The New Yorker at 100

This is The Daily Show! I'm Jon Stewart.

We've got a great one for you tonight. David Remnick will be joining me.

He is the editor of The New Yorker magazine.

What an erudite crowd.

Celebrating their 100th year at The New Yorker,

and we'll be discussing the difference between umlauts and diaereses.

I can't believe you have to do the walk.

It'll be great. Are you going to wave?

Yeah.

Please welcome David Remnick! Sir!

A hundred years of The New Yorker.

And this, a special treat. I don't know if you can see this.

It is their swimsuit edition.

Mr. Dewey, Truman Capote from The New Yorker.

- The New Yorker? - Yes, The New Yorker.

Everyone loves the cartoons in The New Yorker.

New York City I like New York City

New York City...

As hundreds of newspapers and magazines struggle to survive,

The New Yorker is doing just fine, thank you very much.

It's only 100 years old? Look what it's done.

The New Yorker won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday

for long-form investigative journalism.

An article by a young chef named Anthony Bourdain

is rocking the restaurant world this week.

Pauline Kael's reviews didn't just change movie criticism,

they changed movies.

Like it

Like it, I like it...

The New Yorker.

Oh, I get it. That's kind of funny.

For people like me from the Midwest,

pick up The New Yorker magazine and get a window into being a New Yorker.

I'm a writer for The New Yorker.

- It's a magazine... - I'm familiar with The New Yorker.

New York City...

Tonight, the Defense Department is on the defensive.

It denies a report in this week's New Yorker magazine.

Controversy today

over the cover of the new issue of The New Yorker magazine.

For the first time, The New Yorker is endorsing a candidate for president.

An editorial in this week's edition...

My home in New York City...

All you'll have for entertainment is that giant stack of New Yorker magazines.

Oh, come on.

You and I both know I'll never read those.

In this New York City

Emily, how are you? You're alive.

Hey, Louisa. How's everybody?

All right, we have a lot, so we should go with some quickness.

There have been a spate of stories about how rich people's favorite asset,

are dinosaur fossils.

Since 2022, there has been a major Adderall shortage.

I think we should do a profile of Koji Murata,

the inventor of the first ever wooden satellite, that is...

Every great story we've done over the past 100 years

starts with a great idea.

Our writers follow these ideas wherever they may lead.

Our editors, working with their writers, of course,

then pick apart and polish every single sentence, every single word.

"...but there wasn't much editorial interference,

comma, at first." Do we need the comma after that?

Then the piece gets sent to our fact-checking department

and goes through a process once compared to a colonoscopy.

We say that the cats' names are Tiger, Lover Boy, and Gummy Bear.

Is that correct?

The New Yorker is a miracle, okay?

The New Yorker is a publication

that publishes a 15,000-word profile

of a musician one week,

or a 9,000-word account from southern Lebanon

with gag cartoons interspersed in them.

Never a photograph on the cover, right?

Not a bikini, not a movie star.

And yet it succeeds.

The fact that this exists and is thriving,

and I insist that it's going to thrive not with one century but two and three,

that's amazing.

Jazz Age, New York.

A city buzzing with financiers and flappers,

big bands,

Babe Ruth,

and over 30,000 speakeasies.

Enter Harold Ross,

the unlikely founder of The New Yorker.

A chain smoker with a talent for profanity,

Ross fell in with a group of semi-employed writers and humorists

who met daily at the Algonquin Hotel for liquid lunch and witty banter.

"All the things I like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening,"

one of his cohorts quipped.

And it was there that Ross and his wife Jane Grant

hatched the idea for a new kind of humor magazine.

It would be a weekly for Manhattan sophisticates,

they told people,

and not for the little old lady in Dubuque.

The irony was that Ross himself was a high school dropout

from a Colorado mining town.

But he recruited his clever friends to write cheeky articles

and cartoons about society and culture.

He hired a designer to create a distinctive typeface

and a mascot that poked fun at the magazine's refined air.

They jokingly named this pretentious dandy Eustace Tilley.

And The New Yorker was born.

The 100 years that followed have been a story of survival,

of stubborn resistance,

bold changes,

and some of the most influential journalism,

fiction, and cartoons of the century.

So our 100th anniversary issue is coming up in a few months

and we have to find something special for the cover.

Until you have the cover, you don't know what the personality of the issue is.

You know, it's not something

that you can just slap on at the last minute.

A cover needs to speak to the moment,

but also be a timeless piece of art

that should be able to be framed and put on a wall.

Frankly, chasing that week after week keeps me up with anxiety,

even after 30 years.

Before I came to The New Yorker,

I ran a graphics magazine with underground cartoonists.

I love working with artists who have each their strong point of view,

each a different style,

each different stories that they want to tell,

and that's what I'm trying to bring to The New Yorker.

For the 100th anniversary,

David Remnick came to me and said,

"We have to use Eustace Tilley from the first cover."

I had to bite my tongue not to say, "Oh, no!"

You know.

I understand the impulse,

but I want to do something innovative and not done before.

So obviously, I have to figure out something.

- We'll see how this goes, man. - It'll be good.

The Talk of the Town is the beginning of the magazine.

It whets your appetite.

They're short pieces.

They're little vignettes or little reported pieces.

Each one tells a little story.

Maybe I go shoot pool with a rock band

or hang out with John Belushi's photographer.

Usually, these pieces are very self-contained,

but the one I'm working on now is more open-ended.

Okay.

You might have noticed that politics are really pulling people apart these days,

so I thought I'd go out and take the temperature of the city.

It's kind of a fishing expedition.

You never know. You go out and pound the pavement and...

see what the talk of the town is.

- It's Mark. Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you.

- I'm a writer for The New Yorker. - All right.

I'm with The New Yorker magazine. You know it?

Once I turn on this mode where I'm looking for people

and interesting things in New York,

it's almost like I've been drugged or something.

Every person looks interesting to me.

It's just... It's like a marvel.

- That's your grandson. - Grandson.

- His little adorable face. - He's adorable. Yeah.

Can I talk to you for a bit about stuff? You want to talk to me?

- No. - You don't want to talk?

- No. Sorry. - You sure? Come on, man!

Flop sweat. Let's go.

I'm a writer for The New Yorker magazine.

You want to talk? Can I ask some questions?

I speak a little bit English.

What's your language?

- Mandarin. - I don't have any Mandarin.

- Hi, my name is Nick. - Hi.

I'm writing a piece about all the stress we're experiencing

over the political situation.

So, what's your vibe?

How's your mood? You sleep at night?

Not really.

Do you have a divided household, by any chance?

Well, interesting you bring it up because we are...

I was talking about the guest list for Thanksgiving.

You just walked into my talk piece.

"How you feeling, NYC?"

"Will we tear ourselves to pieces,

or go on living imperfectly as we have done so many times before?"

We're really squeezing the stone, but...

I think there's a piece in it.

For our 100th anniversary, we decided to do a series of videos.

We're having different writers, artists, thinkers come in

and get a personal history

through their experience of The New Yorker.

We have a chair from our original office.

It's from an original office table.

Nice.

They built them to last, boy.

This is one of the most comfortable chairs I've ever been in.

You see, we lost this art.

We lost the art of carving ass shapes into wood.

See, that's why this is so comfortable, but this is a lost art now.

No one can do this anymore.

Do you happen to have a favorite cartoon

that you particularly love from over the years?

All of Emily Flake's cartoons.

My favorite, it's a woman in a circus

and she's reaching across and on the other side is a lion.