New Yorker Magazine

The New Yorker, 20 West 43rd Street, New York NY 10036, Tel: 212-840-3800.

New British editor Tina Brown, who made Vanity Fair the "hot book" of the 80s, has made her presence felt at the venerable New Yorker. Some of her innovations seem overdue. The old New Yorker never deigned to notice its readers; the new one prints occasional brief letters. Brown also runs by- lines above formerly anonymous columns; prints cartoon captions that reflect the funkiness of contemporary English; and even uses photographs -- often arty, vaguely soft-porn portraits by the legendary Richard Avedon. Everything is briefer, more up-tempo.

But one needn't be an old-New Yorker cultist to feel uneasy about certain other changes. Most noticeably, the magazine now runs heavily to the kind of soft-focus "personality journalism" Brown specialized in at Vanity Fair. Politically, the new "New Yorker" has also become a Clinton house organ, its tone set by talented Clintonista writers Sidney Blumenthal and Rick Hertzberg. (Brown knows which side her piece of bread is greased on; in the 80s, Vanity Fair sucked up to the Reaganites.) Good investigative pieces continue to appear -- when Republicans wind up as the goats. But don't expect to read about those mysterious 80s drug flights in and out of Mena, Arkansas. -- Steve Badrich

Compile a name index for this source

Search the NameBase site: While the best way to search for names is to use NameBase, most can also be found here by using only first and last name, separated by a single space, with no quotation marks.

try a NameBase search home page register