Last month the New Yorker celebrated its 100th anniversary. It’s an impressive achievement because the magazine is the bumblebee of publishing: it flies in the face of prevailing wisdom. Just as the bee’s wingspan was once thought to be too small to keep it airborne, so does our smartphone-blitzed attention span appear too short for what the magazine offers.
Everything about the 10,000-word pieces, learned criticism and meticulous accuracy on which the weekly has built its reputation seems anachronistically at odds with the age of TikTok and X, influencers and instant opinion.
