Officially, there is no such thing as the New Yorker masthead. The New Yorker is so averse to having a masthead that The New Yorker will not even comment about why it chooses not to have a masthead.
As a result, the people who make the magazine have spent generations veiled by the fictitious persona Read More
It was a gala day in the spare rehearsal room on West 43rd
Street, just a block from a muted Times Square. Four slightly dissolute actors
in their 20′s stood in a row: three men in faded jeans and ratty T-shirts, one
woman in chunky glasses with a green highlighterhanging from her mouth.
“Marxes!” Read More
There may not be much new material in Tom Wolfe’s latest collection, Hooking Up , perhaps accounting for why the only type on the book cover is the author’s name (bright red over a canary-yellow background, with a string of interlocking rings running vertically across). The title piece, an essay on life at the millennium, Read More
A few months ago, I reviewed in these pages a book of memoirs by Michael Korda, in which I turn up as a good guy. Now, Renata Adler has written a book- Gone: The Last Days of ‘The New Yorker’ -in which I’m one of the bad guys. Renata’s editor is Michael Korda, and her Read More
Ernest Hemingway was stupid. Haven’t you heard? It’s right there, in the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine .
Hemingway has been called a lot of things over the years–vain, anti-Semitic, sexist–and now this.
This ultimate insult comes as an aside in an article on the supposed resurgence of American short fiction in the 90′s. Read More
As Liz Smith wrote the other day, you can get in a fistfight for saying that Lillian Ross had a right to publish Here but Not Here: A Love Story , her memoir of her long adulterous romance with the late William Shawn. Leading critics have called her tasteless and cruel just for telling her Read More
Whenever Time magazine runs one of its “Is Feminism Dead?” cover stories (there have been no less than 119 articles in the magazine sticking pins in feminism during the last 25 years), you can be sure we are in for a resurgence of feminism-even though the f-word itself may be out of style. It’s not Read More
Shelby Coffey III left his Upper West Side apartment on the morning of June 8 and, accompanied by his wife Mary Lee, headed to 47 West 66th Street for his first big day on the job as executive vice president of ABC News. What he would be doing once he got there, he didn’t really Read More
Love stories are never simple. Even for the most conventional couples, there are at least three versions of the story: his, hers and theirs. In the case of William Shawn, the late editor of The New Yorker who was married for 64 years to the former Cecille Lyon, there turns out to have been not Read More
