The New Yorker Makes a Shrine to Itself | The American Spectator

The New Yorker was founded in 1925 as a humor weekly — a whimsical little Roaring Twenties bauble written largely by members of the fabled Algonquin round table for sophisticated urban readers. When its founding editor, the ribald Colorado-born newspaperman Harold Ross, died in 1951, the top job passed to the dour, buttoned-up William Shawn, during whose 36-year reign the magazine ballooned in size (thanks largely to lucrative ads from Tiffany, Bonwit Teller, and other spiffy Fifth Avenue emporia), acquired a staid, serious, often ex cathedra tone, and became a key staple of culturally aspirational postwar households in and around New York as well as in the nation’s more affluent suburbs.
So it’s simply bizarre to hear Remnick enthuse so nauseatingly over his magazine and, implicitly, over himself.
The relatively brief editorships of Robert Gottlieb, a longtime literary editor at Simon & Schuster and Knopf, and the celebrity-focused Tina Brown, who came to The New Yorker from Vanity Fair, were succeeded in 1998 by the reign of David Remnick, who has steered it through a tough era for high-end glossies and who remains at the helm as this relic turns 100.
It’s Remnick, as it happens, who’s at the center of Marshall Curry’s new Netflix offering The New Yorker at 100. In fact, the documentary is a veritable love letter to the guy. Which is unfortunate, because this film could have been an engaging overview of a century’s worth of reportage, fiction, poems, humorous essays, cartoons, profiles, and reviews of everything from books to movies to art, in addition to a fun look behind the scenes at the practical aspects of how such a product is put together, week after week.
Instead, it’s in surprisingly large part a slavering portrait of Remnick, focusing largely on his mind-bogglingly predictable politics — which is, admittedly, relevant, given that when he took over, The New Yorker became, above all else, a hard-core outlet for left-wing propaganda. Yes, it had always…