The New Yorker

I was in The New Yorker offices, on the 20th glass-sheathed floor of the Conde Nast building in Times Square, one Friday in April.

“He circles the floor several times a day and talks to people.”

The week’s issue had just closed, and the place was quiet. People stared at their screens, catching up with all the things they’d had put off during the recent editorial flurry. Remnick was having his picture taken, so I said hello to Pam McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor, whose office is next to Remnick’s. What is he like to work with? I asked her.

“He’s easygoing, and he’s not,” said McCarthy. “He likes to keep his finger on every detail. He really pushes until it’s right. He’s a great floorwalker. He circles the floor several times a day and talks to people.”

Just then Remnick came in with Alexa Cassanos, the director of publicity, and the four of us talked about earphones and earplugs. “In Maine why would you need earplugs?” Remnick asked me. (I live in Maine.) ‘When I’m out of the city,” he continued, “I’m up till four in the morning because it’s so damned quiet. I think somebody’s going to jump in and strangle me. It’s not relaxing.”

“I’m up till four in the morning because it’s so damn quiet.”

We walked a few blocks to a seafood restaurant, Esca, on 43rd Street, where Remnick goes once in a while. Mark Singer, one of the magazine’s best-known writers of profiles, wrote a piece on Esca’s owner, Dave Pasternack, who does his own fishing around Long Island and knows how to cut mahi-mahi into raw tidbits.


Pasternack himself came by the table soon after we’d sat down and told us that he’d opened up a new business – a seafood concession in centre field of the Mets baseball stadium, where he sells crabcakes, fish sandwiches, lobster rolls, and chowders.

Jeff Wilpon, the general manager of the Mets, lost a alot of money several years ago to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but, according to Pasternack, Wilpon was upbeat about his life.

“I was at a party the other day,” Pasternack said “and I go, ‘How’re you doing?’ Wilpon goes, “I was rich and miserable and now I’m poor and happy.'”

“Are you sure about the latter?” asked Remnick.

Suddenly I had a strange and not unpleasant sensation. I’d entered the printed pages of The New Yorker; I was physically inhabiting a Mark Singer profile, as edited by David Remnick.

All I could think about is: when you’re born they give you toast, and on your deathbed they give you toast. Who in this world doesn’t like toast? When you’re sick they give you toast!””I get cartoons about toast every week,” said Remnick.

“Yeah?” said Pasternack.

“I got a cartoon,” said Remnick, “it was a toaster the size of the restaurant.” He turned to me. “Do you waste your time watching baseball?”

I said no, not really, I’m out of it.
Remnick said “I’m sure that when I’m on my deathbed…”

“You’re going to have toast,” said Pasternack, with finality. Then he went away to fillet more fish.

He grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey – “Springsteen Jersey, without the shore” – and his mother got multiple sclerosis when he was six. Some years later, his father, a dentist, became ill with Parkinson’s disease. “To be a Parkinsonian dentist is like a Buster Keaton movie,” Remnick told me. “It’s funny unless you’re living it.” In high school he edited the school paper, The Smoke Signal, writing articles for it under several pseudonyms.

He wasn’t a devoted The New Yorker reader then. “Guitar Player” magazine meant more to me in high school than The New Yorker, he said. “There were no chord diagrams in The New Yorker.”He studied comparative literature at Princeton and took a class with The New Yorker writer John McPhee, who taught him that you have to be willing to seem stupid when you interview people. He spent a semester in Japan, teaching English and feeling lonely.

To be a Parkinsonian dentist is like a Buster Keaton movie. It’s funny unless you’re living it

He also went to Paris, where he wore a Leon Russell T-shirt and nine-dollar Converse sneakers and made money singing Bob Dylan songs in the Metro. His Princeton classmates were all getting jobs as investment bankers; he got a job at The Washington Post, as the night crime reporter. He covered boxing for a while, and then, as he limbered up, he interviewed celebrities in their hotel rooms. He was good, something of a prodigy in fact – a natural reporter, nimble and prompt with copy.

