All the runaway spending finally reached a crisis point in 1998, in the form of an investigative report by the Fortune magazine writers Joseph Nocera and Peter Elkind. In a way that few others had done before, the journalists threatened to puncture the plush mystique that Si and his editors had carefully cultivated around their magazines. For all the tales of excess spending, zero-interest mortgages, Concorde flights, and eye-watering budgets, Fortune had uncovered an inconvenient fact: Condé Nast did not make much money.
The world’s most glamorous magazine publisher had ended 1996 with $55 million in profit on $750 million in revenue. When Nocera and Elkind tallied up the losses at The New Yorker, which at the time was still housed in a separate division of Advance Publications, the profit margin across all of the Newhouse magazines nosedived to roughly 5 percent. (At the time, other magazine companies had margins that were three to four times higher.) Fortune reported that Cosmopolitan, the flagship monthly at buttoned-up rival Hearst, made about as much money in 1997 as every Condé Nast title combined.
The Newhouses’ private ownership model had always shrouded the internal economics of their magazines, and Si and Donald’s determination to keep their business under family control meant that public disclosure rules did not apply. But it had never been spelled out in such black-and-white terms the degree to which Condé Nast remained Si’s plaything, a glamorous money pit bankrolled by the Newhouses’ far more lucrative holdings in newspapers and cable television. Some Condé executives speculated that the family viewed its entire magazine division as a useful tax write-off. “The money was in the newspapers that Donald ran,” recalled one former executive. “Condé Nast was the beautiful pretty girl you have on your arm—the glam, the fun, the reputation and prestige. Frankly, they didn’t care whether it made money.” Si had purchased The New Yorker, GQ, and Architectural Digest, invented Self and Allure and Traveler, and overseen the advent of the Vanity Fair Oscar party and Vogue’s annexation of the Met Gala. The chic little business his father had bought was now an empire. But for all the influence the magazines wielded, the Newhouse brothers’ rough financial formula remained the same: Donald made the money, and Si spent it.
The Fortune article proved especially embarrassing for Steve Florio, the brash-talking publisher and favored corporate son of Si, who in 1994 had been named president of Condé Nast. Queens-born and Long Island–raised, the tall and bearish Florio carried himself with a salesman’s braggadocio. He was central casting’s idea of an eighties businessman: bushy mustache, double-breasted suits with gold buttons, a carouser with an office stocked with sailboat paraphernalia who ate nearly every lunch at the Four Seasons. Like many of his fellow Condé strivers, Florio was the author of his own myth. Over the years, he had claimed to have served in the military, played minor-league baseball, earned an MBA, studied premed, and spent a year after college “as a career counselor in some of the tougher neighborhoods in New York, convincing kids with backgrounds similar to mine to stay in school.” The Fortune reporters discovered that none of this was true. Florio had also frequently fibbed to the press about The New Yorker’s financial performance, claiming that the magazine was raking in cash when it was actually bleeding out.
When Fortune approached Condé Nast’s publicity department for comment about all this dissembling, a spokeswoman offered up a matter-of-fact explanation: “The company policy back then was to say we’re not losing money.”
After all, Condé’s success was predicated on its expert curation of a kind of American fantasy life. Why not extend this worldview to the bottom line, too?
Inside the company, Florio’s reputational issues extended beyond doubts about his truthfulness. He was a fount of dirty jokes and sexual banter, in a manner that would never fly in today’s corporate world and barely flew then. One editor recalled Florio throwing a party for advertisers during New York’s Fleet Week, and sending word to Vogue that he needed young female assistants to attend as eye candy for the clients. The same editor observed Florio, during an office evacuation shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, hugging young women on the ad sales team as they loitered on the sidewalk.
Florio’s chauvinist behavior set the tone for Condé’s macho business side, which stood out against the more feminine spaces of its lifestyle magazines, many of which were led by female editors in chief. One high-ranking female editor kept a private file at her desk of Florio’s more offensive comments and misdeeds; given the mercurial atmosphere at Condé, she figured it would boost her leverage in negotiating an exit package in case she ever found herself abruptly fired. Florio, for his part, made no apologies about his hyperaggressive style. “I was not short on nerve or ego, and I carried a heavy chip on my shoulder,” he wrote in a proposal for a memoir that he later abandoned. “I was, after all, Steve Florio: the Godfather, the Samurai, the leader, the warrior.”
