The New Yorker

• 1. Introduction

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  The New Yorker debuted on the 21st of February, 1925, with a cover image of a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle. Harold Ross, who had spent time at the humor magazine Judge, wanted to build something entirely different: a sophisticated publication with no patience for what he called "corny" humor. He partnered with his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for The New York Times, and entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann, who had founded the General Baking Company, to launch the venture. They set up offices at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan and registered a company called F-R Publishing.

  In a 1925 prospectus, Ross was blunt about his ambitions. The magazine, he wrote, "is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." That sentence captured the whole gambit: a magazine aimed at a cosmopolitan audience, rooted in New York City, but eventually reaching readers across the country and the world. What followed would reshape American literary culture across the next hundred years.

• 2. Ross and the Early Years

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  Harold Ross shaped the magazine's editorial character for more than a quarter century, editing every issue until his death in 1951. The tone he established was one of cosmopolitan sophistication, though the magazine's early years were occasionally precarious. Ross built systems as well as sensibility: in 1927, after an article about the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay contained multiple factual errors and her mother threatened to sue for libel, the magazine developed the rigorous fact-checking procedures it became famous for. Those procedures were already integral to the magazine's reputation by the 1940s.

  The stakes of publishing were raised dramatically in the years after World War II. John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue, a decision that signaled the magazine's willingness to treat serious journalism with the gravity it deserved. Ross had created space for that ambition alongside the humor, the cartoons, and the urbane vignettes of New York life that filled columns like "The Talk of the Town." When he died, the magazine had already earned a reputation few publications could claim.

• 3. A Century of Writers

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  Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" drew more reader mail than any other piece in the magazine's history, a fact that speaks to the power of the fiction the magazine chose to publish. The list of writers who placed short stories in its pages amounts to a map of twentieth-century American and international literature: Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Alice Munro, John Updike, Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King, Roald Dahl, Dorothy Parker, and John Cheever, among dozens of others.

  The nonfiction was equally wide in scope. Under the long-running section called Profiles, the magazine published portraits of subjects ranging from Ernest Hemingway and Marlon Brando to the mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky and the magician Ricky Jay. Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem reportage appeared in the magazine during the editorship of William Shawn before it was published as a book. Kurt Vonnegut observed that the magazine functioned as an effective instrument for bringing modern literature to a large audience, and Tom Wolfe described its prose style as a "High Baroque" triumph of the relative clause and the appository modifier.

• 4. The Cartoon Universe

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  From the first issue in 1925, cartoons were built into the magazine's DNA. For years the cartoon editor was Lee Lorenz, who began cartooning in 1956 and became a contract contributor in 1958; he served as art editor from 1973 to 1993 and as cartoon editor until 1998. His book The Art of the New Yorker: 1925-1995, published by Knopf in 1995, was the first comprehensive survey of the magazine's visual history.

  A small number of those cartoons broke out of the magazine entirely and entered everyday speech. A 1928 cartoon drawn by Carl Rose and captioned by E. B. White, showing a child refusing to eat broccoli and declaring "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it," gave the Broadway musical Face the Music its Irving Berlin song three years later. The phrase "back to the drawing board" originated with Peter Arno's 1941 cartoon of an engineer walking away from a crashed plane. And Peter Steiner's 1993 drawing of a dog at a computer saying "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" became the most reprinted cartoon in the magazine's history; according to Robert Mankoff, who succeeded Lorenz as cartoon editor in 1998, Steiner and the magazine split more than $100,000 in licensing and reprinting fees from that single image, with more than half going to Steiner.

  Behind the scenes, the cartoon selection process had its own lore. James Thurber described the weekly art meetings where Ross reviewed submissions with the editorial staff. At one point in the early 1940s, the quality of submitted artwork seemed to improve noticeably. It was later discovered that the office boy, a teenage Truman Capote, had been acting as a volunteer art editor, dropping pieces he disliked down the far end of his desk. In 2017, when Mankoff left the magazine, Emma Allen became its youngest editor and its first female cartoon editor.

