‘The New Yorker at 100’ Is a Love Letter — and a Gentle Evasion

Academy award-winning director Marshall Curry’s celebration of periodical perfection The New Yorker at 100 now streaming on Netflix brings to mind that scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments where the desert-weary Israelites writhe in eager, self-abasing ecstasy at the altar of the golden calf. In this case the golden calf is The New Yorker and the prostrate are the people who made and participated in this documentary. To call the praise effusive would be an understatement. To claim it’s unearned would be unfair.

The New Yorker at 100
★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Marshall Curry
Starring: David Remnick,Françoise Mouly, Nick Paumgarten
Running time: 1hr 36min

Curry’s 96 minute ode to The New Yorker’s high standards and élitism — the good kind that comes with an acute accent over the é — will be best loved by those already smitten and come as a revelation to those unfamiliar with the liberal institution’s undeniably impressive legacy.

There’s a lot to love and some things to question.

Structurally, the documentary takes the viewer behind the curtains to learn how the magazine is put together by following along as its staff enter the final months of preparation for The New Yorker’s much awaited centenary edition. Curry then weaves this footage into a necessarily truncated overview of its impactful past. The director likened the unenviable task of selecting highlights from this hallowed history to snagging just a few samples from a field full of “fireflies.” Truly. Longtime fans will be shocked to see how many of the magazine’s long cherished luminaries such as groundbreaking film critic Pauline Kael and humorist E.B. White don’t make it into the jar.

The documentary’s tilt towards showcasing and promoting current staff and leadership flags its intent — a wise business decision — to sell the future of The New Yorker as much as glory in its past. Fair enough. The magazine’s 66 year-old editor-in-chief David Remnick claims he’s focused on ensuring The New Yorker, which he describes as “a miracle,” continues “to thrive not for a century, but for two or three.”

Unsurprisingly, one of the most entertaining and amusing parts of the doc is the discussion of the magazine’s legendarily witty cartoons. Charles Addams and his eerie eponymous family are given a well deserved nod. A depiction of Sisyphus relocated to an office cubicle is good. However, having a celebrity explain why it’s funny is not. The doc spends some welcome time with longtime cartoonist Roz Chast who rightly notes “You don’t do this unless you really can’t do anything else.” One of her delightful works features a highway billboard in the style of an injury claims lawyer advertisement. But the billboard is dominated by the looming face of a haggard and knowing cat’s eye glasses bespectacled middle aged mom. The sign screams out “Injured? I told you so. But you didn’t listen. Call 1-800-Boo-Hoo” Then from another artist there is a wonderful depiction of two men marooned on a tiny desert island the size of a Mini Cooper. The two men are examining a message someone has scrawled in the sand. “Bill sucks” it reads. One bedraggled bearded castaway assures the other “We’ll find whoever did this Bill.”

Cartoon editor Emma Allen — who displays a “Life After Yale” book prominently on her book case, cover facing out — reveals the magazine receives about 1000 to 1500 cartoons a week. They purchase ten to twenty. Team player and clearly a good fit for her job, Allen proudly notes the welcome palliative effect of her cartoons on readers. Given, as she notes, the rest of the magazine can with its “devastating long articles” be “a bit of a slog.” Well said.

Surprisingly, the other fun segment in the documentary turns out to be the section addressing The New Yorker’s famed fact checking department. Curry and executive producer Judd Apatow (who knows a bit about funny) no doubt recognized the comic gold that lay within this department of nitpickers. Remarkably, their fact check remit even runs to the magazine’s iconic covers and cartoons. Surely, a lot of this is jokily performative. However the process rightly got some of the most extensive play in the doc.

Sadly, no one thought to ask what anyone in this nothing if not diligent department thought of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City. McInerney’s epoch-defining, bestselling debut novel featured a main character who worked as a fact checker at an almost undisguised version of The New Yorker, struggling with cocaine use and dreaming of writing the Great American Novel. Viewers are left to wonder whether these sorts of occupational hazards still plague the storied sticklers.

Chief fact checker Fergus McIntosh tells an amusing anecdote about the time they published a cover prominently featuring a sun bathing hot dog vendor with two right feet. (Tell me the guy who missed that hadn’t had a toot or two.) Another memorable fact checking failure involved a cartoon portraying a penguin sitting on a couch meeting potential in-laws. The little fellow’s stated preference to be referred to as an “Arctic American” fell flat since the flightless birds are native to the Antarctic.

McIntosh also reveals a type of reader who lives to call out his fact checking team for these sorts of errors. To add insult to injury when doing so they invariably seem abnormally eager to deploy what they must imagine to be a masterful use of ironic derision by tossing the adjective “vaunted” at them. As in “I see your vaunted fact checking system failed again!” Stung, McIntosh and crew soldier on.