Si liked warriors. He had been drawn to bruisers since childhood, when he cultivated Roy Cohn as his friend and protector. Tongue-tied as a boy, Si may have appreciated the security of a silver-tongued spokesman; he also had a fascination with gangster movies, with their romantic portrayals of the heavy. The blue-collar Florio represented the striver that Si, for all his wealth, still identified with—that grinding mentality that Sam Newhouse had embodied, too. “Si likes it when people are controversial; it adds a little excitement to his life,” recalled Eddie Hayes, a longtime lawyer and fixer for Condé Nast. “Si likes tough guys.”
At a company where perception trumped everything, it was no surprise that the sales guys crafted their public image as meticulously as any editor in chief. They lived as large as the fashionistas they serviced, wearing bespoke Italian suits and lunching at the Four Seasons. Florio, whose BMW license plate read “MAGAZINE,” hosted corporate retreats at the posh Ocean Reef Club in Florida, where one year he distributed a color headshot of himself, complete with a silver frame, as a keepsake for the attendees. (“I’m going to keep it visibly displayed where I can look at it for inspiration,” one publisher quipped.) He bought a boat that he sailed around Long Island Sound, where he finagled a membership to the WASPy Seawanhaka Yacht Club, not far from his palatial home in Oyster Bay.
Another tough guy was Ron Galotti, a Montecristo-smoking, Zegna-suited salesman who emerged as Florio’s rival for Si’s affection. Galotti was the son of a liquor store owner in Peekskill, New York, whose father died when he was nine; he barely graduated high school and went into the air force. An early marriage ended after his young son died in a car accident. Galotti got started in publishing at Home Sewing News, a Seventh Avenue trade rag, before joining Hearst in 1978; Si poached him in 1982 with a big salary boost. At Condé Nast, Galotti liked to brag about spending $50,000 a year on cigars. One year, he shipped his Ferrari Testarossa to Colorado so he could impress an advertiser who was opening a hotel in Telluride. (He was briefly detained by local cops who caught him doing 130 miles per hour on a back road.) Galotti dated the supermodel Janice Dickinson; after she broke up with him, he moved on to a journalist, Candace Bushnell, who kept a public diary of their relationship in a column she wrote for The New York Observer called “Sex and the City.” She gave Galotti a nickname—Mr. Big—and recounted one of his favorite phrases: “Abso-fucking-lutely.” Later, at one of the premiere parties for the HBO adaptation, Galotti instructed the actor Chris Noth on the finer points of enunciating the term.
They may never have been as famous as Tina Brown or Anna Wintour, but the fact that Condé Nast’s publishing executives had public personas at all spoke to the unusual nature of life in the Newhouse kingdom. “I used to tease people and say my life is better than James Bond’s,” said Tom Florio, Steve’s younger brother and a veteran Condé executive himself. “Because nobody was trying to kill me. But I had everything else that motherfucker had.” Hearst, with its more staid corporate culture, frowned on sales heads showing up in the gossip pages; Si wanted the Condé aura to permeate all corners of his empire. He had calculated from the start that the more exclusive the company appeared, the more ads it could sell, and the more luxury brands would clamor to pay for space in its pages. Galotti, when he became publisher of Vogue, refused to hand out complimentary copies, reasoning it would make the magazine seem cheaper and less exclusive.
And the publishers knew that Si kept close track of their work. The Fortune article revealed that, while Si could be sanguine about a lack of profit, he had no patience for a decline in ads. He counted every advertisement in every issue published by a Condé Nast title, and did the same for his competitors. Any sign of a drop-off prompted a flurry of scribbled notes on his signature legal paper, which came to be known internally as “yellow snow.” Si’s publishers had a saying—“Up is up”—that became a mantra of the Condé sales side. It meant more pages, more advertisers, more buzz—no matter the cost. “Succeed, succeed, succeed,” recalled Mitchell Fox, a longtime Condé Nast publisher and executive. “Si admired someone who communicates to the world that they are successful. He wants to see his guys be fighters. It’s okay to get knocked down, put on the mat, but you better know how to get up and fight on.”