The Washington Post sent him to Russia in 1988, with his new wife, where he covered, with astonishing fecundity, every phase of the disintegration of the Soviet empire. He wrote somewhere between 300 and 400 stories a year, watching and learning from Bill Keller, the fast-fingered Russian correspondent for The New York Times, now its editor-in-chief.

Framed in Remnick’s office is the front page of The Washington Post for 24th August 1991, which has two Remnick stories. The top one begins: “Communist rule collapsed tonight in the Soviet Union after seven decades as President Michael Gorbachev resigned as Communist Party general secretary and ordered the government to seize all party property”.

“A lot of what I do is just the mental illness of persistence”

By then Remnick was freelancing for Esquire and Vanity Fair, and then staff-writing for Tina Brown’s The New Yorker, writing one telling profile after another – on Don DeLillo, on Mike Tyson, on Benjamin Netanyahu. On Netanyahu’s father, Remnick wrote, “has little white tufts of hair and weary, narrow eye, the eyes of a Chinese Scholar”. On Tyson’s fight with Evander Holyfield: “Incredibly, Tyson once more nuzzled his way into Holyfield’s sweaty neck, almost tenderly, purposefully, as if he were snuffling for truffles. He found the left ear and bit.” Remnick is modest about these writing successes, which he attricutes chiefly to “sitzfleisch” – the capacity to sit in a chair until the work is done. “A lot of what I do is just the mental illness of persistence,” he told me.

When the staff heard the news they stood and applauded for five minutes. “It was an applause of relief,” according to Remnick. “It was like the inner applause when you go to the neurologist and you find out that you don’t have a brain tumour.” The job wasn’t easy at first – he lost ten pounds in the first couple of months. It still isn’t easy. “You have to understand,” he said, “for me to be at this magazine is preposterous. I feel like a pretender.”

Actually, though, he’s the real thing: a great, omnivorous editor. He takes The New Yorker’s history seriously – he’s edited a series of anthologies of themed The New Yorker pieces from earlier eras – but he is just as determined that, in the era of blogs and iPads, he won’t be the last of the magazine’s master of ceremonies.

One of his biggest hits came in 2004: Seymour Hersh’s reporting on abuse in Abu Ghraib. He also brought Ian Frazier, a comic genius, back into the fold – Frazier had been on strike, more or less, during Tina’s tumultuous tenure – and he found and encouraged some good new writers, among them Ben McGrath, who can write deftly about anything, including football concussions and theorists of dystopian collapse.

After 9/11 Remnick had an odd (to me) burst of militancy, as so many did, writing with approval on the attack on Afghanistan, and, in famous comment piece in ‘Talk of the Town’, endorsing the invasion of Iraq. “I was wrong,” he told me, about Iraq. He wants his magazine to get truths out.

I asked him what he would have done if Julian Assange had offered him a basketful of Wikileaks documents. Of couse he would publish them, he said – he’d let the courts sort it out later. “I think the world is better off knowing than not knowing.”

Remnick left me in his office while he did an afternoon circle of the 20th floor. I took some pictures of his bookshelves – hundreds of works by The New Yorker contributors past and present, books in Russian, a well-thumbed copy of the poems of WaltWhitman, and a recent run of the magazine bound in black and gold. Then I looked out of the window at a sign that said Toshiba in big letters, and another sign for Thomson Reuters. Down the street was the tarnished green roofline of the old The New York Times building, one of the seemingly few structures in the neighbourhood that was there when the magazine began. I looked at a snapshot of Remnick’s wife and children, at a small plastic windup radio, at a framed photograph of Updike, at another of Ornette Coleman, at hundreds of CDs, and at a nesting doll of Vladimir Putin, whose profile he wrote in 2003. On his desk was “the long” – the single big piece of paper with all the stories on it thatwere in the hopper, ready to go into future The New Yorkers. I felt like a trespasser, like a spy, too high up in the Manhattan skyline for my own good. I heard the discreet bong of a ringing phone. Remnick walked me to the elevators. “Remember what Barbara Walters said at the end of the Jimmy Carter interview?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Be kind to us, Mr President.”