• 5. Covers That Became Events

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  Saul Steinberg created 85 covers for the magazine over his career, but none traveled as far as his work for the issue dated the 29th of March 1976. The illustration, most commonly known as "View of the World from 9th Avenue," showed Manhattan's own streets rendered in full detail, the rest of the United States compressed to the size of a few city blocks, and the Pacific Ocean barely wider than the Hudson River. It inspired imitators around the world, including the poster for the 1984 film Moscow on the Hudson, which led to a lawsuit. In Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., a federal court held that Columbia Pictures had violated Steinberg's copyright.

  Art Spiegelman, hired by editor Tina Brown in 1992, spent ten years at the magazine and resigned shortly after the 11th of September 2001. His cover for the issue dated the 24th of September 2001, co-created with art editor Françoise Mouly, depicted the silhouettes of the Twin Towers printed in a fifth black ink over a field of black made from the standard four printing inks; an overprinted varnish produced ghost images visible only when the magazine was tilted toward a light. The American Society of Magazine Editors ranked it among the top ten magazine covers of the previous forty years.

  Not every cover was received without controversy. The 21st of July 2008, cover by Barry Blitt, titled "The Politics of Fear," depicted Barack Obama and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office in a way that satirized what editor David Remnick described as "vicious and racist attacks and rumors" circulating in blogs and polls. Obama himself said he understood it as an attempt at satire but did not think it entirely succeeded.

• 6. Editors After Ross

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  William Shawn edited the magazine from 1951 to 1987, a tenure that attracted writers including Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Hannah Arendt. Shawn was, by all accounts, an extremely shy and introverted figure, and his low public profile kept the magazine away from the kind of scrutiny that would follow later.

  Tina Brown's editorship from 1992 to 1998 was markedly different. She introduced color to the editorial pages, ahead of The New York Times, and added photography, reducing the amount of type on each page and producing a more modern layout. She increased coverage of celebrities, business figures, and current events, and added a nightlife column to "Goings on About Town." These changes to a magazine that had looked largely the same for half a century generated more controversy than the tenures of either Shawn or his successor, Robert Gottlieb.

  In 1985, before Brown's arrival, the magazine had been acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., for $200 million, at a time when the magazine was earning less than $6 million a year. David Remnick succeeded Brown in July 1998 and has edited the magazine since. The editorial staff unionized in 2018 and signed its first collective bargaining agreement in 2021.

• 7. Fact-Checking and Style

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  By 2025, about 30 people worked in the magazine's fact-checking department. The Columbia Journalism Review stated in 2019 that no publication has been more consistently identified with rigorous fact-checking than The New Yorker. That reputation was built on a system that traces back to the libel threat over the Edna St. Vincent Millay piece in 1927.

  The magazine's style carries its own quirks that have outlasted generations of editors. Its display typeface, named Irvin after its creator Rea Irvin, appears on the nameplate and headlines. Body text is set in Adobe Caslon. The magazine uses diaeresis marks in words with repeating vowels, writing "reelected" as "reelected" with the two dots and "cooperate" as "cooperate" with the marks, to indicate that the vowels are pronounced separately. It also spells out large numerical amounts in full, writing "two million three hundred thousand dollars" where most publications would write the figure in numerals. These conventions have made The New Yorker's prose instantly recognizable even without the masthead, which lists no editors or staff.

• 8. Into the Digital Century

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  Since the late 1990s, the magazine has used the internet to publish both current material and its archive. Subscribers gained access to the full archive viewable as originally printed. In 2014, the magazine opened online access to its archive more broadly, expanded its website, and launched a paywalled subscription model. Web editor Nicholas Thompson described the goal at the time as making a website that would be "to the Internet what the magazine is to all other magazines."

  The magazine's complete archive was fully digitized in 2025, as part of its centenary publishing efforts. The same year, the documentary The New Yorker at 100 was released. Published 47 times annually, with five issues covering two-week spans, the magazine has won eleven Pulitzer Prizes since 2014, the first year magazines became eligible for the prize. A 2012 Pew Research Center study ranked it highest in college-educated readership alongside The Atlantic and Harper's Magazine. That same readership, according to a 2014 Pew survey, holds strongly left-of-center political views, with 77 percent of readers placing themselves there and 52 percent holding what the survey described as consistently liberal values.