Florio, an inveterate fibber, interpreted this mandate as an excuse to make the numbers look good, even if they weren’t. Temperamental types like Galotti, who called himself “the dictator” in the office, used it as a reason to rebuke underlings. More than two dozen members of his staff quit or were fired over the course of two years. “Was I a motherfucker? Absolutely,” Galotti told me. “But nobody pays you a million dollars a year and wants you to come back into the office rested and smiling. They want you soaking wet.” Once, when he was the publisher of GQ, Galotti got into a shoving match at a Bergdorf Goodman party with a fashion editor who had written unfavorably about the magazine. After the incident made the gossip columns, Florio supposedly smoothed it over by telling Si, falsely, that Galotti had lashed out because the journalist “said something about Italians and Jews.”
“You’d never know when something would set one of them off,” said one veteran Condé executive. “It was not only allowed; it was encouraged. I think Si liked the sport of it.”
Inevitably, lines were crossed. Richard Beckman was a British sales executive, hired by Steve Florio in the mid-1980s, who later became publisher of Vogue. His nickname was “Mad Dog.” In June 1999, at a company sales meeting, Beckman reportedly insisted that two senior female Vogue employees, an advertising executive and a fashion director, kiss one another in front of their colleagues—and then pushed their heads together, badly injuring the ad executive’s nose. She resigned and threatened a $10 million lawsuit that Condé apparently settled for between $1 million and $5 million. According to Anna Wintour’s biographer, Amy Odell, Anna was “appalled by the incident,” but Vogue’s managing editor told her that Anna “wouldn’t have thrown down the gauntlet” with Si and demand that he fire one of the company’s favored executives. Si made Mad Dog apologize to the staff and seek counseling, but he let him stay on at Vogue for another three years—before promoting him to a more powerful role as chief marketing officer of the entire company. Beckman remained at Condé Nast until 2010.
IN THE MONTHS BEFORE the Fortune article appeared, Tina Brown had grown restless at The New Yorker, and increasingly frustrated with her longtime patrons at Condé Nast. Her magazine was still surfing the zeitgeist, and Tina’s provocations were still making headlines, like her dishy first-person account of a lunch with Princess Diana and Anna Wintour at the Four Seasons, which The New Yorker published days after the princess’s death. The article aired Diana’s private thoughts on the Windsors (“Charles is not a leader. He’s a follower.”) and was said to have irked Anna, who had expected the conversation to remain private.
But Tina’s late-night editing sessions had taken a toll, and she was feeling stymied by Si, who had rejected her ideas for expanding into ventures beyond a weekly print magazine. Her ties to Hollywood meant that she grasped the commercial and cultural possibilities of adapting for film and TV. Back at Vanity Fair, Tina had hired Susan Mercandetti, Ted Koppel’s producer at ABC, and sat her next to Si at a Manhattan dinner in order to pitch him on a VF television series. “I was prepping the hell out of it,” Mercandetti recalled, “really thinking through my thought process.” When she arrived at her seat, “Si turned to me, before the first course was served—I didn’t even have water in my glass—and he said, ‘I know you’re going to try to talk me into giving you a television show, but there’s no way I’m doing it. It’s a magazine, and it’s never going to be a television show.’ And he turned to his other side, and that was the end of the conversation.”
Tina tried again at The New Yorker, arguing that Condé could take a cut of prospective box office receipts or start an in-house production company. She also advocated for in-person conferences where the hoi polloi might pay for the privilege of attending talks with the movers and shakers to whom her magazine had access. A quarter century later, these sorts of extracurriculars are rampant in the journalism world: witness The New York Times’s DealBook Summit, or the popular “ideas” festivals sponsored by The Atlantic and, yes, The New Yorker. But in the late 1990s, Si remained fixated on the print magazines that were at the core of his success. Tina’s entrepreneurial interests, Si worried, threatened to dilute The New Yorker’s aura; he viewed himself as the caretaker of a cultural treasure that, axiomatically, was a physical product made of pulp and ink. Recall, too, the slings and arrows that Si suffered when he purchased the magazine, when he dared to enact innovations like full-page advertisements and color photography. As a Newhouse, Si was sensitive to accusations of crassness; Tina’s ideas, forward-looking as they were, likely struck him as exposing the magazine, and his own reputation, to undue risk.
