The New York Observer » David Remnick

Michelle Obama Vogue Cover Divided White House Staff

When Vogue invited Michelle Obama to do a cover story in early 2009, reactions from her staff illustrated the constant role of racial politics in the first lady's decision-making process, according to Jodi Kantor's new book, The Obamas. Read More

Drag Queens and Gay Marriage Featured in R. Crumb’s Axed ‘New Yorker’ Cover

Robert Crumb, the alt-comic writer with a piggyback fetish, has always been ahead of his time. That's what made his comics--usually featuring giant Amazonian women with humungous thighs as a chronic masturbatory fantasy-- so transgressive to begin with.

But for all his former subversiveness, Mr. Crumb is pretty mainstream nowadays. Maybe not New Yorker mainstream though: Vice magazine unearthed a 2009 drawing from the cartoonist that was rejected by David Remnick's magazine. Though an answer was never given on why the cover wasn't run, Mr. Crumb suspects it was because the New Yorker was too afraid of offending people with the image of a (possible?) drag queen and a twee person of unidentifiable sex trying talking to a sweating official from the marriage license bureau, with a sign pointing to a "Genders Inspection" office next to his window.

Below, a high res image of the cartoon, which was discovered at the Venice Biennale in June.
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New Yorker Television Critic Nancy Franklin Taking a Break from Writing

Nancy Franklin announced that she is stepping down from her position as New Yorker television critic on Twitter today. "I've been a critic for 18 years, and a TV critic for 13 of them. That's a lot of sitting alone indoors playing with one's equipment," Ms. Franklin wrote the Observer in an e-mail. "I wanted to get out of Read More

Death of Magazines? Try Magazines of Death!

"It's good to see the journalism of death is alive and well," said New Yorker editor David Remnick as he accepted the public interest Ellie for Atul Gawande's morbid "Letting Go" at the National Magazine Awards on Monday.The soiree at 583 Park Avenue had kicked off with a sober multimedia tribute to the late photojournalists Read More

The Situation and the Story: Press Corps Parties While White House Makes History

It was Wednesday morning at 9:47 a.m. in the White House Press Briefing Room. The president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, took the podium. Major television networks had interrupted coverage to broadcast the president's address. "Now, let me just comment, first of all, on the fact that I can't get the networks Read More

You May Find Yourself in an Ambassador’s Back Yard!

Outside the French ambassador’s home the people of Washington, D.C., mobbed John Legend as if the city had never before seen a star. David Arquette walked out of the gates and met bunches of fans clutching outdated head shots and fresh sharpies. David Byrne emerged, and a man broke into a sprint, holding in his Read More

Remnick Doesn’t Like American Idol Because Everyone Sounds like Whitney Houston

The Morning News' Robert Birnbaum interviewed David Remnick recently, and published an unabridged transcript of their talk. It is really fantastic. A few excerpts here.

Mr. Remnick on Slate:

"Michael [Kinsley] invented one of the first really good, uh, call it a magazine, paper, whatever—I guess paper is not the word we should use ... It's terrific—look, his Read More

Where Have All the Mailers Gone?

Amid all the hubbub provoked by The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list, one elephant-sized fact has been hidden in plain view. Fiction has become culturally irrelevant.

A great novel, one that is for the ages, can still be written. Memorable stories, long and short, continue to be created. Without a doubt, the next Read More

Taking Risks with The New Yorker? David Remnick’s Magazine Follows Wired to the iPad

David Remnick's magazine will become the second Condé Nast title after Wired to develop an iPad app with Adobe instead of Condé's internal digital team, according to Memo Pad.

Following Wired lead comes with the unenviable task of living up to that magazine's numbers out of the gate (the Wired iPad app out-sold the magazine Read More

David ‘Mr. Paywall’ Remnick Defends His Turf

If you're an editor these days, grab a soapbox and talk about a paywall.

Last month, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger hit New York and went on Charlie Rose to talk about what a tragedy it would be for editors to charge readers for content. "I think it is a very profound statement journalistically to Read More

The Beautiful and the Damned at the Authors Guild Gala

"Writing as a form of suffering is no longer possible when you publish yourself," Garrison Keillor told the audience at the Authors' Guild Gala last night at Tribeca Roof. "When you become your own publicist, you have to interview yourself."

Mr. Keillor riffed on the gloom accompanying the heralded death of print and the deprofessionalization of Read More

David Remnick: ‘Millions of People’ Will Pay for News

David Remnick reliably calls back reporters, so when you see that he has done a Q & A with Asharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic paper printed in London, it shouldn't come as any surprise.

In the interview, Mr. Remnick told the paper that, yes, one day, people will have to pay for news, and there are millions Read More

David Remnick Is Sad That 41-Year-Old Sam Lipsyte Can’t Be on the 20-Under-40 List

Sam Lipsyte's recent novel The Ask has been almost universally praised by critics. Over the weekend A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times that the author sums up "the formative experiences of his generation in a voice seemingly characteristic of that overeducated, insecure demographic cohort, who came of age in the late '80s Read More

The Week That Was: April 29-May 5

On Saturday morning, May Day, we announced to friends that this would surely be the best day of all our lives. Nothing invigorates us like warm weather and sweeping pronouncements.

We will not comment upon the success of the best-day plan, but we certainly tried our hardest. Orchestrating the Best Day of Our Lives required Read More

Question Time with David Remnick

David Remnick walked up to the stage, slipped on his glasses, and smiled. It was Wednesday night, and a mostly older crowd had gathered at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square to ask Mr. Remnick questions about his new book, The Bridge.

Mr. Remnick opened with a joke about how little editorial experience he had Read More