a shallow grave, no matter how upset Christopher was). The magazine evolved in the manner of a sprawling general interest magazine of the twentieth century, constantly sprouting new plotlines, developing recurring joke contests, images, and characters. Willie Morris would have seen a kinsman in the creator of Jim "Hey, If Gladwell Can Do It, So Can I" Surowiecki. Besides, there are fewer dull patches in The New Yorker than there are in Morris' Harper's—all due respect.

No matter how funny or blatantly cartoonish some of the supporting players are (Adam Gopnik seems less like a human being than a parody of some automaton who has somehow won a job for life through the world's most unlikely lottery), the writers and their editors in The New Yorker are a recognizable reflection of all of us. The magazine is peopled with every variety of twenty-first-century character imaginable: Menands, yes, but also shadow communities of smug and equally troubled Sedari, disillusioned Talk of the Town reporters, neurotic legal writers, that broad who's always going on about the environment and how bad global warming is, etc. Other magazines have guests, character types who make a purposeful one-issue stand and are then replaced with new types in new situations. In The New Yorker, characters arrive and take full human shape; children grow into adults—and sometimes, without explanation, like a Russian mobster fleeing through the snowy woods of the Pine Barrens, they inexplicably stick around and frustrate our reading-shaped need for lessons and resolution. It doesn't matter that we come to "hate" David Denby. Remnick has no use for our sentiment. He keeps alternating him with the brilliant Anthony Lane, making every other week an experiment in agony.

Everyone in The New Yorker has grown older (and we along with them). One after another, the made men and staff members disappear from the stage—an accelerated version of what happens naturally. "Hope comes in many forms," Newhouse tells Remnick in one of their first sessions. "Well, who's got the time for that?" he replies. "No one who's read that John McPhee chalk essay, that's for fucking sure," says Newhouse.

The end is a mystery, but we know one thing: The New Yorker defies Aristotelian conventions. It is a comedy that ends with a litany of the dead and missing. Sorta like an Andy Borowitz Shouts and Murmurs. Whaddya gonna do? ♦

The Family Guy [NYer]

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