Si, however, was not the only mogul in Tina’s social orbit, and Michael Eisner and Mort Zuckerman were urging her to embrace the seismic changes looming in the media world. She was also upset by a drumbeat of headlines calling attention to the financial woes of her editorship. Under Tina, The New Yorker’s cultural acquisition cost was staggering: all those six-figure writing contracts, hefty kill fees, and indulgent Avedon photo shoots added up. If you had to put a price on buzz, it might be $80 million, a conservative estimate of the amount that The New Yorker reportedly lost between 1993 and 1997. (Fortune would later report, in 1998, that the magazine had lost $175 million since it came under the Newhouses’ control.) When Steve Florio was named president of Condé Nast, in 1994, he was replaced at The New Yorker by his younger brother, Tom Florio, whose early friendship with Tina—she gave him a personalized Edward Sorel sketch for his fortieth birthday—soured as ad sales lagged. Tina was convinced the losses were not her fault—that she had tried to make her budgets and that Si had saddled her with a publisher whose salesmanship failed to keep pace with her own.
The Florio frères soon had a dramatic falling-out that entered Condé Nast lore. In January 1998, Steve publicly likened The New Yorker’s financial performance to a “nosebleed,” and blindsided his brother by telling The Wall Street Journal that Tom was now “informally” reporting to him. Meanwhile, Si was moving forward, over Tina’s objections, with a plan to fold The New Yorker into the rest of Condé Nast, breaking a promise he made when he purchased the magazine that it would remain a separate entity. Shortly before Memorial Day weekend, Tom was expelled from The New Yorker and reassigned to Condé Nast Traveler. Si had appointed a new publisher, David Carey, without bothering to consult with his editor first. When Si called Tina at home to deliver the news, he was met with a glowering silence on the other end of the line.
Like many a Condé editor in chief before her, Tina was running up against the limits of Si’s largesse: he would gladly bankroll her gilded professional life, while refusing to relinquish a modicum of control. And another media honcho was in hot pursuit.
In 1997, Tina had finally gotten a green light from Si to pursue one of her pet projects: the Next Conference, a gathering co-sponsored by her friend Michael Eisner at the Walt Disney Company. Held on Disney’s Florida campus, the $500,000 event featured a cavalcade of VIPs, including Vice President Al Gore, whose trip to the event on Air Force Two was reportedly reimbursed by Condé Nast. Tina accepted a private jet ride back to New York with another attendee, the Miramax mega-producer Harvey Weinstein. When Weinstein and his brother, Bob, learned that Tina’s five-year contract ran out in July 1998, he pitched her on an enticing vision: a new magazine where Tina could control both the editorial and the business side, with an equity stake in the profits (never a possibility at Condé), and a books-and-film division to boot. Tina was exhausted by the day-to-day work of publishing a weekly; her mother, who had been fading from cancer, had died on June 30. A wunderkind about to turn forty-five, Tina found herself pondering a next act. She called Harvey five days later.
On July 8, around 9 a.m., Tina walked into Si’s office and resigned. She was moving from the House of Newhouse to the House of Weinstein: leaving one culture-shaping, status-craving Jewish mogul for another.
Si was stunned by Tina’s defection—and he grasped its relevance as a moment of truth for his stewardship. When he purchased The New Yorker in 1985, the magazine had technically been subsumed by a separate arm of his family’s holding company, Advance Publications. He was now planning to move it officially under the Condé Nast umbrella, a capstone to his decades of work changing the company’s image from a mere fashion publisher to one of literary respectability. This had, predictably, not gone over well among some of the magazine’s stalwarts. “To graft it onto the faceless corporate entity of Condé Nast is going to be the end of the old, authentic New Yorker identity,” one griped at the time. Now Si watched as the woman who had almost single-handedly reinvented his family business, who had fueled Condé’s rise from mom-and-pop shop to glittering powerhouse, walked out of his office for the last time.