The serious side and cultural weight of the journal comes to the fore in the discussion of the magazine’s track record of producing long form journalism of truly unparalleled impact.

From its early typically “fizzy and wry” stories up through the 1940s The New Yorker experienced a major shift after a young writer named John Hersey successfully pitched a government censorship breaking piece. He wanted to cover the human suffering that emanated from the first atom bomb dropped on a civilian population.

Published in August of 1946 “A Reporter at Large in Hiroshima” with its focus on six lives upended by the blast revolutionized journalism and transformed the magazine. It is hard to overstate the impact of Hersey’s masterpiece. Albert Einstein ordered 1,000 copies to send to other scientists. It was read live over the radio. The anti-nukes movement began. The New Yorker, the light-hearted art and culture magazine with the cartoons featuring showgirls, emerged as a major player in serious journalism.

The documentary then treats award-winning writer and biologist Rachel Carson’s summer of 1962 reporting on the dangers of pesticides. Her serialized articles on this subject would be published later that year as the book Silent Spring. The passage of the Clean Air Act and the birth of the modern environmental movement quickly followed. The documentary then discusses the impact of, at that point, a relatively unknown James Baldwin’s seismic “Letter from a Region in My Mind” published later that year. Baldwin’s searing work reignited the discussion of race in America.

The documentary’s penultimate stop on the magazine’s greatest hits in the serious long form journalism category is the one-time enfant terrible of the literary community and former The New Yorker errand boy Truman Capote’s series of articles on a Kansas family’s slaughter. The resulting book, Capote’s In Cold Blood, would be credited with birthing the literary true crime genre.

These were the heady days of the legendary founder and first editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, high school dropout and spawn of a Colorado mining town Harold Ross. Along with his deputy, the seemingly shy but deceptively resolute William “The Iron Mouse” Shawn, Ross forged a path for the new brand. The complex Shawn became editor-in-chief after Ross’s death in 1952 and would serve as such till 1987.

Clearly, these two men bore little resemblance to the magazine’s monocled and dandified, yet remarkably durable mascot, Eustace Tilley. Notwithstanding, Ross and Shawn would prove hard acts to follow.

Personable big time literary editor Robert Gottlieb, who took over from Shawn as editor-in-chief from 1987-1992, had a relatively uneventful run. Gottlieb was followed by the disruptive but necessary “comet” that was Tina Brown. Fresh from famously “fixing” Vanity Fair, Brown took the helm of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998. During her tumultuous stint, the “Brash Brit” famously fired 72 people and hired 50 before that stint prematurely ended. The reawakening begun under Brown would continue under her successor, Remnick, one of her 50 hires and a man a pre-disgraced Charlie Rose would describe as “the Michael Jordan of the publishing industry.”

Remnick arguably fully took the baton from his worthy predecessors with a bold decision in the fall of 2017. He decided to publish Ronan Farrow’s explosive expose of the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal when other media outlets wilted at the prospect. This was not Eustace Tilley’s The New Yorker. So began the #MeToo Movement.

However, for all its social justice bonafides proudly on display in the doc — the distaste directed towards Trump and all things MAGA is both visceral and at times performative — the documentary fails to pin down this reliably left-of-center institution on issues where its readership has less clear consensus. Particularly, it’s crickets when it comes to the situation in Gaza which had been publicly roiling the magazine since late 2023. In addition, the ongoing, at the time of the documentary’s filming, negotiations of The New Yorker union with the magazine’s owner Condé Nast were not mentioned. However, intentionally or not, unblinking, eagle-eyed viewers can catch a pretty clear union solidarity sign reading “Contract-Contract-Contract” discreetly displayed in a lowly fact checker’s cubicle during her few seconds of screen time.

In the end, the documentary which is entertaining and informative mostly succeeds in its efforts to provide a comprehensive overview of how Remnick and the magazine’s various elements, art departments, fiction editors, fact checkers, investigative reporters, foreign correspondents and celebrity profilers all come together to produce the “miracle” that is The New Yorker.

However, amidst all this process detail, one key part of the operation was left behind the curtain — that gateway to readers, the sales and marketing department. Admittedly, it’s not the first thing one thinks about when thinking about what makes The New Yorker The New Yorker. But an examination of how the management and marketing team of this remarkable magazine view and target the people who buy The New Yorker — those who actually read it and those more interested in the cultural cachet associated with the brand would be fascinating.

That’s one more meeting — tote bags and all — a slightly more ambitious and a little less reverent documentarian would have their audience sit in on.

Correction: “Literary agent” as a descriptor of Robert Gottlieb was corrected to “literary editor” on 3o Dec, 2025.

Correction: William Shawn was described this way elsewhere, but not in the documentary, so “who was described in the documentary as an ‘assimilated Jew'” was deleted on 2 Jan, 2026.