What followed was one of the great steeplechases in American journalism.
Si drew up a list of potential replacements. One was Peter W. Kaplan, the editor of The New York Observer. Kaplan was a keen chronicler of status and a romantic about journalism and New York City, whose witty newspaper had more cachet among the cognoscenti than its low circulation numbers would suggest. Editing The New Yorker was a childhood dream of his, and when he was summoned to Si’s office, he suffered a bout of nerves. That morning, he cut his face shaving, and a friend had to point out, minutes before the meeting, that Kaplan had neglected to remove a speck of bathroom tissue from his cheek. At the interview, Kaplan became distracted by one of the framed Krazy Kat cels hanging on Si’s wall; he apparently spent a large chunk of their conversation enthusing about old cartoons and animated movies. Kaplan did not get the job.
Graydon Carter says that Si approached him about replacing Tina at The New Yorker, and that he passed; two others familiar with their conversations said that Si and Graydon mutually agreed that moving him off Vanity Fair, then riding high, would be counterproductive. David Remnick, the prolific Pulitzer Prize winner on Tina’s staff, was also on the short list, though Si initially had doubts, telling a colleague that Remnick might make The New Yorker too “Washington think tank.” In fact, Si’s top choice was more than two thousand miles outside of New York, lacing up his boots for a weekend of hiking in the forests of Washington state, when a call came in from a 212 area code.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Tina Brown told Michael Kinsley. “Si Newhouse wants to talk to you.”
Kinsley, then forty-seven, was among the most admired journalists of his era, a polymath Rhodes Scholar who edited The New Republic and cohosted CNN’s Crossfire. In 1995, Microsoft had tapped him to create an online publication called Slate. (The idea was so ahead of its time that for several years Microsoft distributed a printed version called Slate on Paper.) It was Friday morning in Seattle when Si reached Kinsley; by Saturday, the editor was standing in Si’s apartment, admiring the Andy Warhol Marilyn on the wall. Three hours later, according to Kinsley, Si offered him the editorship of The New Yorker, with a $1 million salary and a $5 million signing bonus. “To the extent he had a strategy at all, it was to bowl me over with money,” Kinsley recalled, “and he succeeded at that.” Kinsley was elated but disoriented; things were moving very fast, and he asked for a beat to speak with his wife. Si, who wanted to announce Tina’s successor by Monday, reluctantly agreed. They met again on Sunday, for a dinner with Donald Newhouse, and upon parting, Kinsley promised a final decision by morning.
Fifteen minutes later, he walked into his room at the Helmsley Hotel and found a message to call Si.
The publisher’s voice crackled over the receiver. “You seem reluctant.”
“It’s a big decision,” Kinsley replied, “but if I do it, I assure you I’ll be energetic and enthusiastic.”
“I’m starting to feel reluctant, too,” Si said. “I think it would be better to call it off.”
Kinsley froze. Grasping for words, he told Si, “This is going to be embarrassing for both of us.” A few Newhouse-ian mumbles later, the call, and the prospective editorship, was finished.
“I was really angry,” Kinsley told me. “I sulked for a while. What annoyed me, in some ways, was that he offered it to me and then withdrew it with the same ‘who cares?’ attitude about the consequences. That’s something that only a rich man would do.” At the time, Kinsley considered himself adept at handling wealthy benefactors, but Si’s caprice left him confounded. “He was very nice,” Kinsley said, “until the last phone call.”
The episode revealed a fundamental truth. Condé Nast was Si’s passion project, and he wanted the men and women he entrusted with it to share that passion. He didn’t like losing money, but he didn’t particularly care about making heaps of it, either. At the time, his brother, Donald’s, newspaper holdings were still generating enormous profits, and the family had made shrewd investments in lucrative cable television systems. The Newhouses, in other words, were doing just fine—which meant the Condé magazines could remain Si’s plaything, the asset whose dividends accrued in status, not dollars. Kinsley would have made a fine magazine, even an exceptional one. But Si’s idea of a great editor was shaped by Alex Liberman, Diana Vreeland, and Tina Brown: creative iconoclasts who never doubted their fitness to dictate the culture to the world. That Kinsley hesitated at all, when the prize of The New Yorker was in his grasp, must have struck Si as hugely concerning. So, he turned to a different option: the bookish son of a dentist, not yet forty years old, who had little editing experience but a sparkling prose style and a bloodhound’s nose for news.
Perhaps most importantly, when Si offered him the job, David Remnick did not hesitate to say yes.
REMNICK ONCE WRYLY REFERRED TO his upbringing as “Springsteenian.” Both he and Bruce grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, where Remnick’s father, a dentist, practiced from a home office, and his precocious son perused the magazines piled up on the waiting room table. Esquire and Rolling Stone were favorites; The New Yorker was not. “I didn’t know how to read it, which is to say, I didn’t know how to understand it,” Remnick recalled. “It seemed like something from Greenwich, Connecticut, or Princeton, New Jersey, which is to say, two places I knew nothing about.” New York City, just across the Hudson River from his home in Hillsdale, “was a million miles away and twenty-five minutes away, and I wanted to bridge that twenty-five minutes and million miles as quickly as possible.”
Remnick edited his public high school’s paper, The Smoke Signal, then went on to Princeton, where he studied comparative literature and wrote a thesis on Walt Whitman. As an undergraduate, he wasn’t lacking for confidence. When John McPhee, a New Yorker staff writer since 1965, accepted Remnick into his Princeton creative writing course, McPhee asked if he’d been concerned about being rejected. “That never crossed my mind,” Remnick replied. An internship at The Washington Post, the summer after he graduated, led inadvertently to his New Yorker debut. The magazine often republished examples of poor newspaper writing in a recurring feature called “Block That Metaphor!,” and in 1981, the editors singled out an infelicitous phrase from an article about the Miss America pageant: “Deanna Fogarty, Miss California 1979, is acting sexy. Sexy like a Muriel cigar commercial. Lips pouty and pursed. Eyebrows arched and hips akimbo.” The sentence is attributed to “David Remnick in the Washington Post,” along with a sly comment: “1979 was the year of the contortionist.”
“Five people tore that out and sent it to me,” Remnick later recounted. “I thought, ‘I’ve finally made The New Yorker, and now I can die in shame.’ ”
That gaffe aside, Remnick earned a staff job at the Post, where he demonstrated an unusually wide range, writing on crime, boxing, tennis, celebrities, and Soviet dissidents. Remnick disliked Washington—“He said there were no decent bagels,” recalled Sally Quinn, who sat beside Remnick at the paper’s Style section—and, in 1988, he accepted a job at the paper’s Moscow bureau. There, he chronicled the fall of Communism, which became the basis of a Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Lenin’s Tomb. He was Tina’s first major hire, in 1992, and became one of her most prolific and versatile writers, profiling Mike Tyson, Ralph Ellison, Luciano Pavarotti, the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Pope John Paul II.
In the days after Tina resigned, Remnick met twice with Si, once while wearing a Leon Russell T-shirt he’d bought at a concert. Si peppered him with questions about how he might run the magazine; he spent the weekend writing a lengthy memo that he handed in on Sunday night. On Monday morning, July 13, Remnick was having his hair cut when Steve Florio called and said, breezily, “I guess if you don’t fuck it up, you’ll be the editor of The New Yorker.” Remnick was soon face-to-face with Si, who said he planned to announce the promotion in a half hour.
“Do I get to make a phone call?” Remnick replied. It felt a little more like being arrested than being offered the job of a lifetime.
By 11 a.m., The New Yorker officially had a new editor in chief—and he had to turn out an issue by Friday. Remnick had not edited a publication since The Smoke Signal, and not everyone at the magazine understood the logic. “David getting picked was like Sarah Palin,” one editor said, recalling the confusion. “ ‘Him?’ ” But the bulk of the staff greeted Remnick with an ovation that morning, and Calvin Trillin, a New Yorker writer since 1963, declared it a smart choice. “I had steeled myself for the possibility of some Condé Nast trend-hound arriving with his black shirt buttoned up to the collar and telling us we needed to pay a little more attention to the club scene,” he said. “It never occurred to me that anything this sensible would happen.” Remnick’s catholic taste made him an apt Tina successor: like her, he believed high and low culture were equally worthy of thoughtful scrutiny. Tina’s incursions into ostensibly lowbrow subjects like Roseanne Barr had been met with censure, but now the culture was catching up. The Sopranos would debut on HBO six months into Remnick’s tenure, kicking off an era of literary television that put the medium on par with novels and the theater. Bill Clinton was about to be impeached, merging the sober business of governance with tabloid scandal. And Jon Stewart was in talks to become host of The Daily Show, where a younger generation of educated, upwardly mobile elites—that is to say, the kind of people who subscribe to The New Yorker—would soon turn for their news. Remnick liked mixing the silly and the serious, the poetic and the profane, an egalitarian editorial ethos that fit the times. “A balance between stardust and heft,” as he later put it.
Tina was busy starting Talk magazine with Harvey Weinstein, but Remnick retained many of her core staff writers and artists—the DNA of The New Yorker, in many ways, remained hers—while also hiring new critics like Peter Schjeldahl and persuading Woody Allen to start contributing again after a long drought. Si’s sentimental view toward the magazine, which remained his favorite of the Condé stable, allowed Remnick some breathing room. “David’s mandate, such as it is, has nothing to do with ad pages or revenue,” Si said. “I think he has got to discover his own magazine for himself.”
One early Remnick highlight grew out of an unsolicited pitch by an unknown writer—or, technically, the writer’s mother. Remnick’s wife, Esther Fein, a reporter at The New York Times, was approached one day in the newsroom by a colleague touting an essay written by her son. “I hate to sound like a pushy mom, but I’m telling you this with my editor’s hat on, not my mother’s hat on,” the woman said. “It’s really good, and it’s really interesting, but nobody will look at it, nobody will call him back.” The woman was Gladys Bourdain, a Times copy editor, and her son was named Anthony. His essay, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” which Remnick published in April 1999, was a merciless, hilarious, and sometimes revolting peek into life at a Manhattan brasserie. It got Anthony a book deal, which led to a pair of TV shows; soon, he was one of the most famous chefs in the world.
Tina had been burdened with shaking off the cobwebs that had accumulated from the Shawn years. Remnick inherited a newsier machine, more attuned to the rhythms of post-millennium culture and already accustomed to breaking big scoops. In 2004, the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh exposed the torture of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in three devastating New Yorker articles, reshaping the national conversation around the Iraq War. Lawrence Wright published a bombshell investigation into the Church of Scientology in 2011. Remnick created features like “20 Under 40,” a list of fiction writers to watch, and, in 2000, broke decades of precedent by putting a photograph on the cover, sneaking a William Wegman portrait of a Weimaraner dog into an illustration of Eustace Tilley. These were the kinds of heresies—brazen salesmanship, gimmicky lists—that sparked revolts among the Shawn-era staff and brought Tina no end of public grief. By the early 2000s, however, they were welcomed as innovations in a changing industry. Remnick even succeeded at executing the sorts of entrepreneurial ideas that Tina had hoped to implement, only to be blocked by a reluctant Si. In May 2000, for the New Yorker’s seventy-fifth anniversary, the magazine threw a New Yorker Festival, three days of events where readers could travel to New York to meet their favorite writers or see live interviews with stars like Paul Simon and Jon Stewart. After years of bleeding money, The New Yorker broke even in 2001, and reportedly earned a profit of $2 million in 2002. “In your own quiet ways you must be very proud,” Si wrote to Remnick and his publisher, David Carey, in 2004. “As I am of my association with you and your wonderful magazine.”
For Remnick, the excitement has never faded. He once marveled at the fact that he could now assign stories to his former mentor at Princeton, John McPhee. “I have to tell you, it was a very strange and wonderful feeling,” Remnick said, “to call up John and say, ‘Well, whaddaya got?’ ”